-Broadcast-
This was the life Sasori had chosen, and he had no complaints about it.
He was a puppet now — fully, permanently, by his own design. He did not eat. He did not sleep. He did not age. He had shed everything that made flesh a liability and kept everything that made it useful. The only obligation he carried was to Lord Buggy, who had given him, without condition or sentiment, what no one else in the world could provide: bodies. Strong ones. Famous ones. The raw material for art that would outlast everything.
The Joker Pirates' ambitions were his ambitions. Buggy's dream was his dream. He would follow that man's path until the mechanisms inside his puppet body finally failed — and he had built them to last a very long time.
"You were a pirate once, Gin." Sasori's voice carried the flat, precise quality of someone who did not raise it for emphasis. "Once a pirate, always a pirate. The Joker Pirates will welcome you at any time, regardless of what uniform you're wearing now."
Gin's answer came fast, and hot.
"Monsters who desecrate the dead." The word monsters landed like a blade set down on a table rather than swung — deliberate, not impulsive. "People like you should be put down. Clean up whatever poetry you've built around it — it doesn't change what you've done. The Marine has been good to me. I won't go back."
Sasori did not argue. He had expected this.
What Gin did not say, and what Sasori could not have known, was how far the man had come to reach that answer.
He had found the Ame Ame no Mi (Rain-Rain Fruit) by chance — pulled from a refrigeration chamber inside a shark's belly, of all places, still intact against the odds. A Logia. The kind of power that changed a person's trajectory overnight. In the years after Whitebeard's era ended, when the balance of the seas was still settling, a Logia user of Gin's caliber rose fast. Other pirates gathered around him. He became a captain not because he sought it but because the gap in strength made the decision for everyone else.
He was not suited for it. He knew it. He was a subordinate by nature — someone who took on the character of whoever he followed, who found his best self in service to someone worth serving. He had become a pirate in the first place because he had followed Don Krieg. That said everything necessary about the mechanism.
When the Marine admirals came for his crew, they came in force. What had gathered around Gin scattered or fell. By the end of it, he was the only one left standing, taken not in defeat exactly but in isolation — the last figure on a field after everything else had been removed.
They brought him before Artoria Pendragon.
He had expected a tribunal. A sentence. Possibly an execution, depending on her mood. What he received instead was a conversation that lasted through an entire night, the Fleet Admiral sitting across from him without ceremony, speaking to him like someone she intended to have a future relationship with. She did not catalogue his past offences or use them as leverage. She spoke about the world she was trying to build, and she asked him what he wanted from the world he'd lived in so far.
By the time the sun came up, he had run out of reasons to say no.
She cleared his record. She gave him a rank. Mission by mission, the file attached to his name grew heavier with achievements rather than crimes, and his personal strength outpaced every benchmark the Marine set for officers at his level. Artoria herself presented him with the Admiral's title — Aohebi, the Blue Serpent — in a ceremony that felt, he had to admit, like arriving somewhere he'd been walking toward without knowing it.
He was not going back.
"I don't know whether the Marine survives to the end." Sasori's tone had not changed. "But today, you end here."
The exchange had reached its natural conclusion. Sasori returned to Edward Newgate.
The wound in the puppet's abdomen sealed behind him without sound, the flesh-and-wood seams drawing together until no gap remained. Sasori settled into the hollow interior — the chest cavity his finest work had prepared ally for this purpose, sized precisely for a body that did not need to breathe. His real form would remain here, protected by seven metres of the most powerful combat puppet he had ever constructed.
The elite puppet did not require a puppeteer at the controls every moment. This was the nuance that made elite puppets categorically different from standard ones: they had their own minds, their own instincts, their own fighting sense. The man Sasori had reconstructed was still Whitebeard, in the ways that mattered for battle. He retained the reflexes built across decades of combat, the tactical instincts that had kept him standing when lesser men would have fallen, the sheer aggression that had defined his presence on the sea.
What the puppet did not have was memory of this moment. In the time Sasori had been visible, Whitebeard's consciousness had been suspended — no conflicting memories, no confusion, no awareness of the pause. When he returned to himself, the fight simply resumed.
Sasori provided direction through something closer to suggestion than command. Edward Newgate had no knowledge of Gin. He had never met the man. But the puppet opened its eyes on Iron Island with one clear intention already in place, rising from some deep stratum of reconstructed instinct: there is a Marine Admiral in front of me, and my sons need avenging.
"I'll take an Admiral's head today," the puppet said, and the voice was Edward Newgate's — deep, unhurried, carrying the weight of someone who had never needed to shout to be heard across a battlefield. "For my boys."
