Agonized shieks echoed endlessly through the royal chambers of the Shogun's Keep, the most sacred and heavily fortified sector within Wano Country.
Thick pools of vibrant crimson blood completely blanketed the floor. Fukurokuju, the supreme commander anchoring the Wano Ninja Corps, lay entirely motionless within the gore, his vital signs hovering at an unmapped threshold.
Whether he was dead or alive remained an open variable.
Standing directly before Kenshin's blade, the tyrannical monarch who had ruled over thousands, Shogun Kurozumi Orochi, was dropped heavily onto his knees. The aggressive, ferocious array of eight reptilian heads he had previously brandished had been systematically reduced to a solitary, pitiful head.
His internal energy signatures had degraded to a terrifyingly weak pitch, his condition indicating that his physical system was on the absolute brink of total deletion.
Kenshin stood over his battered frame, looking down from a position of absolute superiority. His features were frozen into a mask of pure detachment, completely devoid of joy or sorrow.
"It is finalized!"
"No... spare my life parameters! I can download whatever data your system craves directly into your accounts—absolute power, infinite luxury, any woman across the land! I can grant it all to you!" Orochi whimpered frantically, his cellular mass re-stabilizing back into his weak human form.
CLEAVE!
A lone katana slash whistled through the air, and the absolute final head separated from the torso, vaulting across the stone floor. The expression of raw, unadulterated terror remained frozen across the severed face, locked permanently into the tissue.
"No entity across this sea possesses the leverage to save you!" Kenshin noted coldly, his eyes tracing the stagnant features with absolute disgust.
His strategic planners flagged a severe level of irritation toward the final word the tyrant had uttered.
Women.
To translate human beings into standard economic commodities or trade variables was a logic loop Kenshin completely rejected. Exactly ten rotations of the calendar ago, his biological mother had sustained a fatal deficit explicitly because this depraved monster's sensors had locked onto her beauty.
His entire family infrastructure had been violently pulverized as a consequence of that single event.
"Exit the shadows!" Kenshin directed his voice toward the right flank of the chamber. "Terminate your evasion sub-routines. My sensors indicate your signature has been anchoring that coordinate for a significant length of time."
"Your scanning matrix successfully locked onto my position from the initiation of the raid?"
Slowly stepping out from behind the structural woodwork of the wall was a lone figure. He possessed long, sweeping blue hair, and his eyes projected a sharp, intensely malicious glint that instantly signaled to any analyst that his profile was an exceptionally hazardous anomaly to cross.
"Why exact variable prompted you to abort your offensive lines while the target was functional?" the stranger asked, leveling an unblinking stare at the swordsman.
"What exact reasoning dictates that our unit was required to initiate an engagement against you?" Kenshin countered smoothly.
Following the line, Kenshin and Bell exchanged a brief, knowing smirk. During the initial phase of the high-intensity clash, Bell's Wide-Range Observation Haki had flagged the arrival of a powerful incoming signature, signaling for Kenshin to maintain a defensive buffer to mitigate a surprise flank.
Yet, completely defying standard combat parameters, the newcomer had chosen to grant zero reinforcement to the Shogun.
Furthermore, the secondary imperial guards they had been expecting to breach the perimeter had returned an absolute blank on the radar. Bell had scaled up his scanning diagnostic to analyze the surrounding sectors, and the resulting calculation cleared up the anomaly immediately.
An outside asset... had systematically blockaded the incoming reinforcement routes for them!
And the individual who had engineered that structural buffer was the exact asset standing right before their eyes!
"Boss Kyoshiro!" Usopp blurted out, his visual processors instantly matching the profile against his domestic database.
The figure was none other than the apex underworld tycoon ruling the entire criminal syndicates of the Flower Capital—Boss Kyoshiro!
In the public ledgers, he was codified as Shogun Orochi's most loyal, unyielding hound!
During the encrypted audio logs Usopp and the others had intercepted outside the screen moments prior, the primary topic dividing the Shogun and Fukurokuju's focus had been this exact man.
He was the enforcer who had personally executed the legendary Oiran Komurasaki right before the Shogun's eyes.
