-Real World-
The ceasefire between Onigashima and Wano Country was holding, for now. Kaido had other things to think about.
He was not yet certain whether Uchiha Madara was the power standing behind the puppet general. The Infinity Castle's movements suggested organisation and intent at a level that matched someone of that calibre, but the picture was not complete. He kept the question open and kept watching.
The Sky Screen had moved to Iron Island, and what it was showing was instructive in ways that had nothing to do with the Marine or the Revolutionary Army.
"Another dragon," Kaido said. He was watching Gajeel reconstitute in Iron Smoke Dragon form, the black scales catching light, the breath coming easily in an atmosphere it was now converting for its own use. "A dragon, joining the Revolutionary Army. Didn't the Beasts Pirates offer him anything worth considering?"
He was not particularly troubled by the answer. Gajeel's choice was his own, and dragons, in Kaido's experience, had a tendency to follow their own gravity regardless of what was offered to them. What interested him was the methodology. He had watched the entire sequence — Gajeel eating the seastone-laced ore over a sustained period, processing the mineral through his Zoan physiology until it became native to him, embedding it into the iron fillings he expelled as weapons. The seastone's power-suppressing property transferred on contact. Against a Logia user, it was a trap that closed before the opponent realised it had opened.
And then, when Smoker's carbon monoxide had brought Gajeel to the ground and any reasonable observer would have written the outcome off — the absorption. The same fundamental attribute that had originally accepted iron and built it into flesh and breath, turning around and accepting carbon, building it into the existing structure, producing something neither element could have achieved alone.
Careful, and reckless. A combination that produced results.
"Every mythical beast dragon-type," Kaido said, to no one in particular. "Not one weak one among them. Blue dragon, sky dragon, iron dragon — different attributes, different application, the same basic principle. A dragon finds what it needs and makes it its own." A pause. "The Beasts Pirates are a zoo. But there's only one real dragon in it."
He did not say this with satisfaction. He said it with the honest assessment of a man who knew his organisation's structural problems and was not in the habit of pretending otherwise.
Queen had his own professional interest in Gajeel, and it was running alongside Kaido's strategic analysis on a separate track entirely.
"That stomach." He had been staring at the Sky Screen with the expression of someone who had encountered a phenomenon that violated his engineering assumptions. "What kind of stomach can process seastone as dietary input and integrate it into a biological weapon system? The mineral should inhibit any proximate Devil Fruit ability — you'd expect autoimmune collapse before the integration stage even begins." He was talking to himself more than anyone present. "I need samples. Body composition. Metabolic rate. The ore-consumption data alone would be worth three years of research."
He paused.
"Also I want to ride it."
No one acknowledged this.
Jack's situation was fresh enough in the room that the mood around the Three Disasters commentary had acquired a certain edge. Kimimaro had dealt with him without particular difficulty, and the name of the Drought had taken on a quality it had not previously possessed — ally, the quality of something that had been tested and found wanting. The Beasts Pirates' reputation for hard power had rested on the assumption that the Three Disasters represented it accurately. Two of them had now demonstrated that the assumption required revision.
King was still recovering. Jack had joined him in the infirmary. Among the Three Disasters, that left Queen — who was scientifically indispensable, tactically creative, and not the first choice in a direct power comparison against comparable opponents.
The Tobi Roppo existed below that tier, which meant the honest accounting of who in the Beasts Pirates could operate independently at the highest level began and ended with Kaido himself and, on a good day, King.
"More new blood," Kaido said. "And the ones we have need to develop faster."
His eyes moved to where Kurozumi Tama was watching the Sky Screen. Black Maria stood beside her, attentive.
The experiments had been Queen's project, run over several days with the systematic rigour he applied to anything he considered genuinely interesting. The Dango Dango no Mi (Dumpling-Dumpling Fruit) produced dumplings of extraordinary potency — any creature that ate one became, in short order, Tama's cooperative companion. The mechanism was consistent and reliable. The question was scope.
The artificial Zoan users were the control group. Every one of them responded to the dumplings without exception. They ate, and the loyalty restructured, and they sat in front of a small girl with deep purple eyes and treated her instructions as the most natural thing in the world to follow. The control group was a complete success.
