Spandine made his way through Alubarna's war-torn streets with practiced caution, hugging the shadows of shuttered doorways and pressing flat against crumbling walls whenever the crack of musket fire split the air nearby.
He still wasn't sure exactly why the rebel forces, after flooding through the breached city gate, had left the Oasis Hotel largely unmolested. Street fighting had consumed whole blocks around it, the Revolutionary Army tangling with Royal Army soldiers in brutal close-quarters combat while the main thrust of the rebel advance pushed relentlessly toward the palace district. In the chaos of three converging forces, a luxury hotel simply wasn't a priority for anyone.
Whatever the reason, Spandine was grateful.
He trotted up the hotel's broad marble steps, slipped through the ornate double doors that now stood permanently open, their management long since fled, and made his way up to Finn's floor. The hallway smelled faintly of gunpowder and desert dust even here, and somewhere far below, a distant explosion rattled the crystal pendants of the corridor lamps. Spandine straightened his coat, steadied his breathing, and knocked on the Admiral's door.
He was halfway through composing a prayer that Finn hadn't gone sightseeing when the door swung open.
"Madam Hina." Spandine's face visibly relaxed.
Hina regarded him with calm, dark eyes and stepped aside to let him in without a word. From inside the suite came Finn's voice, unhurried and mildly amused, directed at a Den Den Mushi perched on the side table.
"Aren't you supposed to be protecting your girlfriend's family? Don't tell me you've already forgotten what I told you."
A faint nasal wheeze came through the snail before Vergo's voice answered, steady as ever.
"Windsor's family is already settled in the Oasis Hotel, sir. A few floors below you. I've asked the staff who stayed behind to look after them." A brief pause. "I'm heading to the palace now. Windsor was born into a noble family here in Alubarna and has been to the palace more times than she can count. With the city in this state, having someone who knows the layout from memory is an advantage I couldn't overlook. Given the assignment you gave me..."
Finn leaned back in his chair, one ankle crossed over his knee, and rubbed the corner of his mouth with his thumb.
The assignment had been simple enough to state, if not to execute: locate the Nefertari clan's suspected fruit-inheritance technique amid the chaos of the siege. Something that had been nearly impossible to act on while both sides were still fighting over the walls. Now that Alubarna had fallen and everyone who was going to be somewhere was already somewhere, Vergo had found his opening.
He'd just also found a rather convenient guide.
"You weren't planning this from the beginning, were you?" Finn asked, tone carefully neutral.
Silence from the Den Den Mushi.
"Using someone's feelings like a compass isn't exactly..." Finn paused, turning the thought over. "Well. When I introduced you two at the exhibition, none of this had happened yet. That part I'll grant you."
He exhaled through his nose, the expression on his face somewhere between reluctant acceptance and mild toothache.
"Anyway. Be careful. And don't do anything that can't be undone." He reached out and rested two fingers on the Den Den Mushi's shell. "The hotel is fine. Don't worry about that end."
He hung up.
For a moment, Finn sat quietly, then turned to look at Spandine.
"Why are you here?"
Spandine didn't hesitate. "I missed you terribly, Admiral. The moment the gate came down, I couldn't bear to wait another second before coming to receive your guidance."
Finn waved a hand toward the nearest chair.
"The truth, Spandine."
"Ahem." The older man settled into the offered seat with the careful movements of someone whose dignity had recently taken a bruising. The months of working alongside Finn had worn away some of his more performative edges, and what came out now was something closer to genuine. "It's dangerous out there. I thought, well. You'd be safe here, Admiral. So."
Hina turned slightly toward the window to hide her expression. The flattery always came first, reliable as the tides.
Finn shook his head, a corner of his mouth pulling upward.
"If you knew it was dangerous, what possessed you to run through it so quickly?"
"Because it might be more dangerous to stay put." Spandine spread his hands on his knees. "Lord Hancock and Lord Jinbe have both entered the city. Doflamingo as well. Mihawk has gone looking for Dragon." He paused to let that settle. "Outside the walls, it's just Crocodile and me. If that man decides he has bad intentions for the people standing between him and the Nefertari clan, I would rather be inside the perimeter than outside it. And my mission is what it is, Admiral. Cobra and Vivi, alive and delivered. That hasn't changed."
"Mihawk went after Dragon..."
