-Broadcast-
Kozuki Momonosuke had not appeared from nowhere. The moment he announced his name, Still Water Prison's intelligence files snapped into place around it.
Suspected son of the legendary samurai Kozuki Oden — the age difference made no sense, but nothing about the Kozuki clan had ever made easy sense. Active on the seas for years now, out of Wano's closed borders, which was strange enough on its own. In a country that kept itself locked away from the world, anyone with real ability got newspaper coverage every week simply by existing.
Morgans had run a story on him months back: Kozuki Momonosuke had challenged Kaido, King of Beasts, and come away badly beaten. A notable failure for a notable name. But nobody who walked away from Kaido was entirely nothing — and nobody without serious power possessed a Mythical Zoan.
The Azure Dragon. A fruit with a complicated genealogy, given Kaido's own.
None of that was currently relevant, because Momonosuke was staring at Domino again.
"Domino," he repeated, tasting the name like it pleased him. "I still don't know nearly enough about you, but I find myself already imagining our future together."
Domino's patience had a bottom, and she could feel it. "Why did you break into Still Water Prison?" Her voice came out flat, professional. She was being civil because she had no choice, not because she wanted to be.
The grin was still on his face — soft-eyed, warm, the kind of expression that probably worked on a lot of women who hadn't spent their careers managing dangerous people in confined spaces. And then, without transition, it was gone.
The temperature in the room didn't change. But something did.
Momonosuke straightened, and the playfulness drained out of him like water through a crack. What replaced it was still, and sharp, and entirely different. His eyes had the quality of a blade that had just been unsheathed — not threatening, exactly. Simply serious in a way that made everything around him feel small.
The shift was startling. Not because it was dramatic. Because it wasn't — it happened in the space of a breath, clean and total, as if two completely separate people occupied the same body and only one of them was allowed out at a time.
"I've wasted enough words," he said. "I came for someone. I'm leaving with them." He paused, almost as an afterthought. "And I'll be taking you with me."
The air moved.
What came out of him was not a sound or a motion but a pressure — Haoshoku Haki, Conqueror's Haki, expanding from his body like a shockwave radiating from a detonation point. Red-black lightning crackled at the edges of it, the particular signature of someone who had pushed that power beyond its natural limits. Dust rose from the floor in spiraling columns. The corridor groaned.
Guards in adjacent sections hit the ground without knowing why. Those closer lost their footing entirely, knocked back against the walls or simply folded. The air itself seemed to compress, dense with something that bypassed the senses and pressed directly on the will.
Domino seized a support beam. Hannibal caught a doorframe. Both of them stared.
"That's enough."
Magellan stepped forward.
He moved with the unhurried certainty of a man who had stopped being afraid of things a long time ago. He tilted his head back, and from between his teeth came a rapid barrage of small projectiles — purple-black spheres, dozens of them, each one trailing a faint iridescent shimmer as it crossed the air. They spread as they flew, a wide dispersal pattern aimed at saturation rather than precision.
Doku Fugu — Poison Puffer. Venom balls laced with the concentrated output of the Doku Doku no Mi (Venom-Venom Fruit), each one carrying enough toxin to drop a giant.
Momonosuke didn't move.
The spheres reached him and burst across his skin, coating his arms, his chest, his face, releasing their contents in a wet chemical hiss. Purple liquid ran down his jaw. The smell was immediate and wrong — the particular wrongness of something designed at a cellular level to unmake living things.
Momonosuke blinked. Looked at his arm.
The skin had gone slightly red where the venom touched it. He prodded it with one finger, experimentally.
"Itchy," he announced.
He looked up at Magellan with something between respect and mild irritation. "You're Magellan. Luffy-senpai talked about you. Said you were the rudest man he'd ever met — spitting poison on people, if you can imagine." He rolled his shoulder. "He got hit badly. I'm here to collect on his behalf."
Magellan's expression didn't change.
He had processed the relevant information the moment Momonosuke shrugged off the Doku Fugu. A dragon-form Zoan with the constitution that implied — a body that had been restructured at a fundamental level by the fruit, hard-baked resistance to conventional toxins as a natural consequence. He had seen something similar when the Blackbeard Pirates had survived his poison in Impel Down years ago, and that had been due to Shiryu's antidote. Luffy had survived through a combination of improbable willpower and Ivankov's intervention.
This was different. Momonosuke hadn't needed anything. He'd simply stood there.
Which meant escalation.
Dragon physiology or not, Magellan calculated, everything has a tolerance limit.
The Doku Doku no Mi began producing new toxin at full capacity. Purple-black liquid beaded across his skin and ran freely down his arms, pooling at his fists — not the rapid-fire projectile method now, but concentration. Raw venom accumulating for something heavier.
"You guessed right. I'm not here for Luffy's connections ally." Momonosuke's posture had shifted again, marginally — weight balanced, slightly forward. "But I won't be giving you any reward for figuring that out."
His shirt tore.
Not dramatically. Just the fabric giving way as the thing underneath expanded — scales rising through skin along his chest and arms, red-gold and glittering, the physical signature of partial Zoan transformation. The outline of something vast moved beneath the surface, contained in a human frame by an act of deliberate will. The shadow of the Azure Dragon shifted along his right arm and gathered at his fist.
What he threw was not a punch in any conventional sense.
The impact carried Armament Haki, dense and black at the contact point, but wrapped around it — infusing it — was the Conqueror's Haki, red-black lightning crawling up the shockwave as it expanded outward. The shape of a dragon's head opened in the compressed air ahead of his fist, roaring without sound, and the corridor ahead of it ceased to be structurally coherent.
Stone cracked. Steel buckled. Dust and rubble blew backward in a wave.
The phantom dragon hung in the settling debris, mouth open, its spectral scales throwing red light across every surface — across Hannibal's horrified face, across Domino's white knuckles on the doorframe —
And across Magellan, standing directly in its path, unmoving, venom running freely down both arms, watching the attack arrive with the expression of a man who had made his decision and was done reconsidering it.