-Real World-
Strength was the only currency the Beasts Pirates accepted, and Kurozumi Tama did not have any yet.
She knew it. She had known it from the first day she arrived at Onigashima, when she had looked around at the people surrounding her and understood instinctively that she occupied the bottom of every hierarchy that mattered here. The cadres betting on her future were doing exactly that — betting. Against the immediate and visible reality of what she currently was: a small girl with a fruit whose most impressive demonstrated application was making enemies of the organisation briefly cooperative.
Some of the veterans did not bet. They watched. And their watching had a quality to it that she recognised from the streets of Wano Country, from years of learning to read the difference between people who had not noticed her yet and people who had noticed her and were deciding whether she was worth the trouble.
Sasaki had noticed her.
He was one of the Tobi Roppo, which gave him standing to say things that a lesser cadre would have kept to himself. He said them in the open, in front of the assembled group, with the particular confidence of someone who believed his own logic was impeccable.
"The future is the future." His voice did not rise. It didn't need to. "The present is the present. A girl with no combat power, requiring protection and resources — that's a liability we're choosing to carry based on a Sky Screen prediction. I'd rather spend those resources finding crew members who can fight now. Gajeel, for example. There's a target worth pursuing."
He looked at Tama where she stood beside Black Maria. The look was not anger — it was the flat assessment of someone evaluating cargo.
Tama kept her eyes down and pressed her hands together in front of her. She had nothing to say to this. She could not demonstrate strength she did not possess. She could not argue against a comparison she knew was accurate. She stood there and felt small, which was not a new feeling, but which had a sharper edge here than it had ever had in Wano.
Ulti, beside her, was quiet for a reason that was different from Tama's. Sasaki's contempt extended to the Ulti siblings as well, which Ulti had registered and filed with the focused precision of someone who did not forget things.
Kaido let the internal friction run. The Tobi Roppo existed in a structure where challenge was institutional — any one of them could attempt a Three Disasters rank through demonstrated superiority in direct combat. The competition was not dysfunction. It was the mechanism by which the organisation identified its real hierarchy, as opposed to the one written down.
He watched the Sky Screen while the meeting dissolved around him. Puppet Whitebeard was continuing to work through Gin's defences with the Gura Gura no Mi (Tremor-Tremor Fruit) — the Admiral was being kept reactive, which suited the puppet's combat style. On the other side of Iron Island, Gajeel in Iron Smoke Dragon mode had the offensive edge over Smoker but was losing ground in the close-range exchanges, where Smoker's years of physical conditioning and Haki refinement were producing a narrower gap than the transformation suggested. Both fights were in stalemate.
The Iron Dragon. Kaido came back to the thought. Reckless and methodical at the same time — the seastone ingestion scheme alone was the kind of long-term planning that most of his own cadres could not sustain, and Gajeel had wrapped it inside a fighting style that looked purely aggressive until the trap was already closed.
He looked around at the people in the room. The ancient Zoan users, massive and hard-scaled and proud of it. Dinosaur physiology, Armament Haki, dense flesh — real enough as combat assets. But when he tried to find the quality he was thinking of, the particular combination of nature and ingenuity that made a dragon something categorically other than a large and aggressive animal, he did not find it in this room.
"Thick skin," he said, to no one. "Thick skin and thick heads."
He sent them away. He needed to drink, and he needed to do it without the audience.
Black Maria stayed, because she understood what kind of company he was looking for. The others dispersed in pairs and small groups, sorting themselves by affiliation and mood without needing instruction.
Tama followed Ulti. Two women finding the same direction, which was practical if nothing else.
Sasaki and Doflamingo walked together.
This had not happened by accident. Men who shared certain values tended to locate each other in groups, and these two had identified their common ground early — a shared impatience with anything that couldn't demonstrate its worth immediately, and a shared contempt for the protection extended to things that hadn't earned it.
They watched Tama and Ulti disappear in the direction of the residential quarters.
