The artillery exchange three streets over had settled into a rhythm by the time Doberman's unit hit the entrance line. He stood in the doorframe of a blown-out column with cannon smoke drifting past his shoulder, watching the stalled breach with the expression of a man assessing a chessboard he'd seen before.
"The general told me," he said conversationally, to no one in particular, "that the moment anything went sideways in Mary Geoise, I was to bring my people up here and sort the place out."
Spandine, bleeding from the cheek and reloading with slightly shaking hands, gave him a look that contained equal parts relief and mild exasperation. "Then start sorting."
Doberman's face settled into something more serious. He turned to his unit.
"G-5. Break their line."
What followed was not elegant. The G-5 Marines had not been stationed in the New World for years by being elegant. They came through the entrance with the kind of collective momentum that came from fighting crews who would kill you if you gave them the opportunity to think, and they brought that same energy through the doors of a government headquarters building without adjusting the calibration.
The security force inside was good. They had discipline, positioning, and familiarity with the terrain.
They did not have the G-5's particular relationship with violence.
The line broke in minutes.
Spandine watched it happen with the quiet appreciation of a man who had spent years cultivating relationships with competent people for exactly this kind of situation. "Your Marines are something else."
"Different tools," Doberman said, without particular pride. "Ask us to do an assassination, we'd embarrass ourselves. That's your department."
Across the entrance hall, the fighting had reorganized into a tighter scrum around three pressure points where the remaining security held. Who's Who was engaged near the left corridor, moving fast and using the confined space well, his saber-toothed tiger ability giving him reach advantages that had been enough to hold his opponent up until two minutes ago.
Then a figure came out of the interior and hit him from the side.
Who's Who went through a wall section and landed heavily near Spandine's position, close enough that Spandine stepped back. The agent straightened, shook debris from his coat, and felt his ribs with a careful hand.
"That's impressive," he said, which from Who's Who was an acknowledgment with some genuine weight behind it.
The figure who had thrown him was already announcing itself. A half-transformation bloomed through the man's frame: his body broadened and thickened, black hair pushing through the skin, two great curved tusks rising from his jaw like pale blades. Not a full beast form. The hybrid state, where the strength had been maximized and the intelligence retained.
Doberman tilted his head, reading the shape of it.
"Mammoth?" he said. "No. Nose is wrong." He squinted. "Wild boar."
"Wild boar," Spandine confirmed, watching the creature sweep two CP agents aside with a single shoulder charge. "Don't let the classification fool you. Those tusks are load-bearing."
Doberman's expression did not change, but something in it became interested in a way that had not been there before.
"Good," he said. "I wanted to test the new ability on something worth the trouble."
Spandine's head turned. "New ability? Since when do you have—"
But Doberman was already gone.
He reappeared directly in front of the boar man and raised one finger, extending a finger gun at the man's center mass.
The boar man's response was immediate. "Iron Block."
The Rokushiki technique hardened his body in the instant before impact. He was not Marine or CP, but the World Government's security services trained on the same techniques, and he'd had enough time with them to make the defense automatic.
Doberman's finger went through it anyway.
The hole it left was clean and precise, and the boar man registered it the way a building registers a new window: structurally present, temporarily not a crisis. His vitality was exactly what Spandine had said it was. He charged forward, tusks leading, with the full momentum of several hundred kilograms of transformed muscle behind him.
Doberman stepped back, drew the sword at his hip, and met the tusks with a horizontal cut that arrested the charge through sheer technical clarity.
The boar man was strong. Doberman held it.
For a moment they were static, sword against tusk, and then the battlefield changed.
The blood that had been on the floor for the past twenty minutes, soaking into the stone from a dozen engagements that had started before Doberman arrived, had been background. Evidence of fighting. Something to step around.
It moved.
It gathered first at the edges, then converged, a dark red torrent flowing without a source of motion, without gravity doing anything to explain it, pooling from three directions into a rushing current that swept across the boar man's legs before he could redirect his attention from the sword in his face.
"What—"
He staggered. Not from the blood's weight, but from the shock of it, the sudden wrongness of something that wasn't supposed to be a threat behaving like one.
Spandine had gone still.
"The Blood Torrent," Who's Who said, from somewhere to his left. "There was a pirate, some years ago. Craster. Had a reputation for a while before Admiral Finn dealt with him. Blood-Blood Fruit, Paramecia type. Controls any blood, freely. The man was frightening in concept and mediocre in execution." He paused. "The fruit itself is a different matter."
"Finn got it from Impel Down," Spandine said, mostly to himself. He was watching the blood move and doing the arithmetic. The battlefield was not a small space, and there had been fighting here for the better part of an hour. "On a battlefield, quantitative change becomes qualitative change."
Doberman seemed unconcerned with the boar man's tusks now. He reached into his coat and produced a small bottle, purple liquid inside, and closed his fist around it.
The glass broke in his grip. Not a single drop fell.
Every fragment of liquid was already moving, drawn into the current of blood that Doberman was holding in the air like a patient, until it merged with the torrent completely.
The boar man charged again, wounded and bleeding and determined, and Doberman stepped aside.
He reached out, toward nothing, and pulled.
From the wound the finger gun had made in the boar man's side, a gush of blood erupted outward with sudden, terrible force. Not a slow bleed. A directed extraction, pulled by something that had taken ownership of the fluid inside him.
The boar man's charge ended before it began. His legs stopped cooperating. The transformation flickered, destabilized, the hybrid form requiring reserves of something that was currently leaving his body faster than he could compensate for.
He went down to one knee.
Doberman watched him with his head tilted slightly, the detached attention of a man running an experiment he was reasonably confident about.
The blood he'd taken, mixed now with what had been in the bottle, reversed course.
It went back.
Through the wound. Into the body.
The boar man's expression changed as it entered him. Not pain at first, just confusion, then a dawning recognition that something was wrong in a way that didn't have a precedent for him. His skin began to color badly, purple spreading from the wound site outward, the transformation collapsing entirely as his body tried to address something it had no mechanism for addressing.
He was on the floor within seconds. Within thirty, he had stopped moving.
The process that followed was not something anyone in the room looked at directly for very long. The body continued to change after the man was gone, the contaminated blood finding more of itself in the surrounding area, spreading outward, turning what it touched, a slow dark expansion that smelled of something that had no clean name.
Doberman lifted one hand.
The blood answered, gathering into the air around him, corkscrewing lazily through the space above the floor.
Anything it touched on the way through the remaining combatants ended the fight quickly and permanently. CP operatives and G-5 Marines alike read the situation and moved back, giving Doberman a wide and widening radius of empty floor. No one needed to be told twice.
Ten minutes after he had broken the entrance line, Doberman stood alone in the center of a cleared hall, filthy blood orbiting him at shoulder height, and the bodies of the security force arranged around him in various states that made the specifics of the Blood-Blood Fruit very clear to anyone who needed clarification.
Who's Who had been quiet for a while. He spoke first.
"I'm going to say it. I think he might be a psychopath."
Spandine looked at the scene. He looked at Doberman. He looked at the scene again.
"No question," he said. "Certified."
Doberman, from across the hall, didn't appear to hear them, or perhaps simply wasn't bothered. He was studying the movement of the blood with the focused interest of someone still figuring out exactly what he had.