Scrambling out of the tunnel that led back to the nightmarish lab, Galit, Jannali, and Eliane burst into the dim light of the island, their breaths coming in ragged pants. The air, once heavy with the silence of the grave, now felt thin and charged with impending chaos. Without a word, Galit Varuna's long, nimble fingers darted to a pouch on his belt, retrieving a small, sleeping transponder snail.
"Do you reckon that'll even work now?" Jannali asked, her voice a low, tense murmur as she scanned the shadows around them. "With all the spooky business gone pear-shaped?"
"I am about to find out," Galit replied, his emerald eyes fixed on the mollusk as he began dialing. The soft purupurupuru of the spinning dial seemed deafening in the uneasy quiet.
Eliane, her small hands still shaking, looked up at him. "Who are you calling?"
Across the island, in the vast, open courtyard of the palace, the mood was deceptively light. King Gordon was leading the way, a spring in his step that hadn't been there before. "You see? The music has healed our home! The curse is lifted!" he proclaimed, gesturing to the sky where a few brave birds were indeed tentatively circling.
Uta walked beside him, a soft, hopeful smile on her face, though it didn't quite reach her eyes. Marya followed a few paces behind, her golden eyes missing nothing—the way Gordon's cheer seemed just a hair too broad, the subtle tension in Uta's shoulders. Atlas Acuta ambled beside her, his rust-red fur gleaming in the weak sun, while Vesta chattered excitedly to Jelly Squish about the musical theory behind the score's success.
Then, a sound cut through the calm: Pururin! Pururin!
Marya stopped dead. Atlas cocked a fuzzy eyebrow, also halting his pace. With a fluid motion, Marya pulled the ringing transponder snail from the pocket of her denim shorts.
Galit's voice was a sharp, staticky whisper, stripped of all its usual calculated coolness. "Marya. We need to meet! It's important."
Atlas, his lynx-like ears twitching, leaned in. "Meet you where, Noodle Neck? At the sub? What could be so urgent that—"
"Don't be ridiculous, furball," Galit snapped back, the insult lacking its usual playful edge. "We found something. And you are going to want to see it."
Marya's grip on the snail tightened. "What is it?"
"It's Uta and the King. They aren't who or what they say they are. They're clones."
The words landed like a physical blow. Marya felt a rush of heat move through her cheeks, a cold fire that had nothing to do with the ambient temperature. She swallowed, hard. "What do you mean?"
"We found the lab," Galit confirmed.
Jannali's voice cut in over the line, her twang strained. "Yeah, mate, and there were specters guarding this place, but they're gone now. I don't know what we've just unleashed, but—"
"Good work. Come find us. Then you can show us this lab." Marya's voice was a low, controlled blade, cutting Jannali off. She could hear the beginning of a protest before she snapped the receiver down, silencing the snail and pocketing it with a finality that made Atlas flinch.
"What do you want to do, boss?" the lynx Mink asked, his tone uncharacteristically serious.
Marya didn't answer him directly. Instead, she took a slow, methodical step forward, her combat boots crunching on the gravel. "Gordon," she called out, her voice cutting through the false peace.
The king turned, his large, balding head tilting. "Yes, my dear? What is it?"
Marya's gaze was a physical weight, locking onto him. "Who are you, really?"
Gordon's face crumpled into a mask of bewildered innocence. "What do you mean? I am the King of Elegia."
Another step. "Don't play dumb." The air around Marya seemed to grow colder. "We know about the lab." Her eyes, like twin suns, shifted to Uta. "What we don't know is why. What is the purpose?"
Gordon began to wring his hands, a nervous, fluttering motion. "I have no idea what you are talking about! This is an ancient island, the ruins can be complex, there are all sorts of strange rooms—"
"You have been playing us since we got here," Marya stated, her voice flat and absolute.
Vesta Lavana, her rainbow hair seeming to dim, looked between them, her vibrant violet eyes wide with confusion. "Playing us? Marya, what are you talking about?"
