Punk Hazard, New World
The chamber reeked of rust, wet stone, and burnt metal. Shadows clung to the fractured walls, the only light coming from the sputtering arcs of the plasma cutter chewing its way through the vault's face. The door itself was a towering monolith of steel and alloy, buried beneath tons of dust and rubble. Even half-cleared, it still loomed over them—its circular frame lined with reinforced locking rings and seams no wider than a hair.
It had taken them a week of backbreaking, nerve-shredding labor to even get this far, working in complete secrecy deep beneath the construction site. Every strike of their tools, every hum of the cutter, was a gamble.
"Third Research Institute…" one of the men grunted, sweat streaming down his soot-streaked face as he strained against a crowbar to pry loose a panel. "I wonder what they've got in there to keep it sealed this tight. A whole week for just one door! Whatever's inside has to be worth a fortune. Imagine—one haul, and we'd never have to bow to anyone again."
He was no officer, no veteran of the seas. Just a bottom-feeder in the Donquixote Pirates ranks—one of those too cowardly to sail but too cruel to live honestly. The kind who hid behind a powerful name and wielded it like a bludgeon.
"Shut up," hissed the man crouched beside the vault's locking mechanism. He was the oldest of the three, the one who'd been "leading" this little betrayal. His eyes were locked on the glowing cut line, but the tightness in his jaw betrayed his nerves.
"You want to get caught, is that it? You know what happens to traitors in this pirate crew, right…?. I've seen it. You've seen it. You think the monsters up there would let it slide?"
Both of them knew who he meant. No one dared speak her name aloud here.
The third man, holding the cutter steady, snorted without looking up. "Rumor is, before the Family took the island, this place was a stash for the World Government. Look at these doors—two feet thick, lined with seastone braces. You think anyone wastes that on storing garbage?"
The leader didn't answer. His gaze flicked toward the corridor beyond, the black mouth of the tunnel swallowing any light. Out there, the construction teams worked in the open, moving rubble and reshaping the island for its future fishman inhabitants. Out there, someone could wander too far and hear them.
And if word reached the higher-ups…
His stomach tightened. The Donquixote Family didn't just punish traitors—they erased them. Not with a clean death, but with slow, deliberate brutality. They made examples that lingered in the minds of survivors for years. He had seen the aftermath more than once: men reduced to red smears and broken whispers.
But ambition was a disease, and the vault was a lure he couldn't turn away from. If the rumors were true, this could be his one chance to rise above the muck. The cutter's hum died down, replaced by the hiss of cooling metal. A jagged seam now cut across the vault's surface, glowing faintly from the heat.
The leader's breath caught. Just one more push, and they'd know if they had gambled their lives for treasure… or for nothing.
CREAK…
The massive vault door groaned like some ancient beast awakening from centuries of slumber. The three men froze, tools in hand, sweat dripping down their brows. The sound wasn't just noise—it was a promise.
And then, silence.
Just when they thought their week of backbreaking effort had been for nothing, the hinges gave way with a sudden, bone-rattling BOOM as the entire slab collapsed inward. The impact shook the ground beneath their boots, sending a cascade of dust and loose stones raining from the cavern ceiling.
It was the sound of victory. Or it should have been.
Instead, their eyes widened—not with joy, but with dread. That boom wasn't just noise; it was a beacon. It would travel through the collapsed tunnels like a war drum, and sound had a way of attracting predators in these waters.
No one spoke. No one moved. They just stared at the jagged, dark path leading to the outside world, ears straining for even the faintest trace of approaching footsteps. After what felt like an eternity, one of them exhaled in shaky relief.
"Fuck… I thought we were done for—"
"Don't you dare jinx it," the leader hissed through clenched teeth. But his warning came too late.
From the tunnel, faint but unmistakable, came the slow, deliberate clap… clap… clap.
A shape emerged from the darkness, massive shoulders brushing the broken stone walls, each step deliberate and unhurried. The rhythmic clapping echoed like a death knell.
"I have to commend your resilience," a deep, gravel-edged voice rumbled. "Three nobodies, carving through a vault like this in just a week… I'm almost impressed."
