-Broadcast-
Still Water Prison's emergency state had every guard on duty scrambling back to their posts. That was the order. The reality, as Magellan well knew, was that obedience and actual alertness were different things.
"I don't think it's that serious," one patrol guard muttered to his partner as they made their rounds.
"The deputy directors panicking over nothing," the other agreed.
They kept their voices low, but the attitude was widespread. Most of the staff shared Hannibal's instinct — that Magellan was overcautious, that Still Water Prison was a fundamentally different beast from Impel Down. The difficulty of attacking it was in a different class entirely. Even with a traitor inside, no one could breach this place quickly. It simply wasn't possible.
Hannibal himself was holding to that position, standing beside Magellan in the main corridor with the quiet confidence of a man who was fairly certain he was right.
"You're overthinking it," he said. "What lunatic would invade Marine Headquarters? And Still Water Prison ally — it holds prisoners. That's all it's good for, to outsiders."
Domino drew breath to agree — they had food and fresh water for a year, the Dead Water was impenetrable, no vessel or creature could survive it —
The building lurched.
It wasn't subtle. The floor shuddered hard enough to send guards stumbling into walls, and the ceiling groaned with a sound that had no business coming from this depth. A second tremor hit before anyone had recovered from the first — stronger, more deliberate. Dust rained from cracked joints in the stone.
Then the shadow appeared.
It came slowly, spreading across the outer wall like a wave of darkness that had mass to it. No shape, no detail visible through the reinforced outer hull — only the presence of something vast pressing against the prison from outside, and the creaking of stressed material that had never been stressed before.
Domino gripped the wall. "What is that? How is anything alive out there?"
"Hannibal." Magellan's voice cut through the noise without rising. "Control room. Seal this floor off from the rest of the prison. Now."
Hannibal stood frozen for a half-second — and in that half-second, something passed across his face that wasn't quite cowardice and wasn't quite shame. He understood what Magellan was doing. The man was staying. Whoever or whatever came through that wall, Magellan intended to be standing in its way.
"It's already too late for that," Domino said quietly.
The shadow outside had resolved into something with scales.
Red scales, each one catching the prison's interior lights and scattering them like broken glass. The creature moved along the seabed with a serpentine rolling motion, enormous, dwarfing the giant squid that occasionally wandered into the Dead Water and dissolved. This thing had not dissolved. It was still coming.
Then the lights found its head.
The dragon's skull alone was the size of a small hill. Its proportions were ancient and elemental — long whiskers trailing like silk banners in the current, fangs catching the light in cold flashes, eyes carrying the weight of something that had been alive for a very long time and had accumulated a lot of opinions about the world. Every scale on its face shimmered with a faint inner light, as though the creature wore the night sky on its skin.
It looked at Still Water Prison the way a craftsman looks at a problem.
Then it hit the wall.
The first impact sent a visible shockwave through the structure. The second buckled something internal. By the fifth, a crack split the outer wall from floor to ceiling, and the Dead Water began to seep through — slow at first, then faster, that poisonous, Seastone-laced liquid finding the gap like it had been waiting for it.
And then the dragon was gone.
One moment it was there, thousand meters of red scale and ancient presence. The next, the space outside the crack was empty — and through the narrow fissure, slick with water and moving with the careful efficiency of someone who had planned this, a young man in Wano-style clothing squeezed himself inside.
He was coated head to toe in a thin membrane of water that clung to him like a second skin — a film that kept the Dead Water from touching him directly. He straightened up on the prison floor, shook water from his hair, and looked around with the expression of someone mildly surprised that the hard part was over.
"Finally in." He glanced back at the crack. "Simpler than I expected, honestly."
The water film peeled away from his body and, with apparent intelligence, flowed back to the gap in the wall. It spread itself across the breach like living caulk, sealing the crack from the inside, blocking the Dead Water's ingress. The prison's hull held. No further seawater poured in.
The Dead Water, it seemed, understood the assignment.
Magellan, Hannibal, and Domino stared.
The young man dusted off his kimono — a futile gesture given that he'd just crawled through a flooded wall crack — and turned to face them with the easy bearing of someone who had not just punched through the most secure prison in the world with his face.
The thousand-meter red dragon, Magellan processed. Was this man.
They had heard of Kaido transforming into a blue dragon. But who was this? A Mythical Zoan user of comparable caliber, in Wano clothing, invading Still Water Prison alone — or apparently alone. The young man had muttered something about another cadre. He had not come here by himself.
"You —" Domino began.
The young man's eyes found her.
Whatever operational thought he had been organizing visibly derailed. Domino's golden curls, the fitted prison warden's uniform, the precise way she had been standing — all of it landed on the intruder like a physical blow. His expression shifted from purposeful to something significantly less dignified.
"Could I ask your name, beautiful lady?" His voice took on a register that had no business being deployed in a crisis situation. "The moment I saw you, I found myself deeply... distracted."
Domino's first instinct was violence. She suppressed it. The man had just cracked the outer wall with his body. Provoking him physically before she knew his limits would be stupid.
She adjusted her posture instead — just slightly, just enough. Her voice came out softer than usual. "I don't even know who you are. You come in through my wall and don't introduce yourself?"
The young man actually looked embarrassed. He touched the back of his head.
"Kozuki Momonosuke," he said. "Heir to the Kozuki Clan and future Shogun of Wano Country." He seemed to remember himself and straightened up. "And I would be honored, my lady, if you would consent to accompany me when I leave this place. As my wife. I can offer considerable wealth and a great deal of —"
Domino's eye twitched.
Kozuki Momonosuke, son of the legendary Kozuki Oden — a man who had, apparently, inherited his father's iron constitution and his father's complete inability to think clearly in the presence of an attractive woman. He had added visiting Still Water Prison to his mission objectives ally because Domino was on staff, and he had never had a Marine warden before.
He had broken into the most secure prison in the world.
He was currently trying to flirt his way through it.
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