-Real World-
DarkGreymon had its mouth open and the light building in its throat was the colour of a forge at working temperature. Sasaki was half-buried in the fractured floor, the armoured plating on his neck locked at an angle that offered no leverage, and the gap between his current situation and its natural conclusion was measured in seconds.
"Little Kuro — don't kill him."
Tama's voice arrived before the breath did.
The light dimmed. DarkGreymon closed its jaws. The heat in the air dissipated slowly, the way a room cools after a fire has been banked rather than extinguished. The creature held its position over the Triceratops with an expression that communicated clearly what it thought of the interruption, but it did not move.
Tama was a kind girl. She had been given a reason to be otherwise today, and she had chosen not to take it. Cadres fought among themselves — that was the Beasts Pirates, and she had understood it from the first week on Onigashima. But a dead Tobi Roppo was a problem that would land on more people than just Sasaki, and she did not want to be the kind of problem that landed on people.
She asked for an apology. To Ulti, and to her.
Sasaki dragged himself out of the floor on limbs that were reporting new structural opinions about themselves, and apologised. The words came out without the quality of forced performance — whether because the beating had genuinely reorganised his perspective, or because DarkGreymon was still standing three metres away, was not a distinction Tama found it necessary to investigate.
"You broke it," Ulti said, surveying the ruins of the residential block with the practical eye of someone who had grown up in an organisation where everything eventually became someone's responsibility. She gestured at the collapsed walls, the displaced roof sections, the interior that was now indistinguishable from exterior. "You fix it." A pause, during which she looked at what DarkGreymon had contributed to the damage. "All of it."
Sasaki, who had no remaining negotiating position, accepted.
Doflamingo and Queen had already gone.
The departure had been quiet and without announcement, which was the departure style of people who had not been present and were prepared to maintain that position under any subsequent inquiry. If Lord Kaido decided the afternoon's events required explanation and attribution, Sasaki was available. Sasaki had, after all, been the one who had walked through the female members' quarters and started hitting people.
Queen, on the ship back to his section of Onigashima, turned the events over with the methodical attention he applied to problems that interested him. The dark creature — DarkGreymon, the smaller form, not the entity the Sky Screen showed in the future — had stopped a fully Haki-wrapped Triceratops charge with one claw. Without Armament Haki. Without any technique that his instruments could identify. Just mass and force applied with something that was neither wild nor performed.
And then Tama had said two words and it had stopped.
He had designed the afternoon as a pressure test. He had expected failure or desperate improvisation. He had not modelled the possibility that the girl would close a deal with a dimensional creature in a matter of seconds under active threat and immediately have working operational control over the result. The Dango Dango no Mi was more interesting than its surface application suggested. So was Kurozumi Tama.
He revised his models accordingly.
Ulti walked up to DarkGreymon after Sasaki had gone to find construction materials, and looked at it the way she looked at most things that had impressed her — with the focused appraisal of someone collecting data.
The creature's muscle structure was visible where the black plating thinned at the joints, and what was visible was clean and dense in the way that things built for function rather than appearance tended to be. It was not like the ancient Zoan forms she was used to — those had the quality of something that had developed over geological time. This had the quality of something that had been assembled to precise ations.
She reached out to touch it.
DarkGreymon stepped back and fixed her with a look that would have communicated its position on unsolicited contact even to someone considerably less perceptive than Ulti.
She withdrew her hand. "Fine. Rude."
Tama, beside her, had rested one hand against the creature's flank — the cool, metallic texture of the scales giving her something to hold onto while the afternoon's events continued to arrange themselves into a shape she could process. She had agreed to terms she did not fully understand. She had a creature from another dimension that answered to her. The floor of her room had been destroyed and was now someone else's repair project. All of this had happened in the space of what felt like a very short time.
"I feel like I'm dreaming," she said.
"You're not," Ulti said, with the confidence of someone who had just been hit into a wall by a triceratops and was basing the assessment on physical evidence.
