There was little to do inside the sweltering rock bubble except think.
Finn leaned his shoulders against a slab of fallen masonry, arms crossed over his chest, turning Saint Warcury's final, spiteful words over and over in his head. He thought about the precise timing of the strike. He thought about the dead air that followed it. For half an hour, the God's Abode had fired a single, devastating shot and then gone entirely silent, leaving a hundred royal delegates trapped in the wreckage while the Marines' heaviest hitters sat there with them.
The rhythm of the attack didn't make sense. It gnawed at him.
"Fufufufufu."
Doflamingo dropped down from the string lattice, landing lightly beside him. He stretched his neck with the loose, insolent ease of a man who had decided that being buried under a mountain of rubble was simply beneath his dignity. "We came all the way up here to cast a Birdcage," Doflamingo mused, a dry chuckle in his throat. "Instead, I'm the one sitting in a cage. Life has a terrible sense of humor."
Finn's eyes flicked toward the warlord.
A bird in a cage.
Trapped here.
Delaying time.
"Wait." Finn pushed himself off the rock, his posture straightening sharply. "That clever old bastard."
Doflamingo raised an eyebrow from behind his shades.
"Saint Warcury wasn't warning me about the God's Abode," Finn said, the pieces snapping together with sickening clarity. "He was ensuring I'd hesitate. He fed me just enough intel to make whatever is in that building feel like a massive, unknown threat. He knew I'd slow down. That blast wasn't meant to wipe us out. It was meant to dump a hundred kings into the dirt right next to us." Finn dragged a hand through his dust-caked hair. "We're not protecting them. We're being held hostage by them. They are the cage."
Doflamingo went quiet, the amusement draining from his face. "And the silence since?"
"Whatever else Im has locked in that vault isn't ready yet. They need time. They know we won't launch a full-scale assault on the God's Abode with a hundred royals trapped in the crossfire. So they gave us a damn good reason to sit still, and now they're waiting." Finn slammed a fist against his thigh, the sharp smack echoing in the hot air. "Perfect timing. If that beam had hit ten minutes later, the conference would have been adjourned and the room empty."
The logic was flawless and deeply irritating. Im had chosen the exact second the royals were most vulnerable. A second shot would force the Marines to abandon the kings or die trying to shield them. And Warcury's dying smirk was the final, brilliant layer of the trap: he had planted enough mystery to ensure that even after the kings were evacuated, Finn would approach the God's Abode with extreme caution.
The elder had spent his last breath buying Im a few precious minutes. Whether it was blind loyalty or just a final, spiteful act of defiance against Finn, the result was the same.
"We don't have a lot of options here," Finn muttered.
Doflamingo nodded, his usual grin replaced by uncharacteristic, grim sobriety.
Then, Finn froze.
"I'm an idiot," he stated flatly.
Doflamingo turned to look at him.
"Spandine brought CP-9 with him." Finn was already unhooking the Den Den Mushi from his belt. "CP-9 has a Door-Door Fruit user. Blueno can open a portal directly into this cavern and walk everyone out in three minutes."
He flicked the receiver up. The connection caught almost instantly.
Spandine's voice drifted through the speaker, dripping with the warm, eager tone of a man who had been desperately waiting to be useful. "Admiral! How are things on your end? Is there anything I can—"
"Do you have the Door-Door Fruit user with you?" Finn cut in.
A brief pause of surprise on the other end. "Yes, sir. You know about him?"
"Send him to us right now, we need—"
The stone wall next to Sakazuki's magma shell suddenly flared with light.
A single, blinding bolt of lightning punched through the molten rock like a needle through thin silk. The strike was surgically precise, burning a perfect, clean hole through the volcanic barrier without singeing a single one of Doflamingo's structural threads. A cool draft of outside air rushed through the gap. Through that newly opened door, her sword Konpira catching the dim glow of the magma, walked Gion.
She took one sweeping, professional look around the chaotic cavern, registered the surviving kings and the heavy atmosphere, and then looked directly at Finn. "Not too late, I hope?"
Finn's eye twitched violently.
He had just figured out the perfect solution to their problem. And she had simply walked through the wall and solved it first.
"Admiral? Admiral, are you still there? Should I send the agent to support you?" Spandine's voice buzzed from the Den Den Mushi, sounding genuinely confused.
Finn looked at Gion, who offered a small, knowing smile. He looked down at the snail in his hand.
"No," Finn sighed, rubbing the bridge of his nose. "His hobby is bartending, isn't it? Have him make coffee. I'm going to want a very large cup after this is over."
A very long, profoundly confused silence stretched across the line.
"...Coffee, sir?"
"Good coffee. The Five Elders' private office probably has excellent beans. Help yourself to their stash."
Spandine, a man who had survived a long, treacherous career by being exactly as useful as the situation demanded and not one inch more, recovered beautifully. "Understood, Admiral. When you return victorious, I'll have the finest cup in all of Mary Geoise waiting for you. You have my word."
