They met without fanfare, under the earth that belied the marble pageantry above. The corridors that led to the Geoise's subterranean axis were not carved in the public tongue but grown in silence by hands that knew old contracts—runic veins of Voidglass and Starbone, lattices of Seastone threaded through iron, all arranged in geometric logic that confused ordinary senses. Only those who carried the formal keys—or the dust of a Geoise pardon—could read the glyph-lines that lit as they moved. Elsewhere, outside the sight of any map-maker, administrators and functionaries who sold their loyalty for influence adapted petty lies into a thousand bureaucratic covers; but the Geoise did not need lies. They rewrote the ledger itself.
In the quiet chamber beneath Mary Geoise they called the Cortex of Ruin—an apt, dissonant name that echoed in certain ancient ledgers—Valero settled his hands on a slab of smooth, black metal. Corandal and Salandin sat at his sides like carved, living complement. Malodor's voice was low and calm, like an oath. Tallinn's fingers traced a worn loop in the place mat, a small ritual before speech. The five others—the Quiet Circle, lesser-known but no less implacable—sat further back, seen more as instruments than participants. The air smelled faintly of old paper, cleaned stone, and a chemical onyx that could erase memory-tests from a mind within three days when applied correctly.
They did not shout. They did not storm. Panic would be the odor of amateurs. Instead, they listened to the reports fed through a hundred channels that bowed to their will: the Den Den Mushi echoes wired into private channels, the sealed dispatches of CP0, the telemetry of LorBearer archive nodes, and the silent readings of a thing more ancient and more inconvenient—the Nanorb Digest.
The Nanorb digest arrived as a set of visuals in the chamber's center—a mirrored globe that reflected not light but probability. It had been fed the ciphered logs that Beckman and Shanks had left smoldering in the ocean, the fragmentary radiotelemetry, the thin smoke of burned documents and the island gossip that mushroomed in taverns. The digital ghost of the villa-ship shivered across the globe, and where the Black Fruit's resonance shifted there was an unease that made even Valero's eyes narrow.
"No alarms," Corandal said. "No clamoring. No public declaration."
"That is the point," Salandin replied. "A public declaration expands rumor into narrative. We do not wish the public to tell the story before we control the script."
Malodor closed his eyes and inhaled as though tasting the future. "The sequence implies an extraction rather than a raid. Professional, surgical, not a simple pirate band. Evidence suggests Red Hair signature, but also advanced Nen manipulation. If Red Hair is involved, they behaved like an erasure team."
Tallinn's voice, a dry whisper, added the next chord: "And the black fruit's signature—our labs report an anomaly in the nanorb feed. It showed a vision: light, an expanding void, a will embedded in darkness. Not merely darkness—intent. A force that assimilates."
Valero's gaze did not shift. "We will open Level Obscura. Palimpsest Protocol will begin at once." The word landed like a scalpel; no one repeated it. In their world, administrative names were weapons. To invoke Palimpsest was to fold facts and masks into one another until even memory forgot what had happened.
The first motions were quiet, bureaucratic, precise.
CP0 was instructed to return to base under the cover of an "Urgent Audit." Files, manifests, and logs attached to the villa-ship's transit were quarantined. The CP0 teams who had eyes on the villa-ship were told their presence was requested in Mariejois for debrief—a necessary stop for standard procedures. No one could leave; no one could discuss details on open lines. The instruction carried the legal weight of a Geoise signature; it was law made of silence.
Dragon Knights were not summoned like a storm. A Dragon Knight's movement required no trumpet in that court; instead, a shuttle code was sent—a single glyph that moved through the LorBearer conduits. Marius, cloaked as a Lord-Adjudicator in the public view, stepped from a gallery in Gorta without announcing his passage. He was older than most kings, a blade tempered by ceremony and secret serums, his arms inked with sigils that matched the Cortex's runes. His name carried the kind of rumor that frightened port clerks into forgetting a day's paperwork.
"Send Marius," Valero said. "He will not arrest. He will observe, prune, and plant. He will walk as a question in Gorta's market. He will make the ledger tremble and watch what moves."
