—Real World—
In the men's dormitory, Usopp watched the Sky Screen with the quality of attention of someone hoping very hard that a scene will cut away.
It cut away. The Sky Screen showed two figures in the same room and then, with what Usopp could only interpret as mercy, moved on. No details. The sound of breathing fading into scene transition. Adults in the audience filled in the rest themselves.
The relief on Usopp's face was immediate.
"It moved on," he said, to no one in particular.
Beside him, Chopper had been watching with the earnest attention he brought to everything he didn't understand yet. He tugged at the corner of Robin's sleeve. "They were hugging and it looked like they were going to sleep," he said carefully, "but why did Usopp take off his clothes first?"
Robin looked down at him with a smile she was not quite able to keep small. She touched the top of his head. There was a time for that lesson, and she had determined this was not it. "Heat dissipation," she said. "He runs warm."
Chopper considered this. He looked at his own fur and appeared to find it plausible.
—Broadcast—
The morning of departure arrived with the quality of mornings that have been put off as long as possible.
The crew assembled on the dock carrying what they had come with and what they had acquired — Chopper's medicines packed into the medical bay, Robin's books in the cabin, Sanji's stores loaded and organized, Zoro's swords back where they belonged. The Thousand Sunny sat at anchor looking exactly as a ship looks when it is ready and the people who sail it are not entirely ready.
Usopp was the last to board.
He and Kaya had said most of what needed saying the night before and in the early hours of the morning, and now they were standing at the end of the dock saying the rest of it with their arms around each other and neither of them looking at the ship. The crew gave them the space to do this without comment, which was the most considerate thing the Straw Hats knew how to do.
He eventually walked up the gangplank with red eyes, which he did not explain and did not need to.
The anchor came up. The Thousand Sunny's Coup de Burst was not needed — Franky fed cola to the engine and they moved steadily away from Sakura Island under sail, the cherry blossom forest receding on the hillside behind them, growing smaller as the distance grew.
Tsunade stood on the dock with her arms folded, looking entirely composed, which was almost certainly a performance for Kaya's benefit. Kaya stood beside her and watched the ship go and did not try to look composed at all.
Everyone on deck watched them back until the island was small enough that watching felt like something other than witnessing.
There was a noise from somewhere in the rigging.
Po dropped onto the deck from a height that should not have been comfortable, landed with the grace of something that weighs considerably more than its dimensions suggest, and looked around at the crew with the expression of someone who has committed to a decision and would like it acknowledged.
"Po," Usopp said. "You — when did you —"
"I had a feeling this would be interesting," Po said. He did not elaborate. He sat down and began eating what appeared to be a bamboo shoot he had brought aboard for the purpose.
The crew exchanged looks. Luffy appeared to find this completely acceptable. Several other crew members appeared to be performing rapid internal calculations about bamboo supply logistics. Chopper already looked like he was planning to offer the panda a medical examination.
"Welcome," Luffy said.
—Real World—
In the present, the scene had barely finished before Sanji found a stick.
The precise origin of the stick was unclear. He had it. He was moving toward Usopp with the focused energy of a man who had watched a person he considered wholly unworthy receive something he had been trying to conceptualize for himself since approximately the beginning of his adult life.
"Kaya was right there," Sanji said, with a quality in his voice that suggested this was barely the surface of what he was feeling. "She was right there. She's going to be that beautiful and she chose you."
Usopp had assessed the situation correctly and was already moving.
"Sanji, be reasonable —"
"I am being completely reasonable —"
The chase went three circuits of the deck before Nami indicated, with a look, that the noise level was not welcome, and Ace, leaning against the mast, said: "I think this is their version of a hug."
Zoro said nothing. He was watching the chase with the expression of someone who had no particular investment in the outcome but found it mildly interesting.
The stick did not connect. Usopp was fast when motivated. The gap between them maintained itself, just barely, around the Thousand Sunny's various obstacles, until Sanji either tired or achieved some form of catharsis, and the energy dissipated into general crew noise.
Ace had come over to Luffy's side of the deck at some point in the general chaos.
"When you meet Blackbeard," he said, quietly enough that the words were for Luffy and not the deck at large, "don't fight him alone. He's not someone you beat by charging in. My brothers and I will handle the main engagement — you delay him. Don't let pride make you take that one on without support."
Luffy looked at him.
"I know," Luffy said.
Ace looked at his younger brother for a moment with the expression of someone who wants to believe that and is not quite finished deciding. Then he nodded.
The Outer Gods story was already doing something to the world.
The footage of the Black Goat Cub, and of what Nami had encountered in the cherry blossom forest, and of the Sky Screen's gradual accumulation of evidence pointing toward entities that existed entirely outside the hierarchy that pirates and Marines and World Government had all, in their different ways, assumed was the only one — it had landed in different places for different people.
For most of the powerful people in the world, it had landed as an abstraction. The Grand Line operated on the logic of strength; gods and cultists were either irrelevant or manageable, depending on which category you decided they fell into. The majority of the people who had survived to hold serious power in this world had done it by trusting their own capacity for violence over any other variable. Theological content did not fit neatly into that framework, so most of them set it aside.
But the cultists were a different matter.
The connection between the Black Goat Cub on Sakura Island and the organizations that had been operating in the shadows of the New World had been noted by the Marine's intelligence division, by the World Government, and by several of the underground networks that the World Government nominally opposed and actually used. Cultists who trafficked in summoning rituals had been dangerous before; now they were dangerous in a category that everyone agreed required more aggressive management.
The suppression came quickly and from multiple directions at once. Marine ships, bounty hunters working in the World Government's interest, and certain underworld factions with their own reasons to want the ritual networks disrupted all moved in the same short window. Cultists were captured and executed. Their organizational infrastructure was dismantled wherever it could be found.
The survivors went underground and became harder to find and more certain of their purpose.
Elsewhere in the world, on the island chains surrounding Wano Country, Donquixote Doflamingo was moving.
The collapse of his arrangement with the World Government had left him without Dressrosa and without the political insulation that had made Dressrosa worth having. He had departed with what he could carry: his organization, reduced but functional; his money, which was considerable; and his talent for identifying opportunities in other people's disruptions.
Wano Country had changed.
Kaido's tenure as the country's effective ruler had always been a matter of indirect control — factories, key personnel, the machinery of exploitation run through intermediaries. Kaido himself had treated Wano as private territory, valuable for what it produced, not worth the administrative cost of formally occupying. But the times had shifted. Uchiha Madara had appeared on the open sea, which was the kind of event that forced every major power to reassess its positions. Where Madara was mattered, and whether his attention was currently on Wano was a question everyone was asking.
Doflamingo had arrived into this reassessment.
He had not been welcomed, exactly. But Kaido was a practical man who had learned to value capacity over loyalty, and Doflamingo had capacity. He also had an existing conflict with Kurozumi Orochi, who controlled Wano's political surface and whom Kaido kept around as a useful tool without finding entirely trustworthy. Doflamingo competing with Orochi for position was, from Kaido's perspective, a way to keep both of them working harder than either would on their own.
Doflamingo understood this calculation. He had made similar ones himself many times.
He settled into the role available to him and began, in the way he had always begun, to make himself indispensable.