-Broadcast-
Golden lightning threaded through the sky above Marine Headquarters like a living serpent, splitting the dark clouds in great, sweeping arcs. Between heaven and earth, a single figure stood without flinching — the Fleet Admiral, surrounded by the men and women of the Marine, exuding an authority that made the air itself feel heavier.
Slowly, the lightning condensed. It drew together beside Artoria Pendragon, coiling and contracting until it took the shape of a holy spear wreathed in sacred light.
The lance glowed with a deep, resonant gold — not the sharp brightness of ordinary flame, but the warm, immovable radiance of something ancient and absolute. Artoria raised her right hand and closed her fingers around it. The moment she made contact, the spear answered with a low, bone-deep hum, as though it recognized the hand that had wielded it across a thousand years.
"It is the anchor of justice that tears apart the sky and connects the earth..."
She lowered the tip of the lance toward the ground and whispered the words that unlocked it. The glow intensified — not gradually, but suddenly, flooding the world with light. A surge of power rolled outward from the spear like a pressure wave.
The ground beneath her feet dissolved into golden ripples that spread in every direction. The lance left her hand and drove its power downward into the earth, descending until the weapon itself vanished into the spreading tide of light.
"With my will, I shall interpret the justice of the Marine — and let it shine at the end."
"All is returned to nothingness — Rhongomyniad."
The Fleet Admiral stood bathed in sunlight, her silhouette somehow taller for having released the weapon. She had let go of the lance, and yet no one could look away from her. The cloak of justice hung from her shoulders like a banner; the light and her presence were indistinguishable from each other.
The admirals and senior officers around her had never seen this technique before. None of them knew what it would do.
Some of the sharper marines had already tilted their eyes skyward. Above the Infinity Castle — now heaving up and down by dozens of meters as Nakime fought to separate it from Rome — the clouds had begun to crack.
The crack was not metaphor. It was fact. Ten thousand meters above the earth, a colossal golden spear tip descended through the cloud layer at a pace that felt almost ceremonial. It was as if the divine had decided there was no need to hurry. Nothing could stop it.
"Look — the sky. There's a crack in it."
"Something's falling. Something enormous."
"...It looks like the tip of a spear."
Strange lights began flashing around the descending lance head, braiding together into a vast energy field. Lightning moved through it; the atmosphere shuddered; winds screamed across the upper sky as though the weather itself was recoiling. To the people inside the Infinity Castle who looked up and saw it, there was only one word: doomsday.
Douglas Bullet stared up at the golden pillar of descending light and felt his mouth go dry.
He had fought against powers that shook islands, against men who could split the earth and stop tsunamis with their bare hands. None of it had felt like this. The closer the lance descended, the more viscerally he felt its scale — not just its size, but the terrible, patient weight of the energy coiled inside it.
Is this really the power a Fleet Admiral can carry?
The attack radius of the spear tip alone was enough to swallow the Infinity Castle entirely. Everyone inside was going to burn.
Galdino wiped the sweat from his forehead with the back of his hand. He had not felt anything like this in a long time. The last time energy fluctuations of this magnitude had washed over him, he had been standing in the presence of Lord Buggy at full power — in his complete form.
A bitter smile tugged at the corner of his mouth.
Lord Buggy is gone. We can only rely on ourselves now. And now is not the time to give up.
He looked at the golden lance tip descending through the clouds and made his decision.
Galdino's figure became a streak of white light. He was the first to charge upward toward the falling spear.
The closer you got, the worse it felt — not just dangerous, but sacred in a way that had nothing to do with the Marine. This thing did not belong to the sea or the earth or any of the forces that pirates and marines fought over. It belonged somewhere else entirely.
Can an ant fight a god?
I think I can try.
Galdino did not yield to it. He met it. He activated his Devil Fruit ability to its fullest extent and erected his domain around the descending weapon, hoping that the unique physics of his wax-domain could at least slow its fall.
The Domain Expansion Wax Museum — materialized in the sky. The pocket dimension it generated was indeed remarkable: a mature domain at the second-highest tier in the Joker Pirates, capable of overriding Logia intangibility, of converting the world around it to wax given enough time. In the sky above Rome, it held against the descending Rhongomyniad for a handful of seconds.
Then the holy lance pierced through it.
The domain shattered. The pocket dimension crumbled. And Galdino's blood painted the sky in a wide, crimson arc.
Behind him, the Joker Pirates officers moved to take his place, one after another — because there was nothing else to do, and because none of them were the kind of people who stood still and waited to die.
Bullet struck next. Then Black Sperm. Then Kokushibo.
It made no difference.
Against the judgment of a king, those below the king's level are ants. That any of them had survived long enough to try was already a miracle. Each blow they landed against the descending lance was absorbed without even slowing it. Each one fell.
The spear of shining end struck the depths of the Infinity Castle like a falling star.
The impact erupted without warning — golden light surging outward like a tide, swallowing the Castle's alien architecture whole. Buildings collapsed inside the alternate dimensions. Streets that had existed in folded space became rubble. The screams of the Joker Pirates' remaining crew were swallowed entirely by the roar of the detonation.
In the face of that force, nothing was significant. No structure, no life, no power that had been gathered inside those walls. In the span of moments, the Infinity Castle was gone — not defeated, not driven back, but erased. As though it had never existed above Rome at all.
Minutes later, when the golden light finally faded, the sky above the fortress was clear.
No Castle. No fog. Not even a stray cloud where there should not have been one.
The sun shone unobstructed on Rome, and the great fortress — which was already on its way to becoming legend — looked more majestic than it ever had, bathed in that clean, open light.
Artoria Pendragon stood at the center of it.
She wore the cloak of justice over her Marine uniform. She had released the Rhongomyniad; her hands were empty. And yet the marines nearest to her found, without meaning to, that they had lowered their eyes. Not from fear, exactly. From something older and less nameable — the involuntary recognition that certain people are simply larger than the space they occupy.
The air around her felt still.
Her will was law. Her presence was gravity.
The sun fell on her and made her look like the answer to a question no one had thought to ask.