"Who's-Who raised a fair point," Sasaki said. "We're taking a Sky Screen broadcast as a strategic directive. A child who can't fight, can't train, can't even argue for herself — and we're holding a Tobi Roppo slot open for her based on a prediction." He paused. "I don't think it takes much to test whether the prediction holds."
Doflamingo said nothing immediately. He let Sasaki reach his own conclusion at his own speed, which was the most efficient way to handle a man who wanted to believe his instincts were his own idea.
"If she breaks," Doflamingo said eventually, "and leaves — that's information the organisation needs. If she doesn't break, she's proven something. Either outcome is useful."
He did not specify what he personally wanted the outcome to be. He didn't need to.
Sasaki's jaw set. He had been looking for permission more than advice, and permission was what he'd received, dressed lightly enough in operational logic that he could maintain the fiction of reasoned judgement. He told himself this was for the Beasts Pirates. He told himself that flowers grown in shelter could not survive open air. He believed both things with the earnest conviction of a man who had been wanting to do this since the first day the girl arrived.
Doflamingo and Queen found a roof with a clear sightline and waited.
Tama had been given quarters with the other female crew members. She had parted ways with Ulti at the corridor junction — both were tired, both were carrying the weight of the afternoon's meeting in different ways — and she had gone to her room alone and closed the door and lay down on the bed.
She was full. Someone had fed her, as people here fed her consistently and without condition. She was not cold. She was not afraid of the next meal not arriving. These were significant improvements over most of her life in Wano Country.
She closed her eyes and tried not to think about Sasaki's face, and the way he had looked at her like she was a number on a ledger that was coming up short.
She was almost asleep when the wall came in.
The sound arrived first — a collision that hit the air like a physical impact — and then Ulti came through the door, which was no longer in its frame, moving horizontally in a way that indicated she had not chosen this direction of travel. She hit the floor near the wall beside Tama's bed and stopped.
Tama was already sitting upright.
"Sasaki." Ulti's voice was controlled in the way that voices get controlled when there is genuine anger underneath that hasn't decided what to do with itself yet. She pulled herself off the floor. Her Zoan constitution had absorbed the impact without complaint; the wall had done worse than she had. "Tama — find somewhere to be that isn't here. Now."
Tama understood the instruction and the reason for it at the same time. She slid off the bed and looked for a direction.
She did not find one quickly enough.
The triceratops came through the doorway at Sasaki's walking pace, which was unhurried because he was not concerned about what he would find or what it would do about him. His hybrid Beast Form stood like a moving wall in the corridor, grey-armored and spiked, the horns on his skull oriented forward with the patient readiness of something that expected the space in front of it to yield. The green hair above the grey plating was the only colour in the silhouette. His eyes were red-lit with the warmth of someone who had found a context where his instincts were fully licensed.
Tama stood in the corner of the room she had been given and looked at the triceratops filling the doorway and felt the precise sensation she had felt in Wano Country when things were about to go very wrong and there was no one positioned to stop them.
"The weak have no freedom in front of the strong." The voice was still his voice, carrying easily even through the changed geometry of his vocal anatomy in Beast Form. He did not shout. He was not performing anger. He was stating a position he found self-evident. "You have no right to argue with that. The Beasts Pirates don't need a vase, Kurozumi Tama. I'm done waiting for you to become something useful."
He lowered the horns.
The floor registered each step as a slight tremor. Three tonnes of ancient Zoan muscle and armored hide advancing at a pace that was measured rather than rushed — he did not need to rush — toward a small girl with no Armament Haki and no technique that would stop a triceratops charge.
Even if Ulti reached her first, even if the intervention succeeded — that was not the point. The point was the experience of standing in front of this and understanding what the Beasts Pirates were, and what she was, and whether she was willing to remain after this moment clarified the distinction.
If she ran, that was an answer.
If she broke, that was an answer.
Either one would do.
On the roof above, Doflamingo and Queen watched the floor below them and did not move to intervene.
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