— Broadcast—
Seven Tyrants. Moving in a single unit, slow and unhurried, each step leaving an impression in the floor.
From the ruins of the wall, Venom's head emerged — the black surface peeling back from one side of Caesar Clown's face long enough for the scientist's mouth to work.
"Tyrants. Tear apart anything you see."
The authorization transferred. It was all the programming required. Seven pairs of eyes that had been the flat color of nothing shifted to red, and seven bodies that had been walking at a pace designed to communicate inevitability began to run.
Venom pulled Caesar Clown back into the wall. Its actual intention was simpler than combat: take the body, leave the building, find a better host later. Being confined in a facility run by creatures it considered lower life forms was a humiliation it had been cataloguing since the moment of fusion. But before it withdrew, it had left something running. Caesar Clown was genuinely unhinged — even Venom, which had no particular standards in that regard, had noted this.
Garou had been in the process of resuming the Venom situation when the Tyrants committed to their run.
He looked at them.
"Fine."
He closed the distance before the first Tyrant's arm completed its swing, planted his weight, and drove his fist into its torso with enough concentrated force that the body left the floor. It traveled backward through the air and removed two of the ones behind it from their trajectories on the way down.
The straitjacket split on impact.
Garou watched what happened next with the expression of someone updating their assessment mid-engagement. The pressure that the garment had been containing expressed itself immediately: the body expanded at a rate visible in real time, the musculature reorganizing around new parameters, a second set of eyes opening across one forearm, the proportions of the thing becoming something that the original design had not included.
"Every last one of you is disgusting," Garou said. "There is not a good scientist in this building."
The remaining Tyrants that were still upright collided with him and found the same results, in sequence. Two of the ones that fell close to each other began to merge — the biological material at their margins becoming continuous, the combined form producing a protective density at the structural points that the individual versions hadn't had. Larger. Slower to damage. Still not fast enough.
Garou settled into the next stance.
Whirlwind Iron Fist.
The emphasis was speed — not the redirective precision of the Flowing Water Rock-Crushing Fist, but pure velocity applied with surgical accuracy. His arm became something that the eye could track in retrospect but not in real time. Each strike found the division points between merged biological masses and drove through them, separating what the Tyrants had joined with enough kinetic interruption that the regenerative process couldn't close the gap before the next strike arrived.
Pieces did not reassemble quickly when separated at speed. The disconnected flesh lost whatever property made it continuous. What had been Tyrants became, in two minutes, a pattern across the floor.
Garou shook out his hand and looked at the result.
"Satisfying," he said. He meant it. "The mobility these things were proud of — completely useless." He reached down, found the last one still producing movement, and ended the discussion.
The laboratory went quiet.
He became aware of high heels.
From the direction Ada had left, footsteps were returning — but wrong. The cadence was right; the quality wasn't. The sound of a person walking when the person is not entirely in charge of the walking.
Ada appeared first. Her eyes were forward and empty, focused on nothing, carrying herself with the stiff fluency of someone whose body is executing instructions from outside its normal chain of command.
Behind her: a woman who looked like she had been assembled to be looked at, and had made peace with this and turned it into a professional asset. Short golden curls. Blue eyes with the clarity of cold water. White dress, black fishnet stockings, the combination producing a visual result she was clearly aware of and indifferent to. She moved through the wreckage of the laboratory with the comfort of someone entering a room they had already decided belonged to them.
She looked at Garou. She looked at the floor. She looked at Garou again.
"You have some real skill," she said, with the measured appreciation of a professional evaluating a professional. "Breaking into Marine Headquarters for a commission. I haven't seen recklessness of that particular caliber in some time."
Character Note: CP0 — Stussy. Artificial Human.
Vegapunk, who had been assessing his remaining options from his position on the floor, felt something in his chest unclench. He knew who this was. The former Queen of the pleasure district, CP0's particular specialist in a category of operations that required a kind of capability. His savior had arrived.
Garou looked at her and arrived at a practical conclusion: she was not on a bounty warrant he had seen. He did not particularly want to hit women, but that preference had limits, and arrogance was one of them. He had never kneeled for a stranger in his life.
He began to set his stance.
"Stinky man." Stussy's voice didn't change in register or volume. "You only know how to fight. Why don't you kneel?"
Garou's legs took him to his knees before his brain had registered the command as having been issued.
He stared at the floor for exactly the time it took to understand what had happened. Then the fury arrived: not at her, ally — at the fact that his body had simply complied, without consulting him, as though the legs understood the sentence and his actual intentions were a secondary consideration.
He began to fight for the use of his own limbs.
One knee lifted. The effort behind it was visible in every line of his face — cords in his neck, knuckles white, the muscles of his thighs working against whatever had imposed itself on his motor control. From two knees to one. He held there, shaking with the tension of a person who is winning a fight with themselves but has not won it yet.
Stussy watched this with mild interest. She had already crossed the room to where Vegapunk was and was standing next to him with the patience of someone who had all the time available and saw no reason to rush.
"I thought you were impressive," she said, conversationally. "And you did kneel."
Garou did not answer. He was busy.
The charm behind Stussy's voice was not a Devil Fruit ability. It required no activation, no condition, nothing that could be identified and worked around through Haki discipline or combat experience. It simply worked, on the kind of people it worked on, which was most of them. That a master of Garou's caliber was generating this much resistance was information worth having.
She noted it and said nothing.