DarkGreymon turned its head toward Tama. Something passed between them — not words, not exactly — and then the creature's body began to change. Not the violent, structural change of a Zoan transformation, but a compression, a folding inward, the mass redistributing from ten metres of dark predator into something that descended through stages and arrived, in the space of a few breaths, at the size of a clenched fist. The sphere that remained was white and smooth, faintly warm to the touch.
It sat on the rubble in front of Tama.
She picked it up. It fit in her palm. From the outside it looked like something that should not contain what it contained, but the weight of it felt right in a way she could not explain. She turned it once in her fingers and tucked it into her kimono sleeve.
"I have to take care of this," she said, to no one in particular.
The report reached Kaido before the construction crew had finished assessing the damage.
He heard it, processed it, and drank several bowls of wine with Black Maria while he decided what weight to assign it. The weight he assigned it was considerable. Tama had demonstrated the value the Sky Screen had described — not in training, not in a controlled environment, but under active threat with no preparation time and no support beyond an injured Ulti. That was a different category of data point.
He punished Sasaki first. Rabbit Prison, ore extraction detail, several months — sufficient to communicate that unsanctioned violence against Beasts Pirates personnel carried a cost, and that the cost applied regardless of how confident you were in the outcome. The verdict was not difficult.
The harder decision was structural. The Tobi Roppo slot that Tama had been occupying provisionally — a position that several veterans had been audibly displeased about from the start — was no longer the appropriate placement.
Kaido made an exception, which was something he did rarely and which therefore meant something when he did. Kurozumi Tama was elevated to Beast Disaster. Not Tobi Roppo filler. A Disaster.
The Three Disasters had been three for as long as the Beasts Pirates had held their current form. He made it four.
He was not satisfied. Four was still not enough. The New World was no longer the territory it had been when he first claimed his share of it — other forces were pressing, other Emperors were making moves, and the ambitions he had set aside while managing the present were growing more urgent. The Beasts Pirates needed more power, more breadth, more cadres who could operate independently at the level the organisation's reputation implied. He was going to need to build faster than he had been building.
He needed more dragons.
Several seas away, Yamato was eating steak on Morgans' flagship and had been doing so for long enough that even Morgans, who was not a man given to restraint in any area of his professional life, was beginning to calculate the cost.
She had left Onigashima on this ship because Morgans had offered and the alternatives had been worse. The Beasts Pirates' territory was effectively sealed — Kaido's influence extended outward in all directions and most vessels with any self-preservation instinct declined to cross it. The few that didn't were either very powerful, very foolish, or working for Morgans' operation, which occupied some unusual middle category between the two.
He had been trying to extract information about Kaido from her since they cleared the blockade line, with the professional persistence of someone who had built an empire on the principle that every person knew something worth printing. Yamato had told him several things, none of which were what he was actually looking for. He did not have her mother's name. He did not have her origin story. He did not have the inside account of what it was like to grow up as the child of an Emperor who expressed paternal care primarily through a mace.
He shifted approaches.
"Yamato." He leaned forward, the beak and the keen business intelligence both angled toward her. "If Kaido is your father — and he is, clearly — then the woman who gave birth to you must have been remarkable. What do you know about her? Name, species, home island?"
Yamato stopped chewing.
She put the question to her memory, which she applied to most problems with considerable force and had historically produced reasonable results. The question of her mother was not one of those results. What she found, when she searched — which she had done before, occasionally, in the long years of Onigashima's walls — was nothing of substance. Not absence exactly, because absence implied that something had been there and been removed. More like the space where a memory should have been had never been occupied.
All her childhood memories were Kaido. His shape. His weight. The quality of being corrected by him, which she had experienced at regular intervals across her entire remembered life. She did not know if the deficit was ordinary — if all children had this gap when the absent parent had left no impression — or if there was a reason the information had never reached her.
She sometimes wondered if she was his biological daughter at all. The doubt arrived periodically and never resolved in either direction.
"I don't know," she said finally.
Morgans looked at her for a moment. Then he wrote something in his notebook that was probably not what she had said but was adjacent to it in a way that would read better in print.