-Broadcast-
When Sakazuki opened his eyes, the winter landscape was gone.
He was standing in a city that had no right to exist in any physical sense. Buildings floated at impossible angles around him, connected by bridges that curved against gravity, the entire structure arranged according to an interior logic that had nothing to do with architecture and everything to do with will. There was no ground below as far as he could see, and no sky above that was not also occupied by more buildings, inverted, their windows catching the light from angles that made no geometric sense.
He looked down at himself.
Marine uniform. His actual uniform — not the civilian clothes the Domain had dressed him in from the moment he crossed its threshold. He was himself again. Fully himself, with the weight of rank and identity and purpose returned to him like blood returning to a numbed limb.
Not the Domain. He assessed this in under three seconds. A different space entirely.
The audience watching through the Sky Screen had no such uncertainty. The floating city surrounding Sakazuki was immediately recognizable to anyone who had been paying attention — this was the Infinity Castle, Buggy's mobile fortress, controlled by Nakime's Mato Mato no Mi (Castle-Castle Fruit). What Nakime had done, the Sky Screen made clear, was merge the Castle's interior with the Marine Headquarters in Rome — swallowing the entire building into her own domain to contain the Admirals inside it. The darkness that had covered Rome had not been a blockade. It had been a stomach.
An elegant solution, if you did not have to live inside it. The limitation was obvious: a strong enough person breaking outward would separate the structures again, and then Nakime would have lost her strategic positioning and gained nothing. The pirates needed someone in here to buy time. That was the game.
"So many unpleasant memories." Sakazuki let the magma rise through his body — not technique yet, just presence, the Magu Magu no Mi (Magma-Magma Fruit) asserting itself after whatever the Domain had done to suppress it. "Have either of you thought about how you want to die?"
Two figures stood in front of him.
Galdino he recognized. The man was composed in the way that people are composed when they are relying on a prepared position rather than personal courage. He had run the circus, extracted exactly what he came to extract, and was now positioned for the next phase of whatever Buggy had planned for him.
The second figure was different.
Black coat, simple enough that the simplicity was itself a choice — the kind of person who understood that stillness drew less attention than color. Flat, neat hair with just enough disorder to suggest that orderliness was a discipline he maintained rather than a natural state. And the mask: orange, spiral-patterned, covering everything below the eyes. Everything above the mask was a single visible eye — red, sharp, the Sharingan's tomoe rotating in its iris with the particular quality of an eye that was doing more than looking.
Sky Screen Character Note: White Zetsu Mutant — Tobi.
Tobi was leaning toward Galdino rather than forward. The posture was less hiding-behind and more tactical reorientation — putting his companion between himself and the Logia Admiral while he reassessed.
"How did you pull him out?" he said to Galdino, voice pitched for one set of ears but carrying anyway. "We barely started. Can we put him back in?"
"Something got into the illusion space from outside," Galdino said, not looking at him. His eyes were on Sakazuki. "Something that wasn't our doing. If I'd been a second slower pulling the construct down, I'd have lost the ability to think clearly. Whatever it was, it came from inside him."
Rodan. Sakazuki filed this without external acknowledgment. The Super Ancient Creature in the volcanic interior of his fruit had interfered with the Domain from the inside — not combat, not yet, but presence. The Domain had not been built for what lived inside an awakened Admiral's heart.
"Evil Uchiha," Sakazuki said. The Sharingan was something Admiral Kisame had flagged ally — the warning was recent enough to still have a location in his memory. "Those eyes have no business existing. There's no room for your kind in Wano Country, and you don't deserve the rest of the sea either."
He was not interested in the conversation going further than this.
"Raijin no Tobira."
The fire came from his chest before it came from his hands — the magma moving with his intent rather than waiting for the gesture, and from the crack in his sternum, something else came with it. The lava flowed outward in all directions and then stopped flowing, because Rodan was using it as medium rather than letting it disperse.
The bird came through the fire the way a thing comes through a door it has been behind for too long.
Wings first. Each wing at full extension was architectural in scale — not a large bird's wingspan but a landmass's, geological, the kind of surface area that created its own weather on the downstroke. The feathers were lava-formed, each one a sealed column of liquid rock that flickered at the edges where the heat was highest. The head followed: angular, primordial, built for a world that had not needed to account for other apex predators because there hadn't been any. The eyes opened — both of them, amber-volcanic, the color of the core of the earth at the moment it is still deciding whether to be rock — and found Tobi with the quality of attention that old creatures give to small things they are about to step on.
Rodan filled the available vertical space in the Infinity Castle's corridor. Buildings shifted to accommodate the wingspan on reflex — Nakime's control over the Castle re-routing structure around the emerging shape before it could simply pass through walls by mass.
Tobi was behind Galdino before the wings were fully extended.
"Galdino," he said, in a voice that had abandoned any pretense of composure. "I cannot help with that. I need to leave immediately."
"Use your space-time ability," Galdino said, still not looking at him. There was a quality in his voice — not calm exactly, but resolved, the resolve of someone who has already decided they are not leaving. "Stay alive. That's your assignment."
"Galdino—"
"My assignment is here." Galdino's fingers moved through their preparation. His hands were making shapes that Sakazuki recognized as the precursor to a technique, not combat technique but something structural — the kind of motion that preceded a domain shift rather than an attack. "Go."
Tobi's silhouette became translucent. Then absent. The space he had occupied carried a faint residue of his presence for less than a second before that too was gone — slipped through into a dimensional gap that closed behind him without a seam.
Sakazuki was already moving. Rodan moved with him, the bird and the Admiral occupying the same attack vector, the lava dragon technique and the creature's body converging toward Galdino's position in the same instant, the heat ahead of them scorching the floating architecture, the Castle's stone blackening and cracking as the temperature of an awakened Logia's full commitment approached.
Galdino completed the gesture.
He had been waiting for exactly this distance. The smile on his face was the smile of someone who has been patient for a very long time and has just arrived at the moment the patience was for.
"Domain Expansion: White Prison — Wax Museum."
White.
Complete white, instantaneous, covering everything that the gesture reached — which was everything in the available space, which was Sakazuki, and Rodan, and the Infinity Castle around them, and all the space between them and Galdino. The color of candles. The color of the material that the Doru Doru no Mi (Wax-Wax Fruit), at its highest expression, could impose as the governing physical law of a created world.
Galdino had pulled both of them inside.
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