-Broadcast-
The Celestial Dragon on the lawn had been granted the mercy of being left alive.
He understood, in the way that people understand things when they have just experienced something that reorganizes their entire conception of the world, that Buggy had simply lost interest. The clown's attention had already moved past him to the interior of the holy land, to whatever he had actually come here to do, and the Celestial Dragon had been reclassified from "target" to "irrelevance" with the casualness of a man dropping a receipt he no longer needed.
The female slaves who had been arranged beside him were the only ones who smiled.
The Celestial Dragon pressed his hands against the wound at his center and began moving. Crawling, mostly — his legs were not reliable — toward the outer perimeter. One hundred meters. The buildings in this direction were still intact. The worst was behind him. He could see the edge of the inner city ahead, and beyond it, some theoretical version of safety.
He did not reach it.
An invisible edge passed through him from one side to the other, and then passed through him again in a different direction, and then several more times in rapid succession, and then the question of his reaching anything ceased to be relevant. What remained was a contribution to the general landscape of ruin that Buggy had been painting across the holy land since his arrival.
"If I had taken your money," Buggy remarked to no one in particular, "your money would still be your money and I'd need you alive to access it. This way it's already mine. Much simpler."
No one stopped him. No one came close to stopping him. Government agents who rushed ahead without strategy had made the first mistake available to them — moving without adequate information about what they were moving toward — and paid the standard rate for that mistake. CP0 agents who arrived with Armament Haki active lasted slightly longer, which was the difference between dying in the first second and dying in the second or third. The awakening of the Bara Bara no Mi (Chop-Chop Fruit) did not require proximity. It did not negotiate with defenses. It imposed its logic on everything in its operational radius, and the humans inside that radius were not exceptions.
By the time Buggy reached the area immediately below Pangaea Castle, the count of agents he had passed through was somewhere in the low hundreds, and he had found none of them worth the attention of a full stop.
He was alone in the heart of Mary Geoise. Not alone in the sense of having cleared the area — people were still present, still running, still attempting to coordinate a response — but alone in the sense that no one currently alive in his vicinity was capable of doing anything about him. The God's Knights had not materialized in his path. The outer perimeter had been staffed exclusively with CP9 and CP0. He had arrived at the core of the most protected location in the world as though he had been walking through an empty corridor.
The Five Elders were not blind, and they were not deaf.
They were, however, slow. The institutional reflex of Pangaea Castle was not urgency but deliberation — meetings convened, positions taken, consensus formed through the gravity of accumulated centuries of never having needed to hurry. Even now, with a Four Emperors-level threat inside the holy land's inner perimeter, the five old men arranged themselves in their meeting configuration.
The first of them: tall, broad across the shoulders, dressed without ceremony in a way that contrasted sharply with the sacred context. A large bald head. Glasses. A beard worn with the casualness of someone who had stopped caring about what anyone thought of his appearance several centuries ago, probably. He held a sword that had an uncomfortable quality to it, the kind of weapon that had been in the presence of a great deal of death for a long time and had been shaped by the proximity.
[Sky Screen Character Note: Financial Martial God — Saint Nasujuro.]
"Why has Buggy come here to kill people rather than exercise his Emperor prerogatives at sea? What does he want?"
The second: the youngest face among the five, though "youngest" was doing considerable work in that sentence. His complexion was dark, his features relatively unlined compared to his colleagues, but a scar crossed his neck — the kind of scar that a person acquires from someone who knows exactly where to aim and almost reaches their destination. Whatever had left that mark had been very dangerous.
[Sky Screen Character Note: God of Farmwork — Saint Shepherd Ju Peter.]
"Has anyone contacted the Marine? Or are we handling this alone?"
The third: the oldest face in a room full of old faces. An extravagant mustache that seemed to have been maintained as a philosophical statement. A prominent birthmark on his forehead. Wrinkles and age spots covering the geography of a head that was bald in the same determined way as Nasujuro's, but with the additional quality of looking very difficult to damage.
[Sky Screen Character Note: God of Law — Saint Topman Warcury.]
"I've wasted years on those dogs and they can't respond to a single emergency."
The fourth: the most composed of the group, which was visible in the quality of stillness his body produced — the stillness of someone who had been performing composure for so long that it had become the default state. An enormous goatee, well-maintained. More hair than the other four combined. He spoke like a person who had given a great deal of thought to how things ought to be said before saying them.
[Sky Screen Character Note: Environmental God of War — Saint Marcus Mars.]
"Is negotiation an option? If this escalates to open combat inside the holy land, the collateral damage will be — substantial."
The fifth was Saint Jaygarcia Saturn. He did not share his colleagues' uncertainty about the correct posture here. He had been watching this particular situation develop in his mind for years, which was the disadvantage of being the one among the Five Elders whose specialty was understanding how things worked rather than simply reacting to how things appeared.
"Buggy the Clown is not someone you negotiate with. Whatever he wants, what he requires is a show of force sufficient to make him calculate that leaving is preferable to continuing. A Four Emperors is not Red-Haired Shanks, and even Shanks does not respond to reasoned argument when he is in motion. We prepare for a fight to the death, and we do not hope for any outcome more favorable than that."
He said it without the quality of someone delivering bad news. It was just the accurate assessment.
The Five Elders sat with this. The room around them was the most fortified civilian location in the known world, staffed by the most loyal agents the World Government could produce, defended by the most powerful private army in current existence — and a man in a red suit with clown makeup had walked through all of it unchallenged.
This had happened because they had not invested in the kind of defenses that stopped someone like Buggy. This had happened because, for generations, the strongest thing that had ever threatened Mary Geoise from outside was the concept of bad press, and you dealt with bad press through Morgans. The physical defenses had atrophied through disuse until they were adequate against second-rate intrusions and nothing above that.
They would not make this mistake twice. But twice was not a category that applied to problems that were already inside the house.
The question now was what Buggy the Clown had actually come to Mary Geoise to accomplish — because whatever it was, it was not simply violence for its own sake. He had targeted a Celestial Dragon for a insult, and then he had continued inward. He had a destination.
None of them could identify what it was yet. And in that gap between what they knew and what he intended, the Five Elders felt, for the first time in a very long time, the discomfort of not being the most informed people in the room.
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