If the verbal exchange had been the opening act, what came next was the curtain rising on the real performance.
Photographs of Lord Im on the Void Throne. Photographs of the Five Elders with their heads to the floor.
These were not allegations. They were not interpretations. They were documentation, and the moment those images began circulating around the round table, everything that had been said in the previous hour stopped being argument and became evidence.
Finn hadn't finished.
"Supreme authority," he said, looking directly at Saint Warcury whose composure was visibly fracturing. "You have held a seat at the top of this world for decades. Seventy-six years of breathing, eating, collecting tribute, and never once using any of it to do anything worth mentioning. You have spent that time accumulating power without purpose and kneeling before a woman whose existence you have been hiding from everyone in this room. And now you want to lecture the Marine about loyalty." He shook his head. "I have never seen anything quite so shameless. You are the highest authority in the world the same way a dog on a leash is the one taking its owner for a walk."
Saint Warcury's eyes had gone red.
His mouth moved. No words came.
Then, without further warning, his face went white, and he pitched forward and collapsed against the table, scattering documents and glasses in every direction, unconscious before he stopped moving.
The conference room went silent for a full second.
Finn stared at the man.
"Really?" he said quietly.
He hadn't expected that. None of the Marine had. The Five Elders had spent centuries as the most insulated, most pampered, most unchallenged figures in the world. No one had ever spoken to them this way in a public setting. No one had ever spoken to them this way at all. Whatever fortitude they had built up over the years had apparently been the kind that required the absence of opposition to remain intact.
It was a small and slightly undignified moment, but it didn't slow anything down.
The photographs kept moving around the table.
And as they reached delegate after delegate, and face after face changed, something that had been building in the conference room for the past hour finally broke through the surface. Kings who had spent years bowing their heads and paying their tribute and watching neighbors get dismantled for minor acts of resistance were looking at proof that the system demanding all of this was not the righteous authority it claimed to be. It was a private arrangement. A single figure on a throne that was supposed to be empty, and five men in front of that throne with their foreheads against the floor.
The anger that came out was not the clean, principled anger of people defending an ideal. It was the messy, long-suppressed anger of people who had been made to feel small for a very long time and were now discovering they had been right to resent it.
It needed someone to start.
Doflamingo stood up.
His expression was extraordinary, a man who had just witnessed an unforgivable betrayal and was refusing to contain his reaction for the sake of decorum. His voice carried across the full width of the room.
"What is this? Someone sitting on the Void Throne? You, kneeling before her?" He threw the photograph down on the table with controlled force. "You have been deceiving us. Deceiving the entire member-state system, deceiving a hundred and seventy kings, treating this entire framework like a theater performance for your own benefit. If you cannot explain what is in those photographs right now, in this room, in front of everyone here, then this matter does not end today."
Several of the delegates near Doflamingo exchanged sideways glances.
The King of Dressrosa had held that throne for less than two years. His outrage at being deceived had a slightly theatrical quality to it that a few of the older delegates found difficult to take seriously. The kingdoms that had been paying tribute for generations, watching their economies drained and their councils ignored, were the real victims of the system he was describing with such fresh indignation.
But no one said so.
Because he was right, and he had been first, and in a room full of people waiting to see if it was safe to speak, first mattered more than credibility.
Within minutes, voices were joining from every direction. A few to start. Then more, finding that the Five Elders were not issuing consequences, were not summoning enforcement, were in fact sitting at the table with pale faces and shaking hands, and deciding that this was the moment to say what had gone unsaid for years.
The blond elder, Saint Saturn, was staring at the photograph in his hand.
His face ran through several colors before settling on something between fury and calculation.
He looked up at Finn.
"You were in that hall," he said. The words were slow and precise. "You took these photographs. You, the Marine, working alongside Dragon and the Revolutionary Army." He said it like a verdict. "You have been conspiring with our enemies."
Finn opened his mouth.
Saturn didn't give him the chance.
"Stussy." His voice was sharp and commanding. "Take your CP agents and arrest these people. All of them. Now."
The conference room shifted. Heads turned toward the CP section of the table.
Stussy was reaching into her handbag.
