-Broadcast-
The sky above Iron Island became a second battlefield.
Water weapons materialized in the air where the rain curtain had thickened — not rain anymore but construction, the Ame Ame no Mi's more deliberate applications taking shape out of the accumulated moisture. Arrows with edges sharp enough to pass for steel. Blades that rotated in place with the patient persistence of something waiting to be aimed. Heavy spherical masses whose weight was immediately apparent from the displacement they made in the air around them. Axes, hooks, tined weapons — an entire ordinance assembled from precipitation, catching what little light reached Iron Island's oxidized surface and throwing it back as cold, transparent radiance.
Gin stood above it all, partially dissolved into water vapor, framed by his own armory. He had heard Doflamingo's name too many times, in too many conditions, to give the Heavenly Yaksha face he wasn't sure it was owed.
"You're not making me very happy," he said, looking down at the figure working his threads against the acid rain below. "Come up or don't, but make a choice."
The weapons didn't wait for the choice.
They fell together — not all at once but in sequence, the way rain falls when there's a wind, one wave yielding to the next before the target could fully address either. Doflamingo's threads worked. The Ito Ito no Mi's awakening pulled material from the corroded ground, rebuilt it into thread, cycled the damaged filament back before the acid could finish it, and produced defensive layering three times over and three times under. He blocked the first wave.
The second wave showed him the ceiling on that approach.
Each weapon that broke through his defense carried the sharpness of something second only to a Supreme Grade blade. They found gaps in the Armament Haki. They found each other's paths. Doflamingo's expression, which had spent the entirety of their engagement maintaining the particular quality of amusement that had been his public face for years, changed.
He looked up.
"There are too many," he said, and it was the most honest thing he had said since walking onto Iron Island.
The weapons broke through in numbers. Armament Haki could hold against some of them, and some of them, and some of them — but all of them, sustained, with the acid rain simultaneously reducing the Haki's duration and the water-constructed weapons striking immediately after each repair, was a problem with no workable solution at his current output. He didn't have the strength he'd had in Dressrosa. Whatever he was, he was not operating at that level.
One by one, the weapons found purchase.
He was fixed in place by the accumulation — blood running, various weapon shafts anchoring him upright, the life draining out of his eyes in the way it had drained out before on at least two prior occasions that Gin was aware of. The battlefield went quiet around the fact of his death. The acid rain continued falling, indifferent to the outcome.
Gin descended and stood beside the body.
He had done this before. More than once, as it turned out, which meant the question of how many times it was possible to kill the same person remained open. He examined the corpse with the attention of someone trying to understand a trick he'd seen performed several times and still hadn't fully decoded.
The Ito Ito no Mi's awakening had been real. The moves had been right — the angles, the sequencing, the particular way the threads moved when the awakening reached its maximum breadth. The voice, the micro-expressions, the manner. Any observer who had met Doflamingo once and not twice would have been completely convinced.
A puppet. The conclusion assembled itself from the available evidence without requiring much work. Someone built a puppet that could use the fruit.
If Gajeel's backup was this — a puppet capable of Shichibukai-level output wearing the face of a dead Yonko cadre, convincing enough to destabilize opponents emotionally before the fight began — then the Revolutionary Army had been fighting smarter than Gin had given them credit for. And if this was only the backup, the primary opponent was somewhere on Iron Island waiting for the Doflamingo puppet to do its job.
He turned to find Gajeel.
Smoker had been contained — the seastone net was doing what seastone nets did, and whatever Smoker was working on from inside it hadn't produced a resolution yet. One Admiral down, one standing, one dead puppet on the ground.
And something was moving across the island.
He emerged from the puppet's hollow chest the way a person emerges from a doorway they'd always intended to use.
Red hair, dark and deeply set eyes, the expression of someone whose attention was currently on something precise and not particularly urgent. He was not tall. He moved in a way that didn't announce itself — not the aggressive kinetic presence of most fighters, but the steady movement of someone who had already decided how this would go and was simply walking toward the conclusion.
Behind him on the ground, the Whitebeard puppet he'd been inside continued to exist: nearly seven meters tall, golden hair still catching the wind, a crescent-shaped white beard that the builder had gotten exactly right. In its hand — held properly, at the correct angle, with the weight distributed the way a man who had used it for decades would hold it — was Murakumogiri, Whitebeard's Supreme Grade blade.
A duplicate of it, at least. Real enough.
"Whitebeard is my best work so far," the young man said. He wasn't addressing Gin with any particular urgency. He was describing something he was proud of, the way an artist discusses a piece at exhibition. "I want to know how much distance there is between him and a Marine Admiral. That's worth finding out."
Sky Screen Character Note: Sasori — Joker Pirates Seventh. Paramecia-type Devil Fruit — Puppet-Puppet Fruit. Ability user.
Gin looked at the Whitebeard puppet. Then at the person who had stepped out of it.
The Tremor-Tremor Fruit — the Gura Gura no Mi — had been taken by Blackbeard at Marineford. That was confirmed and documented. If Sasori's puppets could retain the original Devil Fruit abilities of whoever they were modeled on, the question wasn't whether the Whitebeard puppet had the Gura Gura no Mi. The question was whether a fruit that had already passed to another user could be replicated through the puppet mechanic, or whether what the puppet could demonstrate was something different — a copy of the power that derived from the puppet's construction rather than the fruit itself.
Either way, if that puppet swung Murakumogiri and activated what it was built to activate, Iron Island's geological stability was going to become a question.
Gin had killed Doflamingo again. He had a puppet-builder in front of him, a Whitebeard replica looming at his left, and Smoker still netted somewhere behind him.
He prepared himself for what came next.
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