—Broadcast—
The sea train was, in a mechanical sense, nearly perfect. Most of its crew were dead. The track ahead was clear. It continued moving toward its destination with the patient indifference of engineered things — no hesitation, no distress, no awareness that anything had gone wrong. It simply went.
Rengoku Kyojuro had already sent word to Marine Headquarters. Reinforcements were coming. The gap between coming and here was his problem alone.
He pushed through the last interior door.
The cab had been a workspace once. Polished, purposeful, full of the specific pride that Water 7 craftsmen built into everything they made. That was now impossible to see. The surfaces — seats, console, canopy, dashboard — were uniformly dark with blood, layered thick enough to have stopped being shocking and become simply the color of the room. The smell was physical. It had weight.
What moved was worse than what didn't.
Pieces of flesh clung to the metal surfaces throughout the cab, and they moved — not falling, not sliding, but turning, flexing, pressing against the metal with a slow insistence that suggested intention. They were dark in color, irregular in shape, and they filled the cab the way mold fills an abandoned room: thoroughly, without urgency, as if they had all the time they needed.
Rengoku Kyojuro's expression did not change. His eyes did.
"The sea train is the pride of mankind," he said, and his voice was entirely level. "Scum of the dark have no right to touch it."
He gripped his sword with both hands.
"Breathing of Flame — Type Four — Winding Flames!"
The blade swept through a rising arc and the fire that followed it did not shoot forward — it spun. A vortex formed around him, tight and accelerating, heat radiating outward in waves that pressed against the walls. The fire tornado pulled the air of the cab into itself and what the air carried with it — every piece of moving flesh caught, rolled, burned, and came apart within seconds. The smoke that replaced them was black and bitter, and the fire ate that too.
When the carriage cleared, Rengoku stood in the middle of a scorched cab with his sword lowered.
The sea train's whistle sounded.
Long. Unbroken. Fully committed.
No brakes. No deceleration. Whatever had been controlling the cab had managed, before it was destroyed, to ensure the train would arrive at its destination at full speed.
He looked at the console. At the tracks ahead visible through the blood-smeared front window. At the approaching shape of Arabasta Station growing rapidly larger.
Half a minute. Less.
He set his feet.
The platform came apart under the impact.
The train hit it at full speed and kept going — glass erupted outward from station buildings, support columns cracked, signboards tore free and spun through the air. The people on the platform had scattered the moment they heard the whistle's pitch; most of them made it. The train didn't care either way. It ground through the station structure and drove into the sea train that sat idle on the far track, and the collision between two masses of moving metal produced a sound that cleared the district.
The crash finally bled off enough momentum to stop. The train tilted. The carriages folded against each other at wrong angles. The track buckled under the impact points and stayed buckled. Metal fragments spread across the platform in a wide radius. The air above the station filled with smoke and the acrid copper smell of sheared steel, and then, slowly, the screaming and the crying and the running started filling in behind it.
From the air, the three of them on their shadow bats looked down at Arabasta Station.
"I guessed this would happen," Jade said, watching the smoke column rise. She had pulled the Flying Shadow Night Bats clear of the train early enough — the moment the cab's whistle changed tone, she'd understood what it meant and given the order. All three of them had cleared the carriages well before impact.
"That's a shame about the swordsman," Perona said.
The desert platform below, which had carried the specific warm character of an Arabasta port under afternoon light, was now a wreck site. The station's distinctive architecture — the colors, the archways, the small market stalls that had been scattered along the boarding area — was buried under debris and leaking smoke. Rescue workers were already moving into the edges of it, picking toward the carriages.
Then a fire dragon burst from the wreckage of the front cab.
It swept outward from the impact point and dissipated, and behind it, walking out of the destroyed cab with a sword in hand and his Marine cloak in pieces, was Rengoku Kyojuro. His face had taken some cuts. His uniform was shredded in several places. His footing, as he stepped down from the wrecked frame of the train onto the buckled platform, was completely steady.
He stopped walking and looked at what surrounded him.
Wreckage in every direction. Civilian belongings scattered across debris. Rescue workers calling to each other through the smoke. Fire in three places and spreading. Families in the crowd searching for families in the crowd.
For the first time, the certainty in Rengoku Kyojuro's eyes flickered.
He stood in the middle of what had happened and looked at it, and for a moment he simply didn't know — not what to do next, that part was clear — but what it meant, whether the people he'd led through carriage after carriage were balanced against this, whether any accounting made sense of the gap between what he'd prevented and what he hadn't.
What exactly am I protecting?
"Save me—"
The voice was thin and half-buried. Coming from one of the tilted carriages still on the track.
"—save the child—"
The uncertainty in his eyes settled back into focus. He adjusted his grip on the sword, turned toward the voice, and moved.