-Broadcast — Flower Capital, Wano Country-
Outside the Shogun's Mansion, the SWORD team watched through Hibari's telescope as the severed head of Kurozumi Orochi sat at a contestant's feet.
"A samurai cutting down his own lord," Hibari murmured. "That's Wano for you."
Sett stood beside Helmeppo with his arms crossed, the size differential between them significant enough that Helmeppo had quietly adjusted his standing position. The two of them had been talking in the way that people who take fighting seriously tend to talk — comparing what they'd seen, measuring the gaps between expectation and reality.
"What are you reading?" Sett asked.
Helmeppo's Clairvoyance was already working. Through it he could see the body on the garden stone in biological detail: the vitality draining, the tissue already beginning to cool, the severed neck doing exactly what severed necks do. By every metric his ability could register, Kurozumi Orochi was a freshly dead man.
"He's dead," Helmeppo said. Then, after a pause: "But Kyoshiro hasn't lowered his sword."
That was the detail that mattered. The man who had made the cut — who had no conceivable reason to stay defensive after his enemy was down — was still watching the corpse. His posture was the posture of someone who had been wrong before and was not prepared to be wrong again.
A contestant near the front stepped forward and grabbed the severed head by the hair, lifting it to inspect the expression on Orochi's face.
"Killed by his own dog. What a way for a Shogun to go. Ruins the whole thing."
He was still working out whether the head was worth points when the eyes moved.
Not a death-twitch. Not a post-mortem reflex. The pupils — dilated flat, the way dead eyes go — began to contract. To focus. To register the upside-down face of a Celestial Dragon holding them at arm's length.
"Get your dirty hands off me." The voice came from the head. "Do you have any idea whose head you're holding?"
The contestant dropped it immediately.
The headless body, which had been lying still on the garden stone, stood up.
It stood there without a head for a moment — blood still falling from the stump — and then something began to emerge from the wound. Not a gush. Not a spray. Something deliberate: granulations of flesh rising from the severed tissue, twisting toward each other, finding each other, building. Eyes first. Then a nose. Then the full square face of Kurozumi Orochi, reconstructed in under a minute from the fracture upward, pale as something that had never seen sunlight, hair matted and wet with blood.
And the head on the ground — the original — grew a new body from its own stump in the same time.
When both processes completed, two Kurozumi Orochis stood in the Shogun's Mansion garden, both furious, both bleeding freely from wounds that had already stopped being wounds.
The garden was very quiet for a moment.
"Two of him," someone said. "Is that double points?"
The logic of Karasu-Tengu's split had already established the pattern: bisection meant multiplication, not death. Orochi's Mythical Beast Devil Fruit, whatever it actually was, had produced the same result through different mechanics.
The resurrected Orochi turned his full attention to Kyoshiro. "I raised you from nothing. I gave you everything you have. You bite the hand that fed you, and you think I won't repay that?"
Kyoshiro wrapped his blades in Ryuo — Armament Haki darkening the steel to black — and said nothing back. He had killed Orochi once. He would do it again. And again after that if he had to.
He drew both swords.
Oden's Two-Sword Style: Taoyuan Juken.
The name came from his mouth like a statement of intent. He moved — faster than the Celestial Dragons around him could properly track, the two blades forming a cross-shape in motion, the combined strike unspooling into a sequence that hit from four vectors in the time it would have taken an opponent to choose which one to guard against. Orochi's reconstructed body separated into four pieces. The blood hit the garden stone and kept spreading outward.
Kyoshiro stood still. The blades dripped. He looked at what remained of the first Orochi.
Not enough. Killing him clean was not what Kozuki Oden's memory deserved. It was what Kyoshiro's discipline required — but not what the years owed.
The second Orochi, still standing at the other end of the garden, began to understand that the primary threat had not shifted to him yet. He was assessing his options when a God's Knights member came up from behind.
The contestant was built like a load-bearing wall. He said nothing. He simply wrapped both arms around Orochi from behind and began to squeeze.
"Let — let go of me — I am the Shogun of Wano — you have no right—"
The arms tightened. The Armament Haki behind them was not subtle. Orochi's body — hollowed out across years of drink and excess, with no real physical conditioning underneath the supernatural healing — had no answer for this kind of force. His ribs began to go. Then his sternum. The internal pressure built in directions the body is not designed to accommodate.
His eyes turned red. He screamed. He ran out of room to scream and screamed with less volume. His words in the final moments were about his money, his women, the things he had accumulated — the only things he had ever truly organized his existence around.
His flesh went last.
What hit the garden stone was no longer recognizably a person.
Kyoshiro wiped his blades.
He had wanted Orochi to suffer, and Orochi had suffered. That was what it was worth. Whether the two deaths held — whether the fruit's mechanics had an answer to total physical destruction that mere decapitation hadn't — was a question the night had not yet finished answering.
He kept his swords out.
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