The rest of Finn's sentence never arrived.
A sound reached them through the heavy stone walls of the hotel, not quite a sound at all but something felt in the chest before it registered in the ear. A slash. The kind that moved enough air to make a distant pressure wave. Finn knew exactly one person in Alubarna capable of producing that.
He let his Observation Haki unspool outward.
The scene resolved in fragments, the way it always did, like watching a play with the lights half-down. Mihawk had pushed deep into the city's interior, and now stood surrounded on three sides by a chaotic tangle of Royal Army soldiers and Revolutionary Army fighters who had apparently been caught in the same street at the same time and were presently unsure whether to fight each other or the man who had appeared in their midst. The question, for practical purposes, didn't matter. Mihawk had already answered it.
His blade moved with an economy that was almost contemptuous. Every strike was clean and direct, stripped of flourish, as though the elaborate swordsmanship of lesser practitioners was simply unnecessary weight. Yoru's arc described geometry, not drama. The black blade went where it went and cut what it found there, and the soldiers giving ground before it weren't slow, they simply couldn't see the opening until it was already behind them.
Dragon, by contrast, was exercising restraint that Finn found genuinely interesting. He wasn't fighting so much as redirecting, pulling back when Mihawk pressed, moving the confrontation sideways and away from the densest civilian areas with the practiced care of a man who understood collateral damage better than most. It made him look reactive, but Finn recognized the shape of it. Dragon wasn't losing. He was choosing the battlefield.
For now, it had the appearance of Mihawk's advantage.
Finn held the observation for a long moment, then let it soften. He stroked his chin slowly.
Mihawk was significantly stronger than when they had first crossed paths in East Blue. Back then, the defeat at Gion's hands had been real, even accounting for the circumstances. The sea had blunted his maneuverability. Gion's Rumble-Rumble Fruit had neutralized the physical approaches he relied on. And in raw overall capability at the time, he had genuinely been a half-step below her.
That was no longer obviously true.
Something had changed in him when he'd claimed the title of the world's greatest swordsman. A threshold crossed, or perhaps a conviction. Whatever it was, it had stripped away something he hadn't needed and left only the essential thing. He struck now with the settled authority of a man who had already decided where his sword would land, long before the moment of contact. No wasted motion. No visible technique. Every cut was the cut.
The great swordsmen Finn had encountered across his years in the Marines had always kept something in reserve, a secret art, a signature technique, a limit they approached but did not exceed in normal combat. Mihawk, in that moment of observation, seemed to have inverted that entirely. His secret was that there was no gap between his ordinary and his exceptional. The apex was the baseline.
Finn exhaled slowly and withdrew his Haki.
Troublesome. A little bit. If he had to take the field against Mihawk right now, he'd come out on top, but he wouldn't call it comfortable. Mihawk's current strength sat close to Gion's, possibly right alongside her. Whether he'd actually surpassed her was another question. Finn considered it with genuine attention, and concluded: probably not quite.
Gion had grown quieter about her training over the past few years, low-key to the point where outsiders might mistake stillness for stagnation. They'd be wrong. In terms of practical combat performance within Headquarters, Finn knew of exactly zero people who could say with confidence that they could beat her. Kuzan had lost to her three times running. He didn't talk about it anymore, which Finn found privately entertaining.
Sakazuki and Borsalino held the Admiral title, which meant Gion had chosen not to challenge them directly. Beating an Admiral was a statement that reflected on the Admiral's dignity. You didn't do that lightly, not if you respected the institution. Finn understood that calculation. He'd made versions of it himself.
Still. If he was being precise about it: Sakazuki, he thought, might actually come out behind Gion in a serious engagement. Borsalino was the harder question. The man had never, in Finn's knowledge of him, genuinely shown what he could do at his ceiling. Not once, in all these years, in all the battles Finn had witnessed or received reports of. There was always the sense that a gear had simply never been engaged.
Before the Dark-Dark Fruit, Finn had privately acknowledged that Borsalino might give him real difficulty. There was a version of that fight he didn't win cleanly.
He thought of something else, a scene from the world he'd come from: a moment when three of the sea's most fearsome powers stood arrayed against the Marines, and Borsalino had tilted his head and asked, in that unhurried drawl, whether perhaps he ought to go over and deal with it. The tone of that question had always stuck with Finn. Not bravado. Genuine, mild curiosity about whether the problem required his attention yet.
