-Broadcast — Flower Capital, Wano Country-
The white paper was everywhere.
It came out of Denjiro's clothes in continuous streams — not a hidden stash but something that seemed to have no bottom, sheet after sheet catching the air and dispersing in all directions, moving toward the Fearful Sheep Demon as though drawn by a current. The demon stopped. It watched the paper approach with a curiosity that was almost comical on something that size.
The first sheet touched it and disappeared in a flash of light.
Then the rest arrived.
The detonations came one after the next without pause — each one enough on its own to be significant, stacked together into something that shook the entire block from the foundation up. The sheep demon couldn't catch the paper; every attempt to claw at it produced another explosion at close range. More paper kept coming. The frequency of the blasts increased until it was no longer a sequence of explosions but a continuous roar, and the structures that had survived Todoroki's blue fire were finished by the shockwave of a thousand simultaneous detonations. The smoke that rose from the Shogun's Mansion district was visible from the far end of the Flower Capital.
The explosion carried a message to every corner of the city: the samurai's final act had been his loudest one.
When SWORD reached the site, the smoke was still rising.
The ruins were quiet in the way that places are quiet after an overwhelming amount of noise — the silence feeling like a physical substance. Todoroki, Sett, and Helmeppo moved through it and found the inventory of what the thousand explosions had left behind.
Three bodies. Each one different.
The first was the Fearful Sheep Demon — or what remained of it. The black skin was perforated across every surface, most of the skull-head destroyed, the tentacles collapsed. The third form was identifiable only by the texture of the skin and the bone fragments of the sheep's jaw.
Next to it: a hybrid creature. Multiple monster elements combined with human limbs into something that hadn't finished assembling itself before Denjiro's paper found it. This had been the fourth form — it never demonstrated an ability. The explosions had killed it before it could.
And beyond that: a woman.
Long hair, spread across the rubble behind her head. White clothes with elements that didn't fit the style of Wano Country — something from a different register, unsettling in its ity. Her face was pale and still. This had been the fifth form. Whatever psychic ability it carried — the body's appearance suggested something in that direction — it had not been enough to protect against absolute physical force delivered at that scale.
Todoroki stared at all three. He counted back. The original man. The flesh mountain. The sheep demon. The hybrid. The woman.
"Five," he said. "He has died five times tonight."
"Back up," Helmeppo said sharply. "There's something in her — it's moving."
All three retreated.
The woman's body lay still. Her abdomen rose once, improbably, and an arm pushed through from inside — thick, blood-slicked, feeling the air above the wound for purchase. Then a head. Then shoulders.
A bald man crawled out of the body of the fifth form and stood up in the ruins, covered in blood and mucus, approximately two meters tall, built like someone who had spent decades doing manual work. His skin was bronze. His earlobes were large. He was not wearing clothes. He had no male physiological characteristics below the waist — a body that had been born minutes ago, assembled from the fruit's mechanics rather than grown.
He moved his new limbs experimentally. He looked at what was left of his previous forms. He looked at SWORD.
"Denjiro." His voice was exactly Kurozumi Orochi's voice, coming from a completely different face. "I should be using your real name now. I didn't think you'd push me this far. Those papers were a nasty surprise."
The Yamata no Orochi — the mythological eight-headed serpent that was the basis of Kurozumi Orochi's Mythical Zoan fruit — had given its user something approaching eight lives, each expressed through a different form. Six had now been demonstrated. The sixth stood naked in the rubble, looking harmless.
Several God's Knights contestants who had retreated earlier were back now, watching.
One of them was wearing boxing gloves.
The bald man's sixth form looked, on the surface, like a large but ordinary person — no obvious supernatural features, no visible power, no immediately threatening characteristic beyond the fact of what it had just emerged from. The Celestial Dragons assessed this and drew a conclusion.
The boxer stepped forward and hit the sixth form directly in the face.
Teeth left Orochi's mouth. His body staggered. A sound came out of him that was the sound of someone who had not expected a fist to hurt that much.
The boxer hit him again.
The sixth form stumbled backward, bracing itself against a piece of rubble. The boxer did not stop. Each punch landed with the full weight behind it — God's Knights-level Armament Haki, disciplined force, no hesitation. Bruises formed. Blood appeared. Ribs gave way in sequence. The bald old man tried to raise his arms and found his arms were not equal to the task.
He went down.
"Stop," he said from the ground. "I yield. I surrender. Please. It hurts—"
Nobody stopped.
Every contestant still standing in the ruins of the Shogun's Mansion had spent tonight watching this man's fruit absorb everything thrown at it and produce a new form from the wreckage. Nobody was interested in the sixth form's plea for mercy.
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