The journey back through the dense foliage of Lagoonia's outer island was a silent, tense march. The cacophony of the market and the echoes of clashing blades had faded, replaced by the oppressive humidity of the jungle and the weight of the boy over her shoulder. Sanza, still securely bound in Jelly's azure coils, had exhausted his muffled protests and now hung like a sack of disgruntled, expensive flour. Marya's golden eyes, however, were not on the path ahead, but on the spaces between the broad, waxy leaves and the deep shadows of the palm trunks.
Shadows shifted where there was no wind. A faint, unnatural rustle echoed her own steps a half-second too late. They were trailing her. Not to attack—not yet—but to herd. She fixed her gaze forward, on the sliver of turquoise sea visible through the green. Her pace didn't quicken; a retreat was only a rout if you ran.
She broke through the tree line onto the rocky shelf of the hidden cove. The submarine bobbed there, a sleek, predatory shape of dark metal against the gentle water. Relief was instantly swallowed by cold unease. The air was wrong. It was silent in a way that spoke of absence. Where was the bickering? The sound of Vesta's off-key humming, Atlas's bored grumbling, Jannali's colorful swearing as she stowed supplies?
Her brow furrowed. She reached out with her Kenbunshoku Haki, casting a fine net of awareness over the cove. She found the lingering, fading echoes of her crew's familiar auras—sparks of anxiety, focus, and vibrant energy now hours cold. She found nothing present, nothing alive except the scuttling crabs and the watchful, hidden eyes in the jungle behind her. Her jaw flexed. Her shoulders, already tense, drew up tight beneath her leather jacket.
Then she saw it. A splash of wrong color in a tidal pool by the water's edge. Something pearlescent and curved, half-submerged in the brine.
She walked to it, her boots crunching on the gravel. She reached down and pulled Mikasi from the water. The guitar—currently in the form of a small, ornate drum—was inert. No playful vibration, no mischievous shape-shift. Salt water dripped from its shell, and it felt as lifeless as any ordinary instrument in her hand.
Marya's lips pressed into a thin, hard line. Her stern expression deepened into genuine concern. She held the drum up. "What are you doing here?" she asked the air, her voice low. "Where is she?"
Mikasi offered no answer, only a slow drip… drip… of seawater.
"This can't be good," she muttered.
A sharp snap of a branch echoed from the tree line, louder this time. A deliberate signal.
"Friends?" Jelly whispered, having reformed on her shoulder into a worried, wobbling lump.
"Not subtle ones," Marya replied, her tone dry. She slung the damp Mikasi over her shoulder by its strap and strode to the vessel's hatch. The mechanism opened with a hiss of pressurized air. She ducked inside, dumping Sanza unceremoniously onto the cold metal deck. He grunted as he hit the floor, a fresh wave of indignant mumbling starting behind Jelly's gag.
"Search," Marya ordered.
Jelly bounced away, his form flowing through the narrow corridor, the galley, the bunks. "Bloop! All gone!" he chirped, his voice echoing with lonely confusion.
The interior was tidy, supplies neatly stowed. But it was empty. On the main console, a single Den Den Mushi slept, its shell a neutral beige.
Sanza pushed himself up, wriggling until he was sitting. "I demand you return me to the Holy Land at once! My father will—"
Marya moved. She grabbed him by the collar of his bomber jacket and hauled him up, strapping him firmly into one of the navigation chairs with a heavy, multi-point harness. "Sit. Don't move. Don't touch anything." Her voice left no room for debate.
Sanza squirmed. "I am a Celestial Dragon! You cannot—"
Marya put a single finger up, inches from his face. The gesture was more silencing than a shout. "You can sit here on your own," she said, her voice dangerously calm, "or I will have the jellyfish bind you to the chair. Your choice."
Sanza's eyes darted from her unyielding golden gaze to Jelly, who had molded himself into a large, quivering pair of handcuffs. The boy's bravado faltered. He scowled, the heavy Gallagher eyebrows drawing down. "Fine," he huffed. "I agree to your… temporary terms."
"Why are you doing this?" Sanza pressed, his voice quieter, almost curious. "Why risk the wrath of the Navy and… and pirates? For a brother you didn't know you had?"
Mary silenced him again with a look, but this one was different. Less impatient, more complex. "I will answer your questions," she said, the words feeling strange in her mouth, "once we are out of here. Fair?"
