Sengoku stood in the ruined hall and took quiet stock of how far this situation had drifted from what he had imagined.
He had come to the God's Abode expecting the final confrontation. The corrupt mastermind behind eight hundred years of hidden rule, the Marines carrying the weight of justice, a brutal fight with everything on the line. That was the shape of it in his head.
Instead, he was watching Imlia sit on an ancient throne, lean forward on her sword like it was a desk, and ask Finn to run away with her to another world.
She had genuinely offered to hand over everything — the World Government, all of it — in exchange for one person.
And she had meant it.
Sengoku turned this over privately. The most dangerous part of the whole situation was that a small, traitorous corner of his mind could see the logic of it. If Imlia left this world, that was arguably one problem permanently solved. The issue was that the solution required giving her Finn, which was not something he was going to do, regardless of what his practical instincts said.
He kept that thought to himself.
Imlia was watching Finn, waiting for his answer with an expression Sengoku had not expected to see on the face of someone eight centuries old. Patient, but genuinely invested. Like the answer actually mattered to her.
Finn was quiet for a moment. Then he said, with great care, "I'll pass. Long journeys aren't really for me."
Imlia's expression fell. The disappointment was real, unguarded. She recovered quickly and pressed again. "Are you certain? I'll offer anything. Anything for any of them, too." A pause, and then she said, more quietly, "I have not had anyone by my side in centuries, Finn. No one in this world has ever been worthy. Except you. If you came with me, we could..."
"Hey." Gion's voice cut across the room. "Don't even finish that sentence."
There was nothing diplomatic about the interruption. Gion folded her arms and fixed Finn with a look that made it very clear that whatever Finn might have been about to say next, he was not going to say it.
Finn, for his part, had a brief internal moment of mild frustration. He had been about to hear exactly what Imlia was proposing, which was information. He was also, if he was honest, experiencing a fairly straightforward human reaction to being confessed to by the most remarkable woman he had ever encountered, in front of an audience.
He set both of those aside, looked at Gion's expression, and adjusted accordingly.
He squared his shoulders. He let the gravity of the moment settle into his posture. He looked at Imlia and said, in a voice that carried conviction, "Don't waste your hopes on me. I, Rodriguez Finn, Admiral of the Marines and embodiment of justice, will never go along with you."
Gion gave a short nod. Good. That was the right answer.
The hall went quiet.
Imlia sat still on the throne for a long moment. The warmth she had extended throughout this conversation did not disappear entirely, but something beneath it shifted. She had been at the top of this world for more than eight hundred years. She had never lowered herself to ask anything from anyone. Today was the first time. And the answer was no.
When she spoke again, her voice was cooler. "So you would prefer I capture you by force and read the coordinates from your soul that way?"
Finn smiled. "I'd prefer you surrender now, before this ends badly for you."
"Hmph." She rose from the throne in one clean motion, the sword coming upright in her hand, and looked down at them from the raised platform. "You are not in a position to make that offer."
Finn was already moving before she finished speaking.
His eyes went black to the edges, the darkness pressing out from his irises as the Dark-Dark Fruit surged through him. He brought it down into the floor.
"Abyss of Darkness."
The tiles beneath the throne turned black and kept turning. The darkness climbed the legs of the chair, swallowed the armrests, consumed the whole structure in seconds, pulling it into nothing. The throne that had sat at the center of the world's hidden power for eight centuries was simply gone.
Imlia was standing five feet to the left of where she had been, sword in hand, unhurried. She had read the attack the moment it began.
"That sword of yours," she said, glancing at Shindokutō. Her tone had shifted again, into something reflective. "I recognize it."
"Shindokutō," Finn said, raising it.
Something crossed her face. Not quite grief, but close to it. "Shindokutō," she repeated softly. "That boy's blade."
"Claudius?" Finn tried.
"No." She shook her head. "History has never lacked for men of your quality, Finn. That sword was first forged by a great pirate known as Hellscream, Grommash Proudmoore. Over two hundred years after his era, it passed to the Night Lord, Orgrim Khaz'goroth. Then to Donquixote Claudius." A pause. "When I say 'that boy,' I mean Orgrim."
When she said the name, something came into her eyes that had not been there before. Not the bright excitement of talking about Uranus, not the appraising interest she aimed at Finn. Something quieter and older.
An old friend, Finn thought. She's remembering an old friend.