The directives proliferated like seeds in winter soil.
Dragon Knights, selected for their knowledge of treaties and ancient island lineages, would not fly like a fury; they would slip like ink across paper, untraceable. A strict list of objectives: identify any leak in CP0; thread misinformation through the vassal royalty in Gorta, ensuring that the narrative centred on "mechanical catastrophe" rather than theft; ensure the Blava-Blava's pattern was isolated—no external copies, no whispers, no academic rumination permitted. The LorBearers—those Celestial Dragons whose true labor was knowledge in hidden halls—were ordered to open certain boxes in the Archive only under triple lock. Their hands would place the Nanorb samples into Project Umbra's chamber; this was research that had both scientific curiosity and an element of fear.
Project Umbra was neither a public program nor an academic exercise; it was the Geoise's curiosity written as a black-housed laboratory. It would re-create the nanorb's conditions within perfect, fail-safe bounds: a ring of Seastone anchors, a vacuumed chamber lined with Voidglass, a lattice of starbone conduits. Nen-engineers—the few men and women capable of aligning aura into the precise geometry the lab required—would join LorBearer scholars to model the Black Fruit's signature. Their goal was not to see the future but to make it legible: was the dark vision a prophecy, a characteristic of the fruit's nature, or a manufactured pattern intended to be misread? If it was a weapon, then the weapon needed to be described to the Geoise in immutable terms before it reached others' hands.
Palimpsest Protocol demanded legal artifacts. Ledgers would be rewritten—carefully, elegantly. Manifests edited to attribute loss to engine fire, to aging welds, to improper maintenance. CP0 officers who had direct access would be placed on indefinite leave while "investigating" the very failures they had overseen; the move would be presented publicly as a devotion to transparency while internally it served to bury knowledge. Harbor registries would be frozen through "emergency modernization." Custom houses and trade guilds were to be called upon for pseudo-reviews. Over the next thirty days, dozens of small changes in routine procedure—an audit here, a temporary closure there—would congeal into a narrative that would not dare breach the Geoise's interest.
But the Geoise knew that paper was not always enough. Power had weight, and the world had men who understood it.
Thus came the Drake Nights—shadows that moved between commerce and force. Deployed as merchant convoys off critical ports, they would appear as traders and insurers, but under their hulls carried small strike teams, ships rigged to seize any unregistered submersible or micro-buoy, and teams trained to extract physical signatures from the sea that might tie stolen cargoes back to a vessel. Drake Nights were surgical: they did not engage in spectacle; they erased it. Their orders: comb sea lanes for anomaly signatures, sweep for Seastone ballast patterns, interrogate insurance agents under the pretense of audits, and quietly seize any suspicious submersible while leaving no public trace.
CP0's long chain of command tightened. The mask brigade—the men who had been dispatched to the villa-ship—were to be examined. Questions would be asked, but only the kind that produced paper answers the Geoise could manipulate. Internal logs were to be redacted, and for those whose names appeared in logs, quiet reassignment awaited: a transfer to a diplomatic mission, or a posting to a slow desk in a far port. The Geoise would not punish publicly; they punished via erasure—promotion to exile within the machine of the State.
Even as the elders convened, the Cortex's other systems whirred. Teleportation pads—long buried under the foundations of Mariejois and guarded by triple-lock runes—were engaged. These pads, relics of an earlier age of geometry and void-magic, were not trivial. They required a triad key: one Elder's biometric signature, one LorBearer attestation, and one Cipher-pol incantation. Together, they created a folding in space that transported chosen troops to the inner sanctum used by the Geoise for operations that required no witness. The pads spat out Marius and his small party near the docks of Gorta in silence; no ferry's sails indicated arrival. He walked into the city as if the city had always expected him, his presence a question that policed itself into answers.