The figure stepped into the light of their work lamps, and all three men felt the same primal chill run down their spines. The towering frame of a bull shark fishman loomed over them, his jagged teeth catching the light in a grin that was all predator. The sea-blue skin stretched taut over corded muscle, his black coat hanging open just enough to reveal the scarred torso beneath.
Arnold.
A top cadre of the Donquixote Family. One of the true inner circle. And the only fishman, save for Lady Shyarly herself, who stood among the Family's most trusted.
Behind him came his entourage—two fishmen, several armed humans in the Family's colors. One of them chuckled, resting his rifle lazily over his shoulder.
"Arnold-san, looks like you lost the bet," he smirked.
Arnold's grin didn't falter. "Fine, fine. Drinks are on me tonight. For the entire crew." His tone was light, almost playful. But his eyes never left the three huddled figures before him. They were the eyes of a shark scenting blood.
The leader swallowed hard, realizing his window for salvation had all but closed. Arnold had been aware of their little secret from the very first day. The collapsed tunnel wasn't exactly subtle, and the noise of plasma cutters echoed far in these buried halls. Arnold had simply chosen to wait—to see if they'd come clean.
They hadn't.
"Master Arnold… we were—" the leader began, desperation in his voice. "We were going to tell you. We just wanted to confirm what was inside first. For all we knew, it could've been nothing! That's why we didn't—"
Arnold didn't even glance at him. He turned instead to his entourage, eyes narrowing in mock consideration. "Do you believe their story?"
A ripple of laughter rolled through the group. The kind of laughter only criminals knew—dry, pitiless, and knowing. Even the other fishmen with Arnold were far from naive.
"Master Arnold, please! I swear I'm not lying—" The leader's voice cracked. His right hand, slick with sweat, inched toward the pistol tucked at the small of his back.
Arnold still didn't look at him. His gaze was locked on the vault, his massive frame stepping forward one slow, heavy stride at a time. And then, before the leader could even draw—before the others could blink—pain like molten iron exploded in his wrist.
He looked down in disbelief. His pistol clattered to the floor, still gripped in a severed hand. Blood spurted in rhythmic bursts from the ragged stump where his hand had been.
"AAAAAARRRRGGGHHH!" The scream tore out of him as he collapsed to his knees, clutching at the ruin of his wrist. The other two men shook like leaves in a storm. Neither had seen Arnold move. He hadn't even turned his head. It was as though their leader's hand had simply… vanished.
The jeers and chuckles of Arnold's men died into a heavy silence. Everyone present knew what came next. The Donquixote Family didn't just kill traitors—they made examples of them. And Arnold… Arnold had a reputation for ensuring those examples lingered in memory.
Without breaking stride, Arnold stepped past the bleeding man and stood before the yawning blackness of the vault's interior. His expression was unreadable, but there was a glint in his eyes—something between curiosity and calculation.
"Take them away," he said, voice low but cutting. "We'll deal with them after I see what's inside."
The men obeyed instantly, dragging the three screaming, pleading traitors into the shadows.
Arnold remained still at the threshold of the vault, his observation haki unfurling into the oppressive dark. The stale air beyond smelled of dust, chemicals, and something faintly metallic. Something… wrong.
The Third Research Institute had been missed during the Family's initial sweep of the island. A mistake. One Arnold had no intention of repeating. If there were other hidden places like this buried beneath the island they were remaking into a fishman haven, they would be found. And purged.
Without another word, Arnold stepped into the black, the darkness swallowing him whole.
Soon after Arnold stepped into the oppressive dark, a few other fishmen and Donquixote pirates followed, their footsteps echoing off cold steel walls. The beam from a single hand-lamp cut across the gloom, catching on dust motes that hung thick in the frigid air.
"Get some light in here," one of the humans muttered, his voice small in the vast silence. Others fumbled with portable lamps, their fingers stiff from the unexpected chill.
The deeper they moved, the clearer it became—this was no ordinary vault. The space was vast, far larger than any storage chamber. It wasn't a simple steel room; it was as if an entire natural cavern had been gutted and then sheathed in reinforced plating, every seam bolted and riveted shut. The design wasn't made for storage.
