Standing on the city wall, Finn slowly withdrew the darkness pooling in his palm. A thin line of sweat traced down his temple, the only outward sign of what it had cost him.
Absorbing the Pluton cannon's beam on his first real use of the Dark-Dark Fruit. Not exactly the controlled introduction he had imagined.
"Of all the ways to break in a new ability," he muttered, exhaling slowly, "that one was exciting."
He hadn't fully finished speaking before Hancock, Doflamingo, and Jinbe closed in around him from either side. They hadn't been able to see through the city wall, but they had felt it. Whatever had erupted from the desert, it had carried the weight of something ancient, something wrong, something that didn't belong in the same world as swords and fists.
For a moment, every one of them had genuinely believed they were about to die.
And then a Marine Admiral had done something to make it stop.
Doflamingo stood with his hands in his pockets, his bright pink coat catching the dry desert wind. He stared out past the wall toward the distant dunes, jaw loose with something that wasn't quite shock but was close to it. Where the beam had passed, the sand had fused into glass. Long crystallized furrows stretched through the desert in a pattern that no natural force could have made, each one gleaming coldly under the sun.
"Admiral," he said, and for once the drawl was gone from his voice.
Finn followed his gaze. Far out across the desert, half-buried in the dunes, sat the silhouette of something massive. At this range it resembled a ship's cannon scaled up until it was roughly the size of a warship, though it was neither a ship nor a cannon in any conventional sense.
He hadn't been thinking about ancient weapons. In the version of events he'd carried in his memory, Crocodile never got close to Pluton. He didn't have the expertise. He couldn't read the ancient texts.
And in any case, Pluton was supposed to be a battleship.
Somewhere along the way, Alabasta had become far more complicated than he'd anticipated.
"What is that thing?" he asked.
Doflamingo looked at it again, then shook his head. "I'm not certain."
Jinbe and Hancock had even less to offer. Neither of them had seen anything like it before.
Finn turned it over quietly. Caesar's gas weapons, the ancient cannon, all of it in Crocodile's hands. He could spend time theorizing how it had happened. Or he could simply walk out there and ask.
The Nefertari family was finished. Cobra was in Spandine's custody. Vivi had apparently slipped away, but that was a manageable inconvenience for the cover story already in place. What mattered now was the man sitting in the desert who had just tried to vaporize an entire city.
"Where's Mihawk?" Finn asked, glancing around.
Doflamingo and Hancock both shook their heads. They'd been occupied with Moria's zombie forces until he withdrew, and then the gas had started, and then this. Tracking Mihawk's movements hadn't been a priority.
Jinbe scratched the back of his head. "Last I saw him, he was pushing north through the gate. Chasing Dragon. The two of them disappeared into the desert."
Finn almost smiled. Mihawk pursuing Dragon through a poison gas attack, a city in flames, an ancient weapon firing on the walls, and a Marine Admiral standing on the rampart with darkness pouring from his hands. The man's focus was something to admire.
Or commission. He briefly imagined recommending Mihawk for a senior operational role.
He let the thought go.
"Leave Mihawk to his business," Finn said, the amusement fading into something colder. "Let's go pay Sir Crocodile a visit."
The Warlord position wouldn't save Crocodile. Spandine had already given Finn the complete picture before any of this started. Whatever argument Crocodile constructed, there was no one left to hear it.
And Finn had no intention of letting him speak long enough to try.
Out in the desert, Crocodile had taken a moment to collect himself.
The shock faded. The disbelief faded. What remained was a calculating mind rapidly processing the current situation, and the current situation was not ideal.
He saw them coming: an Admiral and three Warlords of the Sea moving toward him across the crystallized sand, unhurried, the way people move when they know you're not going anywhere.
He considered the cannon. It needed time to cool, then to recharge. It was not available.
Running was an option, technically. But running in a desert against a gravity manipulator and a man who moved like Mihawk's colleagues had trained him was not an option in any meaningful sense.
What remained was words. Crocodile was good at words.
"Admiral," he said, when they came close enough. Smooth voice, good composure, cigar nowhere in sight but the easy authority of a man who had been Sir Crocodile for a long time. "I wasn't aware you were in Alubarna. With everything that's been happening, I've been somewhat occupied."
Finn smiled. It didn't reach his eyes.
He raised his arm and pointed it at Crocodile.
Crocodile's tone shifted instantly. "It's a misunderstanding. I'm still a Warlord of the Sea. I was acting under Mary Geoise's mandate to neutralize the Revolutionary Army."
It was a reasonable argument on paper. If the cannon had killed Dragon and his people, if the Warlords had all died from the gas before anyone could report what actually happened, the story Crocodile was telling might have had room to breathe. Mary Geoise had made greater compromises than that when the outcome served them.
But Spandine had already told Finn everything, in detail, sitting across a table in the Oasis Hotel. There were no gaps in the picture.
Finn said nothing. Darkness gathered in his palm, slow and deliberate.
Crocodile felt the temperature in his chest drop. He'd read the intelligence reports. He knew what the Admiral's ability was supposed to be. What he was seeing now was not that.
