-Broadcast — Flower Capital, Wano Country-
Across the Flower Capital, the God's Knights were discovering what fighting thousands of Orochi clones actually meant in practice. Each clone had Imitation ability. Each clone had independent reasoning. The original body issued direction; the clones completed it by their own judgment. It was not a hive mind — it was an army of tacticians, each one improving every second it spent in contact with an opponent.
The lives it was costing the God's Knights were not coming back.
In the ruins of the Shogun's Mansion, the three-way match had arranged itself with a certain dark fairness. Three Orochi clones facing three SWORD members. One opponent each.
The clones sized up what was in front of them.
One clone looked at Sett — at the red-furred ears, the size, the fists — and said: "Those arms. I wonder which is harder, your fist or mine."
One clone looked at Helmeppo and said: "Is my opponent an underage child?"
One clone looked at Todoroki Shoto — white hair on one side, red on the other, mismatched eyes, the large scar — and said: "Bald versus bald. Why are we making this difficult for each other?"
Todoroki touched the unscarred side of his face.
Sett stopped waiting.
He had been waiting for hours — observing, holding position, exercising the patience that came naturally to someone who had spent years in underground fighting circuits learning that the wrong moment to move was the last mistake you made. But he had also spent years in underground fighting circuits, which meant he recognized when the moment had arrived.
"My fists are larger than that man's who just tried to beat you." He was talking about the boxer. "Don't confuse me with him."
His Armament Haki was Armament Haki in the way that Ryuo — Wano's advanced flowing variant — was Armament Haki: the same base, a different generation of understanding. Sett's version produced a red luminescence across his knuckles, something between light and heat that he'd named for himself years ago.
Heroic Spirit.
Both fists, simultaneously: left to the chest, right to the chest, the two impacts arriving in the same instant through a technique that shouldn't have been possible at that speed. The clone's chest opened. The wounds didn't simply bleed — the Heroic Spirit infused in each strike spread from the point of contact, something corrosive at the edge of it that pushed against the clone's regenerative ability and slowed what should have been an instant repair.
The clone touched the holes in its chest with both hands. Felt the edges. Felt the particular quality of what was eating at the wound.
"Interesting." Kurozumi Orochi's voice, from a bald face that wasn't Kurozumi Orochi's original face. "I was going to kill you. Now I'm not sure. There's a place in my Shogun's Mansion for someone who understands Haki the way you do."
Sett hit him again. "Survive today first."
It was a genuine assessment, not a taunt. Orochi had lived long enough to see Armament Haki genuinely innovated twice: once in Kaido, once — now — in the half-Mink fighter standing in front of him. Pioneer-level understanding, the kind that appeared once in several centuries. The kind that made the Ryuo of Wano Country possible to teach systematically instead of discovered individually. Burying that in the Marine was genuinely wasteful, and Kurozumi Orochi had always found waste offensive.
Sett found Orochi's vocational assessment considerably less interesting than continuing to fight and kept doing that instead.
"If I don't go to hell, who will?"
The golden light came from Helmeppo's body before the words finished.
The Arhat Fruit had been working quietly all night — his Clairvoyance reading the battlefield, confirming what was real and what wasn't. Now the fruit's second ability surfaced, the one that had been interrupted before completion in the Infinity Castle arc: a full transformation, his body suffused with golden light and taking the form of a Golden Arhat, a Mythical Zoan expression that was something between monk and divine manifestation — the Arhat of Buddhist tradition given physical presence, the light of it pressing outward in every direction.
The purifying quality of that light had a effect on Orochi's sixth form. Something in the clone's biology — the evil, the corruption, whatever metaphysical property the fruit's multiple dark forms carried — reacted to the Buddha's light as though being scoured from the outside.
"You look more like Buddha than the last Admiral who held that concept," the clone said. It advanced anyway, walking into the golden light to understand what it felt like.
The Arhat Fist hit it and it learned something about purification that it hadn't wanted to know.
Todoroki Shoto was thinking carefully about his teammates' positions.
The fusion — ice and fire combined into the third-state explosion — would have solved his problem immediately and completely. It would also have solved Sett and Helmeppo, who were standing within blast radius. This was the constraint.
Without the fusion, he had two tools available separately.
He started with the one that didn't require any immediate cleanup.
The cold air from his left side descended from his body into the ground and spread outward in a directed front, silent and fast. By the time the Orochi clone across from him registered the temperature change, frost was already forming on its ankles. Cold traveled up. Legs. Torso. Arms. The clone's face, in the last moment before it froze completely, showed the expression of something that has recognized too late what is happening.
It became a standing block of ice, arms slightly raised, frozen mid-motion.
Todoroki looked at it. He looked at the distance between himself and his teammates.
He produced a fire tornado from his right hand — a contained one, directed, kept to the column of ice rather than the surrounding area. The ice melted. What was inside the ice melted along with it. The regenerative ability that had answered every other attack tonight found that it could not repair faster than it was being destroyed from two directions at once, and stopped finding answers.
The steam rose from the ruins where the third clone had been.
One down.
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