Silence settled over the Void Throne Hall like dust after a long fall.
Im had not moved since sitting down. Her eyes were closed, one hand propped beneath her chin, the other resting loose on the armrest where the butterfly still folded its wings in perfect stillness. She might have been sleeping, or simply waiting for something that had not yet arrived.
Dragon held his breath on the beam.
Finn held his in the dark.
The Five Elders were taking their time.
They hadn't lied to Kong, exactly. They had genuinely gone back for something. But the detour had eaten into the schedule, and so they arrived late to a hall where everything had already arranged itself without them.
Five minutes Finn spent watching Im from the dark recess of the carved beast's eye. He took in what details he could: the pale gold hair, the proportion of the face, the absolute composure in her posture. He had already decided, with some relief, that she was not Donquixote Claudius. The histories were unambiguous on that point: the man who had once ruled the world for over two hundred years had been, by all available accounts, exactly that, a man. This woman was something else entirely.
Eight hundred years old, perhaps. Perhaps older. And yet she looked like someone who had barely begun her twenties.
The thought was unsettling in a way he didn't pursue.
Then footsteps echoed from the far entrance, and the Five Elders walked in together.
Dragon's focus sharpened. This was the part he had been waiting for without knowing he was waiting for it.
He knew the Five Elders. Not personally, but by reputation and by the position they occupied at the absolute summit of the World Government. The highest authority in Mary Geoise. The supreme figures of the Celestial Dragon order. No one above them, no hierarchy they answered to, no power in the world that could compel them.
That was the story, anyway.
So when the Five Elders' eyes moved to the woman sitting on the Void Throne, and no anger crossed their faces, and no challenge rose in their posture, Dragon found himself recalculating rapidly.
They didn't look surprised.
They looked like men arriving at an appointment they had made.
Together, without a word exchanged between them, all five descended to the base of the staircase and dropped to their knees. Heads that had never bowed to any authority in living memory pressed toward the floor. Their voices came in low, careful unison.
"Your servants, the Five Elders, offer their respects to Lord Im."
Dragon stared.
In the pillar, Finn was already steadying his hands and making sure the angle was right.
The butterfly on Im's fingertips went still a moment before her eyes opened.
Those eyes were sharp, the pupils narrowed the way a hawk's narrow when it spots movement far below. They swept across the kneeling Five Elders without particular interest, the way someone might glance at furniture they had arranged years ago and found exactly where they left it.
Then her gaze shifted.
Dragon realized, in the half-second before it happened, that his concentration had slipped. The shock of watching five of the most powerful figures in the world prostrate themselves before a woman no one had ever mentioned had fractured his composure for just a moment, and in that moment his Haki had wavered.
He clamped down on it. Hard. But the disruption had already occurred.
The Five Elders hadn't noticed. They were kneeling with their heads down, eyes fixed on the floor.
But Im's gaze had already moved to the beam.
The butterfly fell from her fingertip. Not gently, not as though startled, simply without vitality, as though whatever quality had made it want to stay there had ceased.
Im raised one slender finger and pointed at the beam.
Dragon was already moving. His body dissolved into wind before conscious thought caught up to the decision, and he came apart into a rushing current that tore toward the hall's exit at speed.
He wasn't quite fast enough.
A narrow burst of force shot from Im's fingertip and punched through the beam where he had been a fraction of a second before. The wood shattered. Splinters scattered across the floor below.
In the dark, Finn blinked.
He'd recognized the technique. The form was different, the execution too refined to be Rokushiki in any Marine sense, but the principle was unmistakable. A finger thrust, concentrated into a single point, fired at range. Something in that family.
Im is using something like that? At her age? That's unexpected.
The Five Elders scrambled. With the commotion above, they had finally looked up, and what they saw sent them stumbling backward.
"Dragon!" The blond elder's voice cracked with shock. "That's Dragon, of the Revolutionary Army!"
The others were already on their feet, the kowtow forgotten entirely.
Im watched the hole in the beam with no particular expression. She didn't look after the direction Dragon had fled. She didn't issue a command or give any indication that the interruption had registered as a problem worth solving.
The Five Elders stood in a cluster at the base of the staircase, stranded between two instincts: the protocol that demanded they remain until dismissed, and the urgency pulling them toward the door Dragon had just used. Neither impulse won. They stood there, visibly unhappy about it.
In the dark point on the carved pillar, Finn stayed completely still.
He had confirmed Dragon's identity the moment the shape of the fleeing figure had become clear. Dragon was here. Dragon had been on that beam. Dragon had just watched five of the world's highest authorities kneel before Lord Im, and now he was somewhere in the castle corridors with that information rattling around in his head.
The complications of that could wait. Right now, he was more focused on something else.
Throughout the silence that followed the Five Elders' failed kowtow, he'd had the persistent, quiet, very uncomfortable feeling that Im's gaze had passed over his location.
Not at Dragon. At the pillar. At him.
He'd told himself it was nerves. The hall was quiet, the tension was high, and the mind filled gaps with what it feared.
But then.
For just a moment, in the space of a single breath, the complete stillness of Im's expression had shifted. Not into alarm. Not into recognition. Just a slight, barely perceptible change around the corners of her eyes, gone before he could be certain he'd seen it at all.
Like amusement.
Finn held the uncertainty, turned it over, and didn't resolve it. He couldn't.
Im's gaze moved away from the pillar and returned to the Five Elders, who were still standing at the base of her throne in the posture of men waiting for a ruling.
She looked at them for a moment.
"Foolish."
One word. Her voice was clear and light, with an unhurried quality to it, almost pleasant to hear. Nothing like the ancient, grave tone Finn had half-expected from someone who had lived through eight centuries. It carried the ease of someone for whom disappointment had long since become a mild observation rather than an emotion.
The Five Elders dropped to their knees immediately, heads down, several of them visibly pale.
They clearly didn't know what the word referred to. Dragon's intrusion, their own failure to prevent it, something in how they'd stood and stared. Any of those, or all of them. None of them asked.
Im rose from the Void Throne.
The motion was unhurried. She stood, gathered the trailing hem of her robe, and descended the stairs at the same steady pace she'd used to climb them. Not toward the Five Elders. Past them, toward the door she had entered from.
"I'm tired," she said, without looking back. "You're dismissed."
And then she was gone.
The hall swallowed her footsteps and went quiet.
The Five Elders remained kneeling on the stone floor for a moment longer, then rose one by one with the stiff, careful movements of men reassembling their dignity.
No one spoke for a few seconds.
"Damn it." The words came out low and tight. "Why was Dragon here?"
"He ruined the master's mood."
"Be grateful she didn't turn it on us."
"What do we do? If we go after him now, he's long gone. We can't throw the World Conference into chaos chasing one man." A pause. "Let's go back. We deal with the conference first."
The decision settled fast, because there wasn't much to discuss. They straightened their robes, exchanged brief looks, and filed out through the main doors with expressions that were somewhere between furious and unsettled.
The hall was empty.
The beam overhead had a splintered hole in it that hadn't been there an hour ago.
The carved stone beast on the pillar near the north wall looked exactly the same as it always had.