Gorta itself was a study in feudal endurance. It was a kingdom named after a Celestial Dragon ruler—proud, ornate, vassal-managed. The capital's officials ran the day-to-day; the Celestial's emblem fluttered from balconies; yet the real strings hummed underfoot. The Gorta royal house, a line of vassals that managed the island and its trade, would be coaxed into cooperation by the Geoise via quiet "offers" and threats dressed as loans. Marius's first task was not to accuse but to learn: who signed which invoice, which captain received which crate, which clerks sat late on certain nights. He moved in markets, tucked a coin beneath a bar table, listened when a fisherman cursed the weather. He watched which ledgers were true and which were circled with a soft pencil for future convenience.
One troubling thread ran on the edge of all their knowledge: Garp.
Garp had become a point of interest—an outlier whose private choices intersected with the Geoise's neat architecture. He had unlocked Nen through an experimental longevity technique traded in half the island; the procedure that had lengthened his lifespan had not been registered with the Geoise. It altered him in obscure ways, bending some of the ceremonial markers that the elders used to separate common men from more useful chattel. It had the accidental effect of making him part-celestial in the pattern of aura—an oddity of classification that the Geoise preferred to keep tidy. It also meant, through blood and marriage patterns, that he had a grandson recorded in some private log as Luffy.
"Monitor Garp discreetly," Valero instructed. "No arrests. No proclamations. He is a node of utility and risk. We will not create martyrdom by overt action. If the boy becomes a center of attention before he is placed, we will lose leverage."
CP0's intelligence wing would place a specialist scholar—an emissary from the LorBearers trained in aura observation—near the ports that fed Gorta, in particular the smaller channels between capital and Fusha. The scholar's remit was narrow: take samples of communal Nen traces, observe for unusual shifts, and report. No arrests. No threats. Only observation. The idea was to maintain close watch on the boy's periphery without nudging fate.
Valero's fingers curled. "If the fruits have been redirected toward East Blue, the initial burn must remain controlled. We will shepherd suspicion, not inflame it. The Palimpsest will convert their breadcrumbs into dust."
Palimpsest moves were methodical acts of erasure. They required not brute power but a choreography of plausibility: engineer paperwork to show that the villa-ship's engines had been compromised by a rare thermal backflow due to an unregistered modification; identify supposed contractors responsible for weld fatigue; arrange a discrete "investigation" that would, in the end, present a plausible error. Most of the world would accept a technical failure. The trade consortium that insured the villa-ship would be compensated quietly. Families would be placated with hush settlements. Rumors would be seeded that the Dragon had misfiled engine logs.
Project Umbra's laboratories, however, would not be satisfied by mere stories. The LorBearers wanted to know: what exactly had the Blava-Blava been showing when the nanorb burned that image of consuming darkness? The answer would determine their next moves. If the black fruit could assimilate powers and convert them into mutable assets, then any user of it could break the Geoise's careful hierarchies. The fruit could, theoretically, make a dog into a dragon or a soldier into an army. That possibility demanded study, containment, or—if containment proved impossible—neutralization.
They never used the word "neutralize" lightly. It meant active steps: chasing the fruit, reclaiming it, destroying any public thread. It also meant deploying Dragon Knights to ensure that the world's seams were not pried open by the wrong hands.
Marius's orders were surgical. Go to Gorta. Do not reveal more than necessary. Find the chain of custody. Search for any sign that the villa-ship's freight had left the harbor in a manner inconsistent with its manifest. Use the Drake Knights as shadow-guards if needed. If any item—especially the Blava-Blava—was traced toward East Blue, report immediately: the Geoise would need to escalate to special measures.
Across the seas, the CP0 recall echoed. Agents came in single-file; their faces were unreadable. Interrogations were procedural; questions were asked by men who took notes rather than by men who shouted. The recall's real purpose was to create gaps in the memory of the responding units: if an investigation could be confined to those whose records could be rewritten, then the truth could be blinded by Palimpsest.
In addition to these tactical moves, the Geoise mobilized their quieter tools: the LorBearers' archival forgeries and the economic departments' lending clout. Treasury oversight would quietly buy off shipwrights and insurers; a "modernization" edict would inject a single man into the harbor registry office who would make sure that a handful of log entries were, by bureaucratic accident, recorded as "lost in administrative transfer." That single entry would be enough; it would cascade across maritime insurance networks and be good explanation for all but the most curious.
