The moment the Kuja Pirates' fleet rounded the headland and came into view of the G-7 port, the dockside transformed from its usual disciplined order into something considerably less impressive.
Marines who had been running routine patrols suddenly found themselves drifting toward the waterfront. Off-duty soldiers who had been sleeping, eating, or playing cards in the barracks appeared at the piers with an urgency that suggested an enemy invasion. Within minutes, a crowd had assembled along the entire length of the harbor, craning necks and murmuring among themselves.
Vice Admiral Momonga pressed two fingers against his temple and let out a long, suffering exhale.
"I am ashamed," he said quietly. "Truly, deeply ashamed. These are supposed to be the elite of G-7. The way they're acting, Hancock could wipe out this entire base with a single technique and not break a sweat."
Standing beside him, Vice Admiral Doberman watched the spectacle unfold with folded arms. Then, against his better judgment, he laughed.
"Hahahaha. Come now, you have to give these men some credit. Hancock is legitimately worthy of the title. Show me a man who looks at her and feels nothing."
Momonga glanced sideways at him. "Would that include you?"
A pause. Doberman's expression stiffened, though something in his jaw tightened just enough to betray the truth before his words could cover it.
"I was simply... moved by her beauty," he said, with great dignity. "Purely aesthetic appreciation. Nothing else. We watched that girl grow up, for heaven's sake."
"So you would also be affected by her charm," Momonga said, neither as a question nor as an accusation, simply as a statement requiring confirmation.
Doberman turned and leveled a glare at him. "Yes. What of it? Are you going to make a production of this?"
"Not at all." Momonga's mouth curved slightly. "I simply wanted to verify that I wasn't the only one. Hahahaha. If even you feel the same way, I can rest easy knowing there's nothing wrong with me."
Doberman stood rigid for a moment, then let out a genuine laugh despite himself.
"Hahahaha. Fair enough." He shook his head. "The Admiral analyzed this, if you'll recall. Hancock's charm isn't something she consciously controls at this level. No one should possess this degree of natural draw. The Love-Love Fruit is operating passively. The fact that it affects us isn't a failure of our character, it's a testament to how completely she's unlocked its potential. The gap between that fruit's upper and lower limits is enormous, and Hancock sits firmly at the ceiling."
Momonga nodded, something almost like admiration settling into his voice. "Every single one of the Warlords is a monster in their own way. And they're all so young."
"Fortunately," Doberman said, "most of them are ours."
"That's right." Momonga smiled. "Fortunately."
They stood quietly for a moment, and then the lead ship of the Kuja Pirates' fleet eased into its berth with a heavy, creaking groan of timber against the dock. The lines were thrown, the gangplank lowered, and a figure appeared on the deck railing.
Hancock.
She scanned the harbor with the unhurried ease of someone who had grown entirely accustomed to the effect she produced. Her dark hair moved in the sea breeze off the Calm Belt. Her posture, even in that casual survey, carried the unconscious certainty of someone who had never once questioned whether she belonged exactly where she stood.
Her gaze found Doberman immediately. Then it widened.
"Uncle Doberman!"
She waved with sudden, unguarded enthusiasm, which was itself rather disorienting in a woman of her reputation.
Doberman rolled his eyes with the practiced weariness of a man who had endured this particular breach of protocol many times before.
"It's Vice Admiral, you brat."
Momonga watched the exchange with poorly concealed surprise. "You two are actually this close? I always thought Hancock was... difficult to approach."
"She grows on you," Doberman said, with a dismissive wave that couldn't quite hide the fondness behind it. "Give it time."
He had watched her grow up, after all, or as close to it as the circumstances of G-7 allowed. When Hancock had first arrived at the base under Gion's arrangement, she had been seventeen and bristling with an arrogance that came from something entirely different than what it was now. The arrogance she carried today was cleaner. Simpler. It was the unbothered confidence of someone who simply knew they were the most beautiful woman in the world and found the universe's failure to constantly acknowledge this fact mildly disappointing. No trauma behind it. No cruelty. Just a particular flavor of vanity that was, against all odds, almost endearing.
She was, as Doberman had learned over years of acquaintance, actually a very normal person once you got past the surface of it.
But the Marines gathered at the harbor did not know this. What they knew was that the Pirate Empress had appeared on a deck railing above them, and the accumulated anticipation of several hundred soldiers deprived of entertainment had apparently reached a critical pressure.
