The first Marine came around the corner fast and nearly walked straight into him.
Lucien stepped to the side, let the man's momentum carry him past, and put two fingers against the back of his neck before he could turn around. The distortion was simple. A sound, sharp and close, from directly behind the Marine's left ear. The man spun hard toward it, and Lucien hit him once at the base of the skull. He was down before he registered that nothing had been there.
Lucien caught him by the collar and lowered him against the wall. He checked the street in both directions. Clear.
He moved.
The next two were together, standing at the mouth of an alley, comparing something on a sheet of paper. Lucien watched them from the shadow of a doorway overhang for a moment. The one on the left was paying more attention than the one on the right. He started with the left one.
He pushed a sound into the right Marine's head first, boots on stone coming fast from behind them, and watched the man turn completely around to look. The left one caught the movement in his peripheral vision and turned a half-second later. In that half second, Lucien was already across the gap.
He took the left one by the jaw and the back of the head and put him down clean. The right one turned back around and had just enough time to look confused before Lucien stepped into him and drove an elbow into the side of his head. He folded.
Lucien rolled his shoulder and kept moving.
The market quarter was the busiest stretch. Marines were spread across it in loose formation, checking stalls, pulling merchants aside, holding up bounty sheets. Lucien moved along the back end of it through the service alley that ran parallel to the main road, watching through the gaps between buildings. He counted eight in visible range. Too many to take in sequence without one of them noticing something was wrong before he got to the next.
He stopped in the gap between a grain store and a covered stall and thought about it for a moment.
Then he pushed into the nearest Marine's head, a simple impulse, footsteps sound towards the east end, someone's running. The man turned and walked briskly toward the far end of the market without breaking stride, already convinced it had been his own idea. The formation shifted to watch him go.
In the gap that opened up, Lucien crossed the alley mouth, took the furthest isolated Marine by the collar from behind, inserted the sensation of a sudden and overwhelming dizziness, and held him up as his legs went. He walked him backward into the gap between two stalls and sat him down against the wall. The man's eyes were still open, but not focused on anything useful.
Lucien straightened up and checked the market through the gap again. Seven left and none of them looking his way.
He worked through four more of them in the next ten minutes. A false footstep that pulled one into an empty courtyard. A whispered name from the wrong side of a wall that sent another one to investigate. One Marine he took the direct approach with, simply because the man had his back turned and was alone and there was no reason to be complicated about it. He put him down with a single clean strike and kept moving.
It went like that for a while. The town was loud enough that individual sounds didn't carry far, and the Marines were spread thin enough that most of them were working alone or in pairs. Lucien moved at the pace the situation allowed and no faster. Rushing made noise, and noise collapsed the advantage he had, which was that nobody currently knew where he was.
The Marines he put down he left where they fell. None of them were dead. Some of them would wake up with headaches and no clear memory of what had happened to them, which was fine. That was the point.
He was working his way through the last stretch of the market quarter when he heard the gunshots.
Two of them, close together, from the direction of the eastern quarter. Then a third, slightly further away. He stopped and looked toward the sound for a single moment. Idris. The spacing between the first two said controlled. The third one said something had moved and he'd adjusted for it. Whatever had found them, Idris had already done the calculation. Lucien turned back to the street ahead and kept going.
The town thinned out near the northern edge, the buildings spreading further apart before giving way to a dirt road that ran toward the tree line. The forest sat about two hundred metres past the last structure, dark and dense and exactly where Lucien intended to be until nightfall. He could see the edge of it from where he was. He was nearly out.
He took down one more Marine near the last row of buildings, a young one who had separated from his unit and was checking doorways alone. Lucien came up behind him, pushed the sensation of a hand gripping his left shoulder hard, watched the man jerk away from nothing, and hit him once while he was turned. He caught him before he hit the ground and set him down against a fence post.
He straightened up and looked at the tree line. Two hundred metres of open ground. He started across it at a jog.
He was halfway there when his Observation Haki spiked.
Lucien threw himself to the right without thinking. The air where he had been standing turned orange and white and wrong, a column of magma the width of a large man driving into the ground and sending molten earth spraying outward in a radius that caught the edge of his boot. He hit the ground rolling and came up in a crouch facing back toward the town.
The last row of houses was gone. Not damaged. Gone. A melted trough ran through where three buildings had been standing ten seconds ago, the stone and timber reduced to cooling slag that still glowed at the edges. Standing on the far side of it, in a Marine captain's uniform that looked like it had already survived considerable heat today, was Sakazuki.
He looked the same as Lucien remembered. Bigger if anything. The cigar was already gone. His expression was the one he'd had at Loguetown, the same flat and complete certainty, except there was something additional in it now. Something that had been given a specific reason and a specific name to point it at.
Sakazuki looked at him across the molten trench between them.
"Lucien Vosgrave," he said. Not a question. Not a greeting. Just a name being confirmed against a face. "You've been busy. Minion Island. Diez Barrels. The Ope Ope no Mi ends up somewhere it shouldn't." He paused and let that sit for a moment. "And before that, an attack on an entire royal family and killing one." He took one step forward, the ground softening slightly under his boot without him appearing to notice or care. "Corazon filed a very thorough report."
He said it the way a man announces that the paperwork has already been completed, and what comes next is just the physical formality of it.
Lucien looked at the trench. At the slag, still moving slowly at the edges. At the three houses that had been standing there a moment ago and were now a cooling memory.
He thought about Doflamingo's strings taking his sword apart. He thought about Trebol's resin and the punishment he'd taken before the Haki had done its job. And now this.
Every significant problem in the last few months had arrived with a Devil Fruit attached to it. Every single one.
He looked at the magma still cooling in the dirt between them. At the sheer casual scale of it. Three houses. Gone. Because Sakazuki had pointed in that direction.
A man who turns into lava, Lucien thought. Of course. Why wouldn't it be a man who turns into lava? That's a perfectly reasonable thing to have to deal with in the last week in North Blue. Completely normal. Fine.
He straightened up from the crouch and looked at Sakazuki across the trench.
"You melted three houses," Lucien said.
Sakazuki looked at him without expression.
"Those people lived there," Lucien said.
"They'll be compensated," Sakazuki said, in a tone that made clear he had not thought about this before saying it and would not think about it after.
Lucien exhaled through his nose and looked at the tree line behind him, now considerably less accessible than it had been a minute ago, and then back at the very large Marine captain standing in the ruins of three buildings with a new and more dangerous power.
He really had been looking forward to the Grand Line. Even greater now than ever.
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