-Broadcast-
They had prepared themselves for shuttered doors. Empty streets. The lockdown behavior of a city that understood what was approaching.
The Flower Capital was doing none of that.
The market stalls were open. Hawkers called out their prices. A city that should have been bracing itself for the end was operating on its ordinary rhythms as though the smoke rising from three different directions on the horizon was someone else's problem — which, perhaps, was precisely the working assumption. People moved through the streets with the unhurried quality of people who have decided to continue living their lives until they personally cannot.
SWORD walked through it in civilian clothes and tried not to look as confused as they were.
"Do they know?" Hibari kept her voice low. "What's happening outside — do they know?"
"They know," Drake said, from the front of the group. "Keep moving. I'll explain at the contact point."
The Beasts Pirates' intelligence base in the Flower Capital was positioned well: downtown, near the flow of traffic along Flower Street, where the density of people made surveillance comfortable and the noise made quiet conversations private. Most of the regular personnel had withdrawn with the rest of the Beasts Pirates. What remained were local contractors — cleaning staff, general maintenance — who came in, did their work, collected their pay, and left without asking questions about the nature of the business.
Drake told them to take the rest of the day off at full wage when the last of SWORD had settled inside. The workers took the money with genuine pleasure and left immediately, which said something accurate about the local attitude toward unexpected free time.
In the Flower Capital, saving money had never been a cultural value. The reasoning was practical and grim: in Wano Country under Kurozumi Orochi's administration, reaching middle age was an achievement, and the uncertainty that surrounded daily life made accumulation feel foolish. Mono no aware — the bittersweet acknowledgment that everything passes — had been woven into the cultural fabric of Wano for generations, and under occupation it had become something closer to fatalism. If the money existed, you spent it on the people you cared about, because the future was not something you could reliably plan for.
The workers scattered into the city looking for family, friends, things that cost money and felt good.
Once the building was clear, SWORD let some of the tension out of their posture. Todoroki Shoto walked the perimeter of the main room with the restless energy of someone who had been waiting for permission to move for hours. Helmeppo settled onto the tatami and pressed his palms together. Grus assessed the room's layout with a professional eye. Kujaku examined Drake's decorating choices.
The decorating choices were notable.
Drake had developed strong opinions about precious metals during his undercover career, and the room reflected them without apology. The Beasts Pirates had not underpaid him. The Marine contact personnel who visited occasionally had taken to supplementing their own operating budgets from his surplus, on the rationale that the disparity between Drake's comfort level and their own was embarrassing to the organization.
"Tonight," Drake said, once everyone was settled, "the Flower Capital holds the Hyakki Yakō — the Night Parade of a Hundred Demons. Orochi has been running this event for years. The premise is that demons and supernatural beings descend on the city during the celebration, and that prayer and incense offerings will earn their protection."
He paused to let this land. "It's a fraud operation. I've watched it from a distance through Observation Haki. Every 'demon' in the white fog is a person in costume — props, makeup, people with physical disabilities dressed as minor spirits. Performance art. The residents believe it completely, and in return for the protection of their supernatural patrons, they donate incense money that Orochi collects and splits with the Beasts Pirates. Fifty-fifty, every year. Some Beasts Pirates members even stage theatrical defeats at the hands of the 'demons' to provide spectacle."
Helmeppo had his eyes open now. "They extort religious donations from people they're already starving."
"It's effective. The Shogun's Mansion has been getting richer every year. Kaido finds the whole arrangement genuinely impressive."
Todoroki Shoto had stopped moving and was looking at the floor with an expression that had started as contempt and arrived somewhere more complicated. "A closed country, generation after generation of this — cults the outside world stopped believing in a hundred years ago are still running here. These people are too ignorant." He said it flatly, not cruelly. A diagnosis.
"Every piece of land raises different people," Helmeppo said, from his position on the tatami. "Ignorance isn't the same as worthlessness. You can reach people. It takes time."
Todoroki Shoto opened his mouth to respond.
The shouting from outside interrupted him.
Drake moved first — the instinct of years embedded in other people's organizations — and the rest followed him into the street, finding positions where they could observe without being part of what they were observing.
A group of refugees had entered the Flower Capital from the outer roads. They looked like what they were: people who had walked through something catastrophic and been deposited here at the end of it without a plan. Ragged, some injured, all carrying the expression of people in whom something load-bearing had broken.
One man had come apart entirely. He was crying and laughing in alternation, the way that happens when the mind exhausts its appropriate categories and starts borrowing from the wrong ones.
"Everyone is dead," he was saying, to anyone who stayed in front of him long enough. "Everyone. The whole village. Nobody left out there." The laugh that followed was not the laugh of someone who found it funny. "You're all going to die too. Everyone. Just go and die."
Some of the refugees had organized their remaining coherence into something more directional. "The ghosts aren't coming," one of them called out, to the crowd forming around them. "The Night Parade, the demons, the salvation — it's Orochi collecting your money. There are no demons. He's been lying to you for years."
This was, in a city holding itself together through the expectation that something supernatural was imminent, a bad thing to say.
The argument was immediate. The Flower Capital's residents were not unaware of what was happening beyond their walls — the refugees were delivering confirmation at volume, not revelation. What they were not prepared to do was surrender the one thing that was allowing them to function. The Night Parade was tonight. The demons would come. Against butcher knives and no alternatives, the belief was the only resource available.
The people who had invested the most went at the refugees directly.
The Beasts Pirates had evacuated with their assets. The Marine was holding the perimeter shut. The Celestial Dragons were burning inward from the edges. And the people of the Flower Capital stood in their city with their incense money and their costumes and their deeply human, deeply functional faith in something that was not coming — and fought each other over the right to keep believing it until they couldn't anymore.