-Broadcast-
The survivors had closed their eyes.
When you have run out of directions to run and the sound of the water is already inside your ears, the body arrives at a quality of stillness. They held each other — pirates and craftsmen and bar staff and the island's indigenous residents, people who had been careful about touching each other before today — and waited for the weight of a hundred-meter wave to make the waiting stop.
The impact they were waiting for did not arrive.
The wave passed. They felt it pass — the pressure change outside the sphere, the vibration that moved through the water of the barrier and registered in their chests as a full-body sound — and then the vibration faded, and the Sabaody Archipelago's remains were still there, and they were still inside the sphere, and outside the transparent wall of Kisame's water prison the ocean currents of the first and second halves of the Grand Line were moving through each other in the direction of the gap, carrying with them species of fish that had never been in this part of the world before.
They let go of their silence.
People who had never spoken to each other in the ordinary course of a day — who had arranged their lives ally to avoid the categories of person they considered beneath or dangerous — were now holding each other's arms and saying things they would have been too careful to say yesterday. Life and death redistributed priorities with an efficiency that social convention couldn't match.
Outside, through the sphere's wall: sea kings investigating the blue barrier with the enormous, patient curiosity of creatures that had never seen anything quite like it. They were close enough that the survivors could see the scale of their eyes. Then something — not heard, exactly, but felt in the water — and the sea kings moved away, giving the sphere a wide birth that they had not needed to be asked to give.
"Is this a Devil Fruit ability?"
"The view is—" Someone stopped. Started again. "The fish in the second half look different."
They did. The colors were different. The species were not catalogued in any book available in the first half, because no one in the first half had seen them before.
The ruins of the Sabaody Archipelago were manageable ruins, which was the most that could be said about them.
More than half of the island cluster was gone — the coastal sections, the facilities and coating operations that had existed at sea level, the areas that the grove trees' roots hadn't been deep enough or strong enough to protect. What remained was perhaps a tenth of the Archipelago's original footprint, sitting in a sea whose current dynamics had permanently changed. The source of income that had made Sabaody Archipelago unique — its position as the only viable transit point for the second half, the only place to coat a ship — had dissolved with the Red Line's gap. You didn't need to dive anymore. You could simply sail through.
What that meant for the island's future was a calculation that would take months to properly run.
The Marine officer who had been stationed here recognized the voice before he recognized anything else. "Admiral Kisame." He said it first to himself, confirming the identification. Then louder, to the survivors around him. "It was Admiral Kisame who saved us. His Water Prison Shark Dance Technique. Only he can produce a barrier at this scale."
The gratitude that moved through the crowd had the quality that gratitude gets when the alternative was very recently visible and concrete. They were still alive. The person who had made the decision to hold the barrier rather than retreat was somewhere above them, standing on the water.
They could not repay this. Most of them would not meet Kisame again in their lives. They would tell the story instead — the fish-man Admiral who stood on the ocean surface above the ruins and held the water back.
Kisame felt the tsunami weakening.
He was still on top of the sphere, one foot on the curved surface, monitoring the Haki thread that ran through the Water Prison and reported its structural integrity back to him. The wave from the second half had spent most of itself against the sphere and the debris field of what the Sabaody Archipelago had been. What remained of it was traveling on — through the first half's sea lanes, toward whatever was next in its path.
He tracked it mentally. Marine Headquarters was occupied by Nakime's Infinity Castle, which had swallowed the city of Rome and was currently sitting on top of what had been the HQ's location. The Castle's structure had turned out to be an inadvertent seawall — the tsunami reached it, expended itself against the Castle's exterior architecture, and continued past in a diminished form. Rome, for once, had benefited from being inside an extradimensional prison.
The Devil's Triangle: nobody home. Moria had been absent from Thriller Bark for some time, the ship was gone, and the Marine's intelligence on his whereabouts was characterized by its complete absence of intelligence.
Enies Lobby. The government agents stationed there had the physical capabilities to carry people. A smaller wave by that point — manageable, though the buildings would not manage it as well as the people inside did. The reconstruction estimate was several months.
Beyond that, the wave's energy would be too diffuse to produce catastrophe-level damage. Large residential islands would see elevated tide lines and nothing more consequential. Anyone at sea on a small vessel in the wrong position at the wrong time would have a bad experience, but that was an ordinary risk for anyone who had chosen to be at sea on a small vessel.
"The rest of you — maintain order." He addressed the Marine survivors in the sphere without descending. "The Water Prison holds as long as I'm present. Organize the supplies. Identify the survivors by group. Keep secondary casualties to zero." He paused, looking at the people visible through the sphere wall — the mixed categories of person that a place like Sabaody Archipelago always accumulated, all temporarily reduced to the same relevant category: alive. "I'm going to the gap."
He swam upstream.
The current flowing from the second half through the Red Line's breach was continuous — the pressure differential between the two ocean bodies had not fully equalized, and would not for some time. He moved against it without difficulty, shark physiology built for exactly this kind of sustained effort in exactly this kind of water, Samehada strapped across his back and not currently needed.
The closer he got, the more wrong the scale felt.
From a distance, the gap in the Red Line had registered as large. From close enough to see the detail of the cut surface, it registered as a different category of large entirely. The Red Line rose over ten thousand meters above sea level, but the waterline gave only the visible portion — the actual thickness of the red stone geological formation from one face to the other was something no surveyor had ever officially measured, because surveyors had never been given access to measure it. Tens of kilometers, at minimum. Possibly more.
Whatever had cut this had cut it cleanly. The edges were smooth in the way that only Buggy's Liberation stage produced smooth edges — not the ragged mouth of an explosive breach, not the fracture patterns of something that had been struck repeatedly until it failed, but the clean separation of something that had been divided from itself all at once, at the substrate level, by a force that did not distinguish between important rock and unimportant rock.
Kisame extended his Observation Haki in every direction. Land, sea surface, the water column below him, the edges of the gap itself. He held the scan for a full minute, covering everything within range.
No life signatures. None. The entire area around the gap — the surface of the water, the exposed stone, anything that might have survived the Domain's last expression before the breach — was empty.
He looked at the smooth edges of the Red Line's cross-section. At the gap that now connected the Grand Line's two halves directly. At the absence of any indication that the people who had caused this were still in a condition to be found.
Did they die together? The question did not have an available answer. The Domain had been Buggy's — its interior had operated by Buggy's rules, which meant that whatever had happened to Im, to the Five Elders, to Miranda Lotto inside her time-stopped shell, had happened under conditions that the outside world had no records of. Only participants knew, and participants were not presenting themselves.
He held this uncertainty for a moment. Then he angled his body toward the gap.
The current pulled him forward, through the breach, past the smooth red stone walls on either side, and into the second half of the Grand Line.
He came up on the far side and surfaced.
The sky on the second half looked the same as the sky on the first half. The water was darker. The weather on the horizon was different — the second half's atmosphere had never moderated itself for ease of navigation, and the cloud formations visible from this side of the gap had the character of things that expected to be taken seriously.
He floated on the surface and looked back at the gap — at the first half's sky visible through it, at the red stone walls on either side framing the opening.
The Grand Line was no longer divided.
He needed to find out what had survived on this side, and whether anything that was still surviving needed to know about it.
He kept swimming.