-Real World-
The rebels who had camped outside the royal capital for days could no longer contain the fury that had been building in their chests. The Sky Screen had lit a fire in them, and today they intended to let it burn.
They would conquer the capital. They would hang the king and his daughter. They would put an end to the thousand-year dynasty of the Kingdom of Arabasta and drag it back to something older and rawer — the iron rule of the desert tribes.
But the rabble that composed this army had long since forgotten what had sent them marching in the first place. King Cobra had used Dancing Powder to steal the rain from the outer provinces, forcing every tribe into a brutal scramble for water. That was the wound. That was the reason. Yet here, crouched before the gates of Alubarna with siege ladders raised and blades drawn, most of them no longer thought of water at all.
Even if Cobra came out now and confessed everything — even if Crocodile himself stepped forward and took the blame — it would change nothing. Hundreds of thousands of men had marched across the desert. They had come this far. They would not leave empty-handed.
Wealth. Women. Status. Power. Once an army like this smells the blood of royalty in the air, no single truth is loud enough to send them home.
The thousand-year foundations of the Kingdom of Arabasta were crumbling, and the dust was already rising.
King Cobra stood on the city wall and looked down at the sea of rebels stretching to the horizon.
He had not slept in days. The dark hair he had worn his entire life had been replaced, strand by strand, with white. In the span of one crisis, he seemed to have aged a decade.
"I cannot reach Koza," he said quietly. "The rebels are beyond anyone's control now." He exhaled. "I have failed my ancestors."
Below, the rebel forces were assembling siege ladders in long, disciplined rows — disciplined, at least, in their destruction. The king's army held the walls, but Cobra understood calculation. The walls would not hold forever.
Koza. The name sat in his chest like a splinter he could not reach.
His kindness, his decades of just rule — it had been enough to hold the loyalty of the royal army. Outside the gates, it meant nothing. To the rebels camped in the sand, the king was simply the man at the top of the tower they intended to pull down.
And if they caught him, they would have the legal claim they needed to install whatever they wished in Arabasta's place.
As a father, Cobra had one remaining priority.
He had told Princess Vivi to leave. She had refused, planting herself at his side with the quiet, unyielding stubbornness of someone who had decided how she wanted this to go. A princess without a kingdom would become nothing more than a trophy for whoever took her. Vivi understood this. She had made her peace with it — and she had prepared herself for the alternative.
Koza, she thought, watching the rebel lines advance from the wall beside her father. Is this truly what you wanted?
She thought of the boy she had grown up with. She had never imagined that the years between them would deposit them on opposite sides of something like this, staring at each other across a battlefield. People changed. She knew that now in a way she hadn't before.
Sanji stood a few steps behind her, hands in his pockets, cigarette between his lips.
He had been assigned here by the crew — the gentlemanly arrangement, since someone had to make sure the princess didn't get killed. He'd accepted without complaint. He always accepted when a woman needed protecting.
But he had not expected this.
The rebel army filled the desert like a living dune. Tens of thousands of camels moved in formation, their hooves churning the sand into great rolling curtains of yellow that swallowed the light. The rumble of their advance reached the walls before the army itself did. Sanji had spent the first half of his life in a kitchen and the second half on the Grand Line — and the number of people he had encountered in his entire existence did not come close to what he was looking at right now.
His hands were shaking slightly when he struck his match.
I should have grabbed Vivi, grabbed the captain, and gotten out, he thought. None of this had anything to do with us.
He took a long drag. The smoke moved through him, slow and familiar, and the nicotine worked its way up through his brain and unwound something tight behind his eyes. By the time he exhaled through his nose, the shaking had stopped.
He looked at Vivi's back — the rigid set of her shoulders, the way she refused to show anything from where the rebels could see her.
"Princess Vivi," he said, his voice even. "When they breach the walls, I'll escort you to the front and out of the city. If you don't want to go..." He paused. "I'll knock you out and carry you. Your father has already asked us to do exactly that."
Cobra had spent several days making a quiet study of the Straw Hat Pirates.
