Time rolled back to the exact moment the beam tore into Pangaea Castle.
A massive golden hand breached the mountain of shattered stone, pushing upward with slow, grinding force. Sengoku hauled himself from the wreckage. His great Buddha form was still active, radiating a dull, fading light through the choke of pulverized rock. Blood leaked down his chin, warm and metallic, and a high-pitched ringing drilled into his ears, drowning out the roar of collapsing architecture.
He had thrown his shockwave head-on against that beam of light. It had not been enough. His bones ached with a deep, vibrating trauma he had not felt in decades, back before Finn took the admiral seat, back when Sengoku bled on the front lines instead of managing them from a desk. His body held together, as it usually did, but his internal organs felt bruised and shaken.
He coughed, spitting a dark clump of blood into the dust, and let his golden form dissolve. He stood up as a normal man in a haze of thick, choking smoke.
The eastern half of Pangaea Castle was simply gone. Dust hung heavy in the air, coating the back of his throat, but the silhouette of destruction was unmistakable. The conference room was gone. The entire wing it had occupied was erased. In their place sat a smoking, sheer-edged crater, offering a view of the God's Abode that no one was ever meant to see.
His first thought was not about tactics or retaliation.
There had been over a hundred royal delegates in that room.
Sengoku scrambled over jagged slabs of masonry. He let the shifting, grinding sounds of settling stone guide him downward into the collapsed heart of the building. The air grew stifling and heavy as he descended, navigating tons of marble and iron that had been twisted into shapes the builders never intended.
He found a pocket of space melted out of the bedrock. Searing heat washed over him from below.
"Sakazuki," Sengoku called down.
The glowing, molten ceiling of the cavern shifted, cooling slightly at the edges as the magma receded. Sakazuki's voice rasped up from the stifling dark.
"Fleet Admiral."
"Casualties. Report."
"Seven dead. Twenty-three serious injuries." Sakazuki paused, letting the heavy, suffocating silence fill the gap. "We responded as fast as we could. Borsalino, Garp, and Doflamingo covered the angles I couldn't reach. The rest are alive."
Sengoku let out a harsh breath he had not realized he was holding, displacing a small cloud of ash.
Seven dead kings meant seven nations without rulers. It was a disaster. But when he had watched that room erupt into blinding white destruction, he had done the dark arithmetic in his head, and he had prepared himself for a total wipeout. Seven was a miracle.
He dropped down into the cavern.
The heat radiating from Sakazuki's magma canopy was oppressive, but beneath it lay a marvel of desperate engineering. A dense, shimmering lattice of white strings stretched across the expanse. The razor-thin threads anchored into the surrounding debris, bearing the weight of thousands of tons of crushed stone. They hummed and vibrated under the immense pressure, but they held firm. Doflamingo had not hesitated for a second.
"Finn?" Sengoku asked.
"Not buried with us," Sakazuki replied. His tone was entirely flat, carrying the quiet certainty of a man who knew that worrying about Finn's survival was a waste of breath.
Sengoku accepted this and turned to the immediate nightmare at hand.
Nearly a hundred kings were huddled in the suffocating dark of a collapsed building, right in the middle of a warzone. They were the Marines' most valuable political shield and their most dangerous liability. Until the royals could be extracted, every heavy hitter in this pit was effectively pinned. Any clash between the monsters trapped in this rubble would bring the rest of the castle down on the delegates, regardless of whose side they were on.
So they waited.
Five minutes bled by. Then, at the far edge of the cavern, the debris shifted. It did not crumble or fall. It simply vanished. A localized sphere of pitch-black darkness seeped through the cracks, quietly swallowing tons of stone before receding in deliberate, rhythmic pulses.
The gap widened, and Finn stepped through.
He brushed a layer of grey dust from his sleeve, surveying the battered kings, the humming strings, and the glowing magma roof. His face settled into a flat, unimpressed line. It was the look of a man who had expected a disaster and was thoroughly annoyed to be proven right.
"Cruel," Finn muttered to the empty air.
He had not been in the room when the beam struck. In the fraction of a second before the blast, he had weighed his priorities. Sakazuki could survive a hit like that. Borsalino and Garp could handle themselves. The flag officers were not his concern.
Stussy was a different story. She held the authority of a fleet admiral, but she possessed a fragile, mortal body. And she had been sitting dangerously close to the Five Elders, who were the obvious targets of the strike.
He had wrapped her in his darkness and dragged her out.
Now, Stussy sat against a slab of ruined marble in the space Finn had cleared. She was covered head to toe in white plaster dust, but her posture remained flawless. She smoothed her skirt with careful dignity, entirely unhurt, projecting the calm of a woman who had survived much worse than falling masonry.
Beside her lay Saint Warcury.
He was taking shallow, wet breaths. That was the only positive thing that could be said about his condition.
The elder had been unconscious when the attack hit, his body already pushed past its limits by Finn's earlier confrontation. He had woken up just in time to register the blinding light, but not in time to move. He took the blast with zero defenses.
Finn's eyes flicked to the elder's side. The damage was catastrophic. A massive portion of Warcury's lower back was simply gone, cauterized at the edges but bleeding heavily from the center. There were no medical supplies here. The man was ancient, the wound was fatal, and the math was undeniable.
Warcury was awake. The sheer agony had shocked him back into the waking world. He lay flat on his back, staring up at the jagged rock ceiling. His face had settled past the twisting grimace of pain into a pale, terrifying stillness.
Finn stepped closer, looking down at him. The Five Elders had been the opposition for years. They were the architects of the corrupt system Finn had spent two decades dismantling. But it was purely business. You could tear down a man's empire without hating the man himself.
"You're dying," Finn said. His voice was level, stating a simple fact of nature.
Warcury did not flinch. He had already reached the same conclusion.
The elder lay quiet for a long moment, the only sound the ragged drag of his breathing. Slowly, his eyes drifted from the ceiling to Finn.
"Im," Warcury wheezed. Each word looked like it cost him a month of life.
"Almost certainly," Finn agreed.
"Inside the God's Abode." Warcury paused, his chest hitching. "There is a small Pluto. I was unconscious for the impact, but I saw the end of it. That was a weapon attack. Not full-scale. A partial construct, built on recovered technology. They have been developing it for years."
Finn went perfectly still.
When the beam had erased the wall, he had recognized the terrible, consuming quality of that energy. He had seen something like it in Alabasta, years ago, in a very different context. He had filed the thought away at the time.
"A small Pluto," Finn repeated.
"Not the original. Nothing close to the original." Warcury's voice was thinning out, fading into the dust. "But the technology was preserved. Partial reconstructions. Mary Geoise has been working on them since before this era. In the God's Abode, there is also..."
The elder's voice gave out. He choked on a breath.
Finn leaned down, his shadow falling over the dying man. "What else is in there? Finish it before you go."
Saint Warcury looked up at him. For a second, his wrinkled, blood-spattered face was entirely unreadable. Then, the corners of his mouth twitched. With the absolute last drop of his fading strength, the dying elder smiled. It was a look of pure, spiteful satisfaction.
"If you're unhappy," Warcury whispered, his voice laced with genuine pleasure, "then I'm content."
He let out a short, rattling sound that might have been a laugh.
Then a wet hiccup.
Then he stopped moving.
Finn stood perfectly still, staring at the motionless body as the dust settled around them.
He turned his head to look at Stussy.
"He died happy," Finn said, his tone entirely flat. "I'm choosing to find that irritating."