-Broadcast-
"It's called the Beherit."
Kagura said it the way she would say the name of a disease—precisely, without drama, as if precision was the only responsible response to something dangerous. They were back inside Rome now, in her office, away from the open air of Sabaody and whatever might be listening there.
"It's a key. An extremely dangerous one." She looked at the red stone in Artoria's palm without moving closer to it. "You should let Admiral Naraku deal with it. It is connected to his origin, and he is the only one who should be handling it."
Artoria looked at the stone. The stone sat there with the flat patience of an object that had been waiting for centuries and was not in a hurry.
"Start from the beginning," Artoria said.
Kagura did.
The Battle of Marineford had left the world's map of power full of blank spaces, and blank spaces on maps are filled by whoever moves fastest. The Seven Warlords of the Sea had emerged from the war largely intact—they had participated in the technical sense of having been present, and had departed in the practical sense of having not engaged seriously. They returned to their respective arrangements and continued their respective business with the ease of people who had successfully navigated between obligation and consequence.
One of the seven was different.
Gecko Moriah was, by most assessments, the weakest of the Warlords—a fact that had been made uncomfortably public when the Straw Hat Pirates had dismantled Thriller Bark in the Devil's Triangle some months prior. He had survived that, and he had survived Marineford by the margin of the fat man who fought beside him being thick enough in the blood to absorb a Hellhound without dying, and he had spent two months afterward recovering in proximity to the Straw Hat crew, which was not a conventional convalescence environment.
During those two months, through a combination of eavesdropping and what he characterized to himself as strategic extraction of information, he had assembled pieces of a description: an island somewhere in the West Blue, ancient, isolated, with tombs in its interior that no local resident would approach. The information had come from Nico Robin—who had mentioned it in passing and had not, at any point, expected to be taken seriously.
She had underestimated Gecko Moriah's enthusiasm for graves.
The storm had been building for six hours before it became genuinely dangerous.
The boat was small—appropriate for a crew that had left Thriller Bark's two remaining cadres behind to guard the Devil's Triangle, taking only Perona and a handful of reliable soldiers on what was, in principle, a research expedition. In a storm of this scale, small was not adequate.
Perona had her hands wrapped around a rope on the port side, her pink twin ponytails completely destroyed by the rain, her Gothic dress plastered against her skin with the weight of three hours of continuous soaking. Her crown was still on her head by some miracle of spite. Her umbrella had surrendered to the wind twenty minutes ago and was now somewhere in the ocean.
[Sky Screen Character Notes: Cadre of the Thriller Bark Pirates — Perona. User of the Paramecia-type Horo Horo no Mi (Hollow-Hollow Fruit).]
"If that woman lied to us," Perona said, through her teeth, to the storm, "I am going to find her and haunt her personally."
The woman in question was Nico Robin, who had said nothing about this specific storm in her vague description of a remote island with interesting tombs, because she had not known about the storm, because she had mentioned it casually to people she had not expected to act on the information.
Seven meters tall, Gecko Moriah stood against the wind with the stubbornness of a man who was too large to be easily moved by it. His cross-stitched face was running with rain, his onion-shaped silhouette was catching the gale like a sail, and he was comprehensively miserable. When he saw Perona shaking, he moved between her and the wind without discussion—his bulk serving as a windbreak, which it was adequate for even if it was useful for very little else at this precise moment.
[Sky Screen Character Notes: Captain of the Thriller Bark Pirates — Gecko Moriah. One of the Seven Warlords of the Sea. User of the Paramecia-type Kage Kage no Mi (Shadow-Shadow Fruit).]
Perona looked up at him.
She did not say thank you. She didn't need to. He already knew.
"There's a light," someone called from the bow.
There was—faint, barely visible through the rain, the specific quality of light that belongs to coastline rather than open water. An island. Far, but there.
The crew moved with the coordinated urgency of people who have been given something to move toward.
The approach was not clean. The coastline, as it materialized out of the dark, was defended by reefs—submerged rock formations that made the final hundred meters a problem of navigation that the available light and storm conditions were not cooperating with. The hull took damage. Water entered. At a certain point, the boat stopped being a vessel and started being an obligation, and Moriah made the calculation that keeping people alive was worth more than keeping the hull, and they abandoned it.
He had Perona in his arms before she had finished registering that they were going into the water. The darkness and rain closed over them, and they swam for the shore, and they made it, and then the darkness and rain closed over them again in a different sense—separated from the rest of the crew by the terrain, by the weather, by the specific poor luck of a night that had been testing them for hours and had not finished.
They were on the island.