Atlas placed a heavy hand on Vesta's shoulder, his voice a low rumble. "The others found a lab. With clones of…" His eyes flicked between Gordon and Uta. "…of them. And the 'curse' we just broke may not have been a curse at all." He looked pointedly at Vesta, letting the implication hang in the air.
Vesta began to tremble, the memory of her own emotional sacrifice to play the score now feeling cheapened and manipulated. "What are you talking about?"
"They may have been guardians," Atlas clarified, his gaze sweeping the courtyard as if expecting an attack. "The question is, what were they guarding?"
Gordon let out a strained, nervous laugh. "Don't be silly! This is—"
Marya cut him off, her focus now entirely on Uta, a painful, personal betrayal simmering beneath her stoic surface. "The curse is broken," she said, her voice softening a fraction, an attempt to reach the cousin she thought she knew. "Come with us."
Uta's entire being jolted as if she'd been struck. Her face, usually so expressive and open, tensed into a mask of anguish and frustration. She balled her fists, her knuckles bleaching. "How many times do I have to tell you?" she yelled, her voice cracking with a raw, desperate energy that made the hair on Atlas's neck stand up. "I can't leave!"
"You can," Marya insisted, taking another step, her tone leaving no room for argument. "The choice is yours. You will."
That was the final straw. Uta's eyes flashed with a terrifying, familiar power. The air around her began to warp, taking on a sing-song quality, a visible ripple of energy that promised a lullaby of oblivion.
"Uta, no!" Gordon cried out, his voice a genuine shriek of panic.
But it was too late. Uta locked her gaze on Marya, the cousin from her past who was now threatening the only reality she had ever known. The air vibrated with the buildup of her monstrous power.
"I CAN'T LEAVE!" she screamed, the words imbued with the full force of her Devil Fruit ability, a wave of compelling sound aimed directly at Marya's will. "AND NEITHER CAN YOU!"
The air shattered.
Uta's scream was not just sound; it was a physical law, rewritten into a crushing, melodic command. The very atmosphere in the courtyard twisted, colors bleeding together like wet ink on parchment as a powerful, compulsive rhythm erupted from her. The hopeful birdsong was instantly drowned beneath a torrent of dazzling, dangerous harmony.
Marya's golden eyes narrowed to slits, her body coiling with instinctual tension. "So that's how it is," she murmured, the words barely audible over the rising symphony.
"Oh, you have got to be kidding me!" Atlas cursed, his rust-red fur bristling as he felt an invisible, melodic current wrap around his limbs.
Vesta stood frozen, not in fear, but in shocked, horrific awe. The voice of her idol, the instrument of so many of her dreams, was being wielded like a weapon. "What… what is this?" she breathed, her multicolored hair seeming to lose its luster.
"This is her Devil Fruit power," Marya stated, her voice a flat, calm counterpoint to the auditory storm. "The power to pull people into her own musical dimension."
"Devil Fruit?" Vesta and Atlas snapped their heads around, the revelation a secondary shock amidst the primary assault.
Uta's voice soared, crystalline and terrible. "I will turn you into an eternal song! A note in my symphony forever!"
With a shriek of protest from Vesta and a wobbling "Bloop!" of alarm from Jelly, they and the lynx Mink were violently jerked off their feet. They tumbled through the warped air as if dragged by invisible strings, slamming down onto a suddenly materialized, giant musical staff that glowed with ethereal light. They were pinned there, trapped like butterflies on a sheet of music.
Uta's attention returned to Marya. She poured her will into the song, a specific, binding verse meant to seize her cousin, her family. But Marya merely took a slow, deliberate step forward, her combat boots crushing the gravel beneath them. The compulsion slid off her like water from a seabird's feathers.
"Uta," Marya said, her voice laced with a patience that was rapidly thinning. "You know you can't trap me with just a song. Not like them."
"SHUT UP!" Uta shrieked, her face contorted with a pain that went far beyond the current moment. "You have always been stronger! Smarter! More capable! But not this time! Not here, in my world!"