He didn't wait to understand it. He threw his hand out and the desert responded.
"Desert Sword!"
Sand surged upward, condensing midair into a broad crescent of compressed golden blades, and drove toward Finn in a single cutting mass.
"Dark Water," Finn said quietly.
The darkness in his palm expanded in a low wave. The Desert Sword hit it and stopped. Not deflected, not broken apart. The blades simply ceased. One moment they were there, and then the darkness had absorbed them, and there was nothing.
"Weak," Finn said, as though commenting on the weather.
Crocodile's eye twitched.
"This is a desert," he said, and let his restraint go.
He threw everything into it. The sand wasn't a weapon anymore, it was the landscape itself rising in response to his will, a wall of golden chaos surging outward in a massive wave that swallowed the horizon between them. It should have buried all five of them without leaving a mark.
Finn stomped his foot.
The darkness beneath him erupted downward and then outward along the sand, spreading in every direction like ink dropped into water. Within seconds it had covered hundreds of meters, saturating the sand, climbing over the dunes. The charging desert wave slowed, darkened, and then simply vanished. Swallowed from below.
From above, the entire stretch of desert surrounding Finn was a circle of absolute black, the sand completely saturated. Even Crocodile was inside it.
Crocodile had gone elemental the moment he felt the ground change beneath him. He dissolved into a column of spinning yellow sand and rose into the air, looking down at the blackened desert with something approaching genuine alarm.
What was this? The intelligence reports said Press-Press Fruit. Gravity. This wasn't gravity.
"Abyss of Darkness."
The words rumbled out of Finn like something dredged from the bottom of the ocean. Below, the black wave of sand pulsed once and then collapsed inward, taking the last traces of Crocodile's sandstorm with it. The desert frenzy he'd built simply ceased to exist, consumed.
He felt his sand disappearing. Not scattered, not blown apart. Gone.
Finn looked up at Crocodile floating in the air above him and let out a slow breath through his nose. There was genuine regret in his expression, not for what was coming, but for the waste of data.
"With your strength," he said, "I can't measure anything useful."
Crocodile didn't respond. He was watching Finn's eyes.
The pupils had dilated. Then they'd expanded further. The whites of his eyes disappeared, irises and sclera bleeding into a uniform black that had no depth to it. The effect was hideous in a way that wasn't about aesthetics. Something about that absolute darkness made every instinct in the body want to look away.
Then the pull began.
It wasn't a gentle force. Crocodile felt it hit his elemental body like a hand closing around sand in midair, and he tried to do what a Sand-Sand Fruit user always does when grabbed: disperse. Let the sand scatter and reform somewhere the enemy couldn't reach.
The sand didn't scatter.
It locked up. His elemental state held for one suspended moment, then was forced back together, every grain dragged into a coherent shape against his will. The darkness was interfering with his transformation, actively preventing him from completing it.
"What," Crocodile said, and then he was moving.
Not flying. Falling. Drawn in.
He hit Finn's palm like a launched projectile, and then Finn's fingers had closed around his throat and lifted him off the ground.
Crocodile kept his composure. He caught Finn's arm with one hand to take some of the weight off his neck, angled himself to leverage a grip break, and smiled with the kind of cold menace that had made lesser men empty their bowels.
"You shouldn't have touched me directly," he said. "Become a mummy."
He released the full drain, not the measured technique he'd use on a soldier or even a Vice Admiral. The version that could empty a city. Every drop of moisture within reach, pulled toward his palm.
He felt the ability respond, felt it reach outward the way it always did.
Then he felt it hit nothing.
He checked his hand. His own hand. And realized.
"Where," Crocodile said slowly, "is my ability?"
Finn's grip tightened with casual contempt. He began to apply pressure.
"You absolute waste of time." He started to close his hand.
"Ahem." Doflamingo cleared his throat from slightly behind and to the left. "Admiral. A moment."
Finn looked at him. The question was in his eyes without words: you're defending this man?
Doflamingo held up one finger, expression somewhere between delicate and apologetic. "We didn't bring any fruit."
Finn paused.
He looked at Crocodile. Then at Doflamingo.
He looked at his own hand, at Crocodile's neck inside it, and felt the burning clarity that had been driving him begin to cloud around the edges. He hadn't questioned it until just now. The intention to kill had arrived complete, unambiguous, immediate. He hadn't thought about the ability-stripping test, hadn't thought about preparing an ordinary fruit nearby to receive the Sand-Sand Fruit's power when the window opened. He'd walked straight toward killing Crocodile with no vessel ready to catch what came next.
That wasn't how he'd planned this.
Finn frowned and lowered his arm slightly, letting some of the pressure ease without fully releasing his hold.
What had come over him?
He hadn't asked about the cannon. He hadn't gotten any useful information. He'd barely spoken. He'd just raised his hand and tried to end it.
The Dark-Dark Fruit was still relatively new to him. Sixty percent control at best. He'd been forcing the gravity and the darkness to cooperate rather than letting them work naturally.
Was this a side effect?
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