-Broadcast-
Fury's raw physical strength was in a category by itself. The God's Knights assigned their best close-combat specialists to pin it down and keep it occupied, which meant everyone else had to manage Sorrow and Mirth.
"Don't bully a weak woman," said Sorrow — frail-looking, hollow-cheeked — and fanned the air in front of her with the green folding fan.
What came out of that fan was not a gust. It was a wall of wind that expanded in every direction with her at the center, and it did not stop. Trees tore from the earth. Rooftiles lifted en masse and became projectiles. The roofs beneath them folded inward. The sound was continuous — everything cracking, splitting, being pulled apart — and underneath it, people airborne who had not chosen to be.
Then came the rain.
Large, heavy drops, and every one of them was wrong. Where they landed on skin, the flesh below them began to rot visibly, eating inward. Men and women who had been throwing punches a moment before were occupied with watching what was happening to their arms.
Sorrow stood quietly at the center of the downpour, untouched by it, looking at the ruin around her with an expression that wasn't satisfaction. It was something more like helplessness. As if she didn't entirely want to be doing this, but the storm had come out of her before she'd decided to produce it.
She raised the fan again and sent the next wave into a different cluster of fighters.
Long-range attacks changed nothing. Her wind and acid rain covered too much ground and hit too indiscriminately. Anyone who tried to stand back and shoot was still inside the radius. The only option was close range, and two agile God's Knights volunteers had already reached the same conclusion — they crossed the distance in seconds and came up behind Sorrow, blades aimed at her neck.
Not far away, Mirth raised the drumstick.
"Why don't we have some fun?"
The drumstick came down. The sound it produced was not a drum sound — it was something that arrived in the chest before the ears registered it, a concussive wave that knocked thought sideways. Everyone within range grabbed for their heads simultaneously. Heartbeats lurched.
The second beat summoned lightning.
It came straight down from the sky and landed on the two volunteers who had been a half-second from Sorrow's neck. The current ran through both of them completely — light blazing out of every gap in their Armament Haki, bodies rigid, skin charring. They survived, but they were done.
By the third and fourth beats, the lightning was no longer landing on targets. It was spreading across Flower Street in every direction, arcing between iron fixtures and wet stone, illuminating the whole district in strobing white. The onlookers on the edge of the battle couldn't help staring. The combatants in the middle of it couldn't help flinching with each beat, bracing for the bolt that might find them next.
The four demons were not invincible. The contest's participants understood that intellectually, and the ones who had been fighting longest could feel it — Fury's skin had been broken once, Sorrow's fan could be disrupted if multiple wind attacks hit her simultaneously, Joy's bells required proximity to work. There were cracks in the wall. Enough people, enough pressure, and something would give.
So more God's Knights came. The Flower Street battlefield, already chaotic, grew denser. The seriously wounded finally had enough cover to drag themselves back from the front line. Joy and Anger held one flank; Sorrow and Mirth held the other. Neither side could disengage. The only way it ended was through attrition.
At the Shogun's Mansion, a different siege was underway.
Sesshōmaru — silver hair, white kimono, the luminous mark on his forehead — had hundreds of God's Knights around him and was discovering that raw numbers, unlike skill, actually created complications for line-of-sight displacement. The technique required a clear visual target. Enough bodies in the way, moving unpredictably, and the angles became cluttered.
And then there was Blueno.
The CP agent's Doa Doa no Mi (Door-Door Fruit) carved passages through space itself — doors appearing in empty air, in walls, in the space directly behind a target's head. Blueno could be anywhere within his own range almost as fast as Sesshōmaru could be within his, and the presence of a second displacement-capable combatant complicated every calculation. Sesshōmaru's advantage had been built on the assumption that conventional opponents could only move through space in one way. Blueno refused to cooperate with that assumption.
Outside the Shogun's Mansion walls, Kurozumi Orochi reclined in the garden, attendants arranged around him, entirely unbothered by the sounds of combat on the other side of the gate.
"What a lively night," he said to no one in particular. "So many people came."
Above — high on the eave of the Shogun's Mansion's outer roof — Figarland Garling stood watching. He was here in his capacity as supreme referee, above the fighting, observing. That was his role for tonight.
Under a large tree on the adjacent street, Yasuo leaned with his back against the bark and listened to the wind move through the leaves above him. He had come to Wano Country to find the head of the Kurozumi family. Not to save anyone. The Kurozumi family had no claim on his protection, and he had no illusions that anyone was going to ask him to provide it.
Nearby, the SWORD team operated as observers. Hibari had a camera-bug raised, methodically documenting everything visible — the layout of the Shogun's Mansion approach, the distribution of God's Knights, the positions of the named combatants. First-hand intelligence, the kind that couldn't be reconstructed from after-action reports.
"Why isn't anyone going after the main target?" said the figure standing beside Kujaku. "Kill him, and doesn't this whole thing end?"
He was enormous. Not in the way that large men are large — in the way that forced everyone near him to quietly recalculate their assumptions about scale. Red-furred ears rose from his head, the fur matching the color of his hair. His eyes were sharp under a heavy brow, and the leather vest he wore left his arms and chest bare, which meant the people standing next to him could see exactly what those arms looked like. Every step he took left faint impressions in the stone beneath his boots.
Character note: Sett — half-Mink, half-human. SWORD reserve attachment.
Kujaku glanced at the fist resting at his side. It was, in fact, roughly the size of her head.
"Sett," she said. "We're observing."
He didn't look convinced.
Sett had been found in an underground fighting circuit — the kind where the matches weren't sanctioned and the winners weren't celebrated in polite company. The Fleet Admiral herself had pulled him out of it personally. Formally enrolling him in the Marine had not been a viable option; the institution had a difficult enough time with species it recognized, and a half-Mink, half-human with Sett's particular appearance and temperament had generated too many complications before he'd even been given a rank.
SWORD was the practical solution. Less formal, fewer questions.
He had been sent here to familiarize himself with his future teammates. He was currently finding the observation assignment deeply unsatisfying.
His fists, for their part, had not stopped being ready.
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