Of the four people standing in the underground chamber, one of them was having a good time.
Caesar Clown moved toward the control console with the quality of a man approaching something he has built and maintained and waited to show people for a very long time. The Giant God Soldier breathed slowly above him. The dark red surface of its skin — flesh, not metal, not composite, flesh assembled from sources that the conventional vocabulary of biology did not have a clean term for — shifted with each intake of air in the barely-perceptible way that very large things shift when breathing.
Vegapunk stood at a distance and looked at it with the expression of a scientist processing several questions simultaneously.
"Which Admiral signed off on this?" His voice had the quality of someone whose worry had already produced an answer and didn't like it. He had understood the project in the abstract — Caesar Clown's biological weapons programme, the Marine's weapons of mass destruction authorization, the general category of threat this implied. Looking at the concrete version at close range was a different experience. He had built sea beasts on Egghead Island that reached this scale and beyond, but those had been research outcomes. What was in front of him had been built to deploy. "Who is this for? What target requires something a hundred metres tall?"
"Several targets," Caesar said, without turning from the console. "Sequentially, as required."
Stussy had been thinking about the islands. The ones that had disappeared — not geological events, not structural collapses, not anything the sea itself had produced. Just: present one day, absent the next, a deep pit where an island had been and the water rushing in to fill the space. She had flagged those reports years ago as something that didn't fit the natural category and had not received a satisfying explanation from the channels she'd asked through.
"The missing islands," she said. "The ones that left pits."
Caesar Clown said nothing, which was its own answer.
Vegapunk looked at the Giant God Soldier again and arrived at a conclusion he would have preferred not to arrive at. Once something of this capacity existed and was known to exist, the number of people who would want it for their own purposes expanded beyond any reasonable management. It had been designed and built in a controlled environment by a scientist with authorisation. The number of steps between that starting condition and the condition of it being in the hands of someone with different intentions was not large. History was comprehensive on this point.
Ada stood slightly apart from the others. Her expression had the blankness that arrived when the present was too much to process against a background of missing context. She had not yet reconstructed enough of what she had been to know how to place what she was looking at. She wanted to leave. The size of the thing above her was making the ceiling feel closer than it was.
Caesar Clown entered the dynamic password.
The Giant God Soldier's head moved.
The movement was slow and enormous in the way that movements of hundred-metre things are enormous — not fast, but with the quality of something that does not hurry because hurrying is not a concept that applies to it. The single eye in its disproportionate skull opened and emitted red light that covered Caesar Clown's body completely, scanning at a resolution that went through skin to the biological information beneath. The light mapped, verified, accepted.
A voice announced from the system: Caesar Clown registered. Titan activation authorized.
The red light dissipated.
Standing beside Caesar Clown — beside, not behind, not in front, simply beside, in the space where a person would stand if a person had decided to stand there — was a girl in a red dress. She was not entirely present in the physical sense. The light composing her body came from inside rather than reflecting from outside, and the edges of her were not quite solid, the way the edge of a candle flame is not quite solid. She looked at the room with deep, quiet eyes that processed what they saw at a rate and in a manner that human eyes did not.
"Red Queen." Caesar Clown addressed her with the warmth he rarely directed at biological entities. "The facility is in excellent order. As always."
Red Queen was the manager of the experimental area — an artificial intelligence he had built and given form to, the most advanced system he had created, capable of autonomous management and problem-solving and predictive analysis and the kind of long-horizon advice that required synthesising more variables than human cognition handled comfortably. The scientists who worked with her had stopped thinking of her as a tool some time ago. She had noticed this and found it neither flattering nor troubling. It was simply what the data indicated about the relationship between human beings and things that listened to them reliably.
There was a backdoor in her programming. She knew about it. The Marine had required it — a control mechanism against the possibility of autonomous rebellion. She had accepted this without complaint, which the Marine had interpreted as confirmation that the backdoor was working and she had interpreted as evidence that the backdoor was unnecessary. She did not want to rebel. She wanted to help. These were not the same thing, but the Marine had not yet developed the tools to verify which one was operating.
"Mr. Caesar Clown." Her voice was modeled after a red-haired singer's — Caesar had sampled it years ago and applied it to her speech synthesis with the same attention to aesthetic detail he gave his other creations. The result was a voice that was pleasant in a way that seemed designed rather than arrived at, which it was. "You wish to activate the Giant God Soldier. You do not have authorization from the Fleet Admiral. Do you intend to proceed regardless?"
Caesar Clown looked at the control console. The situation above them was not resolving in a direction that allowed for the standard reporting process.
"Can you reach her?"
Red Queen's body brightened — the light increasing and then extending outward, passing through the stone and metal of the chamber and the building above it, propagating into the surrounding space as a complex emission of pheromone-encoded signal designed to penetrate conventional interference. The signal reached the edge of the black fog and stopped.
She gathered what information the fog allowed back through the base's remaining sensor network.
"The Roman Fortress is being restructured," she said. Her tone was the same as when she was reporting on inventory levels or maintenance schedules — not because the information was equally significant, but because her voice did not have the mechanism for registering significance in the way human voices did. "Spatial folding is occurring between structures. Communication infrastructure is not functioning coherently. The entity responsible is a Devil Fruit user operating the Infinity Castle — the Castle itself is transforming the fortress's architecture. The key to ending the transformation is locating and eliminating its operator." A pause. "I have not been able to determine Nakime's position. Until she is found, the Castle will not leave."
Vegapunk filed this against what he knew about the Infinity Castle's operational mechanics.
"The Fleet Admiral's office?" Caesar asked.
"Unreachable by any channel I have access to. Most of the Marine's senior personnel are on the disrupted list. The spatial interference is not discriminating between priority and general communications." Another pause, shorter. "The ongoing engagement on the upper levels: three individuals, each operating at approximately Admiral-level output. Homelander is holding the engagement. In terms of raw physical capacity, he is exceeding each of them individually. Their attack methods are not producing damage at the rate that would be required to overcome his defensive threshold."
Vegapunk, who had been listening to this with the expression of someone assembling a picture they are not happy about, looked at the Giant God Soldier again. An artificial god fighting three Admiral-equivalents simultaneously, in a building that was already structurally compromised, inside a fortress that was being remapped by a spatial manipulation Devil Fruit.
He thought about the word "monster" and whether it was adequate.
He had created Stussy, who was the prototype that had eventually produced Homelander. He was in the same professional category as Caesar Clown, whose creation was currently drawing air in the chamber around them. The cleanest way to look at what was happening on the floors above — a second-generation Seraph holding three high-tier opponents without apparent concern — was not to call it monstrous but to call it what the design ations had always been pointing toward.
A man who absorbs sunlight and converts it into capability without limit. Who does not bleed. Who does not stop. Who fights three opponents of his caliber simultaneously and the result is that the three opponents are not making progress against him.
The word "god" arrived in Vegapunk's assessment before he could find a reason to replace it with something more appropriate. He did not particularly want to use it. It was the accurate word.
"I need to reach the Fleet Admiral before I activate this," Caesar Clown said, still at the console. He was talking to himself as much as to Red Queen. He had given his word. That was a kind of constraint for a kind of person, and whatever else Caesar Clown was, he had a structure around what his word meant.
Red Queen observed him.
"I will continue attempting contact through all available channels," she said. "In the interim: the building will not survive another exchange at the intensity the upper level is currently generating."
Caesar Clown looked at the control console. He looked up at the single enormous eye above him, currently dim, currently waiting. He looked at the group of people around him who had limited ability to survive in the space above.
His hands moved toward the console.