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Helmeppo came back to himself slowly, the world returning in pieces — the cold of the ice beneath him, the ache of his body registering damage from too many places to count at once.
He checked himself immediately. Reflex. The Arhat's light had given him something in those final seconds before the Guillotine swept across the field — a partial shield, the Buddha's radiance absorbing some of the blood drops before they reached him. His heart was intact. His brain was intact. His organs had taken damage, but nothing had severed anything immediately fatal.
It was, by any honest accounting, a miracle.
He turned his head.
Todoroki Shoto lay beside him, already cold. His eyes were still open. Helmeppo looked at them for a moment, then quietly recited a passage of scripture in his mind — not aloud, because there wasn't anyone left nearby to hear it, and the words weren't for the living anyway. He didn't close the boy's eyes. He couldn't bring himself to.
He got to his feet.
The seventh form's sweep had thrown up a massive cloud of dust and displaced air, filling the field with thick white fog that cut visibility to almost nothing. Somewhere out in it, Sett might still be alive. Helmeppo started moving, dragging his damaged body through the white.
His Clairvoyance was spent. He'd hit his daily limit during the fight — no reserves left in the technique. He was searching blind.
The fog shifted.
Not from wind. Something moved through it, pushing it aside with presence alone, and what emerged from the white was not anything that belonged in the world of the living.
It was covered in flesh and blood, as if it had climbed up from somewhere below the earth. Dozens of bone spurs jutted from its back in a jagged crown — sharp enough that the cold light caught each one and threw it back. Its body was enormous, muscular, radiating pressure that was less like a physical force and more like a sound too low to hear. The eye sockets in its skull-like head held a faint, wrong light. Its mouth was open. The teeth were what teeth look like when the thing wearing them doesn't need to eat.
One skeletal hand rested on its hip. It had emerged from the fog and positioned itself in front of Helmeppo with something almost like composure.
The Eighth Form. The final form.
Kurozumi Orochi, at the end of everything he was.
Helmeppo walked toward it.
The skeleton demigod watched him approach with something that might have been curiosity. "Brave enough," it said, its voice a low grind of air through a chest that shouldn't be breathing. "Where's the other one? It would be more entertaining with both of you."
The last of the Arhat's light gathered in Helmeppo's right fist. He pulled it together, all that remained, and drove it into Orochi's face with everything he had left.
It didn't matter. He knew it before the punch landed. The Arhat Fist hit the Eighth Form's skull and stopped — no crack, no recoil, no damage registered. The difference in what each of them was at this moment was not something that could be overcome with anger or grief or the memory of a dead teammate.
Orochi didn't even bother to wind up. A light backhanded swing — almost casual — connected with Helmeppo's body, and the world went sideways.
He hit the ground hard and lay there, his bones screaming about things that had broken, his vision swimming. He tried to push himself upright. His arm gave out. He went back down.
The Eighth Form looked at him on the ground without hurry. "I'll deal with you later," it said.
Its legs bent. It launched itself upward in a single motion, the sonic boom of its acceleration splitting the air behind it as it rose and curved away through the Wano sky, tracking something — or someone — in the distance with that too-wide perception of its.
Two sets of footsteps.
Helmeppo heard them coming through the fog before he saw the figures — running, uneven, the particular rhythm of people who were hurt but moving anyway. Kujaku and Hibari came out of the white, both of them covered in blood that was not primarily their own.
Hibari reached him first. She pulled a syringe from her field kit without speaking and pressed it into his arm — a specialized anesthetic, strong enough to dull the compound damage across his body. The relief that spread through him was immediate and profound.
Helmeppo, who had been gritting his teeth through internal organ damage and multiple fractures, found enough air to speak.
"I'm glad you made it. Where's Grus? Isn't he with you?"
The silence that followed was its own answer.
Hibari's shoulders shook. She didn't put the syringe away. Kujaku stood a step back, her hands — usually so precise, always in control — raised slightly in front of her, as if she was still processing where the blood on them had come from.
She was trembling.
Kujaku, who had walked away from a comfortable life of privilege on principle, who had clashed with the old-guard Marine and won the argument enough to resign from it with her head held high — she was trembling.
"The captain is dead." Her voice came out flat, the way voices go when emotion is too large to carry on tone. "He used his body to shield us. I couldn't do anything when it mattered. I hate that."
When the seventh form's second wave had erupted, Grus had read the situation in an instant. He'd shaped himself into the largest clay form he could manage and thrown it over both women, pressing them to the ground beneath a mass of Nendo Nendo no Mi clay.
The Clay-Clay Fruit was a Paramecia. It had no Logia's intangibility, no Zoan's regenerating flesh. The Flying Guillotine had found every gap, every seam, punching through the clay and through the man beneath it in dozens of places simultaneously. He'd held. He'd kept the clay in place, kept his teammates underneath, kept the barrier together through the pain of it.
The shot that ended it had gone through his head.
He had died with his teammates beneath him and his hands still pressing the shield closed.
Hibari grabbed Helmeppo's arm with both hands. Her grip was tight and her eyes were wet and her voice was not steady. "We have to run. We can't beat it."
Kujaku nodded, and the nod cost her something. She was the vice-captain now, by default, and she put that weight on her face and made herself look at Helmeppo directly. "She's right. We have to go."
There was no shame in it. Helmeppo knew that. For anyone who had survived to the Eighth Form of Kurozumi Orochi, the shadow it left behind would not fade easily.
But surviving was still better than the alternative.
They ran.