The moment Borsalino's composure cracked, Fleet Admiral Sengoku was already moving.
Armament Haki surged through his fist in a dark sheen as he drove a punch straight toward Imlia. He was too close to Finn and the others to risk his Buddha transformation, so he kept it human-scale, which was still a considerable thing to receive.
It was still an enormously powerful blow.
But Imlia had clearly spent her eight-hundred-odd years doing more than governing. Against multiple elite opponents at once, she moved like someone who had been in exactly this situation before, possibly many times, against many different generations of power.
As Sengoku's fist closed in, she bent her waist backward with impossible flexibility, palms finding the floor tiles behind her. All ten fingertips dug into the stone and left clean gouges in the thick slab. She used that grip to whip her legs upward, and as her body straightened, those legs coiled around Sengoku's extended arm like a pair of constrictors.
"Fishman Judo," she said, her voice unhurried, almost conversational. "Leg Capture."
Her hands shoved off the cratered floor. She rotated once in the air, taking Sengoku with her through that rotation, and slammed him into the ground. The impact sent cracks racing across the heavy tile in every direction.
Tsuru had been waiting for exactly that moment. She ignored the question of whether her old comrade — and, if the rumors were to be believed, her closest friend — was all right on the floor, and lunged for Imlia's arm as she descended.
The Wash-Wash Fruit activated on contact.
The ability was deceptively subtle, and Tsuru had always known it was stronger than it looked. Unlike raw power-type fruits, hers operated on a different principle entirely, closer to the Childre Fruit or the Love-Love Fruit than to anything in the standard Paramecia classification. It did not need to overpower its target. It only needed to make contact, then render a judgment: once a certain threshold of malice was detected, the cleansing began automatically, stripping the target of resistance for a brief but critical window. Doflamingo himself, a man who operated in darkness as casually as breathing, went pale at the mention of her name. He never once tried to fight her directly.
But when Tsuru caught Imlia's arm and the fruit's judgment ran its course, something went wrong.
Not blocked. Not neutralized. The ability had worked as intended, made its assessment, and returned a result.
The result was: not guilty.
Tsuru stood there for a moment with an expression she almost never wore. Shock.
The woman plotting to rule the world from a hidden throne, who had ordered nations erased and history rewritten, had just been evaluated as honest. Clean. Without ill intent.
Before she could process it, Imlia gripped her forearm in return and sent her tumbling across the hall.
Imlia straightened, shook her pale gold hair back from her face with a motion that managed to look effortless, and glanced at Tsuru with something approaching warmth.
"A remarkable ability," she said. "I have not seen its like in over three hundred years. The last person who carried that fruit gave me quite a bit of trouble."
Chief of Staff Tsuru picked herself up off the tiles. The shock on her face had hardened into something more complicated.
"You deceived yourself," she said flatly. "That's the only explanation."
Even Doflamingo, who had spent his entire adult life practicing a philosophy of deliberate cruelty, still carried some buried register of guilt that the Wash-Wash Fruit could find and pull on. That residual conscience was the mechanism. Even the worst people usually knew, somewhere, that what they were doing was wrong.
The fact that it had not triggered for Imlia meant that there was no buried register to find.
From beginning to end, she had never once believed she was doing anything wrong.
"Deceived myself?" Imlia looked genuinely displeased with the phrasing. She paused, then said with particular care, as if correcting an imprecise translation: "To borrow someone's words — my heart and my actions are as clear as a mirror. Everything I do is just. Good and evil are categories that humans invented for themselves. I, Imlia, do not submit my conduct to human judgment. The only arbiter of my right and wrong is myself. And by that measure, I have never done a single thing wrong in my life."
The hall went briefly quiet.
Then Finn realized why the words felt so familiar.
He had said almost exactly that. To Sengoku. Years ago, when he needed the Fleet Admiral to trust him and he reached for the most convincing language he could construct.
He had not expected to hear it back from the mouth of the most dangerous person on the planet.
How does she know that? When did she—
He let the thought go. Later. Right now, there were more immediate problems.
