"Now I understand why ancient smiths spent months just preparing to forge a single magical weapon."
Ornn straightened up from the anvil and immediately regretted it. His lower back sent a sharp protest up his spine. His arms hung at his sides like wet rope, heavy and uncooperative, fingers still curled from hours of gripping the hammer.
He had swung thousands of times today. The octagonal hand hammer wasn't particularly heavy — manageable for someone his size — but thousands of repetitions had a way of making even manageable things insufferable.
And for all that effort, the ingot had reached nine folding cycles.
Nine. Out of one hundred.
"At this rate," he muttered, rolling his shoulder until something popped, "ten months. Maybe eleven."
And that was just the steel. After the steel came the harder problem — finding five Animal-Class Devil Fruit users willing to donate their hearts to his project. Willing being a generous interpretation of the arrangement.
Then whatever came after that.
Then avoiding detection by the Beasts Pirates the entire time.
He exhaled slowly through his nose.
Things are never as simple as they look on paper.
The factory cafeteria was loud and smelled of coal smoke and something that had once, presumably, been food.
Ornn joined the queue and shuffled forward with the patience of a man conserving energy. When he finally reached the front, he received his dinner: twenty millet dumplings — the same grey, dense variety he vaguely recognized from Wano's prison rations — and a side dish of kimchi so dark it had stopped resembling any vegetable in particular.
He ate it in four bites. He was not proud of this.
He set the empty bowl down and waited for the satisfaction that didn't come. The dumplings had done nothing. His stomach registered their arrival with complete indifference, the way an ocean registers a cup of water poured into it.
He stood and walked out before the urge to look at other people's bowls became something actionable.
The arithmetic of survival was becoming a problem. The cafeteria rations barely sustained basic function, and he wasn't doing basic function — he was running a body twice the normal mass through thousands of hammer strikes a day. The deficit would compound. He'd collapse from starvation before the steel was ready.
The sea wasn't far. Fish existed in it. He could smell the ocean from the right angle on a clear day.
But the shackles on his ankles were not a metaphor. They were iron. And even if he somehow slipped out, the surveillance Den Den Mushi network covering Onigashima would flag him within minutes.
He needed a way out of the factory. Or at least a way to the shoreline and back.
How—
A hand came out of the shadow at the corridor's corner and covered his mouth.
The force that followed was enormous — not a guard's rough grab, but something with real power behind it, dragging him sideways into darkness before he'd finished processing what was happening.
His hand went to his pocket before conscious thought caught up.
He'd prepared for exactly this possibility. The half-tongs he'd salvaged from the melted pair — he'd spent idle minutes grinding the broken end against stone until it held a serviceable point. Not elegant. Functional. Something cold and sharp to introduce to whoever thought grabbing him in corridors was acceptable behavior.
He got the improvised blade out and was raising it when a voice stopped him.
Indeterminate pitch. Somewhere between registers, like it hadn't fully committed.
"Relax. I'm not going to hurt you. I just need a favor."
Their bodies were close in the narrow shadow. Ornn processed several pieces of information simultaneously — the voice, the grip strength, the physical architecture of whoever was pressed against his back — and arrived at a conclusion that made him slowly lower the sharpened tongs.
He let out a small, deliberate whine — playing along, buying himself a second to think — and nodded once.
The hand released his mouth.
He turned around.
The figure was nearly his height, which was already unusual. Two horns curved from the head. A Hannya mask covered the face. White kimono, red hakama, a thick shimenawa rope belted at the waist. The wrists bore handcuffs — heavy, deliberate, the kind a parent puts on a child they've decided to contain rather than raise.
On those wrists: Sea Prism Stone.
Ornn looked at the horns. Looked at the handcuffs. Looked at the sheer restless energy radiating off the figure even while standing still.
There she is.
Yamato. Kaido's daughter. The person who had spent years wandering Onigashima like a ghost in her own home, surviving on scraps and stubbornness, calling herself by a dead man's name out of sheer ideological commitment.
What she was doing inside a weapons factory full of armed guards was a reasonable question. Ornn considered it for approximately two seconds before realizing the implication: if she'd gotten in, she knew how to get out.
His interest sharpened considerably.
Yamato extended both arms toward him. The handcuffs caught the dim light.
"You're a Fruit user — one that Kaido's people haven't discovered yet." It wasn't quite a question. "Can you use your ability to remove these?"
She must have read something in his expression because she continued quickly, with the earnestness of someone who had rehearsed sincerity until it became genuine:
"I know how this sounds. But I give you my word — on my honor as a samurai — that if you help me, I will protect you. Whatever comes from this, I won't let it fall on you."
She bowed. Deep and formal, the shimenawa swaying forward with the motion.
Ornn looked at the handcuffs. Looked at her. Looked at the handcuffs again.
"How did you know about my ability?"
"I saw you earlier. In the workshop." A pause. The smile in her voice was audible even through the mask. "The solution is straightforward — pour a small amount of magma into the lock mechanism. When it cools and solidifies, the structure changes just enough that the key below will—"
"Stop."
Yamato stopped.
Ornn pinched the bridge of his nose.
"Is there any chance," he said carefully, "that you don't fully understand the temperature range of slightly cooled magma?"
"...Is it hot?"
"It is significantly hotter than regular fire. It is hot enough, in fact, to detonate the explosive charges almost certainly built into those handcuffs, which would send both of us through the ceiling and several floors beyond it."
Silence.
"Oh," said Yamato.
"Yes."
Another silence, longer this time.
Ornn looked at the Sea Prism Stone cuffs, the horn tips visible above the mask, the genuine confusion radiating off someone who had clearly thought this plan through no further than step one: find magma user.
He sighed through his teeth.
This was, he reflected, exactly the kind of complication that arrived precisely when you didn't need it — carrying a hidden route out of the factory in one hand and a bomb on each wrist in the other.