The Leukocyte King's scythes carved through the air, each strike a thunderclap that sent shockwaves rippling across the heart chamber. Marya danced backward, Eternal Eclipse shrieking as it parried a blow that would have split a battleship. The blade's void veins pulsed angrily, inky tendrils now snaking up her neck, but she pressed forward—each step closer to the tumorous core, each heartbeat a drumroll of desperation.
"Room!" Law's voice cut through the chaos. His sphere flared, enveloping the colossus in a surgeon's grid. Kikoku flickered, and with a snarl, he unleashed a barrage of Takt strikes—telekinetic slashes that peeled back layers of bone-plating like the skin of an overripe fruit. The King roared, ichor gushing from a hundred wounds, but its six scythes retaliated in a whirlwind, forcing Law to retreat.
"The core's shielded!" Law barked, veins bulging as his Room strained against the Void's corruption. "Three layers of armor—I'll strip them. You strike!"
Marya didn't nod. She lunged.
The King's scythes converged, a scissoring death-trap, but Law's Shambles swapped her position with a chunk of fallen bone. She rematerialized above the colossus, blade plunging toward the exposed core—only for a spiked tail to whip upward, deflecting the strike. The impact numbed her arms, and she crashed into a fleshy wall, the breath knocked from her lungs.
"Again!" Law demanded, his Room flickering as he dodged a scythe. "Trust the cut!"
This time, they moved in sync.
Law teleported behind the King, Kikoku stabbing into a joint between armor plates. "Gamma Knife!" he hissed, and the blade flooded the colossus with radioactive agony. The King staggered, its movements slowing—a split-second vulnerability.
Marya was already airborne, Eternal Eclipse held aloft. The void veins in her arm burned, the sword's hunger merging with her own. "For Vaughn!" she screamed, plunging the blade into the core.
The world erupted in light and shadow.
The core shattered—a supernova of darkness—and the Leukocyte King's roar became a death rattle. Its scythes disintegrated, bones crumbling to ash as the heart chamber quaked. Law grabbed Marya's arm, yanking her back as the floor beneath the colossus collapsed, swallowing it into the Primordial Current below.
"Move!" Law dragged her toward the core's pulsing mass, now exposed and vulnerable. Behind them, the city screamed—walls bleeding, arteries rupturing. The Dawnless City was dying, and it would take them with it.
Marya's vision blurred, the void veins now creeping past her jawline. But the core loomed ahead—a grotesque orb of throbbing meat, its surface etched with Poneglyphic warnings.
Almost there.
Together, they ran—surgeon and swordswoman, the line between salvation and annihilation thinner than a scalpel's edge.
The core pulsed—a grotesque, living planetoid of meat and malice, its surface slick with black ichor that wept from pores the size of cannons. Poneglyphs glowed across its hide, their ancient script a warning screamed across millennia: "Here lies the sin of genesis. Turn back." The air thrummed with the Primordial Current's dirge, a basso profundo that vibrated in the teeth, the bones, the soul.
Marya staggered, Eternal Eclipse dragging behind her like an anchor. The void veins had reached her jaw now, spiderwebbing across her cheek in inky filaments. Her breath came in ragged gasps, each exhale tinged with the same bioluminescent mist that choked the chamber. Law's hand clamped her shoulder, his grip clinical, unyielding.
"Your sword," he ordered, amber eyes locked on the core. "One strike. Precise."
She laughed, the sound raw and jagged. "You think it's that simple?"
"It's surgery," he snapped, Kikoku's crimson eye narrowing. "Cut the rot. Nothing more."
But the core reacted.
A tendril of flesh lashed out, snapping toward Marya—not to attack, but to caress. It froze inches from her face, quivering, before peeling open to reveal a lipless mouth. The voice that emerged was Elisabeta's.
"Marya… you came."
She recoiled, but the tendril pursued, its words a honeyed poison. "The Void isn't destruction. It's rebirth. The Current… it can bring him back. Vaughn. Your mother. All of them."
Law's Room flared, severing the tendril. "Ignore it. The Void lies."
But the core's surface rippled, forming a tableau—Vaughn alive, laughing; Elisabeta hunched over her notes, smiling; Mihawk's blade crossed not against her, but beside her. The visions pulsed with the warmth of a sunlit memory, each frame etched into Marya's retinas.
"It's not real," she whispered, more to herself than Law.
"No," he said coldly. "But the temptation is. Strike. Now."