He rose to his full height.
The Conqueror's Haki came with him.
It did not announce itself with sound or light. It pressed outward from his body like a tide coming in — a pressure that had nothing to do with Devil Fruits or physical force, a direct communication between his will and the world's willingness to bend. Black lightning threaded through the air around him, crackling at the edges of his silhouette. The ground around his feet groaned. The sea at the island's shore went choppy without wind to explain it.
Everyone on Iron Island felt it at the same time. Not as pain, exactly — as the sudden, wordless understanding that something vastly more powerful than themselves had decided to pay attention. The men who were not Admirals found handholds, or sat down, or simply stopped moving.
Gin squinted against the pressure. He held his footing, but not without effort.
The strongest man on the sea. Even dead. Even rebuilt from materials and craft rather than the original living substance. Even knowing, from analysis, that the version before him was not Whitebeard at his absolute peak — that puppet construction retained capability rather than perfectly restoring it. Even knowing all of that: this was what had required the full strength of the Marine and Whitebeard's own failing body to put down the first time. That the Marine had managed it once did not make the achievement feel smaller. It made it feel more significant.
If the Conqueror's Haki came through, then the Observation and Armament Haki came through too. And the Gura Gura no Mi...
Gin did not finish the thought before Murakumogiri was already moving.
The Supreme Grade blade carved through the air with Armament Haki wrapped from tip to crossguard, black and dense, trailing the afterimage of the swing as the puppet crossed the distance between them in something that did not resemble a step so much as the elimination of intervening space. Gin read the trajectory and made a decision that had no room for debate: his body came apart.
The Ame Ame no Mi dissolved him into water vapour from the inside out, the man's physical form dispersing into a fine mist that spread and thinned across the open air, diffusing away from the path of the blade before the blade arrived. The swing connected with nothing.
Murakumogiri passed through empty air where a Marine Admiral had been.
The puppet Whitebeard tracked the mist with eyes that had been built to find targets. His left fist — the one not holding the blade — began to glow.
Not the black of Armament Haki. White. A deep, structural white that seemed to originate not at the surface of the fist but somewhere inside it, resonating outward through the knuckles and into the surrounding space.
The Gura Gura no Mi (Tremor-Tremor Fruit).
"Stop hiding." The voice was flat with contempt, not heat. "Come out."
The fist drove into the air.
Not into anything. Into the air itself — into the medium — and the medium fractured. The space around the impact point cracked like a mirror struck at its centre, fissures spreading outward in every direction, the fabric of the air breaking open in lines that had no physical explanation beyond the force behind them. The shockwave that followed was not a wave in the conventional sense. It was a discontinuity. A break in continuity between one moment and the next.
The ground registered it as an earthquake. The earth cracked in radiating lines from where he stood. The sea at the shore surged — not into waves that built slowly but into walls that rose and rushed without preamble, driven by a force originating hundreds of metres from the water itself. They came in and kept coming.
The dispersed mist that was Gin caught it throughout its volume simultaneously. Not a surface hit. Not a directed strike he could angle away from. The Tremor-Tremor Fruit's force propagated through the medium he was occupying — he had become the medium — and the shockwave moved through him the way it would move through any substance, dealing damage to everything it passed through.
It was the fundamental problem with a Logia facing this particular fruit. You could become the air, the water, the lightning, the mist. But the Tremor-Tremor Fruit did not hit you. It hit the space you were in.
Gin reconstituted.
He pulled himself back together from the dispersed vapour with the deliberate, controlled concentration of someone who had practiced this under conditions far worse than combat. His form solidified in the air above the island, standing on nothing, facing the puppet below. His face was bleeding from every opening in it — eyes, ears, nose, mouth. The internal damage was real and significant in a way that superficial cuts were not. He could feel it. Things inside him that were usually silent were not silent anymore.
He had not taken injuries like this since before Artoria had handed him an Admiral's title. Possibly not before that, either.
He raised one hand and wiped the blood from his chin without breaking eye contact with the thing below.
"The Marine killed Whitebeard once." His voice was steady. "We can do it again."
Above the Island, the sky was changing.
The clouds that had been gathering since the beginning of the fight were moving with intent now — not drifting, not pushed by wind, but building toward something. They thickened and darkened from the centre outward, spreading across the sky in a formation that blocked the light in stages. The air between the clouds and the ground carried the charge of something about to happen.
The storm that Admiral Aohebi was assembling over Iron Island had not yet broken. But it was close.