-Broadcast-
News from the Red Line reached Onigashima in less than half a day.
Kaido stood on the coast, facing the direction of where Mary Geoise had been, and waited in silence for his cadres to return. The sea stretched empty in that direction now. No holy land. No towering Red Line peak trailing clouds above it. Just a gap in the world where something enormous used to be.
The first to return was Meruem.
He had lost both arms and a section of his tail. That he had made it back at all from a fight against a fellow countryman — a soldier of his own evolutionary origin, no less — was something between fortune and stubbornness. Kaido looked him over without comment.
The trip had not been entirely without result. Meruem had spent every gram of strength he could concentrate into his jaw and teeth, and at the end of it he had a piece of dead skin roughly the size of a fingernail bitten from Homelander's arm. He treated it like a relic.
After the Insect Disaster entered the Infinity Castle, Nakime's spatial arrangements had placed him opposite Homelander — deliberately, it seemed, without giving him any choice in the matter. He had gained little intelligence as a result. Kaido did not blame him for it. Fighting on someone else's ground, at someone else's discretion, meant you had already given up the first advantage before the first blow was thrown.
"Take that tissue sample to Queen," Kaido said. "Homelander's biology has Vegapunk's fingerprints on it. There may be something worth reverse-engineering."
"It seems this trip did not go well for you either."
Kaido's gaze drifted upward. Far in the distance, a black shape was growing steadily larger against the sky — and then the full silhouette of Dark WarGreymon resolved itself from the haze.
The Ultimate-form Digimon had always been a terrifying presence: a hundred-meter titan of black alloy, engineered for war at a scale that dwarfed ordinary combat. Now countless hairline cracks ran across its entire body, the kind of fractures that spread inward through something made to never break. Dark gas leaked from the fissures in thin, drifting columns, and each time it did, the creature's movements slowed by another fraction.
It was willpower keeping it airborne. Nothing else.
Dark WarGreymon descended to the coast and opened its massive palm. Kurozumi Tama lay curled in the hollow — unharmed, dressed in a close-fitting kimono that must have been worth more than most villages, sleeping with the stillness of someone who had simply run out of strength to stay awake. She looked far younger like this. Like what she actually was.
The black titan reached the edge of what it could sustain. It turned its fractured face toward Kaido, and when it spoke, the voice that came out was lower than it had been before — ground-down, like a bell that had been struck too many times.
"Please tell Lady Tama... it will be some time before I can come find her again."
Kaido met the request without hesitation. "Go in peace. No one on Onigashima will touch her."
Something shifted in Dark WarGreymon's expression — a release of tension that even cold metal could apparently hold. After years of fighting for Kurozumi Tama, the promise was enough. Its body began to come apart from the edges inward, the black alloy dissolving into flakes that scattered and faded before they reached the ground, until there was nothing left of it at all.
Tama was woken by the sea breeze off the coast. She rubbed her eyes, pushed herself upright, and looked around — and found Kaido standing over her with a plush coat in his hands.
Dark WarGreymon was already gone.
Kaido said nothing about it. He draped the coat over her shoulders himself, an unusual piece of quiet care from a man not known for it, and said only: "Your Kuro has gone back. He'll find time to come see you again."
"Really?" A tear slid down the corner of Tama's eye before she registered it — a reflex, not a decision. She blinked it away. She chose to believe what the captain said. But the emptiness of not seeing Kuro for so long was its own weight, and believing didn't quite fill it.
Rather than take up more of the captain's time, she gave him a summary of what had happened inside the Infinity Castle.
The opponent she had drawn was her standing enemy: Admiral Aramaki. When the two of them met, there was nothing to negotiate. Aramaki took one look at Dark WarGreymon and started fighting with everything he had, and that was the end of any pretense at a tactical approach. The war between them was savage. Aramaki lost everything below the chest. Dark WarGreymon came back wearing cracks across every surface of its body. Neither side walked away with anything they could call a victory.
The choice to leave before the end had been Kuro's. It recognized the danger faster than she could and extracted them both while there was still time to extract. When the divine spear fell from the sky and the Infinity Castle vanished, the two of them had already made it far enough out to watch from a distance.
Tama described the Rhongomyniad the way she had experienced it: not as an attack but as an ending — a point of light from above that simply decided the city was no longer there. Kuro had admitted, directly and without embarrassment, that it could not have withstood that technique. Whatever level the Marine's Fleet Admiral was operating at, it was somewhere that Kuro could not reach.
Kaido was quiet for a long time after that.
He turned Artoria Pendragon's face over in his mind. He had formed an estimate of the new Marine leadership from the outside — from reports, from what the Sky Screen had shown, from the logic of her achievements. The first-hand accounts his cadres were bringing back now were systematically dismantling that estimate and building a larger one in its place.
"Everyone below the king is an ant," he said, not quite to Tama. Then: "Buggy... you won't die that easily, will you?"
He had been thinking about the Joker. Buggy the Clown had traded his headquarters to test the real strength of the new Marine Admiral — and in doing so had done the rest of the world's power-holders a service they hadn't asked for and couldn't repay. That was the kind of calculation that looked like stubbornness from the outside, but Kaido recognized it for what it was.
The question that remained: had anyone inside the Infinity Castle survived what followed?
Kaido had coveted the Joker Pirates' talent pool for years. To see those cadres burned away on a battlefield they should never have needed to stand on was a particular kind of waste that sat badly with him, even if he would not have said so.
That evening, by Kaido's order, Onigashima held a celebration for the two returning cadres. A new round of drinking started before the sun finished setting. Music, noise, the usual organized chaos — the soldiers and officers of the Beasts Pirates knew how to mark a homecoming, even a costly one.
The atmosphere in the Shogun's Mansion in neighboring Wano Country was the precise opposite.
Kurozumi Orochi had driven all the women out of his chambers, leaving only Kimimaro — who stood motionless against the wall in the manner of someone used to being furniture when the room required it — and proceeded to vent everything he was feeling on the furniture itself. He had already killed two women earlier that day. The only thing that had stopped him from continuing was the small purple-clad courtesan who had put herself in the way.
Orochi was a psychopath of the particular variety that had learned to dress itself in titles and ceremony. He destroyed everything within reach, then stood in the ruins and felt the familiar hollow weight of knowing that none of it helped. He did not know how much longer he could live in a place he had spent half his life stealing by increment.
"That damned Garou played both sides and thought I wouldn't find out." He paced through the wreckage of a side table. "The moment I see him again, I will cut him into pieces. He failed the mission and had the nerve to take my money while he was at it." The bounty hunter's attempted double-dealing had been exposed. Garou would not be returning to Wano Country.
While Orochi was still mid-complaint, the air behind him began to warp.
Space folded inward at a precise point — not violently, but with the deliberate certainty of someone who had moved through space this way for long enough that it no longer required effort. Kimimaro registered the energy signature and without a word excused himself from the room, closing the door behind him with care.
The man who stepped through wore red armor over black, his long hair unbound, bloodshot eyes open and alert. He carried the folding fan that served as his weapon the same way ordinary men carry walking canes — present, habitual, never absent.
Uchiha Madara had come to Wano Country.
Orochi stopped complaining. In the presence of an ally he could not afford to antagonize and did not have the power to threaten, his temper found its limits with unusual speed.