The core's flesh parted, revealing a fissure—a bullseye of throbbing, tumorous tissue. Law's Room enveloped it, Kikoku humming as he marked the strike zone. "Aim here. The 'sin of genesis' ends today."
Marya raised Eternal Eclipse, the blade trembling as the Void's whispers crescendo. The veins reached her temple.
"You could rule this power," the core crooned in her mother's voice. "Not die a martyr."
For a heartbeat, she hesitated.
Then Law's hand closed over hers on the hilt, his touch ice-cold, his voice a blade. "Martyrdom is a luxury. Do your job."
The sword fell.
A scream tore through the chamber—not the core's, but the world's. The blade pierced the fissure, void-energy erupting in a geyser of anti-light that bleached the room to monochrome. The Poneglyphs shattered, their warnings dissolving into ash. The core convulsed, its flesh sloughing away in putrid waves, revealing the Primordial Current beneath—a swirling maelstrom of iridescent chaos, its tendrils thrashing as if in agony.
Law's Gamma Knife followed, a scalpel of radioactive fury plunged into the wound. "Rot," he hissed, and the core detonated.
The blast hurled them backward. Marya's skull cracked against stone, her vision blurring as the chamber disintegrated. The last thing she saw was Law's silhouette against the collapsing Void, his coat billowing like a reaper's shroud, and the Primordial Current's final, fading snarl:
"YOU… WILL… REMEMBER…"
Then—
Darkness.
The blast's aftershock rippled through the Dawnless City like a death rattle. Corridors of flesh and bone liquefied, walls dissolving into rancid sludge that rained from above. The air reeked of burning marrow and petrified rot as the Heart Pirates fled—not as victors, but survivors.
Law dragged Marya by the arm, her boots skidding through rivers of ichor. Blood trickled from her temple where the Void's backlash had struck, the inky veins along her neck now dormant but seared into her skin like cursed tattoos. Bepo lumbered behind them, swatting falling debris with his claws, his fur singed and matted. "C-Captain—the path's collapsing!"
"Move!" Law barked, his Room flickering as he teleported them past a cascading avalanche of bone shards. The city was eating itself alive, its once-pulsing veins now ruptured geysers of acid. Ahead, the corridor split—one path choked by a thrashing tendril of Void-energy, the other crumbling into the abyss.
"Left!" Marya coughed, her voice hoarse. Eternal Eclipse trembled in her grip, its blade cracked and dull. "The bloodstream—we can ride the current out!"
Law didn't argue. His Room engulfed the tendril, Kikoku severing it in a burst of black sparks. They plunged into the artery, the ichor's current seizing them like a riptide. Bepo howled as the corrosive fluid ate at his fur, but the polar bear held fast, using his bulk to shield Marya.
Shachi's flare cut through the gloom ahead, its crimson light revealing Jean Bart hefting a stone pillar to brace a collapsing ceiling. Penguin and Ikkaku crouched beneath it, the latter's wrench sparking as she welded a makeshift support.
"Captain!" Shachi waved frantically, his face streaked with soot. "Over here!"
Law's Shambles swapped their positions with a chunk of debris, depositing the trio safely behind the barricade. Marya collapsed against the wall, her breath ragged, as Jean Bart's booming voice cut through the din. "Sub's dock is half a mile northeast! Corridors are unstable—we'll need to dig!"
"Dig with what?" Penguin snapped, gesturing to his dislocated arm. "We're down to spit and spite!"
Marya lifted Eternal Eclipse, the blade's fractured edge glinting. "Use this."
Law's hand closed over hers. "Sword's unstable. One wrong strike and—"
"And we die here instead of there." She met his glare, gold eyes burning. "Trust me."
He released her. "Make it count."
The crew carved through the disintegrating city like a dagger through sinew. Marya's strikes were precise but faltering, each swing of Eternal Eclipse splintering the fleshy barriers as the Void's scars on her neck pulsed angrily. Law's Room guided them, teleporting the crew past bottomless fissures and swarms of dying antibodies, their forms melting into puddles of tar.
Bepo took point, his claws shredding through membranes that hissed and recoiled. "It's reacting to the sword!" he panted. "Like it's afraid!"
"Good," Marya muttered, cleaving a final wall to reveal the dock—or what remained of it. The Polar Tang listed precariously, its hull dented and scorched, but intact. The sea beyond churned with the city's death throes, waves clawing at the sub's hatch.
"Go!" Law shoved the crew toward the sub, his Room straining to hold the disintegrating pier. "Ikkaku—engines hot! Bepo, seal the bulkheads!"
