-Broadcast-
White.
Floor, walls, ceiling — all of it the same absolute white, the kind that had no temperature and no depth, that absorbed the eye without giving it anything to rest on. Wax figures occupied the space in every direction: standing, seated, mid-gesture, each one finished with the fidelity of a craftsman who had studied the living versions until there was nothing left to learn. The light came through windows that had no obvious source, falling in sharp-edged columns across the floor and catching the figures' surfaces at angles that made them look almost warm.
They were not warm. The air in this place had a cold that went past ambient and into structural — not the cold of a room in winter but the cold of a space that had never been designed to be lived in.
Sakazuki checked himself first. Then the room. Then the ceiling.
Above him, occupying the full upper span of the wax museum's dome, were two figures suspended as though they had always been there: Rodan, a hundred-meter avian form rendered in white wax with the precision of something the craftsman had studied very carefully, and the lava dragon — his own technique, solidified, frozen mid-flight, the magma transmuted into the same material as everything else in this Domain. Both of them hung from the ceiling like the centerpiece of a collection. Decorative. Inert.
The Doru Doru no Mi (Wax-Wax Fruit) had caught them both in the same instant.
He was still himself — not wax, not yet — but the walls were close and the air carried a weight that his Logia senses were beginning to register as pressure rather than atmosphere. Something in this space was already working on him. He could feel it at the edges of his elemental form, a kind of resistance where there should have been none.
Footsteps. Galdino came around a corner of standing figures with his hands in his coat pockets and his stride carrying the looseness of a man who had arrived at a place he had been imagining for a long time.
"Your bird is something," he said. "Still has a trace of life in it, even in here. I've never had a piece like that in my collection." He looked up at the ceiling with genuine appreciation. "It's mine now, obviously."
"You've improved," Sakazuki said. He wasn't offering a compliment — he was assessing. The Wax-Wax Fruit at its base level was a support tool. Restraints. Keys. Platforms. The version that had produced an entire interior world with its own physics was something built on top of that foundation through years of work, and it had produced a result that was, by any technical measure, above what a Seven Warlords-level pirate was supposed to be capable of. "The Sand Man couldn't do this. He could only play with sand his entire career."
Galdino's expression shifted slightly at the comparison. Not displeasure — something closer to satisfaction that the point had landed.
Domain, Sakazuki thought. He had heard the term. He had not, until this moment, faced one directly — every Marine officer who had encountered a Domain-stage Devil Fruit and not survived to report on it had created a substantial gap in the institutional record. The white world around him was most likely not a spatial trick or an illusion. It was the fruit itself, expressed outward at a level that made the environment an extension of the user's will. Which meant that the waxification he was already feeling at the edges of his elemental form was not a technique Galdino had aimed at him.
It was simply what happened when you were inside Galdino's world.
Logia intangibility was not a negotiable property of his body — it was his body. And it was being affected anyway.
Galdino was quiet for a moment. He walked between the wax figures with a familiarity that suggested he had spent a great deal of time in this space — or in imagining it. He stopped in front of one of the larger pieces and looked at it without expression.
"I was Mr. 3," he said. "The third number in Crocodile's organization. Neither first nor last. Strong enough to have a designation, not strong enough for anyone to remember the designation without prompting." He turned to face Sakazuki. "The most notable thing I did in Baroque Works was a conspiracy — a sneak attack on two giants. That was my ceiling. Everyone knew it."
He said this without apparent bitterness. It was a statement of prior fact rather than a grievance.
"I was at Marineford because a group of people I couldn't say no to dragged me there. I did what I could. I watched Ace save his brother from your fist." A pause. "He was twenty years old. The biological son of the Pirate King, Whitebeard's godson, a man who had defeated a Shichibukai in single combat. He had everything ahead of him. You took that in under a second."
Sakazuki said nothing.
"I couldn't process that," Galdino continued. "Not the act — I'd seen violence. I couldn't process the scale of it. Even Whitebeard, at the end, had half his face gone. And then Blackbeard arrived and everything became chaos, and I survived because I was too small for anyone to prioritize, which had always been how I survived everything." He looked at his hands. "After that, somehow, I ended up with the Joker Pirates. Buggy looked at me and saw something that no one else had seen. I'm still not entirely sure what it was."
He said Buggy's name without irony. Whatever else the clown circus had been, Galdino's relationship to its architect was not performance.
"The Domain took me less than a year to learn. Apparently that makes me a genius." He said this with the flat tone of someone who had received the information secondhand and is still deciding what to do with it. "I killed people I had once considered impossible to defeat. One after another. And every time, I thought: that's one more step. One step closer to the thing that has been sitting in the back of my mind since Marineford."
He straightened.
"My name is Galdino. Not Mr. Three. Not Crocodile's third man. Galdino. I stopped being anyone's subordinate a long time ago, Iam Buggy partner" His eyes found Sakazuki's directly, and the thing in them was not rage — it was something that had been refined past rage into something quieter and considerably more committed. "I need you to use everything you have. This is the fight I've been building toward. Don't insult it."
The white particles that had been drifting through the air since Sakazuki entered the Domain shifted. Accumulated. Began to settle.
Sakazuki looked at his arm. White spots — small, precise, geometric — were forming on his skin. Not on his clothing, not on the surfaces around him. On him. On the elemental body of a Logia user whose power was expressed as magma, as one of the highest-temperature substances in the natural world, in a temperature range where wax did not exist as a solid material.
It was existing anyway.
Inside a Domain, the user's fruit was not just a power — it was physics. And in Galdino's physics, everything became wax eventually.
So that's what Domain does to a Logia. He filed the information with the efficiency of a man who has accepted that the situation is serious and has decided to concentrate on solving it rather than resenting it. I'll need to work faster than it spreads.
The magma came up through his body in full, scorching the air between them, and Galdino moved.