It was made to keep something in.
Arnold's sharp eyes swept the walls, noting the layers of reinforcement, the embedded locking mechanisms, the faint marks of something—claws, maybe—that had raked the steel from the inside at some point in the distant past. His jaw tightened.
"Tch," he muttered, breath misting in the freezing air. "What kind of twisted experiment were they running down here…?"
The temperature gnawed at their bones, unnatural in a place with no active power source. It was the cold that kept the smell at bay—a cloying stench that still wormed its way into the nostrils, heavy with decay. And then they saw the table.
It dominated the center of the chamber, a slab of black metal surrounded by rusted, frost-covered instruments. Upon it lay a corpse.
No—a thing.
Its size dwarfed even the largest fishman, the frozen flesh stretched taut over a form that was wrong in ways the mind didn't want to parse. Patches of skin were missing, replaced by stitches or crude metallic grafts. A section of its torso had been cut open, revealing not ribs but something plated and chitinous beneath.
Even after years under ice, there were hints of rot creeping through, the edges of wounds darkened and curling. The thing's head—half-frozen, half-exposed—was like nothing Arnold had ever seen. It was not a giant. Not a Sea King. Not any creature from the known Blues. It looked like an amalgamation of several species welded together in defiance of nature.
Arnold stepped closer, his boots ringing against the frost-coated steel floor. His instincts told him the truth—this was not born. It was made.
One of the fishmen swallowed hard. "Boss… what is it?"
Arnold didn't answer. His gaze was fixed, not on the corpse, but on the restraints bolting its limbs to the table. They weren't chains. They were locking clamps, thicker than a man's thigh, each one scorched with marks of strain—as if whatever had been here once tried to break free.
The silence was broken by a voice from deeper within the vault.
"Master Arnold!"
Arnold turned sharply. At the far end of the chamber, one of the fishmen was standing by what looked like a second tunnel—its entrance marked by another vault door, this one partially caved in but still intact enough to hold whatever was behind it.
The man's lamp beam shone into the narrow gap between warped steel and the frame, but the darkness beyond seemed to swallow the light whole.
Arnold's expression darkened. If this chamber, with its corpse and biting cold, had been only the first layer… what the hell was buried deeper?
The second vault door fell to them far quicker than the first, its ancient locks already weakened by time and frost. With a groaning crack, the warped steel shifted just enough for them to slip through.
Pitch darkness swallowed them whole. Even with headlamps and torches, the light seemed to die just a few meters out, devoured by the cold. And the cold here was different—not the still chill of a sealed room, but something that felt alive, pressing against their skin, seeping into their bones.
One of the fishmen ran his hand along the sidewall, expecting steel like in the first chamber. Instead, his fingertips slid across smooth, biting cold—ice. His brows furrowed, and he lifted his lamp toward it.
What he saw made his heart seize.
Beneath the glassy surface, a massive, unblinking eye stared back at him—lids frozen wide, the iris larger than his entire torso. For a second, he was certain it tracked his movement. The fishman jerked his hand back with a strangled cry.
The scream cut through the silence like a blade. Every head turned, beams of light swinging toward him, until another voice—this time trembling and high with panic—rose from deeper in the chamber.
"Arnold-sama… y-you need to see this!"
Arnold was already there before the man had finished the sentence. He stepped forward, his own lamp casting light into the vast heart of the chamber. And then he froze. His breath misted, then stopped entirely for a beat. Even his heart seemed to skip.
The ice wall wasn't a wall at all. It was a prison. Inside, stretching into the unseen distance, stood dozens—no, hundreds—of titanic figures. Not merely giants as the world knew them; these were something older, more primeval. Each one towered over even the tallest giants of Elbaf, their forms preserved in haunting perfection.
They were frozen mid-stride, mid-battle, as though a great storm had consumed them in an instant and sealed them in crystal tombs. Beards of frost hung from their chins, weapons clutched in hands the size of ships. And yet… Arnold's sharp eyes caught movement.