"EMPRESS!"
"LADY SNAKE PRINCESS!"
"Is that her? That's actually her? I put in a transfer request to G-7 specifically because I heard there was a chance of seeing her in person!"
"With a face like that, even if she weren't a Warlord, I couldn't arrest her. I'd just give her whatever she wanted. Does that count as robbery?"
"I declare, here and now, that I am in love!"
"Shut your mouth, you shameless dog. She's not interested in your greedy staring!"
"My love is pure! It's pure, Lady Snake!"
"Petrify me! Please, petrify me!"
The last shout came from somewhere in the middle of the crowd. No one could afterward determine who had started it. The request was objectively absurd, possibly even suicidal, and yet it carried in it a desperate sincerity that resonated with something deep and unexamined in the soldiers around the man who had said it.
Within three minutes, the virus had spread through the entire harbor.
"PETRIFY ME, LADY SNAKE!"
"PETRIFY ME!"
Hundreds of voices. In unison. Heartfelt.
Doberman turned slowly to look at Momonga.
"I've been gone less than two years," he said, his voice dangerously calm. "Less than two years. What did you do to these men?"
Momonga straightened up with the expression of someone who has prepared a thorough defense.
"I had nothing to do with this. This is clearly the atmosphere you left behind when you were base commander. I'm just as appalled as you are."
"Absolute nonsense," Doberman said flatly. "When I commanded this base, nothing like this ever happened. Not once."
"I find that very difficult to believe."
Neither of them looked at the other after that. It was a point of honor on both sides that neither would claim ownership of whatever this was.
Up on the deck, Hancock had endured approximately as much of it as she intended to. She stepped up onto the railing with the graceful ease of someone who had balanced on ship rails in open sea storms, rose to her full height, and tilted her chin upward.
"You fools."
The crowd went electric.
"I will grant your ridiculous request."
The roar that erupted from the harbor could likely have been heard from Impel Down.
"LADY EMPRESS!"
"DO IT! DO IT!"
Hancock shook her hair once, the black cascade catching the light off the water. Then she raised both hands before her chest, fingers curling together into a single, perfectly formed heart shape.
"Mero Mero Mellow."
The harbor fell silent.
Several hundred men stood in frozen poses of adoration, arms outstretched, mouths still open mid-cheer, perfectly preserved in gleaming stone. The afternoon light reflected off hundreds of petrified surfaces with an almost artistic quality.
Doberman surveyed the scene. He pressed a hand over his face.
"Momonga," he began, turning.
He turned to an empty space.
He looked down.
Vice Admiral Momonga stood beside him as a very dignified stone statue, one hand raised as if making a point, expression preserved in an expression of composed authority.
"Oh, for the love of," Doberman muttered.
He stared at the statue. The statue did not respond, as statues generally do not.
"Were you even shouting? You were shouting, weren't you." He jabbed one finger at the stone Momonga. "You had the absolute nerve to lecture me and you were probably the loudest one out there."
The stone said nothing, because stone says nothing.
Doberman pinched the bridge of his nose and waited, because there was very little else to do.
Hancock came ashore a few minutes later with the unhurried air of someone who had just completed a minor administrative task. Her eyes swept over the stone Momonga and widened with a flicker of genuine surprise.
"Oh, is that Vice Admiral Momonga?"
"Don't," Doberman said.
She laughed, bright and uncomplicated, completely at odds with the Pirate Empress persona that the newspapers loved to print. She gestured at the several hundred stone soldiers arranged in enthusiastic poses throughout the harbor. "Should I release them now?"
"Leave them for a while," Doberman said. "They have rotating holidays right now. They were idle, they were going to cause trouble anyway. Let them enjoy their petrification quietly."
The Calm Belt had its rhythms, and G-7's seven garrison battalions ran on rotation schedules that produced, on any given day, a substantial number of soldiers with nothing particularly urgent to occupy them. When the Pirate Empress arrived, those soldiers needed somewhere to put their energy. Doberman was, despite himself, pragmatic about this. The alternative was worse.
Still, he had not expected quite this many of them.
Despite his instruction to leave them, Hancock unpetrified Momonga within a few minutes anyway. The man showed no remorse whatsoever. He dusted himself off, straightened his uniform, and said, with great seriousness, "I should mention that I've been having some lower back trouble. Petrification actually has quite a restorative effect on muscle strain. It's like being completely reforged. I've read about this."
