The sniper's head was still in the Inugami's hand when it looked at them.
That was how fast it had been. The creature had crossed from the eastern rooftop to their position — less than a kilometer, multiple buildings, no visible movement — in the time between one breath and the next. They hadn't seen it arrive. They had simply found themselves being regarded.
"That — did it teleport?"
SWORD formed up without needing to discuss it. Drake and Grus moved to the front. Helmeppo and Todoroki Shoto anchored the rear. Kujaku and Hibari were in the protected center, which was where their skill sets put them and where the tactical situation required them. Weapons out, Armament Haki building, every face pointed at the silver-haired figure standing behind them on the rooftop's edge.
The silver-haired figure dropped the head it was holding.
"I can smell soldiers on you," it said. The voice matched the appearance — measured, a little distant, the tone of something that had long since stopped being impressed by most things it encountered. "You're marrine."
Sky Screen character note: Inugami — Sesshōmaru.
The displacement that had brought it here was not Soru. It wasn't any technique SWORD had been trained to account for. As long as its eyes could reach a location, Sesshōmaru could be there — not in the sense of moving quickly, but in the sense of simply arriving, with no visible interval. The defensive formation meant nothing against that. They all understood this simultaneously.
Drake moved out of the formation before anyone could stop him. He had the Beasts Pirates' identification mark in his hand and the practiced body language of a lower-ranking subordinate addressing someone several levels above him. "There's been a misunderstanding. I'm with the Tobiroppo — this is a private matter. These people are with me."
Sesshōmaru raised one hand and indicated the team behind Drake with a gesture that was almost lazy. "I know your affiliation. They don't carry pirate scent. If you're traveling with Marine personnel, you're an undercover agent." A pause. "The Beasts Pirates' internal problems are outside my jurisdiction."
Drake's posture relaxed slightly. Kurozumi Orochi and the Beasts Pirates had spent years in a cold mutual contempt — Orochi running his schemes under Kaido's nose, Kaido aware that something was wrong but unable to identify it fully. Sesshōmaru had no reason to do the Beasts Pirates any favors by exposing their spy for them.
"Then we can—"
The index and middle fingers of Sesshōmaru's left hand produced a whip of yellow-green light.
It moved before Drake had finished the sentence. The first pass went through him — through his body, from one side to the other, and Drake's face registered confusion rather than pain because the pain hadn't processed yet. He looked down at what had happened to him with the expression of someone who hasn't decided whether to believe it.
The second pass divided him at the waist.
He went down in two pieces, and neither piece moved again. The blood reached the rooftop eaves and the faces of the people nearest him, because that was what blood at volume does when something stops a body that quickly.
Grus stood where he was for a full second. The clay was already building under his skin, automatic, the fruit responding to his nervous system's distress signal before his conscious mind had fully processed what had just happened. Drake's body was on the rooftop in front of him. Drake, who had been standing next to him thirty seconds ago.
"Drake—"
"Is this spy your friend?" Sesshōmaru's voice had the quality of someone making a clinical observation. "I had assumed the Marine operated on hierarchy alone — superior and subordinate, nothing personal. Like us."
The something that Grus was feeling was not hierarchy.
"I'll kill you—"
He moved. Sesshōmaru's left wrist was already moving in response, the light whip forming again — and then Helmeppo was there, pushing Grus sideways and taking the line of the strike himself. Armament Haki at full concentration, coating every surface he could cover in the half-second available. The whip landed on the hardened layer and the impact was sufficient to dent it — not through it, but the structure beneath the Haki took the force and the force was extraordinary. Helmeppo's expression through the hit was the expression of someone absorbing something at the edge of what they could absorb.
He held.
"Fall back — everyone move!"
Grus came back from wherever the grief had taken him. He grabbed Kujaku and ran. Hibari was already moving. Four members of SWORD evacuated across the rooftop toward the far edge, pulling angles between themselves and Sesshōmaru as they went.
What remained on the rooftop was Todoroki Shoto.
His hair — white on the left, red on the right — was lit from underneath by what his body was producing: cold air from the white half, heat from the red, both visible, both building. In Sesshōmaru's perception, the two elemental signatures were distinct and hostile to each other, which was the expected configuration. Two opposing forces in one body generally produced instability.
"Don't run," Todoroki Shoto said.
He brought them together.
The repulsion between fire and ice, when overridden by sufficient intentional control, produced something that was neither fire nor ice. For a fraction of a second, Todoroki Shoto was the center of a process that didn't have a clean category. Then it released outward.
The explosion took the rooftop, the surrounding buildings in a radius of dozens of meters, and the airspace above them all simultaneously. Bricks and tile and structural timber went in every direction. The mushroom cloud that formed above the site was visible from the General's Mansion. The shockwave reached the celebration venue and rattled every window between here and there.
The four members who had cleared the rooftop had covered their ears before the detonation. They'd worked with Todoroki Shoto long enough to read the signs.
Silence came back gradually, in pieces, through the ringing.
"Is he—" Kujaku started.
The smoke where the rooftop had been did not immediately answer. Drake's body was somewhere in the rubble — or dispersed through it, which was the more accurate description of what the explosion had done to everything in its radius. He had died as a pirate in the Flower Capital, without a last word, without a transformation into his Dragon form, in the space of a conversation that had lasted less than two minutes.
Whether the Marine would ever formally acknowledge what he had been — what he had spent years of his life being, embedded in enemy territory, sending intelligence home at the cost of his own identity — was not something any of them could answer right now. The smoke was still rising, and Sesshōmaru's status in it was unknown, and they needed to move.