They did not overreact. Their security posture remained at "Maximum Shadow," a phrase that signaled full, invisible mobilization but no public alarm. It was the posture of a government that rejected spectacle. The Geoise spoke in directives that stained paper into silence, in legal instruments that cut like scalpels. They enlarged control while minimizing effect.
But there were anxieties even among immortals. The Nanorb vision would not be ignored. Valero studied the replay on the chamber globe. Light. Then an implosive, black bloom. It moved like a predator, and its weight in the digestive air of the vision said that if the fruit's user were permitted to awaken with the black fruit in his hand, certain structural rules of power could collapse. The elders convened a second circle of thought: protocols that belonged not to the CP0, not to the Drake Knights, but to the Dragon Knights themselves.
"Select no more than five," Valero said. "No grand legions. Send them as archivists to the docks and as shadows into the markets. If the fruit is in East Blue, the Dragon Knights must not go calling as knights. They must be merchants, priests, anyone. Silence is our uniform."
They also decided upon a quiet preemptive legal move: to issue a sealed Order of Censure against any CP0 officer whose logs might permit rumors. The Order demanded indefinite administrative duty away from ports, with the threat of public exposure if the officer did not cooperate. The logic was cold and efficient: all that had to happen was to displace nodes of information into those whose files they controlled.
They also authorized a LorBearer outreach to allied kingdoms of trade—a web of academic letters and grant offers designed to encourage scholars who might stumble upon the Black Fruit's signature to report their findings to specific Geoise-certified channels. A thousand small acts of influence were worth more than a single cannon.
Perhaps the most delicate order concerned Garp's grandson, Luffy. He was a point of delicate leverage and, potentially, a narrative weapon. The Geoise did not intend to seize a child. They intended to make sure the child never became a subject of curiosity. Hence the scholar in the ports. Hence the quiet economy of favors. They would watch, and if necessary, they would redirect: a "scholarship," a quiet seaside orphanage stipend, the discreet placement of a guardian who would, if required, steer a boy's path without his knowledge.
When the Dragon Knights and Drake Knights were given marching orders, each unit received a set of spatial maps—schematics of the teleport pads beneath Mariejois, routes of logistic convoys, and the precise coordinates for the Cortex access points. They were given a single paradigm: act as if nothing had occurred. Erase, cover, and file. If anyone asked, they had orders from a higher tribunal to "assist in the investigation." They had no paper that could be publicly referenced beyond the edicts that disguised their mission as an audit.
The Geoise moved like that. No trumpets. No banners. They controlled rumor by owning every channel of correction. Their strategy assumed time: time to reweave reality before curiosity hardened into conspiracy. Their hubs—the Dragon Knights in ports, the Drake Nights in the sea lanes, the LorBearers in the archives, CP0 in quarantine—were interlocking cogs whose teeth were not seen by historians and whose workings would never be engraved in monuments.
And yet, beneath the calm, a force woke.
Project Umbra's labs began their work. The LorBearers' greatest minds—tired figures with new obsessions—took the Blava-Blava's pulsed samples into vacuumed rooms and sealed them beneath Seastone rings. They studied the patterns as if each line were a verse, and found in the fruit's pattern a grammar of assimilation: touch, pattern, recurrence, integration. It seemed to take what it observed and recomposed those observations into something new within itself. Any transformation? Yes. Any limit? Not yet known. This knowledge hardened the Geoise's resolve. Information gave them options: protection, incorporation, or ultimately, nullification.
The elders did not shout. They drew plans. They created codes. They issued the first orders—Palimpsest, Project Umbra, Dragon Knight deployment to Gorta, the Drake scour of sealanes, CP0 recall and purge—each an action in an invisible theater.
Their message to the world would be silence. Their message to themselves was urgency. Their instruments were not guns alone, but laws, edits, and a thousand small lies that settled like fine dust on the world.
Outside the Georgian vaults, the legal world continued its charade. An investigation would be filed, neatly worded. A mechanical failure was easy to accept. The Geoise would not shout of stolen fruits; they would quietly remit an explanation and a small payment. The right steps would be taken, the right seals stamped, and the memory of a villa-ship's loss would become another footnote for students who never asked difficult questions.
