The square still lay littered with all the unconscious rejects. Some spectators already moving in to capitalise on their state, stealing what they could from their bodies before they woke.
Up on the balcony, John swayed about drinking heavily from a bottle of red wine. The sight of blood not discouraging him from his drink in the slightest.
His eyes hardened even while his unnerving smile still plastered his face. Atlas' back still left in his mind like a sunspot. The defiant streak of their new recruit spoiling his appetite. It looked like it would be another liquid supper for him today.
Linlin still beamed. She had chosen right after all. She wasn't fully sure what that last ability was, but the way it had knocked out all the deadbeats in a single beat left her giddy.
"Mamama!" She laughed out loud, her head swinging back as she went. "This! This is what it takes to be my future husband!" She looked back at where Atlas had left the square. The way he had stared at Rocks, the way he hadn't given in to the stronger beast. That was why she had chosen him.
Kaidou huffed again. She kept repeating herself. He'd already told her to shut up but the old hag never seemed to listen. Normally even calling her that would earn him a hit to the head but her joy seemed to have made her deaf.
Still, his blood boiled at the idea of facing off against that lab rat again. "What was his name again?" He suddenly seemed to realise he'd never bothered to remember it. Not many earnt that from him.
Newgate was dragged from his thoughts by that. His thoughts drifting away from the hurt in that boy's eyes. "Atlas" he spoke as if from the corner of his mouth. "He said his name was Atlas."
Silver Axe nodded, but he made no effort to comment. Shiki gave him a screwed look. He hated the way he stayed silent. What kind of rival didn't speak? Still he too didn't say much. Just gave a short laugh before levitating off.
The others all had some reaction of their own.
The two from wano seemed to stay silent, although theirs felt less comfortable than the rest. They were among the weakest after all. Best to stay quiet when witnessing the rise of another monster.
Instead they looked back to John. What they lacked in outright strength they made up for in their shrewd cunning. Whatever it took to stick by Rocks' side. If John wasn't a fan. Well then, neither were they.
Streusen didn't bother to comment. He already felt the headache over Linlin's continuous boasting. He knew her too well. This would be a long night of her laughing and drinking and eating while reminding him why she deserved the best and praising herself for seeing something in the boy.
---
Atlas returned to the room they'd set aside for him. He didn't speak. Didn't even register any of the random faces along his path.
Once inside he went about regaining some semblance of his own mind. He sat alone with the silence for a long while after the door shut behind him.
The room didn't have much in it. A cot. A washstand. A single high window that let in more heat than light. He stared at the wall opposite, but he wasn't really seeing it.
He was still seeing them. The recruits.
Not their faces. He'd been moving too fast for faces to matter, and most of them hadn't even seen him coming. It was the sound he kept replaying. The thud, thud, thudding of bodies hitting stone. So many of them, all at once, dropped by something that hadn't even felt like him doing it. Something that had simply happened, the way weather happens, indifferent to who stood underneath it.
He flexed his hands slowly, turning them over in front of him. They didn't feel any different. That was the unsettling part. Whatever that had been, that invisible wave, that pressure that folded grown men to the ground before they could so much as flinch, it hadn't come from his fruit. He knew his fruit's edges by now, ten years of scientists mapping every inch of it for him. This had come from somewhere else. Somewhere he hadn't known was in him at all.
The thought sat cold in his gut alongside everything else. How many other things was he capable of that he didn't yet have a name for?
He didn't get long with the thought before it curdled into something worse. Those men hadn't deserved to die, and as far as he knew, they hadn't. But they'd deserved that? Whatever unconscious, wordless violence had poured out of him because he couldn't stomach a crowd's greed for one more second?
A knock came at his door. Firm, but slow.
Atlas didn't answer straight away. He'd been sitting on the edge of the cot since he'd left the square, staring at nothing, letting the adrenaline bleed out of him in silence.
"It's open," he said eventually. His voice came out flatter than he meant it to.
Newgate ducked through the doorway, his frame nearly too large for the room. He didn't sit. Just stood there a moment, hands loose at his sides, looking at Atlas the way a man looks at a storm he isn't sure has passed yet.
"Wanted to see how you were holding up." A pause. "After all that."
"Fine." The word came out clipped. Not quite a lie. Not quite the truth either.
Newgate nodded slowly, like he'd expected that answer and didn't believe it any more than Atlas did. He leaned against the doorframe instead of the wall, arms crossing over his chest.
"You did well out there," he said. "Better than well. But..."
Atlas felt it before the word even landed. That familiar tightening. The bracing.
