-Real World — Punk Hazard-
Kozuki Momonosuke crawled through the snow with the focused patience of someone who believed that moving slowly enough would make him invisible.
He was not invisible. He was a small boy crawling through open snowfield in the dead of night, but the guard was asleep and the tent was close, and hunger had removed most of his capacity for strategic thought. He covered the distance — a few dozen meters that felt, in the crawling, like considerably more — and finally laid his hand against the tent's edge.
He pressed his mouth shut to contain his excitement.
His arm slipped inside. He opened a Marine marching pack by feel alone and rooted through it without looking, prepared to eat whatever his hand landed on first. He was not in a position to have preferences. His fingers found something that had the texture of dried meat and his entire body responded with relief.
He began to pull his arm back.
A large hand closed around his wrist from inside the tent.
"Well, well. A thief. On Punk Hazard, of all places."
The veteran captain had not been in a deep sleep. Twenty years of field postings had calibrated his rest to the kind that ended the moment something in his environment changed. The sound of a tent flap moving was more than enough. He'd felt the hand enter the pack, identified it as small, and decided to wait and see what it intended to do.
A petty thief, apparently. On a frozen wasteland with no inhabitants.
He tightened his grip. Momonosuke thrashed, found the grip immovable, made several urgent requests to be released, and — when none of those worked — stuck his head into the tent and bit the captain's arm as hard as he could manage.
The bite was serious enough to leave marks. The arm reddened, swelled slightly, did not bleed. The captain's response was a single punch from inside the tent, angled out through the flap, which connected with the boy's eye socket and launched him roughly half a meter through the air. He landed in the snow. The dried meat fell beside him.
The sleeping sentry had been jolted awake by the commotion. He grabbed his weapon, stood up, and found a small black shape lying in the snow not far from the tent. The captain emerged behind him, slapped him on the back of the head for falling asleep on watch, and took a burning log from the fire.
The firelight fell across Momonosuke's face.
The sentry squinted. "He looks familiar. Has he been on the Sky Screen?"
The captain stared. He rubbed his eyes. He pinched his own cheek to verify he was fully awake.
"You idiot," he said, very quietly. "That's Kozuki Momonosuke."
The five words hit the sentry like a bucket of cold water. He looked at the unconscious boy in the snow — one eye already swelling shut, black and blue around the socket from a punch that had been thrown with no particular care — and then at his captain, and then back at the boy.
This was the person who, according to the Sky Screen, would one day go to war with Kaido the Beast. Who would wield a dragon fruit and become a figure whose name carried the weight of Wano's future restoration.
He was currently lying face-up in the snow like a dropped parcel.
The captain woke the rest of the team, gave his orders briskly, and within the hour they were moving. Momonosuke — hands and feet bound, slung across a recruit's back — came to consciousness during the march, to a severe headache, to the misery of an eye socket that had been punched recently, and to the gradual, unwelcome understanding of his situation.
He began making demands. He demanded to be put down. He demanded to know where they were taking him. He demanded his immediate release.
The veteran captain came to stand in front of him. He reached out and pinched the boy's cheek the way you pinch a child you have no respect for and no fear of.
"Kozuki Momonosuke," he said pleasantly. "You've just delivered yourself to the Marine. The welfare of every man on this team — promotions, bonuses, all of it — is riding on you right now. We're very grateful." He patted the boy's face. "Without that dragon fruit, you're an ordinary child. The future doesn't count until it happens. Right now, you're a prisoner."
He wasn't wrong.
The recruit who had been asleep had apparently done the math in the captain's head already: the boy's hands were soft and well-maintained, no frostbite, no signs of exposure. Someone had been taking care of him. That someone was currently not present, which meant they had gone looking for food and hadn't come back yet — which was probably why the child had crawled out of whatever hole they'd been hiding in and made his way to a Marine campfire in the middle of the night.
Hunger had delivered Kozuki Momonosuke directly into Marine custody.
The contact report went out to the Punk Hazard garrison before dawn. A sled unit was dispatched. The Marine Headquarters was notified to send a ship. Kozuki Momonosuke was to be transported to the Science Department — to Caesar Clown, ally, for study. The Kozuki bloodline was worth understanding carefully. Perhaps something useful could be produced from it.
The future Shogun of Wano bounced along on a recruit's back, bound and furious, with one eye swollen shut, heading somewhere he did not want to go.