Chapter 479: A World in Uproar
While Brett slept, the world shook.
Somewhere in the New World, a certain bird-man was laughing so hard it seemed like his face might split along the seams.
"Ha ha ha ha ha! Now this is something! This is really something!" He slapped his knee, grinning wide enough to swallow the horizon. "Word like this needs to reach every corner of the world the moment it breaks! Well done, Zephyr, you old Black Arm! You actually talked both of them into it! You actually did it!"
"Now the NEO Navy has really earned the right to call itself a navy!"
He cackled without restraint. "Add Fish-Man Island into the picture and they might genuinely have a shot at the World Government! And on top of that, the Revolutionary Army is already standing on the opposite side! Ha ha ha ha! I can almost see it now, a war that sweeps the whole world! This time, it might truly be the kind of upheaval that hasn't happened in eight hundred years!"
"I've been waiting so long for this!"
The NEO Navy's media wing was already preparing to move. But the World Government's press apparatus was faster. The bounty posters from Navy Headquarters had been finalized, the official statements drafted. Tomorrow's newspapers were already on the presses, rolling through the night.
The publishers, for their part, were sweating through their collars.
They had no choice. The situation was simply too extraordinary.
Two former Navy Admirals, defecting. In one move, the balance of power between the Navy and the NEO Navy had been rewritten almost completely. As of now, the NEO Navy could plausibly field enough strength to wage a real war against the Navy.
Was this the era finally coming apart at the seams?
The people who heard first couldn't stop the unease from spreading through them. Nobody could say what the world would look like on the other side of what was coming.
One way or another, the current that had been running beneath the surface for so long was about to break into the open.
What that would mean for the world, Brett had no idea.
He woke up not knowing how long he'd slept.
His stomach had woken him.
From the moment he'd left Fish-Man Island to now, the only thing he'd eaten was the bread Miss Ain had given him. The hunger had finally caught up with him in a way he couldn't ignore.
He opened his eyes, and the first thing that reached him was a familiar scent, clean and faint, like cool water over pale stone.
He turned his head.
Shyarly was lying beside him. Her cool, soft form was pressed close, and her long fish tail, still present since she hadn't yet reached the age when it would become legs, had curled loosely around his. Her dark hair was spread across her face in sleep, scattered strands crossing pale skin, the contrast of black against white as sharp and quiet as ink on paper.
Brett just looked at her.
How long had it been since he first met her?
Twenty years? It couldn't be less than that.
Somewhere across all of that time, without him noticing quite when it happened, every corner of him had filled up with her.
Shyarly wasn't the most beautiful woman Brett had ever seen. She wasn't the most gentle, the most considerate, or the most powerful. But she was Shyarly. The one person whose presence could still the noise inside him without asking anything of him at all. However bad things got out there, however close to the edge he'd been pushed, the moment he came back to Fish-Man Island and found her, it was as though the world settled back into place.
He reached out carefully and brushed the hair away from her face.
The girl who had once been a bright-eyed young prophet had grown into someone unmistakably, undeniably herself.
He was glad he'd been here to see it happen.
Really, no matter how you looked at her. She was just perfect.
Brett reflected privately that when it came to a certain other woman, the famous Boa Hancock, he had always been able to remain entirely unmoved. Calm as a stone, without a second thought.
But Shyarly was something else entirely.
"Mm."
Perhaps his attention had reached her somehow. Her eyelids fluttered, and she opened her eyes, finding his immediately.
"You're awake?"
Shyarly sat up with a small yawn, unhurried about it. "Do you want to eat?"
Brett wrapped his arms around her and pressed his face into her shoulder. He breathed in slowly. "You know, Shyarly, have you ever considered learning Observation Haki?"
She rested her arms around his neck, her fingers drifting through the hair at the back of his head with no particular urgency. "What are you talking about all of a sudden? I have no interest in fighting. Having you protect me is more than enough."
"That's not what I meant." Brett spoke quietly against her ear. "I was just thinking. It would be nice if you could read minds too."
Shyarly paused.
Then she said, quite calmly, "I don't need prophecy or mind-reading. If it's Brett, I already know."
"..."
He held her tighter.
"Shyarly always manages to say the most ordinary things in exactly the way that goes straight through you."
"I'm not that likeable a person," she replied, even.
"Who said that?" Brett pulled back enough to look at her directly. "I like you very much, Shyarly. No, more than that. I love you. An embarrassing amount."
"Yes, yes. I know. I love you a tremendous amount as well."
She reached up and ruffled his hair briskly. "Now. Do you want me to cook something?"
"That's completely perfunctory."
Brett sighed.
Then he felt something cool and brief touch his lips.
Shyarly sat back and tucked her hair behind her ear with one hand, entirely composed. "And now?"
Brett straightened up with absolute seriousness. "Now I desperately want to eat something you made. More than anything. Immediately."
A nod. "Simple things are fine, I assume. Though you don't have ingredients here."
"Don't underestimate prophecy, Brett. I brought some yesterday."
She picked up the piece of coral sitting beside the bed, formed a new bubble around herself with practiced ease, and drifted toward the kitchen. At the doorway she looked back, and the smile she gave him then was the rare, genuine kind that didn't bother hiding anything.
"Wait nicely."
Brett watched her go, smiling back with everything he had.
He lay there for a moment in the quiet that followed.
After what had happened before, there was a weight he hadn't entirely set down. Against a power like that, even with ancient weapons on their own side as a counterbalance, it was hard to imagine getting through what was coming without serious losses.
How many of his people might end up like the NEO Navy forces? Evaporated by something that enormous, that indifferent?
He couldn't picture how he'd feel watching that happen.
But worry wouldn't change the arithmetic. What he could do, what he needed to keep doing, was everything possible to improve their chances before it came to that.
Shyarly always said it the same way. The future ahead is the best possible one. All you have to do is walk toward it with your chin up and your fear behind you.
Just that. Nothing more than that.
Brett got up and stretched.
"Shyarly, do you need any help?"
"I have significant doubts about that."
"Don't underestimate me! Do you have any idea what a chef who can actually communicate with his ingredients is worth?"
"..."
Once he had thoroughly replenished himself on Shyarly's cooking, the vitality came flooding back.
His first order of business after that was the Ryugu Palace.
Brett sat on one of the palace sofas with a newspaper in each hand. The assembled faces of Fish-Man Island's most important people looked back at him from across the room.
"The whole world is in an uproar right now," he said.
"Of course it is." Tesoro grinned across from him.
"Hard to believe, even knowing what we know." Jinbei had his arms folded. "Something like this is just too far outside of what anyone expects."
"Agreed," Neptune said, lifting his coffee cup with a thoughtful expression. "If I hadn't already known the truth, I'm not sure I'd believe it myself."
They were all here. The people who mattered on this island.
Brett looked down at the two papers in his hands and said nothing for a moment.
The world was going to be very loud for a while.