-Real World-
Caesar Clown had been retrieved from his experimental base ally for this briefing, which he understood was a form of recognition and was trying very hard not to let show on his face.
The room in front of him contained Fleet Admiral Sengoku, the three Admirals, the Hero of the Marines, and a row of senior officers whose combined kill count would have been difficult to calculate. Every pair of eyes in the room was pointed at the podium. Caesar Clown, who had spent the past several months in a laboratory where the most threatening thing was occasionally a failed experiment, felt the collective weight of this attention like a physical pressure.
He was, as a general rule, excellent at surrendering. It was one of his most refined skills. In the presence of someone stronger than himself, he could produce a capitulation so smooth and complete that it became almost elegant. He had done it many times and saw no reason to be ashamed of the efficiency.
He was also, and this was the complicating factor, genuinely excited about the science. He had been doing calculations since the Sky Screen began showing the Year Without Summer sequences, and the numbers were extraordinary.
The excitement won over the nerves.
"Volcanic eruptions release energy into the upper atmosphere as particulate matter," he began, and then realized he was already going too fast for the audience, and adjusted. "The ash. When a volcano erupts with sufficient force, the ash column rises high enough to reflect solar radiation back into space before it reaches the surface. The planet cools. The crops fail. The sea temperature drops. This is the mechanism. I can show you the mathematics."
He turned to the blackboard.
Forty minutes later — he lost track of time when the equations were going well — he stepped back and surveyed what he had produced. Half the blackboard. Mostly correct. He turned around.
"To generate a Year Without Summer effect at global scale, you need a minimum of eight hundred cubic kilometers of volcanic ash introduced into the atmosphere at sufficient altitude." He registered the expressions in front of him. "You don't have a reference for that number. Consider: if you took the border length of the Kingdom of Arabasta and divided it by five, the area that figure represents — the ground coverage of the ash deposit from a single event of this magnitude — would bury five countries of that size simultaneously. In an instant."
The room was quiet in a way that meant the number had landed.
"Following the ash event: seismic activity of corresponding magnitude. Following that: tsunami propagation along all adjacent coastlines. The temperature drop is not uniform — the global average was five degrees, but the Grand Line's weather patterns would produce local variations of ten to twenty degrees in some regions. The crop failure is total in those areas." He paused. "Conservative mortality estimate from starvation alone: one million people. That estimate assumes functional supply chains and governance, which a simultaneous global shock does not support."
He did not say this with pleasure. He said it the way he said all scientific conclusions — with the flat precision of someone reporting what the numbers produced regardless of what you wanted them to produce.
"Food insecurity at this scale creates secondary cascades. Prices rise. The exploiting classes extract the same revenue from a smaller supply, which means less food reaches the people at the bottom of the distribution. Selling family members to meet debts. Piracy as the only available economic model. Social order that had been under pressure for years collapses in a much shorter timeframe than it otherwise would have." He set down the chalk. "The dark age you may have observed in the Sky Screen's future broadcasts — whatever portion of it traces to political causes, a significant fraction traces to this. The Year Without Summer is not a contained event. It reshuffles everything."
He stepped away from the board.
Nobody spoke for a moment. Then Sengoku looked at the blackboard again, as if re-reading the equations could produce a different conclusion.
On the other side of the room, Sakazuki was watching his future self erupt on the Sky Screen with an expression that had moved past his usual blankness into something more and less comfortable.
He had always understood that the Magu Magu no Mi (Magma-Magma Fruit) was a weapon of a particular kind — total, indiscriminate at its outer limits, requiring judgment to be anything other than catastrophic. He had always believed his judgment was sufficient. That belief now had data attached to it: eight hundred cubic kilometers. One million dead. Five countries buried in an instant.
He did not look away from the screen, but the quality of his attention had changed.
"You should try not to explode at people quite so enthusiastically in the future," Borsalino said from beside him, in a tone of such gentle unhelpfulness that it was almost an art form. "The immediate emotional satisfaction of the eruption, I understand, is significant. But the downstream consequences, as we have just been informed by our resident scientist, are somewhat broader than intended."
"I'm not an angry tyrant," Sakazuki said.
"I didn't say that."
"That was the implication."
"I implied that the eruption has downstream consequences. You supplied the emotional interpretation."
Sakazuki elected not to continue this exchange. Borsalino, satisfied with the outcome, looked back at the Sky Screen.
"What I genuinely want to know," Borsalino continued, after a moment, with a register that was slightly more serious, "is what he encountered on that island. In Winter Country. For the eruption to reach that scale — that's not a combat technique. That's not even an awakening in normal operation. Something pushed him past every limit simultaneously."
He left it there. They both looked at the Sky Screen.
The most recent segments had provided some context, none of it fully legible. A force in the Kingdom of Winter had, at some point, attempted to sacrifice Ellie to something the available intelligence was calling an evil god. Sakazuki had apparently failed to prevent it. What had emerged from Ellie at the end of that night in Galdino's circus Domain — the cold laugh, the white blood, the entity looking out from behind her eyes — had not been explained by anything in the Marine's current records.
The cult investigations had produced little. Dozens of members arrested across recent weeks; all of them were what cult members typically were — people who had been deceived by someone who understood how to exploit need, given false community and false meaning in exchange for money and compliance. None of them knew what they were actually participating in. The leaders, in the cases where leaders had been found, were operating several steps removed from any actual theological infrastructure. Whether the cult connected to the entity in the Domain, whether that entity connected to the Behelt artifacts the Marine had been tracking — the thread was present but not yet traceable.
What was traceable: Ellie was not a dream the Domain had invented. She had been real, she was dead, and something that had been using her appearance had known Sakazuki's name and told him to wait for her.
"The Marine doesn't have a category for this," Tsuru said, from the other end of the room, not looking up from her notes. "We'll need to build one."
There was one additional development the Sky Screen's broadcast had produced, and this one was more actionable.
Galdino — Mr. 3, Third Brother, future Domain-stage combatant capable of holding his ground against an Admiral — was currently in Arabasta. Currently at his previous level of strength. Currently in a room with Crocodile, having just watched the Sky Screen describe his future in flattering terms to an audience of billions.
The Marine's threat assessment office updated his file. The bounty moved. Considerably.
Somewhere in Arabasta, bounty hunters who had previously classified Galdino as a low-to-medium priority target were doing rapid recalculations. The future version of a man was Admiral-level. The present version was not. The window between these two states was the most profitable window in the business, and a significant number of professionals were now planning to travel to Arabasta to attempt to act inside it.
Poor Third Brother, who had spent years cultivating the invisibility of being not-quite-threatening-enough to be worth the effort, had just lost that invisibility permanently.
Crocodile, for whatever complicated reasons of his own, had told him to stay inside. This was, under the circumstances, genuinely sound advice.
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