-Real World-
On the back of Zunesha, the great elephant that wandered the seas without rest, the Mink of Zou had been watching the Sky Screen the way they watched most things — together, loudly, and with very strong opinions.
When Sett's character information appeared on the Sky Screen, the crowd went quiet for exactly one moment.
Then everyone spoke at once.
"There's no reproductive isolation between humans and the Mink? Has anyone in the tribe actually tried this before?"
"Half-Mink, half-human — a Hybrid. Sett. A black-market fighter. How do you connect all of that into one person?"
"The two species have completely different ideas about what's attractive. How would they even end up in the same bed?"
There was no entry in the Mink's recorded history for anything like this. If there had ever been a precedent, whoever documented it had clearly decided to leave it out.
Sett, on the Sky Screen, was undeniably real — a body built beyond what either parent species would produce alone, with the ears of a cat-type Mink rising prominently from otherwise human features, thick fur across skin that otherwise read as human. A Zoan fruit user could achieve a half-beast form, but they couldn't hold it for long and reverted to human at rest. Sett simply was what he looked like, at all times, with no fruit involved.
The world did not receive this kind of appearance charitably. Among humans, looks that fell outside the familiar were treated as invitation — for mockery, for exclusion, for targeting. The Mink had their own difficult position: Celestial Dragons collected them as curiosities; black-market traders put prices on them. To be neither fully Mink nor fully human was to be legible to both groups as a problem and to belong to neither as a person.
That Sett had survived to adulthood in the human world without being swallowed by it was, by any honest accounting, extraordinary. Someone — a parent, or perhaps both — had kept him alive long enough to grow into something that could keep itself alive. And then, eventually, the Marine Fleet Admiral had found him in an underground fighting circuit and decided he was worth keeping in a different way.
The debate about which parent was which had already started and was showing no signs of resolving.
"The father was human. The mother had to be a Mink. Only a female Mink could produce something that strong."
"But think about it — female Mink stay on Zou. They don't go wandering. It would have to be a male Mink who left the island, stayed in the human world long enough to—"
"The male Mink who go out to sea, they're surrounded by humans for years. Tastes change—"
"Don't say that like it's natural—"
"I'm just saying the numbers support it—"
The argument would not be settled today. Perhaps not ever.
Inuarashi, Ruler of the Day, stood apart from the crowd and had been standing there long enough that it no longer looked like he was listening. He was listening.
Sett's cat-type ears were the detail that had caught his attention. Cat-type Mink. He knew most of the Mink who had been scattered across the sea over the years — the males who had left, which was almost all of them who left at all. He could not account for Sett's mother. That particular trail led to Nekomamushi, who had led the Guardians away from Zou the moment the Sky Screen revealed that Kozuki Momonosuke was still alive somewhere in the world.
The math had been simple: the young master was alive, and in the current period he would be at his most vulnerable. Inuarashi and Nekomamushi had talked through the night, and by morning Nekomamushi had taken the Guardians out to sea to find him. Repaying the debt to Kozuki Oden was not something that could wait.
Nekomamushi, you've been gone long enough. The young master is still out there.
Even the Nine Red Scabbards combined were not equal to Kaido. The only hope was Momonosuke. That had been the conclusion, and it had not changed.
Inuarashi's mind moved on to the other thing — the thing the Sky Screen had revealed that was still sitting uneasily somewhere behind his eyes.
No reproductive isolation.
He had not needed the Sky Screen to confirm that the Mink were valuable to collectors. They had always been. The black market price for a Mink ran below that of a mermaid, but it was not zero, and the Mink who had been taken over the centuries had mostly not come back. Now there was something new in the ledger: documented proof that the two species could produce offspring. That category of information, once visible on the Sky Screen, would reach people whose intentions toward Zou Island were not protective.
There were nobles in this world — male and female both — who had exhausted every conventional avenue of indulgence. For them, novelty was the only remaining currency. The idea that a small number of them would now decide to pursue this particular novelty was not paranoia. It was math.
Inuarashi began, quietly, to think about Zou's defenses.
"Carrot."
The rabbit-type Mink girl, who had been chewing a carrot at the edge of the crowd and thinking her own thoughts, looked up. Inuarashi was looking at her with the expression he used when he was saying something he wanted to be taken seriously.
"Don't let the hairless people fool you. They mean us harm."
Carrot stared at him, ears upright, chewing suspended.
Did he hear me? She had been thinking — only thinking — about what it would be like to go out to sea with Nekomamushi. To finally see the world the newspapers talked about. The hairless people who built cities and sailed ships and filled the pages with names she'd only ever read.
She hadn't said any of that out loud.
Had she?