-Real World-
The light column vanished from the Sky Screen and the silence it left behind settled over the Straw Hats' temporary quarters in Arabasta like a held breath waiting to be exhaled.
Luffy was the first one to speak.
"Is that skeleton uncle related to Brook?"
The question landed with the gravity of something completely sincere. Luffy had watched Ainz Ooal Gown's Sky Fall reduce half an arena to white ash, had watched two Marine Admirals disappear into the column's radius with their survival uncertain, and the conclusion his mind had arrived at was bloodline comparison.
"That's what you got out of that?" Usopp's voice came from somewhere behind the couch, where he'd apparently ended up during the light column's reveal. "That's your takeaway?"
"Well, he's a skeleton. Brook is a skeleton." Luffy was frowning with genuine philosophical effort. "Can skeletons be related?"
Nami pressed two fingers to her temple.
Chopper had gone very quiet. He was sitting with his knees drawn up, ears flat, staring at the wall where the Sky Screen's image had been. The doctor's mind did not work like Luffy's, and it had arrived at different conclusions from the same footage.
"We should go home," he said, quietly but with complete seriousness. "Drum Island is cold and the rabbits are aggressive, but nothing there can do that. Nobody on Drum Island can do that."
"Chopper." Usopp extracted himself from behind the couch, grabbed Chopper by both antlers, and hoisted the reindeer into the air with the energy of someone who had decided that panic was contagious and needed to be managed before it spread. "We have been out here for a very short time. You are on this ship and you are staying on this ship."
"That is a restriction of my personal freedom!"
"Emergency food does not have personal freedom."
"I'm not emergency food—"
"I'm not sure about that—"
Luffy had immediately joined the chase, and within thirty seconds the three of them were cycling through the living room in a circuit that had already claimed one small table and was threatening a lamp. Nami materialized from somewhere with the Iron Fist of Love already loaded and proceeded to apply it to each of the three skulls in sequence — Luffy first, then Usopp as he ran past, then Chopper on the backswing — until all three were standing in a row with matching red welts on their heads, staring at the floor with identical expressions of wronged innocence.
"We're sorry," Luffy said.
Chopper and Usopp echoed him a half-beat later, the way people do when they've learned that being in second place behind the captain's apology tends to produce a slightly lighter sentence.
Luffy still got most of the follow-up. By the time Nami finished, the rubber man was horizontal on the floor with a creative arrangement of bruises and what appeared to be genuine tears.
Robin had been watching from across the room, a book held in front of her face. The book was not doing much to conceal the expression behind it. She had arrived on this ship expecting many things, and this had not been among them, but she'd reached the stage of membership where the daily absurdity had stopped being surprising and started being something else — something harder to name, and warmer than she'd expected.
"You too," Nami said, turning to her, but without the same heat. Same-sex protocol. "Don't just sit there laughing while I'm managing this chaos."
"I wouldn't presume to interfere with your methods." Robin's book lowered slightly. "You're doing very well."
"We have no say in what any of them become in the future," Robin added, more quietly, when Nami sat down beside her. Around them, Luffy was already recovering with the speed of someone made of rubber, his bruises fading in real time, the grievance already evaporating. "Worrying about it now is purely self-imposed suffering. It happened or it didn't happen. Right now, none of it has."
Nami looked at her for a moment. Then at Luffy, who was sitting up and asking Usopp something about whether bones could have cousins.
"You're annoyingly wise sometimes," Nami said.
"I've had practice."
Sanji appeared from the galley bearing cocktails for both of them, navigating around the disaster zone of overturned furniture without breaking stride, his gaze moving over Luffy and the others with the practiced detachment of someone who had accepted that the captain would be beaten, recover, and be beaten again on a reliable cycle. There was no point in treating each iteration as a crisis.
"We'll be stronger when it matters," he said, setting the glasses down. "And whatever the Marine is dealing with up there, that's their problem. They spent years doing dirty work for the Celestial Dragons. Watching them struggle is just the bill coming due."
He said it lightly, but the shape of the thought was not light. The Marine and the World Government were bound together in ways that made separating them nearly impossible — attack one and the other would feel it, and both would respond. Everyone in the upper world understood that. Mutual preservation instinct, even between institutions that resented each other.
The Sky Screen had shown what Ainz Ooal Gown was. It had shown two Marine Admirals unable to close that gap. Whatever that meant for the future — the Straw Hats' future, anyone's future — the calculation could wait until they were stronger.
Outside, in the desert, a different kind of calculation was being made.
The rebellion had been building for months on the foundation of genuine grievance. One hundred thousand people camped across the Arabasta flats, banners raised for the demand that King Cobra step down, for the accusation that he'd poisoned his own people. Koza had lit that fire. He had not built the kindling, and he could not now control what burned.
Because inside those hundred thousand, there were others who had not come for politics.
Marshall D. Teach sat in a tent near the outer edge of the rebel mass, surrounded by his crew, and raised his glass with the enthusiasm of someone who had decided that someone else's revolution was an excellent opportunity.
"To the cause!" he declared, with enough volume that the declaration was clearly for morale rather than discretion. "And to what comes after the cause!"
The Blackbeard Pirates drank.
The plan was not complicated. When the rebels broke through into Alubarna, the Blackbeard Pirates would break off from the mass and head directly for the royal palace — ally for the treasury. The Nefertari family had accumulated wealth over generations in a kingdom whose strategic position made it valuable to everyone. However much they'd managed to store over the centuries, it was certainly more than anything Teach's crew had collected through conventional means.
And the Sky Screen had been generous with its previews.
It had shown Teach's future. An Eight Billion, Eight Hundred and Eighty Million Berry bounty — a number so large that hearing it out loud produced a quality of silence in listeners, the silence of someone's internal scale recalibrating. It had shown him the trajectory: what he would become, what he would need to become it. And one of the things he would need, without question, was resources. Recruitment on the scale he was planning required a reputation, yes, but it also required the practical capacity to support a crew that would make that reputation real.
The Nefertari treasury would make a reasonable start.
"Boss." One of the crew — older, grizzled, the kind of veteran who had seen enough to know the difference between ambition and delusion — leaned in from across the tent. "The bounty the Sky Screen showed. You're planning to actually get there?"
"Not planning," Teach said, still grinning. "Living."
Outside, the desert wind moved through the rebel camp, through the hundred thousand people who believed they were here for Arabasta, past the tents of men who were here for entirely different reasons, toward the walls of Alubarna that none of them had broken through yet.
The night was not over. The rebellion had not reached the capital.
But it was getting there.