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The Hyakki Yakō — the true Night Parade of a Hundred Demons — had officially begun in the Flower Capital.
Save for the blaze of lanterns along Flower Street, every other district was shuttered and dark. The citizens who had fled to root cellars and bolted rooms knew better than to look out their windows. The ones wandering the pre-dawn streets were not Wano's people. They were hunters: God's Knights and Celestial Dragon contestants soaked in blood earned far from home, none of them yet understanding what was waiting for them in this capital.
Jewelry Bonney had never wanted to be here.
As an illegitimate child, she'd leveraged her Celestial Dragon blood the only way the system allowed — into the God's Knights as a reserve member. Even then she didn't belong. The certified Celestial Dragons closed their circles against her. The mixed-blood contingent, outliers themselves, at least acknowledged a shared wound: they carried the bloodline, but not the name. They'd been denied the former's privilege and refused to accept the latter's defeat. Service in the God's Knights was their compromise — dangerous work in exchange for the possibility of recognition, of being seen as something more than half.
Bonney was an outlier even among them.
She was designated Number Zero for this operation. The numbering system was standard God's Knights protocol — no surnames, no identities, just codes to keep things clean during combat. Number Ten was the team leader, a bearded captain who'd accepted her into his mixed-blood unit after she'd been separated from the main group. Since she wasn't claiming any kills, there was no point distribution to fight over. They'd coexisted without incident for half a day. That was about as well as it was going to go.
"Zero." The young man walking beside her, Number Ninety-Nine, kept his voice low. He wasn't even eighteen, but there was nothing boyish in the way he spoke about killing. "You haven't scored a single point. If you finish this event at zero, the commander will take issue with you."
Bonney said nothing. She watched the street ahead. Behind them, behind all of them, the people of Wano Country had been dying quietly all night — men, women, the very old. She'd witnessed it. She hadn't stopped it. She told herself there was a difference between killing and not saving. She was starting to doubt it.
"Eight hundred years," Ninety-Nine continued, when she didn't respond. "The status of the Celestial Dragons has never wavered. Whatever the future holds, that's for the next generation to worry about. You think too much, Zero."
He was devoted, the way they all were — not out of love, but out of hunger. If he could prove himself worthy, he might earn what they'd all been denied: a true name. A real place at the table.
The one who started this evil will have no descendants. Bonney walked at the rear of the formation. She thought of Kuma. She thought of her mother. She thought that retribution, when it came, would not be gentle.
"Found one."
Number Five, the bald man, spoke with the particular satisfaction of someone who'd been looking forward to this. He was already moving — long knife raised, blade catching no light in the darkness before it swept forward at a shadow pressed against a building wall.
The impact came with a sound he hadn't expected.
A woman in a kimono. His strike had caught her across the midsection. She should have fallen. She should have been dead. Instead, the two halves of her simply... separated, and the upper body hit the ground and kept moving — hands clawing the cobblestones, dragging herself forward on her palms, her internal organs spilling out behind her in a glistening trail. Her mouth was open, producing sounds that had no language in them, a broken-pitched keening that was both protest and benediction.
Nobody spoke for a moment.
She kept crawling.
Number Ten stepped forward. He drew his rapier and removed the woman's head in one clean stroke. The body stilled. The head rolled to rest against the gutter, face upward, expression unchanged.
"She's looks like a human," said Ninety-Nine, studying the remains with clinical interest. "But her vitality is completely different. This isn't normal."
"You're overthinking it," said Number Eighty-Eight, brushing hair from her face with her uninjured arm. She was the team's senior woman — commanding presence, deliberately revealing clothes, the kind of beauty that weaponized itself. "Occasionally someone just doesn't die quickly. Don't make a pattern out of one data point."
The others accepted this, or pretended to. But the unease didn't leave. Since they'd entered the Flower Capital, something had been watching them. Not a sound, not a shape — just the persistent sensation of eyes in the dark, everywhere and nowhere at once. They'd searched. They'd found nothing. It was the particular discomfort of being observed by something that didn't need to be seen.
"Keep moving toward the Shogun's Mansion," said Ninety-Nine. "Even if we're not scoring points, there might be something worth watching."
They moved in silence through the darkened street.
Ninety-Nine was walking at the center of the formation, still wearing the faint smile of someone who found the night more interesting than threatening, when the cold light came.
It appeared from nowhere — a flash, a line, a verdict — and his head was on the ground before his expression had finished forming.
His body stood for a full second longer, momentum carrying it forward, before it collapsed.
Blood spread across the cobblestones in a dark, widening stain. The rest of the team froze, then scattered into defensive postures, scanning the surrounding dark. Nothing moved. A wind passed through the street, carrying cold air and the iron smell of blood, and nothing else.
Then the light returned.
Number Eighty-Eight reacted — faster than most would have managed, her instincts sharp — but not fast enough. The blade took her dominant arm at the shoulder. She hit the ground and stayed there, writhing, her composure gone entirely. The pain of a severed arm was a different category of experience than she'd trained for.
Two figures stepped out of the darkness.
Both stood well over two meters. Both wore ordinary kimonos, unremarkable in style, at complete odds with the violence they'd just committed. One wore a Hannya mask — the traditional demon-woman face, horned and gold-eyed, mouth fixed in its hollow scream. The other had the bearing and features of a man drawn directly from ancient Wano painting: classical, composed, carrying the weight of something older than any of them.
They walked side by side. Unhurried.
"I hate women the most," said the masked one.
"Second is a good-looking little boy," said the other.
They had come from the direction of the Shogun's Mansion, and they had just found Bonney's team.