-Broadcast — Flower Capital, Wano Country-
The Shogun's Mansion — the oldest, most ornate structure in Wano Country — was being eaten from the inside.
The flesh mountain moved through its interior with no particular urgency, absorbing walls and support beams and screens and everything else it encountered. Wherever it passed, it left a negative space where a building had been: a ragged hole with chewed edges, the surrounding material marked by the pattern of something that had simply swallowed the architecture and kept moving.
A giant hand — actually dozens of hands merged into one, still multiplying at the wrist — reached through a corridor toward Kyoshiro.
"You betrayed me." The voice filled the hallway from every wall simultaneously. "After everything I gave you. Why? Why?"
Kyoshiro cut the fingers off and kept moving. He did not run in a straight line — straight lines gave the thing a direction to move in; circles and cuts through rooms delayed it. "You gave me nothing worth keeping," he said to the walls. "I am a retainer of Kozuki Oden. What favors could you possibly offer that would be worth betraying him for? Every day I spent serving you was a day I spent waiting for today."
He moved through the servants' quarters — empty; the staff had been dismissed before the Night Parade, which had probably saved their lives. The Oniwabanshu were a different matter. Orochi's personal guard squad — fake ninja who had no real ninjutsu and made up for it by abusing whatever authority Orochi's name gave them — had stayed at their posts. Kyoshiro killed them efficiently as he passed through. He had disliked them for years and this was long overdue.
The mountain of flesh behind him demolished three more rooms on its way through.
Outside the Shogun's Mansion, the three SWORD members who had arrived via Todoroki's ice path looked at the contestants who had retreated from the flesh mountain and found them unimpressive.
"Celestial Dragons," Todoroki said.
"Running from that," Sett agreed. His fists closed and opened. He had come here for a fight and was deciding which direction to apply it.
Helmeppo had arrived intending to pull both of them back. He looked at the Shogun's Mansion — the sounds coming from inside it were not reassuring — and revised his assessment of how that conversation would go.
Todoroki raised the hand that controlled fire.
Blue flames gathered in his palm — not orange, not red, a particular shade of blue that sat at the edge of the visible spectrum and did not behave like ordinary combustion. He studied the mansion wall for a moment and made the adjustment he needed.
"Netherfire."
The blue flame crossed the gap between them and the mansion wall and landed. It held. Then it spread — not the way fire spreads when helped by wind, but the way it spreads when it has decided to, as though it had its own intention about where it was going. Within seconds the first wall was fully involved. Within a minute the entire facade was a solid curtain of blue, and the sound coming from inside it had changed register entirely.
The light it produced was the wrong color for firelight. It illuminated the garden and the surrounding Flower Capital streets in a cold blue that turned every shadow the wrong direction.
Inside the mansion, the flesh mountain encountered the fire.
It tried to compensate — splitting itself faster, proliferating new mass to smother the flames. Under ordinary fire this might have worked. The fat and oil content of the flesh could displace oxygen. But Todoroki's blue flames were not interested in oxygen as a prerequisite. They burned through the new flesh faster than it could be produced. The fat that the flesh mountain generated became fuel rather than suppressant, and the fire tornado that formed around its body in the next few minutes rotated the burning faster than anything on the surface could manage.
The flesh mountain shrank. It made sounds during this process that neither Kyoshiro — who had cleared the building by then — nor anyone watching from outside was likely to forget.
When it stopped making sounds, it had stopped entirely.
Kyoshiro stood at the edge of the garden and watched the blue fire work for a moment. "Burn it clean," he said. "Everything in that building belonged to a man who earned nothing. Let it go."
Todoroki controlled the fire's perimeter with careful gestures, keeping it inside the mansion's footprint. It was not containment so much as direction — he was not stopping it from burning, only from expanding to the surrounding structures. The Shogun's Mansion burned for ten full minutes. When the blue fire finally went out, the most prestigious building in Wano Country was a level field of black ash. The nearby stonework had partially melted. Nothing recognizable remained.
Helmeppo stood back from the ruins and pressed his hands together. "Buddha have mercy." He meant it genuinely. Working people had built that place, the way working people build everything that powerful people then claim. Whatever Orochi had used it for, the building itself had not deserved this — and whoever came next to Wano Country would have the workers rebuild it for them, and those workers would receive the same credit they always did.
Todoroki looked at his hand. "I expected it to hold longer."
When the ground cooled enough to walk on, Kyoshiro went in. He needed to be certain.
The contestants who had retreated earlier came back as well — curiosity operating where courage hadn't — and picked their way through the ruins under the eye of the SWORD team.
The ruins were uniformly black. Ash and melted stone and nothing else. Except in one place: a pool of dark liquid that had not evaporated. In a fire that had partially melted the stone around it, this pool was still liquid, still present, the surface shimmering with a faint luster that did not belong to any ordinary biological fluid.
Someone stepped closer. The pool began to boil.
Not from heat — the surrounding ground was hot, but this was something else, the boiling coming from inside the liquid itself, bubbles rising and bursting at the surface with the rhythm of something breathing. The color was black. The smell was blood.
As the people in the ruins watched, the liquid rose.
Not much — not quickly — but it rose, pulling itself upward into the air in threads and strands that bent and twisted and found each other, accumulating.
Kurozumi Orochi's Mythical Beast Devil Fruit had survived the complete incineration of every physical form it had expressed tonight.
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