-Broadcast-
The moment SWORD's three survivors connected with Aramaki, the tension that had been holding Helmeppo's body upright for the last hour let go all at once. He sagged. The two women kept him from going the rest of the way to the ground.
Aramaki transferred another measure of life force through his palm — the Mori Mori no Mi's vitality current stabilizing what the anesthetic had been managing — and Helmeppo's condition moved from immediately critical to simply very bad, which was an improvement. Whatever else needed treating, the medical ship could handle. Right now the priority was distance.
"We move," Aramaki said. "Talk later. Get out of Wano Country first."
He could feel the collision from where they stood — the pressure of Kaido and Orochi's battle transmitting through the air and ground in a continuous low-frequency tremor that someone who knew what to feel for could read like a weather report. Two forces at that level intersecting in one place. Even at the outskirts, the fringe effects of it were strong enough that Aramaki had already concluded he would not be walking away cleanly from a direct engagement with either of them today.
Wano Country. It carried history the way some places carried water — saturated, unable to hold any more, still being asked to absorb. Unraveling all of it would take someone remarkable and considerable time. Today was not that day.
Walking was too slow. Helmeppo needed support and the ground between here and the warship was not kind terrain. Aramaki knelt on one knee and pressed his palm flat to the earth.
"Don't be alarmed at what you see next," he said. "And don't shout."
Green light moved from his hand into the ground in a sustained current — the Mori Mori no Mi feeding natural energy directly into the soil, not as growth for its own sake but as instruction. The vegetation responded immediately, roots pushing upward, trunks rising and thickening at a rate that had nothing to do with seasons. Branches extended outward with the deliberate geometry of something that knew what it was doing. Leaves filled in the canopy in seconds.
The tree men stood thirty meters tall, solid-limbed, unhurried in their movement. They were not fast by the standard of combat, but they didn't need to be — they needed to carry three people across terrain at a pace that outpaced pursuit, and that they could do.
Kujaku and Hibari watched them come and kept their feet planted through what appeared to be sheer willpower.
"They look bulky," Aramaki said, "but they move well. Climb up. They'll take you to the warship."
Helmeppo caught the qualifier in Aramaki's phrasing. "You're not coming with us."
Aramaki shrugged with the quality of someone who had already made the calculation and didn't feel the need to discuss it. "Something's incoming. Go. I'll follow when I can."
The sonic boom preceded the arrival by less than a second.
Dark WarGreymon descended from above the cloud cover at an angle that put it between SWORD's tree men and the coast — a hundred-meter mass of black-metallic construction that should not have been able to hover without wings but was doing so anyway, its form combining animal characteristics with something that was definitely not from the same taxonomy as anything Aramaki had catalogued in his years at sea.
On its shoulder, Kurozumi Tama stood with her arms crossed, looking down at the evacuation in progress with the expression of someone who had taken an order she wasn't personally enthusiastic about executing.
"Beasts Pirates are the master of Wano Country," she said, loud enough to carry. "No need to rush off. You're our guests."
Dark WarGreymon's attention moved over Aramaki with the quality of something assessing a genuinely interesting problem. The low-level targets — the tree men, the three humans in them — it noted and dismissed. The Admiral was another category.
SWORD, being carried in the branches, had opinions about the hundred-meter monster now between them and the sea.
"It hovers without wings," Hibari said.
"Probably a Beasts Pirates research project," Kujaku offered.
"It's going to fight our Admiral," Helmeppo said. "We'll be fine."
The confidence in that last statement was doing some work, but it held.
Aramaki signaled the tree men and the evacuation continued moving — slower now, angling wide around Dark WarGreymon's position. He turned toward the monster and its rider directly.
Tama watched the tree men not stopping. Her expression shifted. She had done Aramaki the courtesy of sending Dark WarGreymon as her opening, which was not something she did for opponents she dismissed. And the Marine admiral was apparently going to use that as an opportunity to run.
"Let him see what Kuro can do," she said. "Blast them."
Dark WarGreymon looked at the tree men and their passengers. The passengers were effectively irrelevant to it — the life-gap between a Digimon of its classification and ordinary humans was not a contest. But Tama had given the order, so it would not refuse on the grounds of disinterest.
It raised both hands toward the sky.
The black energy sphere assembled in its palms slowly, like something being recalled rather than built — a compression of force that had a name and a shape it always returned to. It grew past the size of Dark WarGreymon's body within seconds, then kept growing, darkening the immediate sky with its shadow. The air around it became unstable, displaced by the mass of energy accumulating at the center.
Tama stood closest to it. The pressure coming off the forming technique was enough to make her heartbeat audible to herself. Dark WarGreymon's output existed at a level that was simply not on the same scale as a human body's tolerance. She was here because of the Dango Dango no Mi's (Dumpling-Dumpling Fruit) contract — without it, proximity alone would be a sentence.
She held her ground.
"Dark Gaia Force."
The tree men were moving. SWORD was moving with them. Aramaki was looking up at the black sun building above him with an expression that contained, briefly, something close to genuine appreciation for the view.
Then he measured the life energy radiating off Dark WarGreymon and stopped.
No impurities. No mechanical signature. The readings were entirely biological — not a Beasts Pirates science project, not a modified creature, not anything he could categorize against any life form he'd encountered in years of ranging across the seas. It was natural. It was just natural in a way that implied it had not grown up on this planet.
From another world, he thought. How?
The metaphysical question would have to wait. The black sphere above him was reaching the point where it would release, and Aramaki — dignified Admiral of the Marine, not a man who would let the Beasts Pirates see him hesitate — needed to answer it with something appropriate.
He pressed his palm back to the ground.