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The fight between Momonosuke and Magellan was still going.
The evidence was in the ceiling — a drop of red corrosive liquid came through from above, eating through the stone layer by layer, trailing a path of dissolving material as it descended toward the corridor where Hannibal and Domino were moving.
Hannibal grabbed Domino by the arm and pulled her sideways without breaking stride. The red droplet hit the floor where she had been standing and kept going, burning a neat hole through the stone.
Domino stared at it.
"He's using the poison giant," Hannibal said. "Magellan doesn't bring that out unless he's in a real fight."
"Then we don't have time to stand here." Domino collected herself. "Control room. We seal the connection between the upper and lower levels and let those two do whatever they want up there."
They moved. Prison staff intercepted them twice on the route — guards wanting to know what was happening, what the emergency protocol meant, who was fighting upstairs. Hannibal had no time for any of it and said so. He waved them off and kept walking.
Then they rounded a corner and found Garp.
The old man was making his way through the corridor with his hands clasped behind his back, jaw set, moving with the unhurried certainty of someone who had been through enough emergencies that this one didn't rate as particularly alarming. Nominally a prisoner. Practically, on a day like this, something else.
"What's happening up there?" he asked. "Invaders?"
Hannibal made a quick decision. He left Domino with Garp and continued alone to the control room — a short distance, and with Garp standing at the junction, nothing ordinary would get through. The Marine hero's presence was worth a full squad and everybody in the prison knew it.
Domino relayed the situation while they waited.
An intruder. Kozuki Momonosuke — young, Wano clothing, claimed that name without hesitation. Almost certainly a Mythical Zoan user; the dragon that had struck the outer wall had been his transformation. Deputy Director Magellan had engaged him and was holding, but not quickly resolving the situation.
Garp was quiet for a moment.
Kozuki. The name was old enough that it shouldn't have meant anything to most people currently alive, but Garp had been alive for a long time. In Roger's final voyage, the crew had taken on a samurai from Wano Country — that name, that clan. This young man claiming it either had a story attached to him or was a convincing liar, and Dragon's father had lived long enough to develop an instinct for the difference.
The outside world had moved considerably in the years since Garp had arrived in Still Water Prison. He was aware of the gaps in his information. New pirate stars he didn't know, political shifts he hadn't tracked. But the Kozuki name wasn't nothing.
There was also the more immediate question: how had any Devil Fruit user crossed the Dead Water at all?
Domino answered that too. When Momonosuke had entered, his entire body had been coated in some kind of liquid — not water, not venom, something with apparent intelligence, capable of responding to basic commands. It had sealed the breach in the wall behind him after he entered. Natural water, she was guessing — some form of liquid life that could absorb seawater and neutralize the Dead Water's effect.
That was concerning. It suggested resources beyond one person with a strong Zoan.
The sound from above shifted — a grinding of stressed stone, then a series of deep mechanical impacts as the upper levels sealed. Hannibal had reached the control room. Through the walls came the sound of seastone barriers sliding into place, layer after layer, the upper floors locking themselves off from the rest of the prison. Cut off from above. Cut off from below. Whatever happened in Magellan's section now stayed there.
Hannibal walked back out of the control room and rejoined them.
"There's one more thing," he said to Garp. "I don't think Momonosuke came alone. If I'm right, there are other intruders in the lower levels already." He looked at the Marine hero steadily. "Can I ask you to guard the prisoner section?"
He didn't need to spell out why. Dragon and Shanks were the obvious targets. Anyone who came here for Straw Hat Luffy's connections would go for the people closest to him first.
Garp stretched his neck, the joints cracking. He opened and closed his right fist a few times, feeling the familiar weight of it, testing the old machinery. It had been a while.
"Go on," he said. "Both of you. I'll handle this end."
He watched them leave, then turned and headed for the prisoner section at an unhurried pace. Gate god, of all the things to end up as. But the people on the other side of that gate were his to protect, and that was all there was to it.
He heard it before he saw it: a wet, rhythmic impact, and beneath it the sound of a man trying not to make noise.
Around a corridor bend, a prison official was slumped against the wall, barely upright, face reduced to something unrecognizable. The features were gone — the structure of them, the distinctiveness. What remained was blood and swelling, a human face that had been struck so many times it had stopped being legible. His hands were still at his sides. He hadn't raised them once.
In the shadows beside him, something was hitting him again.
It was small. Under fifty centimeters — smaller than a child, smaller than most pets — pitch black from head to foot, as if constructed from shadow rather than flesh. A single curved antenna rose from the top of its head, trembling faintly with each movement. And above the black body, wildly incongruous, was a face: deathly pale, almost luminescent, adult in expression, carrying an arrogance so complete it registered as architectural.
"Tell me," it said, in a voice that fit the face better than the body. "Which level are they on?"
The official said nothing. His eyes were open, but only barely.
The fist came down again.
"Stop."
Garp's voice came out flat. He covered the distance in three steps and brought his right fist into contact with the small black body — not a full swing, not the kind of thing that leaves craters, just a clean impact with enough behind it to make the point clearly. The creature was knocked off its feet and skidded across the corridor floor, dissipating slightly at the edges where it hit the wall.
Garp crouched beside the official and got an arm under him, propping him upright against the wall. The man was breathing — barely, shallowly.
"Sea... hero..." The voice was almost nothing. "Be careful... small..."
The words ran out. The eyes closed. The official's breathing stopped shortly after, in the way that meant it wasn't going to start again.
Garp stayed where he was for a moment. The veins across his temples had risen. His jaw was set so hard his teeth ached.
He straightened up.
If the opponent had died under my punch, he thought, that would have been one thing. I wouldn't have lost sleep. What he was looking at instead was a man who had chosen to die rather than give information — who had endured that, in this corridor, alone — and that was something that sat differently.
"Old man." The voice came from the light. The small black figure had reassembled in the corridor ahead, standing in the strip of overhead lighting, antenna still trembling. The pale face was the same as before, the arrogance undamaged. "You're interfering in something that doesn't concern you. Do you want to die too?"
Garp looked at it.
The thing was under fifty centimeters. An adult's expression on something the size of a large cat. In a world where powerful people came in every possible configuration, Garp had long since stopped making assumptions based on stature alone — he had made that mistake once, years ago, with someone he underestimated, and the lesson had stuck. But the shape of this particular creature, in this particular corridor, with a dead man at his feet —
"You look like that," he said, "and you did all of this."
He wasn't quite laughing. It wasn't that. He was reassessing, quickly and quietly, the dying man's last two words.
Be careful. Small.
Character designation: Upper Six — Black Sperm. User of the Saibo Saibo no Mi (Cell-Cell Fruit).
The antenna on the creature's head trembled harder. Whatever passed for its patience was visibly fraying.
"You want to mock me, old man? Go ahead." The pale face twisted. "I'll make sure you understand your mistake."
Garp rolled his shoulder.
"I'm not mocking you," he said. "I'm remembering something someone just told me." He raised his fist — the same one that had knocked the thing across the corridor. "So come on then. Show me what a cell can do."