"Doomed never to reach Grand Blade Mastery?" Ornn said. "I don't think so. I believe I can use it to forge something no less remarkable."
The words landed in the quiet village air with the calm certainty of a statement that had been considered before being spoken.
Tenguyama Hitetsu stared at him.
For a moment the old swordsmith looked as though he wanted to say something considerably less polite. Then something else crossed his face — a sudden recalibration, sharp and urgent behind the tengu mask.
"You said you wanted to use it. To forge something." His voice had changed register entirely. "Are you a blacksmith? Did you forge this piece yourself?"
"Yes," Ornn said. "And yes."
Hitetsu's expression shifted to one of thorough disbelief.
"Impossible. You're young. Far too young. Forging high-quality Sake Heart Steel isn't simply a matter of hammering a hundred times — the critical difficulty is temperature control. Sake Iron Ore must be held at a precise, stable heat across the entire process, otherwise the iron's essence and the carbon react prematurely and the grain corrupts." He looked at Ornn with the frank skepticism of a professional confronting an implausible claim. "That kind of control cannot be measured with instruments. It lives in experience and intuition accumulated over decades. A young man cannot have it."
To understand why Hitetsu's doubt cut so deep, one had to understand what he was measuring against.
The ceiling of what a swordsmith in this world could achieve — through skill alone, through craft alone — was Grand Blade Mastery. Beyond that lay the Supreme Blades, but those required something no craftsman could provide: the wielder's own Haki, poured continuously into the steel over years until the blade was entirely transformed, blackened through and through, elevated into something that transcended ordinary metallurgy. No forge could produce a Supreme Blade. It had to be earned by the sword's owner.
Which meant Grand Blade Mastery was the true summit of the swordsmith's art. The number of blades at that level a craftsman had produced was the measure of their legacy.
Shimotsuki Kozaburo held that summit. White Path and Enma — two blades at the Grand Blade Mastery level, forged by a single pair of hands — an achievement that had placed him beyond comparison among the swordsmiths of the past century.
Hitetsu had come close. In his youth he had forged Celestial Jade Strike — a blade that announced him as Kozaburo's equal or near enough, and set him on a path that many believed would surpass even that legendary craftsman. He had been considered the one man capable of standing alongside Kozaburo's name in the history of Wano's blades.
Then Orochi had stolen the throne. And Hitetsu had spent more than a decade underground, his hands idle, his craft suspended, the years accumulating against him. After escaping, he had settled in obscurity, trying to recover what time and captivity had taken. But high-grade Sake Heart Steel — the only material worthy of a Grand Blade Mastery work — had remained beyond his reach. His current circumstances and condition made it impossible to obtain or forge.
And now a young man stood in front of him holding a piece of it, claiming to have made it himself.
The regret over the blood contamination had been sharp enough. This claim made it sharper.
Ornn looked at the old swordsmith for a moment — at the professional grief that had settled around his eyes when he'd examined the ingot, at the decades of suspended ambition behind it — and made a decision.
"Whether I can forge Sake Heart Steel or not," he said, with a slight smile, "wouldn't you rather see it with your own eyes than argue about it here?"
He glanced at Yamato, who was still standing with the careful stillness of someone conserving the dignity that seasickness had mostly already taken.
What they needed right now was shelter. A place to be still and invisible while Kaido's search patterns swept the obvious routes and then gradually exhausted themselves. If demonstrating his ability at the forge was the price of that shelter, it was a price he was entirely willing to pay.
Hitetsu looked at Ornn for a long moment. Then at Yamato, who looked genuinely unwell in a way that was difficult to fabricate.
Something in the old swordsmith's expression made a decision.
"Follow me," he said.
He turned and began walking toward the village interior.
The reaction from the samurai was immediate.
"Senior Hitetsu — wait." The one called Wutai stepped forward, his voice pitched low with urgency. "If these two are Orochi's people, you'd be leading them straight into—"
Hitetsu didn't turn around. He answered with a sideways look over his shoulder that communicated a comprehensive opinion of this objection.
"You're questioning this old man's judgment?"
The five samurai exchanged glances. The small purple-haired girl on her unusual dog watched the exchange with focused interest from a safe distance.
Hitetsu stopped. Turned fully this time, and looked at them with the patient exasperation of a teacher whose students have missed the point repeatedly.
"If these two are Orochi's people," he said, "then this old man will deal with them himself. I won't let a single villager be harmed on my account." A pause that left no room for further argument. "And if they're not — then you've already wasted enough of everyone's time."
Jiro opened his mouth.
Wutai stopped him with a look. Their martial arts had all come from Hitetsu. If the old man said he could handle it, they had no standing to claim otherwise.
The samurai stood aside.
------
Far away, across a stretch of water and a great deal of stone and fortification, inside the headquarters of the Beasts Pirates on Onigashima—
"WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA—"
The sound was enormous. It filled the throne room, bounced off the walls, rattled the weapons mounted along them, and drove every guard present into the particular frozen stillness of people whose survival instincts had overridden every other function.
Kaido, the King of the Beasts, one of the four Yonko, the man described across the world as the strongest creature alive on land, sea, or sky — was crying.
He sat on his throne like a mountain that had learned to be miserable, both hands wrapped around a sake gourd half the size of a man, tears streaming freely, the sound of his grief filling the room at a volume that had probably reached the shoreline.
Nobody laughed. Nobody would have dared. When Kaido drank, his emotional weather became something that even veteran crew members couldn't predict. Joy could become fury between one breath and the next. Laughter, in this room, at this moment, would result in an introduction to the wall via the large mace propped against the throne.
The guards prayed quietly for him to drink fast enough to pass into unconsciousness.
Then the doors opened.
"Admiral Kaido—" the messenger's voice was doing its best to project confidence and failing — "the weapons factory on the edge of Onigashima. It's — there's been an explosion. The building is—"
Kaido stopped crying.
Raised his head.
Burst out laughing.
"OHHHH! HAHAHA! Good! I never liked that factory anyway!"
He hurled the sake gourd — still half-full — at the messenger's head with the generous enthusiasm of someone sharing a gift.
"Here! Have a drink!"
The messenger caught it mostly by accident and stood holding it, trying to determine whether drinking was the correct response to this situation, when the doors opened again.
The second messenger looked at the first messenger's expression and made several rapid internal calculations.
"Admiral Kaido." He delivered it quickly, like removing a splinter. "Yamato-sama smashed the torii gate. And then left the island. By boat."
The laughter stopped.
The throne room went so quiet that the distant sound of waves became audible.
Kaido looked down at the second messenger from his full height. When he spoke, his voice had dropped to something low and even, which was considerably more frightening than the shouting.
"The handcuffs," he said. "Where are the handcuffs. Who removed them."
The messenger had no answer to offer. He understood this was a problem.
The mace moved.
When it was over, Kaido stood and addressed the remaining guards with the focused calm of a man who had processed his feelings and arrived at a course of action.
"All members of the Flying Six are to seal every sea route out of Wano. Full search of the country — every island, every coast." He paused. "And recall Jhin. Whatever mission he was running, it's cancelled. I want him patrolling the nearby waters. If he finds any trace of Yamato, he brings them back immediately."
The guards moved.
Outside, the mushroom cloud from the factory was still visible against the sky — a dark column rising above the treeline, carrying with it the last evidence of seven days of work, five lives, and one forge god's first steps toward something the world hadn't seen yet.