-Real World-
What had once been the Thriller Bark's domain was unrecognizable.
The artillery barrage had done what artillery barrages are designed to do: transform the familiar into rubble. Gothic towers that had loomed for decades like architectural nightmares—ornate, decaying, magnificently morbid—were reduced to broken teeth jutting from smoking earth. Walls that had stood through storms and time lay collapsed across each other in tangled heaps. Every structure that had defined the island's grotesque skyline was gone, replaced by a uniform landscape of craters, ash, and slow-burning wreckage.
Even the cemeteries hadn't been spared. The Marine cannons observed no distinctions between the living and the resting dead. Tombstones that had marked graves for decades were scattered like playing cards, their inscriptions obliterated. The graves themselves had been filled and refilled by concussive impacts, their neat rows churned into chaos. For the creatures who had called these plots home—the zombies, the Thriller Bark's unusual residents—the destruction had been catastrophic. Of the hundreds that had lurched through these corridors, only a scattered few had any hope of surviving the first salvo.
Below the surface, in the branching network of secret passages that Moria had spent years excavating beneath his ship, the survivors pressed together in the dark and tried to breathe through the dust.
Gecko Moria coughed, a deep rattling sound that shook his enormous frame. The smoke had found its way even underground, threading through the cracks left by impact tremors and turning the air thick with the smell of burning stone and metal.
"Damn Celestial Dragons," he snarled, pressing his sleeve against his mouth. His voice contained the particular quality of a man narrating his own catastrophe in real time. "My ship. My home. Years of work. Turned to rubble because those bastards in Mary Geoise decided to start a war."
If not for his quick reflexes—and admittedly, the reflexes of a captain who'd survived long enough to develop extremely good instincts about when disaster was incoming—they'd all be dead. He'd spotted the artillery formation forming and screamed everyone into the secret passages before the first shells landed.
They were alive. Technically.
The weakest among them had suffered concussions from the ground shock alone, the vibration transmitting through bedrock and hull alike even down here. Two crew members sat against the walls with glazed eyes, held upright by their neighbors.
Perona had her face buried in Moria's chest.
Her arms were locked around his thick neck with a grip that could have challenged a sea monster. She was trembling—not the theatrical trembling she affected when performing her Hollow techniques, but genuine, uncontrolled shaking from someone who had never once in their sheltered life encountered anything at this scale.
"Boss," she managed, her voice muffled against his shirt. "Are we going to die here? I'm not an adult yet!"
Tears ran freely down her face. The girl had grown up under Moria's protection, had developed considerable power of her own, had learned to project fear into others as a professional skill. None of that training had prepared her for the experience of lying underground while an Admiral-level bombardment reduced everything above her to ash.
"Perona—" Moria started.
"Perona." Absalom's voice came from somewhere to the left. His tone was the grave, measured cadence of a man providing comfort. "Consider this. We will all die eventually. One day, at some point. The timing is simply a variable." A pause. "There is something almost beautiful about the idea of us dying together, don't you think? Partners to the last. Perhaps in the next life—"
Perona's crying escalated significantly.
Moria shot Absalom a look that communicated clearly that he should close his mouth and keep it closed. Hogback, sitting nearby with a surgical compress pressed to a bleeding cut on his forehead, reached over and knocked Absalom sharply on the skull.
"Not helping," the doctor said flatly.
Absalom subsided.
The secret passages, at least, were holding. Moria had dug this network over years, partly from paranoia and partly from the instinct of someone who understood that Gothic ghost ships operating in the Grand Line tended to attract unwanted attention. The Marine bombardment had been thorough, but thorough wasn't the same as infinite. Under cover of smoke and debris, the Thriller Bark's remaining crew might be able to slip away before the soldiers came in to mop up.
And the soldiers would come. Artillery was the announcement. The real work happened after.
Let Kaido deal with what comes next, Moria thought, without a trace of guilt. He had no loyalty to the King of Beasts, no stake in whatever ideological battle was being fought above ground between Emperors and Admirals and Celestial Dragons. Kaido had commandeered his ship, disrupted his operation, and now his presence had painted a target on everything Moria had built.
He could fight for himself in that hellscape. Moria was going to get his people out.
One regret nagged at him despite himself. His zombie army—hundreds of animated warriors, the product of years of body collection and shadow manipulation—had been above ground when the artillery hit. That force, weakened as it was, would have been something in this chaos. Not against Admirals, but against the mid-tier soldiers flooding in afterward, it might have provided enough distraction to improve their escape odds by a meaningful margin.
He filed the thought under lessons for next time and focused on the passage ahead.
Above ground, the battle's formal opening act began.
Sakazuki was the one who moved first. He always was.
His Geppō (Moon Step) carried him through the smoke and debris in long aerial strides, descending toward the island's scarred surface with the unhurried pace of a man who had never once considered that the thing waiting for him might not yield. The air around him shimmered with volcanic heat. Each step left a brief print of scorched atmosphere before dissipating.
The flagship's signal flare went up behind him—the general advance, formal and deliberate, committing the entire force to the assault.
The other two Admirals followed his descent. The Shichibukai who'd agreed to participate fanned out across entry vectors, their Observation Haki unfurling like nets cast into dark water, searching for threats before they materialized.
What they found, standing in the ruins at the island's center, was Kaido waiting for them.
