-Real World-
The five old men appeared together in the sky above Mary Geoise, projected by the Sky Screen for the world to see.
For most people watching — particularly those who had never traveled beyond their home island, who had lived their entire lives at the bottom of the world's hierarchy and formed their understanding of the Celestial Dragons through rumor and second-hand description — this was the kind of image that arrived once in a lifetime. The gap in status between the Five Elders and the rest of the world was so vast that it existed more as a concept than a thing you could actually picture. The lower classes had never needed to imagine the Five Elders in physical detail, which was why their mental images had defaulted to something like very powerful men in expensive chairs making important decisions. The reality now visible on every Sky Screen was more unsettling than that.
In the mainstream accounting of the world's power structure, the Five Elders were senior politicians. Ancient administrators who controlled the World Government, directed the Marine through layers of institutional architecture, and shaped global events from behind walls that no one outside them had ever penetrated. Their authority was structural. Their power was systemic. It came from positions, not from persons.
This was the mainstream accounting.
The Sky Screen was showing something else.
[Sky Screen Character Notes — Five Elders: Saint Nasujuro — Financial Martial God: Bakotsu. Saint Shepherd Ju Peter — God of Farmwork: Sandworm (Sunaoki). Saint Topman Warcury — God of Law: Houki (Fūsanni). Saint Marcus Mars — Environmental God of War: Itsumade (Izunaten). Saint Jaygarcia Saturn — Science Defense Martial God: Ushi-Oni (Cow Demon).]
Not Devil Fruit users.
The labels were explicit about this. The suffix attached to each name — the designation that identified their beast forms — did not use the classification language that accompanied all known Zoan transformations. There was no "Model" notation. There was no fruit name. There were simply the names of the things they were.
The Marine officers who had absorbed the implications of this revelation some chapters back sat with it again, watching the five men on screen and doing the calculation that the sky had already done for them. Every Celestial Dragon in the world was descended from the twenty kings who had consolidated power eight hundred years ago. Most of those descendants had the combat effectiveness of moderately well-fed livestock. Doflamingo, who had demonstrated actual fighting capability, operated at Warlord level. Against the backdrop of this dynasty, the Five Elders were the ceiling of what the World Government contained — and the sky was now showing that their ceiling had nothing to do with political appointments.
Five mythical beast demons, wearing the faces of old men, ruling the world from chairs in Pangaea Castle.
The room was quiet in the way that rooms become quiet when everyone in them has arrived at the same conclusion and is deciding whether to say it out loud.
-Real World — Marine Headquarters-
Borsalino had been a Marine long enough to have met the Five Elders on multiple formal occasions. He had never found those meetings particularly interesting. Politically powerful ancient men in expensive rooms had a way of becoming sameness after the first few encounters — the same gravity, the same controlled authority, the same performance of being beyond challenge.
"If the Celestial Dragons are genuinely this capable," he said, in the tone of a man sharing a weather observation, "that does change the calculus somewhat. There might not be quite as much room as we thought."
He was speaking to no one in particular, which was how Borsalino generally communicated his most honest assessments.
Sakazuki had a different reaction. He had been chewing on something since the Lulucia footage and he reached the part that required verbal output. "Buggy the Clown. From the beginning: he took Kuma, who had already outlived his usefulness as a Marine instrument, and through the bear he now has an indirect line to a woman who can access Nika's power. Three Nikas on the pirate side. Kaido, whatever the second-generation Seraph situation is, and now Bonney." He paused. "That clown turns every piece I thought was off the board into a resource."
The genuine anger in his voice was not at the cleverness of it, exactly. It was at having failed to see the step coming.
Tsuru, who had been following the Sky Screen with the methodical attention of someone maintaining a running inventory of all new information, let the silence after Sakazuki's comment sit for a moment before speaking.
"Bonney is not marked as a Devil Fruit user. Her power has no origin in this world. The designation 'Miss Multiverse' has been attached to her since the Sky Screen first showed her — and now we're watching her draw Nika's ability from what the broadcast is describing as a counterpart self in another timeline." She considered this. "I've been doing this work for a long time. I've encountered most categories of impossible. This is a new one."
Garp had been listening with his chin on one hand and something working in his expression that wasn't quite his usual combination of exasperation and affection.
"You know what I keep thinking about," he said, to no one in particular. "I'm wondering whether there's a version of things somewhere out there where my grandson, my son, and me all ended up in the same place. Fighting together. Same side, same cause." He seemed to be genuinely curious about this rather than sentimental, which was somehow more disquieting. "Three generations. A Marine family, actually a Marine family." He made a sound that wasn't quite a laugh. "Cap's imagination works faster than the intelligence department sometimes."
The room declined to confirm or deny this.
Tsuru brought the conversation back. "The operational question is Bonney. The Sky Screen has just demonstrated, at length, that she can access a form of Nika's power and survive multiple fatal wounds while using it. The Marine cannot afford to leave that capability in the Joker Pirates' orbit. The word from the top is capture. Failing that: neutralize."
No one around the table objected to this framing, which would have been a more interesting outcome.
The current Bonney — the one who existed in the present timeline, not the future one shown on the Sky Screen — was on a boat.
She was watching herself on the sky with an expression that might generously be described as processing. The white-haired figure in the footage, standing unharmed in the center of a gravity field that would have flattened most people, swinging a baseball bat at a legendary swordsman's gravity-infused attacks — she could confirm, as the subject of this surveillance, that she had not known what she was doing while she was doing it. She had felt the form come over her. She had let it come. She had not understood its source.
"Stronger and bigger," she said, mostly to herself. "I always thought that just happened under pressure. I didn't know it had a name."
Her crew — the uncles, as she thought of them, the men who had been traveling with her long enough to have opinions about her choices — were watching the same footage and having the reaction of people whose traveling companion had just been identified as a major military priority by multiple factions simultaneously.
"Nika is the World Government's longest-running problem," one of them said. "We need to disappear."
Bonney knew he was right. The ability was too visible, too significant, too wanted. The Marine wanted it. The World Government wanted to eliminate it. Every major pirate organization with long-term ambitions would want to control it or remove it. Moving openly on the sea was no longer viable.
She needed to find her father before anyone else found her. That was the whole calculation, reduced to its simplest form.
The boat kept moving. The sky kept broadcasting. And somewhere in Mary Geoise, Buggy the Clown continued deeper into the heart of the holy land, toward whatever he had actually come there to find.
Saturn, alone among the Five Elders, already had a theory about what that was.
He had been sitting with this theory since the moment Bonney's Nika capability had appeared on the sky. The experiment conducted on Ginny — Bonney's mother — years before any of this had become visible. The results of that experiment had not appeared in the subject. They had passed to the next generation, which was not the outcome the records had predicted. Genetics, it turned out, had its own interpretation of experimental parameters.
Kuma value had just increased again. Which meant Buggy's leverage had just increased again. Which meant the Five Elders were dealing with a situation where the most capable manipulator on the sea was in the holy land right now, and they still didn't know what he wanted.
Saturn considered this for a moment.
Then he stood up, because sitting was no longer appropriate.