The cargo ship was quieter than expected.
Ornn stepped aboard and did a slow, casual sweep of the deck. Four Beasts Pirates crew members, all minions — no cadres, no Devil Fruit users he could sense. The ship ran a fixed route that had never once been troubled. Why waste capable soldiers on a route that had never needed them?
The tension in his shoulders settled slightly.
He fell in behind a guard and helped shift Sake Iron Ore, moving pieces of the same material he'd spent seven days hammering into something worthy. The work was familiar. His hands knew it. He moved without thinking, which left his mind free to watch the porthole.
The commotion started precisely on schedule.
"Meimei!"
The voice carried even through the hull. Through the porthole he caught the flash — ice-blue Haki wreathing the mace, Yamato's form sweeping through the dock guards like a tide erasing writing in sand. One swing. Every guard on the bank folded.
Right on time, he thought.
In his peripheral vision: one of the crew members reaching for a Wano-style Den Den Mushi, already pressing it to his ear.
Ornn dropped the iron ore on the man's foot.
The man looked down at his foot. Looked up. Got a fist in the face before he could process either sensation. He went down without a sound.
"What the—"
The other three came fast, blades out. Ornn didn't wait for them to organize. He called the magma up through his arms — seven days of practice making the process smooth now, the golden heat rising to his skin like a greeting — and turned toward them.
He spread his fingers and flicked.
Droplets of thousand-degree magma scattered across all three in the same motion. Not aimed at vitals. Just contact — just enough of the most painful thing they'd ever felt landing on exposed skin.
The swords hit the deck. Their owners followed shortly after, and Ornn put them down cleanly before they could find the coordination to keep fighting.
He looked at the four unconscious men. Looked at the porthole.
He raised his magma-wrapped fist toward the shore.
Yamato saw it. Her body language changed immediately — the coiled readiness unspooling into motion as she finished the last of the dock guards and turned toward the distant silhouette of the torii gate, already moving.
Ornn ran down the gangplank.
A fresh contingent of factory guards was pouring out of the main entrance, drawn by the noise, converging on the dock with weapons ready and questions forming on their faces.
He pointed urgently in the direction Yamato had gone.
"Move! The attacker went that way — Yamato's gone crazy, she's hit the cargo ship and she's heading for the gate!"
He put enough panic in his voice to be convincing. Not too much — panic that performed itself was suspicious. Just a man reporting something urgent to people who needed to hear it.
The guards didn't look at him twice. They ran.
Ornn waited until they'd rounded the corner, then turned toward the factory.
The monitoring room was deep enough inside that the noise from outside arrived as a muffled backdrop — shouts, the distant crack of Yamato's Haki, the general audio signature of something going very wrong for everyone but him.
He went through the entrance with his head down and his voice already going.
"Lord Theo — it's bad, Yamato's lost it, she hit the cargo ship, there are brothers dead and injured, she's heading for—"
The donkey-faced warden looked up from his desk.
The long face. The leather armor. The particular expression of a man who had always been small enough to be harmless and had compensated by making himself unpleasant.
Theo's eyes went to the Den Den Mushi immediately — the correct tactical instinct, get word to his superiors, specifically to Sasaki of the Flying Six, before this became his personal disaster.
Ornn crossed the room in four steps and hit him in the stomach with a magma-wrapped fist.
The fist stopped.
Not deflected. Not dodged. Stopped — like hitting a wall that happened to be shaped like a man. He looked down and saw it: pitch-black Armament Haki coating the warden's abdomen, the magma sputtering against it with an irritated hiss, producing heat and sound but almost no damage.
Of course, Ornn thought, with the distant clarity of a man recalibrating mid-strike. He's a cadre. Of course he has Haki.
He'd known it was possible. He'd told himself he'd accounted for it. Apparently accounting for something and being ready for it in the moment were different skills.
He was pulling back when the donkey hoof caught him.
He didn't see it until the sound of displaced air was already too close to matter. The kick connected just below his shoulder, square in the ribs, with the full weight of an Animal-Class transformation behind it and Armament Haki coating the strike.
The wall arrived very quickly.
He hit it back-first and slid, and the bloom of pain through his torso took a moment to fully process — his body still trying to catalogue the damage while his lungs renegotiated their relationship with air. He tasted copper. Opened his mouth and let the blood go rather than swallow it. Breathing became slightly easier.
Above him, Theo looked down with the expression of a man who had just been mildly inconvenienced.
The long face tilted. The jaw worked in that characteristic grinding motion.
"Aoun." The voice was flat with disdain. "You've been busy. New clothes, no shackles — and you thought you'd try me." He pressed one hoof onto Ornn's chest, pinning him, and picked up the machete from the desk with the unhurried ease of someone who had already decided how this ended. "Talk. How did you get the shackles off? Where did the uniform come from?"
Ornn looked up at him.
He could feel the tongs behind his back — the Sea Prism Stone handcuffs still bound to the sharpened end, wrapped in strips of fabric. He'd positioned them there deliberately. The problem was reaching them without telegraphing the intent to a man who was currently standing on his chest and watching him with professional wariness.
So he talked.
He rambled — vague, scared-sounding, the verbal equivalent of a man buying time while his options assembled themselves. Theo listened with the patience of someone who didn't need to hurry. The machete turned idly in his hand.
Now.
Ornn twisted, found the tongs with his fingers, and drove the Sea Prism Stone end hard into Theo's calf.
"You think that kind of trick works on—"
The sentence stopped.
Theo looked down at his leg with the expression of a man who had just noticed that the floor had become unreliable. The Armament Haki across his body flickered. The machete dipped. His other hand went to the wall for balance.
The Sea Stone's effect on a Devil Fruit user was immediate and total — Haki didn't protect against it, couldn't be summoned to cover the gap. The strength went out of him like water through cupped hands.
The machete hit the floor.
Ornn pulled himself upright, ribs screaming, and looked at the warden who had put a whip across his back on the first day.
He took a breath.
Then he opened his mouth and breathed out.
Not magma — not the big transformation, not the forge god's full fire. Just the bellows breath. The sustained, directed flame that a smithing god could produce without thinking, the exhalation of a furnace that had been burning since before this island existed.
It was quite sufficient.
The flames caught Theo's mane and moved with enthusiasm.
Eat that, Ornn thought, watching the warden scramble, you and every whip you ever held.