Helmeppo had lost his nerve the moment he'd set foot on this battlefield. He let out a hollow laugh, stumbled back two steps, and went limp. "This is insane. We've already lost."
"Helmeppo..."
Helmeppo seized Koby by the arm. "Let's run, Koby. Even if you want to be an Admiral someday—whatever—you need to survive first! Did you miss the news a few days back? The reason Akainu never showed up is that the kid beat him. And now we've got practically every Emperor here at once!"
Things had gone completely off the rails.
His words left Koby standing frozen. But they managed to jolt the Marines around them back to reality—some of them outright dropped their weapons and fell into total despair.
"What are you all afraid of? The Four Emperors aren't on the same side!" The bellow came from a Vice Admiral somewhere in the crowd. Naturally, it barely moved the needle.
"Garp, sir...?" Aokiji looked at Garp and noticed the man appeared to be breathing a subtle sigh of relief.
The person kneeling on the execution platform had been looked after by Garp since childhood—and had technically been entrusted to him by Roger himself. Even though his position required him to hold the line, he'd never once stopped hoping, in the deepest part of himself, that Ace would be saved.
This is impossible. There's nothing to fight.
The newly-appointed Aokiji had already lost all motivation to keep this going.
Below was pure chaos. On Shanks' ship, things weren't much better.
"The child said it herself, Big Mom. No connection." Beckman's patience was running thin.
He pried Yimi out of Big Mom's hands—gun in one hand leveled at Big Mom's head, the other arm tucking the girl safely behind him.
By now several of Big Mom's children had climbed aboard and closed a ring around Beckman.
Even so, his composure didn't slip. "You're the second Emperor today who showed up claiming to be her family..." His voice carried an easy contempt. "Don't tell me kidnapping children is the path to becoming Pirate King."
Then he noticed something flicker across Big Mom's face.
Is there actually something to this?
"Drop the act—you already knew, didn't you? Who doesn't know the Red Hair Pirates and Hawk-Eye go way back?" Big Mom hadn't even spoken yet when one of her sons—the one who'd been throwing out wild theories on Smoothie's behalf—couldn't contain himself any longer.
"Shut it!" Smoothie's foot shot out and sent him sprawling—saving her brother's life before Big Mom could turn her attention to him.
But the damage was done. He'd already pointed Big Mom's thoughts in the right direction.
Hawk-Eye had taken his Warlord position as cover while quietly collecting the world's missing history—but his history with Shanks, stretching back to before Shanks had even lost his arm, wasn't exactly a buried secret.
So why had Red Hair conveniently turned up here, and run right into Hawk-Eye's daughter on top of it?
Big Mom leaned forward, arranging her expression into something she hoped resembled warmth—a difficult project, given that neither her face nor her reputation were cooperating.
"Little Yimi, Grandma just has one question. Will you answer honestly?"
In the presence of children under ten, Big Mom sometimes produced something that looked almost like real tenderness.
"You're not my grandma." The cat had no interest in cooperating with someone impersonating her grandmother.
"She says she's not~" Shanks had climbed back aboard with the rest of the crew.
Big Mom ignored him entirely. Right there in front of Shanks, without any preamble, she brought it up directly—confirming what had been nothing but her son's speculation moments ago: "Do you know the truth of this world?"
"The truth of the world...?" Shanks looked sharply at Yimi.
The Void Century? Surely a child couldn't know something like that.
Yimi held Big Mom's gaze for a few seconds, then opened her mouth—barely, just slightly.
How does this enormous woman know to ask that?
In the previous world, the cat had discovered the truth on her own: the world was round. But when she'd generously tried to share this revelation, that wretched low-life Shizhi had swooped in and stolen all the credit for her labor.
Yimi's eyes slid sideways. "Not telling you."
Someone among Big Mom's children made a strangled noise.
She actually knows.
Boom—
A fist wrapped in Armament Haki drove into the Red Force's deck, blasting a whole section of planking skyward.
"Napoleon!"
"Yes, Mama."
Big Mom lifted the captain's bicorne from her head; an enormous cleaver extended from within it and met Shanks' long sword.
"The sky... split open?"
The spectacle of two Emperors' Conqueror's Haki clashing at full force reached the Marines below—those who'd still been clinging to some last thread of optimism—and extinguished it.
The Soul-Soul Fruit, a Paramecia. Charlotte Linlin's ability: to breathe life into inanimate objects, and to perceive or strip away the lifespan of any living thing.
"That won't do, Little Yimi. A dear little grandchild of mine—hiding behind her grandmother's enemy."
Unlike Kaido's attempts at persuasion, whether Big Mom half-believed her own words or was completely sincere, no one could ever tell. She lavished overwhelming maternal warmth on small children sometimes; tried to kill her own flesh and blood other times; operated without a shred of principle most of the time, then suddenly invoked a pirate has her own code of honor at unpredictable moments. She was a woman so volatile that even her eldest son couldn't make sense of her.
Big Mom narrowed her eyes, studying the small figure who had leveled a lance at her.
"Can't see it?"
She couldn't see this child's lifespan—as if something were blocking it, or as if the girl might die at any second. An endlessly perplexing strangeness.
"Four Emperors!"
"Host, this one is real," the system offered helpfully. "No need to doubt this one."
Using her Stand as a Kinsect, Yimi collected Red and White Lights from Napoleon and Zeus respectively. She layered Armament and Conqueror's Haki infusion over them and—with no pretense of chivalry whatsoever—drove straight at Big Mom's flank while Big Mom and Shanks were locked together.
"Was it Hawk-Eye or Rayleigh who taught you to fight dirty?" Shanks called out.
"Ganging up on your own grandmother with outsiders—!"
Big Mom rolled her eyes.
Perhaps because she hadn't even used the Flying Roundslash, the several-fold enhanced Conqueror's Haki still didn't land with anything close to the force Yimi had imagined.
A childhood not entirely unlike Kaido's—but Charlotte Linlin was even more extreme. From infancy she'd possessed monstrous raw strength and a durability no one could explain. In her early years, seized by one of her food-craving frenzies, she'd accidentally annihilated an entire giant tribe. In all her years she'd almost never had her defenses broken through—and this wasn't defense propped up on Devil Fruit power the way Kaido's was. Before she'd somehow ended up with the Soul-Soul Fruit, she'd already been a monster by birth.
"Mamamamama—"
Her trademark cackle rang out. Big Mom seized the Spear of Longinus, and with irresistible brute force ripped it clean from Yimi's hands and hurled it thousands of meters away. The spear drove itself half-deep into the wall the Marines had built to hold back Whitebeard's advance, the shaft buried to the midpoint.
"Bullying a child," Marco remarked—he'd nearly caught the collateral himself, and spared just enough attention to glance sideways. "No class."
Yimi looked down at her two empty hands. Then opened her mouth, just slightly.
That was the first time anyone had ever taken the Spear of Longinus from her. And thrown it that far.
Pure white radiance broke free without restraint. In an instant it stripped away half of Shanks' flagship—and forced Yimi into a state of complete detachment, neither angry nor glad.