—Broadcast—
With the First Apostle dead, the tentacle creatures on the island lost whatever had been sustaining them. There was no need to hunt them down. Given a few days, they would rot where they stood — or shuffled, or dragged themselves — into harmless heaps of organic matter. The island would be unpleasant for a while. Then it would simply be quiet.
The more immediate problem was transport.
Moria, Perona, and the Shadow Queen were stranded on an island with no ship, and building one from scratch was a project that required materials, labor, and a degree of enthusiasm that none of them currently possessed. They were still working through the logistics when, at dusk the following day, a pirate vessel emerged from the horizon and resolved the matter entirely.
The crew of that ship would later struggle to articulate exactly what had happened to them.
Ten days out from the island, Jade stood at the ship's bow.
The blue-black tint had faded from her skin. She looked, from a distance, like an ordinary young woman — short dark hair lifted by the sea wind, eyes on the water, expression somewhere between calm and absent. Moria, who had watched her extract a Devil Fruit's core essence through a living man's abdomen with her bare hand, found the ordinary appearance more unsettling than the alternative.
He approached anyway.
"Master Jade." He kept his voice respectful — a habit he'd developed faster than he expected, given that he'd spent most of his career refusing to be respectful to anyone. "It's windy out here. The Shadow Legion has finished the cleaning work below. You could think through whatever it is in the cabin."
She didn't answer immediately. The sea wind moved through her hair, and she let it.
Whatever she was looking at, it wasn't the water.
Moria retreated without pressing. He'd learned, in ten days, that the Shadow Queen was a direct master — she said what she wanted, didn't make her subordinates guess, didn't complicate simple interactions with tests of loyalty. But there were moods she went into that he'd decided were not his business to interrupt. The closer they got to wherever they were headed, the more frequent those moods became.
He was, surprisingly, bothered by this. Not being able to share a master's burden sat poorly with him. He was getting sentimental in his old age. Or his new undead age.
Even the Shadow Legion had picked up on it. Their work pace had slowed — not from laziness, but from the particular distraction of underlings who are quietly trying to figure out how to improve someone's mood without being asked.
"Ten days," Jade said, without turning. "We should be arriving soon. Start getting ready."
Moria nodded, already calculating. Whatever waited at their destination, he was stronger than he'd been two weeks ago by a margin he was still adjusting to. The shadow-eating had continued throughout the voyage whenever opportunity presented itself — not at the rate the island had offered, but steadily. He'd grown accustomed to thinking about Kaido in the abstract, as an immovable fact of the world. He was beginning, cautiously, to think about him differently.
Not yet. But eventually.
He was allowing himself eventually.
The fog rolled in on the eleventh day, thick enough to reduce visibility to a ship's length in any direction, and from somewhere inside it came the sound of a whistle.
Then the sea train came through.
It emerged from the grey like something that had no business existing — a full locomotive on rails that ran across open water, moving fast enough that the spray it kicked up was still settling when the last car passed and the rumble of its wheels faded back into the sound of waves. Its metallic body caught what little light there was and threw it back in scattered fragments. Condensation blurred its windows. Somewhere inside, dim and shifting, shapes moved.
The three of them stood at the rail and watched it go.
"I didn't expect sea trains in this era," Jade said, and there was something genuine in her voice — the particular wonder of an antique confronting proof that the world kept inventing things without her permission. "If more island-connecting lines were built, the world might be a little less ignorant."
"That one's from Water 7," Moria offered. "The shipbuilders there built two total. This is the longest route." He paused. "Pirates don't touch it. Tickets are open to everyone — destroy the route and you've destroyed your own transport. And Water 7 spends serious money on protection. The Marines keep a presence on the line too."
Perona had ridden it before and said so, in the tone of someone who had previously considered themselves worldly for the experience. Smooth, stable, scenic. Nothing like being on a ship when the weather turned.
She was watching the retreating outline of the train in the fog and frowning.
"Something's wrong with it."
The others looked.
She was right. The train's lights — which she described as normally bright enough to make the windows glow warmly even at distance — were scattered and inconsistent. A few here, dark stretches between them. And in some of the windows, not the steady electric light she remembered, but something that flickered. Flame.
"A hijacking?" Moria mused. "Doesn't make financial sense. Half the tickets are cheap passage. The serious money doesn't ride the sea train — they have their own ships and don't like sharing space with crowds. There's not enough to extract to justify destroying the route, and destroying it makes you an enemy of Water 7 and everyone who uses it." He scratched the back of his neck. "Too much cost, not enough return."
Jade's mouth curved slightly. The expression didn't reach warmth.
"I suspect," she said, "that there aren't many living people on that train."
The fog closed behind the sea train's outline, and the sound of its wheels faded completely, and the ocean offered nothing further on the subject.