Hiyori was quiet for a moment after the room cleared.
Not composed-quiet — the kind that came after something had been running at full speed and then stopped. She sat with it, and Ornn waited, and eventually she looked up with an expression that had moved through several things and arrived somewhere more settled.
"I almost made a very serious mistake," she said.
"You wanted to do something. That's not a mistake."
"The method was." She straightened slightly. The composure was returning, but it had a different quality now — less performance, more foundation. "My grandfather is alive. My brother is at sea. If either of them needs the Kozuki name to mean something when this is over—" She stopped. "It has to mean something. I understand that."
Denjiro, across the room, appeared to be experiencing the specific relief of a man who had been carrying a terrible decision alone for months and had just had it resolved by someone else. He was doing an admirable job of not showing this.
Ornn let the moment settle, then moved on.
"There's something only you can do," he said.
She looked up.
"Shutenmaru." He kept his voice even. "His real name is Ashura Doji — one of the nine red scabbards. He's been in the Atamayama mountains for years, running the thieves, going nowhere. My friend is already up there with Hitetsu's letter, but Shutenmaru is—" He paused, choosing the word. "Stubborn. Particularly in the way that people become stubborn when they've given up on something but won't admit it."
"And you think I can reach him."
"You look like your mother."
The room was quiet.
Hiyori absorbed this without visible reaction, which was its own kind of reaction.
"Beyond that," Ornn continued, "the men with him — the ones who've stayed — they've been holding on for a long time without much to hold onto. Seeing you would remind them what they're waiting for. That matters more than a letter."
Denjiro hit his knee with his palm. "He's right. One look at Hiyori-sama and even that stubborn old fighter won't be able to pretend the cause is dead." He paused, then added with the expression of someone simultaneously regretting the past and adjusting to the present: "And the Flower Capital is — considerably more dangerous for you than the mountains."
Hiyori looked between them. Then she nodded once, with the decisiveness of someone who had just found a direction and intended to keep it.
"I'll go," she said.
---
With Denjiro's assistance — contacts, documents, a plausible explanation for Holdem about their route — Ornn returned to Bakura Town late that evening with Holdem in tow and Hiyori travelling alongside in a borrowed travelling cloak and the general presentation of someone who was definitely not Kozuki Hiyori.
The town gate was quiet. They were waved through without incident.
Outside Bakura Town, where the road split toward Amigasa Village, a figure was waiting.
Wutai — the senior of the five samurai from Amigasa Village, the one who had been first to object when Hitetsu brought Ornn and Yamato inside — straightened when he saw them and moved forward with the urgency of a man who had been standing here for some time and was glad to be done with it.
"Sir Ornn." He bowed briefly. "Hitetsu-san sent me. He said to find you the moment you returned." A pause. "There's been a development at Atamayama."
Ornn looked at him.
"Your friend and Shutenmaru," Wutai said. "They've been fighting."
"How long."
"Since this morning."
---
They heard it before they saw it.
The mountain was far enough from any Beasts Pirates patrol routes that the sound hadn't drawn attention — just the continuous ring of impact, the particular percussion of two people hitting each other very hard for an extended period and neither of them stopping.
Ornn and Hiyori reached the treeline at the base of Atamayama to find the thieves arranged in an uncertain ring around the clearing above, watching with the expressions of people who had wanted to intervene several hours ago and had concluded, on reflection, that this was not something they should insert themselves into.
In the centre: Yamato, still going, the mace moving with the loose confidence of someone in their element. Opposite her: a large man with a topknot and the build of someone who had spent decades swinging heavy things, his expression carrying the particular sourness of a man who had come to be left alone and found that request being refused with considerable enthusiasm.
Shutenmaru — Ashura Doji, one of Oden's nine red scabbards, currently the most stubborn man on Atamayama and possibly in all of Wano Country.
He's not going full strength, Ornn noted, reading the rhythm of the exchange. The name. The history. Fourteen years of being one of the nine and knowing what that meant and not knowing what to do with it anymore. You didn't kill the daughter of the man you'd sworn your life to, even when she was being thoroughly inconvenient.
"Yamato," Ornn called out.
She heard him immediately — turned, the mace lowering, the fight-brightness in her face shifting into something warmer. "You're back. How did it go?"
"Well. Stop fighting."
She stepped out of the circle without argument, which was both a testament to her trust in him and a measure of how long she'd already been at this.
On the other side of the clearing, Shutenmaru had lowered his weapon and was staring at the figure standing beside Ornn at the treeline.
The stare lasted several seconds.
"Lady Toki," he said. Quietly, like the words had arrived before he'd decided to say them.
Hiyori stepped forward into the clearing's light.
"You're mistaken, Uncle Ashura." Her voice was steady. "I'm Hiyori."
The silence that followed moved through the clearing and touched everyone in it. The thieves who had been watching the fight stopped watching the fight. Some of them, Ornn noticed, had stopped breathing.
Shutenmaru looked at her for a long time. Something shifted in the lines around his eyes — the particular movement of a face that had been set against something for years and was encountering a reason to reconsider.
He didn't say anything.
He didn't need to.
---
One month later. Amigasa Village — Hitetsu's forge workshop.
The rhythm of the hammer was different now.
Not louder — more deliberate. Five ingots lined up in sequence, each one approximately ten kilograms, each one receiving exactly one stage of the forging process before Ornn set it aside and moved to the next. Cycle after cycle, no pause longer than was necessary, the heat maintained at the precise temperature that the work required.
The bamboo grove filled with the warm smell of wine as the first round completed.
Hitetsu had been watching from the edge of the workshop with the expression he wore when he was working through a problem. He crossed the clearing and examined the five completed ingots with the hands of a man who had spent his life knowing what high-grade Sake Heart Steel should feel like.
He knew what it felt like. He was looking at it.
"Fifty kilograms," Ornn said, rolling his shoulders. "As agreed."
"Yes." Hitetsu set the last ingot down carefully. Then, with the precision of a craftsman who did not ask questions he hadn't already half-answered: "The method. Forging each ingot separately, one stage at a time, cycling through all five before returning to the first." He looked at Ornn. "That's not standard practice. There's no efficiency argument for it — by the time you return to the first ingot it's cooled beyond the optimal range. You're reheating unnecessarily."
"Personal habit," Ornn said.
Hitetsu looked at him with the expression of a man who had been teaching and practising metalcraft for sixty years and was not persuaded by personal habit as an explanation for a deliberate and consistent technical choice.
Ornn held the look without elaborating.
What he didn't say was the truth: that he'd discovered it by accident three weeks ago, when the Heart of Steel had registered an ingot cooling on the anvil as a hostile presence and condensed a mark on it. He'd shattered the mark on instinct. The constitution pulse had moved through him exactly as it did against a living opponent.
He'd stood there for a moment.
Then he'd done the arithmetic.
Ten kilograms per ingot. One mark per ingot per hour. Five ingots per round meant five stacks per hour, every hour he spent at the forge. Indefinitely. With no upper limit on the Heart of Steel's enhancement and no cooldown interaction between targets — each ingot was a separate entity, a separate hostile presence in the system's judgment.
He was farming constitution while forging Hitetsu's introduction fee.
The second legendary creation was still in planning. The ore from Denjiro was waiting. The forge work ahead was substantial.
Two birds, he thought, picking up the hammer again. One anvil.
"Shall I start on the next batch?" he asked.
Hitetsu looked at the five completed ingots. At Ornn. At the hammer already raised.
"By all means," the old swordsmith said, with the slightly exasperated dignity of a man who had decided he was going to get his steel regardless of whatever private system was producing it.