The nearest giant's gaze—so close it loomed over him like a god—seemed to shift. Just barely. Watching him. Measuring him. Arnold's instincts screamed at him, but his face betrayed nothing as his observation haki didn't detect any life. Slowly, he turned to his men.
"Secure the lab. No one—absolutely no one—is to know about this. Double the guard. And those three fools from earlier… give their interrogation special attention. I want to know if they stumbled on this by pure chance… or if they were led here."
Orders given, he strode away with a speed that betrayed his urgency. The air outside the vault felt almost warm compared to the chamber behind him. From a sealed case at his side within his coat, he withdrew a black transponder snail—one reserved for conversations that never went on record.
As he walked, he muttered to himself, "No… I need to tell Doffy about this."
The snail's eyes opened, its shell faintly humming before a familiar, lazy drawl spilled through the receiver.
"Fufufufu… Arnold, my friend. Ever since you restarted that island project, you've barely shown your face in Dressrosa. I've kept a few vintages aside just for you. Don't make me drink them alone…"
Arnold was perhaps the only fishman Doflamingo spoke to like this—with warmth, even camaraderie. But Arnold didn't have the luxury of small talk tonight.
"Doffy… we need to talk," he said, voice taut. "We found something here. Something Rosinante mentioned to us once… super-massive giants. We found a frozen chamber under one of the newly uncovered labs. There are hundreds of them, sealed in ice. The ice is harder than seastone. Doffy… it matches what Rosinante described. I think it's them."
On the other end, the easy laughter died instantly. Arnold could almost feel the silence—hear the faint click of gears turning behind Doflamingo's ever-smiling mask. The pause stretched, heavy with thought.
When Doflamingo spoke, his voice had changed. It was still calm, still smooth—but now it carried the razor edge of a man who had just seen an entire chessboard rearrange in his mind.
"…We'll be there shortly. Make sure the area is secure, Arnold."
The line went dead with a click. Arnold closed the case, his jaw set. Whatever those frozen titans were, they had just pulled the full attention of Donquixote Doflamingo himself. And that meant the game had changed.
****
They had crossed half the sea in a single day. No ship, no matter how swift, could have made such a journey from Dressrosa to Punk Hazard. But with Issho's gravity bending the very fabric of the landmass beneath them, the three men had soared over oceans and storms like gods untethered by the earth. They touched down not in exhaustion, but in a heavy silence—each step echoing in the hollow tunnels beneath the island.
Now, deep within the second vault, the air was sharper than a blade. The chamber had been cleared of all bystanders. Only Arnold, Doflamingo, Issho, and Señor Pink remained, their forms haloed by the stark artificial lights strung high across the steel-reinforced cavern. The glow spilled across the wall.
Calling it a wall was an insult. It was an unbroken sheet of ice so massive it swallowed the horizon of the chamber itself. At first glance, Arnold had believed it part of the island's natural geography—a frozen cliff face from some ancient glacial era. But closer inspection told a different story.
This was not native ice. This monolith had been brought here. Its mass alone could have dwarfed smaller islands. And sealed within it—preserved as though trapped between moments—were the silhouettes of giants unlike anything the world had ever seen.
Doflamingo stood before it, his pink coat hanging still in the unmoving air, amber shades glinting with the cold light. Even his flames, when he willed them to life in his palm, faltered and hissed against the surface, repelled as though the ice itself rejected their heat. He could have brute-forced his way in—he wanted to—but recklessness risked damaging the specimens, and
Doflamingo did not damage the unknown. Without turning, his voice curled lazily through the frigid air.
"What do you think, Issho…?"
The blind swordsman's hand rested on the wall, palm open as his Kenbunshoku Haki reached outward, trying to pierce the veil of that frozen world. The silence stretched until Issho finally exhaled, his brow furrowing.
"Sorry, Doffy… I cannot tell. My haki finds no heartbeat, no breath… but my instincts tell me otherwise."
Doflamingo's mouth tugged upward in a razor smile.
"Expected. Who knows how long these fossils have been waiting for us…"
He shifted his gaze toward Señor Pink, who held a special transponder snail in his arms. Its stalk-eyes glimmered unnaturally, tracking every detail of the ice wall. This was no ordinary snail—it transmitted live images across the world, a tool used only when the stakes demanded absolute clarity.
