The morning arrived with the particular indifference of mornings that didn't know what they were interrupting.
Ornn was already awake when the light came through the bamboo. He'd slept in the way he'd been sleeping since Onigashima — efficiently, without ceremony, the way a body sleeps when it understands that rest is logistics rather than comfort. He rose, oriented himself, and started thinking through the problem he'd gone to sleep on.
The food plan had a single point of failure: Tama. Specifically, whether Hitetsu would allow it.
He needed the old man to see the ability first. Once he saw what it actually did, the conversation would be easier.
---
Tama was easy to draw out. She appeared at the edge of the clearing with Komachiyo behind her, carrying the focused, evaluating expression she seemed to wear as a default setting, and when Ornn asked her — carefully, with the tone of genuine curiosity rather than strategy — to show him what her Kibi Dango could do, she looked at him for a long moment and then demonstrated.
Hitetsu watched from the doorway.
Ornn let the silence sit for a moment, then made his case. The farms around Bakura Town ran on guards. Those guards were almost certainly Smile Fruit users of the animal-type — standard composition for Kaido's lower ranks. If Tama fed them Kibi Dango, they could be directed. Redirected, specifically, to let food slip through instead of sending everything to the Flower Capital.
Hitetsu's answer was immediate and left no room for discussion.
"She's a child."
"She's the only one who can do this."
"She's a child," Hitetsu repeated, with the calm finality of someone who considered the matter settled.
They were still at that particular impasse when Yamato walked in.
---
A night's proper rest had done its work. She moved like herself again — that solid, unhurried physical confidence, the sense of someone whose body had remembered what it was supposed to feel like. She took in the situation in about two seconds, asked one question, received the summary, and stood up straight.
"I'll go with her," Yamato said. "She won't be touched."
It was not a complicated statement. It was the kind of statement that came with the implicit understanding that the speaker had already calculated the relevant variables and found them acceptable.
Hitetsu looked at her. Then, with the scepticism of a man who had been making assessments of people's actual capabilities for several decades, he said: "Show me."
Yamato showed him.
The ice-blue energy blazed along her arm as she brought it up — that distinctive cold light, crackling and brilliant — and Thunder Gossip split the air of the clearing with a sound that put every nearby bird into immediate retirement from the area.
The reaction from Hitetsu was not the one anyone in the clearing had been expecting.
He was on his feet with the saber drawn before the echo died.
The blade was black — Armament Haki coating it in the flat, absolute darkness of someone who had trained that particular skill for a very long time. His whole posture had changed. The careful, dry composure of the swordsmith was gone, replaced by something older and considerably more dangerous.
"Where did you learn that technique."
It was not a question. It was the verbal equivalent of the drawn blade.
Yamato blinked. "I — what? I developed it myself—"
"That technique belongs to one person." His voice had dropped to something quiet and precise. "I have seen it used once in my life, and the man who used it was not someone I am inclined to associate with friendly strangers showing up at my door."
Ornn stepped between them.
"Let me explain," he said.
---
It took a while.
He started from the beginning — the factory on Onigashima, the handcuffs, the seven days at the forge, the escape. Yamato filled in the parts that needed her voice. Hitetsu listened without interrupting, the saber still in his hand for the first several minutes, then lowering incrementally as the story became too detailed and too internally consistent to be fabrication.
When Yamato pulled Oden's journal from inside her kimono and set it on the table between them, something went out of Hitetsu's posture that had been held rigid since the moment the ice-blue light appeared.
He looked at the journal for a long moment without touching it. Then he reached out and opened it, slowly, with the hands of someone handling something that had been a long time coming back to them.
The silence that followed was the kind that didn't need to be filled.
Ornn glanced at Yamato. She was watching Hitetsu with the earnest, slightly uncertain attention of someone who wanted to say something and hadn't found the words yet.
Then she found them, or something approximating them:
"You knew him, didn't you. You knew Oden."
Hitetsu set the journal down carefully. "What makes you say that."
"The way you're looking at it." A pause. "And — and I think you might be one of the red scabbards."
Ornn went very still.
Hitetsu went very still.
Yamato, unaware of the reaction she had produced, pressed forward with the momentum of someone following a thought to its conclusion:
"Are you Kin'emon? You're about the right age, and—" She studied him. "No, the build is wrong. Denjiro, maybe? Or—" She tilted her head. "Actually, now that I look at you, the height is — are you Raizo?"
