-Real World-
Uchiha Madara's arrival on the Fleet Admiral's flagship had produced an immediate effect on every Marine below Admiral rank.
Fear was understandable. The spatial distortion that had deposited an ancient Uchiha onto the deck — the same technique that had brought him to the battlefield at the Devil's Triangle, the same spatial manipulation that made intercepting him nearly impossible — meant that the vessel had just become a combat zone with an Emperor-class opponent standing ten meters from where most of the command staff conducted operations.
If this ship became a battlefield in the conventional sense, survival rates for non-combatants approached zero.
"Sengoku," Madara said, and his voice carried the specific tone of someone making an offer they expected to be declined, "hand over the girl. Today's farce ends completely." A pause. "Think carefully about your subordinates."
The man didn't mind killing here. This was evident in his posture, in the way his eyes moved across the deck taking inventory of targets, in the complete absence of any indication that the lives present represented anything more than tactical variables. In Uchiha Madara's assessment, outsiders were numbers. If those numbers could be leveraged to pressure an opponent, that was efficient. If they couldn't, they were simply obstacles to be removed.
Artoria Pendragon was the Marine's future.
The Sky Screen had established this as institutional doctrine. Every Marine on the ship, from the Fleet Admiral to the newest recruit who'd signed up because the food was regular, understood that surrendering the knight girl meant surrendering everything the organization was attempting to become. The twelve Admirals operating under unified command. The merit-based system that drew talent from every species rather than human supremacy. The vision of a Marine that served justice rather than political convenience.
Killing her meant all of that remained theoretical rather than implemented.
The silence lasted perhaps three seconds.
Then someone — a sailor, middle-rank, no one whose name would appear in history books — straightened his back and shouted.
"Fight to the end for justice!"
The effect was immediate.
Not universal, not instantaneous across the entire crew, but spreading in the way that conviction spreads when one person demonstrates it's possible to choose principle over survival. Other voices took it up. The shouts weren't coordinated. They didn't have the rehearsed quality of a slogan. They had the raw quality of people who'd made a calculation about what dying for would be worth it.
"If you want Artoria, step over our dead bodies first!"
"Evil loses eventually!"
The phrasing was imperfect. The delivery was imperfect. Several of the Marines shouting were visibly afraid — hands shaking, voices cracking, the physical signs of people whose bodies were communicating that this decision had consequences. But they were shouting anyway, because the alternative was living in a world where they'd chosen their own survival over the organization's future, and that world didn't contain anything worth the additional years.
Dignity had value. Surrendering to threats had costs. Even people who looked weak when standing next to Admiral-class combatants had convictions that operated independently of their combat capability.
They'd all seen the Sky Screen. They knew what Artoria built in the future. Sacrificing the architect meant sacrificing the structure, and the structure — the Marine that treated its members as people rather than resources, that elevated based on merit rather than politics, that united every species under a shared principle — was worth more than any individual life including their own.
Everyone else on this ship could die. Artoria Pendragon could not die here. She had work remaining.
The atmosphere had reached the point where words were unnecessary.
Fleet Admiral Sengoku removed his justice cloak with the deliberate motion of someone who'd performed this action before battles his entire career. The coat came off. His shirt followed. A man in his position did not reach that position by surrendering when threatened, and whatever else could be said about Sengoku's career — the bureaucratic paralysis, the political compromises, the Five Elders' assessment that he'd become more figurehead than force — he had never been a coward.
He would fight to the end for the justice he believed in. He would transmit that justice to the next generation of Fleet Admirals. This was the obligation the position carried.
"You heard Uchiha Madara's offer," he said to his crew, and his voice carried across the deck without strain. "The Marine has weak people. It does not have cowards. As your Fleet Admiral—"
His body began changing.
"—it is my honor to serve with subordinates like you."
The light came first.
Not the golden glow of Borsalino's Pika Pika no Mi (Glint-Glint Fruit), not the specific quality of light that Logia users produced when transitioning between states. This was Buddha-light, the illumination that religious art depicted around enlightened figures, emerging from Sengoku's body as though his skin had decided to stop containing it.
It rose like dawn — the first ray of sunlight breaking a dark sky, spreading outward from his position, touching everyone present.
The Hito Hito no Mi, Model: Daibutsu (Human-Human Fruit, Great Buddha) operated at full conversion.
Sengoku's body expanded. The process was rapid but not instantaneous — flesh and bone reorganizing themselves according to the Mythical Zoan's template, skin transitioning from human coloring to gold, the proportions shifting from man-sized to monument-sized. His figure grew massive and majestic, the specific scale that temples were built to accommodate, every detail carrying the weight of something that had been carved with religious intent.
The golden Buddha's face held compassion.
This was the fruit's signature — not the rage that some Zoan transformations produced, not the predatory focus that carnivore-types generated, but benevolence. His eyes revealed wisdom and mercy. His expression radiated the tranquility of someone who had seen suffering and responded with the conviction that it should end. Every subtle movement of his features communicated that same quality: gentleness, understanding, the promise that those who approached would find protection.
The Buddha-light spread across the deck like spring wind — warm, reassuring, carrying away worry and pain, replacing them with hope and courage. The darkness that fear had planted in people's hearts dissolved under it. The fighting spirit that Madara's threat had suppressed returned.
The Marines felt it and straightened further.
This was their Fleet Admiral. This was the Hito Hito no Mi, Model: Daibutsu operating at its ceiling — the fruit that turned its user into the physical embodiment of enlightened compassion, the Mythical Zoan whose very presence inspired the conviction that justice would prevail because justice was worth fighting for.
