Finn stared at the corpse for a long, quiet moment.
Over the years, he had expected many things from the Five Elders. Obstruction. Endless political manipulation. That specific, calculated condescension unique to men who had held absolute authority for so long they had entirely forgotten what a real challenge felt like. But he hadn't expected this. Not from a man who had spent his life radiating the cold dignity of the world's highest throne.
Saint Warcury lay in the dust, eyes half-open. The ghost of a smile still clung to his face, as if his dying brain had locked in on one final, petty victory just before the lights went out.
Finn had pushed the man into an anger-induced faint. That faint had left him unconscious and defenseless when the beam tore through the castle. The blast had vaporized a chunk of his spine that no amount of medical care could replace. And yet, in his very last breath, with Finn leaning in to hear the world's greatest secrets, the old man had dangled the bait and intentionally died mid-sentence.
It was on purpose. That faint smirk frozen on his face made it painfully clear.
"Hey." Finn nudged the elder's arm with the toe of his boot. "Are you actually dead?"
The arm flopped back against the rubble, heavy and lifeless. He was definitely dead.
Finn stared at the corner of the elder's mouth. A very specific, familiar annoyance flared in his chest. After a second, he realized with deep irritation that it was respect. Reluctant, grudging respect. He crouched down and brushed a hand over the man's face, closing his eyes.
"He took it to the grave," Finn muttered. "Deliberately."
Stussy sat against a shattered pillar nearby, methodically dusting white plaster from her sleeve. She carried the unhurried composure of a woman who had just survived the partial vaporization of Pangaea Castle and fully intended to remain professionally flawless despite it.
"Revenge for scolding him into a coma?" she offered, her tone perfectly conversational.
"He knew exactly what he was doing," Finn said, pushing himself back to his feet. "He knew he wasn't going to finish. He gave me just enough to ensure I'll spend the next week staring at the ceiling, wondering what else is locked inside that building. That wasn't a dying man clearing his conscience. That was a dying man settling the score."
"Well, you are the reason he was lying there in the first place."
"I know. It doesn't make it any less annoying." Finn swept his gaze around the dark, excavated cavern. "We should find the others."
He closed his eyes and pushed his Observation Haki outward. He kept it tight and measured, letting his awareness flow through the press-press force lattice he had passively woven into the surrounding earth and air.
He picked up their signatures almost immediately. That wasn't the surprising part. The surprising part was the static. The mental image was blurry, washed out by a deliberate wave of interference. Someone on the receiving end was broadcasting their own Haki, muddying the waters. They weren't throwing up a hard block, which would act like a massive beacon, but they were bleeding just enough white noise into the environment to scramble the exact numbers and positions.
Only a handful of people in the world knew how to do that. When an admiral unleashed their Haki, they could read a whole island. To hide from that, you either vanished completely, or you flooded the searcher's radar with junk data. Sengoku was using the second method. It meant the former Fleet Admiral was alive, conscious, and actively managing the disaster zone.
Finn locked onto the source of the interference and raised his hand.
Darkness poured from his palm, forming a dense, concentrated stream rather than a wild flood. It struck the collapsed wall of the cavern, cleanly swallowing twisted iron, shattered marble, and pulverized concrete. The debris simply vanished into the void, leaving a smooth, silent tunnel behind. It was far safer than digging by hand or shifting gravity, especially when he couldn't be sure the God's Abode wasn't prepping a second shot. Every vibration mattered.
Stussy followed close behind, trailing a hand along the cleanly sheared rock wall for balance in the gloom. They left Warcury where he lay. There was nothing more to do for him, and Finn had zero interest in hauling a dead monarch through a subterranean crawlspace.
A few minutes later, the tunnel broke through into Doflamingo's makeshift bunker.
The space looked like the nightmare of a giant, architectural spider. Thousands of razor-thin white strings crisscrossed the room, anchoring the floor to the crumbling walls and the sagging ceiling. Every single line was pulled taut, bearing unimaginable weight. The entire web hummed with terrible tension, vibrating with a low, musical note every time the mountain of rubble above them settled. It wasn't elegant. It was the desperate, frantic work of a man who had two seconds to stop a ceiling from crushing him, built with nothing but adrenaline and miles of wire.
Beyond the strings, glowing a hellish orange-red, was Sakazuki's contribution. A shell of molten rock, at least three meters thick, coated the outside of the string lattice like volcanic armor. The heat radiating off it was suffocating. The air inside the pocket was thick, dry, and bordering on unbreathable.