Sanza studied her face, looking for the lie. He found only a stark, weary honesty. He gave a single, regal nod. "Fine. I agree."
Marya turned to the console. She picked up the receiver of the sleeping Den Den Mushi. It awoke instantly, its features melting and reshaping.
The face that formed was sharp, aristocratic, and fierce. Amber eyes stared out from beneath a fringe of silver hair. A lioness-tooth necklace was visible at her throat. It was a face accustomed to command. "You certainly kept me waiting long enough," the woman said, her voice a low, confident purr that crackled with static.
Marya's brow raised a fraction. "And this is?"
The snail's face formed a smirk. "You took something that belongs to me. So, I took some things that belong to you."
Marya's eyes narrowed. "What, exactly, did you take?"
A new voice, familiar and laced with chagrin, cut in from the background. "Sorry, boss." It was Atlas.
Marya's jaw ticked. A cold knot tightened in her stomach. "What do you want?"
"For you to return what you stole," Jeanne de Clisson's voice came back, clear and hard. "The boy."
Marya's eyes shifted to Sanza. He was shaking his head, his eyes wide, his expression a silent, pleading 'no' that cut through his usual arrogance. The terrified child was back, peering out from behind the mantle of the god.
Marya let out a slow sigh, her mind racing through scenarios, weighing a brother's ghost against the lives of her crew. "And if I refuse?"
Jeanne chuckled, a sound without warmth. "What do you think? Do you have any idea who it is you are dealing with?"
Marya's eyes narrowed further. "How would I, if you haven't told me and we've never met?"
In the background, she could hear a muffled snicker. It sounded like Jannali. Then Vesta's voice, whispering, "Ooh, she's good."
A sharper voice, Vitus's, snapped, "Quiet!"
A faint, grim smirk touched Marya's lips. "It would not be in your best interest to harm any of them."
Jeanne's sneer was audible through the snail. "You think you are in a position to make demands?"
Marya cocked her head. "Aren't I?"
"NO!" Jeanne's roar was sudden, a crack of thunder through the speaker. The snail's face contorted with fury. "I am Jeanne 'La Lionne' de Clisson of Grutte Pier Dorian's Sovereign Fleet! You are a thief in my waters!"
Marya blinked once, slowly. "That is certainly a mouthful."
The snail's expression twisted, patience worn to a frayed thread. "Bring the boy to Agashima! We will make the exchange there at dawn! No tricks, or your crew feeds the eels!"
Marya opened her mouth to reply, to bargain, to say anything, but the connection died with a definitive click. The Den Den Mushi's features slumped into a sleepy pout.
Marya let the receiver fall from her hand, dangling by its cord. She closed her eyes and let out a long, slow breath that was half-sigh, half-curse. Pirates on one side. A brother's secret on the other. And her crew in the balance.
She moved to the pilot's chair, her mind already charting the course to Agashima, calculating risks.
She never reached it.
The world exploded.
A deafening BOOM tore through the cove, and the entire vessel was wrenched sideways. Marya was thrown against the console, metal groaning in protest. Sanza screamed, held fast by the harness. Jelly, who had been bouncing nervously, was plastered flat against the stairwell with a startled "Yipe!"
Alarms blared to life, red lights painting the interior in pulses of panic. The acrid smell of scorched metal and sea spray flooded through the ventilation.
Marya pushed herself up, a fresh, hotter curse on her lips. "What now?!"
She lunged for the hatch, throwing it open. The sight that greeted her was a masterstroke of bad timing.
The cove was no longer a secret. The rocky shoreline was lined with Marines, two dozen at least, their rifles aimed at the vessel. And out in the deeper water, just beyond the cove's entrance, sat Fujitora's massive warship. Its broadside was facing them, and from its gun ports, small plumes of smoke still drifted. The water where a cannonball had struck mere feet from the hull still churned.
Standing at the ship's railing, his coat damp but his posture unbent, was Admiral Fujitora. He held no transponder snail. His blind gaze was fixed unerringly on her hatch.
Marya stared, the pieces of her disastrous day locking into a final, impossible configuration. Pirates ahead. The Navy behind. Her crew as pawns in between.
A dry, humorless sound escaped her. Not a laugh, but the acknowledgment of a cosmic joke.
