-Real World-
The audience had a consensus and a disagreement.
The consensus: Buggy the Clown was a king-level power. Not debatable. The Domain had produced a gap in the Red Line that the most conservative measurements placed at over ten kilometers wide, cut with the clean edges that only the Bara Bara no Mi's Liberation stage produced. The Five Elders were gone. The World Government's administrative infrastructure was in partial collapse. Whatever else the Clown King was, he was now the man who had done what no one in written history had done — permanently altered the Red Line.
The disagreement: what had happened to the people inside the Domain.
The theories varied in their s but occupied three basic positions. First: Buggy and Im had destroyed each other in mutual annihilation, as king-level conflicts had a precedent for doing to the surrounding landscape. Second: Buggy had survived and fled — the Joker Pirates included Tobi, whose spatial transit techniques had already been demonstrated in this very confrontation; a prepared exit was plausible. Third, and the most contrarian position: Im had killed Buggy, sustained catastrophic injuries in doing so, and was currently somewhere at the bottom of the sea recovering at the pace of an eight-hundred-year-old immortal entity.
None of these theories could fully convince the others. The Domain's interior had been opaque to external observation, and the aftermath had produced no bodies and no survivors to interview.
What most audiences had not fully processed yet — because the Red Line gap was an immediate sensory shock that occupied attention — was the final image before the Domain closed: Im's true form. A shadow entity of incomprehensible scale, the two red eyes the only identifiable feature, the rest of it an architecture of darkness that had accumulated over eight centuries of hidden existence.
Some people, watching that image, had recognized something.
-Real World-
On Onigashima, Moria had not been sleeping well since the broadcast.
He had already told Kaido everything he knew. All of it — including the incident he had spent years trying to think about as infrequently as possible, because the nights after thinking about it were not good nights.
"The thing Im became in Buggy's Domain." He sat across from Kaido in the cherry blossom pavilion, a cup in one hand, his other hand braced against his knee as if he needed the anchor. "The shadow entity. I've seen that before. Or something that looked like it from a very great distance." He paused. "Perona and I, outside the castle. In the Devil's Triangle. We were fortunate enough to see it once and not attract its attention."
Perona had stepped behind him when he started talking. She had the body language of someone who could hear what was being described and did not want to be visible while hearing it.
"From that distance," Moria continued, "the shadow was approximately fifty thousand meters tall. The eyes—" He stopped. Started again. "Each eye was larger than Thriller Bark. Not comparable. Larger than. We were looking at something that used the sky as a room."
Kaido had been listening with the particular quality of attention he deployed when information required him to revise a mental model he had been operating with. He did not interrupt.
"The legend of the Devil's Triangle has been around for hundreds of years," Moria said. "I always assumed it was something ancient. A creature, maybe. Possibly an entity connected to the sea. I made a career out of not trying to find out exactly what it was." A pause. "The Sky Screen has now told me what it was."
He drained his cup.
"Im has apparently not left the Holy Land very often in centuries. The Devil's Triangle is close enough. On the rare occasions when something that old needed air, that was apparently as far as it went." He set the cup down. "Which raises the question of why it couldn't go farther. Or didn't. Or wouldn't."
Perona pressed a little closer to his back. She had been having nightmares since the first time she saw the shadow in the Devil's Triangle — the finger descending, the Thriller Bark crew disappearing one by one, Moria's strength meaning nothing. The nightmares had come back.
Kaido looked at his wine bowl.
"If my Domain existed," he said, thinking through it in the methodical way he thought through things that had revised his model, "and if the Atomic Separation Shrine pulled me inside it—" He filled the bowl and drank half. "I would be sliced up. At my current level. That is an honest assessment."
He did not say this with distress. He said it the way a craftsman assesses the distance between their current capability and a piece of work they intend to complete eventually.
