— Broadcast—
Garou remained where he was — locked in place, one knee on the floor, the other leg working against the compulsion without making much progress. Vegapunk moved past him and came to stand beside Stussy.
He looked at Ada. Her eyes were forward and empty, the same way they'd been when she walked back down the corridor — present in body, absent in every other sense.
"Stussy." He kept his voice careful, the way he had learned to use with her across years of working in the same building. "She isn't a threat to us. Let her go. She should be allowed to pursue her own freedom."
Stussy turned her head and considered Ada with the evaluative attention of someone who had worked alongside a person long enough to understand exactly what they were capable of. Former CP0. Dangerous in most of the ways that the word implied. Not someone you release without thought.
"If I remove it," she said, "don't come back to me when you regret it."
She stepped to Ada's side and snapped her fingers once in front of her eyes.
The focus returned gradually — like a lamp finding its brightness. Ada blinked, looked at the laboratory around her, looked at Stussy, and then arranged the pieces of the last several minutes into an order that made sense.
"I didn't expect you to have something like that," Ada said. Her voice was even. Her posture had shifted entirely; the sleepy vulnerability of the hospital gown was gone, replaced by the particular alertness of someone who has decided never to be caught at a disadvantage again. "I underestimated you."
Vegapunk stepped between them with the practiced efficiency of someone who had mediated exactly this kind of professional friction before, across years of shared workspaces where people with dangerous capabilities had been required to coexist.
Ada, for her part, had more immediate practical concerns than rivalry. Her memory had a gap in it that started at Dressrosa and ended here. Stussy might know what filled it. Before she could ask, Vegapunk redirected.
"What is happening outside? How did a mercenary get into the science base of Marine?"
Stussy gave them the short version.
Rome was under attack — a coordinated operation, multiple factions, executed in the same window as an assault on Mary Geoise. The connections within the city had been severed in advance. What they called Marine Dispersion had created pockets of isolation throughout the city: different dimensional spaces, corridors that didn't connect where they should, Observation Haki blocked at the outer membrane of each pocket. The Admirals were cut off from each other.
She had been near the science base when she encountered the isolation effect. Her enhanced X-ray vision had allowed her to read the physical structure through the artificial darkness well enough to navigate toward it. She had arrived in time to find a hungry wolf conducting experiments on the building's contents.
"The science base was nearly emptied out by him," she said, with the mild tone of someone describing a minor administrative problem.
The sound of veins was audible. Garou was standing.
Not quickly — it was a process, each centimeter of height reclaimed through an argument between his body and whatever had told it to kneel. The legs that had responded to a single sentence were being overruled, one muscle group at a time, by something more fundamental than instruction. He got to one knee. He stayed there, shaking. He got his feet under him.
And his mouth worked.
"What did you do to me—" the words came out rough and furious— "you witch."
Stussy looked at him with something that wasn't quite amusement but was adjacent to it. It had been a long time since anyone who called her that had retained enough structural integrity afterward to regret it. She studied the lines of tension across his face, the way the willpower was operating in him like a second skeleton beneath the first.
"There's value in this one," she said, more to herself than to Vegapunk. "It would be wasteful to dispose of him too quickly."
Vegapunk, who had seen Stussy's dangerous smile before and understood what it meant for the recipient, allowed himself a moment of private sympathy for the man.
"This is the first time the telepathy has encountered real resistance," he said. "Repeated application will probably generate tolerance. This is the better window to get answers."
He took a moment to explain, for Ada's benefit, what Stussy was.
Vegapunk's most successful first-generation android — the product of bloodline cloning and developmental guidance, not assembly. The process had produced something he had not designed for and had not prevented: a person. No ideological imprint had been installed during her creation. The decision had been deliberate. He did not build switches into the people he made. He was not Caesar Clown.
As a result, Stussy's loyalty to him was not a function of programming. It was the gratitude of someone who understood that the person responsible for their existence had treated them as a life worth living rather than an instrument worth using. In the softest architecture of her internal world, she regarded him as something close to a father. He had never said this to her directly, and she had never said it to him. The understanding existed without requiring language.
The telepathic ability had come later — developed after the Battle of Marineford, during a period when Vegapunk had become increasingly desperate about the trajectory the world was following since Dr. Clover's death. He had needed to know whether a low-intensity version of the Anti-Life Equation's core mechanism could be externalized safely. Stussy had been the test case. She had agreed.
The result was an ability that could rewrite the operational priorities of another person's motor cortex with a sentence, leaving the deeper layers of self-perception untouched — or mostly untouched. A low-end version, as he'd described it. Considerably safer than what the full equation could do. In the right hands.
Stussy's hands were, mostly, right. Her ethical framework had outpaced his cautious expectations, and she used the ability rarely and with what she considered justification. The pirates brainwashed into unwitting intelligence assets. The unhappy households quietly restructured into functional ones. The occasional application to the entertainment district's working population that she described to him with a particular expression that told him the details were none of his business.
She frightened herself, sometimes, with what she could do.
He understood the feeling.
"Tell me who sent you," Stussy said. "Everything you know."
The second application of the telepathy hit Garou while he was still hauling himself upright. The fierce set of his expression began to waver — the determination in his eyes running into something that wasn't argument but wasn't compliance either, a contest happening in real time between what the ability was doing and what his will was insisting on. His mouth opened.
He was still trying to stand while he spoke.
Kurozumi Orochi of Wano Country had commissioned him. The brief had been simple: enter Marine Headquarters during the attack window, extract whatever intelligence was accessible, cause disruption. The deposit had been substantial. A mercenary's annual operational needs covered with margin left over. He had not asked detailed questions about what was generating the attack window, because mercenaries who asked detailed questions about clients' arrangements tended to accumulate enemies faster than fees.
What he knew, at the level of general operational context:
The attack on Rome was a diversion. The real target was Mary Geoise. The Joker Emperor — Buggy, one of the four Emperors — had organized the simultaneous operation. Rome's Admirals were occupied inside the isolation pockets; the pirate cadres drawn from multiple major factions had provided the necessary bodies to sustain it. The other Emperors had no particular understanding of what the Joker Emperor's objective at the Holy Land actually was. They had participated because someone had been willing to test the defensive ceiling of Mary Geoise openly, and none of them had been willing to miss the intelligence that test would generate.
The wealth accumulated by the Celestial Dragons over centuries was a fact everyone in the pirate world understood. One Piece — whatever it actually was — remained theoretical. The holy land's treasury was empirical. That alone was sufficient motivation for a contribution.
Garou finished speaking and went back to the work of standing up. He was almost there.
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