From the swirling melodies around her, forms began to condense. Sing Sing Warriors, Uta's melodic foot soldiers, manifested from the very notes she sang. They were humanoid shapes of pure, solidified sound, armed with shimmering staves, their blank faces turned in unison toward Marya. Gordon cried out again, a useless, wailing protest, but Uta, in her rage, didn't even look at him. A flick of her wrist and a melodic phrase sent him flying through the air to stick fast to the same musical staff that held the others.
"Don't do this, Uta," Marya called out, one last time. It was not a plea, but a warning.
It went unheeded. Overwhelmed, possessed by a lifetime of frustration and the lurking entity that fed on it, Uta clenched her fists and belted out a sharp, dissonant chord. The Sing Sing Warriors charged, a wave of animated music crashing forward with silent intent.
Marya sighed. It was a sound of profound weariness, the sound of her cousin accepting a fight she never wanted. In one fluid motion, she drew the obsidian blade of Eternal Eclipse from its sheath. As the sword cleared the scabbard, a single, profound, and funereal toll echoed across the courtyard, a sound that seemed to still the very air Uta's music had agitated.
The world around Marya fractured. Her long black hair dissolved into a swirling nebula of liquid void-stuff—strands of starlight, ash-gray tendrils, and whispering soul-smoke. A tripartite halo of gold, silver, and obsidian flickered into existence above her head. Her skin cracked with glowing, black veins that mapped mythical rivers across her arms. Her eyes transformed; her left pupil now a window to the serene Elysian Fields, her right a gateway to the burning damnation of Naraka.
This was the Aioní̱as Skotádi—the Eternal Abyss Form.
And she was not alone.
From the shadows that bled from her form, nine Grim Reapers materialized. Three were Heaven's Heralds, cloaked in robes of woven nebulae, their faceless gold masks reflecting no light, wielding scythes of captured starlight. Three were Purgatory's Arbiters, their bodies half-rotted, floating scales of judgment in one hand and mirror-bladed swords in the other. Three were Hell's Executioners, horned skeletons whose lava-dripping chains scraped across the stone. They stood in a silent, terrifying semicircle around Marya, waiting for a command.
Uta gasped, her song faltering for a split second. The sight was not of this world; it was a cosmology of death given form.
Marya's voice echoed, layered with the whispers of a thousand lost souls. "Call. Them. Off."
Uta, panting and sweating with the effort of her power, gritted her teeth. A flicker of the cousin Marya knew was buried deep beneath the rage and programming. But it was snuffed out. With a furious cry, she gestured, and her Sing Sing soldiers renewed their attack.
Marya didn't even move. A flicker of her will was all it took.
The nine Reapers became blurs of motion. The Heaven's Heralds moved with a grace that defied physics, their starlight scythes passing through the sound-warriors, not cutting them, but severing the very melodic bonds that held them together. They dissolved into harmless, fading notes. The Purgatory's Arbiters reflected the warriors' own aggressive intent back at them, paralyzing them in moments of sonic feedback before shattering them with their mirror-blades. The Hell's Executioners simply waded through the ranks, their chains whipping out to ensnare whole groups, dragging the struggling forms into the dark mist at their feet where they were silenced forever.
In seconds, the army was gone. Only the eerie silence of the Reapers remained.
Marya locked her dual-world gaze on Uta. "End this," she commanded, her voice softening back into something almost human. "Come with us. You don't have to be trapped here anymore."
But the offer of freedom was the final key that unlocked the deepest cage. Uta's face crumpled, then hardened into a mask of pure, unadulterated fury. A scream, ripped from the core of her being, was not a word, but a chord of such profound despair and chaos that the sky above them darkened.
"UTA, NO!" Gordon wailed from his musical prison.
But it was too late. The notes pouring from Uta's throat were no longer hers. They were ancient, corrupt, and hungry. The air itself began to curdle, and from the gathering gloom of dissonant music, something colossal began to form. A silhouette of pure malice, with multiple glowing eyes and a jagged, monstrous shape that promised the end of all songs.
On the musical staff, Vesta and Atlas strained against their bonds, but they were held fast by Uta's unwavering will.