The Red Line gap had done something to his worldview that he was still in the process of cataloguing. He had always understood, in the abstract, that "the Red Line is unbreakable" was a statement about everyone's capability to date rather than a physical law. But there is a difference between knowing something in the abstract and watching it become false in real time at a scale you can measure in kilometers.
He had been training by jumping from ten thousand meters since before most of his crew were born. He had used this as a benchmark — a point at which the impact was large enough to be meaningful, the survival certain enough to be productive. It was a comfortable challenge, which meant it had stopped being a challenge some time ago.
He put the bowl down.
"I'm going to ram the Red Line," he said.
Doflamingo, sitting nearby, considered this.
"Daily," Kaido continued. "Until it moves. Until I create a gap on my own terms. If the Clown King can open a ten-kilometer hole with a fruit technique, then I am not currently strong enough, and I need to fix that."
The quality of light that came into his eyes when he committed to something had not appeared in some time — not since Kozuki Oden, in a sense that had nothing to do with grief and everything to do with the motivating clarity that an equal opponent provides. Madara. Buggy. Two targets that the Beasts Pirates would have to be capable of reaching. The title of Strongest Creature had always been a ceiling more than a goal, and ceilings became obstacles when you needed to grow past them.
"Starting today," he said.
He stood, picked up his kanabō, channeled with the white Conqueror's Haki that had replaced the ordinary black and walked out of the pavilion.
Behind him, Moria and Doflamingo exchanged a look.
Within the hour, the training regime had been extended to everyone.
Kaido's approach to crew motivation was direct and consistent: his kanabō picked subordinates up out of whatever they were doing and relocated them to whatever he was doing, and this process was not subject to objection. The strongest crew in the world had not become that by staying in comfortable positions.
The two largest members received special attention. Queen, who was the Beasts Pirates' foremost scientific mind and had a physique built more for laboratory work than impact training, found himself in the program by the same mechanism as everyone else. Moria, who had spent years in the physical condition of a man whose crew did most of the physical work, found the first session deeply unpleasant and the sessions that followed somewhat less so and was not permitted to stop.
Perona tried to communicate that she was a guest rather than a crew member. Kaido's kanabō communicated back that this distinction was not currently relevant.
The results over the following weeks were visible. Moria's silhouette began to change — not dramatically, not in the way of someone who had chosen transformation, but in the involuntary way of a body that had been given work to do and was responding to it. The Thriller Bark survivors, the ones who had come with Moria and had not yet found their footing in the Beasts Pirates' hierarchy, found that the shared suffering of the training schedule was a faster integration mechanism than any deliberate socializing would have been.
At the Beasts Pirates, ability was the relevant credential. Nothing else was, in any consistent way. Moria had a grudge against Kaido that predated everything else in his current situation, and he was not ready to let it go permanently — but he was practical enough to recognize that the grudge required capability to act on, and the capability required time, and the training was building toward capability. He filed the grudge in the appropriate place and put his body to the work.
Perona, meanwhile, had found a friend.
Kurozumi Tama
The Beast Disaster — dark lilac hair, purple eyes, a kimono in green, a personality that swung between the practical directness of someone raised in poverty and the easy warmth of someone who had been claimed by the big family of the Beasts Pirates and liked it there — had a natural social ease that Perona's gothic affect did not discourage.
They had started talking because Tama had been curious about Perona's Horo Horo no Mi (Hollow-Hollow Fruit) and Perona had been curious about Tama's Dango Dango no Mi (Dango-Dango Fruit). Within a few days they were sharing a room, which surprised Perona slightly more than it surprised Tama.
The topics were endless. There was something clarifying about talking to someone who had grown up in the Beasts Pirates from childhood — who understood its rhythms and its violence and its particular brand of loyalty without romanticizing any of it. And Tama had never met anyone who had both seen a fifty-thousand-meter shadow entity and developed a successful career aesthetic around gothic negativism, which Perona considered underrepresented.
Moria watched this from a careful distance and felt something that was not quite parental and not quite the expression of relief, but was located in the general neighborhood of both.
His little princess was smiling more.