—Real World — Wano Country, Shogun's Mansion—
Kurozumi Orochi sat up so fast he nearly knocked Komurasaki off her seat.
"Brother Jack," he said, and the word brother did a lot of work in that sentence that the rest of his body was not supporting — he was drenched, pale, speaking with the particular quality of someone who understood exactly how much trouble they were in and had decided that friendliness was their best remaining option. "We're all family here. Whatever the issue is, we can discuss it."
Jack looked at him.
"Who's family?" The mammoth's voice carried the contempt of someone who had thought about this for the duration of a boat ride and had arrived at clear conclusions. "You are a dog. Kaido's dog, tied to the position of Shogun. That's what you are, and that's all you are. We are the masters of Wano Country. We don't need the dog explaining himself to us."
Orochi's mouth opened and closed. He was clever enough to know that none of the things he wanted to say would help him.
He began slowly backing up toward Komurasaki, thinking about exit routes.
Komurasaki had been watching the mammoth fill the room with the calm assessment of someone who had spent years making accurate reads under pressure. She moved before Orochi could reach her — crossed the space between them in two quick steps, wrapped her arms around him, and buried her face in his chest. The tears came with apparent spontaneity.
"General," she said. "Please don't abandon me. I'm frightened." A pause. "Stop pretending and show him what you can actually do. Make this awful pirate leave."
The tactical genius of this was that Orochi now could not easily retreat without abandoning the woman, and retreating without the woman would damage his reputation in the only direction he actually cared about. He was frozen — a general who couldn't advance and a man who couldn't retreat, standing with Komurasaki's arms around him while a mammoth the size of a building decided whether to charge.
Without her present, Kurozumi Orochi would probably have been kneeling on the floor by now.
"General," Komurasaki continued, her voice pitched with just the right quality of helpless distress, "are you really going to tolerate this? He destroyed your mansion. That deserves punishment."
Orochi's scalp crawled. Punish Jack the Drought. The phrase arrived and left his mind without stopping.
Jack, for his part, felt the desire to fight fully engaged. "Who's punishing whom, Orochi? I've been looking forward to this."
The mammoth moved.
It crossed the hall at the speed that something its size shouldn't be able to reach — the floor cracking under each step, the displacement of air preceding it like a warning. The ivory caught the light. At this range, Orochi's face was the first thing that would stop it.
Komurasaki's arms loosened. She was already stepping back, positioning herself at an angle that would allow her to move in any direction that wasn't toward the mammoth. The tears had stopped with the precision of weather clearing.
Orochi couldn't move. He watched the shadow getting larger and felt, clearly and ally, that he was about to lose his head.
A figure in white dropped from somewhere above and landed in front of him. One hand caught Orochi by the collar. The other planted against the floor as a pivot. In a single motion, both of them were airborne, the mammoth's charge completing itself against empty space and the wall beyond it.
Jack extracted his tusks from the plaster, turned around, and looked at the young man standing in front of Orochi with the general behind him.
White hair. Pale skin. The two red marks between his brows. The faint, shifting pattern of the curse mark visible at his collar.
"The way you're dressed," Jack said. "You're Kimimaro."
Komurasaki was looking at Kimimaro closely.
The Sky Screen had shown him — his appearance in the future Wano, the seal on his skin, the flesh it had grown to carry part of Orochi's body and soul. She'd assumed, when she saw it, that he was constructed ally for that moment. A tool made for a purpose.
He was standing here. He had been in the mansion this whole time. Which meant either the Sky Screen was accurate about Wano Country's future in ways she hadn't credited, or the young man in front of her was considerably more present in Orochi's plans than she'd understood.
Neither option was comfortable to sit with.
Orochi, behind Kimimaro, was looking at his own bodyguard with an expression that contained genuine surprise. He had known Kimimaro was here. He had not expected him to act.
"General." Kimimaro's voice was quiet and unhurried. "You should step back. I'll handle this."
It was not phrased as a question. Orochi stepped back.
The seal spread across Kimimaro's skin as it activated — the tadpole-script characters moving through the pale surface, each one a point of change. His body answered the seal. The bones responded first: pushing outward through the skin at the shoulders, the forearms, the spine, each one a spur that emerged clean and sharp without the hesitation that implied pain. His frame expanded. His musculature rebuilt itself around the bone structure that was leading it. His face changed shape in the way faces do when the architecture underneath them is no longer the same.
What was left was not the slim young man who had stood there a moment before. It was something that wore the same features in a different register — taller, armored in its own skeleton, the bone spurs giving it an outline that suggested a creature adapted for killing rather than a person who did killing as a choice.
His eyes were red.
He reached behind himself and took hold of the spine that ran along his back. He pulled.
The spine came free from the flesh with the sound of something separating that was meant to stay together, but the expression on Kimimaro's face during the process contained nothing that suggested the separation was unwelcome. The length of bone and cartilage in his hand shifted, the joints responding to his grip, loosening and reconnecting in a flexible configuration. He rotated his wrist once. The bone whip moved like something it had always been.
Jack watched this with the interest of someone genuinely encountering a new category.
"You're not a Devil Fruit user," he said. "The Sky Screen was clear about that. So what is this?" He reset his stance. "I'll find out by taking you apart."
The mammoth charged again.
Kimimaro moved like a calculation — not fast in the way Devil Fruit speed was fast, but precise in the way that something with a very clear understanding of angles and distances is precise. He left the ground as the mammoth's head came down, the bone whip already unwinding in a spiral around his rising body. He was looking for the eyes before he was fully in the air.
The mammoth's eyes were its weak point. Everyone present understood this, and Kimimaro had made his decision accordingly. The bone spur at the whip's end caught the light as it swung.
Shikotsumyaku
A battle between a powerful warrior and an agile assassin was a different kind of fight than Jack had walked into this room expecting to have.