The choice of Wano Country as the hunting venue had sent a particular current of excitement through the God's Knights and the younger Celestial Dragon houses. A closed nation. Unmapped terrain. A population that had never been softened by contact with the outside world. The anticipation ran high among people whose primary recreation was deciding how quickly something could be made to stop living.
Wano's numbers alone made it attractive. Registered citizens numbered in the hundreds of thousands. Add the undocumented — those who had slipped out of the official count for any number of reasons, people without identities, people the census had never reached — and a conservative estimate landed somewhere above one million. That was an order of magnitude beyond anything like Kamiya. A serious venue, by any measure.
The scale was also the problem. To work through a population of that size, from the most fortified heights to the remotest valley settlements, would take at minimum a month of sustained effort. Outsiders navigating Wano's terrain — mountains that funneled attackers into killboxes, cliffs that provided natural defensive lines, waterways that moved in ways no chart adequately captured — would find that the country itself fought back on behalf of its people. Prey that understood the ground had time to run, to hide, to regroup.
The organizers had accounted for this in the rules.
Outside Wano's waters, fleets had begun to gather. Marine flags. World Government standards. And alongside them, banners that belonged exclusively to individual Celestial Dragon houses — personal colors, family crests, marks of identity that served no military function and existed entirely to announce that someone important had arrived and expected to be recognized.
The advance formations tightened around the country's perimeter. Onigashima was already gone. Kaido had received his information early enough to carry the island clear of the area before the first ship arrived. He left behind the land but nothing that had been worth taking.
The Beasts Pirates had operated on a simple principle in the days before departure: preserve the territory, abandon the population. Every factory that could be disassembled had been disassembled and loaded. The open-air seastone quarries had been demolished — blasted rather than left for whoever came next. Then came the final sweep: precious metals, stockpiled food, furs, any resource with value that could be moved was moved to Onigashima. Better to have it than to watch the Celestial Dragons destroy it for the entertainment of doing so.
In Kaido's accounting, the people of Wano Country were already dead the moment the agreement was reached. Since they were going to die regardless, there was no moral weight to stripping the land clean first. He had made his peace with this.
The people of Wano had not been given any such clarity. What they saw was the Beasts Pirates exhausting resources and removing infrastructure without explanation. Word spread in the way word spreads when people are frightened and don't have the information they need to be frightened correctly. Kaido was dying and was liquidating everything before the end. The Kozuki clan was returning and the pirates were retreating in advance. The world itself was ending in some form not yet specified.
None of the rumors were accurate. All of them produced the same result: panic, scrambling for survival supplies, and the rapid dissolution of whatever social order had been maintained under Beasts Pirates occupation. People who had shared rations the week before were in bloody conflict over them now. The country began destroying itself before the first Celestial Dragon ship cleared the horizon.
Aboard the World Government's largest flagship, Saint Figarland Garling stood before the assembled contestants and explained how the points would work.
He was the supreme referee for this event — the God's Knights' commander, a God Valley survivor whose age and bearing communicated very clearly that he had seen this operation run well and run badly, and that he preferred the former. His role was structural: enforce the one rule that mattered, observe everything else.
"The same points system as previous years," he said, "but with a finer breakdown this time. The contestant with the highest total wins."
In earlier iterations of this kind of operation, the citizens had been captured, reduced to slave status, and released inside their own country to be hunted. The format had grown stale — too controlled, too predictable, too much like a stage production where everyone knew their marks. Wano would be run differently.
Each contestant received a recording bug fitted to their person. Upon landing, they moved freely. They killed whoever they chose. Every kill converted to points in real time, transmitted back to the command hall where Garling could observe each contestant's performance as it happened. The top performers might find their careers inside the God's Knights advanced considerably by the end of a single day.
The only prohibition was killing other contestants. Discovery meant immediate disqualification. Everything else — every method, every target, every form of assistance or deception — was permitted. Winning through cleverness was still winning. The final ranking was points, nothing else.
The point values were structured around Wano's own class system, which the Celestial Dragons had studied and found usefully hierarchical.
Killing one person from the untouchable class — the lowest of Wano's social strata, the largest in number — earned one point. Commoners with property earned two. Smugglers and outside pirates operating in Wano earned ten. Samurai — the armed class, the primary source of organized resistance — earned one hundred points each. Retainers of the shogun's court, the powerful loyalists who had survived decades of Beasts Pirates occupation while maintaining their allegiance, were worth five hundred.
The daimyo who governed Wano's regional territories — six major regions, each with its own ruling lord — were assigned ten thousand points per kill. Kurozumi Orochi, the shogun himself, was set at one hundred thousand.
The breakdown was deliberately crude. Individual samurai varied enormously in capability, and the point value didn't reflect that variation. But a simple system required no administration, no dispute resolution, no judgment calls in the field. It was economical. The organizers had made a practical decision and were comfortable with the inequity.
To add volatility to the opening day, the Marine would release a substantial number of prisoners into Wano before the contest began. Serious criminals, all of them — people with genuine blood debts and the combat capability to make the early hunting genuinely competitive. The addition of dangerous prey moving freely through the same terrain as the contestants would complicate things in ways the organizers considered entertaining.
Among the audience receiving this briefing, conversation had already started.
"The Flower Capital is where the action will be concentrated." One voice, calculating. "I've heard Orochi is just a puppet. Killing him would be easy points, but he's going to be the first target for everyone."
"My family's reputation is on the line. I'll take the Snake myself."
A third voice, with a different kind of anticipation in it. "Flower Street in the capital is supposed to be remarkable. Before handling the more important targets, it might be worth taking a detour."
The room had the texture of something that had lost the capacity to understand that what it was describing was wrong. These were not people performing cruelty against their better instincts. The instinct was the cruelty, unexamined and fully at home in itself. The pleasure that an operation of this scale would provide — the release it offered to the particular kind of emptiness that total material abundance produced — was something the Celestial Dragons expected to be drawing on for years afterward. Events like this one were growing harder to organize. Non-member nations were becoming scarcer. At some point in the near future, the hunt would have to be run in a member state, which would require choosing a country and a king to absorb the consequences. Whoever was chosen would simply have to consider themselves unlucky.
It was in this crowd — amid the contestants reviewing their kill strategies and the nobles expressing their intentions toward Flower Street — that a slender figure stood apart.
Jewelry Bonney. Deputy Commander of the God's Knights, Wearing her contestant's position the way someone wears something they have no choice about. She kept her head down. No one in the crowd addressed her. She didn't address anyone.
No one looking at her from the outside would have been able to say what she was thinking.
One wondered whether her mother Ginny, watching from wherever the dead go, would have found the scene cause for grief or something else entirely.