—Real World — Wano Country, Shogun's Mansion—
Losing an eye made Jack angrier, not slower.
The bone spur had taken the left one cleanly — Kimimaro's aim had been accurate enough that there wasn't much question about the intent. What followed was a mammoth operating on pain and fury rather than strategy, which was in some ways harder to manage than a mammoth operating on strategy. The mansion absorbed most of it. Walls, pillars, floors — the structure came apart room by room as the fighting moved through it, Jack's charges becoming less targeted and more like atmospheric events. Even with Armament Haki reinforcing the hide, the bone whip found its angles. Jack was large, and large things that keep getting hit eventually run out of what keeps them moving.
The main beam of a collapsing section caught him across the head. The rubble came down after it. The movement underneath stopped.
Kimimaro stood at the edge of the ruins for a few minutes, watching for any sign of continuation. When none came, he let the curse seal recede. The bone spurs retracted. The muscle mass that had built itself around the expanded skeleton returned to its resting state. What was left was a slim young man with pale skin and two red marks between his brows, looking at a pile of debris with the expression of someone completing a calculation.
The seal cost him something each time. He was aware of this and had always been aware of it. The power was real and the limitation was equally real.
"I'll need a room," he said, to no one in particular, since no one in particular was nearby. "Somewhere quiet. I don't want to be disturbed."
Kurozumi Orochi emerged from the doorway he'd retreated to, Komurasaki at his side.
He looked at the unconscious mammoth buried in the rubble of his own mansion and felt, for the first time in this interaction, like he was on solid ground.
"Well done," he said, with the particular enthusiasm of someone who had been afraid for the last twenty minutes and was now compensating. "Very well done. It was past time someone taught that man a lesson."
Jack was the one among the Three Disasters who had never made the slightest effort to pretend that he respected the Shogun of Wano Country. The other two at least performed the courtesy when it was convenient. Jack had simply never bothered. Orochi had catalogued this grievance carefully, across years, without any outlet for it. The outlet had just arrived unexpectedly in the form of a pale young man with a bone whip.
Kimimaro acknowledged none of this and walked past him toward the interior of the mansion. "Prepare a room. Nothing else from me."
Orochi nodded at a servant and watched the young man go.
Komurasaki stood beside him, her expression neutral, her mind moving through the implications at speed. Kimimaro had been here the entire time. He existed. The Sky Screen had not constructed him for effect — he was a real person with real capabilities, already integrated into Orochi's household, already relevant to the real world's trajectory. Which raised the question of what else the Sky Screen had shown accurately.
She filed it and kept her face pleasant. "General," she said, "with someone like that as protection, what do we have to fear from the Beasts Pirates?"
Orochi pulled her into his side with the satisfied air of a man who had survived something through no personal effort and was now prepared to take credit for it. "Jack? I wouldn't even dignify him by acting personally. Only Kaido himself would be worth my attention. Small characters can be handled by my subordinates."
Komurasaki smiled. She was very good at that.
The surviving members of the Orochi Oniwabanshu assessed the damage.
Fukurokuju came down from the beam he'd been embedded in. The inventory of what was broken in his body took time to complete, and the conclusion was that he would not be leaving a bed for the better part of a month. He had served Orochi through many things. He had not anticipated the mammoth.
Jack's men found their commander under the rubble — one eye, significant structural damage, breathing with the stubborn quality of something built ally to not stop breathing regardless of circumstance. They had the argument about what to do in the compressed timeframe that emergency situations allow: go back in and finish things, or take care of their commander.
"We go in, we die," the sensible one said. "Move him."
They moved him to a clinic and sent word to Onigashima.
—Real World — Onigashima—
Kaido listened to the report with an expression that moved through several stages.
Jack had gone in like a cannonball, taken a bone spur through an eye, been buried under the Shogun's Mansion's roof beams, and was currently being put back together by a clinic. Orochi himself had not needed to do anything. The young man the Sky Screen had shown — the one who had appeared at the Flower Capital and left a piece of Orochi carved into his skin — had handled it entirely.
"Orochi didn't act at all," Kaido said. "What's he thinking?"
The Tobiroppō looked at each other. Several of them were privately calculating whether they could do better than Jack. Several of them were arriving at incorrect conclusions about this.
Queen came out of his laboratory. King was still in recovery — whatever the Sky Screen had shown of future events, he was present-day unavailable for major decisions.
"Lord Kaido." Queen's voice had the tone of someone explaining something for what he hoped would be the only time. "Orochi is still our ally. We need him as a lever to control Wano Country. Replacing a sitting Shogun with someone the population will accept is not a fast operation. The Night Parade has made him more popular among the superstitious population, not less."
This was accurate. The Sky Screen's display of Orochi's eight forms had been, from the perspective of Wano Country's already-credulous population, essentially a religious experience. The general who could become a god-killing monster was receiving incense now. The Beasts Pirates had always relied on the Kurozumi clan's local legitimacy to run Wano — removing that legitimacy in the current moment would cost more than it was worth.
Kaido considered this. He was still thinking about it when Black Maria slid a cup of wine across the table toward him and mentioned, in the way she mentioned things, what she'd recently confirmed.
Big Mom had Kozuki Momonosuke. The Charlotte fleet had brought him to Whole Cake Island. He was there now.
The room absorbed this.
"Linlin's plan," Black Maria continued, with the expression of someone delivering information they personally found entertaining, "is not to arrange a marriage for one of her daughters. She's considering having a child with him herself."
The room considered the calculation of this — Charlotte Linlin, Four Emperors, and a boy who had not yet reached the age where such things were applicable — and arrived at a variety of conclusions simultaneously.
"Kozuki Oden," someone said, "would either laugh or weep."
Kaido found this funny enough to call for wine. The serious matters were still there and would be there after the wine. Wano Country's political situation was not going anywhere.
"As long as Momonosuke stays near Linlin," Kaido said, settling back, "he won't have room to become what the Sky Screen showed. Her Soul-Soul Fruit will manage him." He gestured for the cups to be filled. "The future has already changed in that direction."
Onigashima settled into the particular atmosphere it always settled into when Kaido stopped being strategic and started being social. The pirates were happiest at a banquet. The problems would still be problems tomorrow.
Black Maria poured.