-Broadcast-
The returning prisoners came through the gap the way things come back when they've been thrown: without dignity, without options, in whatever configuration they'd arrived in after contact with Garp's fists. Hundreds of people who had tasted the corridor of freedom for approximately two minutes each. They were not standing.
At the front of the passage, ahead of Dragon and Shanks and the Black Sperm escort, the colony felt it.
"Something's coming."
"From behind. That direction."
"Lot of them. Moving fast."
"Moving faster than they should be."
A brief collective processing pause.
"Dragon — your good father is coming to rescue you."
Dragon and Shanks were both experiencing the passive drain of Still Water Prison — the Dead Water's Seastone content working slowly through everything, suppressing their ability to project Observation Haki outward at meaningful range. They couldn't feel what the Black Sperms could feel. But the Black Sperms were unaffected; they had planned for this, as they had planned for everything about the prison entry.
Dragon stared at the nearest unit.
"He can move?"
"He's moving. Feels like more than before, actually."
Dragon was quiet for a moment. He was doing math of a and uncomfortable kind — the math of a man who had been beaten by his father while the Revolutionary Army's headquarters burned around them, who had watched Garp use something unfamiliar and terrifying and fast and then found himself on the ground with his people dead and both of them on their way to Still Water Prison. He had filed that experience under several categories simultaneously.
"The second time I've seen it," Dragon said, mostly to himself. He pulled Shanks back by the arm, putting distance between them and the corridor ahead. "Stay back. You'll want to see this from a position that isn't in the middle of it."
"What is it?"
"The Eight Gates. First gate this time was just the opener."
The Black Sperm colony did not retreat. They expanded.
The multiplication happened at the speed that cellular things happen at when they have decided to — fractions of a second per division, each new unit fully formed and fully functional, the process cascading outward from the original colony mass until the floor of the corridor was no longer visible under the density of small black bodies. Hundreds became thousands. Thousands became more. The black tide spread across every available surface, wriggling, autonomous, each unit carrying its own intelligence and its own full measure of strength.
The colony had already won one fight against Garp tonight. They had the memory of how it went, how many units it took, where the pressure points were. The second fight would have the same result, adjusted for whatever the old man had managed to recover.
Garp walked into view at the far end of the corridor.
The white light that had been coming off him since the Gate of Opening was still present, steady and even — not dramatic, just the physical fact of what he had permitted his body to do. His injuries had not healed. The blood was still there. The deformed eye socket and the clothes in pieces and the map of bruising across every visible surface were still there.
He looked at the black tide. He looked at Dragon, standing back against the wall with Shanks.
"Little black sperm." Garp's voice was not loud. It carried anyway. "You put me down once. I owe you for that."
The Black Sperms, with the collective confidence of numbers that had already proven sufficient, began to move forward.
Shanks had watched Garp his entire piratical career — not as an ally, not exactly, but with the attention you pay to someone whose trajectory crosses yours regularly and whose capabilities you need to understand. He had never, across all of those years, seen Garp do whatever this was.
"Why didn't he use this when he was chasing Roger?"
"He didn't have it then," Dragon said quietly. "It's new. He learned it recently." A pause. "From Artoria."
The Eight Gates, Dragon had concluded during the months since Baltigo, were a technique whose learning curve required decades of prerequisite work before it was even accessible. Garp had spent his entire career building the physical foundation without knowing it was a foundation for anything. The Gates had been handed to him as the answer to a question his body had been asking since the first time he trained hard enough to find the ceiling.
The Baltigo engagement had been — Dragon's assessment, arrived at without sentiment — the most efficiently executed defeat he had personally experienced. The Gate of Opening alone had made Garp faster than anything Dragon's powers could have countered, stronger than the physical gap between their ages should have allowed, and clearer in his targeting than any man running on adrenaline and anger ought to be. The Revolutionary Army's generals had not been poorly trained. They had been outclassed by a margin, and the margin had a name.
Garp let the power that had been moving through him since the Kaimon continue moving.
He found the second door the way you find something you've been told is there — by feeling for it, by understanding the architecture of what the Gates actually were, by allowing the first gate's clarity to guide him to the next. Artoria's instruction had been careful on this point: the Gates were sequential, each one requiring the previous to be open before it could be reached, and the progression was not a mental act so much as a physical one. You did not decide to open the Gate of Rest. You permitted it to open, and then you stayed present for what it did.
"Hachimon Tonkou — Dai Ni Mon: Kyūmon. Open."
Second Gate: Gate of Rest.
Located in the brain, adjacent to the Kaimon — what the Gate of Rest removed was different in kind from what the first had removed. The first gate lifted the restraints on performance. The second lifted the body's understanding of its own limits of endurance. Fatigue, as a concept that the nervous system used to protect tissues from overuse, ceased to function. The accumulated damage from tonight's fighting was still structurally present — the cracked ribs, the orbital fracture, the blood — but the body's registration of those things as reasons to slow down was no longer operative.
Endless. That was the practical effect. He could draw on what remained without the mechanism that would ordinarily have stopped him an hour ago.
The white light held.
"Hachimon Tonkou — Dai San Mon: Seimon. Open."
Third Gate: Gate of Life.
This one was in the spine. This was the last of the gates that fell within what a body could technically survive — the boundary point before the Gates became something other than extreme physical performance. Artoria had been clear about the distinction. The first three were survivable. Damage would accumulate, costs would be paid, but the body could be brought back from the first three. The fourth was where that changed.
What the Seimon released was mass. Muscle tissue throughout Garp's body received the signal that restraint was no longer necessary and responded accordingly — the visible kind of response, the veins, the density, the posture shifting as the frame expanded slightly into what it had always been capable of being if the body's protective instinct had ever allowed it. The skin flushed deep red, then deeper, the blood running hot enough that the color was visible through the pallor of injury.
And the light changed.
White shifted to green — the characteristic color of the vital energy that the Gates worked with, the deep cellular warmth of a body outputting everything it had accumulated, rendered visible by the simple fact that there was now more of it moving at once than the body's surface could contain.
The green glow filled the corridor.
Domino, watching on the surveillance screen with her hand over her mouth, stopped breathing briefly.
Dragon looked at Shanks. Shanks looked at Dragon.
"Three gates," Dragon said. "He opened three."
Black Sperm, at the front of the tide, had gone slightly still. Not retreating. Reconsidering.
Garp looked down at his hands. The green light moved across his knuckles. He turned the right fist over, studying it for a moment with the expression of a man reading something unexpected in a text he thought he already knew.
"Interesting," he said.
He looked up at the black tide.
"Your turn."