On the Sky Screen, Kurozumi Orochi had already reached his sixth form.
The people watching from within Wano Country worked through the implications with the focused attention of people whose lives depended on getting the math right: the Yamata no Orochi — eight heads in the mythology — likely meant eight forms. Six demonstrated. Two unaccounted for. The regeneration, the multiplying, the cannibalism, the purifying light having only partial effect on it. The thing on the Sky Screen was a monster, and the monster's name was their Shogun.
In the room where the real Kurozumi Orochi sat surrounded by the Oniwabanshu, the sweat was flowing freely.
Not his. Theirs.
A purple-haired geisha had moved close to Orochi's side under the watchful eyes of the other Oniwabanshu members. In normal circumstances this maneuver was reliable. Kurozumi Orochi was consistently interested in beautiful women.
Tonight was not normal circumstances, and Orochi was not interested in anything that wasn't figuring out whether the Beasts Pirates were on their way and how long they would take to arrive.
He sat in the chair and watched the Sky Screen show his future self fighting three members of SWORD simultaneously, and knew things about that fight that nobody else in the room knew.
The fruit he actually possessed — the Yamata no Orochi, Mythical Beast Zoan — had one ability he'd ever confirmed: the snake transformation. Many heads, and you couldn't kill the snake by cutting off one of them; you had to remove them all at once. That was it. That was the extent of what the fruit had ever done for him. The six forms on the Sky Screen — the flesh mountain, the sheep demon, the clones, the imitation ability, all of it — were something the Sky Screen was depicting as his future capability.
He had not developed any of that. He was sitting in a chair. His hands were ordinary hands.
If he'd had even the second form available to him years ago, he wouldn't have needed to trick Kozuki Oden through fourteen years of elaborate deception and poison and maneuvering. He could have simply killed him. The logical gap was enormous and obvious to anyone who thought about it clearly.
The Oniwabanshu were not thinking about it clearly. They were kneeling with their heads down, afraid to make eye contact, and filling in the space between what they knew and what they didn't know with explanations that all reached the same conclusion: the Shogun had been hiding his true power the entire time, and now the Sky Screen had exposed it, and he was furious about it, and this was an exceptionally bad moment to be a retainer.
Orochi looked at their lowered heads and felt something that took him a moment to identify.
It was amusement.
They were terrified of him. Genuinely, physically terrified — the people who had privately considered switching allegiances every time a better opportunity seemed to present itself, the people who had never truly given him their loyalty, who followed him because there was nothing more profitable available. Every one of them now believed he had been the most dangerous man in Wano Country for the past several decades and had simply chosen not to demonstrate it.
He cleared his throat.
"Stop keeping your heads down. Look at me."
"General — we couldn't possibly — your divine face—"
"We're fine with our heads down, please don't trouble yourself—"
He almost laughed. Didn't. Maintained the expression of a man whose mood was dangerous and whose patience was thin — which was easy, because he'd spent his entire adult life maintaining exactly that expression, and it was the only weapon he'd ever truly mastered.
The Kurozumi clan's gift had never been power. It had been performance. The ability to be exactly whatever a situation required, for as long as required, without ever breaking. The restoration of the Kurozumi name, the twenty years of maintaining the Shogunate, the fourteen years of managing Kozuki Oden — all of it had run on deception maintained so consistently that the deceivers sometimes forgot they were deceiving.
Even now, the Oniwabanshu were not asking themselves why a man of apparently monstrous power would have spent his career hiding behind the Beasts Pirates. They were inventing an explanation and believing it.
"Denjiro." He said the real name flatly — not Kyoshiro, which had been the alias, but the name underneath. "Find him. Alive or dead, I want him returned. He's a traitor, and I won't leave that unaddressed."
Denjiro had been Kyoshiro for years, managing the underworld of the Flower Capital, collecting the tribute that made Orochi's extravagant life possible, serving as the one genuinely competent subordinate in a court full of people who were either cowards or sycophants. And across all of it, the real name had been Denjiro, and the real loyalty had been to a dead man, and the real purpose had been waiting for the moment to spend that loyalty on something that mattered.
It was, Orochi had to admit to himself in the privacy of his own thoughts, impressive. He hated it bitterly, but it was impressive.
Fukurokuju — head of the Oniwabanshu, the most cunning of the lot and therefore the most genuinely frightened tonight — pressed his forehead to the floor and received the order. He had spent twenty years believing himself to be the closest person to the Shogun's real intentions, and the Sky Screen had demonstrated in real time that he had understood nothing. He was not sure whether the Shogun had been deceiving him all along or whether the Sky Screen had somehow lied, and both possibilities were equally terrifying.
"It will be done immediately, my lord. Denjiro's head. I swear it."
Orochi waved a hand. Leave. Everyone leave.
The room emptied with the particular speed of people who are very motivated to be somewhere else.
In the silence, Kurozumi Orochi slumped into his chair.
He listened to make sure no one was within range. Then, quietly, with the voice of a man addressing someone who had done him a personal injury:
"Sky Screen." A low, controlled fury. "What exactly did I do to you? You've shown the whole world things I haven't done yet. Things I might never do. You've made people afraid of me and you've made people try to kill me and you've taken Denjiro away and burned my Shogun's Mansion — all in the same night, because you showed them a future where I somehow become an eight-headed monster."
Something on the desk in front of him went through the air and hit the opposite wall.
"I am a paper tiger. I have always been a paper tiger. And now everyone is afraid of the paper tiger, and I cannot tell them the truth without dying, and you did this tonight of all nights."
More objects followed. Outside the closed door, the maids could hear the sound of things breaking. Not one of them moved. The Shogun was upset. This was a known configuration, and the correct response was the same as it had always been: stay away, wait, and survive until tomorrow.
Whether the Shogun was upset because his hidden power had been exposed, or for some other reason entirely, was a question none of them were going to ask.