-Broadcast-
The Domain was already working.
Sakazuki could feel it the way you feel pressure at depth — not pain, not yet, but the persistent awareness that something external was governing the physics around him in ways he had not consented to. The waxification was slow. That was the Domain's particular cruelty: at Admiral-level resilience, the process could not simply overwrite him instantly. It had to earn every centimeter. White spots formed and held, formed and held, each one a small claim staked on the surface of an elemental body that ran hot enough to vaporize most materials on contact.
The wax held anyway.
Around him, the museum's collection stood in rows. Every figure had been a living creature at some point. The finishing work on each one was too precise — expressions that had ity, body language that had narrative. These were not approximations. Galdino had been present for all of them, had watched each transformation through its stages, had chosen when to let the process complete based on aesthetic rather than mercy.
He likes this, Sakazuki assessed, without particular emotion about it. Understanding what an opponent valued was tactical information.
"If I could add a Marine Admiral to my collection," Galdino said, walking the space between figures with the ease of a man in his own home, "I could die content. Fulfill that for me today, Sakazuki."
Space opened beside him and Tobi came through it — the spiral-patterned mask, the single visible Sharingan eye, the landing that managed to be casual despite the dimensional transit required to produce it.
He looked around the museum. He looked at Galdino's expression. Then he looked at Sakazuki and back to Galdino.
"Third Brother," he said. "Are you confessing your love to a Marine Admiral? Because I'm standing right here and I had no idea you were interested in—"
"My orientation is entirely normal," Galdino said flatly.
"The poetry of the speech you were giving—"
"I will seal you in wax and put you on the ceiling with the bird."
Tobi accepted this as a reasonable response and dropped the subject. He leaned against one of the standing wax figures and crossed his arms with the comfort of someone who has found a good vantage point.
"The situation report," he said, dropping to a more practical register. "Other Admirals have entered the Castle. Each one running into something. Third Brother's the only one who's managed to actually contain an Admiral in a Domain — you're doing better than anyone."
"Flattery is pointless," Galdino said. But the pride was visible at the edge of his expression, and he didn't bother to fully suppress it.
The two of them settled into a rhythm of exchange — comfortable, practiced — the ease of people who spend enough time together that conflict becomes its own form of affection. They were also, quite deliberately, not engaging. Waiting. Because every second they spent talking was a second during which the Domain continued its slow, steady work on the man standing in the center of the room.
Sakazuki understood the strategy. He had no God's-eye view of the Infinity Castle, no knowledge of what was happening to the other Admirals in their own corridors, no information about Buggy's actual objectives inside Mary Geoise versus Rome. All he had was this room, and the spreading white on his skin, and the clock.
"I should tell you," he said, interrupting nothing in particular, "that I'll remember your name for a little while. You might find that you remember mine for the rest of your life."
Galdino looked at him.
"However long that is," Sakazuki added, with the tone of someone who is not issuing a threat because a threat would be insufficient.
He stopped trying to contain it.
The magma came up through his pores first — not expelled but seeping, the way water comes up through saturated ground when there is too much pressure from below. The temperature rose past a thousand degrees. His skin darkened as the heat exceeded what even his own body was designed to safely express in proximity to itself, and he let it, because the alternative was to remain contained inside Galdino's physics, and that outcome was not acceptable.
Magma pushed through his mouth, his nose, the corners of his eyes — not violence but overflow, an eruption in the original geological sense, the release of pressure that had been building from the core outward. His body stopped being a human shape that held magma and became a vent.
Then it stopped being a vent and became a volcano.
The eruption went upward and outward in all directions simultaneously. Not technique — not directed force toward a target — but the full output of a Logia body that had ceased to moderate itself, the Magu Magu no Mi (Magma-Magma Fruit) expressing its actual ceiling without the restraint that combat normally required. The magma came down like rain. Like weather. The white floor of the museum disappeared under it in sections, each section becoming fire before becoming ash before becoming a new floor of cooled black rock.
The wax figures went first. The collection that Galdino had assembled across years dissolved in order of proximity — closest figures sublimating before the material even had time to melt, middle-distance figures running and pooling, far figures simply ceasing to be solid at all. The ceiling came next. Rodan and the frozen lava dragon, still wax — then the wax began to run, and then the heat reached the material underneath, and the things that had been inert began to register the eruption.
"How," Tobi said, pressed to the wall, his voice carrying genuine awe alongside the alarm, "is he producing more volume than every active volcano I have ever personally observed. Combined."
Galdino was not responding to Tobi. He was standing in the center of the eruption and working.
The Domain pushed back.
Not through technique — Galdino was not throwing wax at the magma. He was asserting the Domain's physics against the physics of the eruption, white particles condensing wherever the magma flow advanced, wax forming on the leading edge of every lava stream and attempting to solidify it into something the Domain could absorb and categorize. Every inch of this space was a contest between what the Magu Magu no Mi said the world was made of and what the Doru Doru no Mi (Wax-Wax Fruit) at Domain-stage said it was made of.
Two physics. Two answers to the same ground.
The museum's architecture was gone. The white walls had either melted or been reinforced into wax-covered lava barriers, the floor a broken landscape of black rock islanded in white formations that were themselves beginning to crack from below as the magma found new paths. The air at the center of the room was the temperature at which most materials chose a different state of matter.
Galdino held the Domain.
He was losing ground, but he held it — each lost meter consolidated somewhere else, the white world contracting under the eruption's pressure but not collapsing, the boundary between magma and wax advancing and retreating in a way that was less like combat and more like geology, two tectonic forces meeting at a fault line and conducting a slow, total argument about which one governed this particular patch of reality.
His expression had lost the ease of a man running a planned trial. He was working now. He had known Sakazuki had grown stronger over the years — that knowledge was one of the reasons he had spent those years building a Domain rather than a conventional technique set. He had not, until this moment, fully registered that the growth had been mutual.
Somewhere in the back of the calculation, a memory surfaced: the Year Without Summer. A year when the sea had lost its heat and the world had lost its summer and the global temperature had dropped five degrees across every ocean simultaneously. The official explanation had been geological. The actual explanation was that Admiral Sakazuki had disappeared for a period and something volcanic had happened to him in the interval, and no one had been close enough to find out exactly what.
The magma pouring through the Domain's floor was the answer to what had happened that year.
Galdino adjusted his footing on a wax platform that was already beginning to melt at its base, reasserted the Domain's boundary at the three points where it was weakest, and decided he had, perhaps, slightly misjudged the scope of what he was dealing with.
He did not stop fighting.