The silence that followed this question had a different quality to it entirely.
"Raizo," Hitetsu said, very quietly, "is roughly the shape of a rice dumpling with aspirations."
"So you're not Raizo."
"I am," he said, with the controlled precision of a man reassembling his dignity one piece at a time, "nothing like Raizo."
"But you know Raizo—"
"I know all of them." He set down the saber. Straightened. When he spoke again his voice had the tone of someone who had decided, against his better judgment, to simply get this over with. "My name is Kozuki Sukiyaki. I am — I was — the Shogun of Wano Country. Oden was my son."
Yamato's expression went through several stages in rapid succession.
Surprise. Processing. A recognition that landed somewhere between awe and something she clearly hadn't anticipated feeling, because her ears went faintly red and she looked away with the expression of someone caught off-guard by their own reaction.
Ornn watched this with the detached observation of a man witnessing something he had no particular framework for.
"You're blushing," he said.
"I'm not—"
"You absolutely are. Your ears are the color of a sunset."
Yamato covered them with both hands, which confirmed the assessment rather than refuting it. Hitetsu looked between the two of them with the expression of a man who had survived twenty years of war, loss, and enforced obscurity and was finding this particular morning unexpectedly difficult to process.
---
After the room had settled back into something resembling order, the plan was confirmed.
Hitetsu found a loose kimono for Yamato — something plain enough to pass as ordinary. Ornn contributed the finishing touch, rubbing two fingers' worth of soot from the forge's edge across her cheekbones and the bridge of her nose with the brisk efficiency of someone solving a practical problem.
Yamato bore this with the dignity of someone who had made a commitment and intended to see it through.
"Stop moving."
"I'm not moving."
"Your face is moving."
"My face is just my face—"
"It's done." He stepped back and assessed. The horns were still a problem in any crowded environment, but the soot broke up the features enough that a quick glance wouldn't produce immediate recognition. Quick glances were all they needed to defeat. "Good enough."
The three of them left Amigasa Village as the morning settled into full light — Ornn, Yamato, and Tama, with Komachiyo trailing at Tama's heel.
---
The village path through the bamboo was easy. The wilderness beyond was not.
It didn't announce itself. The tree line simply ended and something harder began — dry soil, vegetation that had been left to determine its own fate, the slow evidence of a country that had been quietly bled for two decades. The chimneys of Bakura Town were visible in the distance, trailing black smoke into a sky that had gotten used to it.
Yamato's conversation with Tama died mid-sentence.
She walked without speaking for a while, her eyes moving across the dry ground, the absent farmland, the smoke. Her hands had closed into fists at her sides without her appearing to notice.
Ornn noticed.
"Kaido is still searching," he said quietly. "Every guard in that town has your face memorised by now."
It worked the way it was intended to — not as comfort, but as ballast. Her fists stayed closed, but her posture reoriented toward the practical. She nodded once, and kept walking.
---
Kenzan Village was quiet as they passed through. On the far side, Bakura Town opened up ahead of them — wider streets, more noise, the particular energy of a place that sustained itself by proximity to a working farm.
Yamato stopped at the edge of the tree cover, as agreed.
"Two hours," Ornn said. "If we're not out, or if you see a signal, come in."
"I'll be ready."
He looked at her for a moment. The soot on her face. The horns. The barely-contained readiness that was simply her default state, regardless of circumstances.
"Try to look less like you're preparing to demolish something."
"I'm not—"
He was already walking.
---
The checkpoint at Bakura Town's entrance was manned by two guards with the unhurried authority of people who hadn't been asked to do anything interesting in a while. They looked at Ornn, looked at Tama, and Ornn said what he'd prepared:
"My cousin. Visiting family."
Tama, to her considerable credit, said nothing and looked appropriately bored with the proceedings, which was exactly the right affect.
They were waved through.
Inside, Bakura Town moved at its ordinary pace — market stalls, foot traffic, the background noise of a working settlement. Ornn's eyes went to the public notice board near the gate almost immediately.
Yamato's face looked back at him from a posted drawing. Underneath, in large characters: substantial reward for information.
There were people clustered around it, reading, talking.
Ornn looked at the poster. Looked at the town around him. Thought about the search radius that produced a wanted notice in a settlement this size, this quickly.
Kaido was not being casual about this.
He filed the information, adjusted his assessment of the timeline, and kept walking.