Doberman regarded him with the expression of a man who has heard many lies in his career and is confident this one ranks among the least convincing.
He said nothing, because some conversations were not worth having.
Instead, he turned to Hancock. "Why are you here? Aren't you supposed to be at G-5? I thought I was the one making port calls this far north."
Hancock tilted her head slightly. "I could ask you the same thing. Weren't you settling into your role as G-5's base commander? Why are you back at G-7?"
"Errands," Doberman said, in the tone of a man who was not going to say more than that.
Hancock seemed to accept this without pressing it. "I came from Amazon Lily to resupply before heading to Alabasta."
"Alabasta?" Momonga straightened, suddenly attentive. "I heard things have gotten complicated down there. Dalmatian was dispatched to Alabasta some time ago and there hasn't been much word since."
"You're at G-7 and you know the Headquarters' movements better than I do?" Doberman said, glancing at him.
"Impel Down's Gate of Justice is half a day's sail from here," Momonga said, with the mild irritation of someone explaining something obvious. "We're practically neighbors."
Hancock swept her hair back from her shoulder with a practiced gesture. "The situation there is a mess, apparently. Crocodile obtained authorization from Mary Geoise to summon the Warlords and have our strength assessed. Honestly, how tedious."
"And you didn't refuse?" Doberman asked.
She glanced around them with the particular casualness of someone ensuring privacy in an open space.
"I heard from Senior Hina that the Admiral is also going. I haven't seen him in two years." A small pause. "It seemed like a reasonable opportunity to make sure he hasn't forgotten about me."
It was not romantic sentiment. Neither Hancock nor Finn had ever shared anything like that, nor would either of them have had the opportunity even if they had wished it. When Finn had first known Hancock, she had been a teenager at G-7, and he had already been stationed at Marineford. Their actual contact over the years amounted to a handful of brief encounters and a healthy amount of correspondence through Gion and Hina.
But Amazon Lily and the Kuja Pirates had built their recent prosperity on the cooperation framework Finn had established for the Calm Belt. The island's economy, its safety, and its future were all threaded through the Calm Belt Development Initiative that bore Finn's fingerprints in every clause. For Hancock, maintaining a visible presence with the Admiral who had quietly made all of that possible was not sentiment. It was sound management.
Besides, she was one of the Warlords. Being an unknown quantity to the most influential Admiral in Marine history struck her as a waste of a perfectly good asset.
Doberman nodded, following the logic without needing it explained. "Come to think of it, you became a Warlord and he never actually met you formally after that, did he? Has he ever assigned you anything?"
"Nothing specific," Hancock said. "Being a Warlord hasn't changed my daily routine much. I still manage Amazon Lily's people, cooperate with the Marine on the Calm Belt operations, and handle what needs handling in our territory. No missions beyond that."
She was quiet for a moment, then a confidence settled back over her features.
"This time, I intend to actually demonstrate something worth noticing. Whatever is happening in Alabasta, I'll handle my share of it cleanly. Let him see that I'm not simply a name on a Warlord document."
"I look forward to the report," Doberman said, with a dry half-smile.
Momonga, who had been following the conversation with the focused attention of a man who enjoyed being informed, leaned in. "Are you going alone?"
"I heard Doflamingo, Jinbe, and Mihawk were also called," Hancock said. She considered this for a moment. "Doflamingo apparently refused outright."
Doberman raised an eyebrow. "He can afford to. He has backing."
There was no need to say from whom. The implication was sufficient for anyone who knew how the board was arranged.
They talked a while longer in the harbor, the sea breeze carrying the smell of salt and woodsmoke from the base kitchens, the stone soldiers arranged in their frozen rapture behind them like a very enthusiastic monument to poor judgment. Eventually, Hancock made her way through the base to arrange her resupply: fresh water, provisions, rope, and several crates of dried goods for the journey south.
One by one, as Hancock moved through the base on her errands, the petrified soldiers were quietly restored to flesh, each of them blinking back to awareness with the faint, dazed expression of a man emerging from a very vivid dream.
None of them seemed particularly regretful about what had happened.
By late afternoon, the Kuja Pirates' ships were fully loaded and the fleet was ready to move. The three warship-grade vessels, their serpent figureheads gleaming in the low sun, turned their prows south.
Alabasta waited.