Moria had been watching Amon's face during the scan with focused attention. When Amon's expression had shifted into something that looked like genuine surprise, Moria's patience had run out entirely.
"Well? What did I get?"
"Your luck held up well," Amon said. "Both of these suit you."
That was putting it mildly. The pairing was almost absurdly tailored. A mobility and cooldown tool for someone whose entire combat identity was technique-dependent, paired with a jutsu that would multiply the reach of those techniques exponentially. If the jar had known who was opening it, it couldn't have done better.
Whether it would be enough to trouble Kaido was a separate question. But it would certainly make Kaido's day less comfortable.
"Both good things?" Perona had materialized at Moria's elbow, eyes bright. "What are they? What did Moria-sama get?"
Moria looked equally expectant.
"Let me show you." Amon held up the boots first. "This one is called the Sorcerer's Boots. The effect is simple enough. They increase your movement speed, and they reduce the cooldown time on your abilities."
He paused, watching it land.
Moria went very still. Then something rearranged itself in his expression in the direction of pure delight.
Speed and cooldown reduction. His two most critical requirements. His close-range combat had always been his weakest point, which meant staying out of reach was survival, and his techniques were his entire offensive toolkit. Both problems addressed in a single item. He stared at the boots the way a starving man stares at a meal.
"Try them," Amon said, holding them out.
Moria didn't need to be told twice. He sat, swapped his footwear on the spot, stood back up, and immediately began running through his techniques.
"Doppelman!"
"Shadow Lance!"
"Shadow Asgard!"
He cycled through several in rapid succession, testing the rhythm of each, measuring the gap between cast and recovery. Then he stopped and stood very still for a moment, processing.
"The cooldown is genuinely faster. Noticeably faster." He looked down at the boots, then up, and the laugh that came out was something between triumph and disbelief. "Hahahaha! Who dares call me the weakest Warlord after this!"
"Congratulations, Moria-sama!" Perona clapped her hands together, pleased for him.
"The speed next." Moria took a breath and moved.
The sound he made leaving the room was a sharp rush of displaced air, there and gone before most people in the room had properly registered the motion. The Thriller Bark crew members who had drifted in to watch stared at the empty space where their captain had been.
"Was that Moria-sama?"
"I barely saw him move."
"What are those boots made of?"
Then the same rush of air came back the other direction, and Moria was standing in the center of the room again, breathing normally, face split into an expression of pure satisfaction.
"More than a third faster," he said. "At least. Possibly more." He looked down at the boots with something that bordered on reverence. "Crocodile wasn't exaggerating at all."
As a combatant built around keeping distance and controlling a battlefield with techniques, gaining this kind of speed changed the entire shape of what he could do. The kiting potential alone was almost unfair. Keep moving, keep cycling abilities, never let an opponent close the gap. With these boots, he could sustain that indefinitely.
"Glad it works for you," Amon said. "Now for the second one. Which is, if anything, more interesting."
"More interesting than these?" Moria looked skeptical.
"This one is a technique. A support technique, specifically." Amon held up the scroll. "It's called Shadow Clone Jutsu."
Blank looks from everyone in the room. The name meant nothing to anyone here.
Moria, who had built his entire life's work around the study and application of shadows, leaned forward. "Shadow Clone Jutsu. What does it do?"
"The name is fairly literal. It allows you to split into multiple copies of yourself. Physical copies, not illusions. Each one is real enough to fight independently and to use your own techniques." Amon watched Moria working through the implications and kept going. "Now think about what that means specifically for you. Each clone generates a Doppelman. Every copy of you fighting produces another shadow construct of its own. You'd be running simultaneous instances of yourself, each one fully armed."
The room went quiet.
Moria stood completely still, working through the geometry of it. His shadow-based abilities, already formidable when deployed from a single source, layered across potentially dozens of simultaneous copies. The tactical picture that produced was something he'd never considered because he'd never had reason to. No technique in this world produced anything like it.
Amon could see the exact moment the full picture assembled itself in Moria's head. The expression that followed was one of a man who has just understood something that changes his relationship to a problem he thought was unsolvable.
His thoughts had turned, inevitably, to Kaido.