"This day," she said to the salt-heavy air, her voice barely audible over the ringing in her ears and the shouts of the Marines, "just keeps getting better and better."
The air over the hidden cove, already thick with tension, now cracked with the sharp, flat reports of naval rifles. A storm of lead whistled toward Marya as she stood in the open hatchway. She didn't flinch. She didn't dodge.
The bullets passed through her.
Not through her body, but through the space where her body appeared to be. She shimmered, her form dissolving momentarily into a wisp of grey vapor with each impact, the projectiles harmlessly tearing holes in the mist before she solidified again. To the Marines on the shore, it was a ghostly, impossible sight. A young woman in a leather jacket, walking through a hail of gunfire as if it were a spring shower.
One of the Marines lowered his rifle, his face pale. "She… she's a power holder!" he shouted, voice tinged with superstitious dread.
Marya sighed, a sound of profound weariness. This was a distraction. An irritating, noisy distraction from the real problems—a captured crew, a pirate ultimatum, a brother's name on the lips of a stranger. Her right hand reached over her shoulder, her fingers finding the familiar, worn leather of Nisshoku's hilt.
She didn't leap into a frenzy. She simply drew the blade and, still standing on the deck of her vessel, executed a single, sweeping horizontal cut. There was no visible flash, no shouted technique. A wave of pure, concussive will—Advanced Armament Haki unleashed as a Ryuo shockwave—rippled out from the obsidian edge. It hit the line of Marines like an invisible wall. The sound was a deep WHOMP of displaced air. Rifles flew from hands, helmets spun away, and two dozen men were lifted off their feet and flung backward into the jungle foliage, where they lay still, unconscious but alive. The principle was clear: remove the obstacle without unnecessary waste.
She turned immediately, her senses flaring. From the warship, a second cannon had fired, its black iron sphere aimed not at her, but at the hull of her vessel below the waterline. A tactical, disabling shot.
Marya's golden eyes tracked it. She reversed her grip and swung Nisshoku downward in a sharp, vertical arc. A thinner, more focused crescent of Haki shot forth, intersecting the cannonball in mid-air. It didn't deflect it; it unmade it. The iron sphere compressed, distorted, and then vanished in a puff of black dust and a muffled crump.
Silence returned, broken only by the moans of the wind and the gentle lap of water. Marya walked to the stern of her craft, her boots firm on the metal. She looked up at the distant figure of Fujitora on his warship's deck.
"Don't do this, Admiral," she called out, her voice carrying across the water without strain. "I can let you leave with your ship intact, or in shambles. Your choice."
Fujitora, his coat-tails stirring in the breeze, offered a small, knowing smirk. "Young lady," his voice boomed back, calm and resonant, "I was about to say the very same to you."
A dry chuckle escaped Marya's lips. It held no humor, only a final acceptance. "Okay," she said, almost to herself. "You had your chance."
She closed her eyes. The disciplined calm within her met the roaring, despairing power of the Achlys Fruit, fused with the Void's hunger. She didn't fight it; she channeled it. The air around her dropped in temperature. A fine, freezing mist began to weep from her skin, from the very air itself.
When her eyes opened, they were no longer both gold. Her left pupil swirled with the serene, drifting souls of the Elysian Fields; her right blazed with the damned and the burning pyres of Naraka. Her long black hair dissolved into liquid void-stuff—a stream of starlight, ash-gray tendrils, and screaming soul-smoke that froze the moisture in the air around it. Above her head, a tripartite halo flickered into existence: gold, silver, and obsidian. The black void-veins on her arms and neck glowed like poisoned rivers under her skin. In her hand,Nisshoku had become the Key of Thresholds, its blade split into three terrible aspects: radiant light, mirrored steel, and decaying teeth.
It was not a transformation; it was an unveiling.
The cove was instantly submerged. Not in common fog, but in the Mist of Oblivion. It rolled out from her in a silent, swallowing wave, a glacial bank so dense it turned the bright afternoon into a twilight of freezing grey. It coated the rocks in rime, and the water's surface stilled, filmed with a fragile layer of black ice. The world became muffled, distant, and terribly cold.
On the deck of Fujitora's warship, panic erupted. "I can't see!" "The compass is spinning!" "Where is the shore?!"
