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The Eighth Form was the final one. The highest expression of the Hebi Hebi no Mi, Model: Yamata no Orochi — every form and every life condensed into a single skeleton demigod. To the mortals standing before it, the distinction between this and an actual god was purely academic.
Kurozumi Orochi gathered his power into the tip of one finger, pressing it toward Helmeppo's forehead.
"Enough of this," it said. "Like your companions, you'll become nourishment for this country."
Something bloomed.
It started from Helmeppo's body — a surge of green energy that flickered like light caught in leaves, followed immediately by red flowers erupting across his skin. They opened fast, petals unfolding in sequence from his arms to his chest to his shoulders, vivid as flame against the ash-grey of the battlefield. Before the Eighth Form could process what it was seeing, the flowers had already spread — reaching the monster's skeletal hand, crawling up its arm, covering its face and torso in blooms that kept producing new growth from wherever they'd taken root.
Orochi paused. For just a moment, the flowers had something that could only be described as charm — the instinctive pull of something alive and beautiful in the middle of so much ruin. It was not an emotion the Eighth Form had expected to feel.
That moment was all Helmeppo needed.
He grabbed both women by the arms and pulled them into a run, keeping himself between them and the monster. "Don't look at it. Keep moving." His voice was low and urgent. "That technique only lasts once — Aramaki planted it on me before we came in. We just need to put distance between us and Orochi until the Admiral arrives. Move."
Kujaku and Hibari ran with him, each holding one of his hands.
The red flowers were more stubborn than the Eighth Form had expected. It crushed them with its hands — they regrew. It dug at the roots — new shoots appeared in adjacent flesh before the old ones finished dying. They weren't a threat, not to something of this level, but they clung to its surface and slowed its movement with the sheer persistence of something designed to be difficult to remove.
Annoying. Like watching power take the shape of a weed.
It had bought those three humans three kilometers of distance in less than three minutes.
Off the coast of Wano Country, Aramaki felt the seed break.
It was a precise sensation — the Mori Mori no Mi (Forest-Forest Fruit) always knew the state of the growths it had placed in the world, and the flower he'd left dormant in Helmeppo had just told him everything he needed to know about where his people were and what they were facing. He didn't hesitate. He'd agreed to come when they called, and the call had come.
He was already moving toward the island when the God's Knights came into view — the remnants that Wano had left of them, filtering back toward the coast with Figarland Garling at their head. The Saint's presence registered. Aramaki noted the scale of their losses without any particular expression, and felt something in his chest that was probably satisfaction.
The weaker the Celestial Dragons' personal army, the better. It was not complicated. The strongest force on the sea could not afford to spend another generation asking permission from people who had inherited rather than earned their authority. This outcome had done more for the Marine's future than any single battle in recent memory.
Garling and Aramaki passed each other without speaking. Two institutions with two sets of interests, heading in opposite directions. What had happened on the island was Aramaki's to assess himself.
The flower on his head — a perpetual bloom, petals catching the air — spun as he accelerated, lifting him clear of the water. It was not the fastest mode of travel in existence, but it moved well ahead of any standard Rokushiki application, and it left his hands free.
Hold on a little longer, he thought, in the direction of wherever Helmeppo was.
Kurozumi Orochi abandoned patience.
The fire he'd copied from Todoroki Shoto answered his intent immediately. He turned it inward, burning through the surface of his own body in a controlled sweep. The red flowers charred and crumbled, the roots in his flesh seared to nothing before they could regrow. The pollen, the buried seeds, all of it burned in one pass. His skin smoldered briefly, then sealed.
He looked at the three small shapes disappearing across the scorched ground.
"Stay here."
The power gathered in his index finger — slow, deliberate compression. The air around the fingertip distorted first, pulling inward toward the forming point of darkness. The black sphere shrank as the energy density increased, growing brighter and tighter until it hummed against his skin like a held breath.
He released it.
The Black Flash left his fingertip as a beam of absolute dark, tearing the air in a straight line across the battlefield. The ground in its path dissolved. The wake it left was a channel of absence — not scorched, not broken, just gone — and it was covering the distance to the three running figures faster than legs had any hope of answering.
Kujaku felt it without turning around. Hibari did turn, and her face answered the question of whether there was any time left.
Helmeppo faced forward and kept moving. There was nothing else to do.
Wind passed them.
Not the wind of the explosion's approach — something else, moving toward the beam rather than away from it. An old man with gray-white hair was suddenly standing between SWORD and the Black Flash, his posture unhurried, his sword already leaving its scabbard in a motion that had no wasted component.
The blade moved in a smooth arc, and the wind came with it.
The Wall built itself in the space of the draw — a vertical field of compressed air that expanded from the sword's path and held, invisible as atmosphere but solid as stone against what slammed into it. The Black Flash hit the Wind Wall and stopped. All of it — the compression, the darkness, the obliterating momentum of the technique — absorbed into the currents and dispersed.
The ravine it had carved in the ground before reaching Yasuo stretched back dozens of meters. The wall had caught it at the last possible point.
Beyond the wall, everything was quiet.
Helmeppo, Kujaku, and Hibari stopped running. They turned. They looked at the old wanderer standing with his sword still extended, the Wind Wall already fading back into the air around him.
They recognized him. The swordsman who had killed God's Knights with a single technique as if it required no particular effort. The old man who knew Wano Country in his bones and had come back to spend whatever he had left on it.
If the Wind Wall could hold what the Eighth Form sent at them, then the messenger of the wind had arrived at exactly the right moment.