Madara watched the transformation complete with the expression of someone encountering an old acquaintance.
"I miss those days," he said, and there was something in his tone that wasn't quite nostalgia and wasn't quite satisfaction but occupied the space between. "The last time I fought a Wooden Buddha was nearly eight hundred years ago."
His hands moved through two seals — simple, economical, the kind that practitioners who'd been using ninjutsu for centuries performed without conscious thought.
"Katon: Karyū Enbu!" (Fire Release: Fire Dragon Flame Song)
Four fire dragons erupted from his mouth simultaneously.
They came from different angles — north, south, east, west, the spacing perfect, converging on the Buddha's position with the coordinated movement of predators that had hunted together before. The technique's signature was its certainty: one hundred percent hit rate, no conventional evasion possible, the only response being to withstand the impact directly.
Sengoku, in his Buddha-form, made no defensive gesture.
He didn't raise his arms to block. He didn't generate a barrier. He simply moved forward through the fire dragons' approach, his golden body absorbing the flames as they made contact, accepting the damage as a cost he was willing to pay for what came next.
His objective was tactical rather than survival-focused: shift the battlefield away from the ship. The farther he could drag Madara from the flagship's deck, the more subordinates could evacuate to the surrounding vessels. Every meter of distance he created was lives saved.
The Buddha's palm came up wreathed in golden light.
"Daibussho: Shougeki Sho!" (Great Buddha Palm: Impact Palm)
The shock wave that released from his hand was immediate and comprehensive — a golden pressure front that extinguished the four fire dragons in its path and continued toward Madara's position at a speed that eliminated reaction time for anyone operating without advanced Observation Haki.
The blue-white Susanoo materialized around the Uchiha.
The Buddha's shock wave struck the skeletal construct and sent it backward — not shattering it, not breaking through it, but displacing it as a physical object through pure kinetic force. Madara slid across the deck still enclosed in the Susanoo's ribs, the energy skeleton's feet leaving trails in the wood.
When he stopped, cracks were visible in the construct's bones.
Not catastrophic damage — the Susanoo remained functional, remained capable of defense, but the structural integrity had been tested and found to have limits. The Buddha Palm's force at close range was sufficient to damage even an energy construct that had deflected Garp and Borsalino without visible strain.
If that palm had struck Madara's actual body, the result would have been immediate and terminal.
"Still capable," Madara observed, and began the next technique without pause.
"Mokuton: Mokuryū no Jutsu!" (Wood Release: Wood Dragon Technique)
Two dragons manifested.
They emerged from the deck planks themselves — the wood of the ship responding to the ninjutsu, reorganizing its structure, growing and animating according to Madara's command. The dragons were green, vital, covered in scales that caught light and returned it with the sheen of living things. They moved with serpentine grace, coiling upward and outward, approaching the Buddha from both sides.
The Buddha's body was mountain-massive, majestic in the way that geological formations were majestic, but the wooden dragons were built for exactly this kind of engagement. They wrapped around his arms, his torso, his legs — not restraining through strength but through the specific property that Wood Release carried: energy absorption.
Their scales began glowing as they fed.
The dragons were drawing on the Buddha's power, growing thicker and longer as they drained the life-force and Haki that the transformation generated, tightening their coils with every moment. Sengoku found himself immobilized — not through overwhelming force but through systematic energy theft, his movement progressively restricted as the technique worked.
He'd underestimated Wood Release ninjutsu.
This was a mistake with consequences. The dragons continued their work, scales brightening, bodies expanding, the feedback loop accelerating as more energy meant tighter grip meant more efficient drainage meant more energy available.
Golden light flashed from distance.
The sword strike came from outside the immediate battlefield — a cutting wave traveling at speed, severing both wooden dragons cleanly through their midsections. The technique collapsed immediately, the separated segments losing cohesion and falling away from the Buddha's body as inert wood.
Sengoku tore the remaining vegetation from himself with violence, the golden Buddha's hands ripping away vines and branches, clearing his form.
"Artoria," Madara said, and turned his attention toward the source of the strike. "The future Fleet Admiral, exactly as Doflamingo's intelligence suggested. Sengoku keeps you close."
Artoria Pendragon stood outside the cabin entrance.
She was dressed in her Marine Admiral's coat — white, carrying the justice kanji, worn over practical combat attire that had been designed for movement rather than ceremony. Her blonde hair moved slightly in the wind that Madara's spatial distortion had created. Her green eyes held the specific quality of someone who'd spent years being exhausted and had learned to function anyway.
The sword in her hand was invisible.
Not metaphorically invisible — literally absent from visual spectrum, its presence communicated only through the way air currents behaved around it and the very slight distortion where the blade displaced space. Invisible Air, the bounded field of wind that concealed Excalibur's true form, rendered the weapon's length and reach unknowable to observers.
Her fighting spirit was evident in her stance, in the way her weight was distributed, in the readiness to move that every line of her body communicated.
"The Knight King does not allow the weak to die for her," she said, and her voice carried across the deck with the same authority it carried when issuing fleet-wide commands. "This conflicts with chivalry."
She had no intention of remaining in the cabin while her subordinates fought and died to protect her. That went against everything the position meant, everything she'd built the New Marine to be, everything that separated her vision from the World Government's.
Madara smiled slightly.
"Then let's see if your chivalry can withstand what I learned eight hundred years ago."