There was a reason Zephyr and Gion's reaction to the approaching ship carried a note of genuine surprise.
The New World had gone quiet.
Not silent, not peaceful, not reformed. But quiet in the specific way that large predators go quiet when several of them have recently been hurt badly enough to remember what pain feels like. Whitebeard's forces had effectively vanished from the sea lanes. The man had taken a grievous wound and had been bedridden for months, and without Newgate's presence as a visible anchor, his crews had pulled inward. Charlotte Linlin had retreated to Whole Cake Island with one less arm than she'd left with and had apparently been dealing with her own internal situation since the battle. Kaido had returned to Wano Country and, by all intelligence reports, had declined to do anything visible with his time there. Even the lesser Yonko's alliance between Linlin and Kaido persisted in name, but neither side had demonstrated any enthusiasm for activating it.
Smoker held a quarter of the New World and was busy preparing for the Gran Tesoro opening. He had every interest in keeping his territory stable and no interest in provoking anything that would distract from it.
The result was a New World that had become, for the moment, subdued. Pirates still operated, still caused trouble, still worked their particular trades. But they did so with considerably more awareness of what a Marine presence in the area implied than they had a few years ago. Overt aggression toward Marine vessels, in these waters, in this season, had become the kind of decision that required either very poor information or very good confidence.
Which was why the ship heading toward them at full sail was worth paying attention to.
The warship Zephyr had requisitioned for the exercise was deliberately unremarkable. Standard dimensions, standard armament, nothing on the exterior that distinguished it from any of the dozens of similar vessels that cycled through Marineford's fleet rotation. No identifying flags beyond the standard Marine ensign. It was, by design, the kind of ship a passing pirate vessel might assess as low-priority and low-risk.
That had been the point. Real field conditions meant operating without the protective reputation of an Admiral's flagship behind you.
Zephyr stood at the rail and watched the approaching ship with the steady attention of a man who had been doing this long enough to read the character of a vessel from its movement. The sail configuration, the angle of approach, the specific confidence of something that hadn't adjusted its heading despite having every opportunity to.
Deliberate, then. Not a navigational accident.
"How recent is Weevil?" Gion asked quietly, from beside him.
"Recent enough." Zephyr touched his jaw. "His mother's been pushing him out. Building his name. She's calculated, even if he isn't."
Gion watched the ship. "She calculated that this was a safe target."
"She calculated it looked like one."
He gave the order. The warship began its combat preparations with the particular focused efficiency of people who had been drilling these movements for weeks and had the discipline to execute them under stress. On the main deck, the cadets moved to their positions with speed that was good for their training level if not yet quite polished enough to satisfy Zephyr.
Ace reached the nearest cannon before anyone had finished giving the order to reach it.
He was older now, lean in the way of someone still growing into his frame but with the physical confidence of someone who had been training seriously since he was old enough to hold a weapon. His dark hair was pulled back, his expression completely serious, the playful affect he carried in ordinary moments replaced by something much older and considerably more focused. He assessed the angle of the approaching ship, made an adjustment to the cannon's elevation without consulting anyone, and began coordinating the other cadets around him with the natural efficiency of someone who had been giving instructions to groups for years.
"Three volleys, staggered," he said. "First volley on my signal. Second and third on my count. Keep spacing tight."
No one questioned it. That said something about how the preceding weeks had gone.
Zephyr watched him from the upper deck with the expression of an instructor who has been watching talented people for decades and recognizes specific varieties of it. He said nothing.
On Ace's signal, the first volley erupted from the warship's port side, a line of fire and smoke that rolled across the water toward the approaching pirate vessel.
On the pirate ship, Bakkin saw the flash of the guns before she heard the report.
She'd targeted this warship specifically because nothing about it suggested a reason not to. Routine Marine vessel, no special markings, traveling in a configuration that implied training exercises rather than active combat operations. Whatever was on board, it wasn't a flagship.
But the first volley was precise. Too precise for a training vessel running standard drills. The shells were grouped tightly and the timing was controlled.
"Weevil," she said, without raising her voice.
He emerged from the hold with the unhurried movement of something large that has learned that speed is less useful than force. Edward Weevil was enormous in the specific way that spoke to something beyond ordinary physical training, the kind of scale that sits wrong to the eye because nothing in the surrounding environment quite scales with it. His hair was long and golden. The crescent-beard shaped something like a stylistic homage to Whitebeard's mustache that achieved effect through sincerity rather than accuracy. His naginata was large even relative to him.
The wounds on his body were old: deep, extensive, badly scarred. Whatever had put them there had been committed to the task.
"Mom?" he said.
"The shells," Bakkin said. "Stop them."
"Okay," Weevil said.
He brought the naginata up with both hands, and the motion had the particular quality of something that has done this before, that knows what it produces, that doesn't need to think about the mechanics. The blade came down in a single arc.
The shockwave that erupted from the slash was not small. It rolled across the water in a visible pressure line, catching all three volleys simultaneously and scattering them in different directions, shells detonating short or wide or deflecting off the wave face into the sea. The secondary effect of the shockwave hit the water itself, raising a surge that turned the surface between the two ships into something closer to a storm effect than open ocean.
The wave reached the Marine warship.
Ace had already moved.
He'd seen the slash. He'd tracked the shockwave. He'd done the geometry in roughly one second and arrived at the conclusion that the angle of the wave made standing on the deck a liability. He launched from the rail with Geppo, clearing the ship's side in a single step, and landed in the open air in front of the bow with a hundred meters of churning water between him and the pirate vessel.
He could feel the heat before he'd consciously decided to use it. The Flame-Flame Fruit wasn't a tool he reached for so much as a part of him that responded to his intent. He breathed in, deep, letting the fire gather in his chest the way he'd been training it to, and then he breathed out.
"Fire Fist!"
What left his fist was not a modest flame. It was something that bent the light around it, that turned the air above and below into distorting waves of heat, a fist-shaped mass of superheated fire larger than the distance between them could quite account for. It hit the shockwave front-on.
The collision was loud. The water between the ships went from churned to boiling in a localized area. Steam erupted upward. For three seconds, visibility between the two vessels dropped to near-zero.
Then the steam cleared, and nothing on either side had been destroyed, and both sides had a significantly better understanding of the other than they'd had thirty seconds ago.
On the pirate ship's deck, Bakkin revised her assessment rapidly. That was a Logia. Fire-type. In the Marine's current hierarchy, she knew of exactly one fire-type user at a level that mattered, and what she was looking at was not him. This was younger, faster, and based on the instinctive and fluid manner he'd used it, very recently developed rather than long-trained.
A new one.
She looked at Weevil. "Kill him."
"Okay," Weevil said, in the same tone he'd used before.
He raised the naginata again, and this time the invisible energy accumulating on the blade had a different quality to it. Denser. Slower to build. Something like the technique Whitebeard used, accumulated in the steel before release, though the execution had its own specific character.
On the Marine warship's deck, Ace had landed back on the rail and stood there with the balanced ease of someone who had found his answer and wasn't particularly worried about the next question. His expression had the quality of someone doing arithmetic rather than feeling fear.
"He's strong," he said.
It wasn't a concern. It was an observation.
Gion and Zephyr were already moving toward the forward position.
"Teacher," Gion said, quietly enough that only Zephyr would hear her. "Is that him? The one who's been calling himself Whitebeard II?"
Zephyr watched Weevil on the opposite deck, the sword still raised, the energy still building. He touched his jaw. "The shockwave was his. Matches the technique."
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