-Broadcast-
Dragon looked at his father's face.
Pain — the kind that the body produces when it has been organized into a wall, when ribs have done things ribs aren't built to do and the surrounding structures have responded accordingly. Garp's expression had the quality of something endured rather than felt, which was somehow more disturbing than an expression of actual suffering would have been. The old man was still thinking. That was the most concerning part.
"You've done enough," Dragon said. He kept his voice even. Not soft — soft would be patronizing, and Garp would respond to patronizing by doing something inadvisable out of spite. Even was the right register. Factual. "The Marine has everything you had to give it. You can stop."
Garp looked at him from the wall.
"You're not a marine." The voice was rougher than usual, the breath behind it shallower, but the tone was exactly the tone Dragon had been hearing his entire life — the one that preceded the Iron Fist of Love. "You're a revolutionary. You've made me lose my standing."
"I'm your son."
"Both things are true." Garp's jaw tightened. "Neither of them changes what I have to do."
He had people to answer to. Not the institutional ones — not the Five Elders, not the chain of command that had always been compromised by the people at the top of it. The ones who had stood beside him and died doing it. The ones who had believed that justice was a real thing and spent their lives trying to make it so. If he let pirates walk out of this prison because he was too hurt to stop them, those people's trust became something he had wasted.
He was not willing to waste it.
The power that had been moving through him since the first gate kept moving.
He found the fourth door the way he had found the others — not by deciding, but by permitting. The Gate of Wound.
"Hachimon Tonkou — Dai Shi Mon: Shōmon. Open."
Fourth Gate: Gate of Wound.
What the Shōmon did was wrong, physiologically. It commandeered the body's repair mechanisms and ran them at a rate the body was not designed to sustain — cell division accelerating past normal parameters, tissues knitting at speeds that the baseline human system would never allow because allowing it would consume too much of the body's finite resources. Lifespan, ally. The Gate of Wound purchased healing with years, and on an old man it purchased very little at a price he could not afford.
The bones moved back toward their correct positions. The torn ligaments caught and held. In less than a minute, the damage that Black Sperm's Multicellular form had distributed through Garp's body was no longer structurally present.
He pulled himself out of the wall.
The Multicellular form watched him emerge. Three meters tall, defined, patient — the expression of something that had extensive prior experience with difficult opponents and had developed a professional interest in surprises. "Humans are more complicated than I expected." It sounded genuinely curious. "What else is in there?"
Garp answered by opening the next two.
"Hachimon Tonkou — Dai Go Mon: Tomon. Open."
"Hachimon Tonkou — Dai Roku Mon: Jōmon. Open."
Fifth Gate: Gate of Closing.
Sixth Gate: Gate of View.
He opened them consecutively, one into the other, the power that the Life Gate had released now given something else to run through — the fifth expanding the body's output capacity, the sixth directing that output into speed. Extreme speed. The kind that reorganized the math on every other variable in a fight by making position into something the opponent could no longer plan around.
The green light that had been steady became brighter. Noticeably brighter — intense enough that Dragon and Shanks, standing back from the engagement zone, had to adjust where they were looking.
And Garp's body was changing.
Not dramatically, not all at once, but visibly — the hair at his temples, which had been gray since before Dragon could remember, was darkening at the roots and then further, spreading. The deep lines of his face softened incrementally. The age spots on his hands faded. The musculature that age had been reducing over decades was being given back — growing, not with the gradual process of training but with the accelerated cellular response of a body running entirely on overdraft.
He looked, standing there in green light, like a version of himself from thirty years ago. Like the Marine hero the stories had described. Like the person who had chased Roger across two oceans and given the Pirate King the only genuine competition of his career.
Dragon stared.
"Is there a ceiling?" he said, quietly, to no one in particular.
Shanks watched beside him, his expression carrying the quality of someone revising fundamental assumptions. He had known Garp for most of his life — the old man who chased Roger, the grandfather who showed up in Luffy's village, the Marine hero who had always been formidable but always old. He had filed "old and formidable" as a category and this was not that category. "I thought my crew worked hard," Shanks said. "He's in his eighties."
"He works at it every day." Dragon paused. "He always has."
The Multicellular form felt the change in Garp's momentum — the steady upward progression of each exchange, the punches arriving slightly faster and hitting slightly harder, the accumulation adding up in a direction it recognized as unfavorable. It had three states. It had used one. The calculation for whether to escalate was being revised.
Garp moved.
The speed of the Jōmon made the threshold where it became difficult to track without Observation Haki at full capacity, and Dragon and Shanks were both suppressed by the Dead Water. They caught afterimages. They caught the sound — a continuous percussive thunder as Garp and the Multicellular form collided in the air, exchange after exchange, neither of them giving ground in any lasting way.
The ears of everyone nearby had opinions about this. Blood was the opinion. Dragon and Shanks retreated further, until the battle was happening at a distance their eardrums could survive.
Garp bled in the air. Black Sperm bled in the air. The Gate of Wound kept paying for Garp's damage as fast as it accumulated, continuously, spending what he had left at a rate that only made sense if winning the fight mattered more than what came after it. The body's reserves were not infinite. The Gates were just very good at pretending they were, for a limited time.
But within that time — within the window of what the Gates permitted — he was faster than he had been at fifty. Stronger. Clearer.
He found the flaw in the Multicellular form the way you find any flaw: by watching until the pattern shows itself. An interval. A rotation of weight that committed the mass in a direction, briefly, that left one point of the form's structure exposed.
Garp's right fist hit that point.
The Armament Haki on his knuckles had taken the green light's quality and the black hardening's density simultaneously, and what landed was both of those things at once — the vital force of the Gates behind the concentrated Armament, delivered to the face of something that had put him through a seastone wall not ten minutes ago.
The Multicellular form's face compressed around the impact. Then the form traveled, rapidly, across the corridor and into the wall on the opposite side.
The wall accepted it with the characteristic willingness of seastone under significant force.
Garp landed. Breathed. The green light pulsed once across his surface, steady.
The wall now had two fresh impressions in it: one from his own earlier introduction to it, one from the Multicellular form's current occupancy. The architectural integrity of the section had been having a difficult night.
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