Broadcast-
The Red Armor moved with the authority that only Susanoo could grant. Even reshaped into a shell draped over Charlotte Katakuri's mochi body, the power was unmistakable — the famous god of Wano's mythology, rendered into crimson energy and fitted to a vessel it had never been designed for, still blazing with something that predated the current age.
The energy blade in its hand threw off light like a forge. The swing came down and the slash released — a ribbon of red force that carved grooves into the flooded ground wherever it passed, splitting rock and matter with the clean indifference of something that had been cutting through the world for centuries. It hit Leviathan's flank.
The scales shattered.
Not bent, not deflected — shattered, the ancient plating fracturing like tempered glass under a sudden lateral load, exposing dark flesh beneath. Leviathan's roar rolled across the Gobi in a shockwave that pressed the air flat.
"It's working — push."
"Turn that whale into sashimi."
The siblings drove their combined focus harder into the construct, the amplification from Eight Thousand Spears still feeding into Katakuri's output, the two of them operating in the tight rhythm of people who had shared a battlefield often enough to speak in half-sentences.
Inside Leviathan's enormous brain, something old and unpleasant stirred.
The sensation was familiar. Painfully, ally familiar.
That damned clan.
There had been lean seasons, in the centuries when Uchiha Madara still walked the world and his genjutsu held Leviathan's leash, when the fishing had been poor and the clan had turned to available resources. Leviathan had been the available resource. They preferred sashimi — raw, uncooked, carved fresh — and they had no particular sympathy for what they were carving it from. The memory of it lived in Leviathan's nerve clusters with the kind of permanence that only prolonged, repeated indignity can achieve.
"The Uchiha forced this on themselves," Leviathan said, and the voice carried its full weight now — the bell-toll that bent weaker minds into confusion and hallucination. "An invasive species that should never have appeared on this planet."
Fury did what fury does for creatures of that scale: it changed the environment.
Seawater surged from Leviathan's open mouth in a volume that had no business existing this far from any ocean. It was not a stream or a flow — it was an eruption, a sustained explosion of saltwater that hit the desert floor and spread in every direction simultaneously, rising as it spread. The Gobi Desert, dry and cracked and ancient, found itself being converted into something it had never been, and the transformation happened fast.
Water climbed the Red Armor's legs. Then its waist. Then its chest.
The ocean current churned and dragged, unstable and purposeful at once, tossing the armored construct sideways as the siblings fought to maintain their footing inside it. The height of the water rose with shocking speed — from ankles to neck in what felt like moments. Leviathan and Kisame both submerged, moving into their natural element, and immediately the dynamic shifted in every way that mattered.
In the sea, Leviathan was not a summoned creature performing a service. It was a sovereign.
A black shadow circled the Red Armor in long, unhurried arcs beneath the surface. Dozens of eyes, each one capable of tracking independently, reading the armor's movements from every angle simultaneously. The siblings couldn't match it — they had no equivalent coverage. Charlotte Hikaru turned the Mangekyō Sharingan in one direction after another, doing what she could, but the water diffused her visual range and the creature's sheer size made positional judgment unreliable.
A shadow rushed from the right.
She called it — swung the blade in that direction — and the slash connected with nothing solid. The energy tore through the shape and it dissolved.
"It's a fake."
"We're nearly out of time. Nakime's window is almost here."
Katakuri pulled back on his offensive intention consciously. A prolonged exchange favored no one on their side of the clock. The three minutes were burning down and his sister was burning with them — her reserves weren't built to sustain this kind of duration, and he could feel the Susanoo's cohesion beginning to fray at the edges.
Four shadows converged simultaneously from four cardinal directions.
Four different swimming patterns, four different pressure signatures, closing at the same moment. No way to distinguish by intuition alone which were real.
Charlotte Hikaru made her decision. Both eyes bled.
Blood tears ran down her face as she pushed the Mangekyō Sharingan past its limit — full perspective across all four directions, the vision penetrating the murk, reading each incoming shape.
