-Broadcast-
The gap between Kurozumi Tama and Tsurujo was not measurable in any conventional way.
One was a Beast Disaster of the Beasts Pirates—a title that carried its own weight in blood and burned streets. The other was a teahouse proprietress who had kept a small business alive for more than twenty years through a combination of good cooking, careful reading of the room, and the particular stubbornness of a woman who had decided not to stop. One had rank. The other had history. And between history and rank, they had found, over years of careful navigation, something that was neither friendship in the simple sense nor alliance in the strategic sense, but occupied the space where those two things might have grown if the world had been arranged differently.
They talked until the knock came.
Three strikes on the door frame. Then a voice—male, controlled, unhurried—from the hallway outside.
"Lord Beast Disaster. Captain Kaido requests your immediate return to Onigashima. There is a matter requiring discussion."
Tama set down her tea.
Tsurujo was already moving, anticipating. When Tama rose and pushed through the door into the hallway, Tsurujo followed with a stack of prepared food boxes—bamboo containers fitted with covers, tied with cord, filled with what remained of the afternoon's cooking. She handed them to the man in the hallway without ceremony.
The man in the hallway was Rob Lucci.
Former CP0 Commander, Neko Neko no Mi (Zoan-type, Leopard Model), currently serving as Tama's direct subordinate within the Beasts Pirates. He accepted the food boxes with the economic efficiency of someone who did not waste motion, tucked them under one arm, and fell into step behind Tama as she descended to the ground floor.
"Walk with me to find Okiku," Tama said, without slowing. "Garurumon is probably still in the market quarter. The raw meat order takes a while."
Lucci matched her pace precisely.
They found the market quarter by following the commotion.
Okiku had emerged from the butcher's with several cloth-wrapped parcels and had immediately encountered a problem in the shape of an Orochi Oniwabanshu samurai who had been drinking since before noon and had decided that the afternoon's entertainment was available to him based on no criterion more considered than the fact that he outranked civilians and Okiku's kimono was a particularly attractive shade of blue.
He had not noticed Garurumon.
This was a mistake that would have been easier to understand if Garurumon had been making any effort to conceal itself, but it was simply sitting in the street beside Okiku at its full ten meters of silver-blue fur, watching the scene with the attentive stillness of a creature that had been told to stay and was deciding how literally to interpret the instruction.
The samurai touched Okiku's face.
Garurumon's patience concluded.
The sequence that followed was brief and comprehensive. The Orochi Oniwabanshu samurai was lifted, repositioned, and then no longer present as a complete unit. The street held its breath. The samurai's companions looked at what remained of their colleague and at the wolf that had resolved the situation and attempted to process both facts simultaneously, which required more cognitive resources than most of them had available.
Tama arrived with Lucci to find the market quarter in a state of suspended motion—Garurumon, satisfied, sitting beside Okiku who was quietly cleaning her parcels with a cloth; the samurai's colleagues frozen in a semicircle at what they hoped was a safe distance; and the general public retreating toward any point that was not this one.
She took in the scene.
"Okiku," she said. "Are you all right?"
"Perfectly fine," said Okiku, who appeared to mean this literally. She had the equanimity of someone who had spent enough time in proximity to Garurumon to have recalibrated her threshold for alarming events.
Tama turned her attention to the semicircle of samurai. They were Orochi Oniwabanshu—recognizable by the styling of their armor and the particular quality of their expressions, which combined the bureaucratic arrogance of people accustomed to institutional protection with the dawning realization that institutional protection had not prepared them for this specific afternoon.
They were also, most of them, still drunk.
One of them rallied first, which took more courage than it took sense.
"This animal killed our brother. Someone answer for this or there will be consequences—"
"Wano Country has been governed under your master's rules for years," Tama said. She spoke pleasantly. Her voice was the voice she used in the teahouse with Tsurujo—gentle, unhurried, slightly warm, containing underneath it a quality that made the room feel smaller. "The results are a permanent smog layer, sweatshops that operate past the point where the workers can stand, and samurai enforcers who touch women in the market because they're confident no one will stop them."
She pinched her cheek. A small golden sphere of light came free from her skin, trailing faint warmth, and rose into the air between her palm and the blue of the sky above.
The samurai watched it with the attention of people deciding whether an unknown thing was acrobatics or a threat.
The sphere hung in the air for a moment. It had a quality of waiting, as though something on the other side of it was paying attention. Then the air beside it split.
Kuwagamon descended.
It came through the opening in the air like something the world had been keeping in reserve until sufficient cause existed to deploy it—scarlet-armored, vast, its silhouette suggesting a beetle if beetles had been engineered by something with no particular interest in keeping them below a certain size. Its wingspan cast a shadow across the street that swallowed the semicircle of samurai entirely. Its mandibles—enormous curved shears of chitin that caught the light with a cold-edged precision—opened and closed once with a sound like a blade being drawn. Its four forelegs, each ending in raking claws that gleamed, settled against the cobblestones with the leisurely confidence of something that did not need to hurry.
[Sky Screen Character Notes: One of Beast Disaster Kurozumi Tama's contracted companions — Kuwagamon.]
"That's just a giant beetle," said the elderly samurai at the front of the group, which was the last assessment he made before demonstrating it.
He drew his sword. He applied Armament Haki to the blade with the practiced efficiency of someone who had done it ten thousand times, the steel going dark and dense and certain. He stepped forward and brought the blade down at Kuwagamon's neck joint with the commitment of a man who had settled on a course.
The sword broke.
Not bent. Not deflected. Broke—the Armament-hardened blade shearing apart at the point of contact, the pieces hitting the cobblestones separately, the sound of it hanging in the air for a moment of collective reconsideration.
The elderly samurai looked at his broken hilt.
Kuwagamon looked at the elderly samurai.
Then Kuwagamon's forelegs moved.
The aftermath was not something Tama watched in detail. She had already turned away—Garurumon was at her side, Okiku was collecting her parcels, Lucci was carrying the food boxes from the teahouse with his characteristic economy of expression. She moved through the sounds behind her with the focused attention of someone who had somewhere to be.
"Okiku." She paused. "Walk back through the tea district. The Oniwabanshu's eastern patrol usually misses the shrine road. You'll get back safely."
Okiku, who had navigated Wano Country's irregular dangers for twenty-three years of marriage to a samurai who was frequently absent for reasons of political loyalty, inclined her head without visible concern. "I know the way."
"I know you do." A beat. "Tell Tsurujo the ginger fish marinade is better."
Okiku's expression shifted—something warmer than what she'd been wearing. "I'll tell her."
Lucci fell in beside Tama as she and Garurumon began moving toward the harbor route. Behind them, the street sounds resolved themselves into the sequence that followed events of this kind: silence, then voices at the edge of what had happened, then the particular civic efficiency of people who had learned that cleared streets were everyone's interest.
"Onigashima," Lucci said. Two syllables. A question structured as a statement.
"Onigashima," Tama confirmed.
Garurumon picked up speed.
The Orochi Oniwabanshu samurai who had been involved in the afternoon's events were not going to file a report. Some of this was practical—reports required a reporting officer, and the afternoon's primary reporting officer was no longer a coherent unit. Some of it was institutional—the Beasts Pirates' relationship with Kurozumi Orochi's enforcement apparatus was defined by Kaido's convenience, not Orochi's preferences, and the apparatus had learned, through several demonstrations similar to today's, where the functional limits of their authority lived.
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