She produced a pipe, lighter, and lit it with the unhurried ease of someone who had been waiting for her cue. A curl of smoke rose from the corner of her lips. She turned to the Five Elders with an expression of polite regret, the kind a doctor wears when delivering difficult news they have known about for some time.
"My apologies," she said, "to the five of you."
Saturn's eyes narrowed.
"The CP Agency," Stussy continued, in the same measured tone, "was established with a specific foundational mandate. Its purpose is to eliminate internal threats to the World Government system, to preserve the stability of the member-state framework, and to resolve in the shadows what cannot be resolved in the light." She took a slow breath of smoke. "Having reviewed the original charter and the relevant treaty documentation, I have arrived at a legal determination. The five of you, and the individual identified in these photographs as Lord Im, constitute a threat to the foundational integrity of the World Government system. You have exploited structural gaps in the member-state framework to establish concealed sovereign authority that no member state consented to and no World Conference ratified." A pause. "In the name of the Director General of the CP Agency, I am defining you as internal instability hazards. From this moment, the CP Agency will cooperate fully with Marine Headquarters in the restoration of lawful order to Mary Geoise."
The conference room produced a sound that wasn't quite an uproar and wasn't quite silence.
The calculation was visible on every face. The Marine had prepared for this. The CP had been part of the preparation. This was not a spontaneous confrontation; it was a coordinated operation that had been months, perhaps years, in the making, and it had chosen this conference, this room, these hundred witnesses, as its stage.
The Five Elders reached the same conclusion at approximately the same time.
Saturn was on his feet before Stussy had finished speaking. The other three functional elders were already moving, chairs scraping back, robes gathered, making for the exit with the focused urgency of men who had suddenly remembered where their actual resources were.
Not here. In the God's Abode. Guards, weapons, Uranus. Everything that could reverse what was happening was on the other side of the castle.
Borsalino's light arrived before they covered three steps.
The beam was narrow and precise, passing through Saturn's shoulder with the clean efficiency of something that had never learned to hesitate. Blood hit the floor. Saturn staggered, caught himself on a chair, and looked back with an expression of genuine surprise, as though he had not expected the Marine to shoot at a World Conference.
"Running?" Finn was already standing. The smile on his face had an edge to it that hadn't been there during the speech. "From us?"
The gravity came down like a closing hand.
It caught all four of them simultaneously, pressing through the air and into the floor, pinning legs and slowing movement as effectively as chains. The Four Elders strained against it with a force that confirmed everything Finn had quietly assumed: they were stronger than they looked, genuinely stronger, and under normal circumstances that strength would have meant something.
Under the combined weight of the Press-Press Fruit, it meant they were struggling instead of moving.
Then the darkness came up from the floor.
Thick and deliberate, spreading outward from Finn's position like water finding low ground, it wrapped around the resistance the gravity had exposed and added its own weight to it. The sealing property the Dark-Dark Fruit carried moved through the darkness and found the abilities of the Four Elders and pressed against them, not cutting them off entirely but making them heavier, harder to reach, like trying to lift something familiar through deep water.
"The Abyss," Finn said quietly.
The Four Elders were not going anywhere.
The conference room shook.
It was not an earthquake. The rhythm was wrong, and the directionality was wrong, and the sound that preceded it was not the groan of settling stone but something sharper, something like a pressure wave pushed ahead of a moving object.
Every head in the room turned toward the windows.
Finn turned with them. The windows on the eastern wall faced the God's Abode.
There was light coming from that direction. A concentrated, moving column of it, and it was pointed at Pangaea Castle.
He had seen something like this before. In Alabasta
"Pluto," he said, under his breath.
Sengoku had already seen it. His voice cut through the room at full volume.
"Everyone down!"
His body transformed in the same motion, the great golden Buddha expanding outward and upward, one arm swinging through the eastern windows with enough force to shatter the frames, his palm extended and blazing with the concentrated force of his ability, pushing back against the incoming beam with everything he had.
The beam met him anyway.
Fleet Admiral Sengoku's enormous figure was swallowed by the light.
And then the eastern wall of the conference room inside Pangaea Castle ceased to exist.