-Broadcast-
Five minutes earlier.
Garp slowed his breathing to almost nothing and waited in the dark.
His heart rate had dropped deliberately — the old discipline of someone who had spent decades learning to be still when stillness was what the situation required. He watched his son walk away with the Black Sperm escort, watched the gap in the third-level gate produce a steady outflow of prisoners who had decided that now was the time, watched both things happen simultaneously and could not stop either of them.
Over eighty years old. That was the math.
He let the number sit for a moment, then set it aside. The Marine wasn't done with him yet, even if his body had opinions about the subject. Even if his face currently looked like it had been used as a demonstration piece for what Armament Haki could do to the human skeleton. Even if the blood had stopped being surprising some time ago and had become simply a feature of the situation.
Artoria. He thought of her the way he thought of a particularly difficult problem that had sorted itself out while he wasn't looking. She had put him here. She had known, at some level — the kind of knowing that came from reading situations carefully and very far ahead — that a prison like this one, housing people like the ones below, would eventually become unstable. And she had left the Marine hero in it. Not because she didn't trust him. Because she did.
"Smart woman," Garp said, to the ceiling, to no one. "Planned everything out."
He fell from the shadows to the corridor floor.
The landing was not graceful. He had stopped pretending it would be. He straightened up in the connecting passage between the upper and lower sections and turned to face the direction the prisoners were coming from.
The pirates saw an old man.
Their initial alarm — a jailer beast, something with teeth — resolved quickly into something they could assess with their eyes. Gray hair, deformed from impact, clothes in pieces, skin beneath them a map of bruising and dried blood. An old man who had clearly already lost one fight tonight and was standing in the corridor anyway.
Some of them recognized him.
In better circumstances, that recognition would have produced a different calculation. Monkey D. Garp had a place in the hierarchy of things the pirate world understood as dangerous, and under normal conditions, the smart move was to go in a different direction immediately. But these were not normal conditions. The old man was bleeding from multiple sources. He was holding himself together through apparent will rather than structural integrity. And there were a great many of them, and they had been in Still Water Prison for long enough that the desire to walk through something — anything — had accumulated to critical pressure.
"Move," one of them said. "You're already half dead."
"You're going to stop all of us?"
"Let's see how many bones he has left to break."
They came forward. The thin, depleted bodies of people who had been in the Dead Water for months, moving with the particular recklessness of desperation — not fast, not powerful, but numerous, and none of them planning to stop.
Garp crossed his arms in front of his face.
The prisoners read it wrong. They saw a man covering his head, protecting his face, the instinctive guard of something frightened. They came faster.
Sengoku, he thought, as the familiar faces moved through his mind in the brief moment before the decision. Tsuru. Zephyr. Dragon. Luffy. Roger.
Old bones. Please hold together a little longer.
"Hachimon Tonkou — Dai Ichi Mon: Kaimon. Open."
Eight Gates Release — First Gate: Gate of Opening.
What happened next was not entirely physical.
The corridor's air pressure changed. The prisoners in front felt it before they understood it — a shift in the space around the old man, something coming through him rather than from him, a release of something that the body had been holding back by instinct since birth. The white light didn't emanate from Garp so much as emerge through him, from somewhere underneath the flesh, as if the body had been housing it all along and had simply been told it was allowed to show.
The storm that followed was not wind. It was the residual pressure of a body suddenly operating without any of the governors that keep living things from destroying themselves, and every prisoner in the forward section of the corridor experienced it as a force that removed their footing without consulting them about it.
They tumbled. They grabbed at walls and grabbed at each other and found neither purchase. The old man stood in the center of it, back straight, eyes open, looking like a man who had just remembered something he had forgotten about himself.
Fleet Admiral Artoria Pendragon had found the Eight Gates technique in ruins — old text, pre-Void Century origin uncertain, a physical cultivation method from an age before Devil Fruits had become the world's dominant power system. The ancient practitioners had developed it as a answer to a problem: how do people who train only their bodies compete against people who have consumed miracles?
The answer was: at significant personal cost, you remove everything the body uses to protect itself from itself.
Artoria had recognized immediately who the technique was for. Not every Marine could use it — you needed decades of physical conditioning, decades of Haki refinement, a body that had been pushed until it knew its own architecture at a cellular level. The Eight Gates were eight locks on eight doors, and the doors led to power that the body would ordinarily never allow because allowing it would break the body. Opening them was permission to spend what you'd built over a lifetime faster than any lifetime should permit.
Garp had been the obvious candidate. She had presented it to him. He had understood what it was and had accepted it with the particular quiet of someone who had already made peace with the relevant costs.
This was his first time opening even the first.
The Gate of Opening — Kaimon — removes the brain's instinctive restraints on the body's performance. Everything that the conscious mind could not normally force the body to do is now permitted.
He was aware that his thinking had become very clear. Faster than it usually was, at a resolution he hadn't experienced in some years. This was one of the gifts — the restrictions that governed thought as well as muscle were lifted, and the result was a clarity that felt almost peaceful.
"The first gate is more than enough for this," he said.
He moved.
What Domino saw on the surveillance screens — and what she would later describe to Hannibal, struggling for language that didn't sound impossible — was an old man with serious injuries moving through a crowd of hundreds at a speed that the cameras struggled to track. Not the speed of a young man at peak condition. Something different: the speed of accumulated force finally permitted to express itself without restraint, the entire output of eighty years of the Marine hero's career made briefly available all at once.
The prisoners did not collectively lack fighting ability. They were third-level inmates — the kind of people who had done something serious enough to end up here. Under any normal calculation, even a Garp in prime condition would have found numbers like these a genuine problem.
Under the First Gate, the calculation was not normal.
He moved between them and through them, and each contact produced a result. Bones broke — not carelessly, but inevitably, each impact carrying precisely more force than the relevant structure could absorb. Teeth departed from mouths they had occupied for decades. One prisoner, arriving from the wrong angle at the wrong moment, encountered a punch that passed through the resistance of his torso entirely and did not leave him in a recoverable condition. The blood that continued to accumulate on Garp after that belonged to other people.
Two minutes.
He covered the corridor in two minutes, returned to the start, and looked at what was behind him.
Most of them were down. The ones who weren't were reconsidering their position rapidly. He collected them — the mobile, the semi-mobile, the ones that required carrying — and sent them back through the gap to the third level. Not gently. With the efficiency of someone who had one more thing to do and was already running a deficit on what it was costing him to do it.
When the last one was through the gap, he straightened up and looked at the ceiling.
The Gate of Opening had a duration, and the duration was not infinite. He could feel the edges of it already — the point where what he'd borrowed would come due. He needed to get to Black Sperm before that happened.
"Second meeting," Garp said, to the general direction of wherever the little black man had gone. "Let's see who's got the harder fist."
He started walking.
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