-Broadcast-
Hibari and Kujaku got Helmeppo upright between them. Moving was slow and every step cost something, but they moved. Staying alive was the only thing that still mattered.
"So Orochi went after Sett," Helmeppo said, more to himself than to the others. "That's why it didn't finish me. I hope he's holding on."
The two women exchanged a look over his head. Kujaku told him what had happened: the moment Sett had recognized the gap between himself and the Eighth Form, he'd made the calculation and left. When the Flying Guillotine's second and third waves swept across the field, he was already gone — leaving Helmeppo in the middle of it alone.
Kujaku's jaw tightened. She hated deserters. She ranked them just below traitors, and the line between the two categories was thinner than she usually admitted.
"Pray he can buy us enough time to get clear," she said. It wasn't generosity. It was pragmatism.
"With something this large happening on the island, Admiral Aramaki has to be moving," Helmeppo said. Hibari's reminder had surfaced the thought — he still had the emergency signal device Aramaki had given them. He hadn't wanted to use it. He still didn't. But the option was there.
The detonations came without warning.
A chain of explosions tore through the Flower Capital, one after another, and then the fire came — rising in a wall that swallowed entire streets and pushed a column of smoke and heat into the sky. The shockwave traveled through the ground before it reached them through the air, and all three of them staggered, grabbing each other to keep from going down.
Whatever was happening back there, neither side of it was human-scaled.
The surviving citizens of the Flower Capital ran past them in every direction, faces blank with a fear that had moved beyond thought. The street they'd been running down was now red from reflected fire, the air thick and acrid. Buildings that had stood through the night groaned and cracked in the heat.
When gods fight, mortals endure it. That was the only honest description for what Wano Country had become.
Two more explosions. Then a sound that wasn't an explosion — a crack of displaced air, close and getting closer fast.
Helmeppo shoved both women away from him. "Go. Go. Don't stop."
He didn't know if he was fast enough. He didn't think he was.
He wasn't.
The Eighth Form landed behind him without a sound — at a speed that made the landing itself the only evidence it had arrived. Helmeppo felt it before he heard it: a cold that had nothing to do with temperature, and a weight of presence that pressed against the back of his neck like a blade already resting there.
Kujaku and Hibari had stopped. Their faces said everything.
Helmeppo turned around.
The Eighth Form stood where it had landed. In one skeletal hand, loose and almost casual, it held Sett's head.
Helmeppo stared at it. His chest tightened into something that didn't have a clean name — grief and rage and a dull
His body took a step back before he told it to.
He stopped it. Forced himself still. Forced his eyes up from the head in the monster's hand to the empty-socket face above it, the bone spurs and the wrong light and the teeth.
Buy time. Let them run.
He unclenched his fists deliberately. Let his shoulders drop. Made himself look as unthreatening as a badly-injured, barely-standing man already could.
"Wait," he said.
The Eighth Form paused. It regarded him.
"I want to ask you something," Helmeppo said. His voice was steady enough. Barely. "You've been dormant all this time. Hiding what you are. With this kind of strength — you never needed to. Why?"
The Eighth Form considered him for a moment. A different last question and it would have ended there. But this one reached something inside the skeleton demigod that apparently still had opinions.
"Have you ever seen a real god?"
Helmeppo blinked. "God?"
"God has absolute power," Orochi said. The rough, panting voice carried something that wasn't quite reverence and wasn't quite fear, but lived in the space between them. "Not what people call gods. Not titles given by the World Government or crowns passed down through bloodlines. I mean the real kind."
"Are you saying that you're —"
The Eighth Form shook its head. The modesty in the gesture was almost stranger than anything else it had done. "There are many things called gods in this world. I am not even one of them." A pause. "You have never seen a real god. I have. With my own eyes."
The hollow sockets held their wrong light. The bone spurs stood still in the smoky air.
"In front of that kind of power, what I am right now is just a slightly larger ant. Nothing more."
That was why. Years of low profile, of performing the role of a weak and wretched shogun, of keeping his head down while building his fruit's potential in secret — not arrogance, not caution, but the clear-eyed conclusion of someone who had looked at the ceiling of the world and understood exactly how far below it he stood.
Fame was worthless. Status was worthless. Both were tokens used by people who had never sat across from something genuinely divine and understood, in their blood, that they had no seat at that table. Not yet. Maybe not ever.
The only rational response was to accumulate, quietly, and wait.
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