-Broadcast-
The black mass reorganized itself.
What emerged from the consolidation of hundreds of individual Black Sperms was something that had only one of everything it needed: one enormous arm, assembled from the combined mass of the colony, and enough faces distributed across its body to make the composite silhouette genuinely disturbing. A giant of sorts — not tall enough to be threatening by the standards of this world, but large enough to grip a man by the hair and lift him off the ground without effort.
Which was what it did.
Garp hung in the air, face bloodied, one of the small white faces positioned directly at his eye level. Several dozen other Black Sperms had arranged themselves in a loose ring below, and each of them had opinions they wanted to share about the Marine hero's personality, his judgment, and his current predicament. Their vocabulary for this purpose was extensive and indelicate.
The composite giant swung the old man slightly, for emphasis.
"Don't look down on me, old man."
-Real World-
The war room at Marine Headquarters had seen a great many things frozen on the Sky Screen over the years. Battles. Executions. The fall of cities. Sengoku and Tsuru had watched most of them together in one configuration or another, and they had developed, across decades, a shared language for the aftermath — the particular quiet that followed something that could not be undone.
They watched Garp hang in the black giant's fist.
Neither of them spoke for a moment.
Tsuru's expression was the careful neutral of someone exercising deliberate control over what their face was doing. Sengoku looked older than he usually did, which was saying something. The man on the Sky Screen was their contemporary — the third point of a triangle that had defined the Marine's upper tier for thirty years. Watching him there, bloodied and suspended, was not something either of them had a prepared response for.
Happy for him or sad — they couldn't quite determine which, and perhaps it was both, and perhaps that was the honest answer.
Garp saw himself on the Sky Screen.
His first expression, watching his own defeat play back, was grim. Then it shifted — not to bitterness, not to anger, but to something quieter. He exhaled through his nose.
"Years from now," he said. "Still getting beaten like that." He turned the thought over. "Can't argue with it. Time doesn't negotiate."
Kuzan had been watching the same sequence, and he had thoughts about it.
"Black Sperm," he said, to no one in particular. "Sixth cadre of Buggy's Joker Pirates confirmed on the Sky Screen. Cell Fruit user — multiplication, division, recombination, and each individual unit retaining its own full strength. It's not a power that rewards the kind of fighter Garp is. If you try to match it physically, one-plus-one becomes ten, becomes a thousand." He paused. "He wasn't beaten because he's old. He was beaten because he was the wrong person for that opponent."
The subtext was clear enough: don't blame him for this.
"The one who would actually counter Black Sperm in Still Water Prison is Magellan." Kuzan continued, thinking it through as he spoke. "Doesn't matter how many times the cells divide — if they're all poisoned, there's nothing to reconstitute from. But Magellan is currently engaged with a half-dragon who breathes fire and shrugs off contact toxin. He can't be in two places."
"So the prison has no answer," someone said.
"It has some answers. They're just all occupied."
Sakazuki's voice cut through the room from the far side. "Hannibal's people are wasting time. If they can't stop the intruders from reaching the prisoners, they should flood the prison with gas. All sections. End it."
The response to this around the room was several pairs of eyes finding the ceiling.
"Those are living people," Tsuru said, without inflection.
"They're pirates."
"They're living people in a prison, which is where we put them because executing them on capture was deemed inappropriate. If we wanted the flexibility to kill them later at convenience, we should have made different decisions then."
Sakazuki did not appear convinced. But the room's collective energy was not with him on this one.
The Marine Headquarters analysis of the Broadcast's future continued, quieter, with the unspoken undercurrent that everyone was doing the same calculation: how many high-bounty pirates would eventually fill Still Water Prison, and whether the Marine of that future era had fully accounted for what it meant to concentrate that much dangerous potential in one location.
The faces on the Sky Screen were mostly visible, with one consistent exception. Certain figures remained deliberately blurred — the Sky Screen withholding, as it occasionally did, whatever information Kaito had decided was not yet ready to be revealed. The people present in the prison's lower levels with Dragon and Shanks, whoever they were, remained unknown quantities.
"Buggy sent them for Shanks." The observation came from the corner. "Momonosuke and Black Sperm — two of his strongest cadres, for a prison break. He's extracting a target, and we don't need to guess which one."
Sengoku frowned. Not at the conclusion — the conclusion was obvious. At the part that followed from it. "I can't read Buggy the Clown. I've never been able to. Sending cadres of this caliber into Still Water Prison for the sake of friendship — it should be too high a cost. There must be something else behind it."
The Joker Pirates had the resources to attempt this. The question was what Buggy expected to receive in return, and whether Shanks knew the full shape of the debt being incurred on his behalf.
Uta had been awake for some time.
She was also watching the Sky Screen.
She grabbed Shanks' sleeve — her one-armed father who had always been looking at something slightly past her, toward some horizon she couldn't see — and demanded to know about Buggy. The man on the Sky Screen who had sent two of the most dangerous people she'd ever seen into the world's most secure prison, because Shanks was in there. The man whose crew apparently included individuals who had just put the Marine hero on the ground.
"How strong is Buggy really? Don't ignore me and answer properly."
Shanks raised his wine bottle. He drank. Considered the question with the expression of a man who didn't have a comfortable answer.
"There are too many things about Buggy I still can't explain," he said finally. "What he shows — what he actually has. The gap between those two keeps being larger than I expect." He lowered the bottle. "What he'll become, in the end... I don't know. I genuinely don't."
He turned the bottle in his remaining hand. There had always been a question sitting in the back of his mind — had sat there since he was young enough to ask it — about Buggy's origins. About Roger's habit of finding things in unexpected places. A baby in a treasure chest on God Valley didn't seem more improbable than anything else about that period of history. The old members of Roger's crew would know. Most of them were gone. The ones who weren't had made themselves hard to find.
Rayleigh, though. Rayleigh was reliably in the Sabaody Archipelago, coating ships and pretending to be semi-retired.
Shanks gave the order to change course.
— Revolutionary Army Headquarters-
Dragon had been watching the Sky Screen.
His father was still suspended in the black giant's grip when Dragon's knuckles cracked.
Blood and loyalty and ideology are three things that do not always align, and Dragon had spent his adult life navigating the gaps between them. The family had a complicated relationship with violence as a form of affection. None of that changed what it meant to watch his father — old and bleeding and unrepentant, still refusing to look like he had lost — held up for the world to see.
Dragon was quiet for a long time after the scene ended.
Then he called in his commanders and gave them a standing order: any encounter with Joker Pirates crew, regardless of context, regardless of operational priority. No mercy. No reporting required. Handle it.
The Revolutionary Army had never had much use for pirates. Today it had one less.