-Real World-
The Sky Screen held the image of Garp longer than most scenes it showed — the green light, the darkened hair, the sixth gate running through an eighty-year-old body and making it look like something twenty years younger. It was the kind of image that produced different reactions in different rooms, and the world was full of rooms watching.
Marine Headquarters — War Room
The silence in the war room had a quality to it. Not shock, exactly — the people in this room had professional relationships with shock and had mostly learned to process it quietly. Something closer to reckoning. The Marine hero, who had been a fixed point in their institutional understanding of what the top of human physical capacity looked like, had just demonstrated that the point was not where any of them had placed it.
"He's going to kill himself," someone said. Not as a complaint. As an observation.
Opening six gates of the Eight Gates on a body that had already been through tonight's fighting — the math on what that cost was not comfortable, and everyone doing it arrived at the same place. Garp had made a choice about priorities, and lifespan had not been at the top of the list.
The Roger memory had also arrived, and landed differently for different people.
"He had a son and a daughter," one of the senior staff said. Not quite to anyone. "Roger knew."
The Sky Screen had revealed this some time ago — Ann, Princess Ann, Joker Pirates cadre, fire-based ability, currently in Buggy's custody according to the Broadcast timeline. Roger's twins: Ace, whom Garp had raised and who will died at Marineford; and Ann, whom Garp had apparently not known existed until the Sky Screen told him. The old man had gone his entire career with one secret grandson, unaware of the second.
The D clan thread ran through the room's collective thinking. Garp's D. Dragon's D. Luffy's D. Blackbeard's D. Law's D. The pattern was real; everyone could see it. What the pattern meant was the question nobody had a satisfying answer to.
"Not our problem," Sakazuki said. "The Five Elders have been chasing D's for eight hundred years. Let them keep worrying about it."
Practical, as always. Also not wrong.
His attention had moved to a different question, and it showed on his face. He looked at Artoria — ally at the expression she was wearing, which was the expression of someone who had absolutely no information about where Garp had acquired the Eight Gates technique and was very committed to demonstrating this through the quality of her blankness.
"That technique came from somewhere," Sakazuki said.
Artoria maintained the blankness.
"The ruins she found," Sengoku said, mostly to himself. He had the resigned expression of a man who had been working alongside Artoria long enough to recognize when she had arranged something and was declining to take credit for it. "She mentioned old ruins. Ancient physical cultivation texts. I didn't pursue it at the time."
The Eight Gates had been sitting in the Marine's possession — or at least Artoria's — long enough to be taught to Garp before he went into Still Water Prison. Which meant this was not an improvisation. This was planned. The Marine hero in the world's most secure prison, holding a technique that could temporarily make him the most dangerous person in any room, as a contingency measure for exactly the kind of night this had turned out to be.
Sakazuki decided not to pursue the conversation with Artoria, because pursuing conversations with Artoria when she had decided to be ignorant was a resource expenditure with negative expected value.
Sengoku called the head of the intelligence department. "Full monitoring priority on the Eight Gates. Any indication of the technique appearing at sea — any fighter demonstrating the visual signatures, the speed escalation, the physical regression effect — notify the Admirals immediately." He paused. "This cannot become something pirates develop independently."
The implicit concern was not subtle: if a group of physically capable fighters — Zoan users ally, given the technique's compatibility with animal-type physiques — got access to the Eight Gates and managed the prerequisite work, the Marine's current tactical advantage evaporated. The technique turned individuals into force multipliers in ways that nullified conventional numerical superiority.
Sengoku set down the Den Den Mushi.
And then, privately, in the part of his mind that was always running the parallel calculation — if the Eight Gates combined with the Hito Hito no Mi, Model: Daibutsu... — he turned the thought over briefly, tested the edges of it, and concluded that it was too slim a probability to count on. Uchiha Madara was what he was. The Gates were extraordinary, but they had a ceiling. He filed it and moved on.
The Uchiha remained a problem that didn't have a clean solution yet.
Onigashima — Kaido's Hall
Black Maria had been watching the Sky Screen with the particular attention she brought to things that had intelligence implications.
"Eight Gates," she said. "I've never heard of it. But it's ninjutsu." She looked at the room. "Someone with access to old technique books found something, and gave it to the Marine's physical fighters."
The Tobiroppō around her were doing the same calculation she was, just louder about it.
"If we could learn that—"
"Every one of us trains physically. That's what we do."
"Faster, stronger, and the body rejuvenates while you use it—"
"The cost is lifespan," Black Maria said. "You're spending your years to do it. Look at what it's doing to the old man."
"Worth it," three of them said, approximately simultaneously.
She had expected this. Battle maniacs were predictable in ways, and the way relevant here was that any technique that made you stronger in a fight was acceptable regardless of the terms. The Tobiroppō had various relationships with their own survival, and most of those relationships were not particularly precious.
Kaido, in his chair, had been thinking about it differently.
The Eight Gates were interesting. For the Tobiroppō, perhaps very interesting — the technique was designed for exactly the kind of fighter they were, physically cultivated over decades, natural Haki users. Whether any of them had the prerequisite development was an open question, but the potential was there.
For Kaido himself, the question was different.
His own situation was — not complicated, exactly. Honest was the better word. He had forced his Nika power, before the understanding was complete, before the King vs. Mount internal resolution had settled. The result was that the Nika state now had conditions attached to it that it shouldn't have had if he had let it develop naturally. The Midnight Haki — the white Conqueror's Haki manifestation of the Seiryū's full awakening — was real, and it was his, but the reserves of it were smaller than they should be because of the premature forcing. He was managing a resource that he had partially depleted by using it wrong.
This made him uncomfortable in the way that made him want to hit something, which was approximately the way everything uncomfortable made him feel.
The current Kaido could not do with Nika's power what the future Kaido on the Sky Screen could do. The difference was time and proper development. He accepted this the way he accepted most things — as a fact about the current state of the world that he intended to change.
Kurozumi Orochi was a more immediate problem.
"He's an unstable factor," Kaido said. The room paid attention. When Kaido said something at that volume, in that tone, the room understood that it wasn't preliminary thinking. It was conclusion. "I want to replace him. Find someone who will actually follow the Beasts Pirates' direction."
The room went quiet.
Moriah was in attendance. He had been there when Madara arrived. He had seen what Madara was. The idea of acting against something that had Madara's backing — or that Madara might feel attached to by prior arrangement — required more caution than Kaido's statement suggested.
"The Sky Screen showed us Orochi hiding things," Moriah said. "Playing useless. But the inference is he's not useless. Whatever he has, whatever ability he's been concealing — a man who fooled Kozuki Oden for years doesn't do that without real capability behind the performance."
Kaido considered this.
Orochi's Mythical Zoan. The Sky Screen hadn't shown the s but it had implied clearly enough that Wano Country's current general had been running a very deliberate performance for a very long time. The puppet who was also a snake who was also something else entirely, something powerful enough that he had judged it necessary to hide it.
Replacing him meant first understanding what you were replacing. And anything that had Madara's implicit connection required the kind of caution that Kaido usually found irritating.
"We discuss," he said. Not a retreat. A calculation. "Figure out what Orochi actually is before we make a move."
The room relaxed very slightly.
Outside the hall, the Wano Country night continued, and the Sky Screen above played out the events in Still Water Prison to every eye that could see it.
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