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The sea burned in a circle.
King's Army captain noticed the way sea burned when he pulled himself out of the water and looked at the pattern. The fire spread in a ring around the combined fleet, precise enough at its edges to suggest intent rather than accident. The patrol boats that had been in the northern arc were gone, their crews in the water, but the main fleet was untouched inside the circle's boundary.
Not destruction, the captain thought, treading water, watching the flames. Containment.
Whoever had done this didn't want a battle. They wanted everyone to stay exactly where they were.
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Inside the tent, Wapol heard the distant explosions and misread them completely.
This was consistent with Wapol's approach to most information.
He raised his hands and laughed with the specific excitement of a man who believes something spectacular is happening on his behalf. "My new power! How about it, Cobra? Scared?"
Cobra looked at him.
He was not scared. He was calculating — reading Wapol's face, reading the quality of the excitement on it, and arriving at a conclusion that the excitement was genuine but the understanding behind it was not. Wapol believed he had arranged this. Wapol believed the fires were his.
The messenger who ran in twenty seconds later disabused him of this belief with efficient thoroughness.
"Your Majesty — our ships are burning too — people are dead — "
Wapol's arms came down.
The excitement left his face in the specific way excitement left faces when the world had just produced an outcome that bore no relationship to expectations. He looked at the messenger. At Cobra. At the tent walls, as though the tent might offer some explanation.
"Where is my advisor?" he said. "Get me my advisor — "
The tent flap opened.
Vergo walked in.
White plaid coat. Sunglasses. The mask covering the lower half of his face. He moved with the unhurried quality of someone for whom the changed situation had already been processed and responded to, the adaptation complete before he crossed the threshold. His role as consultant had served its purpose. What stood in the tent now was not a consultant.
Wapol went toward him with the indignation of a man whose plans have been disrupted and who needs someone to receive that indignation. "You told me this would — "
Vergo's bamboo stick found Wapol's abdomen before the sentence finished.
The impact was not theatrical. It was the specific, calibrated force of someone who had been restraining themselves for several months and was no longer restraining themselves, applied precisely to the point of maximum effect. Wapol left the ground briefly and hit the tent floor and did not get back up in any hurry.
Jess and Chessmarimo looked at this, looked at each other, and found a corner to occupy at considerable speed.
Vergo straightened his sunglasses.
"I told you when we first met," he said, to the general area where Wapol was recovering, "to address me properly."
Pell and Chaka had already read the room and were moving — both shifting into partial animal forms, the Bird-Bird Fruit's falcon eyes sharp and tracking, the Dog-Dog Fruit's jackal physicality dropping into a combat stance. They placed themselves between Vergo and Cobra with the practiced speed of guardians who had been ready for something and had found it.
Vergo looked at them with the expression of a man doing arithmetic.
He moved.
The exchanges were brief and not in the guardians' favor. The bamboo stick found Pell once and Chaka once — the specific places on each of them that an exceptionally capable fighter identified in the first second of engagement — and both of them hit the tent walls at approximately the same moment. Neither was finished, but neither was between Vergo and Cobra anymore.
"The Animal-type fruits need more development," Vergo said, to no one, without cruelty. An observation.
He turned to Cobra.
Cobra had not moved during any of this. He stood where he had been standing, and his expression carried the specific quality of a man who had assessed his options completely and understood them clearly and was not going to pretend otherwise.
"You have a secret," Vergo said. "Something your country is hiding that concerns the Void Century. I don't need to know what it is specifically. I need confirmation that it exists." He held the bamboo stick at his side, not threatening, simply present. "Tell me that much and no one else in this tent gets hurt today."
Cobra said nothing.
Vergo had expected this. Cobra was not Wapol. Cobra was a king who understood what he was protecting and why, and no amount of bamboo stick was going to move a man like that with words alone.
So Vergo raised the bamboo stick.
The tent came apart from above.
Not torn — removed, the canvas and poles separating from their arrangement all at once as something very large and very fast came through them from above and landed between Vergo and Cobra with an impact that sent a shockwave across the island's ground hard enough to feel in the feet of everyone standing on it.
The dust came up.
Through it, a shape — large, dark, the Earth-Wind Composite Form's jade scales catching the firelight from the surrounding sea in scattered green points.
Then the shape stood up, and Evan Lindsay was there, the Earth Demon form partially active, the Ancient Armament ribbons drifting around him in the lazy, unhurried way they drifted when he was not yet applying them and was simply thinking about what he was going to do next.
He looked at Vergo through the settling dust.
At the bamboo stick. At Cobra behind him. At Pell and Chaka against the tent walls. At Wapol on the floor, who had raised his head to see what had arrived and appeared to be reconsidering several of his life's decisions simultaneously.
Then Lindsay looked back at Vergo and his expression settled into the one it wore when he had found something that interested him considerably.
He waved a hand through the remaining dust.
"Let's skip the talking part," he said. "You were going to hit him. I came to stop that. The situation is clear enough."
He opened his arms.
"Come on," he said, and the grin had the quality it always had when he meant it — bright, genuine, entirely without performance. "Let's fight."
Vergo looked at him.
He had heard the name. He had read the bounty poster with the same attention he gave to information that was operationally relevant, which was close and thorough. He had watched, from the Drum Kingdom's coast, the reports come in about four warships and one sound. He had processed the Ancient Armament Haki, the composite transformation, the learning speed that Doflamingo had found interesting enough to mention twice.
He was not afraid.
But he was — and this was not something Vergo experienced frequently — genuinely uncertain about the shape of what was standing in front of him.
Behind Lindsay, through the open top of the destroyed tent, the ring of fire on the sea was still burning. In the sky above the northern horizon, the dragon that had started all of this was banking on a long arc, and whoever rode it had not yet made their intentions clear.
Too many variables, Vergo thought. Moving too fast.
"Young master," he said, very quietly, to the phone bug in his coat.
The line was still open. Doflamingo had heard everything — Wapol hitting the floor, the guardians going down, the arrival, the invitation.
"Virgo," Doflamingo said. His voice had the specific quality it took when he was interested rather than amused. "How does he look?"
Vergo studied Lindsay for a moment.
"Like something that's been waiting a long time," he said, "to do exactly this."
A pause on the line.
"Fufufu.." The laugh was quiet. "Don't die."
Vergo pocketed the phone bug.
Looked at Lindsay.
Adjusted his grip on the bamboo stick.
"Alright," he said.