After a night of heavy drinking, Amon was out cold, sprawled across the bed and dead to the world.
The women Cobra had brought over had technically been dismissed, but after getting a proper look at Amon, the daughters of various ministers found they couldn't quite bring themselves to leave. They invented one excuse after another to drift back over, offering toasts, striking up conversations, finding any reason to linger. As a gentleman, Amon couldn't very well turn away a woman who came to him with a raised cup, so he drank. Cup after cup, round after round, until even his formidable tolerance buckled under the weight of it all.
The moment they noticed he was starting to go, the women only picked up the pace, toasting him faster and finding every opportunity to get a little too familiar along the way. By the end of the night, he had lost count of how many of them had snuck a kiss on his face when they thought no one was looking.
Vivi had been quietly furious the whole time, and little Lily hadn't been far behind her in the scowling department. It was only after the two of them joined forces and started actively blocking further advances that the women finally relented and backed off. Somewhere in the haze that followed, Amon had been steered into a room and put to bed by the pair of them.
"What is this?"
Half-asleep, he became dimly aware of something near him. His eyes cracked open. His mind stalled for a blank moment. Then he sat up sharp.
"Vivi, why are you in my bed?"
Vivi was draped across him like an octopus, arms and all.
"What do you mean your bed? This is my bed," she mumbled, rubbing at her eyes without a trace of urgency.
"Wait, hold on." Amon looked around the room, and the pieces slowly clicked into place. He was in her room. He had no memory of getting there, but given that Vivi had been the one to haul him off to sleep, the answer wasn't hard to work out. The girl had simply brought him back to her own room and seen nothing unusual about spending the night curled up against him.
"I brought you here," Vivi said, blinking at him, genuinely confused by his alarm.
She had seen him go down and decided to handle it herself. At her age, the idea of it being strange or improper hadn't entered her thinking.
Amon pressed a hand over his face. He was grateful the night had passed without incident. Given the state he had been in, things could have ended up far more complicated and a lot harder to explain.
"I'm going back to sleep. I'm tired," Vivi announced through a yawn, and dropped back down onto him without further comment.
He stared at the ceiling.
She was already breathing slowly and evenly within minutes, fully asleep again.
"Fine."
He glanced over at Lily, who had made do with the sofa, and at Karoo, who had settled on the floor, and gave up entirely and lay back down. Sleep wasn't coming for him, but with his current physical condition, a sleepless night barely registered. His body didn't need the rest the way it once had.
He looked at Vivi a moment, then reached out and summoned the exclusive Jar he had received the day before. The banquet had swallowed the entire evening, so he hadn't had a chance to open it yet. Now seemed as good a time as any.
To keep the noise from waking anyone, he ran a thin current of sword energy along the surface of the Jar rather than breaking it open by hand. It split like a watermelon under a blade, clean and quiet, and three items tumbled out into his waiting hands. He caught them all and laid them out carefully on the bed.
He picked up the first one.
"Advanced Observation Haki Upgrade Voucher: Upon use, upgrades Observation Haki from intermediate to advanced level."
Yes yes yes. His Observation Haki was sitting at the intermediate tier from a long time now, which capped his range at around five hundred meters. Pushing it to advanced should stretch that to somewhere between one and two thousand, a serious jump in practical coverage.
He set that aside and checked the second item.
"Marines Six Powers Set: Upon use, grants a complete set of the Marine Six Powers."
He turned it over in his fingers a moment. Honestly, it was hard to work up much excitement for this one. His physical combat had long since moved past the point where the Six Powers would add anything meaningful. Still, it cost nothing to keep, and if nothing else he could always pass it along to someone later. He slipped it into his ring, his subspace, without much thought.
The third item was last.
"Resurrection Coin: An item originating from an online game. Upon use, revives a person who has died within the last ten minutes."
He looked at it longer than the others. A revival item was something else entirely. The ten-minute window was a firm limitation, but inside that window it was very extraordinary. He tucked it carefully into the ring. Something like this could prove invaluable down the line.
Then he picked up the Observation Haki voucher again.
"Use."
The card dissolved and entered his body the moment the word left his mouth.
[Ding! Congratulations, host. The Advanced Observation Haki Upgrade Voucher has been used. Observation Haki has been upgraded from intermediate to advanced level.]
The system chimed, and he felt it immediately. His perceptual range expanded outward in a sudden rush, stretching past five hundred meters, past a thousand, settling somewhere above two thousand. More than four times what it had been before, spreading out around him like a widening tide.
He lay back and let it settle, quietly mapping the world inside that new radius while Vivi slept on, completely oblivious.