-Real World-
Most of the Blackbeard Pirates had not expected this.
Whitebeard's three strongest division commanders — the Phoenix, the Flower Sword, and the Fire Fist — standing together at the gate of the royal capital, on the side of the king. The rebels who had been riding the momentum of their breakthrough looked at the three men and felt that momentum quietly drain away.
Ace had been a Logia user on the Grand Line for years. It showed. A single Hiken — one punch, one arc of flame — and thousands of the camel cavalry who had flooded through the gate were gone. Not retreating. Gone. The fire had moved through them faster than any of them could react, and the survivors had nothing to show for it except the memory of what fire did to men and animals in an enclosed space.
The rebel mass outside the gate had seen it. They were not moving forward anymore.
From the rebel center, Teach recognized the three men without needing to be told. He had lived on the Moby Dick long enough to know every significant face in the Whitebeard Pirates by sight. Whitebeard had committed serious resources to this hunt — his First, Fifth, and Second Division Commanders all in one place. The old man clearly wanted this finished.
Teach was not afraid of Ace. He had never been afraid of Ace. If it came to it, Ace could be used as a bargaining chip; the son of Gol D. Roger had value to certain parties who would pay well for him. But he was not going to step out from behind a hundred thousand rebels just because Ace had said his name loudly.
The battlefield held its breath. Rebels gripped scimitars and muskets and did not advance. The tribal soldiers at the front had no idea what their leadership was thinking, only that the three men at the gate were the reason they had stopped.
"Teach, you coward," Marco called out, scanning the rebel crowd with calm eyes. "Still hiding in there, playing dead—"
The gunshots interrupted him.
They came from inside the rebel mass — aimed not at Marco but at Ace. Long-barreled weapons, the kind that could exceed the speed of sound. The shots were Blackbeard's crew's work, deliberate provocations designed to spark the reaction they needed. The bullets punched clean through Ace's torso, two neat holes, front to back.
Ace looked down at them with mild interest. The wounds closed almost immediately. Logia.
The rebels had been watching. Now, having been given an excuse to open fire, they took it. Thousands of firearms came up at once and discharged in a single sustained roar, a wall of lead that would have ended most things living. The Whitebeard Pirates' three division commanders were enveloped in the barrage.
The smoke cleared. All three were standing.
Marco's wounds sealed in tongues of blue-gold phoenix flame. Vista had not bothered being hit — he had been cutting bullets out of the air with both swords throughout, his blades moving in short, economical arcs. Ace simply was not made of anything the bullets could meaningfully interact with.
"Monsters!"
"Firearms don't work on them—"
"Are they all Logia?"
The rebels did not run. But the guns in their hands had stopped feeling like security.
Vista stepped forward into the crowd.
He wielded both swords with the relaxed precision of someone who had been doing this for a very long time and had stopped finding it surprising. Armament Haki darkened his blades in a thin black coating, and he moved through the rebel infantry the way wind moves through tall grass — not with force, but with direction. Every swing was a decision. Heads left shoulders. Blood reached the sand before the bodies did.
"I haven't fought this many people at once in years," Vista said, to no one. He sounded interested. "I'd almost forgotten what it felt like."
Whitebeard did not encourage his crew to kill the weak. It was a matter of the old man's personal ethics, and those ethics tended to become the crew's ethics by proximity. Vista had spent most of his years at sea staying his hand. These rebels, though, had butchered their own commander with their own weapons and called it justice. That act had crossed a line that Whitebeard's philosophy did not protect, and Vista had no further restraint to offer them.
He cut his way through the center of the rebel formation with mechanical thoroughness. The rebels who turned to flee found him already moving to cut off the angle. Those who stood their ground found that standing their ground accomplished nothing.
The center of the rebel mass was thinning. And as it thinned, Vista found what he was looking for: the general shape of where the Blackbeard Pirates were positioning themselves in the crowd, the small cluster of unusual stillness around which the ordinary rebels moved like water around a stone.
"Teach." Vista's voice was not loud. "Stop hiding. There's nowhere you go that we don't follow."
The explosion came from three directions at once.
Purple smoke — dense, heavy, the kind that spread faster than it should — billowed out from canisters detonating in the middle of the rebel mass. The wind caught it and pushed it outward in a widening ring. Rebels at the edges breathed it in before they understood what it was.
The ones who inhaled it first convulsed. Then their skin darkened and their eyes turned the color of old blood, and they stopped being rebels and became something else — something that moved toward living flesh with single-minded urgency, ignoring wounds, ignoring pain, ignoring the screaming of the people around them. They bit. They spread what they carried in their teeth. The chaos that followed was a second assault layered on top of the first.
The uninfected rebels tried to run. Some passed the smoke to others while running. The infected ones did not care which side anyone had been on.
"Teach." Marco was airborne now, his arms already reshaping into wings as he lifted above the smoke. The phoenix flames shed the purple haze off his feathers without effort. From the air, the pattern was clear — the canisters had been dropped from a central point, and the drift of the smoke mapped back to its source. "He wants to drag everyone down with him."
Marco looked down and found the source: an old man seated on a trembling white horse, his medical bag open across his lap, his hands working the release mechanisms on a second set of canisters with the calm efficiency of someone who had rehearsed this many times.
Doc Q. Blackbeard's ship doctor, the man whose Devil Fruit — the Shiku Shiku no Mi (Sick-Sick Fruit) — could manufacture and transmit disease in any form he chose. He had modified it today into something faster and more direct than illness: a conversion agent, turning the living into vectors.
Beneath him, Stronger — Doc Q's white horse, normally steady — was shaking badly, the animal's instincts screaming at the wrongness of everything around it.
Vista did not approach the infected rebels gently. Armament Haki on both blades, he moved through them with the understanding that hesitation would spread whatever they carried. The only way to stop an infected rebel was to take the head. He did that. Efficiently, without malice, and without pausing.
"Ace." Marco's voice came from above. "Your front left. Clear a path in that direction."
Ace did not ask for clarification. He turned to his front left and swung.
The Hiken that formed was not the controlled burst he had used on the cavalry. This one was wide — dozens of meters across — a rolling mass of fire that moved like a living thing through the infected crowd, burning the smoke ahead of it, incinerating whatever it touched, and continuing in a direct line toward the cluster where the Blackbeard Pirates were sheltering.
Doc Q looked up from his canisters and watched it come. The color left what remained of his complexion. Stronger locked all four legs and refused to move.
"Ace." Teach's voice came from behind the advancing wall of fire, lazy and amused. "You actually came. Over Thatch?"
Black smoke curled up from Teach's body. He walked forward through his own crew, unhurried, and raised both palms as the Hiken reached him.
Two dark spirals opened in his hands — swallowing vortices, the particular emptiness of the Yami Yami no Mi (Dark-Dark Fruit). The fire hit the darkness and came apart. Not extinguished. Disassembled. The Mera Mera no Mi's attribute damage — the thing that made Logia fire dangerous to anything it touched — unraveled the instant it made contact with the Dark-Dark Fruit's absolute absorption.
Ace's fire fist was swallowed completely, without residue, as if it had never existed.
The Dark-Dark Fruit was the nemesis of every other Devil Fruit. The Sky Screen had shown it. Now Ace was seeing it with his own eyes.
Teach smiled across the space between them.
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