"I've seen that look before, kid." Newgate's voice dropped lower. Gentler, maybe. Trying to be gentle. "In the eyes of men who let their hate carve out everything else that used to be in there. It's not a good road. I'd hate to see you go down it."
Silence.
Atlas' hands curled slowly against his knees.
"You'd hate to see it." His voice was quiet. Too quiet. "You'd hate to see it."
He stood. Newgate didn't move, didn't flinch, just watched him with that same steady, searching look. The one that had made Atlas feel, for one unguarded second, like someone was actually paying attention to him. That only made it worse.
"You've known me a handful of days." Atlas' voice cracked with the force he was holding back. "You don't get to stand there and tell me what road I'm on. You don't know what it took just to have a road. To have anything. I built myself back up out of nothing while men in white coats decided how much pain I could survive in a day. And you–"
He stopped. His breath came ragged.
"You get to just warn me off it? Like I'm a kid about to touch a hot stove?"
Newgate said nothing. Didn't defend himself. Didn't explain.
That silence should have felt like victory. It didn't.
Atlas' chest heaved, the anger draining out of him fast now that it had somewhere to go, leaving something rawer underneath. He looked away first, jaw tight, refusing to see whatever was on the older man's face.
A long moment passed.
"You're right."
Atlas' head snapped back up.
"I don't know." Newgate's voice was even. No performance in it. "I've never had to face that. Never had everything taken from me the way it was taken from you." He exhaled, slow. "I spoke before I understood. That was wrong of me. I'm sorry, Atlas."
Sorry.
The word hit somewhere Atlas hadn't braced for.
He opened his mouth. Nothing came out.
No one had ever said that to him. Not once. Not the scientists, not Saturn, not a single person who'd ever had the power to hurt him and chosen to anyway. Power, in Atlas' entire world, had only ever meant never having to apologize for anything.
He stood there, mouth still parted around a response that wouldn't come, staring at a man twice his size who had just made himself smaller than he'd ever seen anyone make themselves. On purpose. For him.
Newgate didn't wait for a reply. He gave a small nod, like he understood the silence better than Atlas did himself, and stepped back through the door.
"Get some rest, kid."
The door clicked shut.
Atlas sat back down on the edge of the cot, hands pressed against his knees, and found he couldn't remember, for the life of him, what he'd been so angry about.
quiet didn't last.
Newgate had stood over him tonight with every reason to walk away untouched. Instead he'd apologized. Something Saturn never had, not once, in ten years of deciding exactly how much pain Atlas could survive.
And tonight, without even choosing to, Atlas had done the deciding for someone else.
He thought of Saturn. Of hands that decided, coldly and at a distance, how much pain a person could survive today. He didn't want to be a man who did that to others without even choosing to.
The room felt smaller than it had a minute ago.
Atlas stood, if only to put some space between himself and his own thoughts. The walls weren't going anywhere, but at least outside them there'd be air that didn't taste like the inside of his own head.
He made it three doors down the corridor before he ran into Kaidou.
The kid was leaning against the wall with a bottle already half-gone, grinning the way he only did right before trouble. "There you are." He shoved off the wall, swaying only slightly.
"Atlas. Fight me."
"Not now, Kaidou."
"C'mon." Kaidou stepped into his path, undeterred. "You knocked out that whole square and didn't need your giant form to do it. I wanna see what you can do for real"
"I said not now." Atlas tried to step around him. Kaidou countered, blocking the hall with an ease that suggested this wasn't the first time he'd cornered someone this way.
"Scared?"
"Exhausted." It came out flatter than he meant it to, and truer.
Kaidou didn't take the hint. He kept pressing, needling, the bottle swinging loosely from one hand as he talked over Atlas's attempts to walk past him. It was watching that bottle, more than anything Kaidou said, that gave Atlas the idea.
An errant thought: he wanted a drink. Badly, suddenly, the way he hadn't let himself want much of anything in years.
Then, right behind it, unbidden: a memory. Test No. 118. The scientists pouring liquor down his throat by the bottle, dispassionately curious whether his fruit could distort his body's tolerance the same way it distorted everything else.
It had, for a while, until they'd pushed past what even a Fishman's reformed liver could manage, and then they'd simply written the results down and moved to the next test.
He could use that now. Drink Kaidou into the floor without ever feeling it himself.
He decided, in the space of a breath, that he didn't want to.
"Fine," Atlas said instead, and watched Kaidou's face light up like he'd already won something. "Not a fight. A drinking contest."
Kaidou blinked, thrown for exactly one second before his grin came back twice as wide. "Worororo! Now that," he said, "I can do."
Two birds. One stone. Kaidou got his challenge, Atlas got an excuse not to think, and if his head hurt like hell in the morning, well. Maybe that was the point.