— Broadcast. —
The Sky Screen shifted its angle.
After Kisame and Kuzan had been separated by the sound of a piano — whatever that meant in the context of Buggy's Domain — they had each been moving through the black fog independently. No contact between them. Kuzan's trajectory unknown. Kisame was following something older than navigation: the smell of the sea.
Hoshigaki Kisame was a fish-man. The black fog blocked most of his conventional senses with reasonable efficiency. It did not block the particular awareness that salt water produces in a creature built around it. The ocean had a smell that reached him even through the Domain's interference, a directional pull that operated below the level of conscious tracking. He followed it.
The route took him through sections of Rome that had gone quiet in ways that required explanation.
The Marine soldiers he encountered were not injured. They were dried out — lying where they had fallen, their bodies evacuated of whatever biological fluency gives a person their weight. No wounds. No marks. Something had been thorough about what it took and careful about what it left behind. He filed this under active threats of unknown type and continued moving, his senses extending outward at maximum range, looking for whatever was waiting for him.
Nothing presented itself.
The sea smell grew stronger.
Nakime did not let fish return to the ocean.
The Infinity Castle's navigator understood exactly what Admiral Kaitora was following and had been following it forward from the moment he had started. The smell was real. Its source was not where he thought it was.
The black fog behind him dissolved the instant he stepped through the final barrier. The environment that replaced it resolved itself around him with complete certainty: heat, dust, a sky of uncompromised sun, the horizon extending in all directions without interruption.
No ocean.
Every step he took raised dust. The ground was cracked in the pattern that appears when water leaves soil over a long time and does not return. The sun overhead was the kind that causes things to happen to the body's fluid systems if the body does not have access to shade and water.
A fish-man's skin was not equipped for this. The physiological architecture was marine — smooth, designed for the kind of heat exchange that works when you are wet and the medium around you is water. In high temperature without moisture, the cooling mechanisms that humans use — sweat produced through follicles, retained long enough to matter — were not available in the same configuration. The body fluids that kept the systems running would leave faster than they could be replaced.
Whoever had arranged this location had understood fish-man physiology ally.
"You defeated generals picked a good environment," Kisame said to the space in front of him. His voice was flat. "Some thought went into this."
Charlotte Katakuri was standing in the heat without visible discomfort. A large man with red hair, a trident, muscles that had been demonstrated previously to the Marine's satisfaction in the course of being eaten by water sharks and remaining silent throughout the process. Beside him: a small girl with straight black hair, the physical contrast between them sufficient that it was difficult to immediately process that they shared a mother.
Charlotte Hikaru. Five years old. The youngest of the Charlotte children Kisame had a awareness of, for reasons.
"Admiral Kisame." Katakuri moved his limbs deliberately — a demonstration, not a warm-up. Both arms. Both legs. All of them present, all of them functional, the same configuration he had possessed before the Thousand Shark Technique had worked through them systematically on Cake Island. "I've been looking forward to this. I want to know how much water you can produce in this environment."
He appeared, by all available evidence, to be fully restored.
Kisame looked at this for a moment and ran the logic.
Charlotte Katakuri's limbs had been eaten. All of them. He had confirmed this personally and the confirmation had been definitive — the kind of evidence that does not leave room for reinterpretation. The only mechanism he could think of that would produce the man currently standing in front of him was the Wish-Wish Fruit, Charlotte Alluka's ability, which operated outside the frameworks he was accustomed to working with.
Kuzan was the relevant comparison. Admiral Kuzan had lost his legs to a battle outcome. Kuzan now walked on a pair of ice legs, constructed from his own Hie Hie no Mi (Ice-Ice Fruit) and worn like an extension of himself. Functional, but built from his fruit rather than his body. The difference between that and what Katakuri appeared to have achieved was the difference between adaptation and restoration.
He had never seen the Wish-Wish Fruit operate directly. He could not reconstruct how it had done this.
Charlotte Hikaru looked at him with her large dark eyes. Then the eyes changed.
Black → the dark red that was not simply red — → three tomoe appearing in the iris in their classic arrangement → and then the step beyond that, the Mangekyō pattern, the windmill design that he had learned to keep his eyes away from and had been keeping his eyes away from since.
"Brother." Her voice was small, precise. "Don't underestimate him. For a fish-man to become a Marine Admiral, he has to have something that makes it impossible to dismiss him."
Katakuri positioned himself in front of her without being asked. As a response to the Sharingan, this was also practical — if the sister was behind the brother, the brother's body blocked the line of sight between Kisame's eyes and hers. The Mangekyō required eye contact to function in its most dangerous configurations. Blocking the angle was a reasonable opening move.
Kisame kept his focus on Katakuri.
He remembered clearly what had happened the last time he was on Cake Island. The invasion had been proceeding. Charlotte Cracker had not been able to hold him — the biscuit constructs dissolved immediately in water, which made the engagement brief. Jinbei had been the target, and he had reached Jinbei. He had been, by his own assessment in the aftermath, in a position to do considerably more than what he had done.
The Sharingan had stopped him.
He had closed his eyes and held that position and retreated, because the alternative — engaging directly with a Mangekyō user with his eyes open — was a risk profile that he had not been willing to accept with the prior target still unsecured. He had made the conservative choice. He had captured Jinbei and left.
Afterward, in his self-examination to Fleet Admiral Artoria, he had been honest about this: the conservative choice had been the wrong one. He should have continued. The opportunity had been there and he had not taken it. If he had pressed forward while holding Jinbei, the outcome for the Big Mom Pirates would have been considerably different, and his record would look different, and the number of fish-men who could point to an Admiral among their people would carry a different weight.
That decision was done. It could not be adjusted retroactively.
This one could be made correctly.
The Marine Headquarters was under the greatest crisis it had faced since Rome was built. He was an Admiral. He was a fish-man from a species that the institutional history of the world had spent centuries treating as secondary. There was nothing in this environment — not the heat, not the dryness, not the two opponents in front of him — that constituted a sufficient reason to leave.
"Little sister." He was looking at Katakuri but the words were directed past him. "I want those eyes. The Fleet Admiral's wall has a space for them. Uchiha clan eyes are worth having as a collection."
He watched the surface of Katakuri's expression for the response — the flicker that appears when someone is deciding how to protect something they consider important. He found it.
Then he moved.
The strategic logic was simple: eliminate the threat you can look at before the threat you cannot. If Katakuri went down, the distance between Hikaru and Kisame became a variable he could control. A child who was watching her brother's life depend on what she chose next was a child who was not calmly deploying Amaterasu.
Pick on the weaker one first. Use the result to constrain the stronger one.
He was not proud of this logic. He was going to use it anyway.