The surviving royals were scattered around the edges of the room. A few huddled in the corners, weeping quietly into their hands, their regal dignity finally giving way to the sheer terror of the day. Sengoku had likely ordered them to keep it down, because the crying was muffled and laced with shame.
Others were doing their best to project an air of control. They sat with straight backs and rigid jaws, but their wide, panicked eyes betrayed the performance.
Then there was the third group. A handful of older kings stood clustered near the back wall, speaking in low, harsh whispers. They weren't panicking. They were angry. These were men who had survived coups and assassinations, and their first instinct was to plot a way out rather than wait for death.
Sakazuki knelt in the center of the room, eyes closed, hands pressed flat against the stone floor to maintain the magma shell. As Finn's dark tunnel breached the outer rock, the Fleet Admiral's eyes snapped open.
"Someone is eating through the magma layer," Sakazuki rasped.
Sengoku looked up from a badly bleeding delegate. "Finn?"
Sakazuki paused, feeling the shape of the void. "Yes."
The glowing slag at the edge of the webbing parted. The darkness receded, and Finn ducked into the sweltering room, Stussy right behind him. Both were coated in a fine layer of gray dust.
Finn took a slow look around. He registered the groaning strings, the boiling roof, the terrified monarchs, and the suffocating heat.
"Sorry for the delay," Finn said, keeping his voice entirely conversational. "Everyone still in one piece?"
A collective, shuddering breath seemed to leave the royals. The crushing tension in the room shifted instantly. It was the visceral relief of watching the cavalry walk through the door, a sudden drop in the air pressure that Finn found slightly suffocating in its own right. He ignored it.
Doflamingo twitched a finger, parting a section of the string wall so Finn and Stussy could step fully into the center of the bunker.
Sengoku wiped blood from his hands and passed his bandages off to Chief of Staff Tsuru without a word. He walked over to Finn.
"Seven dead," Sengoku stated, answering the question before it was asked. "Twenty-three critical. The rest are stable."
"And you?"
"I'm fine. I took the beam head-on, but the Buddha form absorbed the worst of it." A dry, humorless smile touched Sengoku's mouth. "I haven't taken a hit like that in years. Almost forgot how much it hurts."
"What's the situation topside?"
"Kuzan and Gion are making their push. The castle guard is putting up more resistance than anticipated. And the Revolutionary Army just entered the field." Sengoku's jaw tightened, the muscles ticking under his beard. "Dragon got exactly the opening he was waiting for. We should have the street fighting suppressed within the hour. Once the perimeter is secure, we can extract the delegates."
Finn nodded slowly. Dragon's timing was infuriatingly perfect. Finn had known the Revolutionaries would move on Mary Geoise, but doing it right on the heels of the Marines' own mutiny was brilliant. Dragon let the Marines shatter the World Government's defenses and provide the moral justification, then marched his forces right through the open door without firing the first shot. It was ruthless, efficient, and exactly the kind of play Finn would have made.
"It's quiet," Finn said softly.
"Too quiet," Sengoku agreed, his voice dropping to a low rumble.
It had been nearly half an hour since the God's Abode fired that devastating beam. Thirty agonizing minutes of waiting for the second strike. But nothing had come. If Im had access to a weapon capable of vaporizing half a mountain, and the Marines were pinned in a hole with a hundred helpless kings, a second shot was the only logical tactical move. The silence meant something was wrong on the other end. Neither of them knew what, and neither of them liked it.
But for now, they were blind. They had to sit in the sweltering dark and wait for the surface to clear.
"Saint Warcury is dead," Finn said, breaking the heavy silence. "I was there when he passed."
Sengoku didn't blink.
"In his last breath, he told me that whatever hit this castle was a partial reconstruction of Pluto. Reverse-engineered from old blueprints, not the original ship. He called it Little Pluto. Then he started to tell me there was something else hidden inside the God's Abode, got to the punchline, and died before he could finish."
Sengoku stared at him, his brow furrowing. "On purpose?"
"Completely on purpose. He died with a smile on his face."
Sengoku reached up and tugged at his braided beard, a nervous habit that only flared up when he was genuinely thrown off balance. "Eight hundred years sitting on the throne of the world," he muttered. "I suppose it shouldn't be a shock that they have weapons we've never heard of."
"Little Pluto is bad enough," Finn said, glancing up at the glowing, groaning ceiling. "A knockoff weapon managed to carve a chunk out of Pangaea Castle from miles away. If they ever get their hands on the original, at full power, that's a whole different kind of war."
"Let's focus on the problems we can punch first," Sengoku grunted.
Far above their heads, muffled by thousands of tons of rock and magma, the deep, rhythmic thud of Marine artillery continued to shake the earth.
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