-Real World-
The reunion between Perona and the version of Moria that had regained his memory while occupying his own zombified body was brief, tearful on her end, and complicated on his.
She had watched—from outside, on the boat, through the specific misery of not knowing what was happening below—while the Sky Screen showed her what she could not otherwise see. She had thought they were both finished. Then the zombie had looked at her with the particular quality that meant the person behind the eyes had come back, and she had run at him and thrown herself into his arms and cried in the specific way of someone releasing the aftermath of being very afraid.
Moria held her.
He had lost his crew once. The people who had followed him before fighting Kaido—all of them, the entire organization he'd built—taken in a moment. He had spent years afterward filling the gap with zombies, which was not a complete substitute. The girl was real. He was not going to say anything about the situation that would make it worse.
His hands were wrapped in bandaging. He raised one of them and put it on her head anyway.
Kaido was watching this from a position nearby and finding it disagreeable in a way he could not immediately articulate.
The articulation arrived after a moment: Yamato did not do this. He observed the father-and-daughter configuration in front of him and felt something he categorized, incorrectly, as contempt.
"You like making other people into zombies," he said, in the tone of a man delivering an accurate observation rather than comfort. "Now it's your turn. And the person who took your fruit can control it at a level that makes you look like you were practicing." He looked at Moria. "Aren't you ashamed?"
Moria rolled his eyes, which was an undignified gesture for a Shichibukai but he was currently bandaged from shoulder to hip and his options for dignity were limited. He said something to Perona and she separated from him and moved away, because whatever came next was an adults' conversation.
[Sky Screen Character Notes: Shadow Queen — Jade. Former master of a lost shadow-legion. The Shadow-Shadow Fruit's original inheritor.]
"Awakened," Moria said. "The fruit was already awakened in her, and she took it straight out of my body." He turned the experience over with the professional dissatisfaction of a craftsman whose tools had been repossessed by the previous owner. "I've never encountered anything like that. The Kage Kage no Mi responded to her the way it never responds to me—as though the connection I have with it is recent and hers is fundamental."
"Because it is," Kaido said. "You ate a fruit someone else mastered first. The prior master always leaves a residue."
"And the murals. The nine shadow-legions." Moria was thinking now rather than reacting. "She demonstrated two of them in the tomb—shadow-eating insects and warrior forms. The murals showed at least seven types I haven't seen. If I could learn the techniques she developed—"
"You'd need to awaken the fruit first," Kaido said, with the specific flatness of someone who has already run the math. "You can't access those techniques through imitation. The awakening is the prerequisite, not the method."
Moria sat with this.
"Then I need to find her."
"You need to survive finding her," Kaido said, which was not agreement but was the more useful observation.
He looked at the Sky Screen. The footage of what Moria had encountered in the tomb—the gold-eyed woman rising, the arm through the stomach, the black substance changing hands—had played for every major force simultaneously. The Shadow Queen was now a known quantity. The question of what she would do next was, at this point, open.
Kaido's personal assessment was that unearthing the Shadow Queen had introduced a variable he would have preferred to keep buried. He had enough variables. The arrangement he had made with Orochi for the stability of Wano Country depended on a relatively predictable external environment, and a newly awakened ancient devil who had just repossessed her own fruit from a living Shichibukai was not a predictable external environment.
He would leave her in her tomb.
Moria, he could see, had already arrived at a different conclusion. He was going back to negotiate with her. Whether this was brave or stupid depended on outcomes.
The war room at Marine Headquarters had the atmosphere of people who had been discussing the same problem for a long time and had not resolved it.
"Why hasn't Admiral Naraku appeared in the broadcast?" said a senior officer, which was the question that had been circling the room since the Sky Screen had cut from the red stone to the Shadow Queen without providing the Admiral context that Kagura's appearance had seemed to promise. "Her named Kagura — does she have an incomplete information? Or is the Sky Screen simply not showing us that section yet?"
This was not answerable and remained unanswered.
The broader question—whether the Shadow Queen's emergence was connected to whatever the broadcast was building toward—occupied the more analytical minds in the room.
"Moria digs up one ancient demon," said a Vice Admiral from the far end of the table. "What is the probability that the next time he puts a shovel in the ground, he finds something worse?"
"He's a professional," Sakazuki said, from the hospital by proxy—his input was being conveyed through a subordinate. "In the wrong discipline."
The consensus that formed was roughly: the Kage Kage no Mi (Shadow-Shadow Fruit) in Gecko Moria's body was a resource that had attracted the attention of the Shadow Queen, a resource the Five Elders had also noted, and a resource that would attract further attention as the broadcast continued revealing its lineage. Leaving Moria in Wano Country under Kaido's protection was leaving him in a location where the Marine could not reach him.
"Eliminate Moria," Sakazuki said, through his subordinate. "While Kaido's attention is elsewhere. Without the fruit, the Shadow Queen has no mechanism to further upgrade herself from him. With the fruit still in his body, he's a threat vector."
Kuzan considered the footage of the tentacles emerging from the innkeeper's body—the specific quality of something that had not been indigenous to that woman until relatively recently, the male voice from the wrong throat. The cult statue in Arlong's compound, covered in tentacles. The red and black objects that the Sky Screen had briefly shown, which bore no resemblance to any Devil Fruit or ability in Marine records.
"This might be connected to something older than the Shadow Queen," he said. "The island where Moria found the tomb. We should send investigators before we send anything else."
"Send both," said someone.
The Five Elders, watching from Mary Geoise through the standard channels, had already arrived at the same conclusion from the opposite direction: Gecko Moria's Kage Kage no Mi was a useful resource. The Shadow Queen was a potentially useful resource. The Marine's interest in eliminating both was an obstacle.
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