He'd allowed himself to be awakened from his drink. That was notable in itself—an Emperor willing to be roused by artillery fire rather than treating it as background noise suggested he'd at least respected the scale of the force arrayed against him. His hybrid form was already active: the Uo Uo no Mi, Model: Seiryū (Fish-Fish Fruit, Azure Dragon) expressed in the towering dragon-man configuration that made him roughly three times the height of a large man. Scales covered every visible surface, each one catching the smoke-diffused light with a cold metallic gleam. His eyes had taken on the depthless quality of something geological, ancient, patient.
His kanabō, Hassaikai, rested across his shoulder.
The Conqueror's Haki was already moving. Not as a sudden burst or dramatic declaration—it was seeping out of him the way lava seeps from a fissure, a constant slow release that had been building since the first shells hit his island. Red-black lightning crept across the rubble around his feet, crawling outward in jagged lines, and every Marine who had descended too close without sufficient strength found their legs going soft without understanding why.
"Sakazuki," Kaido said. His voice had the particular resonance of someone who'd been drinking excellent sake and was now mildly annoyed to be doing something else. "Zephyr's student, if I remember correctly. I've been told you're competent." His gaze moved to the other two approaching figures. "Don't waste anyone's time with preliminaries. All three of you, together. From the start."
He wasn't showing off. He was being efficient.
Sakazuki didn't respond with words. He never wasted them when actions were available.
"Ryūsei Kazan!" (Meteor Volcano)
The sky tore open.
Dozens of magma fists erupted from the clouds Sakazuki had seeded in the upper atmosphere—each one the size of a warship, trailing fire as they descended in overlapping arcs. The attack covered the entire island's surface area, every point of cover and open ground receiving equal treatment. Each impact detonated with enough force to shatter bedrock.
The smell of sulfur became total. The temperature around the impact zone spiked to levels that turned the air itself into a hazard for anything with lungs.
Kaido stood in the middle of it and didn't move.
Not because he couldn't—because he was calculating, assessing, feeling the weight of what had arrived. When the last lava fist cratered into the earth around him and the smoke began to clear, he was there, scales faintly lit from residual heat, entirely unmarked.
"Interesting," was all he said.
Borsalino's Observation Haki registered everything: Kaido standing in the center of what should have been a killing field, the magma cooling around him like an ornamental border, his body temperature unchanged by thousands of degrees of heat pouring directly onto his scales. The Admiral processed this without allowing his expression to flicker.
"No Armament Haki hardening," Borsalino noted, his voice retaining its habitual mild surprise, as though he were observing a curious weather pattern. "That's just... his skin."
The implication settled over everyone in range of his words.
Sakazuki had already stepped forward, closing distance on Geppō. His expression was what it always was—carved from the same volcanic material he commanded.
"There is no absolute defense," he said, not loudly but with the complete conviction of a man stating physical law. "Even the Four Emperors have limits. We find them."
The other two Admirals moved simultaneously, bracketing Kaido from different angles. The Shichibukai held positions further back, weapons ready, Observation Haki pushed to maximum range.
"Yata no Kagami!" — a searing arc of Borsalino's light. "Absolute Zero!" — a wave of ice reaching for Kaido from Kuzan's direction.
Three attributes, three simultaneous vectors, designed to force even something like Kaido into a defensive position where he couldn't answer all three at once.
Kaido's expression didn't change.
He swung Hassaikai in a single horizontal arc.
The kanabō moved through the air faster than something that massive should have been able to move. The energy it displaced wasn't just physical force—it carried the full weight of his Conqueror's Haki, the red-black lightning condensed into the weapon's path and released in a surging violet torrent that stretched from one end of the impact zone to the other.
The torrent met all three Admiral-level attacks simultaneously and didn't slow down.
Light, ice, fire—each was absorbed into the energy column for half a second before being overridden, stripped of coherence, and scattered into nothing. What remained continued forward, a wall of compressed Conqueror's will that hit the Marine formation at the edge of the field and went through two warships before its energy dispersed.
The sound reached the distant fleet a full second later.
In the ringing silence that followed, nobody moved.
The three Admirals had cleared the attack's path through movement rather than blocking—Sakazuki dropping, Borsalino flickering in light, Kuzan walling off with ice that was then shattered but at least redirected. All three had survived by margins calculated in fractions of seconds.
But the strike hadn't been aimed at them specifically. It had been a sweep. Coverage fire from someone who didn't need to aim because their power was sufficient to saturate the entire relevant space.
Cold sweat was a difficult condition to hide.
"Hm," Borsalino said, after a moment. "He's strong."
Nobody disagreed with this assessment.
The critical problem had now arrived, written plainly in the debris field around them: Kaido had both offensive and defensive capabilities operating at ranges and scales that made standard combat approaches inefficient. Someone needed to get close, absorb hits, and create windows for the others to work. That was the only tactical route available.
But the mace had just demonstrated what "taking hits" from Kaido meant. The ships it had clipped on its passage were sinking.
Who goes first?
The question hung in the air above the island like smoke.
Sakazuki looked at his two colleagues. They looked back. No one spoke, but the calculation was happening behind all their eyes at the same moment—an unspoken, mutual acknowledgment that what was being asked wasn't just courage. It was willingness to absorb damage that no human being should survive, from something that treated Admirals as appropriate sparring partners.
Kaido shifted Hassaikai back to his shoulder. He seemed genuinely curious about what they'd decide.
"Well?" he said. And almost—almost—smiled.
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