"Why tell me this?" he asked. "Those names don't mean anything to me."
She seemed to notice herself, then. The expression settled back into something more composed. "I saw the blade and thought of him. He called himself the King of the Night. He kept to the Sea of Eternal Night, which meant I could never reach him there." A faint smile. "This sword was his parting gift to me before he died." She raised the blade she carried. "He named it Avalon. The Blade of Promised Victory. He made me promise I would never be defeated in my lifetime, and this blade would be the proof of that promise." She leveled it at Finn. "Are you prepared to lose?"
"Here," Finn said, and the darkness around Shindokutō deepened, gravity and dark-element winding together into the absolute compression of Infinite True Void, the blade going black as the bottom of the sea. "Take that too."
They were provocative words. Imlia smiled at them.
Then she was gone.
Not fast. Gone. There was no transition Finn could track, no blur or afterimage. One moment she was in front of the empty space where the throne had been, and then she was simply not there.
Finn's Observation Haki expanded immediately, the gravity-sense of the Press-Press Fruit extending outward in every direction like lines in still water, feeling for the disturbance of a moving body.
He found it in the instant before she arrived.
She was in front of him, Avalon already falling, carrying the weight of a cut that intended to go through everything in its path.
"Open!" He drove Shindokutō forward to meet it.
He was confident in this strike. He had good reason to be. In seven years of fighting at the highest level, nothing had stopped Infinite True Void. Not Whitebeard. Not Kaido. Not Linlin. Not Shanks. The blade that cut through Conqueror's Haki coating, that destroyed Great Grade swords — it had never met anything it could not pass through.
Avalon stopped it.
Not blocked. Not deflected. Stopped, with a gap of three fingers between the two blades where Finn's strike simply could not cross. He pushed. The resistance did not yield.
"Conqueror's Haki," Finn said, and there was genuine surprise in his voice. "You coated it."
He had seen Conqueror's Haki used as a coating. He could do it himself. But it had never stopped Infinite True Void before, not even when Whitebeard tried.
Imlia's smile was patient. "Taijutsu has a ceiling. Swordsmanship has a ceiling. Physical techniques, Devil Fruits, all of them — every form of power in this world has an upper limit." She pressed forward slightly, and the resistance against Finn's blade grew heavier. "But there is one power without a ceiling. One that cannot be trained to a maximum, cannot be measured and exhausted. What do you think that is?"
He already knew the answer before she said it.
Conqueror's Haki did not grow the way Armament or Observation did, through drilling and refinement and accumulated hours of practice. It grew the other way, through what you had lived, what you had fought through, what you had chosen to become and kept choosing across time. Garp was probably the closest thing to a ceiling it had in this world, and even Garp had not reached eight hundred years.
Imlia had.
Eight hundred years of Conqueror's Haki, growing with every year she had spent at the summit of the world, never once bending.
Finn had not let himself imagine what that number looked like until right now.
"That's right," she said, reading his face. "No limit. The Conqueror's Haki — the power of the king, the force that stands above all others — is the one thing in this world that never stops growing!"
She drove forward.
The pressure of her Haki hit Finn like weather, like gravity, like something that had nothing to do with physical force and everything to do with the basic weight of existence bearing down on a single point. He was pushed back, boots scraping across the tiles, and held his footing through sheer refusal.
Then the aura expanded outward.
It was not aimed at Finn anymore. It was not aimed at anyone. It simply expanded, the way a storm expands, because that was its nature, because it had nowhere else to go, because eight hundred years of accumulated sovereignty had to go somewhere.
Sengoku felt it. Sakazuki felt it. Borsalino, Gion, Kuzan, Tsuru — every person in that hall felt the pressure drop on them simultaneously, the sense of something vast and absolute pressing downward from above, the wordless instinct that said: there is something here that has stood above you for longer than you have been alive.
Above them, the ceiling began to crack. Stone dust fell in slow curtains. The cracks deepened and spread, and then a section of the roof gave way to the sky above, and the sky above was no longer clear.
Dark clouds were moving. They came from every direction, converging over Mary Geoise with the speed of a storm that had no natural cause, drawing in and thickening and flickering with lightning along their undersides as the wind below them reversed direction and began to climb. The thunder that followed was continuous, rolling from one edge of the horizon to the other.
One person. One exhaled breath of authority.
And the whole sky answered.