And in the quiet between drafts, Valero looked at the globe again. The image of the black bloom lingered. "We will not be the ones to be surprised," he said, and the others nodded.
They would be surgical. They would be precise. They would be invisible. But they would move.
Because some things—especially possibilities that could unmake the neat tables of power—must be met with patient, terrible control. The Geoise's hand closed over the world's ledger, and they rewrote a part of history before the ink had even dried.
Under the ink-black sky of the New World, the Red Force cut through waves that seemed almost luminescent, the water reflecting stars with a tremble as if the ocean itself knew secrets. On deck, Shanks' eyes never left the two Devil Fruits cradled in their respective containment orbs, the black obsidian and the pulsating rubber fruit. The night was calm, almost too calm, as though it knew the storm of destiny the crew carried with them.
Beckman leaned against the rail, his usual calm aura heavier than the humidity. "Three days, two weeks, to get everything ready for your... leave," he said quietly, as if speaking aloud would make the time shorter. His voice carried weight; no words of worry, just observant calculation.
Shanks gave a faint nod. "Two weeks and three days," he corrected. "That's all the time we have to make the territory look lived-in, active. After that, we vanish."
Roo, who had been tending the lower decks, emerged with a grin that barely concealed his concern. "You really think the lads will be ready for three years away from civilization? Especially in that island?"
Shanks' smile was patient, a gentle weight on the night. "They won't know what hit them. By the time we're done, they'll be stronger than anyone expects."
Yasopp's eyes flicked to the horizon, where the sea met nothingness. "And the Drake Nights? They've been deployed, but no one knows where. Could be anywhere along the route." His tone was clipped, a subtle undercurrent of caution. Even he knew the Geoise and their shadow tools never acted without purpose.
Ben beckoned the younger members to gather. The training ahead would not be conventional, nor safe. They were headed toward a deserted island, one overgrown with monstrous fauna that had already begun tearing the land apart from within. From whispered logs captured during the heist, the crew knew something vast and incomprehensible was consuming the island from the inside out. They would need to neutralize it before even beginning Luffy's secret training.
The Red Force approached the deserted island under the cover of pre-dawn fog. The silhouette of twisted trees and jagged rocks rose from the horizon like jagged teeth. Shanks watched in silence, letting his mind trace the map of what had once been a thriving jungle before the monster began its slow feast. The island's decay was eerie, almost deliberate, as though some malevolent intelligence moved beneath the soil and rock.
"Scouts first," Shanks ordered softly. Beckman and Yasopp moved down the rigging, observing the coastline, reading the land through their sharpest senses. Roo and a few others took small rowboats, skimming close to the shore to gather initial samples: twisted vines that had grown in unnatural spirals, rock formations that hummed faintly with residual elemental energy, and footprints too large to be anything known.
Shanks' eyes flicked to the Devil Fruits. Five more waited below deck, each safely ensconced in the containment units specially made for the journey. Though none of his crew needed them, he knew who did. "Luffy will need these. All of them. Every one. And when he does, he will not just survive—he will reshape the world."
Below, the crew began their first layer of reconnaissance. The ground itself seemed to resist their steps; plants shifted subtly as they passed, as though the island was aware. The few birds that remained were unnaturally large, with eyes that gleamed in a predatory intelligence. Beckman crouched behind a shattered boulder, scanning the horizon. "Whatever is eating this island," he murmured, "it's intelligent. It's not just a force—it's a predator with a plan."
Roo and Yasopp joined him, sharing whispered observations. "Could be connected to the Devil Fruits somehow," Roo speculated. "Something resonating with power. Or something trying to guard power."
Shanks remained quiet, letting them theorize. The truth was simple yet terrifying: the creature's hunger had begun on the surface, but it tunneled beneath, corroding core stability of the island. They would need to contain it before it expanded further.
