-Real World -
The Marine's announcement came out of necessity and embarrassment in equal measure. Kozuki Momonosuke had been taken by the Big Mom Pirates. The Marine Headquarters fleet arrived at Punk Hazard to find the branch base reduced to ash and the sea empty from horizon to horizon. By then, Charlotte Smoothie's ships were already in Totto Land's outer waters — territory where a Marine patrol vessel had no future.
The Marine released the news themselves before anyone else could shape it: the Big Mom Pirates had seized what remained of the Kozuki bloodline. The story reached every major news outlet within hours.
The sea's various factions processed this information according to their own interests. The Beasts Pirates and Kurozumi Orochi had both been hunting Momonosuke; now he was in Charlotte Linlin's hands. The Whitebeard Pirates might act — Oden had been their brother, and brothers had obligations. Shanks kept quiet. He hadn't known Oden closely enough to inherit that debt, and he already had more problems than he needed.
Whether Linlin would keep Momonosuke, sell him, or leverage him against Kaido remained to be seen. The initiative, as she'd calculated, was entirely hers.
-Broadcast — Flower Capital, Wano Country-
At the Shogun's Mansion, Kurozumi Orochi was drunk.
He lay with his head on a woman's lap, her hand moving through his hair, sake doing its work on his square face, the sounds of the Night Parade reaching him as a distant background that he found more entertaining than alarming. Sesshōmaru was still occupied — the Inugami had hundreds of God's Knights pressing him from every angle and hadn't been decapitated yet, which meant the situation remained legally and technically ongoing.
Kyoshiro stood nearby, bent at the waist in the precise angle of someone who had made a career of servility. "My lord. The people outside have come for your head. It's a lively night."
"How many ghost gods are left?" Orochi asked the ceiling.
"One, my lord. The splitting demon. The rest fell to the invaders. I would advise we withdraw before—"
"We stay." Orochi reached back for his cup. The Night Parade had not yet reached its peak, and he was its architect; leaving before the ending was beneath him. "How many times do I need to die for this to be my country? We stay."
The God's Knights had maintained their discipline on the question of Orochi's head — by unspoken agreement, Sesshōmaru had to fall before anyone moved on the Shogun himself. Attacking him while the Inugami still stood was too dangerous; the yokai might turn and take the attacker's head before any points could be claimed.
The agreement held until it didn't.
One contestant looked at the crowd around Sesshōmaru, looked at Orochi reclining thirty meters away with minimal guard between them, and made a calculation.
"I'm not waiting. His head is worth a hundred thousand points and that thing isn't going to fall before dawn. I'm going."
One person breaking means a dozen people breaking. Weapons came out. More than a dozen contestants turned away from the Inugami and started toward the Shogun's Mansion garden.
Kyoshiro drew his sword. He stepped into position between the approaching group and Kurozumi Orochi with the bearing of a man who intended to die in his lord's defense if necessary.
Orochi scrambled upright. His hands found the two women nearest him and thrust them forward — not gently. They begged. One of them was pregnant and said so. Orochi pushed harder. These were playthings, pretty ones but ultimately replaceable; this was an efficient use of resources, and he had been generous in letting them live as long as they had.
The first wave of sword energy came through. The two women absorbed most of it.
The contestants regrouped. Kyoshiro held his position, the blade across his chest, his eyes moving between threats — six simultaneous lines of approach, two flanking, one elevated.
"General." His voice was steady. "I will send you off today."
Orochi opened his mouth to reply.
The blade reversed.
Every person in the garden watched Kyoshiro's sword complete a full arc that ended not in front of him, aimed at the contestants — but sideways, aimed at the neck of Kurozumi Orochi, his own lord, wrapped in Ryuo — Armament Haki — so deep the blade turned black.
The steel hit the side of Orochi's neck and kept going. Through half the neck before Orochi's body understood what was happening.
The garden went completely silent.
"You—" Orochi's voice came out wrong, air escaping from the wrong places. "You dare — you dare — I will make you—"
Kyoshiro's second hand found the handle. He had waited a very long time for this. Faces moved through his mind in the moment before he completed the motion — people he had known, people Orochi had broken, and at the end of all of them, one face: Kozuki Oden.
"When you betrayed Kozuki Oden," he said quietly, "you should have known this day was coming."
He drove the blade the rest of the way through.
The blood came in a volume that surprised even the God's Knights. Orochi's head left his shoulders and rolled across the garden stone, coming to rest at the feet of several Celestial Dragons who had to step back to avoid it. The headless body stood for a moment — a famous indignity of the severed neck — and then collapsed.
Kyoshiro took a handkerchief from his kimono and cleaned his face.
"You had more years than you deserved. This settles what I owed."
The garden was still silent.
The contestants looked at each other, then at the head, then at Kyoshiro.
A Wano samurai had killed Wano's Shogun. Before any contestant had landed a single blow on him.
The questions that immediately followed were almost entirely about the point system: did a kill made by a non-contestant count toward the contestants? Could the head be claimed by whoever picked it up? Was a kill worth a hundred thousand points still worth a hundred thousand points if it had already been made?
The spectators who had gathered at the edges of the garden to watch found themselves equally unhappy. Many of them had not come here to see a retainer's betrayal end the night's central drama before it had properly climaxed.
This was gekokujō — the inferior overthrowing the superior — a tradition older than Wano's current arrangement of power, and at least in form, entirely Wano in character.
Whether the head was worth anything to anyone was still being argued over when the blood stopped spreading.