Clap! Clap! Clap!
Rosse clapped with a smile, ignoring the bloody scene around him, slowly walking toward Toki.
The crisp sound of his palms, under the silent night sky, was especially jarring, especially unsettling for Toki.
"What about them? How will you deal with them?", Toki took a deep breath, trying hard to calm herself, her gaze drifting toward the village not far away.
Not all the enemies had been killed just now.
A grand performance always needed some to spread the word.
And those who had personally experienced it were undoubtedly the best storytellers.
But aside from the attacking samurai, the village had also taken part in the assault on Rosse.
Perhaps many of them were innocent, or unwilling to join in, but none of that mattered.
From what Toki knew of Rosse, there could only be one outcome for the entire village.
"Of course, it's up to you. No matter what you do today, I won't interfere," Rosse's tone was casual, but Toki didn't feel any joy at all.
Listen to her new idea? If only it were that simple.
Toki sighed inwardly, but she didn't do as Rosse wished.
Though she couldn't change the ending, since Rosse's intention was already so clear, she didn't need to hide.
"Leave it then. I'm not doing the rest. Do whatever you want."
When killing the samurai, Toki hadn't felt much psychological burden.
Even without Rosse pulling the strings, she could have brought herself to act, just that she didn't have the power.
But killing accomplices whose crimes didn't warrant death, she couldn't do it.
Especially since she had just now experienced a massacre where she was the main performer.
"In that case, I'll be gentle," Rosse didn't mind. He stepped past Toki, walking two more paces toward the village.
"Don't worry. It'll be over in an instant, they won't feel pain..."
As his words fell, Rosse drew the famed blade Shusui from its sheath.
SLASH!
A dark red arc of light burst forth. Like lightning from the depths of hell, like the single eye of a demon opening. It flared under the cold moonlight, then in the next instant, vanished without a trace. The glow faded.
Toki held her breath, watching silently. Everything before her seemed frozen, as though time had been paused. The night wind stilled. Even the chirping of insects abruptly stopped.
Time itself seemed to lose meaning in that moment.
Crack!
A faint but sharp sound of breaking rang out, like the groan of ice under unbearable weight, sudden and jarring in the silence.
Then, the sound multiplied, dense as falling rain, yet with a strange order to it.
Toki's pupils shrank.
Her world had changed.
The solid ground, the scattered houses, even the people who only moments before had shown signs of life, in this instant, it was as if an invisible giant hand had cut everything with perfect precision, dividing it into countless geometric fragments.
Houses became blocks of rubble, roads split into irregular slabs, slopes collapsed into drifting dust, and those once-living beings, without a single scream, became pieces of the broken picture along with lifeless matter.
Silent. Soundless.
If slaughter could be called an art, Toki felt Rosse's strike at this moment was the most supreme and terrifying art she had ever seen.
Not wild graffiti, but a meticulous disassembly.
The village was no longer a village. It had become a torn-apart oil painting, every fragment evenly split, like a carefully calculated mosaic.
And those fragments, under gravity's gentle touch, fell slowly, elegantly, and mercilessly into the dense night, as if the canvas was consumed by darkness, leaving no trace.
"The whole village, 1,632 people. None survived..."
With Rosse's aid, Toki's senses could clearly register how many living people had been there.
Now, every last one of them had vanished with Rosse's slash.
And the strike was so fast that even with her accelerated perception, she hadn't seen the sword drawn.
Only light, and the village was gone.
Toki fell silent.
She had seen battles between top-level powerhouses before. Scenes where mountains and rivers shattered.
But this was the first time she had seen such a one strike down countless ordinary people.
The helplessness of being crushed left her utterly wordless.
"Am I really... the same species as you?", After a long silence, Toki finally voiced her confusion.
The gap was far too great.
Was this truly the difference between people of the same kind?
"Mediocre people, domineering people, twisted people, cowardly people, powerful people, weak people... in the end, aren't they all human?", Rosse chuckled softly, brushing his thumb gently across Toki's face, admiring her shattered expression.
Such a naive question.
After so long at sea, how could she still ask something so childish?
They were of the same species, and yet not.
The first was in the biological sense, the second in the sense of awareness.
That difference mattered. At least, to Rosse it mattered.
After all, Rosse didn't like beasts pretending to be human.
"All humans? You call yourself the same as them? Killing your own kind like this, don't you hesitate at all?", Toki pointed instinctively at the corpses, then at Rosse's relaxed, leisurely figure.
She had always felt Rosse wasn't killing enemies, but treating them like ants to be casually crushed.
"Hesitate?", Rosse chuckled, "Didn't expect you to think that. I thought you were the same kind of villain as me."
"How am I not kind?", Toki glared at him. Compared to Rosse, she could count as a saint.
"You used to be a pirate, and you're telling me this?", Rosse raised a brow, looking at her with interest.
Kindness? If it had been Otohime before, maybe she qualified to say that.
But Toki? Hardly. Someone who had drifted with the Whitebeard Pirates for years at sea, what sort of saint could she be?
What, was she going to say: Sure, I watched my comrades kill and plunder, but I myself was a good person?
"Even pirates are kinder than you," Toki muttered unwillingly.
She may have chosen to go along with Rosse, but that didn't mean she wanted to be labeled a villain outright.
Especially after today, Rosse had seen completely through her.
All her disguises were meaningless now. She might as well be open.
"Right, right, the great saint who asked me to slaughter a million people in Ringo," Rosse's lips curled with amusement.
It hadn't been his idea to kill everyone in Ringo.
From that angle, Toki really was his kind.
It was just that her heart was still restrained. If she truly let go, she might even be crueler than him.
"I was just...", Toki opened her mouth to argue, but finally slumped and fell silent.
It was too late.
If she could go back, she would never have suggested it.
Seeing countless die before her eyes, and scheming something that would doom a million, those were two entirely different things.
Back then, a million lives had just been a number to her.
She now realized that with Rosse's plan, Wano was almost certain to end in annihilation.
That was why she had suggested sacrificing one region to unify Wano.
But living through this massacre herself, she realized it wasn't the same.
To see a thousand die in front of her, the impact was far greater than imagining a million.
Watching body after body fall, people who moments before had been alive, her heart had finally been struck hard.
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