-Broadcast-
The Sky Screen held on Issho and Bonney for a few frames longer — the ruined skyline of Lulucia, the fires still burning — before the perspective moved on. The editorial logic of whoever was compiling these broadcasts found something more urgent waiting, and the main view settled back on Mary Geoise.
A man was walking up the stairs.
His hair was green and moved with the particular energy of someone who had given it no instructions and intended to keep not giving it instructions. His face was painted — proper circus makeup, thick and precise, the red at the corners of his mouth extending his grin into something that began in showmanship and arrived somewhere else entirely. His eyes contained the quality of a person for whom the concept of "other people's rules" had simply failed to take root at any point in his development. He wore a red suit with yellow lining over a green shirt, and the ensemble communicated less about fashion and more about the internal conviction that if you were going to do something, you should do it completely.
He walked like a man attending a party he had organized himself for his own benefit.
The CP9 agent currently covering this patrol section had been building resentment since the shift began, and the arrival of what appeared to be a costumed lunatic on a staircase he was responsible for monitoring short-circuited his situational assessment for approximately one second.
"Where did you come from? Do you have any idea where you are? Leave now if you don't want to die."
"I'm absolutely a lunatic," Buggy said pleasantly, "but unfortunately no psychiatrist on any sea has been brave enough to certify it."
He smiled at everyone present. The red at the corners of his mouth caught the light. The smile did not improve on closer examination.
Before the CP9 agent could follow that observation to any conclusion, an invisible force passed through his neck with the precision of something that had been very carefully divided. The cut was clean. Blood reached the white stone of the surrounding buildings before the body reached the ground.
The second agent — a woman, who had now been standing close enough to receive the consequences of this — froze where she stood. The blood on her face had not yet registered as information. Her mouth moved. She produced a name: "Joker... Buggy."
"That's correct. I'm sorry I don't have anything for you."
Her head followed the same arc.
Buggy continued up the stairs.
He danced.
This was not metaphor. He danced — actual dance steps, carrying a rhythm that existed only inside whatever internal music he was currently listening to, each movement large and deliberate and expressive in the manner of someone who had concluded that if you were going to commit mass violence on the steps of the most protected location in the world, you should at least enjoy the choreography. His expressions cycled through states: delighted, coy, mysterious, satisfied. He looked like the headlining act at a performance that the audience had not been told they were attending.
The Bara Bara no Mi (Chop-Chop Fruit), fully liberated, extended its logic to everything in his vicinity. The invisible force that separated the first agent from his head was not the fruit in its ordinary form — not the simple self-fragmentation of a man who could survive being cut apart. This was the awakened expression: the splitting property imposed outward, imposed on the environment, imposed on the people standing in it. CP9 agents who moved to intercept encountered a force that treated the concept of physical integrity as a suggestion. They came apart before they could bring their Rokushiki to bear. The CP0 agents who arrived afterward were more sophisticated — Armament Haki deployed as a defensive layer, hardened against external impact. This bought them marginal additional time. The awakening did not negotiate with Armament Haki, and what Armament Haki could not stop could not be stopped by the people wearing it.
By the time Buggy reached the landing, several hundred government agents had been reduced to the kind of evidence that makes crime scenes difficult to process. He had not looked at most of them directly. The lives of people in uniform defending a place like this were a category of thing he did not find it necessary to treat as significant. He continued inward with the step of a man who had checked "arrive at Mary Geoise" off a list and was now consulting the next item.
The God's Knights were absent from the outer approaches. Buggy had traveled from the perimeter to the innermost ring without encountering anything that qualified as meaningful resistance, which was either an extraordinary lapse in the organization's operational readiness or something more deliberate. He did not spend time on the question. Whatever the reason, the result was that he arrived at the inner sanctum having barely warmed up.
The inner city had not received any signal that something had changed.
On a manicured lawn set against architecture that dated back to a civilization that had never needed to account for the opinions of anyone outside it, a Celestial Dragon was enjoying his afternoon. He occupied a chair of suitable grandeur. Two women were arranged beside him in positions that reflected his priorities rather than theirs. At his feet, a slave's face served as a footrest — literally, both feet planted on the cheekbones of a woman who had been selected for this purpose and was concentrating on surviving the selection. CP0 agents flanked the scene in white, sweat visible at their collars, their Observation Haki already screaming at them about what was coming and their institutional conditioning preventing them from acting without instruction.
The Celestial Dragon saw Buggy from across the lawn and arrived at the wrong conclusion.
"Is this the circus I ordered? The clown's makeup is acceptable. If it were a female clown, I might have some interest. Men don't entertain me."
The slaves understood immediately. The CP0 agents understood immediately. The Celestial Dragon did not understand at all, which was consistent with his complete life history of never having needed to understand anything.
Buggy crossed the lawn toward him. His dance steps had not changed. The music in his head was still playing.
"Since you like women so much," he said, arriving at the chair, tilting his head with an expression of genuine consideration, "why don't you try it yourself?"
The Celestial Dragon opened his mouth to respond with the force of a man who had never been spoken to this way and had opinions about it.
Then he experienced something new.
The proud biological inheritance the God Clan had always treated as their natural attribute and primary measure of status — it separated from the body that had hosted it for however many years of pointless existence that body had accumulated. The cut was precise. The blood was abundant. The God Clan, as a category of being, had just become less capable of a thing it had valued very highly.
The afternoon tea continued around this event with the silence of people who had correctly identified that having opinions about what had just happened would be inadvisable.
Buggy straightened up. He smoothed his lapels. The dance could wait a moment.
He looked around at the inner sanctum of Mary Geoise — the architecture, the lawn, the sight lines, the slave arrangements, the white-suited agents who had not moved because moving without authorization had been trained out of them so thoroughly that the authorization mechanism being dead did not seem to update their behavior.
He appeared satisfied with what he saw.
The party was only beginning.