-Real World — Punk Hazard / Totto Land waters-
There was no time to explain anything. Kinemon and Kanjuro moved in tandem, Momonosuke between them, cutting through the Marine in the passage with the efficiency of two men who had been fighting together for most of their adult lives. The Marine at Punk Hazard had apparently decided, collectively, that dying here with the boy was preferable to letting anyone walk away with him — they came without hesitation, without fear, and none of them stopped until they were down.
"What is wrong with these people?" Kanjuro said, between one opponent and the next. "None of them are our enemy by any personal grievance. They just want to kill the young master."
"The Sky Screen," Kinemon said, removing the last obstacle in the corridor. "They've seen what he becomes. Killing him now is the only move that makes sense to them."
He looked at what was around them on the floor — Marine sailors, all of them gone quickly, hit in the vital points out of some instinct toward mercy for enemies who had at least the virtue of courage. Momonosuke looked at the bodies and didn't say anything. His face had the expression of someone who had exceeded the number of things he could process in a single day.
The reinforcements were thinning. Charlotte Smoothie's front assault was doing its job.
"We need a ship," Kinemon said. "Sea. Open water. As long as we don't cross the main Marine force we can move freely."
They walked out of the base into the night air.
A long pair of legs blocked the exit.
Charlotte Smoothie looked down at them without particular urgency, her height making the gesture feel entirely effortless. Her attention went to Kanjuro first. "You're still on my ship, remember? It's a bit late to be reconsidering the arrangement."
Behind the three of them, Big Mom Pirates had already closed off the route back through the base. Forward and backward were equally occupied.
Kinemon glanced sideways at Kanjuro. "I owe you an apology. We had no choice— leaving without you was the only way anyone got out at all. I'm glad you survived it."
Kanjuro shook his head. "There's nothing to apologize for." He looked at Smoothie, then at the pirates holding the perimeter, then at Kinemon. "We have nowhere to go. The Marine wants Momonosuke dead. Kurozumi Orochi and Kaido want him dead. If we have one of the Four Emperors standing between us and all of that, we have something we don't have right now — time."
He had worked this out before reaching Punk Hazard. After escaping Dressrosa on a raft — a genuinely terrible vessel for the New World, which the sea had expressed its opinion of promptly — he had been picked up by a Big Mom Pirates patrol ship. His identity had been recognized. The trail from him to Momonosuke had been short. Charlotte Smoothie had come to Punk Hazard because Morgans had sold the information first, and Kanjuro had been on the ship when she arrived.
Big Mom had already agreed. The descendants of the Moon's ancient lineage would not be harmed. As long as Momonosuke could be of use on Whole Cake Island, the Big Mom Pirates would shield him from everything else. And if he turned out to be less useful than advertised, he was still worth considerably more as a bargaining piece than as nothing.
Kinemon put down his weapon. Kanjuro did the same. The tension in the surrounding pirates settled immediately.
"Bring all three aboard," Smoothie said. "Leave no one behind. We're done with Punk Hazard."
The pirates treated them with a kind of rough courtesy — no bindings, weapons returned to be held until Whole Cake Island. The samurai's dignity was maintained in the technical sense, which was what could be managed under the circumstances.
Ten minutes later, the branch base had ceased to exist in any meaningful structural sense. The Big Mom Pirates departed with what they'd come for and a considerable amount of additional cargo they hadn't planned on, and pushed into open water at full speed.
The ships from Marine Headquarters arrived to find ruins, ash, and a sea empty all the way to the horizon. By the time anyone organized a pursuit, the Big Mom fleet was already approaching Totto Land's outer waters — territory where a Marine patrol ship had no reasonable expectation of returning from.
In her cabin, Charlotte Smoothie had her den-den mushi connected to Whole Cake Island.
"Mother. Morgans' information was accurate. Kozuki Momonosuke is aboard." She listened. "Yes. This trip was worth making."
On the other end, Big Mom's laughter ran for a full minute. When it stopped: "Bring that brat to me. I want to see if Kozuki Oden's son is everything the Sky Screen says."
Linlin had her reasons. Momonosuke as a chip gave her leverage over Kaido — a way to complicate the Beasts Pirates' plans regardless of how the rest of the board moved. Even if he turned out to be less impressive in person than in the broadcast, he was tradeable to the Marine or to Kaido himself; she held the initiative either way.
But she had other thoughts as well, which she kept to herself for the moment.
The Uchiha clan had already reached the sea. The Hyuga clan, which the long centuries had swallowed almost entirely, was a different matter. If Kozuki Momonosuke truly carried that bloodline through the Kozuki line's ancient roots, then his value was not only political. The current Linlin had no Hyuga-descent child yet. She had time to consider whether that gap ought to be filled.
She filed the thought away and continued laughing.
In his cabin, Momonosuke lay on a clean bed with actual blankets and felt a sudden, inexplicable chill that had nothing to do with the temperature.
He decided he was imagining things.
The mattress was soft. He hadn't slept on anything soft in long enough that he'd forgotten what it felt like. The food had been real food — actual food, with seasoning, and vegetables, and no fish involved. He was warm and full and exhausted and in the custody of one of the Four Emperors, which was a problem he would deal with tomorrow.
He was asleep before he finished the thought.
In the next cabin, Kinemon and Kanjuro sat together. Kanjuro filled in the pieces Kinemon hadn't known: the raft, the storm, the Big Mom patrol ship, the chain of events that had ended with Smoothie taking him to Punk Hazard. It was, as Kinemon listened to it, a genuinely extraordinary series of near-misses.
Dressrosa had fallen into a different kind of chaos after the events Kanjuro had witnessed. After Doflamingo severed his arrangement with the Five Elders and took his remaining forces to Onigashima, the Donquixote umbrella was gone. Sugar's ability had failed; the toys had reverted; thousands of people had recovered memories they hadn't had an hour before. Wano's situation was more complicated than any of the scabbards had faced before, and it was getting worse.
Kanjuro had gotten out on a raft because it was the only vessel available to him. The sea had almost finished him. By any reasonable assessment, sitting in a Big Mom Pirates ship somewhere in the New World, he was already past the point where survival should have stopped being plausible.
The young master was alive. That was what mattered.
Kinemon looked at the wall between their cabin and Momonosuke's and let out a long breath.
Out of the tiger's den and into the wolf's. The Kozuki clan's fortune had always run this way. Perhaps it was simply the nature of their road.
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