-Real World-
Borsalino's file at Marine Headquarters had grown considerably thicker since the Sky Screen began its broadcasts.
The summary was unflattering. Too many engagements in the Sky Screen's future timeline where he had emerged without meaningful injury — which, for an Admiral with a Logia Devil Fruit, could simply mean competence, but which his colleagues had begun interpreting as insufficient effort. A habit of allowing pirates with connections to go free rather than completing arrests. A particular relationship with political convenience expressed itself as excessive caution at moments when excessive caution benefited whoever Borsalino least wanted to inconvenience.
He was not trusted. This had been true for a while. The Sky Screen had merely provided s.
Under normal circumstances he would have been very difficult to move. But Fleet Admiral Sengoku had a salary reduction policy and the patience to use it, and Borsalino had been sent to Arabasta to collect the son of the Pirate King and additionally — secretly, in the way that most of Sengoku's more optimistic requests were formatted — to kill Marshall D. Teach if the opportunity presented itself. The probability of the second part was acknowledged by both parties to be very small. The first part was enough justification for the deployment.
He arrived to find what war leaves behind.
The ancient capital had a particular quality in the aftermath — not ruined exactly, not the kind of spectacular destruction that a Logia battle produced, but diminished in the way of a place that had been host to something terrible and had not had time to recover yet. Bloodstains on the stone walls. Bodies on the roadsides that the desert's scavengers were working through without hurry. The smell that accumulates over days when tens of thousands of people have died in a concentrated area and no one has had the authority or manpower to begin cleanup.
Borsalino took a pair of sunglasses from his jacket pocket and put them on. He adjusted the frame. He stopped looking directly at the roadside.
He was not indifferent to this. He was sometimes accused of indifference — it was a reasonable accusation from the outside — but the accusation required mistaking self-preservation as emotional absence. The way he managed himself at scenes like this was not by feeling less. It was by finding a fixed point and staying on the task.
"What a sad world," he said, to no one. "I'm going to have nightmares for days."
He completed his adjustment and walked on.
The World Government was not well.
The Five Elders' revelation had cracked something structural. The character notes had been precise and the absence of a category had done more damage than any horror could have. Human beings find ways to accommodate monsters they can classify. Monsters that exist outside classification produce a different response.
The speculation that moved through World Government offices across the world went in one direction: the Five Elders were demons in human presentation who had been managing the world's political landscape for eight hundred years toward an end that served demons rather than people. The evidence was circumstantial but plentiful if you were already frightened. The appearance of Naraku in Arabasta — a demon whose power had been demonstrated publicly, with eyewitnesses — was retrospectively interpreted as confirmation.
Government employees made personal calculations. The salaries the World Government provided were generous precisely because the work was not otherwise appealing. Those salaries could only be spent if the spender was alive. The supervisors who ran the government offices across the world had done their own calculation first and acted on it — when they left, the staff under them noticed and drew conclusions.
The Marine, with a cleaner command structure and a Fleet Admiral who enforced discipline through people's understanding that she was entirely capable of replacing them, held. The World Government's more distributed administrative structure did not.
Into this gap, Baroque Works had moved with the focused efficiency of an organization that had been preparing to be exactly this kind of solution.
The terms were clear: in exchange for the World Government's formal recognition of Crocodile's sovereign authority over the Kingdom of Arabasta, Baroque Works would double the territory's annual Heavenly Tribute payments. Arabasta was a member state with a population in the tens of millions. The current tribute rate, under Cobra's rule, had always been modest — the king had never exploited his people aggressively, and the World Government had tolerated this because Arabasta's bloodline was complicated.
The Nefertari line was one of the Twenty Kings. It was also the line that had produced Queen Lily — who had refused Celestial Dragon elevation eight hundred years ago and returned to Arabasta as a traitor to the agreement. The World Government had maintained a quiet arrangement with Arabasta across the centuries: the bloodline would not be touched as long as it did not cause trouble. It was a relationship built on mutual discomfort rather than trust.
That arrangement no longer had context to stand on. The Celestial Dragons were fighting their own survival. The Five Elders were confirmed dead or compromised. The World Government's administrative apparatus was experiencing the functional equivalent of a building whose foundation has been removed. No one with institutional authority was thinking about Arabasta's bloodline politics.
Double tribute, and the formal transfer of sovereign authority. The World Government's representative signed the document.
When the current king's reign formally ended and the new ruler was crowned, a World Government witness would be required to legitimize the transition. On that day, Crocodile's pirate identity would be officially cleared. The Shichibukai system was already scheduled for abolition — a former pirate becoming an allied nation's sovereign was simply an accelerated version of a category that was being dissolved anyway.
Borsalino had no arrest order for Crocodile. His file simply did not contain one.
He stood outside the city's western approach and watched the horizon.
The rendezvous time had passed. The terrain outside the walls was quiet except for the scavengers and the still shapes they were attending to. Teach — large, dark, capable of making very things go wrong in very ways — was not present.
Could the fat bastard actually be afraid of me? Borsalino considered this. It was plausible. He had not been particularly trying to project threat, but he was still an Admiral, and Teach would know that, and Teach's instincts about risk had always been sound even when everything else about the man was not.
"Kizaru. My master anticipated correctly that it would be you."
The voice came from above. A woman on a white bird — elegant in the deliberate way of someone who has chosen every element of her presentation — descended from the direction of the sun in a composed arc. Kimono, hair up, an expression that communicated she found the general category of humans acceptable but not particularly interesting.
Borsalino recognized her immediately. He had seen her in the Sky Screen's footage, and the footage was reliable on faces.
"Kagura." He said it as a confirmation rather than a question. "Naraku's... creation." He paused very briefly. "It's a little strange to meet someone from the broadcasts in person."
Kagura did not respond to this. She reached down from the bird and dropped Ace — bound comprehensively, the knots arranged with an efficiency that suggested no one involved had been interested in making the process comfortable — from the air. Borsalino caught him at light speed before the ground could provide its input.
Ace was alive. Borsalino assessed this in roughly one second and moved it to a different cognitive category.
"Blackbeard Teach has provided the terms of this transfer." Kagura's voice carried the particular quality of someone delivering a message rather than having a conversation. Her expression of mild contempt for her immediate surroundings was consistent and apparently effortless. "The Shichibukai title is the agreed consideration. Do not make us wait beyond a reasonable interval. As for the consequences of an unreasonable interval—"
She glanced at the field outside the city walls.
The white shapes arranged across it were uniform in the way that things are uniform when a very large number of the same kind of thing has been deposited in the same place at approximately the same time. Tens of thousands of them. The scavengers had been at work for days and had not made a significant impression.
Naraku had killed these people to demonstrate a point about leverage. The point had been made clearly.
Borsalino looked at the field for a moment.
"Message received," he said.