"All fake. Every one of them. Where are they actually—"
The real ones cut her sentence short. The Red Armor swung through all four approaches and confirmed it: water sharks, no core, no substance. She was right. But the act of confirming it had cost her the last of her capacity to sustain Susanoo.
The red armor cracked.
It came apart in visible stages — the energy framework losing coherence piece by piece, scales dissolving, the crimson light retreating inward and guttering. In seconds the construct was gone, and what remained was the mochi body, white and exposed, enormous in the water but suddenly very soft.
The shadow appeared directly below them.
Charlotte Katakuri moved on instinct — grabbing his unconscious sister, pulling her away from the dissolving form, trying to create distance. There was nowhere to go. Leviathan's mouth opened beneath them, the size of a sea cave, and the suction it generated was not something that could be resisted by a man carrying a child. The current it created was simply stronger than anything Katakuri's body could produce in opposition.
He wrapped both arms around Charlotte Hikaru and held her against his chest.
The mochi, the brother, the sister, and everything connected to them that hadn't already dispersed — all of it traveled upward into the dark.
Leviathan breached.
The whole enormous body launched from the water in a movement that had no right being possible at that scale, spray exploding outward in sheets, the creature's weight at full extension enough to press a dent into an island's coastline. It hung there for a suspended moment — airborne, impossible, triumphant — and then descended back into the ocean it had created.
The water began to recede. Slowly, then faster, draining back into wherever Leviathan had drawn it from as the ancient creature's power turned inward to other concerns.
Kisame coalesced on the surface, water running off him, standing steady on a sea that was already shrinking. He looked up at the space where Leviathan had been.
"When you're ready, pass me the eyes. The Admiral's collection has a gap."
Leviathan's response came from the diminishing water around him — not words, exactly, but an acknowledgment. The Mangekyō Sharingan, if stomach acid claimed it before the extraction, would be an irreplaceable loss. The creature was aware. It would manage its digestion accordingly.
"Once I have the eyes, I'll contact you through spiritual means. Next time — solve your own problems."
Mist rose around the retreating bulk of the creature, thick and sudden, and within it Leviathan's shape faded until the mist was all that remained. Then the mist thinned, and the desert reasserted itself around empty water, wet sand, and silence.
Kisame stood alone on the receding sea's surface and let the quiet settle.
Then he turned his attention to the practical problem: getting out of Infinity Castle.
He closed his eyes and felt the water that remained — not watching it but reading it, the fish-man's awareness extending through the current, finding its direction, its origin, its flow. Leviathan's manifestation had been violent enough to crack something in the Castle's spatial structure. A gap. The current had a direction, and directions led somewhere.
He dropped below the surface and followed it.
Nothing intercepted him. No sound, no opponent, no obstacle. The current carried him through the gap cleanly, and the compression of Infinity Castle's interior gave way to the open pressure of real ocean water — deeper, colder, vast in the way only uncontained sea could be.
He swam up.
Rome broke the surface ahead of him, except it was not Rome anymore. From the water, looking back at the shore, Kisame could see the shape of Nakime's Mato Mato no Mi (Castle-Castle Fruit) written across the whole city — buildings from different eras and styles compressed together, stacked and merged into configurations that architecture had no vocabulary for. The Marine Headquarters fortress had been absorbed into the structure entirely. There was no fortress visible. Only the Castle, wearing the city like a second skin.
The Marine relief forces — wherever they were inside that — would be scattered across a spatial interior that bore no relationship to the city's original geography. Finding each other, let alone executing coordinated operations, would be a significant problem.
Devil Fruit work. No question. Technology can't do this. What happened inside, how bad is it?
He turned toward the second front. Mary Geoise, on the horizon, was lit from within by red light — pulses of it, the kind that came from large-scale destruction. Explosions, one after another, and beneath them the sustained sound of burning.
The holy land had become a battlefield.