—Broadcast—
The science base had been impressive infrastructure once.
The equipment — hundreds of millions of Berries worth of precision instruments, measurement arrays, containment systems — was now arranged in the configuration that follows when a conflict between people of sufficient power has used a building as its medium. Corners held compressed scrap metal. Main support pillars had developed opinions about their structural integrity. The building communicated, through the sounds of a structure that has absorbed more force than it was designed for, that it was considering its options.
Garou stood in the centre of what remained of the research floor.
The merger with Venom had taken a man already past the boundary of ordinary human capability and pushed him further — past the point where the body's surface communicated anything of its previous self. The black symbiote material covered and reshaped, filling the spaces between what Garou had been and what he was now, extending horns from a skull that had become something other than recognisably human, building a silhouette that the word man only partially described. His emotions, already running at a register most people never reached, had been amplified to the point where the concept of restraint had stopped being practically available.
He held Stussy by the hair, his arm fully extended, studying what he had done to her the way someone studies a problem they have solved to their satisfaction.
She was not solved. She was an artificial human, which meant the body's responses to damage followed a different curve than a biological person's would — slower to terminal failure, faster in some of the intermediate repairs. Her arm had been functional again within the chapter of their previous engagement. Her face, which had been genuinely beautiful in the way that Vegapunk's precision-designed things tended to be, was currently purple-blue across half of it, one eye swollen past practical use. Blood from somewhere above her hairline had tracked down to her jaw and dried there.
She kept her free hand closed.
The grip on the half-functional fingers was tight enough that her knuckles had changed colour.
She was not waiting to be saved. She was waiting for the moment when the damage accumulated enough that a reflex she didn't have to think about could fire.
Garou read this correctly, because Garou read combat states with the accuracy of someone whose body processed that information before his conscious mind received the report. He was not interested in ending this. He was interested in continuing it. The difference between a hunter and a predator is what they do when the prey stops moving.
The sequence of events that had brought Stussy to this position had been fast in the way that serious situations at science bases tend to be fast.
She had arrived with Vegapunk and Ada Wong at the main control room using the standard biometric access — fingerprint and iris, both still active in the system. What the system had not told them was that the control room was no longer in the condition the system implied. The monitors were fragments. The roof had a hole in it that had been created by something entering from outside through the material rather than through any of the designated access points. In a pile of former equipment was Caesar Clown, which was not where Caesar Clown was supposed to be, doing the version of not-moving that indicated he was alive but that the decision to be alive had been made by something other than his own intentions.
Venom had been using Caesar's body as a host since the earlier stages of the incident. The symbiote's interest in Caesar as long-term accommodation was limited — the body was technically adequate but not what the entity would have selected given a broader menu — but Venom maintained the condition it required its hosts to maintain, which was: alive. Some portion of its biological resource had been allocated to Caesar's recovery before the entity had moved on to more interesting arrangements.
They had not finished processing this when Garou came out of the floor.
The second engagement had the quality of a correction. The first time Stussy had fought him, the gap between their capabilities had favoured her — she had the physical output of Vegapunk's Strength-Strength Fruit modifications, the regenerative advantage of artificial human biology, the speed surplus that had let her control the positioning of the fight. In the interval between the first engagement and the second, Garou's body had done what it always did with information about how it had been hurt: absorbed it, adapted to it, and built responses that made the same inputs produce different outputs.
The second fight had not gone in Stussy's direction.
Caesar Clown regained consciousness because Vegapunk's hands were on both sides of his face and the contact was not gentle.
"Still dreaming," Caesar said, with the complete sincerity of someone who genuinely could not rule it out.
Ada Wong's hand closed around his collar. "You have a plan. Stussy can't hold this much longer. Whatever you have that's useful — now."
Caesar Clown was not a man who thrived under pressure. He was a man who thrived under conditions of exclusive expertise, where his knowledge of a subject was the decisive variable and no one else in the room could challenge it. He looked around the ruins of his base with the expression of someone rapidly calculating what he had left to work with.
He had the underground laboratory.
He had the prototype.
He had promised Fleet Admiral Artoria Pendragon a full briefing before he activated it. He had given his word on this, which meant something to him in the way that promises made to people with the capacity to make his life complicated meant something.
He looked at Garou holding Stussy by the hair and revised his timeline.
"Both of you — follow me. There's an entrance to the subfloor. Help me find it." He was already moving through the debris field, checking the floor at intervals, looking for the section of panel that looked the same as the others but wasn't. "I had an agreement with the Fleet Admiral about notification before launch. Current situation does not accommodate that agreement. She'll understand."
Vegapunk and Ada, finding this substantially more promising than the alternative, followed.
"She has no fight left in her." The voice came from a gap in the wall where the structural damage had created an unplanned entrance. "Stand down, Garou."
Garou turned.
The man who had entered was not large by the standards that the science base had recently established as its normal. He was compact and precise, dressed in a martial arts uniform that had the quality of something worn for function rather than statement. Three eyes — the third positioned in the centre of his forehead, smaller than the other two, closed. His bearing had the centred quality of someone who has been in a great many situations that required immediate capability and has never been surprised to find it available.
He was Tien Shinhan. One of the Big Mom Pirates.
His original arrangement had been to locate scientists at this facility and extract them for the Big Mom Pirates' operational needs — the crew had deficits in scientific expertise that external acquisition was intended to address. He had arrived to find the deficits replaced by a structural problem of different character. Most of the scientists whose names he had been given were no longer in a state to be extracted. The two significant exceptions — Caesar Clown and Vegapunk — had just disappeared in a direction he had not tracked in time.
On the floor between him and Garou, Stussy was face-down.
She turned her head by degrees, using the eye that was still operational to assess what had just entered the room. Her breathing was the kind of controlled breathing that keeps a person present when the alternative is available.
This was not who she was waiting for.
From a different direction — from the shadows at the far edge of the floor, where the lights had stopped functioning and the darkness had depth — something else moved into the visible space.
It was green. The outer surface had the segmented quality of an insect exoskeleton rather than skin. The body plan was humanoid in its general proportions but the details were wrong in ways that accumulated into wrongness — the proportions off, the limbs ending in configurations that did not correspond to any standard anatomy. The tail extended several metres behind it, thick at the base and tapering to a point that narrowed into something that was the exact shape of a syringe at its tip. Its eyes swept across the three entities in the space — Garou, Tien Shinhan, and the woman on the floor — with the expression of something that did not assign them categories before it was ready to.
Stussy registered it.
Her expression closed around a conclusion.
Not the person she was waiting for.