The purebred Zoan users were the variable. They ate the dumplings and experienced no effect. The loyalty mechanism found nothing to work with, or something in the fruit's constitution resisted it, or the gap between an engineered Zoan and a genuine one went deep enough to matter here. The result was negative across the board.
Queen had exhaled in honest relief at the outcome. If the Dango Dango no Mi's reach had extended to middle-rank cadres like the Tobi Roppo, the operational implications would have been genuinely alarming. A small girl with the structural ability to redirect the loyalty of the Beasts Pirates' mid-tier combat force was a variable that would require constant management. As it stood, the limitation kept things orderly.
The awakening remained a question for later. What the fruit could do in its base form was already noteworthy. What it might do if Tama reached the stage of awakening was a variable Kaido was tracking alongside everything else.
Tama herself was uncomplicated about all of it. She had not had enough good years in Wano Country to build any particular loyalty to ordinary life — most of those years had been hunger and cold and the humiliation of dependency without security. The Beasts Pirates fed her well. Black Maria looked out for her. The island had things she could purchase and things she could study. She trained because she wanted to repay that, not because she had been given a philosophy about it.
She was not a good person or a bad person yet. She was a girl who repaid kindness and had not yet formed the vocabulary to distinguish between who deserved to offer it.
Kaido had learned something from forcing his own development past what it was ready for. He had the patience, now, that he had not always had. Growth took time and the forced version left deficits. He would wait for Tama's capabilities to arrive naturally.
The Nika fragment in his own body was a separate and ongoing irritation. The Sun God's power moved through him like light through a structure that had not been built for it — present and real, but without clean edges or reliable access. The Sky Screen's spoilers about the future Beasts Pirates made his own current state feel like an open debt he had not yet found a way to repay.
"Whitebeard." Kaido's voice had shifted slightly — not softer, exactly, but with the quality of attention that arrives when a man is thinking about something real rather than tactical. "Even dead. Even made into a puppet, carrying someone else's war forward. No rest."
The Sky Screen had confirmed that the puppet retained the Gura Gura no Mi's function. Whoever had built that puppet understood their craft. The body itself was a younger version of Newgate — before the illness had taken hold, before Marineford — and in that form it fought with a ferocity that the man at Marineford, already dying, had not been able to fully demonstrate.
The strongest man in the world, in the end, had not been able to protect his family or rest after his death. His territory had become Blackbeard's harvest. His body had become a weapon for a puppeteer who cared about craft and regarded the source material as raw input.
The most miserable man in the pirate world. Not wrong.
The Sky Screen had also noted, in passing, something about a Whitebeard II — a descendant, whose existence Edward Newgate had never publicly acknowledged. Whether the claim was genuine was impossible to determine from outside. Whether a man who had spent his life building a family rather than continuing one had left a blood heir behind was the kind of question that the sea tended to answer eventually, in its own time.
In a different room, with different walls, Donquixote Doflamingo watched himself die.
It was not precisely himself — the puppet on the screen had been assembled from his preserved head and the architectural logic of his original body, and it had fought and been pinned and been destroyed by Gin's rain weapons without anything resembling his actual pride or his actual strategic thinking. A puppet that fought at Shichibukai level and did not understand that it was a puppet.
The face had been accurate. The coat, the glasses, the posture — all of it had been accurate. Watching Gin methodically dismantle the construction and leave it as a punctured mess on the ground produced a feeling that Doflamingo did not particularly want to examine.
He set it aside.
The immediate situation was what mattered. He had come to the Beasts Pirates from a position of complete loss — no crew, no territory, no Celestial Dragon privilege, the career-defining operation at Dressrosa concluded in the only way it could have concluded, and Gin personally responsible for the head that Sasori had subsequently repurposed. There was a certain symmetry to it that Doflamingo found, on reflection, genuinely offensive.
What he had now was time and patience and the capacity to operate without being observed. The Beasts Pirates were a large organisation with more moving parts than anyone outside it could easily track. Inside that structure, he could work quietly. The Celestial Dragons had removed his family from their register generations ago, and the family had spent generations proving the decision wrong. He intended to continue that work.
When the time was right, they would feel it. Not the puppet. Not the copy.
The real thing.