-Broadcast-
The Four Elders stepped back.
They had watched the Liberation stage tear their bodies apart and been returned to themselves by Miranda Lotto's Time Fruit. The lesson had been delivered clearly: individually, and even in coordinated group assault, they were not enough. Whatever else the God of the Celestial Dragons intended to do with Buggy the Clown, the Five Elders' optimal contribution to it was to stand aside and observe. They dispersed to the room's margins and did exactly that.
The stage belonged to Im.
"One more question, Buggy."
Im's voice had returned to its baseline register — the smoothness of something that had been worn past the point of grain. His red eyes found Buggy across the restored throne room without particular urgency.
"Have you ever set foot on Laugh Tale?"
He knew the answer. He had known it for longer than most institutions had existed. Among the crew of the former Pirate King, the record was almost complete — Roger had taken his men to the world's final island, and those men had carried the secret of what they found there to their graves, one by one, as age and battle and the sea's ordinary work erased them. Almost complete, because two members of that crew had not made the landing. One was the madman standing here. The other was the red-haired Emperor, still alive, still waiting for something.
Im had made a study of these two exceptions over the years. They were the only thread he could not trace to its end.
"The truth of the world will eventually surface." Im's fingers moved on the arm of the Empty Throne, not impatience — thought. "You're standing in front of me having reached a room that Roger and Shanks never reached. And you had no interest in being the Pirate King for its own sake. What were you looking for?"
The shadows moved before Buggy had formed his answer.
They were not shadows in the conventional sense — not the absence of light, but a presence that had been waiting, patient, inside the darkness that Im accumulated behind him like weather. They peeled away from the mass and resolved into forms: arrows, black and purposeful, each one moving at a speed that Buggy's Observation Haki registered without giving his body time to do anything useful about it.
He dodged one, partially. The second passed through the gap between his Conqueror's Haki response and his body's maximum acceleration.
It entered his chest.
Not a surface wound. Not the kind of damage that a Paramecia user's split property could simply absorb — the arrow moved through him at the level that Im's eight centuries of accumulated power operated, which was a level below the split, below the fruit's self-protective mechanisms, straight through. He felt his heart register the intrusion and then register nothing at all on the left side.
His feet lifted from the floor.
The arrow had not stopped. It held him suspended, blood moving in the way of a wound that has reached something it shouldn't have. His vision lost its edges.
The smile on his face did not change.
Pain, he thought, distantly, is just information. Madmen had different relationships with information.
"Queen Lily—" The words came out through blood he was swallowing as quickly as it arrived. "She betrayed you. On purpose." He coughed. Kept going. "She took the Poneglyphs that the Ancient Kingdom engraved and scattered them across the world, because that woman believed — actually believed — that eventually someone would read them, and when they did, the World Government's story would fall apart in public." Another cough. "She thought the funniest thing she could do with her one life was load the gun and leave it where history could find it."
Im looked at him.
The black arrows on the floor were rising. More of them. All aimed at the same point, converging from different angles, with the particular efficiency of a conclusion that had finally been made.
"She was right, wasn't she." Buggy's voice had dropped to the register of someone using the last available energy for something that mattered. "You've been managing the aftermath ever since."
The Five Elders watched from the margins, expressions carefully composed.
"Finally," Saint Jaygarcia Saturn said, with the satisfaction of a man who had been waiting for a problem to resolve itself and was watching it do so. "One fewer unstable Emperor."
Miranda Lotto did not open her eyes. She tracked the time remaining in Buggy's body — not with any pleasure, simply as professional verification. The wound was fatal by any standard she had access to.
The arrows accelerated.
Buggy pressed his palms together.
The motion was deliberate, unhurried, the economy of movement that belongs to someone who has decided what they are going to do and is simply executing it. The arrows were twenty meters away. Fifteen.
"I didn't think I'd have to use this here." His voice was almost conversational.
"Ryōiki Tenkai: Bunshi Bunri no Yashiro [Domain Expansion: Atomic Separation Shrine]."
A red shrine materialized in the air behind him — not constructed, not assembled, but disclosed, as if it had always occupied that space and was only now allowing itself to be perceived. Inside it, a vast darkness opened like a mouth that had been waiting to be fed.
The Bara Bara no Mi (Chop-Chop Fruit), at its third and highest stage, imposed its nature on the entirety of the space it could reach.
The reach was the entire Holy Land.
The force that came outward from the Domain was not pressure or light or sound — it was category. It reached every person and object within the range of Buggy's third-stage fruit and applied to them a single simple principle: you are now inside my kitchen. Pangaea Castle, the surrounding terraces, the gardens, the harbor district, the elevated walkways where Weevil and Lavi had been standing, the location where Gaara was still watching the ruins with his particular brand of restless attention — all of it, everyone in it, absorbed.
The throne room ceased to exist in the external sense.
Weevil opened his eyes to bones.
Mountains of them — stacked in configurations that suggested accumulation over very long periods of time, mixed species, the geometry of extinction rather than battle. Giants and dwarves and humans and animals and things that didn't fit any of those categories. The ground was covered by a thin cold fog that concealed whatever was below the knee level. The smell was decay's refined end state — not active, not fresh, but settled, the smell of things that had been decomposing for so long they had almost finished.
Lavi was beside him, hammer held in both hands, scanning the environment with the Observation Haki-equivalent focus that Black Order exorcists developed through training.
"What is this." Lavi's voice was level, but level in the way that meant his hands had white knuckles under the grip.
"The Domain." Weevil said it with the heaviness of someone who had seen a smaller version of this and was now applying the scale adjustment. "Lord Buggy's Domain."
He had seen Galdino's version — the White Prison Wax Museum, walls white, cold, physics rewritten to impose wax on the world inside. That Domain could cover several hundred meters. He had been told, in a drinking conversation, that Galdino had learned Domain Expansion from Buggy directly, in under a year. The second student of the art, and already capable of enveloping a significant combat radius.
Buggy was the first. The pioneer. The person who had sat with the Bara Bara no Mi and followed the implications past every boundary anyone else had reached and found, at the end of it, a stage that the fruit had been capable of all along.
Gaara arrived beside them with the cautious movement of someone who had assessed the environment and decided that proximity to people who seemed to understand it was more valuable than distance.
"The Black Order purifies Devil Fruits into Innocence weapons," Weevil continued, looking at the boy. "That's the decision they made — remove the consciousness, compress the power, make it safe. A good decision, probably. But a decision with a ceiling." He looked at the bone mountains. At the fog. At the space that was entirely Buggy's, in which everything that entered was an ingredient in something that hadn't been named yet.
"Lord Buggy will show us what the ceiling looks like when you don't impose one."
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