Yamato fell without any technique to soften the landing. She simply dropped — a straight line from the height King had been flying at, no controlled descent, no Geppo to brake — and hit the ground hard enough to punch a shallow crater into the earth and kick up a rolling curtain of dust.
The dust didn't matter. What was already in the air was worse.
The Celestial Dragons had moved quickly. Every village within their initial dispersal range was burning. The fires weren't contained — they moved the way fires move when nothing is being done to stop them, spreading from structure to structure, consuming the dry timber of homes that had stood for generations in the time it takes to walk between them. The smoke had merged into a single ceiling above the landscape, dark and dense, carrying a smell that bypassed the nose and registered somewhere further back in the skull.
The heat hit her face as she straightened. The air tasted of ash and something else she didn't want to identify.
She had to do something about the fire before anything else.
The cold gathered in her palm — drawn from the Mythical Beast power that lived in her body, a property of the white wolf form she carried — and she threw it outward in a wave of pale blue air. The effect was immediate and disproportionate: the surrounding flames dropped, compressed, shrank. Within seconds the fires in the nearest structures had been beaten back. Within a minute, the major sources had been extinguished, leaving only scattered pockets still burning low in the ruins.
She pinched her nose against the remaining smoke and moved toward the largest building still standing — the home of whoever had been the village's headman, probably, or a local landowner with enough resources to build in stone.
She had prepared herself for the worst before she stepped through the doorway. She had been wrong about what worst meant.
The floor was covered in bodies.
They were in the postures of people who had not been killed cleanly. Elderly, women, children — all mixed together in the configuration that panic produces when the exits are blocked. Charred where the fire had reached them, contorted where they had died before it. The silence inside the building was the silence of a space where everything that made it alive was gone.
Yamato's eyes went red. The veins stood out clearly across her face. She closed her hands slowly, then opened them.
"You're animals." Her voice came out quiet, which was not how she was feeling. "Every single one of you."
She knew there was no one left in this village to save. She had arrived too late. The question now was whether she could reach the next one before the same thing happened there.
Her Conqueror's Haki came out without her fully deciding to release it — rage opening a door she normally kept latched. Black and red lightning threaded through the air around her, spreading outward beyond the village's edge, detectable to anyone within range using Observation Haki. She pulled it back. She couldn't announce herself like that — not yet, not here.
What she reached for instead was the ghost face mask she kept against her body. She put it on.
Yamato had come down from King's back wanting to be a hero. That was the word she'd used in her head: savior. Standing in a building full of bodies with smoke still rising from the floor, she revised the objective. Wano didn't need a savior right now. It needed something that would make the invaders afraid to keep doing what they were doing. If being a demon served the people better than being a hero, she would be a demon.
She turned to leave.
Two God's Knights were coming back up the path from the direction she was heading toward.
They were mismatched in the way that pairs sometimes are — one thin, one considerably less so — and they had the casual posture of people who had just accomplished something and were looking for the next thing to accomplish. When they registered the masked figure in the village doorway, they stopped.
The thinner one assessed her silhouette and drew conclusions from the thickness of her arms, the breadth of her chest, the way she was standing. He decided she was a woman. He decided this was good news.
He stepped ahead of his companion. "You survived? Nice figure on you, hiding behind a mask. Come with me — I'll keep you alive until I get bored of you." He drew his rapier as he approached, the blade there to make clear that this wasn't a request. He was going to be reasonable about it, though. He'd even considered whether to take one of her hands first, just as a precaution. She was holding a kanabō, which implied she had some idea how to use it.
He was still considering this when she moved.
"Raikō Bagua!"(Thunderous Eight Trigrams)
The kanabō ignited with Conqueror's Haki in the same instant she spoke — black and red lightning wrapping the iron length of it — and she crossed the distance between them before the sound of her own voice had finished. He had time to layer his Armament Haki across his body, which was the right instinct and insufficient.
The kanabō connected with the top of his skull. The imagined result — messy, external, dramatic — did not occur. What happened instead was quieter and worse: the impact compressed inward, the force moving through the bone and into the cavity beneath it, and his internal organs and skull simply failed under the pressure of it. He went down without a final word, without even a complete expression of surprise. His Armament Haki had bought him nothing.
His companion had already made a decision.
He ran.
He was calculating as he ran: the movement she'd used was Kaido-adjacent, which meant she was connected to Kaido, which meant engaging her directly without backup was a losing proposition. He could circle back, find others, return with numbers, exhaust her that way. Being Celestial Dragon meant having the resources to solve problems he couldn't solve personally. He could still make this work.
"You want to run?"
The Haki she'd used on the kanabō shifted — she gathered it into a concentrated release, channeled through the weapon in a different way, producing a blade of compressed force that crossed the hundred meters between them before he'd finished his next stride.
He didn't have time to know it was coming.
The headless body lost its balance and folded sideways into the road's edge.
Yamato looked at what she'd done for a moment. She thought, as she sometimes did when she killed, about Kaido — about what his end would look like when it came, and whether her grandfather, somewhere, was connected to the same thought. She didn't hold the feeling for long. There was no time.
She released her human form.
The white wolf appeared where she had been standing — horned, enormous, auspicious cloud patterns flowing across its flanks. Four legs moved faster than two. She put her nose to the wind, found the direction where the screaming was loudest, and ran.