The three invaders did not hold back.
All three trump cards arrived simultaneously — Tien Shinhan's concentrated ki release, Garou's Monster Killing Fist at its maximum output, Meruem's precision-compressed energy detonation delivered from a hand that had observed and improved on Tien Shinhan's technique in the time it took to throw it. The combined force of three Admiral-level outputs in perfect convergence hit Homelander from multiple angles without the staggered timing that a defence could work with.
The combat suit — the blue and red that he had worn through everything the encounter had produced so far without it showing any consequence — finally showed a consequence. The fabric came apart at the shoulder and across the chest, the material yielding under an external force it had not been designed to absorb at this magnitude from this many directions simultaneously.
Inside the operating room, Vegapunk noted this.
"His suit was damaged," he said.
"Yes," Caesar Clown agreed.
"By three opponents working together at their maximum output."
"Yes."
Vegapunk looked at the combat power number above Homelander's position on the screen, which had not changed.
—Real World—
The Sky Screen's revelation of Caesar Clown's combat power assessment system did not pass without notice.
For as long as there had been pirates and Marines and anyone else with cause to measure strength against strength, the working standard had been the bounty — the Marine's published valuation of a pirate's dangerousness, which reflected accumulated intelligence and incident reports and was subject to all the distortions those sources introduced. Bounties inflated with time. They reflected notoriety as much as capability. They were useful and imprecise and everyone had learned to discount them by some percentage that varied depending on who was doing the discounting.
Here, on a single screen at a single moment, was something that claimed to tell you the number.
The debate about its credibility — Caesar Clown himself had acknowledged the system's accuracy ceiling was below seventy percent — was immediate and worldwide. Whether you believed the figures or not, the framework was compelling. A measurement standard at the scientific level, however flawed, was not nothing. It was a basis for comparison that didn't depend on what the Marine had decided to publish about you.
If you could get your number, you could find out where you stood. Relative to anyone. Without the Marine as intermediary.
The response from the people who were below ten thousand was, predictably, the response of people who have just been given a measurement they did not ask for and do not entirely like.
Eustass Captain Kidd had been firing at the ocean for approximately ten minutes.
The Jiki Jiki no Mi's (Magnet-Magnet Fruit) magnetic force carved irregular patterns through the water around the Kidd Pirates' ship, neither aiming at anything nor particularly trying to. It was the form of destruction that served the purpose of making noise during periods when the alternative was sitting with his thoughts.
His thoughts were bad.
The Sky Screen had been running combat footage for hours. It had shown Homelander. It had shown Meruem, Tien Shinhan, and Monster Garou. It had introduced a combat power system developed by a Marine scientist and proceeded to use the ongoing engagement as its demonstration case. It had allocated numbers to people and explained what those numbers meant and spent considerable time on their significance.
So many event and so many people shown.
At no point had it mentioned the name Eustass Kidd.
"The thing runs for this long," he said, to the ocean, "and I'm not in it once? Not once?" He fired again. The water did not respond satisfactorily. "What am I worse than? What about me isn't interesting enough?"
Killer stood at a measured distance and watched. Years of service to the captain had produced in him a reliable instinct for the difference between a mood that benefited from input and a mood that required room. This was the second kind.
"Blackbeard," Kidd said eventually, the anger finding a more address. "Stealing my fruit. You're going to die for that, I'll do it myself." The Jiki Jiki no Mi had been his — had been rightfully, entirely, definitively his — and then Blackbeard had decided otherwise. This was a grievance he returned to at irregular intervals and with consistent intensity.
The ocean continued receiving this information without comment.
Kidd let the anger settle into something with less immediate velocity, which was a process that took approximately ten more minutes. Then he turned and looked at Killer properly.
"What do you think our numbers would be?" He meant the combat power values. "Breaking a thousand — you think that's realistic?"
Killer had thought about this already, because Killer tended to think about things before being asked about them.
"For both of us, breaking a thousand should be achievable," he said. "That CP0 woman was in the low ten-thousands. The baseline for a pirate crew that can operate independently at a high level seems to be around there. A thousand is inside that range for us — probably not impossible."
Kidd considered this. "Ten thousand is the monster threshold?"
"According to the system."
"And you think we're not there?"
"I think a thousand is honest. Ten thousand would require a significant development over what we currently are."
Kidd absorbed this with the expression of someone who finds the answer accurate and unsatisfying in approximately equal measure. He looked at the Sky Screen display — still running the combat footage, still showing the numbers, still not showing his name anywhere in the frame.
"There's no way to check the numbers right now," he said.
"No."
"So I just have to take my crew's word for it that I'm strong."
Killer did not dignify this with a response, which was also an answer.
An island appeared on the horizon. Kidd looked at it with the attention of a man looking for an outlet.
"We're stopping," he said.
The town on the island had, by the time the Kidd Pirates were done with it, a fire in one district, structural damage in two others, and a Marine patrol that had arrived to address the situation and had been addressed in the other direction. The carnivorous fish that gathered in the surrounding waters in the following days ate well. The Kidd Pirates were not the worst thing the sea had produced by a significant margin, but they were not near the better end of the spectrum either. Captain Kidd did not kill everyone, which was the mercy that he was capable of extending when not in a ally eliminating mood.
They continued on their way.
The Arabasta rebellion had been building toward its conclusion for some time, and it arrived the way that things arrive when many forces have been pushing toward the same threshold simultaneously: suddenly and all at once.
The rebel army had moved toward Alubarna's outer boundary. Within the mass of it, in positions that did not announce themselves, the Blackbeard Pirates occupied the space they had been working toward since embedding themselves in the rebel population. Marshall D. Teach had gained a degree of credibility among the rebel leadership through the Sky Screen's exposure of his future notoriety and through Laffitte's particular talent for making himself useful to people who had not yet understood they were being managed. The rebels believed the Blackbeard Pirates were allies. The Blackbeard Pirates believed the rebels were useful.
Neither party was incorrect. The relationship simply had a future that one side had planned and the other had not.
Teach wanted the treasury. He had no interest in governance and no interest in overthrowing a dynasty except as a side effect of reaching a room in a building. The rebel leadership wanted the capital. He was in no way opposed to them getting it. They would open the city for him, and he would go directly for what he had come for, and what happened afterward was their problem.
The rebel leaders had their own agenda regarding the royal family. Vivi — the daughter of the late king, now the only surviving member of the Nefertari line and the person the kingdom's institutional memory pointed to as its legitimate head — was in the capital. What the radical faction of the rebel leadership intended to do with her once they reached her was a decision they had not made publicly, but the private version of that decision was considerably less moderate than the public positions any of them had taken.
Whether she lived or died was, at this moment, a question that the rebel leaders could answer with a word in either direction.
The army moved.
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