Violet had made her choice. She was a woman in the end — what she wanted most was for her three surviving relatives to live free and move forward. Dressrosa still needed someone worthy to sit on its throne, and that mattered more to her than whatever came next for herself.
Doflamingo left the island carrying most of Dressrosa's treasury and its second princess. Women and wealth — he had taken everything in one trip. He wouldn't need to worry about financing his Wano ambitions for years.
-Broadcast-
The second half of the Holy Land Mary Geoise incident began. The broadcast's eye fell downward — past the fortress walls of Rome, through ten thousand meters of crushing depth — into Still Water Prison.
In the deepest reaches of the New Marine's submarine stronghold, the guards had gone quiet. The Den Den Mushi lines connecting them to the surface had fallen silent.
"Impossible. Who would dare attack Marine headquarters today of all days?"
Domino stood in the communications room, her golden curls catching the pale overhead light. Even constrained by a prison warden's uniform, she cut a striking figure. But her expression was anything but composed. A woman's instinct, sharp as a blade — she had felt this before.
The last time had been Impel Down. Buggy the Clown and the Straw Hat kid, one intentionally captured, the other crashing in from outside. The whole facility had nearly come apart. And when the smoke cleared, it was Blackbeard who had walked away with the real prize.
She wasn't going to make the same mistake twice.
"Captain Domino, the Den Den Mushi signal may have been blocked," one of the operators offered carefully. "We have no idea what's happening up there."
"Think about what day it is." Domino's voice was clipped. "All twelve Admirals are meeting above us. Which force on this earth could pin down all twelve of them simultaneously?"
She let that settle. No — logically, nothing had gone wrong. The silence was almost certainly a technical fault, nothing more. The supply shipment was scheduled for tonight anyway; she could send someone up with the delivery and confirm the situation firsthand.
Still, she wasn't going to sit on it. That was how prisons got breached — by people who told themselves it was probably nothing.
Domino made her way to the office floor.
The door to the military deputy director's office bore a plain metal placard: Deputy Director. Domino paused outside it, drew a breath, and secured the gas mask over her face before knocking.
"Come in."
The office was dim. The man behind the desk looked less like a prison administrator and more like something that had crawled out of a judge's nightmare. Nearly five meters tall, seated in a reinforced chair that might have been a throne in another life, Magellan filled the room with a presence that had nothing to do with his size.
He had horns — curved and sharp, rising from his head — and a face so precisely defined it might have been carved by someone with something to prove. His black prison uniform, clearly tailored to fit, caught the dim light with a cold sheen. He sat motionless, staring at nothing, exuding the quiet authority of a man who had long since made peace with being feared.
Even breathing, Magellan poisoned the air around him. The gas mask was not a formality.
"What is it, Domino?"
She relayed the situation without embellishment. The deputy director listened without expression, then frowned — the first sign of movement in an otherwise statue-still face. He seemed to think she was being too calm about it.
She's grown comfortable, his expression said. A few years without a breach and everyone forgets.
"The Admirals will handle whatever is happening above. That's not our responsibility." He rose from the desk — the slow, deliberate movement of a man who never needed to hurry. "Our responsibility is this prison. We secure it, and we do our part."
Magellan hadn't left his office suite in years. Not really. His meals came to him, his paperwork came to him, and the toxic aura his body constantly shed made meaningful human contact a practical impossibility. It was confinement by another name — but he was a man who could endure stillness.
Now he walked the corridor for the first time in memory, Domino trailing a careful distance behind.
They found Hannibal in his office — buried under a mountain of documents, head down on the desk, fast asleep. The civilian deputy director had an endless war with paperwork and was clearly losing.
Activating Still Water Prison's emergency protocol without the warden's authorization required facial verification from both deputy directors: Hannibal for the civilian administration, Magellan for military operations. Neither could do it alone.
Hannibal stirred, blinked up at them, and did not look pleased.
"I'm not having a nightmare?" He rubbed his eyes. "Isn't this an overreaction? Do you have any idea how long it takes to stand down a prison-wide emergency? We'll be burning months of operational time."
Magellan's reply was not a debate. "Do you want to repeat the Impel Down failure, Hannibal? Have you already forgotten what that cost us?"
The threat was clear enough. If it turned out to be a false alarm, they could share the embarrassment. If it turned out to be real and they had done nothing — only one of them would carry that.
Hannibal signed.
The two deputy directors walked to the control room together. The prison's biometric system processed their faces in sequence, confirmed both authorizations, and opened the protocol pathway.
Still Water Prison entered its first official state of emergency since the day it was built.
The effect was immediate for those who knew what to listen for: a low structural hum as the upward elevators sealed, the Dead Water density increasing at the outer perimeter, the automated defense grid quietly coming online. No signal left the prison now. No vessel entering the surrounding water would have a good time.
The prisoners felt the change without knowing its source. The subtle vibration through the walls, the slight shift in pressure — they couldn't have told you what it meant, and it didn't much matter to them. Their lives were already as bad as they got.
Garp was walking the prison corridor, hands behind his back, jaw set in the particular expression of a man who had been carrying something heavy for a long time.
He visited Dragon today, as he did most days. His son was surviving, which was more than could be said for most inmates — the Dead Water saw to that. Without regular food and the old man's stubborn attention, Dragon would have been reduced to nothing long ago. As it was, he was thin and diminished, but still standing.
Red-Haired Shanks was in much the same condition. The two of them — Dragon and Shanks — were among the best-treated prisoners in Still Water Prison, which wasn't saying much, but it was something. No one in the outside world knew they were still alive.
Garp stopped mid-step.
Something felt wrong. He couldn't put a name to it — an old man's instinct, maybe, or decades of reading situations before they broke. He glanced at the corridor around him, at the almost imperceptible change in the way the prison was breathing.
Am I getting too old and paranoid?
He started walking again. But his hand, out of habit, had moved closer to his fist.
Above them, far above
A riot at Still Water Prison was about to begin.