-Broadcast-
Iron Dragon was not a title Gajeel Redfox had asked for, but the outside world had given it to him and he had done nothing to discourage it. Among the second generation of the Revolutionary Army's commanders, he was the one that gave the Marine consistent headaches — not because he was the most ideological, but because he was extremely effective and didn't require a reason beyond the fight itself.
"Your army," Smoker said, his tone carrying the particular flatness of someone who has moved past anger into something colder, "is targeting the Marine now instead of the WG. Is Sabo trying to get everyone killed, or is this actually a plan?"
"We've worked together before." Gajeel stopped chewing and looked at him. "Temporary allies — you and me, one operation. That's where it ended, and we both knew it would." He picked up a new piece of ore. "The people who took down Crow and the first-generation command — you were in that group. I know what you did at Baltigo. Most of the second generation does."
Smoker didn't deny it.
The Marine's assault on Baltigo had been what it was: a coordinated strike against a legitimate military target, executed with the kind of thoroughness that left very little standing afterward. Crow, the former Northern Army commander, had died in it. The fact that Smoker had been part of the force that killed him was information that lived in Gajeel's roster of relevant history, not forgotten and not forgiven, but filed under this is the world we operate in rather than this is a personal debt to collect today.
"I want to kill you for that," Gajeel said, with the same factual register he used for everything else. "But that's not what I'm here for. And you're not here for revenge either — you're here because you want to know if the Clown King is in that fortress."
The words landed differently than they were meant to.
Smoker's composure — which had been managed, barely, since they stepped onto Iron Island — cracked.
The murderous aura didn't build. It arrived. Like something that had been waiting behind a door and the door had been opened from the outside.
"Don't call him that." His voice was at a register that had nothing performative in it. "If Buggy is in that castle — if he's actually here — I've been waiting for this. I know what I am against a Yonko. I know I lose. I don't care."
Gin spoke from two steps back, quiet and without urgency: "You'll care in about thirty seconds when it becomes my problem too." He hadn't changed his posture. His Admiral uniform was already wet at the collar — the Ame Ame no Mi responding to his state without requiring conscious direction — and the sky above them had started to shift, dark clouds accumulating with an artificial efficiency that had nothing to do with the island's weather patterns.
He was also calculating. Nakime had closed the black fog behind them entirely; Infinity Castle had absorbed their position deep enough that real-time communication with the Marine Fleet Admiral was not currently possible. Whatever they learned here, they were learning alone for now.
"Two Admirals against one commander," Gin continued, addressing the general situation rather than Gajeel ally. "Sabo sent you in as an assist, not a solo operation. Either there's backup, or someone miscounted."
Smoker and Gin began manifesting their fruits without ceremony — Smoker's entire body starting to smoke in the colorless, odorless register that made the White Chase genuinely dangerous rather than visually dramatic, and Gin's rain already beginning to fall from the constructed cloudbank above them. The three-way pressure of environmental manipulation and two Logia users in active deployment was not a configuration Gajeel could sustain alone indefinitely.
He didn't appear concerned.
He put one hand behind him and raised his voice slightly.
"Come out. Admiral Gin's got an old friend to catch up with."
A man walked into the space between the mining walls with the absolute confidence of someone who had arrived at an event he'd arranged.
Blond hair, catching the island's red-accented light. Pink sunglasses that covered his eyes without concealing anything about his expression. A flamingo-pink coat draped over an open chest, cropped trousers exposing the ankles, pointed shoes that announced each step against the ore-rich ground with a crisp, deliberate sound.
"Hey, hey, hey." The voice was everything Doflamingo's voice had always been — amused at the gap between how others perceived a situation and how he perceived it, and delighted that the gap existed. "Admiral. I wonder if you remember my face. Dressrosa — you took such good care of the place."
Gin's eyes went to the face and stayed there.
His mind did what minds do when presented with information that doesn't fit the available categories: it rejected, then reconsidered, then rejected again. He had watched Doflamingo die. Not as a distant report, not as secondhand intelligence — he had been there. Had seen the life leave. Had been present for the aftermath that left no reasonable room for uncertainty. He had taken the head to Ann himself and confirmed the delivery.
He remembered the eyes going dull. He remembered the s.
And yet.
"You're not Doflamingo." He said it firmly, because firmness was what the situation required when your own memory was the thing under interrogation. "He died in Dressrosa. I was there. You're not fooling me."
Doflamingo smiled. It was the smile of someone who had heard this argument before, in other forms, in other places, from other people who had been equally certain.
He extended one hand. White threads emerged from his fingertips — clean, precise, exactly as they had always moved — and did something small and precise with a loose rock near the wall, demonstrating the Ito Ito no Mi (String-String Fruit) the way you demonstrate proof of identity: without drama, because the fact speaks.
"I've been resurrected more than once by the time I crossed your path." He let the threads retract. "Every time you thought it was finished. Every time it wasn't." He tilted his head. "Do you want to have a conversation about why, or would you prefer to start with something physical? Either works for me."
Gin processed this.
He had delivered the head. He had confirmed it was dead. Luffy's engagement with Doflamingo in the later stages of Dressrosa had been — according to everything Gin understood about what Conqueror's Haki at that output did to a target — the kind of thing you didn't come back from. That was the framework he'd been operating with.
The Ito Ito no Mi apparently had opinions about that framework.
The String-String Fruit's applications for survival and reconstruction were something Gin had not fully mapped. He was mapping them now, under suboptimal conditions, standing on an iron island inside a pirate alliance's interdimensional castle with two opponents he'd been managing to trap him here.
Did I give Ann a head that wasn't actually finished?
The question was not productive in the immediate term. He filed it and brought his attention back to the present problem.
Doflamingo was watching both Admirals with the particular interest of someone who is exactly where he wants to be.