"Dual Fruit?" Sengoku stared at Finn with the slow, measuring look of a man who was deciding whether to treat the claim as information or as a symptom of something. "Are you sure you haven't been drinking?"
It wasn't an unreasonable response. The intelligence that had come back from Alabasta was fragmentary and not particularly illuminating. Reports of some kind of dark power being used, some kind of mass absorption event at the city walls. Sengoku had read the summaries. He'd assumed it was a further development of the Press-Press Fruit, perhaps some extension of the "Void Slash" technique that Finn had been working with for years. Darkness, gravity, the devouring of matter and energy: the conceptual overlap was plausible enough that he hadn't pressed the point.
The idea that Finn had simply consumed a second Devil Fruit was in a different category entirely.
"The Dark-Dark Fruit," Finn confirmed, with the tone of someone presenting something completely ordinary. "Yes. The one connected to the incident with the Whitebeard Pirates in the New World. The same one that got Thatch killed and had Teach running around to capture Thatch killer."
Sengoku was quiet for a moment. He'd heard of Teach. Not as a primary intelligence target, not before recent events, but the name had come up after Thatch's death and the subsequent internal Whitebeard investigation. Teach had been sent to track down the murderer and had apparently vanished in Alabasta instead. The Whitebeard Pirates had been quietly making inquiries through their networks without announcing anything publicly, which suggested they had theories but not conclusions.
He also knew that Doflamingo had been involved in the Dark-Dark Fruit's movement through the underworld before Alabasta, though the exact chain was unclear.
"And Teach himself?" Sengoku asked.
"Impel Down," Finn said. "I captured him before we left."
Sengoku absorbed this. The fact that Finn had acquired the Dark-Dark Fruit and one of Whitebeard's son, had done so in the middle of a war zone without reporting it as anything other than an incidental development on a vacation, and had apparently not thought to mention any of this until sitting down in his office, was entirely consistent with how Finn operated. He had never done anything the straightforward way when he could do it six moves deeper.
The question Sengoku hadn't explicitly asked, which was whether Finn had arranged this entire chain of events, he also didn't ask now. The answer was obviously yes. The details of how would be interesting but probably not essential to know immediately.
"How did you eat the fruit?" Sengoku asked instead. "Eating more than one devil fruit kill people. That's not a rumor. It's documented."
Finn nodded, with the expression of someone who was going to be selective about what they said next. "It was something specific to the Dark-Dark Fruit's properties, and something specific to my own body. I'm not going to claim I understood exactly what would happen before I did it. I was betting on it working." A pause. "It was a significant bet."
Sengoku looked at him. The lingering concern that arrived was genuine, the particular kind that an older officer develops for someone considerably younger who he is responsible for and who has consistently demonstrated that the normal rules of risk assessment don't fully apply to him but also definitely still can. "If you'd lost that bet, the Marine would have lost an Admiral."
"Yes," Finn said. "That's accurate."
"You could have mentioned this plan at some point before executing it."
"You would have told me not to do it."
A silence. Not an uncomfortable one. The kind between two people who know each other's reasoning well enough that the silence contains the full conversation they aren't having.
"Continue," Sengoku said.
Finn picked up a cup from the table, found it empty, and continued anyway. "The Dark-Dark Fruit's primary relevance beyond the obvious combat applications is the ability-stripping property. We tested it in Alabasta. Crocodile's Sand-Sand Fruit transferred successfully on his death." He paused to let this land. "With that confirmed, the potential applications in Impel Down are significant."
Sengoku had arrived at the same destination approximately one second before Finn named it. His expression didn't change, but his posture shifted very slightly. "The long-term prisoners."
"The ones who were captured rather than killed precisely because their abilities couldn't be safely released." Finn nodded. "The ability-stripping changes the equation. It doesn't have to be all of them, and it doesn't have to be immediate. But the option now exists."
"There's also the Nefertari Devil Fruit inheritance technology," Finn continued. "Vergo secured it from Cobra before CP-9 arrived. I was planning to deliver it to Vegapunk."
Sengoku's expression shifted. He set his cup down and looked at Finn with something between mild apology and the specific embarrassment of a man about to deliver information that reduces another person's recent accomplishment. "Ahem. About that."
Finn's eyes narrowed slightly.
"The Marine acquired that technology long time ago," Sengoku said. "Approximately a century, if the records are accurate. The exchange at the time was considered favorable." He paused. "It has never produced usable results."
The silence that followed had a particular texture.
"Never," Finn repeated.