Fujitora stood firm in the swirling murk, his blind eyes useless, his other senses painting a terrifying picture. The cold bit deep, and the mist carried a psychic weight, a whispering despair. "She is a power holder as well," he muttered, his jaw tight. "A Logia, mutated by something older… truly formidable. Her lineage is a forge that created a monster…"
His analysis was cut off by a sound.
It was a toll. A deep, sonorous, heart-stopping GONG that vibrated through the ship's timbers, through the mist, through the marrow of every man aboard. It was not a sound heard with the ears, but felt in the soul. It was followed by another. And another. Nine times, the Death's Knell Toll rang out.
"Admiral! What is that? What's happening?" a voice shrieked from the whiteness.
Fujitora opened his mouth to command calm. "Men, it is only a—"
He was cut off by a wet, heavy THUD on the deck nearby. Then another. And another. Choking screams were sliced short. The sounds were close, personal, and final.
"Grim Reapers!" a marine wailed, his voice cracking with pure terror. "They are—!" His warning ended in another dull, lifeless impact.
Fujitora's world, built on the senses of gravity and sound, became a map of dying men. He felt their weights vanish from the deck as they were… harvested. He heard the soft, ethereal shhhhing of spectral scythes, the rattle of chains, and the silent, freezing expansion of the glacial swamp that now surrounded his ship in a parallel, cursed dimension. The Mist of Oblivion was not just a veil; it was the border of a tomb.
"The Mist of Oblivion," Fujitora breathed, understanding dawning. "The awakened power of the Achlys Fruit. The rumors from the underworld were true."
In the space between one toll and the next, she was among them.
One moment, the space before Fujitora was empty mist. The next, Marya stood there in her full, terrifying glory. The freezing swamp waters lapped at the deck planks around her boots. Her funeral-shroud robes, stitched with Tengu's feather motifs, did not move in the windless air. Her dual-colored eyes gazed upon him, not with hatred, but with an ancient, impersonal judgment.
She then looked past him, to the ship's mainmast. She lifted the Key of Thresholds high, its three blades gleaming dully in the grey light. With a thrust that held the weight of finality, she plunged it down, not onto the deck, but into the fabric of the dimension she had summoned.
The effect manifested in reality. The sturdy, naval-issue mast, twenty feet from her, didn't just splinter. It erupted. Wood exploded inward as if chewed by invisible jaws, shredded into kindling and frost-rimed splinters. Men who had been clinging to the rigging for safety screamed as they were thrown through the air, landing with broken sounds on the frozen deck or in the icy black water. The ship groaned in agony.
Fujitora's hand flew to the hilt of his sword, his knuckles white. The cold, strategic part of his mind computed the variables: the unknown range of her mist, the intangible reapers, the total sensory deprivation of his crew, the helplessness of his ship. This was not a duel. This was an extermination.
"Enough!" His voice was a roar that strained against the muffling mist.
Marya slowly turned her horrific, beautiful gaze back to him.
"You have won," Fujitora stated, the words ash in his mouth. He let his hand fall from his sword. "This engagement is yours. You are free to go."
Marya looked at him, and when she spoke, it was with a multitude of voices layered over her own—the sighing of blessed fields, the grinding stones of purgatory, the screams of the damned. "Wise choice."
The mist began to recede, pulling back like a tide of ghosts. The glacial swamp evaporated, leaving only damp, salt-stained wood. The crushing cold lifted. Her terrifying form flickered, the halo dimming, the void-hair retracting, the Key of Thresholds resolving back into the familiar, cursed shape of Nisshoku. She stood before him again, just a woman in a leather jacket, though her eyes remained dual-colored for a heartbeat longer, the rings within them stark.
Fujitora let out a long, slow groan, the weight of the concession settling on him. "You are truly your father's daughter."
The last of the mist cleared from her eyes, both returning to their normal gold. A faint, almost imperceptible smirk touched her lips. "You doubted?"
Fujitora shook his head, a gesture of weary respect. "No. But now I understand the full measure of it."
Marya gave a single, curt nod. She walked past him, toward the railing overlooking her waiting vessel. As she passed, she spoke, her voice now entirely her own, dry and edged with the ghost of a threat.
"Next time, Admiral? Just step aside and get out of the way."
Behind her, left amidst the wreckage of his mast and the unconscious forms of his crew, Fujitora allowed himself a small, grim smirk. It was not a smile of amusement, but of a lesson learned, and a future confrontation acknowledged. The test, it seemed, was ongoing.
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