She gripped the hilt casually and gave the sword a single practiced swing. The scabbard flew from her hand, clattered against the tiles, rolled twice, and came to rest on its side. She left it there without a second glance.
It was a small thing to notice, but Finn noticed it. A person who loved their blade did not treat it that way. For Imlia, the sword was a tool, nothing more.
The blade itself was narrow, barely two fingers wide, its edge unmarked by so much as a scratch. It looked like it had been cast as one continuous piece, no seams, no repairs. Just looking at it from across the room, you could feel the sharpness coming off it.
"Infinite True Void," Imlia said, studying Finn with a thoughtful expression. "I've heard of it for years. This is the first time I've faced it in person. It made me feel genuine danger, even instinctively." A faint smile touched her lips. "Its reputation is deserved."
Finn was quiet for a moment. Then he said, "From everything I've seen since we started, you know us very well."
"To be precise," she said, her tone light, almost playful, "I know all the outstanding people of this era. Not just the Marines." She tilted her head slightly. "Though I will say, you specifically are in a category of your own."
The implication was plain. Among every remarkable person alive right now, something about Finn was different to her.
"So you've made a study of the heroes of this era," Finn said, almost to himself.
Imlia exhaled softly. "Honestly, I should have gone to see you earlier, in person. If I had, I might have sensed the time-space aura on you much sooner, and all of this..." She glanced briefly at the cracked and ruined hall around them, then back to him. "...might have been unnecessary."
The others had gone still. Nobody moved to attack. After what Imlia had just demonstrated against Kuzan and Sengoku, nobody was in a hurry. They watched her, they watched Finn, and they waited.
Imlia turned the sword once in her hand and seemed to collect her thoughts.
"Tell me something," Finn said. "This 'time-space aura.' What does it actually do for you? You're not trying to go back eight hundred years, are you?"
"No." She considered for a moment more, then walked to the throne and sat down in it, settling with the ease of long habit. She laid the sword flat across both armrests and leaned forward on it, resting her chin on interlaced fingers, her pale gold hair falling around her face. She looked, at that angle, almost casual. Approachable.
Almost.
Finn noticed, and set the thought aside. The woman was eight centuries old. His internal calendar had no appropriate category for that.
"Uranus," she said. "Tell me what you know about it."
"That it's not from this world," Finn said. "A spaceship. From the moon, supposedly."
Imlia nodded. "That was the assumption for a long time. Mine included." She paused. "More than eight hundred years ago, we found it. We named it Uranus after the sky-king of myth, and eventually it became what you call an ancient weapon. But roughly four hundred years ago, I discovered something." She let the sentence sit for a moment. "Uranus did not originate with the moon civilization either. They found it, the same way we found it from them. It passed through hands, across worlds, until it landed here."
That shifted something in Finn's mental picture. He listened.
"Since then, I have dedicated a very large portion of my time to understanding it. And I have uncovered something remarkable." The anticipation in her eyes was real. "Uranus has the capability to travel through time and space. Not in the theoretical sense. Functionally. Do you understand what I'm saying?"
Finn thought before he answered. "Not entirely."
"It is not a product of this world. It is not a product of the moon. It came from somewhere else entirely, some other world, some other dimension entirely removed from ours." The faint excitement in her voice had a quality he had not heard from her before — something genuine, unperformed. "And I want to go there."
The hall was completely quiet.
Finn stared at her.
The most powerful person alive, the hidden ruler of the entire world, the woman who had held the strings of every major government and institution for eight hundred years, and her ultimate ambition was to leave.
"But I cannot go back," she continued, and the excitement dimmed slightly, replaced by something older. "Uranus arrived here by accident. There are no records in its database that point to its origin. I taught myself the script, worked through every file, and found nothing that could tell me where it came from. What I did find were the concepts of 'time-space aura' and 'world coordinates.' Together, those two things are what Uranus needs to generate enough energy to cross between worlds. To reach somewhere entirely new." She straightened slightly in her seat. "But finding them has been the work of centuries. I collected what traces of time-space aura I could from this world. I tested anyone who seemed a candidate. Toki, Devil Fruit users with spatial abilities, others. None of them carried what I needed. None of them had world coordinates."
She looked directly at Finn.
"And Uranus itself cannot withstand another trial run. It has one crossing left in it. I have refused to risk that crossing without certainty, because the moment I do, and it fails, everything is over. So I kept searching, kept accumulating, kept waiting." A pause. "I had begun to think it might take another four hundred years. That some new object from another world would have to arrive here by chance before I could triangulate a destination." Her expression shifted into something hard to read — relief, wonder, something close to disbelief at her own luck. "And then I saw you. In the Void Throne Hall, before the Conference. You carry the time-space aura, Rodriguez Finn. Not a fragment of it. All of it. And buried in your soul, deeper than any Devil Fruit resonance, you carry world coordinates. Coordinates pointing to a specific world." She leaned forward. "I do not know where you got them. Perhaps it was simply how you were born. But you are the only person in this entire world who has what I need." A beat. "So cooperate with me. Leave this world behind. Come with me to somewhere new."
The room stayed silent.
Finn's thoughts were moving fast and quietly underneath a still expression.
World coordinates. Something buried in my soul pointing to a specific world.
She was describing Earth. She had to be. Whatever imprint the transmigration had left on him — whatever trace of where he had come from was encoded in his existence here — she had been hunting for exactly that for centuries, without knowing what she was looking for.
And she was asking him, more or less, to help her use Uranus to go back there.
He had absolutely no intention of doing that.
But he said nothing yet, and he kept listening.
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