-Real World-
The rebels attacked without a defined main thrust — which meant every direction was the main thrust. They came at the walls from all sides, and the king's army spread itself thin trying to hold everything at once. Every minute, men fell from the parapets and joined the growing pile of bodies below. By the end of the first hour, both sides had stopped thinking about survival and started simply fighting.
The rebels were winning on the walls. They had the numbers, and somewhere along the eastern rampart, a gap had opened in the king's army line — too clean and too convenient to be anything other than deliberate. More rebels poured through it with every passing minute, pushing the defenders back and compressing what remained of the king's army into a shrinking corridor of stone and blood.
Sanji saw the shape of it from where he was standing. He made a quick judgment, tucked Princess Vivi under his arm with as much gentleness as the situation allowed, and carried her off the wall at speed — long legs eating up the distance between danger and the relative safety of the streets below. Behind him, he heard Cobra's voice, and did not stop.
Cobra watched them go and felt something unclench in his chest. Vivi had chosen well.
"Straw Hat boy," he said quietly, to no one in particular. "Take care of her."
He drew the sword from his waist.
The elite King's Guards around him stirred immediately. A king with a blade was a king about to do something irreversible, and every man in that group knew it.
"Your Majesty—"
"We cannot retreat." Cobra's voice was steady. He looked out at the rebels flooding across his walls, the men fighting and dying for the land their families had worked for generations. "Fight for your families. That is all I am asking. Fight with me."
The explosion answered him before anyone else could.
It came from below — from the direction of the main gate. The sound was not a crack or a boom but something more total, a concussive pressure wave that turned the world white for half a second. When the sound faded, the great gates of Alubarna — stone and timber reinforced over a century — had ceased to exist. In their place was a column of smoke rising above a crater's worth of rubble, and the screaming of men who had been standing too close.
The shockwave rolled outward in a ring. Soldiers and rebels alike who had been within fifty meters of the gate crumpled, hands pressed to bleeding ears, unable to stand. The bodies closer to the blast were not whole.
On the walls, a silence fell — and then the rebels began to roar.
The gates were open. The inside contact had delivered.
Teach felt the joy move through him and did not bother suppressing it. He raised his arm.
"The traitors in the city have answered us! No reserves — everything forward! Do not sheathe your swords for three days! Take everything!"
The camel cavalry was already moving. Four legs were faster than two, and the riders knew it; thousands of them swept scimitars overhead and thundered through the ruined gate in a column, trampling whatever the blast had left behind. They were buying time for the infantry behind them, keeping the king's remnant forces from sealing the breach before the foot soldiers could pour through.
On the walls, the king's army heard the gate fall and understood immediately what it meant. Surrounded from above by rebels who had climbed over and from below by cavalry now inside the city, their morale didn't break — it simply stopped. Men who had been fighting on instinct found that the instinct had gone quiet.
The rebels had no use for prisoners. The oases of the desert could not sustain that many extra mouths, and both sides understood this without it being said. The fighting on the walls became a massacre.
Cobra was in the middle of it before his guards could fully react. He carved forward with his blade, and the men around him bought every step with their bodies. But the ring of rebels tightening around the king's position was thickening faster than it could be cut through.
"Your Majesty, we have to go now." A guard captain had both hands on Cobra's arm, pulling. "The capital is lost. As long as you live, Arabasta lives."
"Your Majesty — move."
They did not give him the choice. Two guards took his arms and dragged him, and Cobra — who had not been manhandled since he was a child — found that he lacked the strength to refuse them. Not because he was weak. Because he was exhausted, and some part of him that still thought of Vivi recognized that dead kings could not protect their daughters.
He let them move him.
Near the main gate, the camel cavalry were deep in the city now, their mounts' hooves clattering across the stone streets of Alubarna, scimitars already finding targets among the fleeing soldiers and civilians.
One column rounded a corner and found a group of young people blocking the road.
The riders slowed, sizing them up. Young. Strange clothing. Two women with them — well-built, which registered first. The cavalry commander assessed the threat level and found it low.
"They look like pirates," someone called from the back. "Even our guns couldn't put a dent in some of these bastards."
"Pirates or not, they're standing between us and the treasury."
The young man at the front of the group tilted his hat down — the one with the grinning and frowning faces stitched into the brim. He looked at the cavalry line with an expression that contained no anger and no mercy, just a quiet, settled certainty.
"You chose to ride with Teach," Portgas D. Ace said. "So don't complain about what comes next."
Small tongues of flame ran along his forearms, climbing his shoulders, tracing the lines of his tattoos. To the cavalry in front of him, it looked like a man catching fire and not caring. Several of them had seen the Sky Screen. Several of them recognized who they were looking at and what that meant.
Ace swung his fist forward.
The Fire Fist — Hiken — erupted from his knuckles and expanded as it travelled, a blazing column of orange and white that filled the width of the gate road and kept going. It punched through the camel column front to back, through the gate itself, and out the other side, leaving a corridor of fire and the sound of screaming.
The cavalry in the middle of that corridor had no time to understand what was happening.
The survivors at the edges tried to turn their mounts and flee. They discovered that there was no room. The rebels in the rear were still pushing forward, unaware of what was happening at the front. People and camels compressed into each other, and the fire that had caught on the edges of the column spread with the careless efficiency of fire that has found good fuel.
Burning men ran out through the ruined gate and made it a handful of steps into the open air before falling. Some of them, still on fire, stumbled into the rebel infantry outside and spread the chaos wider.
Ace walked through the gate.
His brothers followed — the expeditionary force that Whitebeard had dispatched, the adopted sons who had tracked Blackbeard from island to island and through a hundred thousand rebels and finally to this burning doorway. They came through two abreast and fanned out into a line on the other side, facing the vast rebel host that stretched across the desert.
Ace stood in the center. His crewmates had stepped back to give him the space; it was his moment, and they knew it.
He scanned the crowd until he found what he was looking for.
"Teach!" The name cracked across the battlefield like a second explosion. "Get out here. Today is the day you die. I will bury you in the sand of Arabasta, and Thatch will finally rest."
Among the rebel commanders watching from the rear, a few of the sharper ones had already gone still.
The man on Ace's left: blue-and-white, calm eyes, a single feather in his hair. Marco the Phoenix — First Division Commander of the Whitebeard Pirates. A man who could not be killed by conventional means, because the conventional concept of injury did not fully apply to him.
The man on Ace's right: lean, elegant, twin blades resting at his sides like they were bored. Vista the Flower Sword — Fifth Division Commander. A man who had traded blows with Dracule Mihawk and kept his hands afterward.
The three of them together, standing at the gate of a burning city, looking out at a rebel army of tens of thousands.
Even the most battle-drunk of the rebel commanders understood the calculation of this particular equation. These were not pirates you provoked by accident. These were the upper cadre of a Yonko crew, and they had come here for one person.
The desert was very quiet in the spaces between the screaming.