— Broadcast—
Neither Garou nor Venom could finish the other quickly. The fight had reached a phase of mutual attrition — each hit landing, each hit absorbed, the laboratory around them accumulating new damage with every exchange. Vegapunk used the noise and the rubble as cover and kept moving toward the far end of the corridor, keeping low, trying not to think too hard about what would happen if either combatant noticed him leaving.
He got approximately halfway before he stopped.
Someone was standing at the end of the corridor.
She had not been there a moment ago — or rather, she had been behind a door that was now open, and the door's opening had apparently been triggered by the same sequence of events that had released Venom. She stood with the particular stillness of someone whose internal navigation has simply ceased functioning, her eyes tracking nothing, focused on a point that didn't correspond to anything in the room.
Her hospital gown was too large for her. It pooled slightly around her feet. Black hair fell across her shoulders in unwashed curtains. The face beneath it was pale in the way that months of sedatives and fluorescent light produce — not sick exactly, but drained of the particular quality that presence gives a face.
Vegapunk recognized her immediately.
"Ada? What are you doing here?"
She didn't respond the way a person with full faculties would respond. Her eyes moved toward him — processing the sound, tracking its origin — but the connection between recognition and expression took longer than it should have.
She had been a CP0 operative once. Whatever was left of that training operated below the level of conscious memory. Before Vegapunk finished reading her condition, she had crossed the distance between them, taken hold of his arm, and applied the kind of grip that makes the recipient understand immediately that the person holding them knows exactly where the tendons run.
Vegapunk cried out.
"Where am I?" Her voice was steady in a way that was clearly work rather than ease. "Why was I being held? I want a reasonable explanation."
Vegapunk, whose life and arm were both under pressure, provided one.
Ada had been adopted into the World Government's apparatus young and had spent her career in CP0. She had crossed paths with Vegapunk for roughly a year during the research phase of the second-generation Seraph program — her Mushi Mushi no Mi, Model: Plaga Parasite provided properties he'd needed to study. After that, their connection had been minimal. She had disappeared during the Dressrosa incident, and at some point after that she had ended up here, in a Marine laboratory, being administered sedatives with enough regularity and volume to produce the kind of damage he was currently looking at.
He told her what he knew. He left out what he didn't. He genuinely did not know why she had been detained — she had an adoptive father who had apparently doted on her, connections that should have insulated her from institutional mistreatment. Whatever secret the Marine had wanted from her, he wasn't the one who had wanted it.
Caesar Clown might know, he thought. But Caesar Clown is currently a vessel for an alien predator, which makes that conversation difficult to arrange.
The fragments of Ada's memory surfaced the way drowned things surface — not whole, not in order, but real.
Faces assembled themselves out of the sedative fog: Spandam, his particular anxious deference; Lucci's flat professional contempt; Kaku's easier manner by comparison. The texture of Water 7 at night. The smell of the CP0 facility. Her body could recall things her mind couldn't name yet.
Then a wall.
Dressrosa. She remembered arriving. She remembered the beginning of the mission. After that — nothing. Not blurred, not fragmentary. Simply absent. The effort of pushing against it produced a headache that arrived with enough force to make her close her eyes for a moment.
She let it pass. Filed it as a problem for later. Focused on what was in front of her.
Which was a large piece of the adjacent wall moving inward.
What came through it was Venom — or what Garou's fist had temporarily reduced Venom to. Half a shoulder was missing. Through the gap in the black surface, Caesar Clown's actual face was briefly visible: his cheek, one wide eye, the expression of a man processing a significant number of bad outcomes simultaneously.
He saw Ada.
The annoyance that crossed his face was genuine and entirely his own, surfacing through the symbiote's control for one unguarded second.
"Why did I release you too?" A pause. "How many things did I release that I shouldn't have?"
Then the black liquid closed back over him.
Venom reasserted control, turning the head slowly. It was hungry. It had taken damage it needed to repair, and repair required nutrition, and nutrition — by the hierarchy it operated under — meant the smartest available targets. Two of them were standing right there, looking at it.
Caesar Clown's body would function for now, but it was a poor fit. Garou's recovery speed and his strange adaptive learning ability had made the fight considerably harder than anticipated. If Venom could transfer to a better host — something with the physical construction that the hungry wolf was demonstrating—
The fangs extended. The tongue moved.
First: eat. Then: fight.
The figure that arrived between it and its targets moved the way Garou moved — like impact that had already decided where it was going to land before the arm finished swinging. The punch took Venom through three walls in approximately the time it took Ada and Vegapunk to process that he had arrived.
The walls came down in sections. Dust. The ceiling above one section creaked and held, barely.
Garou stood in the new opening, upright, fists settling back to his sides.
His eyes moved from the hole to Vegapunk to Ada. The hospital gown registered. So did what was underneath it — he was not blind. He was also not interested. In his operational calculus, no matter how a woman looked, that variable did not affect how he fought or what he did. He had no particular investment in the social pressure that usually modified that behavior. He would hit Ada the same way he'd hit anyone else if she became relevant to the situation.
"Vegapunk." His voice was direct without being loud. "I gave you one chance. Hiding behind a woman doesn't change the math."
Ada absorbed this information calmly. The invader was here for Vegapunk. The situation, from her perspective, had a clear shape: she and Vegapunk were both in a burning building, but she had not set the fire, and the fire was not ally interested in her.
If anything, she owed Garou something in the abstract — whatever else his reasons were, the commotion had opened her door. She would have been in that room until everyone forgot she existed.
She looked at Vegapunk from the corner of her eye.
"Is he one of ours?"
"He is an invader," Vegapunk said, pulling himself closer to her and slightly behind. "We have no room to negotiate."
Ada considered this. Vegapunk had not imprisoned her — she was fairly confident of that now. But the year she had spent on Egghead Island as an experimental subject, useful for what her Devil Fruit provided rather than for any quality of her own, was not something she felt particularly warm about revisiting.
The old man pressing himself against her back did not produce a great deal of protective instinct.
She looked at Garou again.
He looked back at her with the flat patience of someone who has all day.