God Valley 2.0 was not a metaphor for people who had lived through the original. To those who had been there — who had watched what happened to an entire population designated as acceptable losses so that nobles could keep score — the phrase carried weight that couldn't be communicated to anyone who hadn't.
But Wano Country presented problems that should have made it an obvious non-starter for this kind of operation.
It was not a member nation, which checked the first box the World Government needed — non-members had no formal protections, their citizens no legal standing, their deaths no paperwork requirements. But Wano's geography was another matter entirely. The samurai country had spent centuries building its isolation into its terrain. High waterfalls, treacherous sea currents, cliffs that punished any conventional approach — it was not a place you surrounded and converted into a hunting ground without serious preparation. It was the kind of terrain that made defenders feel invincible and made attackers feel like they'd misread the assignment.
More significantly: it was Kaido's back garden. The Beasts Pirates had been operating there for years — factories running on the island's mineral wealth, a steady revenue stream that Onigashima depended on. Any activity in Wano Country happened in Kaido's shadow. For the Celestial Dragons to hold an event there without his agreement would have required a military commitment far beyond what a hunting expedition was worth.
Which made it strange, from every angle, that it had happened at all.
The Sky Screen eventually provided the answer. It had been a conspiracy from the first conversation. Every party involved had used and been used in turn, and when the dust settled, the benefits extracted didn't match the ambitions that had gone in.
One night, an uninvited guest arrived at Onigashima. The meeting with Kaido lasted until dawn. What changed hands in that conversation — what was offered, what was guaranteed — remained private. What emerged from it was an agreement: Wano Country would serve as the venue, and the Celestial Dragons would be allowed to run their game in Kozuki Oden's homeland.
After the guest left, Kaido gathered his most trusted cadres and explained what the next period of time would look like, and what role the Beasts Pirates would play while Wano burned around them.
King did not take this easily.
"Captain." The Lunarian's voice was measured, but the resistance in it was clear. "This is obviously a trap set against us. Agreeing to it seems like an enormous risk."
Wano Country was not simply territory to King. It was the operational foundation of everything the Beasts Pirates had built. What happened in Wano happened to Onigashima. They were not separate questions. When Marine warships arrived to provide "security" for the Celestial Dragons' celebration, they would surround the country — and likely Onigashima as well. Pirates and the Marine had conflicts as a matter of routine, but this wouldn't be routine. This would be the organization that owned the seas encircling the organization that controlled the island, with a population that couldn't go anywhere.
Kaido told his cadres to sit down and stop working themselves up. He had been at God Valley. He knew what these events looked like from the inside, what the Celestial Dragons and the Marine were actually doing when they set one up, and what the gaps in that operation looked like when you knew where to find them.
"The offer I received is not something I can decline." He said it without drama. "Even if Wano Country is lost in the process, we can take another territory. What's being offered in exchange is something I cannot afford to miss."
He had operated in Wano for nearly twenty years. That was long enough to understand something he had resisted understanding for most of that time: the land and the people were not the same problem. The people of Wano would never accept him. It wasn't stubbornness or grudge — it was something older, worn into the culture through generations of deliberate cultivation. Xenophobia as an inheritance. They would not say it plainly in daily life, but in private, in the old sayings passed down from grandparents, the position was clear: an outsider could occupy the general's seat, but they would never become the general in any sense that mattered.
Kaido had once believed in subtle pressure. That if you maintained the right conditions long enough, compliance would follow. What he had learned instead was that the people of Wano would starve before they would work efficiently for the Beasts Pirates. They submitted to violence on the surface and moved at half-speed underneath. The factory output never reflected the workforce's actual numbers, and it never would.
Kurozumi Orochi continued to hold his position precisely because even a known puppet with the right bloodline was preferable to a competent outsider with none. The Wano people understood exactly what Orochi was and chose him anyway. That was not a problem Kaido could solve by applying more pressure. The only complete solution involved eliminating the existing population and starting over — which was not efficient, and not presently the plan.
"When the Celestial Dragons begin their celebration, I'll lift Onigashima clear of the sea area." He let that settle. "When the farce ends, we take it back."
The elegance of the arrangement was that the Celestial Dragons would do the difficult work. The stubborn Ryuo-school samurai hiding in the mountains — the mid-tier fighters who were never worth the cost of hunting down individually, who always seemed to receive advance warning whenever the Beasts Pirates mounted a suppression campaign — would have to face opponents who didn't share their intelligence networks. Whatever survived that collision would be a more manageable version of the problem.
Since the captain had made up his mind, King let it go. He shifted to something more immediately practical. "This may also give us an opportunity to properly assess Orochi's level. We've never actually seen what he's capable of."
To the outside world, Orochi presented as a compliant puppet: a hedonist who filled his days with eating, drinking, sleeping, and women, and left the governing to his handlers. The spies the Beasts Pirates had embedded near him sent back consistently favorable intelligence — useful information, well-processed, arriving on schedule.
Too consistently. Too well-processed.
Black Maria had noticed it first. Something about the general's mansion — a building Kaido himself had never actually occupied — produced intelligence that was slightly too clean. Not wrong enough to identify as fabricated, but too perfect to have come from humans living under stress, forming relationships, absorbing the emotional climate of a court they were embedded in. Real people sent back complicated reports. These reports were uncomplicated.
She had quietly re-examined every spy who had been running in Orochi's proximity. The findings had been, in her own assessment, terrifying.
What she found was that they had been replaced. Not turned — replaced. Something had been wearing their skins. One of Kaido's cadres had confirmed it directly: caught a spy, tore off what turned out to be a surface layer, and found something else entirely underneath. Whatever was inside had been reporting faithfully on behalf of Orochi for years.
From that point, Kaido had begun to reconsider the entire span of his relationship with Orochi. Every favorable intelligence report. Every year of smooth management. All of it filtered through something that wasn't human, sending back exactly what would keep the Beasts Pirates comfortable and inattentive.
What Orochi had actually been doing during that time was unknown. That was the problem.
The Celestial Dragons' hunting game would, among other things, answer that question. Whatever Orochi was, and whatever he had been building in secret, would have to respond to pressure it hadn't chosen and hadn't prepared for. If he couldn't handle the test, he wasn't worth the caution.
Kaido's expression shifted — something that might have been amusement, or the particular fondness a parent develops for an irritating child. "When the show starts," he said, "throw Yamato onto the island as well. I want to see what she actually does for Wano Country."
Yamato had been a problem since the diary. Reading Kozuki Oden's journal had apparently been sufficient to convince her that she was Kozuki Oden — not inspired by, not following in the footsteps of, but was. She had adopted the identity wholesale, announced her intention to become Wano's liberating general, and had maintained this position through beatings and imprisonment without showing any signs of revision. If anything, the resistance had made her more settled in it.
Kaido's educational approach had reached its limits. Since he couldn't teach her himself, the island would have to do it.
King privately mourned for his young master for a moment. Then he went to make arrangements.