"What is happening?!" Vesta cried, her voice trembling as she watched the demonic form of Tot Musica begin to take shape, its presence a physical weight of despair.
Atlas shook his head, his cocky bravado gone, replaced by the grim understanding of a warrior facing an apocalypse. "I don't know."
Vesta's eyes were wide with terror, fixed on Marya's terrifying, divine form standing against the emerging chaos. "Atlas… will she… will Marya have to kill her?"
The lynx Mink watched the standoff between the daughter of Mihawk and the demon-ridden songstress, his voice a low, hopeless rasp.
"I don't know."
*****
The path Josiah Manos carved through Káto Lávyrinthos was a descent from the stark, official light of the docks into the moon's grimy, beating heart. They moved through corridors that felt less built and more gouged out of the rock, the walls bearing the deep, parallel scars of industrial mining claws. The air grew thicker, warmed by the breath of hidden machinery and crowded with the scent of unwashed bodies, sizzling street food of unidentifiable origin, and the ever-present, chalky dust that coated the tongue. Flickering glow-panels, their casings cracked, cast a sickly, intermittent light, creating a strobing effect that made the shadows seem to twitch and jump.
They passed the mouth of a colossal cavern, and the sound that washed over them was a physical force—the collective roar of thousands of voices, machinery, and commerce from the subterranean city of Dusthaven, built into the distant walls like a hive. The main thoroughfare, which Josiah pointedly avoided, was a river of humanity and cargo haulers, all flowing under the immense, fossilized spine of some long-dead leviathan embedded in the ceiling, a permanent and terrifying monument the locals called the Ossuary Spine.
Josiah led them away from the main flow, down a narrow alley that stank of stale water and fermented grain. It was a dead end, terminating in a featureless metal door scarred with rust and old weld-marks. Without ceremony, Josiah rapped a specific, rhythmic pattern against the metal.
A small slit slid open at eye level, revealing a pair of suspicious eyes. A gravelly voice demanded, "Password."
Josiah's jaw tightened, the muscle twitching with impatience. "En Passant."
The slit slammed shut. A series of heavy locks clunked and scraped on the other side before the door swung inward, revealing a stark contrast to the grim alley. Warm, smoky air, rich with the smells of expensive liquor, polished wood, and the low, soulful wail of a saxophone, washed over them. They stood at the entrance of The Onyx Lounge, an oasis of impossible elegance buried deep in the moon's gut.
The doorman, a mountain of a man with knuckles like worn stone, grunted. "Boss is waiting for you in the back."
Josiah guided them through the dimly lit club, past patrons who spoke in low murmurs and cast long shadows. He stopped before a heavy wooden door at the rear. It opened just as they arrived, and a group of rough-looking individuals with the furtive eyes of smugglers filed out, not meeting anyone's gaze. From within the office, a deep, rumbling voice dismissed them. "See it's done clean. No more mistakes."
As the smugglers scattered, the occupant of the office came into full view, and the room seemed to shrink around him.
Cassius Vance was a giant of a man, towering even in the spacious office, his broad shoulders straining the fabric of a bespoke pinstripe suit the color of a deep-space nebula. His skin was a dark, rich umber, and a jagged scar running from his ear to his collarbone glittered faintly, as if dusted with captured starlight—embedded Lunar-Ceramite. But it was his cane that commanded attention. It was a rod of polished, utter blackness, a length of solid lunar mineral-core that seemed to gleam in from light of the room. The handle was carved from a fossilized, ivory-like bone, twisted into a shape that was both organic and cruel, taken from a Typhon. It wasn't a walking aid; it was a statement, a weapon named and feared.
He leaned back in his chair, a wide, knowing grin spreading across his face. "So," his voice was a low baritone that vibrated in the chest, "this is the group that all the whispers are about." His ochre eyes, piercing and intelligent, swept over them. Aurélie, Bianca, Charlie, Kuro, and Ember all felt a subtle shift in their posture, an unconscious bracing for a threat. Souta's eyes merely narrowed, analyzing.
