-Broadcast — Flower Capital, Wano Country-
Most of the people in the garden had their attention on the wrong corpse.
Kyoshiro's blades had quartered one Orochi across the garden stone. The God's Knights member had crushed the other to blood mist. The four-piece body was the more obvious concern — it had already demonstrated it could regenerate from decapitation, and nobody wanted to be standing near it if it started doing that again.
The blood mist, on the other hand, was being ignored.
It had stopped dispersing. In the open air of the garden, the red cloud was pulling inward — not drifting, not settling, but actively gathering, as though something inside it had decided where it wanted to be. The mist condensed into masses. The masses were white. They moved.
The smell arrived before the shape fully resolved. Then the shape.
What assembled itself in the garden above the Shogun's Mansion in the full moonlight was not a man and was not recognizably Kurozumi Orochi. It was a mountain of white flesh, nearly twenty meters tall and growing, its surface a dense accumulation of female body parts — breasts, limbs, faces — all of them twisted into each other and pulsing as though the entire structure was breathing through thousands of lungs simultaneously. Blood vessels spread across the surface like a web under tension. The smell was overwhelming.
Several contestants who had been advancing were now retreating.
"Tear it down," someone said.
The ones who tried found out what tearing it down meant in practice. Every piece removed was replaced before the gap could be measured. A God's Knights member who hit it with fully Armament Haki-reinforced fists sent chunks flying — and then found himself absorbed, the flesh closing around him from behind while he was focused on what was in front of him. His shouts came from inside it for a few seconds. Then they didn't.
The surface of the mountain rippled in a way that suggested satisfaction.
Nobody advanced again after that.
The mountain of flesh was not fast. It didn't need to be. It turned — the motion involving the entire structure rotating at an angle that no single body should be able to achieve — and found Kyoshiro at the edge of the garden.
A face assembled itself on the surface. Many faces, in fact — partial, overlapping — but one of them had Orochi's voice.
"Kyoshiro." The sound came from everywhere. "You betrayed me. Come inside. I'll forgive you."
It began moving toward him.
Kyoshiro understood then what he was looking at: not the end of Kurozumi Orochi, but the second form. The fruit had been hiding this. Everything Moriah had warned about — whatever fooled Kozuki Oden for years must have genuine power behind it — was twenty meters tall and advancing across the garden stone.
He backed toward the Shogun's Mansion. His swords hadn't done it and wouldn't do it. He was not fighting alone tonight. He needed to buy time for the thing that was coming.
On the elevated position above the garden, SWORD's situation deteriorated in a order.
Todoroki Shoto had been watching the flesh mountain for approximately thirty seconds when the left side of his body — the snow-white half — began producing cold air with deliberate direction. An ice path formed in front of him, extending out from his position toward the garden below, and before Captain Grus had finished processing what that meant, Todoroki was already a hundred meters away and accelerating.
"Get back here—"
Sett was on the ice path before Grus finished the sentence, his enormous frame moving faster than its size implied, fists already closed. "I've been standing here all night," he said, to no one in particular. "This is what I'm here for."
Hibari raised her camera-bug reflexively. Kujaku's whip was already in hand.
Grus activated his Nendo Nendo no Mi (Clay-Clay Fruit) and produced enough clay to pin both of them in place before either could follow. He held the clay figures together by sheer force of will and looked at what was left of his team.
Helmeppo was on the ice path.
"I'm not fighting," Helmeppo said, sliding. "I'm stopping them."
Grus stared at the back of his departing team.
Hibari's camera-bug tracked the ice path. Kujaku tested the clay restraints. Neither of them said anything that would help.
Below, the flesh mountain filled most of the garden. Kyoshiro had his back to the Shogun's Mansion wall. Todoroki Shoto was coming down the ice path at speed, and whatever solution he had in mind for a monster that regenerated from individual cells — it was going to become visible very quickly.