Chapter 490: Rising Again
Mariejois.
The Five Elders received a man in their office.
"Caesar. What we need from you now is a deep-sea combat force, built in the shortest possible time."
Saint Mars regarded the man, who was doing a poor job of concealing his discomfort at being in the same room as them. The long-bearded Elder's voice was calm in the particular way that made calm feel like a warning.
"You will have everything you need. Funding, personnel, full cooperation from the Government." Saint Nusjuro added this with the ease of someone confirming something already decided.
"Fuhehehehehe!"
Some of the anxious fidgeting dissolved. The deep and durable arrogance that lived at the core of Caesar Clown reasserted itself, and he straightened up and grinned at the assembled Elders with the confidence of a man talking to peers.
"Leave it completely to me, Five Elders! This genius will have a force capable of dominating the deep seas assembled for you before you know it!"
"That is precisely what we want." Saint Ju Peter gave a small nod. "Prepare yourself. You're dismissed."
"Yes."
Caesar departed under CP0 escort, moving off to begin whatever preparations were next.
When the door had closed behind him, Saint Mars spoke, his tone taking on a different quality. "His research will be exposed eventually. When it is, the Navy's position will become delicate."
"The Navy charging into the front lines is simply what they're for." Saint Nusjuro adjusted the glasses on his nose, the lenses catching a white gleam. "Let them serve their purpose one final time."
"The coming war will likely rival the conflict for dominance eight hundred years ago."
Saint Mars's expression was entirely untroubled by this. His face showed nothing. "We will need a second empty century. Im-sama will cleanse the world again. When that is done, every trace of all of this will be erased."
"If that is the outcome, then the Navy's loyalty becomes irrelevant in the end." Saint Ju Peter gave a quiet nod.
But that outcome depended entirely on winning.
And could they be certain of winning?
Long before now, at the Valley of the Gods, the egg of the sky fortress had been taken from them.
Eight hundred years later, the three ancient weapons were scattered across the sea again.
How many pieces did Brett hold? How many steps was he from the final island?
Unknowable.
What could be known was this: Pluton was under construction. Poseidon had awakened. He already held two ancient weapons in his hands.
It was going to be a brutal, grinding struggle. No one could honestly call the outcome certain.
A shadow settled over the room that none of the five men named or acknowledged.
In the darkness of the deep sea, Momousagi Gion sat motionless on the back of a sea creature and stared at nothing.
She had been like this since the call ended. She didn't know for how long.
Slandered by the Government. Branded a traitor by the Navy. Disbelieved by the woman she thought of as an older sister. The combination had brought her to the edge of something she couldn't hold together on her own.
She was not young anymore. The better part of her life had been spent as a Marine, moving across the seas with Justice as the fixed point she navigated by. It had never wavered. It had always been there.
Now she was moving in the opposite direction from it, or so the world had decided.
"Hey, kinfolk. You should eat something."
A Fish-Man appeared beside her, carrying food, his expression carrying a genuine worry that had nothing calculated in it. "You've got serious injuries. You need to eat."
Momousagi didn't answer. She kept looking at the dark water.
"Whatever terrible thing happened, it's already happened," the Fish-Man said, patient and earnest, leaning in a little as if trying to reach her through the distance she'd put up. "Nothing we do changes what's behind us. So the only thing worth looking at is what's ahead."
"What's ahead?" Momousagi's voice came out flat. A pale ghost of a smile moved across her face. "I've lost all sense of direction."
There was nowhere to go back to. There was nothing in front of her that had any shape yet. She was adrift in both senses of the word.
Who in the Navy would believe her? Tsuru hadn't. If Tsuru hadn't, who would?
"If one road closes, you find another one!"
The Fish-Man said it with the firm simplicity of someone who meant every word and had earned the right to say them.
"This sea is enormous. Every person in it is free. You can't let one setback convince you there's nowhere left to go."
"This great ocean gave life to all of us. In the arms of that, we can do anything we set ourselves to."
Something rang inside Momousagi's chest like a bell struck without warning.
"Stop counting what you've lost. Count what you still have. Think about what you can still do."
The words hit her like a wash of cold water.
The grief and the helplessness receded.
What replaced them was something older and harder and more useful.
Right.
The Government was counting on her to fall apart. They needed her broken.
Instead of sitting here coming apart, she should be thinking about how to clear her name. How to make the Navy understand what the Government had actually done. How to show them the ugliness that had been hidden inside this institution they served.
This World Government was not Justice. It had never been Justice. And a Navy that followed it without question was only serving something that had rotted at its foundation.
She had seen the dark side of the Government many times before, over many years. But she had never felt it the way she felt it now, the way you only feel something when it's happened to your own body. Now she understood, fully and finally, how deep that darkness went. Deep enough to swallow people whole and leave nothing behind to prove they had ever existed.
Something caught flame inside her again.
If the Government was not Justice, then the Navy had to be freed from it.
She didn't know how yet. She didn't know where to start. But for the first time since she'd woken up here, she knew what she was working toward.
"Thank you."
Momousagi took the food from the Fish-Man's hands with both of hers and bowed toward him, a real bow, with genuine weight behind it. "Without you saying that, I don't know how long I would have stayed stuck in my own head."
"Ha ha ha! It was nothing!" The Fish-Man laughed and rubbed the back of his head with the slightly flustered air of someone who hadn't expected their words to land quite that well.
Though she was, by Fish-Man aesthetic standards, a remarkably striking woman, and the effect of her bowing with that much sincerity was doing things to his composure that he was trying not to show.
"Can't just watch a kinfolk suffer and do nothing," he managed. "Out in the human world, our kind already has enough working against us. We have to look out for each other."
"..."
Momousagi pressed her lips together.
Looking at these Fish-Men now, with the Government firmly on the other side of the line in her mind, she felt something close to shame.
The human nobles who had most eagerly persecuted Fish-Men, who had purchased the most Fish-Man and Mermaid slaves for sport, those were precisely the people she had spent her career protecting.
"Things are a lot better than they used to be, though." The Fish-Man's voice had softened into something reflective. "Since Brett-aniki came back to Fish-Man Island, every year has been better than the last."
"The island's gotten richer. Human pirates stopped coming around to cause trouble. And the slave traders who used to work these waters, they're gone entirely."
The respect in his voice when he spoke Brett's name was unambiguous. Completely genuine. The kind that came from lived experience, not from someone being told to feel it.
He had to be at least forty years old. He was calling someone in his early twenties aniki.
"Ha ha. I mean it, Brett-aniki is our island's hero."
A hero.
Something moved through Momousagi quietly.
The Navy's greatest criminal. The enemy of the World Government. The man who had shattered everything she'd once been certain about.
And in the eyes of these people, the one who had changed everything for the better.
What kind of man was he, really?
"By the way," she asked, "where are we headed right now?"
"Back to Fish-Man Island! Ha ha. It's been a while since I've been home. You'll be able to see how much the place has changed!"
Fish-Man Island.
Maybe...
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