"I have been wanting to meet you," Cassius continued, the grin not reaching his eyes. "I believe your unique ability may be of use to me."
Aurélie lifted a single, elegant brow, cocking a hip. "Unique ability?"
Cassius stood, the movement fluid and powerful. He took a single step, and the tip of his cane struck the floor with a sound like a judge's gavel. Thud. The resonance seemed to silence the distant jazz. "Yes. I hear you have the ability to attract the Typhon. Like flies to something particularly sweet."
Kuro adjusted his glasses, a shield against the man's overwhelming presence. "I fail to see how being a walking beacon for cosmic horrors could be considered an asset."
Cassius smirked, leaning against the edge of his massive desk, the wood groaning softly. "I also hear you are in need of a specific part for your vessel. Something rather rare."
Charlie, unable to contain himself, cleared his throat and pointed a finger skyward. "Ahem! We were promised the lunar-titanium alloy in exchange for the delivery of—"
Cassius interrupted him with a casual wave of his wrist, the diamond cufflinks catching the light. "Yes, of course. That trifle has already been delivered to your freighter. I am referring to something more… critical. A Stable Minovsky-Ionesco Core."
A sharp, involuntary gasp cut through the room. All eyes turned to Bianca, her hands flying to her mouth, her eyes wide with a mixture of horror and desperate hope. "It's… it's like the last thing we need," she whispered, her voice trembling. "Then we can, like…."
Kuro sighed, pinching the bridge of his nose. He didn't need her to finish. The core was the heart of a modern warship, a power source leagues beyond anything they had. "Exactly what are you requiring of us in order to part with such a component?"
Cassius's grin widened. "Straight to the point. I like it." He pushed off the desk, the cane thudding again with each step. "I am in need of a distraction."
Souta's eyes narrowed to slits. "A distraction?"
"Yes. The task is quite simple." Cassius stopped before a star chart hologram flickering on his wall, pointing a long finger at a swirling, violent-looking nebula near a formidable orbital station. "You will fly through the gaseous maw of the Indrexu Spiral in armored frames, right near The Bastion."
A soft, horrified gasp came from Emily. She pressed a hand over her mouth, her storm-grey eyes wide with dread. Souta looked at her, his cool composure cracking with sudden alarm. "What is it?"
She shook her head, her voice a whisper. "The gaseous maw… it's a breeding ground for the Typhon. Nurseries. What he's asking…"
Cassius interrupted, his voice booming with finality. "…is that you draw the Typhon out. Let the CUA at The Bastion have a front-row seat to the swarm. While they are dealing with that… unexpected visitation, my associates and I will conduct our business and make our escape."
Charlie, ever the academic, pushed his glasses up. "Ahem! And what, precisely, is The Bastion?"
It was Josiah who answered, his voice grim. "It is a prison. The CUA's primary orbital penitentiary."
Kuro let out a low groan, the sound of a man seeing a trap he'd already stepped into. "So. This is a prison break."
Cassius let out a rich, rumbling chuckle. "I prefer the term 'liberation.' Some of my associates have been guests there for too long."
Aurélie's gaze was flinty. "And in exchange for this 'diversion,' you will provide us with fuel and this core?"
Cassius nodded. "Exactly."
"You can't be considering this!" Emily protested, her voice gaining strength. "To provoke them in their nesting grounds… it's a slaughter! For the Typhon and for anyone in the way!"
Aurélie silenced her with a sharp glare, her loyalty to her mission and her team overriding the moral argument. "We will do what is needed to return home."
A slow, calculating smirk spread across Kuro's face. "You said you would provide the frames."
"Yes," Cassius confirmed. "We have four of our fastest interceptors set aside and ready."
Souta interjected, his voice cold and logical, laying bare the brutal math of the situation. "Which means three of us will need to stay behind."
The statement hung in the smoky air, dividing the room not by hidden allegiances to Syndicate or Consortium, but by the immediate, terrifying question of who would fly into the storm, and who would be left to wait in the lion's den.
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