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Kisame had not set foot on the Holy Land.
That decision — made on instinct, the calculation of a fish-man Admiral who understood that Buggy's operation required him alive more than it required him present — had turned out to be the difference between existing and not existing. The Domain's expansion had a clear boundary at the Red Line's edge, and he was on the water side of it, standing on the surface of the sea with his feet on the waves, watching.
The Domain had a visible perimeter. He could see it — the edge of Buggy's kitchen, where the cutting simply stopped because the Domain had found its limit, or because its occupant had decided this was far enough. Small fish had been swimming the wrong direction and entering the perimeter without understanding what a perimeter was. They did not come back out. He watched this happen several times and adjusted his distance accordingly.
He had not remained a Marine Admiral this long by treating visible threat indicators as suggestions.
Then Mary Geoise was gone.
Not collapsed. Not destroyed in the conventional sense of large things failing — which involved rubble and sound and progressive structural surrender. One moment the Red Line rose above him at its usual altitude, the ancient red stone climbing past the clouds, the Holy Land occupying its customary position at the summit. The next moment there was a hole.
A hole. In the Red Line. Where the Holy Land had been.
Kisame stood on the water and looked at it for a long moment.
"How," he said, very quietly, to no one.
The hole was smooth-edged. The cutting principle that had operated inside Buggy's Domain had not stopped at the Domain's boundary when it reached its final expression — it had continued, briefly, into the substance of the Red Line itself, and the Red Line had been subject to the same rules as everything else inside the Domain's range. Eight hundred years of the world's most important geological feature, the physical barrier that divided the Grand Line into two halves, the structure that had made Fishman Island the only viable transit point between them — gone, in the same moment that everything else in the Holy Land had been processed.
The first half and the second half of the Grand Line were now looking at each other through a gap.
He could see the second half. He could see its horizon, its quality of light, the different character of its sea surface. The Calm Belt's former position on the far side was visible from where he stood.
He could also see the tsunami forming.
When two ocean bodies at slightly different pressures and current dynamics are suddenly connected through a hole in the wall between them, the water moves. It moves toward equilibrium. The equilibrium it seeks first takes the shape of a wave, and the wave it was taking the shape of was approximately a hundred meters tall and accelerating through the gap in the direction of the first half of the Grand Line.
Kisame began calculating the distance to Sabaody Archipelago.
The Sabaody Archipelago had been watching the sky.
From the ground, from rooftops, from the windows of bars and coating shops and the entertainment facilities that existed here for the population of people who were spending large amounts of money in the gap between the first half of the Grand Line and the second — everyone who had a view of the north had been watching Mary Geoise burn since the Domain expanded to cover it. The battle had been somewhere between a spectacle and a catastrophe, depending on how close your professional interests were to the World Government's continued operation.
Then the sky where Mary Geoise had been became empty.
The civilians registered this — "the holy land of the Celestial Dragons has disappeared" — with the inadequacy of language encountering events it was not built to describe. Most of them were still in the middle of understanding the first fact when the second fact arrived: the second half of the Grand Line was now visible through the gap where the Red Line had stood.
"I can see the back half of the ocean. Is this a dream?"
"Something is coming through the hole."
The tsunami covered the distance faster than the sentence could be completed.
It was not a natural wave — not the kind produced by weather or underwater geological event, which builds gradually and allows preparation. This was two ocean bodies resolving their pressure difference at speed. The front edge of it hit the Sabaody Archipelago's shoreline facilities before most people on the island had finished processing that it existed.
The grove trees that maintained the Archipelago's structure had roots deep enough to have survived centuries of ordinary sea conditions. The tsunami was not an ordinary sea condition. The roots held for a moment and then the moment ended, and sections of the Sabaody Archipelago that had existed since the island's formation were simply gone.
At Shakky's Rip-off Bar, the proprietress was still.
She held the skull against her chest. The bar around her — the one she had run for decades, the one that had hosted a particular quality of customer that normal establishments in the first half of the Grand Line didn't see, the one that Silver Rayleigh had walked into and stayed — was already empty. She had not left.
Her eyes had a quality that people's eyes get when they have stopped negotiating with a situation and have arrived, quietly, at an acceptance.
"Buggy." She said it to the skull, and then to the gap in the sky where the Holy Land had been, and then simply said it once more because it needed saying a third time. "Is this what you wanted?" A pause. "Thank you for bringing Rayleigh back. However you managed it, whatever it cost — thank you."
She stroked the bone of the skull with two fingers. The bar was very quiet around her.
If she had not met the Dark King — if she had stayed in the Kuja Kingdom, kept her position, remained a free empress rather than following a man who laughed too much and asked too little — her life would have been longer, probably, and quieter certainly, and less hers.
She closed her eyes.
The tsunami found the bar.
Half of the Archipelago went in the first impact. The other half went in the aftermath as the water distributed itself across everything the first wave had not reached. The facilities, the coating shops, the bars, the entertainment infrastructure that existed here for the purpose of equipping pirates for the second half of the Grand Line — all of it, caught between a force that did not distinguish between important structures and unimportant ones.
The survivors — some of them — had made it to higher ground on the Archipelago's remaining elevated islands. A few had launched boats and were riding the wave's edge rather than facing its wall. The Marine personnel stationed here had tried to organize an evacuation with the personnel and time available, which was not much of either.
Most people in the water were waiting for the second wave.
Then the voice came from above — a fish-man's shout, carrying the particular authority of water-style ninjutsu expanding at full expression — and a blue barrier rose from the sea surface around the largest surviving cluster of survivors, rising and curving inward until it completed the enclosure. A sphere of contained water, transparent enough to see through, large enough to encompass the island section with its people still on it.
The Water Prison Shark Dance Technique at full scale: not the prison-sized version but the version that a fish-man Admiral used when he was not worrying about conserving chakra, facing a catastrophe rather than a target.
The tsunami hit the sphere and spread across its surface in concentric rings of pressure, each one fading as the curve redirected the force along tangent lines rather than through the center. The sphere held. The people inside it could feel the impact as a vibration rather than a wall, which was the relevant difference between experiencing a tsunami and surviving one.
Through the transparent water of the sphere's wall, they could see the second half of the Grand Line's sea flowing past in both directions as the pressures equalized — schools of fish that had never been in the first half of the Grand Line, sea kings following the current through the gap, the deep-water species that lived in the second half's water columns arriving in the first half's shallower conditions for the first time in history.
The Grand Line was no longer divided.
Above the sphere, on the surface of the water, Admiral Kisame stood on the waves, maintaining the technique, watching the schools of fish move through the gap where the Red Line had been, and thinking about Fishman Island.
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