-Broadcast-
There was no version of events in which Bonney and the Revolutionary Army found their way back from what had already happened between them. Even if Bartholomew Kuma somehow recovered his consciousness and his voice and used both to tell his daughter to stop — which was the kind of impossible scenario you could construct in your head but not expect — she would agree pleasantly and then continue. The woman standing across from Issho in the ruins of Lulucia was not someone whose behavior was accessible to persuasion on this subject. The Revolutionary Army had become a category of thing she wanted removed from the world, and that position was not negotiable.
"You've been at it for a long time, blind man. Are you tired already? I was just getting started."
In her Nika form, Bonney smiled with the warmth of someone who found the conversation delightful. Underneath that warmth, just barely detectable, was something that had nothing to do with warmth at all. Human life was quantitative to her in this state. If the complete destruction of every person on the planet could purchase her father's sanity, she would accept that exchange without a moment of hesitation and without any residual discomfort afterward.
The footsteps she took were heavy with an energy that the earth seemed to recognize. White waves propagated outward from each step, spreading across the ruined ground in a rolling motion that resembled a herd of white horses breaking into full gallop — rapid, overwhelming, utterly indifferent to the things in their path. The waves submerged the surrounding terrain in seconds, and whatever was caught in them felt the pull of something that did not permit refusal, drawn inward and held there, unable to fight free of the circular current.
Issho lost his footing for a moment. His body rose and fell with the wave's rhythm, which was not an experience he had encountered in combat before.
This was the third form she had shifted into. The first two had expressed different ability sets entirely. This one was different. The white luminescence, the physics of the thing, the quality of the force it generated — it was a near-perfect match for what the Revolutionary Army's intelligence files described of Kaido's Nika manifestation. The resemblance was not coincidental, and Issho was experienced enough not to treat coincidences as coincidences.
The legend of Nika had been propagating loudly through newspaper channels for the past five years. The Beasts Pirates had engaged Morgans directly and conducted a sustained image campaign portraying Kaido as a liberation figure in the tradition of the sun god — a pirate organization that had committed documented atrocities, presented by the world's most widely-read information network as freedom-seeking saints. The Revolutionary Army had only avoided being misled by this because their intelligence division had separate documentation of Queen's human experimentation programs. Anyone relying solely on Morgans for information had been thoroughly misinformed. The World Government and the Marine had been trying to address the problem of Morgans for years without identifying a mechanism that worked. The newspaper branches they'd shut down had not appreciably reduced his reach.
"Another Nika." Issho drove his sword into the ground and anchored himself through a gravity field radiating from his own body — turning himself into a fixed point that the Nika waves passed around rather than through. "There are so many of you. Kaido is Nika. The second-generation Seraph is Nika. Luffy, the Gomu Gomu no Mi user — Sabo's sworn brother — looks increasingly like Nika. And now you."
From a purely analytical standpoint: if there had been one Nika, the World Government's eight-hundred-year investment in suppressing that power would have made sense as a priority. Four Nikai appearing in the same era made the category dissolve into noise. The Five Elders had apparently reached a similar conclusion and opted to wait. The Celestial gold continued flowing. The Revolutionary Army was doing more damage to the tax base than a proliferation of sun god claimants.
"You're Nika. Kaido is Nika. Luffy is Nika. The sun god really does favor humanity, doesn't he." Issho said it flatly, without particular emotion. Then: "Gravity Blade — Raptor."
He fed gravitational force into his sword and executed a rapid sequence of slashes — dozens of cuts in the space of several seconds, each one wrapped with lateral pressure on the outside edge, transforming each stroke into a compressed projectile rather than simply a blade arc. The ground ahead of each slash compacted and fractured. Stone and metal that stood in the path of the cuts did not negotiate with them; they simply ceased to be in the same configuration they had been in before. The air movement generated by the barrage was substantial enough to carry debris in a wide radius.
Bonney watched this with an expression that her face chose to render in the cartoonish register that Nika's power encouraged — her features spreading outward from her face in exaggerated alarm, the visual equivalent of a startled animal in a children's illustration. The emotional display occupied her face completely and bore no relationship to what she actually intended to do next.
She reached into the ruins beside her and pulled out a structural beam from a collapsed building. The Nika influence converted the timber progressively as she handled it, grain softening, weight redistributing, the entire object becoming something functionally rubber. By the time she raised it, it was a baseball bat. She had also, from some source that did not bear examination, acquired a baseball cap, which she placed on her head at a slight angle.
She squared up to receive the incoming barrage.
The gravity slashes arrived. She swung.
Every one of them came back.
Issho moved into the air before the first returned slash reached him — the reflexes of a man who had survived a very long career by knowing when the geometry had changed. The strikes passed through the space he had just occupied and continued onward, carving furrows in the earth in the direction of what had been the Kingdom of Lulucia's outskirts. The channels they left were several meters across.
He had not been touched. He had also just lost the ground beneath his feet. Bonney was looking up at him with the expression of someone who had won the point and found it satisfying.
Issho recognized, with the honesty of a man whose philosophy was built on seeing clearly rather than seeing what he preferred: he did not know how to beat her. The gravity field was the most effective tool in his arsenal. She routed it back at him intact. She could not be killed faster than she recovered. She was not in any apparent distress. She was playing baseball.
He needed a different approach. He needed, ally, something she would want more than she wanted to continue.
Bonney had already conjured a ball from the surrounding material and was settling into a stance again when Issho spoke.
"Bonney. We don't need to continue this. There is something about to happen in Mary Geoise. Go back. Your father needs someone who can protect him."
She stopped.
The ball remained where it was. The baseball bat lowered.
Whatever had been on her face resolved into something that was not a cartoon expression at all — the alertness of a person for whom one subject cuts through everything else without resistance.
She did not trust Issho. She hated what he represented. She would have been content to pursue this engagement for another several hours. But the words "your father needs someone" reached a part of her that was not accessible to her own discipline, and she could not make herself disregard them.
She listened. He told her what the Revolutionary Army had pieced together: Emperor faction movements suggesting coordinated intent toward Mary Geoise. He was honest that it was inference, not confirmed intelligence — the Revolutionary Army had observed the personnel transfers and the positioning and had drawn conclusions, but they could not produce documentation that made those conclusions certain.
Bonney would rather be wrong and present than right and absent.
She left. She let Issho keep Lulucia. She let the mission end in the most practical way available — not victory, not defeat, but the termination of something that had been consuming a city and was no longer worth the cost of continuing.
The ruins of Lulucia burned steadily behind her as she went.
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