Marya lingered, staring back at the collapsing heart chamber. The Primordial Current's roar echoed through the ruins, its final vow—YOU… WILL… REMEMBER…—twisting into a guttural laugh.
"Move, now!" Law grabbed her collar, hurling her into the sub as the dock imploded.
The Polar Tang plunged into the abyss, its engines screaming as the Dawnless City collapsed behind them. Through the viewport, Marya watched the titan skeletons crumble, the cliffs dissolving into ash, and the Void's Cradle—the sphere that had birthed this nightmare—implode into a singularity of darkness.
But as the sub breached the surface, dawn's first light spilling over the horizon, Law's voice cut through the relieved silence. "It's not over."
On the sonar, a shadow lingered—a tendril of the Primordial Current, coiled deep beneath the waves. Waiting.
Marya touched her scarred neck. "No," she agreed. "But it's enough."
The Heart Pirates sailed east, the sea behind them still boiling.
Dawn broke over the New World, its light gilding the waves in hues of rose and gold—a cruel contrast to the seething scar marring the ocean's surface. The Polar Tang cut through the water, its hull groaning as if burdened by the weight of what lay beneath. Inside, Marya stood at the sub's cramped infirmary mirror, her fingers tracing the jagged black veins now etched into her skin. They coiled from her neck to her jawline, a latticework of shadows that pulsed faintly, a phantom echo of the Void's heartbeat. Tattoos of survival, she thought bitterly. Or surrender.
Law leaned against the doorway, arms crossed, his amber eyes unreadable. "They'll fade," he said, though the lie hung stale between them.
"Liar," Marya replied without heat. She flexed her hand, the scars shimmering like oil under the cabin's dim light. "But they're mine now. A receipt for the bargain."
Outside, Bepo's voice crackled over the intercom. "C-Captain… Marine ships on the horizon. Six battleships. World Government flags."
Law's jaw tightened. "Of course they're here."
The Government fleet fanned out like vultures, their hulls sleek and predatory. At the lead ship's prow stood Admiral Asphodel, his magma-red coat flaring in the salt wind, eyes hidden behind mirrored glasses. A Den Den Mushi projected his voice across the water, crisp and venomous.
"Trafalgar Law. You are ordered to surrender all artifacts and intel recovered from the Dawnless City. Compliance is non-negotiable."
Law smirked, leaning on the Tang's railing. "Nothing left to surrender, Admiral. Just seawater and ghosts."
Asphodel's smile was a scalpel's edge. "We'll see."
Behind him, a squad of CP-0 agents shifted, their masks blank and hungry.
Marya stepped into the sunlight, Eternal Eclipse strapped to her back. The Admiral's gaze snapped to the sword, then to Marya's scars. A flicker of recognition—greed—passed behind those mirrored lenses.
"Ah. Mihawk's stray," Asphodel purred. "How… fortunate."
Law's hand drifted to Kikoku. "Try it."
For a heartbeat, the sea stilled.
Then Asphodel laughed, a sound like breaking glass. "Another time, Surgeon of Death. The Current always collects its debts." He turned, coat flaring. "Set course for Mariejois. Let the scavengers drown in their delusions."
The fleet peeled away, leaving the Tang adrift in their wake.
Deep below, where light dared not linger, the Primordial Current stirred.
A Marine sonar tech aboard the trailing battleship frowned at his screen. A blip—a shadow within a shadow—twisted beneath the ship's keel. He leaned closer, adjusting dials. "Probably a whale," he muttered.
But as the shadow surged upward, brushing the hull with a tendril of iridescent dark, the tech's coffee cup slipped from his hand. The liquid inside boiled, then crystallized into a tiny, perfect diamond.
By the time he called for the captain, the shadow was gone.
That night, Law hunched over his desk, the Tang's hum a distant lullaby. In his hand, a vial of black liquid swirled—a drop of ichor siphoned during their escape. It writhed against the glass, alive with the Current's whispers.
[YOU… WILL…]
He slammed the vial into a lead-lined drawer, but the voice lingered, slithering through his synapses. What did you see? It taunted. What did you want to see?
In the mirror, his reflection's eyes flickered—void-black, just for a heartbeat.
Marya found Mihawk's kogatana in her grip again; its edge pressed to the scarred skin of her palm. The Void's voice was quieter now, a distant tide.
"You could have ruled," it sighed.
"No," she whispered. "But I'll remember."
Outside, the sea calmed, its surface smooth as a burial shroud.
For now.