-Real World-
Three of Blackbeard's crew were dead. The rebels had burned or scattered. The battlefield outside Alubarna's walls belonged to the Whitebeard Pirates, and Teach — bloodied, surrounded, all cover stripped away — had nowhere left to go.
Ace watched the sweat run down Teach's face and felt something cold and clear settle in his chest. This was the man who had lived as a crewmate for years, who had shared meals and storms and the long hours of watch-duty on the Moby Dick. And behind all of it, he had been waiting. Just waiting, for one moment, for one fruit.
"Teach." Ace's voice was even. "For what you are and what you've done, I'll make it quick. That's more than you deserve."
Teach did not answer immediately. He stood in the center of the three of them — Ace in front, Vista to his left, Marco circling from above — and his eyes moved between them with the animal calculation of something cornered and still looking for the angle.
"I will not give up," he said. "Not while I'm still breathing."
He raised both arms and opened his hands, and the Yami Yami no Mi answered.
The darkness came out of him in a wave — not targeted, not precise, but total. It spread across the ground like a tide going out in reverse, swallowing everything it reached. Sand, debris, scattered weapons, bodies — all of it pulled downward and compressed into the dark, as if a thousand small black holes had opened simultaneously in the desert floor. The earth itself cracked and sank where the darkness touched it.
It was not a technique that could be aimed. It was pressure applied in every direction at once, and the intent was clear: if he could not fight them, he would make the ground under their feet disappear.
All three of them moved before the darkness could reach them.
Vista drove both swords into Teach's back — through the gaps in his guard, straight for the vitals. Marco came down from above, his feet reshaping into the taloned grip of his hybrid form, Armament Haki darkening the claws as he landed on Teach's skull and drove him into the sand. Ace stepped in and hit him in the face, again and again, each punch breaking something — teeth, the bridge of the nose, the architecture of that broad ugly face — until the blood was everywhere and Teach's arms had stopped moving.
The double damage of the Yami Yami no Mi did the rest. Every blow that landed registered on Teach at twice its natural force. By the time they stepped back, he was barely conscious, his body's enormous vitality the only thing keeping him present.
He looked up at them from the ground. His expression had changed completely.
"Don't kill me." The voice was different now — low, ragged, unguarded in a way none of them had heard from him before. "Please. I'm asking you. I want to see Dad again. Even if you decide I have to die, let me die in front of him. Let me at least have that."
He was crying with his blood mixing into the sand around him.
Ace's raised hand stopped.
Ace knew, rationally, what Teach was capable of. He had seen it on the Sky Screen. He had read the shape of every manipulation Teach had ever run on the people around him. And still, for a moment, looking at the broken man weeping in the dirt — the crewmate he had actually known, however falsely — his hand didn't come down.
Vista hesitated too. Killing a man begging for his father felt wrong in the bones, regardless of what that man had done.
Marco looked at both of them.
"Don't." His voice was quiet and firm. "You know exactly what he is. Dad's orders were clear — we bring back his head. No escorts, no exceptions, no opportunities for something to go wrong on the way home. Finish it."
He was right. Keeping Teach alive — even for a day, even for an hour — meant keeping him in proximity to any Devil Fruit, any weapon, any leverage point he might identify and exploit. The only safe version of Teach was a dead one.
Ace lowered his hand and stepped back. Whatever remained of his hesitation, he let it go.
"Cutting his head off and laying it at Thatch's grave," Vista said, more to himself than anyone. "That's not a bad send-off for him."
Teach saw the decision settle across their faces. The tears were gone. His eyes went very still.
"Give me a chance," he said, the tone shifting again — bargaining now, calculating. "The Yami Yami no Mi has uses your father hasn't considered. I can be valuable. I can be more useful alive than—"
Vista raised his blade.
It came down with Armament Haki coating the steel, aimed cleanly at Teach's neck — and stopped.
Half a centimeter from the skin. Stopped dead in the air, as if the space between blade and neck had become solid.
Vista pushed. The blade did not move.
A purple barrier had materialized around Teach — hexagonal facets of light, dense and seamless, assembled so quickly that none of them had seen it form. The sword met it and found it immovable. Vista stepped back and looked at what was enclosing the man they had just beaten into the ground.
Teach began to laugh.
The blood was still on his face. The injuries were still real. But something in his expression had inverted entirely — the despair replaced by a satisfaction that had clearly been waiting underneath it the whole time.
"You spent all that time," he said, "trying to kill me quickly. I spent all that time making sure you couldn't." He was already rising, unsteady but upright, the barrier moving with him. The wounds visible on his body moments ago were closing — slowly, but closing. The barrier carried that property too. "Did you think I hid among a hundred thousand rebels and waited, without making other arrangements?"
The light that surrounded him expanded outward without warning. A pulse — not violent, but absolute — rolled out from the barrier in every direction and hit all three of them at once. Ace, Marco, Vista: all of them lifted off the ground and thrown backward, landing hard in the sand.
They got up. They looked at the man standing in the center of the barrier and at the figure who had appeared beside him.
He wore a kimono. He was lean and handsome in the way that suggested something underneath that wasn't human at all, and the air around him had a weight to it that Ace recognized immediately — a particular density of wrongness that the Sky Screen had catalogued precisely.
Naraku.
The Fourth Apostle. The demon who had walked through Arabasta before — in the Broadcast, in the future the Sky Screen had shown — and who had killed Cobra and taken a Poneglyph and been destroyed by Deneve only after absorbing Rengoku Kyojuro's Flame Breathing and surviving everything short of 70% of a Greatsword's demonic power.
Ace had seen that version of Naraku on the Sky Screen. He had watched what Naraku did to Rengoku. He understood what the numbers meant.
Right now, in the Real World, Naraku had not yet done any of that. He had not yet absorbed Rengoku. He was not yet what he would become in the Broadcast. But even this version — the unaugmented one, the one standing next to Teach with faint amusement on his face — radiated something that made the air feel wrong.
"Teach," Naraku said, glancing at the bloodied man beside him, "you could not even protect three subordinates. I'm reconsidering whether this partnership is worthwhile."
Teach steadied himself against the barrier. "We had a deal."
"We do." Naraku looked at the three Whitebeard commanders with the mild interest of someone examining a problem that doesn't particularly concern them. "Kill them outside the walls, and nothing inside can stop us. You take the treasury. I take the historical text." His eyes moved to Ace. "Is that going to be a problem?"
The three of them stood in the sand, slightly injured, looking at what had just stepped into the fight.
If we had been faster, Ace thought. If we had not wasted even a second on Teach's begging—
The moment was gone. Naraku was here now, and they were going to have to deal with what that meant.
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