—Broadcast—
Nobody stopped them.
Naraku walked through the streets of Alubarna with Vivi ahead of him and Rengoku Kyojuro behind, and the city, by royal command, had emptied. Nefertari Cobra had issued the evacuation order within minutes of learning what had happened at the station — he understood the calculation. A demon that could erase a three-kilometer radius and corrupt soldiers on contact was not a problem that could be solved by interposing more soldiers. Survival was the goal now. Only the living had options.
So the streets were hollow, shutters drawn, the capital quiet in the particular way of a city holding its breath.
Naraku walked through it without comment. He had gotten what he came for. He glanced at Vivi occasionally with the sideways attention of someone confirming that a useful object is still where it should be.
Vivi, for her part, was doing the work of composing herself. Her clothes were torn, her hair was out of everything that had been holding it, and she could feel the bruises where the tentacles had gripped her. She had survived Baroque Works. She had survived Crocodile. She had stood on the deck of a ship that was sailing into the first true crisis of her life and chosen, deliberately, not to flinch. She was not going to flinch now either.
She breathed in. She breathed out. She watched where they were going.
The Nefertari royal cemetery.
"A man of your strength," she said, because saying nothing felt like giving him something, "and you're digging graves? Did you learn that from pirates?"
Naraku didn't answer. His tentacles were already at work on the outer wall of the tomb before the question had finished carrying through the air. The bricks — several centuries old, solid, well-maintained — lasted approximately as long as ordinary paper lasts against a candle. The entrance appeared in under a minute, and Rengoku Kyojuro's transformed body pressed Vivi forward into the dark before her eyes had fully adjusted.
Naraku followed, and the exit was gone.
The Nefertari mausoleum was not what outsiders imagined when they imagined royal tombs.
It was large, certainly — the Nefertari line was an old one, and generations of dead required space. But the money that other royal families spent on gold inlay and carved stone and decorative pillars had not been spent here. The walls were plain. The floors were functional. There were places along the outer corridors where damage from some previous intrusion had been repaired recently, the new stonework noticeably lighter in color than the old, the craftsmanship adequate and no more — Cobra had authorized what was necessary and not a grain of sand beyond it.
No matter how beautiful the tomb, the dead cannot enjoy it. It was a Nefertari philosophy that expressed itself in everything from policy to architecture.
Vivi had grown up knowing this about her family. Walking through the mausoleum now, under these circumstances, she felt it as something almost like pride.
At the center of the complex, they found what Naraku had come for.
The Poneglyph stood alone in the chamber — a massive stone column covered in the ancient script that most of the world could not read and most scholars had stopped trying to read. It was older than the kingdom surrounding it. It would be standing long after every living person in this room had ceased to matter to history. It had a quality of permanence that made the surrounding stone feel recent.
Vivi looked at the carvings. She had seen this stone before, as a child, brought here by her father for reasons he hadn't fully explained. She had always assumed the explanation would come when she was older. She was starting to understand that it might not have.
"If you can read what's written on it," she said, keeping her voice level and directing the dryness toward Naraku, "you're one step ahead of me. I've spent my whole life next to that thing and I've never been told what it says." She looked at him. "I'd like to know, honestly. Before whatever happens next."
Naraku's red eyes moved from the Poneglyph to her with an expression of mild amusement.
"Your father chose not to tell you on purpose," he said. "Protection through ignorance. The secrets of the Nefertari have been guarded for a long time. What's carved here records the whereabouts of an ancient weapon." He paused, apparently deciding that telling her cost him nothing. "Things thousands of years old, and they're still worth finding."
Vivi went still.
Crocodile wanted Pluton. The thought arrived with the particular chill of a pattern reasserting itself. He came to Arabasta, infiltrated the country, manufactured a civil war, and tried to tear this nation apart from the inside — all to get to that stone. And now something like this comes looking for the same thing.
She understood, suddenly and completely, that she had no idea what Pluton actually was. Neither did Crocodile, she suspected — he'd wanted it, but his conception of what an ancient weapon meant in a world of Yonko and Admirals had probably been optimistic. She'd had the same assumption without examining it. Everyone had.
What kind of weapon was worth this?
Rengoku Kyojuro stood motionless a few steps behind her, demon-formed, watching without expression. He had read the same Poneglyph with a Marine's instincts and chosen not to engage with what it meant. The World Government did not advocate interest in ancient texts, and interest in ancient texts caused fatal disasters, and Rengoku had enough of those today.
A sound behind them.
A figure appeared at the chamber entrance — tall, purple-skinned, horned, with red eyes that moved with independent ferocity. It was carrying someone.
Nefertari Cobra looked smaller than Vivi remembered, in the grip of the thing holding him. Still upright. Still looking at his daughter with an expression that was trying, above all else, not to show her how frightened he was for her.
"Father—"
Goshinki something that Naraku had sent ahead through routes they hadn't taken — set Cobra down on the floor of the chamber and allowed the reunion to last exactly as long as it was useful to allow it. Then it turned to its master.
It had done what it was designed to do: entered through Cobra's memories, shared his thoughts with Naraku, confirmed what the Poneglyph said against what Cobra's mind knew.
"Pluton," Naraku said, the word carrying the specific satisfaction of a question being answered, "is in Kaido's territory. Underground in Wano Country." He turned the information over. "And it needs someone who can genuinely read the ancient script to activate it."
Cobra sat on the floor of his family's mausoleum and said nothing. The secret he had planned to carry to his grave had lasted until tonight.
Goshinki turned its red eyes to the chamber and kept reading.
The secrets of the Nefertari were apparently more than one.