-Real World / Onigashima-
Kaido was not a man who took counsel easily, and the room knew this. When every person present had finished explaining why moving against Orochi without better intelligence was premature — when the arguments had been made and acknowledged and set aside — Kaido made his decision anyway. He would go to Kurozumi Orochi himself. Fully armed. Tomorrow.
He had been talked out of nothing. He had simply heard what everyone wanted to say.
Then the Sky Screen shifted.
It moved to the Infinity Castle — to corridors that changed configuration while people were still in them, to the Rome operation already in motion — and what it showed was enough, and interesting enough, that Kaido settled back into his chair and watched.
Tomorrow was still tomorrow. There was time.
-Broadcast — Infinity Castle, Rome-
The moment the Infinity Castle had enveloped Rome, it had taken everyone inside it with the comprehensive impartiality of something that didn't make distinctions. Marines inside the fortress. Marines outside it. All of them drawn in. The building's internal space rearranged around them in ways that no Observation Haki could anticipate, because Nakime's control of the structure was not navigation — it was composition. She decided what was adjacent to what, and she was not random about it.
Helmeppo had been moving through a corridor that kept deciding to be a different corridor when he caught bodies in free fall and used himself as the surface they landed on. He had the physical conditioning of someone who had not wasted the years since Marineford, and he had the bald head of someone who had either made a considered aesthetic decision or had stopped negotiating with genetics. He was not happy about being inside the Infinity Castle, but he was functional, which was better than most of the people currently occupying the same space.
The corridor settled around him.
Across from him, on a blood-red lotus platform that emitted a low, luminescence — the kind of light that came from something between sanctity and threat — sat a young man who looked like he had been composed rather than simply born. Pink hair, fine-featured, the kind of face that occupied a space between categories that made people look twice and recalibrate. He held a string of prayer beads that cast their own faint light.
He looked at Helmeppo with the expression of someone who had been waiting for this exact meeting and found its arrival satisfying.
"It's been a while," Coby said. His voice carried the warm, unhurried quality of someone in a room where all the variables were favorable. "I'm sorry about the hair, Helmeppo. You were already getting uglier every year, and now this."
The prayer beads moved through his fingers.
Helmeppo processed the sight of his former best friend in the Infinity Castle, sitting on a lotus platform in a robe with embroidered patterns that caught the light, carrying Buddhist iconography and the composure of someone who had made decisions and was at peace with them.
Coby, the Sky Screen's character notes confirmed. The Marine's Blood Guanyin. User of the Hito Hito no Mi, Model: Miroku (Human-Human Fruit, Mythical Beast — Maitreya).
Helmeppo threw the Zen staff.
He did not want to talk. There was nothing useful to say, and the staff was already in his hand, and the time between seeing Coby and deciding to hit him with something had been approximately one second. The staff left his grip at range and flew flat toward Coby's head with the straightforward intent of a man who had learned that directness was usually correct.
A silver hand appeared from Coby's left side and caught it.
Not dramatically. Not with visible effort. The staff simply stopped, held at the midpoint of its travel, centimeters from Coby's face. The hand that held it belonged to a middle-aged man with short blond hair and an ordinary face — ordinary in the way that certain people's faces were ordinary, presenting nothing remarkable as a deliberate practice rather than an absence of character.
"Helmeppo." Morgan's voice had the quality of someone who expected to be listened to. "Don't be rude to the Blood Guanyin. You're embarrassing me."
Helmeppo looked at his father.
Character designation: Silver Axe Guardian — Morgan. User of the Suigin Suigin no Mi (Mercury-Mercury Fruit).
The Silver Axe. The man who had held the town at sword's edge on the strength of his son's existence as a hostage, who had slashed Garp with a weapon while Garp was technically not fighting him, who had arrived at Helmeppo's current career as a Marine by providing the precise opposite of a model to emulate. Helmeppo had not seen him since the night everything had ended — the night Garp had resolved the situation and Morgan had lost everything, and Helmeppo had started over with nothing.
Now Morgan was standing in the Infinity Castle, guarding the Blood Guanyin, wearing the posture of a man who had found somewhere he belonged.
"You raised me," Helmeppo said. The word raised carried the weight of its irony cleanly. "You held me over the town with a sword. You hit Garp and then you acted surprised when it didn't work out."
"That's family. I was educating you."
"You were using me as leverage."
"Same thing."
Coby, on the lotus platform, watched this with genuine entertainment. He had the expression of someone who appreciated good theater and had arranged to have some. He caught Helmeppo's eye and allowed himself a small, appreciative applause — slow, deliberate, the gesture of a connoisseur.
"Silver Axe," he said, to Morgan. "Go talk to him properly. If you can bring him to our side, you've done something worth doing."
A look of straightforward satisfaction appeared on Morgan's face. He had been waiting for the order. There was no complexity in his relationship with this task — it was a father educating a son, which was something he understood, and the fact that the son was a grown and capable Marine with years of genuine training behind him was just the variables of the current version of the conversation.
He stepped off the elevated position and landed in front of Helmeppo.
"Let me see what you've become," Morgan said. "Impress me. Don't make me feel like I wasted my time on you."
Helmeppo had not come to be impressed. He had not come to have this conversation at all. The Zen staff that Morgan had caught flew back toward him under the guidance of his right hand — he had already recovered the trajectory, already redirected, the motion completed before Morgan had finished speaking.
The staff passed through Morgan's chest.
Not through armor. Through the man's body itself — entering at the sternum, passing through the space where organs should have been, exiting at the back. A clean channel, staff-width, straight through. And through the channel, instead of the things a body should contain, flowed silver liquid — the cold gleam of mercury under light, filling the space the staff had displaced with fluid efficiency, closing behind the exit point as the staff cleared.
Morgan looked down at his own chest. The channel sealed. The silver surface smoothed. He rotated his shoulder experimentally and found it unimpaired.
"Still throwing things at people," he said. "You haven't changed as much as you think."
The Suigin Suigin no Mi had made him something the staff couldn't injure in any conventional way. The silver liquid body filled damage before it registered as damage, maintained function through what would otherwise be incapacitating injury, and did so without apparent limit on the current exchange's terms.
Helmeppo looked at the closed wound in his father's chest and updated his read of the situation.
This is going to be more complicated than a thrown staff.