"Einstein," Doflamingo said, his tone now edged with command, "did you know anything about this during your time in Punk Hazard?"
From the snail, a younger voice answered, echoing faintly through the chamber.
"I do not recall ever seeing such a specimen in my tenure there. This… this predates my work by centuries. And you know, Doffy, the World Government never shared all its secrets with me. I was merely a tool for their ambitions."
Doflamingo gave a single, slow nod.
"Then what do you make of them?"
There was the sound of paper shifting in the background as Einstein replied.
"The closest match in the records… would be the ancient shipwright giants of the Gallelia Tribe of Elbaf. Their size and structure resemble what I see in your feed. But even the Ohara archives hold little about them—only fragments and whispers."
The mention of Ohara drew a faint, almost imperceptible shift in Doflamingo's expression. The rest of the world believed Ohara's knowledge burned to ash under a rain of fire, but in truth, Rosinante had salvaged it before the Buster Call struck. Every forbidden volume, every scroll and etching—all of it—had been spirited away to the underbelly of Green Bit.
To the outside world, Green Bit was an overgrown, uninhabited island, nothing but tangled forests and strange fauna. But beneath that jungle lay a labyrinthine vault carved from bedrock, larger than most cities.
There, under layers of stone and steel, the Donquixote Family had built the single greatest library left in the world. Every scrap of Ohara's forbidden knowledge rested in those endless halls, guarded by armed Tontatta warriors and sea beasts. And in its deepest wing, surrounded by locked gates and den-den surveillance, lay their most dangerous endeavor—the Pluton Project.
It was here, in that buried temple of knowledge, that Einstein now sat surrounded by mountains of ancient tomes, his fingers racing over brittle parchment and half-decayed maps, cross-referencing every known record of the Gallelia Tribe.
And still… the frozen titans before them defied explanation.
Doflamingo tilted his head ever so slightly, the corners of his mouth curling upward again—not in humor, but in the predatory anticipation of a man who had just glimpsed a treasure no one else knew existed.
"Guess we don't have a choice…" Doflamingo's voice was low, almost thoughtful, though the glint in his shades betrayed a sharper intent. "It's better to go straight to the source. Quickest… and most efficient."
Señor Pink, without needing further explanation, reached into his coat and withdrew another transponder snail—this one smaller, sleeker, its shell polished to a mirror sheen. He handed it to Doflamingo without a word.
The moment the line connected, Doflamingo's tone shifted—warmth woven over steel.
"Hello… little brother. Tell me—are you enjoying your hospitality under Whitebeard?"
He chuckled, a low and knowing sound, pausing as if savoring the reply on the other end.
"Fufufufu… good, good. I'd hate to think you've gone soft playing house with the old man."
His voice sharpened, the mirth tapering into something cold and deliberate.
"Listen closely, Rosinante. I suspect we've found the giant tribe we've been hunting. No, I'm not entirely sure yet… but what little information we've scraped together points to them."
He stepped closer to the ice wall as he spoke, his reflection warped in the frozen surface—lips curling into a smile that didn't reach his eyes.
"So here's what I want you to do. You will make a trip to Elbaf—personally. While we try and secure these specimens within greenbit and try and uncover if they are merely dead fossils or simply frozen alive. You'll dig through their sagas, their songs, their elders' memories—anything that can confirm their identity."
A pause, his head tilting slightly, as if hearing a jovial comment making Doffy smirk.
"Yes, I know the risks. Isn't that why I'm sending you...?"
Another beat. His tone softened into that velvet-wrapped baritone, a genuine tone only reserved for his little brother Rosinanate.
"You're the only one I trust with this, little brother. Don't disappoint me, and be careful; if they are really the Gallelia, as we suspect, then we don't know how the giants of Elbaf would react to it."
The snail's eyes drooped into a nod as the call ended with a soft click. Doflamingo's smile lingered, but his fingers were already flexing, purple flames twitching at his fingertips—flames that were already stretching toward Elbaf.