-Broadcast-
The first hours of the Night Parade cost the God's Knights dearly.
Across every district of the Flower Capital, teams that had entered expecting easy prey ran headlong into the dark. Weaker spirits fell to a blade quickly enough — they were never the threat. But the elite-level yokai were something else entirely, and the reserve God's Knights, the ones who hadn't yet hardened into veterans, met their ends before they had the chance to become any.
Numbers were an equalizer, eventually. As the God's Knights consolidated and the main force poured into the capital, the sheer weight of invaders began to grind the yokai down. Even elite monsters could be surrounded and dismembered. And the simpler spirits, the ones barely stronger than ordinary men, were cut apart like nothing at all.
The rule that mattered: sever the head, and they stayed dead. Limbs would regenerate from the stump. The head would not grow back.
Flower Street.
Bonney stood in the center of a ring of bodies — every member of the team she'd been attached to, dead around her feet. She held something in each hand. Two heads, both male, both wearing the same expression of fading arrogance that Hannya and Momotaro had worn in life.
Two elite swordsmen. Two supernatural beings of genuine power. Taken apart by a woman who had spent the entire night refusing to score a single point.
"If the two of you had hated women a little less when you were alive," she said quietly, to neither head in particular, "maybe you'd still have a chance today."
She dropped them on the roadside without ceremony and walked toward the sound of fighting.
In a house set back from the street, behind shuttered screens, a couple had watched everything through a gap in the wood. They had no words for it. The woman had moved, and then the two demons were dead, and that was the entirety of what they'd witnessed.
"A Devil Fruit user?" the man managed.
"I've never seen anything like that," his wife whispered. "She defeated the gods. The legendary gods. Maybe if we leave an offering—"
Bonney never knew that in the weeks that followed, Wano's lower classes would quietly add her to the roster of the eight hundred gods. Small shrines. Private offerings. The pink-haired woman who had walked through the Night Parade and come out the other side carrying demon heads.
She would have found it baffling.
Flower Street itself had become a war.
Karasu-Tengu — the enormous red-furred creature with wings wide enough to block the moon — stood at the center of it, surrounded on all sides. It was covered in blood, its own and others', but it hadn't fallen. The God's Knights had learned the decapitation rule the hard way; they were attempting to apply it now and finding it difficult. Karasu-Tengu did not protect its neck. It traded blows freely, accepted wounds that would kill anything human, and kept moving.
"Nothing is going to matter if we stay stuck here," said one of the contestants, breathing hard. "If the Kurozumi snake's points get taken by another team while we're playing games with this thing, we'll have nothing to show for tonight."
The team exchanged a look. They were past the point of posturing. Four of them, working as a single unit, brought their best techniques out simultaneously.
Karasu-Tengu's body was split into four pieces in an instant. The head separated cleanly. The invaders stepped back, waiting.
Silence. Then cheering, somewhere at the edge of the crowd.
Then the pieces moved.
Not back together. Apart. Each fragment convulsed, shifted, and became something new — four humanoid figures rising from the remnants of one, each radiating a completely different presence.
Four beings of Joy, Fury, Sorrow, and Mirth stood where Karasu-Tengu had been.
Joy was short — almost comically so — but radiated a frantic, coiled energy. It clutched a string of small bells in both hands, and the bells gave off a faint, constant shimmer of light, like sunlight on water.
Fury was immense, built like something assembled for the sole purpose of ending things. It carried a great scythe, the blade catching the lantern light with a cold gleam.
Sorrow was a woman, hollow-cheeked, with a green folding fan that she held loosely, almost uncertainly, as though she'd only just remembered she was holding it.
Mirth was enormously fat, round-bellied, with a great drum strapped to its back. When it moved, the drum shifted, and the suggestion of sound trembled in the air around it.
The four stood together and looked at what was in front of them with the patient eyes of things that hadn't been free for a long time.
Joy: "It's been so long. It feels wonderful to breathe."
Fury: "Kill them. Kill every invader who set foot in Wano Country."
Sorrow: "...Is this really the job for me?"
Mirth: "Let's have a good night. Let's all enjoy ourselves."
The invaders processed this. Common sense said that splitting something into four pieces should make each piece weaker. The four figures before them were not large. They had none of Karasu-Tengu's raw physical oppression. The crowd's initial fear settled into cautious confidence.
Then Joy began to ring the bells.
The sound was soft at first — almost pleasant, the way a clear note struck in an empty room can seem pleasant. Then it was inside the ears. Then it was inside the skull, threading through thought, filling every gap between one idea and the next with something warm and empty and absolute.
Expressions changed. Movements became uncoordinated. People who had been advancing stopped and swayed, and their eyes went somewhere far away.
Joy raised its voice above the ringing. "Ignorant, weak little things. You came into this world and found nothing but false pleasures. Go on, then. Go somewhere better."
The command went into the ears like the bells had — clean, certain, unquestioned.
Within the hundred-meter range of the sound, dozens of God's Knights placed their own weapons against their own throats and acted on what they'd been told. The ones at the edge of the range felt the pull of it but were shaken loose by the violence of the moment, the sharp shock of pain from nearby bodies breaking the hypnosis before it could complete.
The God's Knights had learned the range with the bodies of their own people. They would not go within a hundred meters of Joy again. Distance attacks only — they opened fire immediately.
The bullets found Joy easily enough. Its body was weaker than it looked: skin tore, the hand gripping the bells broke, and Joy staggered.
Fury took two steps and put itself between Joy and the guns. The rounds hit Fury instead. Each impact registered only as something to fuel its anger — skin unbroken, mass unshifted.
"Death to every invader."
It moved. The speed it produced was beyond anything Karasu-Tengu had demonstrated — a single leap that covered the distance between itself and the nearest contestant and compressed it to nothing. The man in the air, above the street, had approximately the time required to understand what was happening before Fury reduced him to the category of past tense.