-Broadcast-
The Sky Screen had not returned to Borsalino.
In the time since he had left the lecture hall — following Savitar into the darkness, into the black hole, into whatever came after the black hole — no one on the sea had seen Admiral Kizaru. The Marine had dispatched search operations. They had gone to the places he was known to frequent, the locations where his patterns had been established over decades, and found nothing. Whether he was alive or displaced or simply unreachable from the present timeline was a question the broadcasts had chosen not to answer yet. His absence had become one of the Marine's ongoing concerns.
For now, the Sky Screen moved elsewhere.
The shamisen strings could be heard before anything was visible.
The sound came from somewhere inside the black fog, directionless, moving through the suppressive atmosphere in the way sound moved when the medium was not cooperating with normal propagation. Esdeath had her sword drawn before she identified the instrument. Wendy was frowning.
"It's a shamisen," Wendy said. "But the fog is blocking my magic particles. I can't get any useful range on what's out there."
They had been moving in a single direction for over ten minutes without finding an edge. The fog was deeper than it appeared from outside — structured, not diffuse, the kind of darkness that had an architect. Nakime's Mato Mato no Mi (Castle-Castle Fruit) had a theory attached to it, and the theory was that the shamisen was not decorative.
"The music is doing something to the terrain," Esdeath said. "It's not a coincidence that the fog moves when the strings are plucked."
Before Wendy could respond, the fog cleared.
Not thinned — cleared, decisively, the visibility opening from nothing to complete in the space of a few seconds, the black dissipating outward and leaving behind an arena. Circular, large, the floor heavy stone that had been laid with care rather than expediency. No stands. No audience. In the distance, a castle loomed at the limit of vision — present and indistinct, establishing itself as context without providing detail. The Infinity Castle's interior logic had deposited them here, and here was somewhere .
"We're inside the Castle," Wendy said. Small grasses grew in the cracks between the stones, stubborn and very slightly incongruous. She was looking at the castle in the distance with the expression she wore when her Tori Tori no Mi, Model: Seiryū's (Bird-Bird Fruit, Sky Dragon's) innate sensitivity was registering something. "The buildings. They have something in them. Magic, but not the kind I use — something with a different source. Something that's been here longer."
She did not say evil. She did not need to. The frown communicated it.
Esdeath did not put her sword away. She adjusted her grip instead.
Then she said: "I'm not going to play games with whoever comes out of that teleportation light. One strike, if possible. Two Admirals tied up in the same fight is a waste."
A purple light opened in the arena's far side. A figure walked out of it.
She was wearing white. That was the first observation, and it was not a neutral one — white this precise and this total in a place with this much capacity for darkness was a statement, not an accident. The dress was floor-length, the fabric catching the arena's ambient light without any obvious source for the light it was catching. Her face was serene with the particular serenity of someone for whom serenity was chosen rather than default.
The horns were next. Not a helmet, not an accessory — horns growing from her head in the way that some races' distinguishing features grew, curving outward and upward with a texture that matched nothing in the standard species catalogue. Behind her at the waist, a pair of black wings folded against her back, their darkness a considered contrast against the white.
Sky Screen Character Note: Pure White Devil — Albedo.
"I thought the Admirals would remain together," she said, across the distance of the arena. Her voice carried with a clarity that had nothing to do with volume. "I'm glad it's you two instead."
She smiled. The smile was warm and wrong at exactly the same time, in the way that expressions on faces that have practiced warmth without needing it are wrong — technically correct, deeply off.
Esdeath had not moved her eyes from Albedo since she appeared. Observation Haki, at range, reading what it could read. Species unknown — the horns and wings pointed toward Devil Fruit Zoan as the most available explanation, but Wendy's assessment of the magic in the buildings gave that explanation insufficient certainty.
"She's not human," Esdeath said. A statement, not a question.
She shifted her weight forward.
Wendy's hands were already moving.
The magic circles that formed from the Seiryū fruit's auxiliary capabilities were white — three of them, concentrically expanding, each one a different configuration of the geometric precision that Wendy used rather than the blunt physical power her companions preferred. The lines of the circles moved as the circles stabilized, the symbols cycling through their activation sequence with an efficiency that reflected how many times she had done this, in what situations.
"Armor of the Sky—"
"Steel Arm—"
"Galloping Wind—"
Three beams of white light descended from the circles and settled over Esdeath: the first reducing magical damage and debuff duration, the second adding structural strength and Wendy's sky-attribute damage to her strikes, the third lightening her body's response to gravity and adding sky attribute to her movement.
The arena was, briefly, very bright.
The light faded. Esdeath stood in the enhanced state — not visibly different, but the ice that extended from her blade carried a quality it had not carried thirty seconds ago, and her feet had found a relationship with the ground that had a different kind of authority in it.
Albedo looked at this with the small kind smile still in place. It did not widen. It did not falter. It simply remained, a constant expression whose quality was becoming more rather than less unsettling the longer it was visible.
"How thorough," she said.
The smile revealed something at its edges that was not warmth.