-Broadcast-
The Gaara half and the Shukaku half were still arguing.
"It's your fault." Gaara directed this at the sand-textured face occupying the other side of his head, each word carrying the flat certainty of someone who had decided in advance that no counter-argument would matter. "You ran out and got in the way. I almost had her."
The Shukaku-half's expression managed mockery through features that were more mineral than human. "Don't overestimate yourself, little brat. The Black Order has told you what to think since you were old enough to think anything. One day that's going to cost you something you can't afford." A pause. "That day, you'll come asking for my help."
Shukaku had lost Crocodile — split between two containers, able to reach neither — and the indignity of this sat heavily on an entity that had existed since long before there were containers to be placed in. He was not interested in continuing the argument. A child who had been given a framework before he had the capacity to question it was not going to be talked out of that framework by a demon, and Shukaku knew the difference between a conversation and a performance.
The sand features receded. The possessed state dissolved. Gaara stood alone, dark circles and all, staring at the direction where Pangaea Castle had been.
Buggy was still there. A show worth watching.
Buggy had located Vivi.
Saint Marcus Mars — the Itsumade form, enormous, wings catching the air a thousand meters up — was circling with her in his talons, high enough to be outside the obvious range of retaliation, not quite high enough to feel entirely safe. The Clown King's Observation Haki covered every altitude. Mars knew this and was calculating.
I'm going to have to deal with that. Buggy looked up at the distant shape against the sky. The Itsumade had survived the Liberation by being outside the radius. Of the Five Elders, it was the only surviving problem.
Then the bell rang.
It came from nowhere he could identify — not from the destroyed buildings, not from any remaining structure, but from somewhere older than the structures, somewhere underneath the architecture of the moment itself. Deep and measured, the kind of sound that exists below music, carrying the weight of accumulated time without announcing what time it had accumulated. It moved through the air and found Buggy's chest and resonated there without his permission.
He stopped.
Around him, the light changed.
Not dimmer or brighter — different, as if the quality of the illumination itself was being retuned. The rubble-field that had been Pangaea Castle began to move. Not falling further, not settling — moving backward, which was a thing that rubble did not do and which his eyes refused to accept for approximately two seconds before accepting it. Sections of stone rose. Dust consolidated. Glass fragments on the ground lifted into the air and flew upward toward the window frames that had stopped existing and were now existing again.
The corpses of the guards and civilians who had been in the wrong position when the Liberation detonated were reappearing. They looked confused. They were standing in a restored room that their last memory had been of standing in, and the intervening event had been excised from their experience entirely.
Buggy watched this with the expression of someone who finds the world interesting.
Time was running backward. Not his time — he was still standing exactly where he had been standing, fully present in the forward-moving current, watching the backward-moving current operate on everything around him. His position in all of this had not changed. He had not been restored to the inside of Saint Shepherd Ju Peter's digestive tract, which was where the rewound timeline logically suggested he should be. Whatever was operating this had either exempted him deliberately or lacked the ability to touch him.
The Liberation had decomposed everything it reached. The time reversal was un-decomposing it. Brick by brick, beam by beam, the great colonnades of Pangaea Castle climbed back into position. The shattered mosaic of the throne room floor reassembled itself across exactly one minute of reversed time, until the red carpet that had been garbage was a red carpet again, and the windows were glass, and the room was what it had been before Buggy had introduced it to the concept of Liberation.
Saint Nasujuro materialized fully — centaur form reversing back into human form, the first-generation Kitetsu back in its scabbard, intact. Saint Marcus Mars descended from the air and landed, returning Vivi to the floor as the reversal completed. Saint Topman Warcury solidified out of what had been pieces. Saint Jaygarcia Saturn and Saint Shepherd Ju Peter reconstituted from their respective states of having been destroyed.
The Five Elders stood in the restored throne room and looked at each other, and then at their own hands, with the expression of things that have experienced being torn apart and are processing the experience of no longer being torn apart.
Warcury: "The Black Order has sent someone extraordinary." He filed this as an observation rather than a relief. "We need to be very careful about this religious organization."
The others did not respond. They were still doing the processing.
Buggy looked up at the Empty Throne and started clapping.
"Wonderful," he said. "A wonderful performance. It turns out the World Government needs to call in outside help to manage its problems." He paused. "I mean that sincerely. I'm impressed."
She had been standing there for some time.
Under the Empty Throne, not far from where the Five Elders had positioned themselves during the confrontation — present, but invisible in the way that closed eyes sometimes make a person invisible, because the absence of gaze removes you from other people's calculations.
A nun's uniform, black and white, fitted with the practical elegance of someone who had learned that comfort and presentation were not incompatible. Her hair was dark and her eyes were closed and on her back she carried a massive clock face — golden, ornate, the hour hand moving with the patient certainty of something doing exactly what it had been made to do, only in the wrong direction.
The Sky Screen marked her:
Black Order Exorcist — Miranda Lotto. User of the Time Fruit (Paramecia-type).
Im looked at her from the Empty Throne. He had looked at many things across eight hundred years and had developed preferences about what was interesting. Miranda Lotto and the clock face behind her occupied the interesting category.
"A remarkable fruit." His voice had returned to its baseline smoothness — the crisis of Buggy's Liberation having apparently passed the threshold back into composure. "The Time Fruit. It has been a very long time since it last appeared. The last user — I believe there was a comparison to be drawn—" He let this thought trail into the silence in the way of someone who finds direct completions unnecessary. "To have the awakening express itself at this scale. The Black Order chose well in sending you."
By absorbing the future time of those around her — extracting from them the seconds and minutes they had not yet used — Miranda had reversed one minute of the world's state. Everything in the radius that had died or been destroyed had been returned to its prior state through the returned time. Her own body was the cost accounting: the future time she absorbed sat inside her, taking up space, and the space it could take up had limits.
Miranda did not open her eyes. She did not need to in order to see. Time moved differently for her than it moved for people whose perception was limited to the present moment — she could feel the past and the approaching future simultaneously, and the eyes that processed visible light were not the most useful instruments she had.
"The cooperation between the Black Order and the World Government will continue," she said. Her voice was quieter than its content warranted. "On the understanding that this matter—" she indicated Buggy with a gesture that did not require looking at him — "is resolved. We assisted once. Future assistance will require negotiation."
She said this without particular edge. It was a practical statement about terms, not a threat.
The Five Elders had cancelled their transformations, returning to their human appearances, and were now arranged in their customary positions. They would not be admitting defeat in front of the Clown. They would wait for Lord Im's latest instructions and execute them.
Buggy, for his part, had noted very carefully during the reversal that his own timeline had not been touched. The Liberation's effects on him remained exactly as they had been. He was the fixed point around which the reversal had operated.
He had a theory about what that meant. He was going to enjoy finding out if the theory was correct.