His conclusion: they were not bad people. They called themselves pirates, claimed they were after the Pirate King's throne, but in practice they were adventurers — the sort who would extend genuine warmth to strangers and go out of their way not to cause harm. The small, strange family gathered around the rubber-limbed boy named Luffy was bound together by something purer than strategy or ambition.
The cook was lecherous, certainly. But his lechery was of the loud, performative variety — all noise, no action. He would not hurt Vivi. He was exactly the sort of person who would die before letting someone else do it.
Cobra had not told Vivi what to do with her life beyond this moment. If she survived — if she managed to walk away from a conquered Arabasta — she was free. The princess of a fallen kingdom would find her title reinterpreted by whoever held power next. But Vivi herself could still choose.
He could not leave. That was not something he was capable of. A king whose people were dying in the streets did not run — not even when the streets were on fire. Cobra would remain on this land, and if it came to it, he would die on it. The heroic spirits of his ancestors were somewhere beneath his feet, woven into the stone and the sand. He would not leave them.
Sanji, with the efficient practicality of someone who had long ago stopped apologizing for necessary violence, laid a hand on Vivi's shoulder — and then knocked her cleanly unconscious. She crumpled, and he caught her before she hit the stones.
She had no way to stop him. There was nothing to stop.
Below the walls, the rebel army was taking its positions.
The senior commanders occupied the center of the formation, their banners planted in the sand. Before an assault of this scale, there was ritual to observe — an oath-taking ceremony, a lighting of the fire before the final charge. And for any ceremony worth remembering, someone had to be sacrificed.
The Sky Screen had made a name for Marshall D. Teach.
Whatever the future held, whatever battles were shown on that impossible broadcast in the sky — one thing was clear to the rebel leadership: Teach was a man destined for the rank of Emperor. And men like that did not wander into your rebellion by accident. They came because they wanted something, and the wisest thing you could do was make them feel welcomed until you no longer needed each other.
Teach had been given a place of honor at the center of the ceremony. Around him, rebel fighters who had seen his future on the Sky Screen straightened instinctively when he walked past.
"Bring them forward," Teach said.
The roar that followed was immediate — a wave of voices from tens of thousands of throats.
Koza and several of his closest lieutenants were dragged into the open space before the commanders. Their feet were bound. Their mouths were gagged. They were pulled forward by the backs of their collars, faces scraping the packed sand, and deposited in a heap in front of the Blackbeard Pirates.
Laffitte stepped forward, unhurried, and produced a sheaf of documents — letters, coded correspondence, dated and signed. He spread them for the surrounding commanders to examine, his expression one of mild, regretful disappointment.
The evidence was precise. It was damning. It said, in the language of dates and handwriting and sealed envelopes, that Koza had been Vivi's spy from the very beginning — feeding intelligence to the royal palace, counting rebel heads, keeping Princess Vivi informed of their numbers and their plans. He had never intended for the rebellion to reach the capital. He had been steering them toward failure, toward a moment when the royal army could be called down on them all at once, so that he could crawl out of the wreckage and shelter under the princess's skirt.
The letters had been prepared in advance, of course. The handwriting was excellent.
The rebel commanders stared at the documents. Then they stared at the bound man in the sand who had called himself their leader. Memories surfaced — every retreat Koza had advocated, every call for caution, every moment he had slowed them down or urged restraint.
Of course. It fit. It all fit.
"He's been backing down since the start," Teach said, his voice carrying easily across the crowd. He didn't need to shout. The silence around him was dense enough to carry a whisper. "Even if we'd failed, he had an exit. He'd duck under the princess's protection and save his own neck. But you?" He let the pause stretch. "You don't have an exit. The only road open to you runs through those gates."
He let that sit.
"You dig your food out of the sand every day. You measure your water by the cup. You live in oases and pray that the rains come and watch the capital — this capital — waste more water in a single afternoon than your family drinks in a year."
A murmur moved through the crowd. Something low and hot.
"You have one head, same as any of them. Two shoulders, same as any of them. So why are you the ones born to scrape for every drop, while the people behind those walls live without ever thinking about it once?"
The murmur grew.
"This is wrong," Teach said simply. "This is very wrong."
The cheering began at the edges and swept inward like a sandstorm.