Kaido. Charlotte Linlin. Together. And Borsalino's first instinct had been something close to inconvenience.
But that was a different world, a different timeline. Back to the present.
Mihawk was strong enough for the moment to matter. That was sufficient.
As he turned his attention back to the room, two distinct pulses of Haki collided at the edge of his awareness, not far away. He focused briefly, then relaxed.
"Jinbe and Ivankov have started."
Hina glanced over from where she stood by the window. "Can you tell who has the better of it?"
"Jinbe's managing." Finn shook his head slightly. "But he's limited out here. Alabasta's the worst possible environment for his style. The rain Dragon brought evaporated days ago. He can't pull water out of stone. So it comes down to Haki and judo, and Ivankov isn't a pushover." He paused. "They're fairly matched for now."
Then, like a piece of theater shifting scenes, a figure launched upward from somewhere in the middle of the city, trailing pink feather coat behind it like a comet's tail.
Doflamingo had found someone.
A heartbeat later, from below, a massive shadow erupted from the earth itself, tall as a building, and drove upward in a spear of darkness.
Doflamingo's strings snapped outward in answer, dozens of white threads wrapping the shadow formation and biting into it with Armament-coated force. The spear slowed, strained, then held.
Gecko Moria.
The Warlord drifted upward from the street, massive and unhurried, his silhouette misshapen and theatrical against the smoke-hazed sky. He wielded his own shadow as a weapon, the darkness having a weight and presence that went well beyond the theatrical. Finn had always suspected that Moria's reputation underestimated him. What he was watching now confirmed it. By the standards of the Seven Warlords, the man was genuinely formidable, and right now he was treating Doflamingo's aerial acrobatics with something like impatience.
Doflamingo moved with the fluid, relentless energy that had earned him the title of Heavenly Yaksha, shifting between angles, redirecting force, never staying still long enough to be defined. The String-String Fruit made him almost impossible to pin. Almost.
Moria stopped waiting.
The shadow beneath him split away from his body, fully autonomized, and rose alongside him as a second self. The Doppelman. Finn had read about the technique in the intelligence reports but hadn't seen it deployed in actual combat before. The effect was immediate. What had been one very dangerous opponent became two perfectly synchronized opponents who moved without communication because they were the same entity. Doflamingo was abruptly fighting a mirror that hit back harder than he did.
The advantage was visible even from a distance. Doflamingo scrambled. One miscalculation, and Moria's giant scissors closed on the space he'd just vacated.
Then a second Doflamingo appeared.
Not a recovery. Not a substitution. A genuine duplicate, strings woven into a shape that moved and responded and kicked hard enough to deflect the scissors' arc.
Hina raised an eyebrow. "His clone technique."
"String dummy," Finn said, watching. "Hollow, but it functions in a fight. Takes some of the pressure off." He paused. "He's adapting. Moria wasn't expecting it."
The battlefield shifted back toward equilibrium, two against two, the symmetry holding in a kind of terrible balance. Alubarna's middle district had become a stage for people who could casually level buildings, and the buildings were suffering for it.
Finn leaned back and let his gaze drift toward the open window.
"Where's Hancock?" he asked, mostly to himself. "Doflamingo's fighting. Mihawk found Dragon. Jinbe's occupied." He turned his head toward Spandine. "She went in from the eastern approach with Jinbe. She should be somewhere in the city."
Spandine shifted his weight carefully. "She may be choosing her moment."
Finn considered that, then decided Hancock probably had her own priorities and would surface when something required her to.
He let the ambient sounds of distant combat settle into the background, then turned back to Spandine with a more direct look.
"Do you think Crocodile will move against you?"
Spandine's expression became something professionally neutral. "Almost certainly. But that's not a problem for my mission. I'm not here to neutralize Crocodile. That's someone else's column. I'm here for the Nefertari clan, Cobra and Vivi, delivered alive." He folded his hands on his knee with the composed manner of a man who had made peace with the dangers of his profession, or at least with the dangers of this particular afternoon. "Whatever Crocodile intends, it doesn't change what I need to do. I don't need to beat him. I just need to reach them first."
He smiled thinly.
"So I really don't bother targeting him at all."