-Broadcast-
The Sky Screen offered only glimpses of the training — fragments, not a continuous record. What came through was enough to sketch the shape of it: Charlotte Hikaru learning Fire Style from the beginning, starting with the most elementary hand seals, working until every reserve of energy in her body was empty. Day after day. The goal was clear enough to articulate even from the outside: she would not be entirely helpless against water techniques a second time. She would force the next Admiral she faced to spend more of their cards than Kisame had needed to spend against her.
Charlotte Katakuri's training was different in kind. His daily discipline included extended immersion in the seawater that ran through Leviathan's interior — not to endure it, but to understand it. To let his body sit in the feeling of powerlessness and develop a precise map of what the Mochi Mochi no Mi did to him under those conditions. The first stage of awakening was behind him. The second stage — what the ancient texts called liberation — was the gate he needed to reach. Without crossing it, he would stay inside this whale indefinitely.
His Observation Haki was the other frontier. His future-sight was real and had saved him more than once, but Uchiha Izuna moved in ways that the Haki couldn't fully predict — the window of foreknowledge too narrow, the gaps too exposed. Izuna began teaching him Ki cultivation from the foundation: not the rough technique Katakuri had developed through combat experience, but the structural principle underneath it. The goal was to braid the three types of Haki together until they formed something unified — a Ki that was genuinely his rather than three separate instruments operated in sequence.
Observers watching the Sky Screen noted, with some envy, that the siblings had found a teacher most practitioners would spend their entire careers unable to locate.
-Real World-
The revelation landed differently for different people in the war room.
The Sky Screen had not announced the connection outright. It had assembled it — through the fragments of Leviathan's interior life shown in recent broadcasts, through Izuna's knowledge of the Uchiha bloodline's manifestations, through the timeline of Charlotte Linlin's disappearance in the Wano region and her return carrying two infants — and the implication was plain enough that any attentive observer could complete the inference.
Uchiha Izuna was the biological father of Charlotte Hikaru and Charlotte Alluka.
Charlotte Linlin had been in the Wano region during her lost period, her condition deteriorating, her grip on any particular personality failing. She had ended up inside Leviathan — how, exactly, was not specified — and in whatever state she was in during that period, she had produced two children with the last surviving elder of the Uchiha clan.
Borsalino absorbed this information and said what he was thinking, because he generally did.
"I can't picture the scene. Uchiha Izuna surviving it at all is the actual miracle." He paused with genuine reflection. "The woman's physique is a mountain. Not metaphorically. An actual mountain of a woman. I don't know what a man is supposed to do with that information or how he proceeds."
Several people in the room did not comment. Several others failed to maintain neutral expressions.
"The more instructive point," Kuzan said, steering the subject toward the practical, "is that it explains the bloodline. The Uchiha inheritance through Hikaru, the circumstances of the twins' birth, why Linlin couldn't identify the father afterward. It was a period she doesn't have reliable access to." He stroked his chin. "It also raises a question about Wet Bone Forest Cave."
He had been thinking about it since the Leviathan sequences began airing. The connection point between Kisame and the creature was established — Leviathan had taught Kisame, had recommended him to the Fleet Admiral, had been the mechanism through which a fish-man from outside the institutional structure ended up as an Admiral. And the reason Kisame had been able to find Wet Bone Forest Cave in the first place, while no Marine intelligence operation had ever located it, might be simpler than anyone had assumed.
"Wet Bone Forest Cave might be inside Leviathan," Kuzan said. "A section of the creature's interior that Kisame found and used as a training ground. That's why it moves. That's why it can't be mapped. It's not a fixed location — it's wherever Leviathan happens to be."
The war room sat with this for a moment.
Artoria Pendragon, who had been dozing at her station with the frequency that had recently become her identifying characteristic in these sessions, did not wake up for the Izuna reveal or for the Wet Bone Forest Cave theory. She had become something between a mascot and a mystery — the youngest Admiral candidate in the New Marine's history, capable of extraordinary things when she was paying attention, and apparently comfortable sleeping through the portions she'd already processed.
Kuzan considered whether Leviathan had told her something in her sleep and decided not to pursue it.
Garp was in a good mood, which was not always correlated with the content of what the Sky Screen was showing. Today it was correlated.
"The Celestial Dragons' holy land is on fire again," he said, with the particular satisfaction of a man watching a long-standing grievance receive natural consequences. "Bigger fire than last time. You can see it clearly from Kisame's exit angle. The whole thing."
"Garp." Sengoku's tone carried the weight of decades of this.
"I'm just describing what I see. The fire is very large. This is observable." He paused. "I don't know exactly what Buggy did in there, but whoever's been living in comfortable certainty that their position is untouchable — they needed the reminder. Badly."
He smiled and did not continue. He had learned, over many years, where the line was. Other people in the war room agreed with him and would not say so professionally. He was the only one who could afford to be the Marine hero and say what he actually thought, and he was not going to waste that.
"Back to the operational matter," Sengoku said, addressing the room as a whole. "Kozuki Momonosuke is on Cake Island. Intelligence confirms Whitebeard is mobilizing — he considers the boy effectively family and he will not allow Charlotte Linlin to use Oden's son as a breeding asset. The Beasts Pirates have not moved, which may indicate Kaido's response is coming through different channels."
He let that sit, then continued.
"Charlotte Linlin's interest in the Hyuga bloodline through the Kozuki line is documented in the Sky Screen's depictions. If Momonosuke reaches adulthood in Big Mom's custody and produces offspring with that inheritance, we are looking at a compounding problem." He was not given to imprecision. "The Hyuga bloodline is not a smaller version of the Uchiha situation. It is a comparable one. We will not allow it to develop."
The order that followed was clean and unambiguous.
Sakazuki and Aramaki would attend the wedding on Cake Island — uninvited, as would everyone else who was coming — and bring Momonosuke back. If the situation permitted a cleaner outcome on-site, that was also acceptable. The Uo Uo no Mi, Model: Seiryu that the Sky Screen showed Momonosuke possessing in the future had not been eaten in the present; the defenders at Punk Hazard were instructed to continue the search. A Devil Fruit capable of producing an Admiral-class combatant was not something the Marine could afford to leave in neutral hands.
The war room processed this and began the relevant preparations.