-Broadcast-
Every camera on the Sky Screen had found Sakazuki.
O'Hara burned behind him — the Tree of Knowledge in the background, the fire patient and total, consuming the library that had taken centuries to build. The island's population had been replaced by Galdino's puppets: a thousand tourists standing motionless in the smoke, no expressions on their faces, no thoughts behind their eyes. The Doru Doru no Mi's control was complete. They moved when Galdino needed them to move and stood still when he didn't, and none of them had the awareness to mind either way.
Galdino himself was invisible. His voice came from somewhere inside the crowd.
"I'm not interested in the texts they were studying here. All that ancient history — too obscure for my tastes. What I want to know is how far you're willing to go for your justice."
"My justice," Sakazuki said, "is the death of every pirate alive. As long as one remains breathing, the war doesn't end."
There was no productive conversation to be had here. The math was simple: kill Galdino, destroy whatever mechanism was sustaining this illusion, and find the way back to Rome. O'Hara had already been destroyed once. If it needed to burn twice, so be it.
He moved.
The magma came up through his arm like pressure through a pipe, dense and scalding, and he appeared in front of where Galdino's voice had last originated. His right fist drove forward — Jigoku no Inu (Hellhound) — a concentrated bolt of superheated magma that would have reduced a normal target to ash before they registered the impact.
It went directly through Galdino's head.
The head dissolved. Not blood, not matter — the impact sent a fracture through the figure's surface, and the surface began to run, the complex colors bleeding away until only white remained, the white liquefying fast under the magma's temperature, pooling on the ground, evaporating as steam.
A wax clone. The entire figure — flawlessly constructed, Observation Haki-proof — had been a candle.
Sakazuki stood with his fist extended and looked at the puddle.
"I can't sense him through the crowd," he said, to no one. His Observation Haki swept the thousand standing figures and returned nothing useful. He had the basics — awareness, proximity detection — but granular location-work through a crowd of a thousand at this range was not what the Magu Magu no Mi (Magma-Magma Fruit) had been built for. Galdino understood this. He had built his arena around it.
"You won't find me that way." The voice came from a different direction. "Let's play properly, Admiral. Let's go back to the past. Let's find out if you'd make the same choices twice."
Before Sakazuki could respond, the crowd shifted.
One hundred of the thousand puppet-tourists detached from the main group and were transported — smoothly, without transition — to a ship on the water. An escape vessel. It was already moving, already putting distance between itself and the burning island. Old people. Children. Women. The composition was obvious, deliberate.
And O'Hara's scholars. Somewhere in that ship, O'Hara's scholars were sailing.
"If you were the one giving the order — what would you choose?"
A soldier executes the orders of the chain of command. The Celestial Dragons had issued the Buster Call through proper channels, and the Buster Call's mandate was total. No survivors who could carry the knowledge forward. No exceptions for proximity or innocence. The demon-slaying order left no room for case-by-case decisions; the moment you started weighing, you had already stopped following the order.
They would remember the sacrifice.
"Ryū no Ibuki." The Dragon's Breath.
His right arm extended and magma poured from it — not a blast but a continuous flow that shaped itself as it traveled, lengthening, organizing into something with a head and a curve and a roar of displaced heat. The lava dragon crossed the water faster than the ship could turn. The impact wasn't an explosion so much as a replacement: the ship became fire, briefly, and then became nothing, the burning debris scattered across the surface of the sea like punctuation.
The water reflected red for several seconds after.
Galdino's voice was already moving again. "Test two."
Two hundred puppets separated from the crowd. Another escape ship. Larger than the first. And on the deck, standing at the rail and looking at him across the water, was a wax figure that wore a familiar face.
Kuzan.
The simulated Kuzan stood with his hands at his sides, positioned among the people on the ship, not hiding, not attacking — simply present, as if the choice of which side he landed on was the whole of what Galdino needed to ask.
"Your colleague is on this one," Galdino said. "He wants to protect innocent people. Now what?"
The two of them had never been the same kind of Marine. They had never agreed on the shape of justice or the appropriate radius of the force used to enforce it. Kuzan's version of things required him to make distinctions that Sakazuki considered the luxury of someone who had never had to hold a line alone. Sakazuki's version of things required a ruthlessness that Kuzan had decided, somewhere, he was not willing to produce.
This had never been a problem between them. It was simply a difference in how two people understood the same word.
"Even if Kuzan were there," Sakazuki said, "he couldn't protect that ship. The only path out for O'Hara's survivors is death."
The wax-Kuzan began to speak from across the water. "Akainu — for your absolute justice, you'll sacrifice everything? Abandon your own colleagues? Kill living people who've committed no crime? Do you feel nothing?"
Sakazuki raised his arm.
Then Ellie spoke.
She had come back to herself — whatever thread of consciousness the Domain had left her, it had reassembled in time to see what he was doing. She was on her feet, her eyes sharp in a way they hadn't been in the circus tent, reading the situation with the diagnostic precision of a doctor assessing a patient who has done something irreversible.
"Please." Her voice was quiet. Not begging — she wasn't constituted for begging. She was stating a position. "Let them go. There are innocent people on that ship. Whatever happened on O'Hara, it has nothing to do with them."
Galdino's wax-face on the distant deck turned toward Sakazuki with an expression calibrated to provoke.
Sakazuki fired.
The second dragon crossed the water and the second ship came apart. Two hundred lives, the wax figure, the argument — all of it gone in the same instant, replaced by fire and floating wreckage and the smell of burning that the Domain had apparently decided should be authentic.
He stood on the shore of a burning O'Hara and looked at what he had chosen. Twice.
The fire behind him had reached the top of the Tree of Knowledge. The wood was old enough that it burned in colors — deep orange at the base, blue-white where the branches met the sky. It would be ash by morning.
Sakazuki had nothing to say about this that he hadn't already said, to himself, years ago, in a version of this conversation that had actually mattered.