"The limitations are severe. First, it only functions on Zoan-type abilities. Second, the success rate is extremely low, and a failure permanently invalidates the specific Devil Fruit for any further attempts. Third..." Sengoku paused again. "After a failure, the ability enters reincarnation immediately and cannot be recovered."
Finn sat with this. He thought about the Nefertari family, maintaining two stable Zoan bloodlines for centuries with that technology, and then he thought about how limited those bloodlines were. The jackal and the falcon. Obvious choices. Not ambitious ones.
The reason the Nefertari had only ever managed those two, now, made a very great deal of sense.
"It's essentially useless," he said.
"Essentially," Sengoku confirmed. "Usable under extremely narrow circumstances for extremely low-value applications. I apologize for not mentioning it earlier. I didn't know you were specifically planning to acquire it in Alabasta."
Finn absorbed this with the specific patience of someone who has discovered that an operation he was proud of achieved considerably less than he believed, and who has decided that expressing irritation at the outcome would be both unproductive and unbecoming. "Well," he said.
"For what it's worth," Sengoku offered, "the Dark-Dark Fruit's ability-stripping is considerably more functional. One confirmed success already."
"Yes," Finn said. "That is worth something."
A brief silence, then Finn's expression shifted back to something approaching enthusiasm. The man's resilience in the face of disappointment was genuinely remarkable.
"The Dark-Dark Fruit itself," he said. "You were curious about it earlier. Do you want to experience it directly?"
Sengoku looked at him. "How unpleasant will this be?"
"It depends on how you define unpleasant." Finn's expression was the particular one that suggested he was being honest rather than reassuring, which was its own kind of information. "The primary property you'd notice is nullification. Your Devil Fruit ability stops responding at direct contact. The secondary is the absorption field, which creates a pulling force on nearby matter and energy. Neither should cause lasting effects in a controlled exchange."
Sengoku considered this. He was a man with decades of experience in structured combat exercises and had survived several encounters that had nearly killed him. A controlled demonstration by a subordinate with an incomplete grasp of a new ability, conducted in a small office, was probably manageable.
"All right," he said. "Brief. Don't overdo it."
"Of course," Finn said, with the tone of someone absolutely about to overdo it.
He stood up, rolled back his sleeve, and let the darkness gather in his palm.
"Dark Water."
Outside the Fleet Admiral's office, Chief of Staff Tsuru was making her way down the corridor with a stack of documents that needed signatures..
She was three steps from the door when she heard a familiar voice from inside.
"Dark Water!"
A beat of silence.
Then: "Ow! My eye, you absolute maniac, you said you'd stop!"
"I did stop. That was the stopping."
"That's not what stopping looks like! You are a rebel! You are personally in revolt against your superior officer!"
Tsuru stood in the corridor and looked at the closed door. So Finn was back. That much was clear from the voice. What they were doing in there, given the specific combination of Sengoku's outrage and Finn's complete lack of audible guilt, was somewhat less clear but consistent with previous patterns.
She looked at the documents in her hands. She looked at the door. She decided the documents could wait fifteen minutes and turned back the way she came.
Far away, on a Marine warship cutting through the New World under a pale morning sky, the deck was quiet enough that the creak of the rigging and the movement of water against the hull were clearly audible.
Gion stood at the prow with her arms folded, looking out at the ocean. Somewhere behind her, the cadets were running drills, the sounds of controlled exertion overlaid with Zephyr's periodic corrections. The man had been running military exercises for longer than most of the cadets had been alive, and his standards had not lowered over the decades.
Zephyr came to stand beside her, looking in the same direction with the particular quality of stillness that very experienced people develop in situations that require waiting. He had a cup of something that had probably started as coffee.
"There," Gion said.
In the distance, a sail. Then two. Then the shape of a ship becoming clear as it crested the swells, moving toward them with the comfortable confidence of something that had never encountered a reason not to.
"Bold," Zephyr said.
"Very," Gion agreed.
The ship was flying a pirate flag. It was sailing directly toward a marked Marine warship in active New World waters without any visible hesitation, no change of course, no reduction in speed. Either whoever was on that ship hadn't registered what they were looking at, or they had and didn't particularly care.
"Are all pirates this reckless these days?" Zephyr asked, in the tone of someone who has a great deal of experience with reckless pirates and has developed a complicated relationship with the phenomenon.
Gion tilted her head. "I think this one might actually be that one."
Zephyr glanced at her. "That one."
"Yes," Gion said, still watching the approaching ship. "I think it might be."