Finn hung up.
Miles away, in a ruined headquarters building, Spandine pulled a small, leather-bound notebook from his breast pocket. He clicked his pen and carefully wrote: Admiral's new preference: coffee. He underlined it twice.
Who's Who, currently dragging an unconscious government official across the marble floor by his collar, paused to watch the exchange. "What the hell are you doing?"
"Advancing my career," Spandine replied smoothly, slipping the notebook back into his pocket.
Gion's field report was sharp and efficient. The castle guard had been entirely broken and pushed back behind the God's Abode's perimeter walls under heavy Marine pressure. The main streets of Mary Geoise were secured. The route to the ruins was clear, and extraction could start immediately.
Once the order was given, the evacuation moved with military precision. Finn and his officers cleared the rubble from the inside, widening the breach, while Marine squads swarmed in from the outside. Within minutes, the surviving royals were being rushed through a heavily armed corridor of Vice Admirals toward the secured sectors of the holy land. Medics rushed in with stretchers, triaging the critically wounded. It was a massive, loud, and complex operation, and the entire time, the God's Abode sat silent behind its high walls, watching them.
No second shot came.
That silence spoke louder than artillery.
By the time the final, shaken royal delegate was escorted clear of the ruins, the Marine front line had consolidated in a tight ring around the God's Abode's outer wall. Finn had already made his decision.
He turned his back to the fortress, looking over the assembled command structure, and began barking orders without a word of preamble.
"Doflamingo. Birdcage. Now. I want all of Mary Geoise locked down tight."
Doflamingo blinked behind his shades. He had been standing shoulder-to-shoulder in a rigid Marine formation for just long enough that the sharp, authoritative bark of the order triggered a reflex he didn't know he had.
"Yes," Doflamingo answered. His tone was clipped and immediate. It sounded entirely too much like a disciplined Marine.
He caught himself a second later, glancing around at the sea of white coats, and muttered, "Everything for justice, or whatever the line is." Being surrounded by this much rank-and-file discipline was clearly doing strange things to his brain. He stepped back from the front line, raising his hands, and began weaving the sky.
"Doberman. Onigumo. Kesha." Finn snapped out the names in quick succession.
The three Vice Admirals stepped forward in perfect unison.
"Take your units and finish mopping up the rest of Mary Geoise. Clear everything outside the God's Abode. No armed resistance leaves the field breathing." Finn paused, his eyes narrowing slightly. "Coordinate with the CP Agency's operations."
Doberman, who had served under Finn long enough to know exactly what 'coordination' meant when it came to cipher pols, gave a single, hard nod. Onigumo's grim face didn't twitch. Kesha acknowledged the order with a sharp salute.
"Everything for justice," the three men rumbled together, turning on their heels to march back to their units.
"Hina."
She stepped out from the second row, back straight, her expression an unreadable mask of calm.
"You have the front line. Defensive posture only. No one leaves the God's Abode. No one enters without my direct order." Finn caught her eye, holding her gaze for a second. "Hold the line."
Hina threw a crisp, flawless salute. "Everything for justice."
The massive military machine settled perfectly into place around him. Finn finally turned back to face the God's Abode. The outer wall was a towering slab of thick stone and reinforced iron. It was the defensive shell of a place that had ruled the world for eight centuries without ever needing a fortress, but had built one anyway just in case.
He felt Sengoku step up quietly to his left side.
"I've already arranged everything," Finn said, before the former Fleet Admiral could even open his mouth. He shot Sengoku a quick, sideways glance. "With your permission, of course."
Sengoku gave him a long, flat look. It was the exact expression of a man who had just watched someone break into his office, rearrange all his furniture, and then ask if he liked the feng shui. "So you issued all the deployments, commanded the entire field, and then remembered I was technically still the Fleet Admiral?"
"I remembered."
"When there was absolutely nothing left to assign."
"...Yes."
Sengoku stared at the iron gates for a long time. Then, with the slow, heavy sigh of a man deciding to just lean into the absurdity of the situation, he muttered, "Everything for justice."
Finn dropped his hand to the hilt of his sword, Shindokutō. His fingers curled around the familiar, worn grip with the muscle memory of a thousand battles. As he drew the blade from its sheath, the dark, oppressive aura clinging to the steel seemed to swallow the ambient light, casting long, unnatural shadows over the pavement.
He walked slowly through the ranks of waiting Marines, stepping past the front line until there was nothing between him and the towering wall of the God's Abode.
Somewhere behind that wall, whatever Im had been buying time for was waiting.
Finn's eyes narrowed to sharp slits.
"Gravity Blade," he said. His voice was quiet, almost entirely conversational, completely at odds with the killing intent rolling off him.
The air around the dark steel warped and twisted as the gravity bent to his will.
"Tiger Bite."