-Broadcast-
The blue-white lightning resolved into a shape.
It was a war mecha — humanoid, but the proportions were wrong in the way that things designed primarily for speed become wrong, too much mass in the right places and not enough in the wrong ones, the entire frame optimized for something that had nothing to do with looking human. The shell was exposed metal with no attempt at concealment, and blue light pulsed across its surface in irregular rhythms, strong and then faint, strong and then faint. The engineers who had built it, if engineers were responsible for it, had apparently decided that the pulse was either decorative or functional and had not bothered to determine which.
Sky Screen Character Note: Time Remnant — Savitar.
The voice that came from it had been filtered through whatever the machine's communication system was until it occupied a register somewhere between human and not, the frequency carrying words without quite committing to a speaker.
"Borsalino." It turned toward him with the particular attention of something that has already assessed everyone else in the room and found them irrelevant. "You're not the Flash yet. But you're interesting enough. Shall we find out how interesting?"
The lecture hall had a moment to register that the mecha was not alone. Hanging from one of its hands — held by the collar with the carelessness of something being carried rather than a person being held — was a young man in a red combat uniform. The hood had been pulled back. His face was visible, and his face had been through a disagreement it had lost comprehensively; bruises and cuts at angles that told a story about the difference in speed between himself and the thing that had hit him.
Barry. The second-generation Flash, apparently. Currently unconscious.
"Previous timeline," Savitar said, to no one in particular, still looking at Borsalino. "If Artoria Pendragon ceases to exist before the Holy Roman Empire forms — does the Empire still form? I'd like to test the hypothesis."
The mecha moved before anyone had fully processed the sentence.
The speed was the problem. At the level Savitar was operating, the decision to move and the arrival were functionally the same event — the intervening space was a formality that occurred faster than the human nervous system could register as sequence. Three Admirals between Savitar and Artoria. None of them had time to respond. The mecha was simply somewhere else, and then it was beside her, and its hand was reaching for her throat.
Yellow light hit it from the side.
Borsalino's hand closed around the mecha's wrist with a grip that had stopped the motion completely, and on Borsalino's face was an expression that the Marines present would later describe differently depending on their perspective — some said it was anger, some said it was something that looked like anger because they didn't have a better category for it. His eyes were very bright.
Artoria had not moved. The sweat at her temple was the only thing that broke the composure. Two speedsters and one of them had wanted to kill her, and she had done the calculation on how that would have ended without the yellow light arriving from the side, and the calculation had not been comfortable.
"Too small in here," Savitar said, apparently not bothered by the wrist that was being held. "Let's go somewhere proper. Bring me a win and I'll give you the boy."
"I was going to suggest the same thing," Borsalino said.
He released the wrist.
Savitar became blue light and was gone through the wall, which it apparently considered optional. Borsalino turned and looked at Artoria for a moment. The expression had shifted into something that functioned as his version of reassurance — which, as with most of his expressions, required some translation to read correctly.
"When I come back," he said, "a raise would be appropriate. Significant. I've been thinking about retirement, and retirement requires capital. This should count for something."
He turned toward the door.
The yellow light that his eyes produced at the beginning of full output was a different quality than the blue-white of Savitar's mecha — warmer, hotter, the color of something that burned rather than something that conducted. It spread briefly through his irises and then his form blurred, and then the form was a streak, and then the streak was gone, and then the sound of him moving at that speed arrived in the lecture hall about a half-second after he had left it, the delayed shockwave of someone who had passed through faster than the air could immediately process.
Two streaks of lightning crossed the darkness outside Rome.
Blue-white and yellow. Not racing exactly — racing implied that one of them was falling behind — but competing, the gap between them closing and opening as each found different paths through the dark that the fog created, each responding to the other's movement. The fog, which had been impassable to Observation Haki and Den Den Mushi signal alike, turned out to be entirely permeable to entities that moved at these speeds. At a certain point, the obstacle became a formality.
They crossed Rome's perimeter. They hit the sea.
Savitar's metal feet ran across the water's surface without any particular interest in this fact. Borsalino's feet did the same — his Logia form converting the contact into light before the salt water could interact with whatever biological substrate was theoretically underneath the ability. He had been doing this for long enough that it required no conscious attention.
His clothing, however, was a different matter.
At the speed required to maintain contact with Savitar across open sea, the friction involved exceeded what the fabric could handle. The Marine uniform — the jacket, the shirt, everything — began to burn at its edges and then across its surfaces, the heat of continuous near-lightspeed movement dissolving each layer in sequence. By the time the two of them arrived over the desert of Arabasta, Borsalino was running across the sand dunes wearing nothing at all, his body maintaining its light-form at the surface while the rest of him caught up to whatever physics governed a Logia user who was not especially dressed.
Savitar stopped on a dune.
The mecha surveyed the landscape, then surveyed Borsalino, then made a sound that may have been a laugh.
"If your admirers knew the future Fleet Admiral was a naked man, they'd be devastated."
"I've found," Borsalino said, standing in the desert with the unhurried dignity of someone who has decided that dignity and clothing are not as related as convention suggests, "that speed destroys clothing consistently. Your armor is impressive. The engineering is excellent."
He was not embarrassed. He had had occasion to run at this speed before. He had formed a position on it.
Savitar's form crackled with blue light, gathering itself.
Borsalino's eyes brightened.
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