-Real World — Punk Hazard-
Kozuki Momonosuke had arrived at a conclusion about himself, and the conclusion was not flattering.
If he could have gone back an hour, he would have stayed in the cave. He would have endured the hunger. He would have waited for Kinemon. The entire sequence of events that had followed from a single decision — I will go get food — had resulted in him being tied up on a sled in the snow, heading toward a Marine branch base with a black eye and nothing to show for it except the knowledge that he had made a serious mistake.
The veteran captain watched him cry and was unsympathetic about it. "Save it. The ship from Marine Headquarters is already on its way. Once you reach Marineford, you're not leaving. Not ever."
This was not a comforting thing to say to a child, and it was not intended to be.
The Sky Screen had given Kozuki Momonosuke full prominence — his own dedicated character introduction, on par with figures like Buggy and Chopper, positioned as someone whose future would matter. The Marine understood that much. A figure the Sky Screen treated as significant was a figure that needed to be removed from the board before that significance could be realized. They had learned this lesson once already; they were not going to be generous about it a second time.
The boy, for his part, had stopped thinking about restoring Wano. He was thinking about food. He had received some rations on the sled — the Marine needed him alive, a dead Kozuki being worth considerably less than a living one — and the food had taken the edge off the worst of it, but not enough. He was tired. He was sore. He was trying not to think too hard about what Caesar Clown was going to want to do with him.
His prayer had narrowed to something practical: that whoever held him next would at least feed him regularly.
The two Marine units merged on the road, the branch base sled force absorbing the smaller patrol team. Numbers grew. The convoy picked up speed.
Kinemon emerged from behind a snowdrift three hundred meters back and stared at what was in front of him.
He had come back to the snow cave and found it empty. He had found the tracks in the snow — small hands, then feet, the dragging crawl of a child who had gone somewhere he had been explicitly told not to go — and followed them until they merged with the boot prints of a Marine patrol, and then with the wider track of a sled force. He had put it together quickly. He was not a stupid man.
He was, however, one man.
Hundreds of Marine sailors on sleds. In the middle of that mass, somewhere, was his young master. Kinemon could fight — could fight well — but a frontal assault at these odds, in the open, in the dark, was not a fight. It was a way to die while Momonosuke watched from the back of a sled.
He exhaled. The tears at the corner of his eyes had already frozen.
"Young master. Young master, why couldn't you just stay put? The Kozuki clan cannot restore Wano without you."
He put his sadness away. This was not the moment for it. He had survived far worse than a Marine branch base, and that was what now stood between him and his young master. He fell in behind the convoy at a distance and followed it on foot through the snow.
He arrived at the branch base in time to watch Momonosuke — hands and feet still bound — be carried through the gate. He watched the gate close. He studied the perimeter, the sentry positions, the lighting, the timing of the shift changes. He sat down in the snow outside the walls with the raw fish he had caught for Momonosuke's breakfast and ate it himself, cold, because he needed to eat and there was nothing else.
He would find a Marine uniform. He would learn the shift schedule. He would find the gap.
He just needed to wait.
Inside the branch base, Momonosuke had been placed in a holding cell separate from the general prisoner population. The guards outside were numerous and attentive. The iron bars were too thick for his arms to do anything useful with, and no convenient explosion had occurred nearby to create an alternative exit.
He lay on the cold floor and felt the gap between the Sky Screen's version of his future and the reality of his present in a way that was difficult to articulate and easy to feel.
He cried for a while. Then he ran out of energy for that and fell asleep, and even snored, which the guards found either amusing or irritating depending on the guard. The ship from Marine Headquarters was already at sea. By tomorrow night, he would be gone from Punk Hazard.
He was still asleep when the explosion happened.
It arrived without warning — a concussive blast that shook the entire base structure, followed immediately by more, each impact rolling through the floor and up through his bones. He sat upright on the cold ground with his heart hammering and found the world outside his cell on fire.
Fireballs had already taken the nearest outbuilding. Thick black smoke was climbing into the night sky. The steel frame of the structure above him was making sounds that steel frames were not supposed to make. Every Marine in the base had found something more urgent than a prisoner to deal with — they were running, shouting, pulling equipment toward the flames.
The bombardment continued without pause. Whatever was out there was not trying to be quiet about it.
Momonosuke pressed his ear against the bars and listened to the Marine outside his cell.
"Why are the Big Mom Pirates attacking us here?"
"What does Punk Hazard have that she wants? There's nothing here — just snow and a base."
Several ships flying Big Mom's flag had arrived at the island's shore ahead of the Marine Headquarters vessel and were now shelling the branch base in a sustained and apparently purposeful way.
Momonosuke stared through the smoke and the flickering orange light at the bars around him and began, very quietly, to recalculate.
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