-Broadcast-
The honest truth about Borsalino was that he was not a man who fought with everything he had. He hadn't been for years. The Marine's longest-serving Admiral had arrived at a position on risk that his colleagues found either admirable or infuriating depending on their temperament: if a situation could be survived through minimal effort, spending more than minimal effort on it was waste. If a situation required significant effort, he would apply significant effort while appearing not to. The distinction was his own.
He had found out his opponent's name, which was something.
"Savitar," he repeated, in the tone of someone making a note for later. "God of Speed. You're interested in my speed ally. You want me to become part of something. That's a lot of information for a first meeting."
"Stop stalling," Savitar said.
The mecha became blue light, and Borsalino became gold, and Barry Allen became red, and the three of them were no longer standing on a sand dune in Arabasta — they were vectors, directions, the concept of movement expressing itself at the edge of what matter was permitted to do.
At full speed, the geometry of combat simplified considerably. No techniques. No preparation. The time required to initiate a complex attack was longer than the time available, so the fight became entirely close-range — two bodies meeting at near-lightspeed velocities and the physics working out the transfer of force between them without negotiation. Every exchange was a collision. Every collision released energy in amounts that had no precedent in conventional Marine combat. The air ionized at the leading edges of their movement. The sand dune they had been standing on ceased to exist as a coherent structure.
Blue and gold traded exchanges across the desert. Red tracked behind, providing what coverage Barry's current condition allowed — he had not recovered fully from the first encounter, and the gap between second-generation and first showed clearly in the gap between his position and theirs. He was still useful. He was not the fight's center.
The fight's center was the two of them.
Borsalino took a hit to the ribs that he felt through his light-form, which meant it had been delivered with enough force to register on a Logia body as something other than nothing. He returned an elbow to the mecha's chassis that produced a sound suggesting the engineering had objected. They separated, reconverged, separated again. Neither of them was maintaining a lead.
"Kizaru." Savitar's voice between collisions, each word compressed into the gap between one exchange and the next. "Your contribution to the God of Speed will be remembered. Today is the day the title becomes real."
"There are no gods," Borsalino said, conversationally, at a speed where conversation required a different definition of the word.
The next convergence was different.
They were past the speed of light simultaneously, and at that velocity two particles moving toward each other did not collide so much as decide together what their meeting would produce. What they produced was a point of light that was brighter than the sun for approximately a quarter of a second, and then a sound that arrived several seconds after the fact because the event had outpaced its own shockwave, and then an aftershock that traveled outward across Arabasta as a physical wavefront, knocking down everything light enough to be knocked down.
And then a crack.
It appeared where the collision had happened. Small — initially, inconspicuously, the kind of flaw that materials develop under stress — and then not small, the edges pulling apart as though the space had been under tension that it had finally exceeded. The crack became a gap. The gap became a sphere. The sphere became something with gravity that expressed itself immediately and completely on everything within its radius of influence.
A black hole. Small. Present. Actively consuming the surrounding environment.
Sand, air, light — the black hole processed all of these without distinguishing between them, and what it produced at the event horizon was the visual artifact of severely curved spacetime, matter stretching into filaments as it crossed the threshold, the geometry becoming something that had no good analogy in normal experience.
"What is this," Borsalino said, which was more of a statement than a question, running in the opposite direction at maximum speed and finding that maximum speed was not creating the distance he expected.
"A black hole," Barry said, running beside him, also not creating the expected distance. "We made a very large problem."
The suction was total. Not progressive — not the experience of being pulled harder and harder — but the experience of the exit routes narrowing, the vector of escape constantly being bent back toward the center by gravity that had no concern for what he wanted the gravity to do. He pushed more output into his speed. The output disappeared into the gravity well's accounting without producing the result it should have produced.
The red light went first.
Barry's trajectory bent, held for a moment by his own speed, and then the math resolved against him and he crossed the threshold, and the red light was simply absent from the world.
Blue went next. Savitar's mecha, operating at speeds that exceeded anything the black hole should have been able to catch, caught anyway — the God of Speed discovering that the universe's mathematics were not impressed by self-declared titles.
Half a minute. Then Borsalino's trajectory bent.
My retirement, he thought, which was not the last thought he would have preferred but was, on reflection, appropriate.
The golden light crossed the threshold.
The black hole, having consumed all three speedsters, assessed its situation and found, apparently, that this was sufficient. It did not continue expanding. From the outside — from the perspective of whatever observers existed in the Arabasta desert at sufficient distance to survive the shockwave — it contracted, the edges pulling inward visibly, the sphere shrinking at a rate inconsistent with how black holes conventionally behaved, until the point of space where it had been contained no anomaly detectable by ordinary instruments.
Gone.
Inside was not dark.
This was the first thing. The inside of a black hole, which both of them had understood as a theoretical concept without having expected to verify it empirically, was not dark. It was stranger than dark — a space where the visual information available bore no clear relationship to the physics that should have been generating it. There was no orientation. The concepts of up, forward, toward, and away from had been filed in a location that the local rules could not access. The distinction between a moment ago and now was blurred enough that tracking time required active effort and produced uncertain results.
Borsalino stabilized his form through the Pika Pika no Mi's (Glint-Glint Fruit's) light-conversion, which gave him something coherent to hold onto in an environment that was not particularly interested in coherent things. He floated. He found Barry Allen floating nearby.
"Is this the multiverse?" Barry asked.
"It resembles descriptions I've read of the space between dimensions," Borsalino said. "Which is not a reassuring resemblance, but it's the most accurate one available."
"How do we leave?"
Borsalino looked around — or rather, performed the motions associated with looking around while the results those motions should have produced were not reliably connected to what his eyes reported. He arrived at an honest assessment of the situation.
"I'm not certain," he said.
This was, for him, a novel experience. He generally had an exit available.
Savitar was not visible anywhere in the space around them. The God of Speed, apparently, had been deposited somewhere else in whatever topology governed this place — or had found a way through it that neither of them had yet identified.
Barry Allen looked at Borsalino. Borsalino looked at Barry Allen. The naked Admiral and the injured Flash floated in the interior of a black hole that had already collapsed from the outside, and the question of how to leave was genuinely open.
"Well," Borsalino said.
He did not follow this with anything, because nothing he had was going to improve the statement.
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