—Real World—
The Sky Screen did not editorialize. It simply showed things, and the things it showed had consequences.
Pluton's location — underground in Wano Country, within Kaido's territory, confirmed by the Nefertari Poneglyph and extracted through the memories of a king — was now visible to every person on the sea who was watching. Which was most of them.
The consequences began immediately.
Crocodile had been back in his own territory for two days.
After the Devil's Triangle, after the Shichibukai dispersal, after the specific humiliation of retreating without winning anything, he had returned to his domain and was doing the work of reassembling his composure. Two days was not enough time for that work. Two days was enough time for the Sky Screen to locate him with precision and deliver the worst possible news in the most public possible format.
He watched Naraku extract the information from Cobra's mind and felt it the way you feel a floor drop out beneath you — the particular sensation of something you built your entire strategy around being rendered worthless by someone else's timeline.
"All of it was real," he said, and the words came out wrong — too flat, too controlled, the voice of a man managing something that wasn't managing well. "The ancient weapon exists. The Nefertari were guarding its location all along." He stopped. "And it's in Wano."
He had spent years on Baroque Works. Years building an intelligence network through Arabasta's infrastructure, years manufacturing the conditions for civil war, years working toward one specific goal: reach the Poneglyph, find Pluton, use Pluton to become something no one on the sea could challenge. He had planned around Whitebeard. He had planned around the Marines. He had planned around the World Government. He had not planned for a Fourth Apostle to walk into Alubarna and simply take the information in an evening.
And the location it pointed to was Kaido's front door.
"I'm not going to Wano." The sentence was not a decision — it was a recognition of a wall. "I can't go to Wano. No one who isn't a Yonko or something worse goes to Wano and gets what they came for." He looked at nothing in particular. "So everything I've done , I worked that hard to make Kaido's position stronger?"
The cadres around him were quiet in the practiced way of people who have learned that their boss's breakdowns run better without audience participation. One of them eventually misjudged the silence.
"Boss." It was Galdino, who had been watching the Sky Screen since the broadcast began and had been getting ideas. He delivered his suggestion without waiting to be asked, which was a breach of the hierarchy he would have observed six months ago, before the Sky Screen had started doing things to people's sense of proportion. "We can't reach the ancient weapon. But we can reach this country. The rebel situation outside Arabasta — the conflict with the royal army is still unresolved. If someone provides a spark—"
Crocodile looked at him with an expression that processed the suggestion and also processed the fact that Galdino had offered it without being invited to.
He said nothing, which meant neither approval nor correction, and turned back to the Sky Screen.
Galdino sat down.
The senior cadres of Baroque Works settled into a quiet calculation. The Arabasta situation was complicated now — the rebels had legitimate grievances and no easy off-ramp, the royal family had just had its most important secret broadcast to the world, and the country had been visited by something that the Marine couldn't stop. Whatever happened next would create opportunities. They could be patient. The Sky Screen would keep showing them what to watch for.
Come early and be served first, was the general consensus. Watch how this develops before moving.
In Alubarna's palace, the crisis had become a different kind of problem.
Nefertari Cobra sat in his chair with his hand over his face. The ministers were arranged around the room in the formation of people waiting for guidance they were not sure would come. Vivi sat across from her father, alive and returned, which was the one part of this day that had gone correctly.
"Is it true?" she asked. "What the Sky Screen showed — about the Poneglyph, about Pluton — is that what's actually recorded in the tomb?"
The king lowered his hand.
There was no practical reason to maintain the secret. It had been extracted from his own mind and displayed to the world. The ambitious powers of every sea now knew what the Nefertari had guarded for generations. Whatever protective value the secret had held was gone.
"It's true," he said. "The knowledge was passed to each king on succession. I would have told you when you took the throne." He looked at his daughter with the specific tiredness of a parent who has spent years protecting a child from something and watched the protection fail anyway. "The whereabouts of Pluton are no longer a secret. That's the reality now."
The room absorbed this.
A minister said something about the rebels. Another said something about the broadcast's reach. A third calculated, quietly, how many ambitious powers on the sea had just redirected their attention toward Wano Country.
Vivi thought about Crocodile, who had destroyed her kingdom's interior from inside, killed her people, manufactured a civil war — all for what was on that stone. And then she thought about what the Sky Screen had shown of Naraku: how easily he had taken what Crocodile had spent years trying to reach.
"There's more than one secret, isn't there?" she said.
Cobra looked at her. He didn't answer. Which was its own answer.
—Real World — Marine Headquarters—
The mood at Marine Headquarters was not good.
Nika — the Hito Hito no Mi, Model: Nika, the Mythical Zoan that the World Government had been cataloguing under a different name for eight hundred years — was now in Wano, under Kaido's authority, inside a man named Kaido. And now Pluton, the ancient weapon that predated every existing power structure on the sea, was also confirmed to be in Wano Country. Underground. In Kaido's territory. As if the island had been selected by someone with a specific sense of irony.
"Nika and Pluton both," someone said, in the stunned voice of a man doing calculation he doesn't want to finish.
"Let Kaido escape," someone else said. "We let Kaido escape."
The Marine's senior officers were managing the news with the dignity available to them, which was limited.
In the Holy Land of Mary Geoise, Saint Saturn overturned his table.
The sound of it carried through the adjacent corridors, and the attendants who heard it exchanged glances and decided to be elsewhere. The old man understood ancient weapons in the specific way of a man who had spent centuries managing the conditions of the world, and what he understood was that a weapon with the capability implied by ancient records, in the hands of a man who had already absorbed a Mythical Zoan and survived a battle with the Marine's most powerful, was not a geopolitical complication. It was a revision of the basic assumptions.
They had let Kaido leave.
"We couldn't have killed Kaido even if we'd known," said one of the remaining Five Elders, in the measured tone of people trying to prevent a complete collapse of composure. "Uchiha Madara was protecting him. The operational conditions were not—"
"We didn't know," Saturn said. "That's the point. We didn't know because we didn't have the information. And now everyone has the information, and we still don't have Kaido."
The five of them sat with this in silence that was not comfortable.
How to explain this to Im-sama was a question none of them were approaching directly yet.
In a small private garden, within the highest point of Mary Geoise, Im sat among flowers that had stopped interesting them.
On the surface of the Sky Screen visible from this garden, Princess Nefertari Vivi's face was visible — alive, returned to her father, looking at the world with the expression of a person who has just been introduced to a larger version of it than she was previously aware of.
Im looked at her for a long time.
The butterflies moved in the garden. The flowers were exactly as they had been this morning.
Im did not look at the flowers.
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