What he could not set aside so easily was the feeling the words had produced. Not because they were his own words, but because of what it meant that they were genuinely hers. No performance, no rationalization. Imlia had not constructed a moral framework to protect herself from guilt. She had simply never needed one. Her sense of self was so total, so settled, that no outside standard had ever touched it.
Finn had met people who were dangerous because they were desperate, people who were dangerous because they were powerful, and people who were dangerous because they were clever. He had rarely met anyone who was dangerous in the way Imlia was dangerous — not because of what she could do, but because of what she simply was.
The weight of it was not unlike standing in front of Whitebeard at his peak, back when Finn had been considerably less than he was now. That same sense of something fundamental, something that did not need to announce itself.
He felt, for one of the few times in seven years, something close to genuine awe.
"If you never see your own evil, you become the most dangerous kind of person," Kuzan said sharply. Cold air began to rise around him, sweeping across the floor toward Imlia. "Someday you will destroy the world and call it righteous."
"If it were right, then yes, destroying the world would be justified." Imlia said it simply, without cruelty and without posturing. It was just a logical position. She planted her feet and shifted her weight into a low, wide stance instead of moving aside.
Finn recognized the posture an instant before his mouth opened.
"Fishman Karate," he said.
"Fishman Karate — Karakusagawara Seiken!" Imlia called it herself, a half-beat behind him.
The punch went nowhere near Kuzan. It hit the air in front of her and the air hit everything else. A three-hundred-sixty-degree pressure wave rolled outward from the point of her fist, and Kuzan's freezing wall dissolved before it reached her, pushed apart and scattered into harmless mist.
That was not the finishing move.
She opened her empty hand and closed it again, and when she opened it, there was water in her palm. Not summoned from a tank or a canteen. Pulled directly from the moisture in the air, condensed by sheer technical mastery until it was something you could see and feel, a small sphere of it sitting in her grip like she had simply decided it should exist there.
"Fishman Karate — Secret Technique: Buraikan!"
She threw it at Kuzan like a slap.
Kuzan's eyes went sharp. His foot hit the floor hard.
"Ice Shield — Absolute Zero Defense!"
The ice came up around him in a sphere rather than a wall, the rounded surface reducing the impact area, letting force slide off the curve instead of meeting it dead-on. It was one of his most refined techniques. The shape meant it was stronger than it looked, and it looked very strong.
The water ball hit it and the hall shook.
For a moment the cold seemed to be winning, the freezing air working up through the point of contact, beginning to crystallize the water—
The ice sphere detonated. Pieces of it skated across the floor in every direction. Kuzan took three steps backward, each one deliberate, and there was no disguising the fact that he was the one who had come off worse.
His absolute defense. Broken.
"The sword cuts the flesh," Finn said. "The heart cuts the soul."
Imlia looked at him.
Shindokutō cleared its scabbard and came level in front of him, the flat of the blade resting across his palm. The power rising from his hand was not a single thing — the gravity-warping weight of the Press-Press Fruit and the hungry pull of the Dark-Dark Fruit wound together into something that was more than the sum of either part.
"Secret Technique: Infinite True Void."
He felt the familiar sense of becoming weightless, of the space between himself and his target becoming a formality, and then he was in front of her.
She was extraordinarily beautiful. He had thought so the first time he saw her, and proximity did not change the assessment. But the knife moved without hesitation, aimed to cut her in half, because respect and admiration did not change what this moment required.
Imlia smiled at the corners of her eyes, just slightly, and twisted left like smoke given a body. The blade passed through empty space.
Finn turned the cut immediately, no pause, redirecting left after her
She arched backward into an iron bridge, spine curved, hands on the floor, dropping below his attack angle with the same unsettling flexibility she had shown against Sengoku. The blade passed over her. Then she pushed off both palms, flipped herself upright, turned two more rotations in the air, and landed lightly in front of the ancient chair at the far end of the room, the throne that had stood there empty and waiting.
She reached behind it and drew a sword.