SWORD had been shadowing the main contestant groups since landing, staying back, keeping to the treeline and elevated ground wherever the terrain offered it. In terms of direct influence over what was happening below them, they had none. Five people without official Marine authorization to act, operating inside a sanctioned World Government event, surrounded by hundreds of God's Knights and Celestial Dragon bodyguards. The math was clear.
Hibari had her telescope out. She watched through it for a while, then lowered it.
"I think I underestimated them." Her voice was flat, the tone of someone reporting a field assessment. "I knew they'd be bad. This is something else." She paused. "Why does the Marine protect these people? Any of them? What is the argument that justifies this?"
Nobody answered. The question wasn't looking for an answer.
"They're having fun," Todoroki Shoto said, from where he was standing at the ridge's edge, arms crossed, watching the smoke columns rise from three different directions. "That's what this is. People with nothing to fear, doing what people without fear do when someone tells them the targets can't fight back."
He had been watching since they landed for something that would justify the use of his abilities. He hadn't found it yet. The samurai who had appeared — and some had, emerging from the mountains and the hidden places in the country's terrain — had fought and died individually, absorbed into the points system one at a time, their resistance producing noise and a brief disruption before the contestants moved on. No coordination. No concentration of force. No organized resistance emerging from anywhere that Observation Haki could reach.
Since the competition had begun, the contestant casualties were still in single digits. It wasn't even close to double figures. The game was under control, which meant the island's defenders were not.
Helmeppo was sitting beneath a tree, back against the bark, eyes closed. He had his palms pressed together. Whatever he was saying was inaudible — the words were entirely private, directed at something that couldn't be verified. He was doing it anyway.
He had looked at what was happening below once, assessed what he could and couldn't change about it, and retreated into the only available response: bearing witness to the cost of it, in the only way that didn't require him to get people killed to accomplish nothing.
"They're staying away from the Flower Capital." Kujaku was watching the contestant dispersal patterns through her own field observation. The God's Knights had spread across Wano's regional territories efficiently, but there was a visible gap in the direction of the country's heart. "Nobody wants to be first."
The logic was straightforward. The Flower Capital was the center of whatever organized will Wano had left. Orochi, puppet or not, had spent years building a court around himself — bodyguards, retainers, loyalists who had survived through various combinations of ability and political alignment. Approaching the shogun's seat early, alone, against concentrated resistance, was how you turned a ten-thousand-point target into a liability.
The efficient play was peripheral harvesting first. Drive the survivors inward. Let fear do the work — let the refugees streaming into the Flower Capital from every burned village bring the news with them, let the city's population absorb the reality of what was coming before the contestants arrived. By the time the outer territories were exhausted, Orochi would have watched his country die from the inside of his mansion, and the psychological effect alone might make him collapse without requiring serious effort. The God's Knights had seen this pattern before. They were applying it.
Whether Orochi would actually cooperate with that expectation was another question. His public profile was deliberately constructed around maximum cowardice and minimum capability. Some of the contestants seemed to have taken it at face value. The God's Knights' veterans, however, were operating with the understanding that men who survive for years as puppets in a country controlled by Kaido either have something real behind the performance, or they die. Orochi had survived.
The village below the SWORD position had been burning for some time before any of them turned to look at the scene unfolding near its eastern edge.
The Celestial Dragons had already killed the adult men. The father of one particular family had been cut down for the apparent offense of not immediately complying. What remained was a mother in a kimono holding a young daughter, and a boy of perhaps nine or ten who had positioned himself in front of them with his feet planted.
He was shaking. It was visible from distance. He stood there anyway.
"If you want to kill someone, kill me," he said. "Don't touch them."
One of the Celestial Dragons found this interesting — not moving, but tilting his head. The boy's terror was a better starting point than immediate compliance would have been. He kicked the boy sideways, breaking ribs, and dragged the two women forward instead.
The mother went white. She couldn't speak. She pulled her daughter into her arms and turned the child's face away from what was about to happen — an instinct, not a strategy; a mother's final attempt to control what her child saw before the end.
The girl was young enough that she didn't fully understand what death meant. She understood enough. She looked at the man with the raised weapon and asked, in a child's precise, unsophisticated language: "Why do you want to hurt us? Has our village done anything wrong?"
The Celestial Dragon found this worth a response. "Wrong? This village was born in the wrong country. That's enough. Resent that, if you want to resent something."
He raised the blade.
The boy had climbed back to his feet, ribs grinding, and was shouting from the ground. The mother covered her daughter's eyes. The weapon began its arc.
A line of force arrived from somewhere above and to the left and removed the man's sword hand at the wrist. The severed arm and its weapon landed separately in the dirt.
The Celestial Dragon stared at the space where his hand had been, then started screaming.
From further up the path — coming from no direction that the chaos had been occupying — an old man walked into the scene. Wanderer's topknot, worn traveling clothes, a sword carried with the unhurried ease of someone who had been carrying one for a very long time. He looked at the screaming noble and at the women and children behind him, and his expression arranged itself into the particular stillness of someone who has already decided what comes next and sees no reason to make it complicated.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Writing takes time, coffee, and a lot of love.If you'd like to support my work, join me at [email protected]/GoldenGaruda
You'll get early access to over 50 chapters, selection on new series, and the satisfaction of knowing your support directly fuels more stories.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~