-Broadcast-
Boarding the Celestial Dragons' ship had not been a decision Bonney made because she wanted to. It had been a decision she made because the alternatives were worse.
As a pirate operating on the open sea, the number of ways a person could be catastrophically killed had grown substantially over the years. Joining the World Government — ally, enduring it, using its shelter while working methodically toward the private goal of getting herself and her father out of its reach — was a form of compromise she had swallowed completely and had stopped tasting. That was what years of compromise did. After a certain point, the flavor disappeared.
She had climbed. Her Celestial Dragon blood, that particular inheritance she despised so completely she had replaced her surname with an X and refused to use it further, was at least useful for the purpose of ascending within an organization that operated by bloodline logic. She was now Deputy Commander of God's Knights — an honorary title, technically, because the actual authority to mobilize the Knights rested entirely with Figarland Garling. What the position gave her was something more practical than mobilization authority: special privileges, jurisdictional latitude, and the legal power to make decisions about ordinary people's lives without accounting for them to anyone.
The other members of God's Knights had similar origins. Most were non-pure-blooded Celestial Dragons who had joined a dangerous organization in exchange for having the right surnames attached to their lives again — surnames that opened doors, that prevented certain kinds of violence from being directed at them, that made them useful to the Celestial Dragons in a way that protected them from the Celestial Dragons. The Twenty Kingdoms' noble families were represented throughout the ranks. The members died for an "honor" none of them had been permitted to examine closely enough to evaluate honestly.
In her private quarters, Bonney sat across from her father and described the battle in detail, as she always did.
Bartholomew Kuma sat in the chair she had arranged for him with the patience of furniture. His face did not change. His eyes did not track her movements. Whatever had once lived behind those eyes — the man who had walked into the most catastrophic deal the World Government had ever extracted from a single person, who had done it fully conscious and fully informed about what he was giving up, who had done it for her — that man was gone. The protocols that replaced him did not include any capacity for recognizing a daughter.
Bonney kept talking. She had long since stopped requiring a response. The monologue was for her own benefit, not his. If she spoke to him as though he were still there, she could maintain, with some effort, the functional fiction that he was.
The pursuit of Issho had ended in Lulucia. She described this without editorializing: the intelligence on his location, the approach, the engagement, her dissatisfaction with the outcome. Every word she used for the Revolutionary Army carried genuine contempt. The organization that had incited the massacre at Sorbet Kingdom, that had gotten the two people who had extended actual kindness to her killed, had earned that contempt by direct action. That Sabo's version of the Revolutionary Army was even more destructive than Dragon's version did not improve her assessment.
The Sky Screen showed the battle in compressed sequence: several frames that communicated the scale of what had happened to Lulucia without lingering on it.
What had been a prosperous kingdom was rubble. The fires had reached the stage where they burned steadily rather than urgently, the kind of burning that indicated everything that could burn had already burned and the remainder was simply consuming itself. The craters were deep — meteorite impacts, or the closest functional equivalent that a gravity-based Devil Fruit awakening produced when deployed without restraint. Most of the structures that remained were structural skeletons. The air carried heat and particulate matter, and the people who had not fled quickly enough had died in the rubble before they could be reached.
In the center of this, two people continued to fight.
Issho stood with his gravity field extended around him in a radius of several hundred meters — an awakened application of the Zushi Zushi no Mi (Press-Press Fruit) that compressed the air in the field to the point where ordinary humans were not simply pinned but flattened, bones and tissue unable to survive the differential between ambient pressure and what the field was generating. His appearance: a scar bisecting his face from forehead to jaw, crossing both blind eyes, the white pupils visible beneath permanently-lowered lids. Short black hair, slightly disordered. A lavender yukata with a black and purple belt. A purple cloak that moved with each adjustment of his stance. He held a cane-sword without apparent urgency, and his face communicated the tiredness of a person who had been trying to conclude a fight for a very long time and had not been able to.
[Sky Screen Character Note: Chief of Staff of the Revolutionary Army — Issho "Heart Sword Smile." User of the Zushi Zushi no Mi (Press-Press Fruit).]
"Bonney. Stop. If this continues, Lulucia will not survive it. There is nothing left to save here except the people still running."
Bonney stood at the center of the field as though the gravity did not apply to her. Her appearance had shifted — the pink hair had turned white, streaming behind her like a banner, and a faint luminescence moved across her skin, the quality of a Nika transformation rather than anything organic. Auspicious clouds drifted at her back. She looked like something that had descended to deliver judgment, not something that had climbed up to give chase.
[Sky Screen Character Note: Jewelry Bonney (Miss Multiverse). Deputy Commander, God's Knights. Her ability allows her to access alternate versions of herself from across the multiverse. By imagining herself as a different person, she draws on the power of her counterpart in that other world. In this battle, she is imagining herself as the successor to the Hito Hito no Mi, Model: Nika (Human-Human Fruit, Mythical Beast — Sun God) from another timeline. This grants her Nika's regenerative ability and combat properties.]
"Too late for that conversation, Issho. I still need to bring you back."
Issho's gravity field was extraordinary. Fully awakened, it could flatten a small fleet. Against Bonney in her current form, it accomplished nothing. The Nika power simply converted the gravitational force into something her body processed as irrelevant — freedom-based physics having a particular resistance to external imposition.
He was aware of this. The problem was that the logical solution — removing the Nika form — required him to kill her faster than her regeneration operated, and he had killed her three times already. She had laughed through all three of them, which was among the more disturbing experiences of his career.
Not theatrical laughter. Not defiant laughter. Just — laughter, the private kind that people produce when something has struck them as genuinely funny, emerging through wounds that should have been final, as her body rebuilt itself and she stood up again with the expression of someone who had won an argument and found it more amusing than satisfying.
Issho could not find the path to victory from where he was standing, and he was experienced enough not to pretend otherwise. His gravity field was the most effective thing he had available, and it was not effective. A swordsman who could not determine how to land a final blow against an opponent who simply did not stay dead was a swordsman who needed a different approach, and he did not have one.
The ruins of Lulucia burned around them. The survivors who were still running kept running. The distance between them and this particular patch of ground was the only thing keeping them alive, and they understood this without being told.