The crew split into teams. Two small groups of scouts moved inland, disguised under thick layers of elemental camouflage, crafted from the unique materials they had gathered during the heist: Voidglass shards fused with Seastone, Stellar alloys that reflected Nen, and even Iceheart ingots for elemental suppression. Each step on the forest floor was measured, leaving minimal trace; each sound muffled, each movement calculated to avoid alerting the island's sentient predators.
Shanks remained aboard the Red Force with the orbs, his presence a quiet authority. Every few minutes, his eyes drifted to the horizon, reading the sea, the sky, and the wind. The patterns of waves could hint at Drake Night activity. He felt the weight of distant eyes, subtle pressures on the aura of the ocean—CP0's presence in the waters, invisible, yet tangible.
"Three days, two weeks," he muttered to himself. "Just enough time."
The first confrontation came sooner than expected. A massive shadow broke through the canopy of twisted trees, the ground itself trembling beneath its steps. The scouts froze, instinctively reading the aura. Beckman's hand rested lightly on his blade, while Yasopp's gun never left his shoulder. Roo readied his cudgel.
The creature emerged—a monstrous fusion of coral, bone, and living metal. Its limbs were both fluid and rigid, a paradox of strength and flexibility. Its eyes glowed with a pattern not unlike the Nen Orb's pulsing signature. This was the island-eater, and it had learned the language of energy.
Shanks felt it through the orbs. The rubber fruit pulsed faintly, recognizing resonance. The black fruit's pulse throbbed like a warning drum. The crew below deck stiffened, recognizing that the first strike of this campaign would define the training ground for the next three years.
The fight was precise. Beckman's movements were a blend of strategic Nen application and careful, surgical attacks. He struck weak points revealed by aura resonance, using the environment against the creature. Yasopp targeted with unparalleled accuracy, each shot feeding into the overall rhythm of suppression. Roo was the frontline, absorbing blows that could have shattered lesser frames, redirecting the creature's energy into traps laid with Voidglass and Stellar alloy.
The monster was relentless. Its attacks tore through the jungle, collapsing trees, shattering stone. Yet the crew pressed, focusing on containment over destruction, understanding that a full annihilation would destabilize the island entirely. They needed it alive for observation—to understand what they were about to train Luffy against.
Hours passed in this brutal ballet. Shanks remained on deck, observing, instructing, calculating. He knew the island's predator was only part of the trial. The real preparation was yet to come: turning a child into a force capable of facing the unknown with mastery over Nen, Devil Fruits, and instinct honed over three years.
By the time the sun broke over the horizon, the creature was subdued, confined by a combination of elemental materials, Nen traps, and carefully collapsed terrain. The island groaned in relief and strain. Shanks' crew allowed themselves a moment of satisfaction—brief, silent, and earned.
Below deck, the five extra fruits hummed with potential, each radiating energy in sync with the subdued predator. They were now ready to be introduced when the time came.
Shanks gathered the crew. "Three days, two weeks," he said, his voice steady. "Our cover remains intact. The world believes we are here. But soon, we vanish. This island, this battle, is just the beginning. What we do here will shape the boy for years. And whatever comes after—we will be ready."
Yasopp and Beckman exchanged a glance, unspoken understanding passing between them. Every observation they had gathered about CP0's strange maneuvers, the Drake Nights' deployment, the subtle shifts in trade and port activity—they were part of a puzzle larger than the island. Shanks' hand rested on the black orb briefly, feeling its warning pulse.
The crew made final preparations. Traps were reinforced, the island's defensive Nen nodes monitored, and patrols rotated to avoid drawing suspicion. Any vessel approaching would be intercepted by natural hazards or illusions created by elemental materials and aura manipulation.
As night fell, Shanks stood alone on the Red Force's prow. The Red Hair Pirates were ready to leave the world behind for three years. Luffy's secret training would begin in earnest on this island, surrounded by monsters, danger, and the raw, untamed power of the New World.
And beyond the horizon, unseen forces moved—Drake Nights hunting silent trails, CP0 gathering whispers, the world government unaware that a child's destiny was being molded in the shadows, a boy who would one day face monsters far greater than this.
For now, the Red Force sailed onward, carrying secrets, fruit, and the quiet weight of years yet to come.