—Broadcast—
No living people.
Perona turned the phrase over in her mind and found it didn't quite fit what she remembered. The shopkeeper from yesterday had been strange — stilted in a way that made her skin prickle — but the woman had spoken, answered questions, conducted something resembling a normal transaction. She hadn't looked like a zombie. She hadn't looked dead.
The red stone came back to her, unbidden. She'd been trying not to think about it since she'd first seen it, and failing consistently. If she'd simply kept it — tucked it away as a decoration, a curiosity — maybe she wouldn't be standing in a lightless street right now wondering what had happened to an entire town's worth of people.
"Someone just came out of one of those buildings." Moria's voice was low, his massive head tilted, eyes narrowed. "I feel like I've seen him before."
He leaned forward, studying the figure that had emerged from a doorway halfway down the street. The clothes were familiar. It took him another moment to place them.
"That's one of ours. From the ship — we scattered when we hit the reef. I didn't think any of them made it to this island."
The figure moved toward them.
It moved wrong.
Every step was effortful in a way that had nothing to do with injury or exhaustion — the body pitched forward as if being dragged by something that didn't understand how human locomotion worked. The gait had a rhythm to it, but it was the wrong rhythm, something that echoed off the empty buildings with an off-beat quality that made the ear want to correct it and couldn't. The man's face, as he drew closer, was the pale of skin left too long in cold water. The exposed flesh was swollen. There was no breath, no warmth, no sense of anything living behind the eyes.
And below the waist, where legs should have been, a mass of black tentacles moved instead, each one finding purchase on the cobblestones and pushing, pushing, pulling the body forward one strange step at a time.
"Since he's your crewman, Moria," Jade said, with the tone of someone assigning a mildly interesting errand, "why don't you go see what he's become?"
The Shadow Queen's word was law. Moria knew something was wrong — the wrongness of it was obvious — and walked forward anyway.
Up close, the smell hit first. Salt and something underneath salt, something older and darker. Moria looked at the swollen face, the empty eyes, the tentacles grinding against the stone below.
You don't want to be human, he thought. Fine.
He didn't hold back. His shadow — the shadow-eating beast that now lived alongside the remnant of his Kage Kage no Mi connection — stretched and lunged, swallowing the tentacle creature's shadow in an instant. The thing stopped moving. It simply stopped, like a mechanism whose power had been cut, swaying slightly in the still air.
Moria felt it immediately. A warmth spreading through his limbs, a density settling into his muscles. He looked at his hand, flexed it slowly.
Then he slapped the tentacle creature.
The thing hit the wall and imploded — not dramatically, not with any theatrical violence, just a wet collapse inward, a burst of red mist, and silence.
Moria stared at where it had been.
Behind him, Perona had gone very still. "Captain," she said carefully, "you're... bigger."
He was. Not dramatically, but perceptibly — a few centimeters taller, a density to his frame that hadn't been there minutes ago. She watched him process this, watched the moment the implications landed.
The desire hit him like a tide coming in.
More.
He didn't reason his way into it. There was no deliberation. The shadow-eating beast shared its hunger with him completely, and suddenly the question of whether the shadows belonged to the strong or the weak was entirely irrelevant. Shadows were shadows. More was more. He turned toward the rest of the street.
The town provided.
They emerged from alleys, from doorways, from the spaces between buildings — more of them, a dozen, then more than a dozen. Each one wearing the clothes of an islander. Each one moving with that same wrong-rhythm gait, that same tentacled lower body grinding against the cobblestones. Whatever had happened to this island had been thorough.
Moria moved through them without ceremony.
Shadow after shadow, consumed. With each one, the growth was measurable — an inch here, a solidity there, the feeling of capacity expanding outward from his core. By the time the last of the dozen had been dealt with, he stood a full meter taller than he had when they'd left the tomb, and his bare hands, he estimated, could now handle anyone short of a named threat without much effort.
Straw Hat, he thought, with the calm of someone making reasonable plans. Next time, I won't need to rely on stolen power. Next time, I take your shadow myself. Without a shadow, you can't survive daylight. Even the grandson of a Marine hero has that weakness. He let the thought settle into satisfaction. Whether I kill you or not will simply be a question of mood.
The fog came in without warning.
One moment the street was merely dark. The next, black mist rolled through it from every direction at once, dropping visibility to arm's length. And within the fog, footsteps — dozens of them, then more, then the kind of number that stops being a count and becomes a sound of its own. Hundreds. Moving through the streets with the same awful wrong-rhythm gait.
Jade's expression shifted for the first time all night. Not alarm. Something brighter than that.
"I've been curious," she said softly, almost to herself, "whether an apostle's strength has declined."
She snapped her fingers.
The Shadow Queen's shadow — already vast, already strange — stretched outward and began to widen, merging with the surrounding dark, pooling and rising in the spaces between buildings. From that pooling darkness, they emerged: ten meters tall, built like wrestlers carved from basalt, each one a perfect copy of the next — the Giant Shadow Trolls, one of the shadow legions she had catalogued in murals centuries before any living person had seen them.
The ground shook as hundreds of them rushed forward.
Perona watched them go and felt, very quietly, that she owed Moria an apology for every time she had complained about his judgment. Surrendering immediately had been correct. Surrendering immediately had been the only sane available choice.
The tentacle creatures — monstrous enough against anything human — were nothing against the trolls. They were lifted, thrown, slammed into walls and pavement with the casual thoroughness of something that is not yet trying. The trolls seemed to want to make an impression. They took their time, varied their methods, ensured each opponent had adequate opportunity to register what was happening before it stopped happening to them. For the Queen's favor, apparently, results alone were insufficient.
Moria followed in their wake and helped himself to the feast.
Shadow after shadow, without pause. The potential of the shadow-eating beast had no visible ceiling — with every addition, he felt more room rather than less, as though his capacity was growing to meet its own demands. By the time the last of the tentacle creatures had been dealt with, the streets were still and quiet again, the fog beginning to thin.
Then a candle appeared.
A small light, moving with the same staggering gait — but this figure was an old woman, shuffling forward through the settling mist, one hand curled around a lit candle as though she'd simply stepped out for a late-night errand.
She stopped when she saw them.
A voice came out of her throat — flat, male, entirely wrong for the body it occupied.
"If you have some skills," it said, "then stay here and become my food."
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