-Broadcast-
Kisame was the first Admiral to break free of Infinity Castle, and he had no intention of going back in to help the others. That was not the task assigned to him. He had somewhere else to be.
He surfaced outside Rome and took stock of what the city had become, then turned and read the horizon toward Mary Geoise. Red light pulsed in the direction of the holy land. Explosions, sustained burning. He filed the information and kept moving — not toward the fighting, but alongside it, tracking at a distance. His job was to observe, to gather intelligence that Fleet Admiral Artoria Pendragon could use when the time came to redeploy. Kisame was a fish-man in a human war, and he understood the value of knowing more than your opponent believed you knew.
He slipped below the surface and disappeared from the city's sight.
At the center of Infinity Castle, Nakime sat with her shamisen in her lap and her one eye closed. Blood traced a slow line down from the closed lid's corner.
She had seen Leviathan. Only at a distance, only for a moment — and that had been enough. The volume of information that single glance had forced into her mind in that instant had nearly broken something in her. She was still processing the pressure of it, pushing against the edges of her skull.
"I failed. I couldn't bring them back."
The moment Leviathan had opened its mouth, space itself had distorted around the swallowing. She had played the strings of the Castle's control mechanism dozens of times in rapid succession, building a transfer point, trying to reach underneath the creature's reach. It hadn't mattered. Whatever Leviathan generated around itself when fully engaged was something her fruit had no leverage against. Charlotte Katakuri and Charlotte Hikaru had gone in, and the window had closed behind them.
This was not a contingency the Joker Pirates had planned for. No one had anticipated Kisame summoning that particular being into the operation.
Across from her in the control chamber, guarding the space with six eyes open simultaneously, was Kokushibo — Upper Rank One, and the reason Buggy could trust that the Castle's center remained secure. The oppressive weight that six eyes brought to a room was not a comfortable thing to sit beside, and Nakime kept her face composed with effort.
"Leviathan and Hoshigaki Kisame have history," Kokushibo said. The observation was analytical, no particular feeling behind it. "That's how a fish-man becomes a Marine Admiral. Someone was watching his development and decided he was worth something." A pause. "Let the others continue holding the remaining Admirals. Time is what Lord Buggy needs — keep buying it."
Kisame had exploited the gap Leviathan's manifestation had torn in the Castle's interior structure, slipping out through the distortion in the ocean current before anyone could respond. One Admiral free was an acceptable variable. It would not affect the operation at Mary Geoise. The Castle's interior still held the rest.
What was slightly different from expectations: the Marine had not yet located the Castle's control center. Artoria Pendragon was apparently not committing all twelve Admirals to recovery operations. She was holding something back, managing her losses, keeping her high-end fighting capacity intact even under pressure.
Reasonable. The thought moved through Kokushibo's assessment without admiration or concern. As long as the high-end strength was preserved, the Marine would never truly scatter — it was a principle that any organization that had survived this long would have internalized. The Fleet Admiral understood it.
The bigger picture, from the Joker Pirates' perspective, was this: the Big Mom Pirates had just lost two of their remaining high-end fighters to a giant whale's digestive system. Totto Land was no longer in a position to negotiate anything with the Joker Pirates. That chapter was closed.
And the wider consequences would take a few years to fully emerge, but the shape of them was already visible. Charlotte Linlin's diminished capacity was not news — those who needed to know had known for some time. What had held the other Emperors back from pressing that advantage was a combination of restraint and mutual calculation. Once the count of Emperors dropped to three and the balance fractured, that restraint would evaporate. The scramble for territory would be immediate and bloody, and it would produce a scale of pirate-on-pirate slaughter that no organization within the current system was positioned to stop.
The Marine watching from the sideline would be the only faction to benefit from the resulting exhaustion.
And when it was time for the final reckoning — under Artoria Pendragon's hand, with twelve Admirals and a functioning merit system behind her — the work would go faster than anyone outside the New Marine currently believed possible.
Inside Leviathan, it was dark and loud and wet.
The digestive system of an immortal super ancient creature was not designed with any category of passenger in mind. The current that ran through the creature's interior was powerful enough to drag anything without an anchor in a fixed direction, moving the contents of Leviathan's most recent intake toward the deeper chambers where the stomach acid waited — acid that the raw biology of the creature produced at temperatures that made the comparison to an active volcano feel like an understatement.
Charlotte Katakuri had lost consciousness. He hadn't released his sister. Even out cold, his arms had stayed closed around Charlotte Hikaru, the two of them tumbling together in the saltwater current alongside fish and shrimp that would not be surviving the next few minutes.
Then a net came down.
It was a wide net, cast with the patience and accuracy of someone who had done this many times in this exact space. It caught everything in its path — fish, shrimp, and two unconscious humans alike — and then the slack went out of it as the line above began to pull. The net tightened, lifting its contents clear of the current, bringing them up through the darkness toward something that was not the stomach.
Fresh air reached Charlotte Katakuri's face.
His consciousness returned in fragments — the sensation of pressure on his chest, someone's hands working methodically, forcing water up and out of his lungs in increments. It took several cycles before he could comply, turning his head and coughing out seawater until his throat was clear. His body was entirely spent. Soaked through with seawater, drained by the Devil Fruit's own weakness, his stamina at the floor of what it could do.
"Please—" The word came out barely shaped. "Save my sister. Save her first."
Then he was unconscious again.
The old man who had cast the net turned to the girl still resting against the Sweet Commander's chest.
He was white-haired and lean in the way of someone who had lived a very long time in a very set of circumstances — not the leanness of deprivation, but of a body that had been reduced to exactly what it needed and nothing more. He moved with a quiet efficiency, checking the girl's breathing, assessing her color, pushing the long black hair away from her face to read the state of her.
What he saw made him stop.
He looked at her face. Then at the closed eyes, and what he knew was behind them.
Could she be…
When most people who knew the Uchiha name heard it spoken aloud, something changed in their expression — a tightening, a reflex toward distance, the instinctive response to an association that had accumulated too many dark chapters. The old man's face did none of that. What moved across his features instead was something that had no business existing in this context: recognition, and past that, a warmth that belonged to someone who had been waiting a long time to see a face like this one.
He had known the Uchiha. He knew their sins, and he knew their grief, and he knew what the generation that came before had done with their power. He carried all of that. But looking at this child — unconscious, barely alive, the Uchiha bloodline written in her face with complete clarity — what he felt was not any of those things.
He was not going to let this die in front of him. Whatever it cost.
The old man gathered both siblings — Charlotte Katakuri across his back, Charlotte Hikaru held in his arms — and moved. He was not large. The combination he was carrying was significantly larger than him, and he managed it anyway, trotting back through the interior of the space he had long since learned to navigate, toward the small house that was his home, where the first aid supplies were kept, where he could start the work of keeping two people alive.
He had been alone here for a long time. Long enough that the accumulation of things he had not been able to say to anyone had become considerable. He had questions too, though he suspected the answers were going to require some patience before the siblings were in any condition to provide them.
He kept moving, and the weight in his arms didn't slow him.