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Crocodile wanted to laugh and couldn't, which was its own kind of comedy.
The ribs that King had broken during their aerial exchange had opinions about laughter, and those opinions were expressed immediately and at length whenever he tried. He settled for the specific dark smile of a man who has witnessed something genuinely worth witnessing and is storing it for later.
A human windmill, he thought, watching the settling dust where Vergo had landed. That's the only way to describe it.
Both forces. Same moment. Vergo caught exactly between them. The fists passing through him on their way to each other, the full-body Armament Haki doing what it could, which was preventing death and nothing else. The spin. The bounce. The final stillness.
Crocodile exhaled carefully, feeling the ribs register their complaint, and watched the two remaining figures on the island settle into their distance from each other.
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The first exchange had answered one question.
King's fist, landing on Lindsay's face, had not moved him.
Lindsay's fist, landing on King's face, had also not moved him.
The two of them stood with their punches still in contact — the impact point between them holding for the two seconds it took each of them to register the result and begin forming an assessment of it.
For King, the assessment was simple arithmetic.
He had hit things at this level before. He knew the weight class he occupied and the one above it and the one above that. What he was looking at was not a weight class he had an existing file for, and this was not a frequent experience, and the infrequency was itself informative.
He pulled back. Lindsay pulled back. They reset.
"You took that punch standing up," King said.
Not impressed — observing. The way a professional observed a technical fact.
"You did too," Lindsay said.
"Yes." King looked at his own fist. "How long since you've been awake?"
"A few months."
King looked at him with the specific quality of attention that someone allocated to things that required a revision of their existing model.
"A few months," he said.
"Give or take."
King was quiet for a moment. Then he clenched his fist, and the flames that had been ambient around him gathered and concentrated at the point of contact — not burning outward but inward, the heat feeding into the Armament Haki, the two combining into something that was more than either separately.
"Jin of the Beast Pirates," he said. "I'm here for the Poneglyph."
Lindsay looked at him.
"For Kaido," King continued. "The historical texts map a path that Kaido needs. Every piece of that map costs whatever it costs." He flexed the flaming fist. "You're in the way of this one."
"Evan Lindsay," Lindsay said.
He pulled the Ancient Armament from the air beside him — a long strip, then another, winding them together with the Earth Demon form's thick fingers into the shape of a blade. Not a careful process. A working one, the weapon forming as he thought about the conversation, his attention moving between what his hands were doing and what King had just said.
"As for why I'm here," he added, "I'm here because I wanted to be. I can be. So I am."
He looked at the blade.
Then at King.
"That's usually enough reason."
King stared at him for a moment.
"Extremely boring," he said, and hit him in the head.
Emperor Flame.
The punch came with the full fire integration — not burning externally but the heat driving through the Armament Haki into the contact point, the technique that King had developed across years of finding things that could take his punches and learning what it took to move them. He put the same commitment into it that he would have put into hitting Kaido, which was the only genuine reference point he had for things that required that level of commitment.
Lindsay's head moved back two inches.
His feet did not.
The Ancient Armament on his fist had met the Flame Armament in King's and the two had produced a shockwave at the point of contact that the island's ground expressed by cracking outward in a starburst beneath both of them simultaneously.
Lindsay pulled his arm back.
Hit King in the face.
King's head moved back two inches.
King pulled his arm back and hit Lindsay again.
What followed was not elegant. It was the specific inelegance of two forces that had found each other at approximately the same level and were working through the implications of that finding in the most direct available method. Each punch produced its sound, and the sounds accumulated into a rhythm, and the rhythm was audible from the fleet's position outside the fire ring as a sustained percussion that the fleet's crew processed correctly as something they should not go toward.
On the third exchange, both of them pulled back from the contact simultaneously — not from pain, from information.
King had identified that Lindsay's left side was marginally faster than his right.
Lindsay had identified that King's fire integration increased fractionally after each exchange — building rather than sustained, a technique that grew stronger the longer it ran.
Both of them had identified that the other was learning in real time, which meant that the window for any particular approach was measured in exchanges rather than minutes.
King's wings spread.
The ring of fire behind his head dimmed — the flames pulling back from the ambient position into a different configuration, the Lunarian physiology's tradeoff made deliberately: reduced defense for the speed increase that came when the flames subsided.
He was going to be faster.
He drew the sword.
Blade King.
The technique came horizontal, the long blade wrapped in fire at temperatures that were no longer ambient but active, the edge carrying enough heat to matter even to the Armament Haki it was going to contact. The stroke was clean and fast and came at a height that required Lindsay to meet it or take it in the throat.
The sound the impact made was not what King expected.
Metal on metal. Sharp. Clean.
He looked at what had stopped the blade.
Lindsay was holding a long knife.
Not a real one — Earth Demon form packed earth and stone, shaped into a blade while King had been drawing his own, the Ancient Armament wound around it in dark irregular wrapping that gave the improvised weapon an edge that had no business existing on compressed soil.
The two blades were locked at the contact point, force balanced against force, and Lindsay was grinning with the specific quality of a grin that was completely genuine and completely inappropriate to the situation, which was his most characteristic quality.
"I just worked that out," he said. He flexed his grip on the improvised handle and felt the Ancient Armament respond to the Earth Demon form's strange strength, the two authorities working together in the weapon the same way they worked together in the fists. "Watching you draw it."
King looked at the blade.
At the Armament in it — not conventional, not the standard darkness of applied Haki but something older, less systematic, more fundamental.
"Ancient Armament," he said.
"Yes."
"Where did you get that?"
"Poneglyph," Lindsay said.
King looked at him.
At the blade. At the horns. At the strange columned pupils.
"You merged with the Poneglyph," King said.
"Yes."
"And took the Haki out of it."
"Some of it."
King was quiet. The flames at the back of his head had re-ignited — the defense returning, the speed tradeoff reversed, the Lunarian physiology resetting to its anchored state. He held the sword level, both of them still locked at the contact point, neither pushing.
"You're the reason the Poneglyph is buried," King said.
"The chamber collapsed, yes."
"Then you've already taken what was in it."
"Some."
King looked at the improvised blade against his own sword for a long moment.
The mission had been to retrieve the Poneglyph — or at minimum to read it, to extract what was in it for Kaido's purposes. What was standing in front of him instead was a person who had already been inside it and had come out carrying a portion of its contents in his own body.
The calculation this produced was not simple.
"The Poneglyph's contents are in you," King said.
"Some of them."
"Then the Poneglyph itself is redundant."
The silence this created had a specific shape.
Lindsay looked at him.
King looked at Lindsay.
The fire ring on the water continued to burn around the fleet. Crocodile, on the island's edge, held his broken ribs and watched this exchange with the absolute focused attention of a man who had been working toward a Poneglyph for years and was now watching someone else conduct a completely different negotiation about it.
"I think," King said slowly, "that Kaido would want a conversation with you more than he wants a stone tablet."
Lindsay considered this.
"I'm not going to Kaido," he said.
"No," King said. "But eventually, Kaido will come to you."
He sheathed his sword.
The improvised blade in Lindsay's hand dissolved back into earth, the Ancient Armament drifting free and returning to its ambient position around his frame.
They stood in the cleared wreckage of what had been a peace negotiation and looked at each other across the remaining distance.
"One more question," King said.
"Ask."
"The punch. When I hit you full force." He looked at Lindsay's face, where the impact had landed and left no mark. "You felt that."
"Yes," Lindsay said.
"But you didn't move."
"No."
King nodded once — the specific nod of a professional acknowledging a technical fact that required acknowledging.
"When we meet again," he said, "it will be different."
"I know," Lindsay said.
"I'll be stronger."