"So your identity maps to the header of Kyoshiro?" Kenshin muttered, a wave of subtle surprise rippling through his thoughts as he cast an analytical glance toward Bell.
Bell offered a slight shake of his head to re-stabilize their posture, before turning a flat glare onto the underworld boss. "What exact motivation prompted your system to provide tactical clearance for our raid?"
"Because... my own core programming has always targeted the permanent deletion of Orochi's life signs!" Kyoshiro replied, his lips curling into a sharp, deeply wicked smile.
"This..." The collective cognitive gears of Kenshin, Bell, and Usopp stalled briefly at the data drop.
Meanwhile, down in the expanding pool of blood on the floor, Fukurokuju's fingers twitched with microscopic movement—though that minor motor control was the absolute limit of his current capabilities.
Initially, when Kyoshiro's signature acoustic track entered his audio range, a massive wave of pure hope had processed through his internal servers.
But as the dialogue between Kyoshiro and the intruders expanded, the textual data grew increasingly anomalous and broken, causing his physical frame to break into a succession of uncontrollable, instinctual convulsions.
What exact paradigm shift has corrupted reality?What structural failure occurred?
Kyoshiro—the asset whose database was supposed to be hard-coded with absolute, uncompromised fidelity to the Shogun—was dropping lines of pure treason.
Why exact did this manifest?!
"Now that Orochi's primary vital stats have officially returned a permanent blank, my system holds zero clearance to maintain these artificial layers of deception," Kyoshiro noted calmly. Reaching up with his hand, he violently tore his formal outer layer aside, pivoting his frame to display the sacred insignia tattooed across his back.
Through his own prior information-gathering loops and tracking arrays, Kyoshiro had already verified the explicit identities defining Kenshin and Usopp's cell.
Therefore, he finalized the choice to execute an absolute, uncompromised download of his true profile.
Maintaining the undercover script carried zero baseline utility; the Shogun was dead!
Even though a subtle thread of surrealism lingered within his internal planners—after all, the historical ledgers consistently dictated that absolute scum survived for a thousand generations, making a tyrant like Orochi remarkably difficult to permanently erase from the board...
Yet today, his life signs had been terminated with total efficiency, completely devoid of any complex cinematic variables.
Granted, his own tactical choices had provided immense structural support to ensure this outcome...
Because his own blades had successfully held off and neutralized the entire wave of the Ninja Corps Fukurokuju had frantically mobilized to reinforce the chamber.
Still, his predictive algorithms suggested that even if those ninja units had successfully breached the threshold, the final calculation of the raid would have simply resulted in a few additional corpses littering the stone floor.
"That distinct configuration is..." Usopp stuttered, his finger trembling as his sensors locked onto the geometry of the tattoo.
He held a clear, permanent index on that exact graphic file; it was the identical marker mapping across Kin'emon's frame—the sacred crest belonging strictly to the Kozuki Clan!
Evaluating the board under this light, the absolute supreme boss of the Flower Capital's underworld was a deep-cover retainer serving the Kozuki lineage.
Hiss... Usopp swallowed a massive breath of cold air as the strategic density of the play processed in his brain.
This was an exceptionally ruthless, high-stakes long con.
For a Kozuki loyalist to systematically scale the administrative ranks of the enemy regime to claim a seat of that magnitude required a tier of unyielding, mental fortitude that common human processors couldn't hope to emulate.
"The structural crest of the Kozuki Clan!"
"What?!" Kenshin and Bell noted, their surprise metrics spiking.
The primary domestic adversary was actually a confirmed ally?
"When the macro-war hits its activation threshold, we request clearance for the entire Kyoshiro Family to synchronize its blades with your alliance!"
"Since your biography is officially verified under the header of a Kozuki retainer, this campaign naturally allocates a command seat to your unit," Kenshin spoke, his voice dropping back to its steady, resonant pitch.
To a native asset of Wano like Kenshin, the legendary figures composing the Akazaya Nine were absolute myths ruling over the history of his nation.
"Superb!"
The group extended their communication loop to synchronize their data tracks, leaving the blood-slicked, severed skull of the monarch resting entirely neglected on the parched floor, projecting an air of absolute, pathetic isolation.
The grand monarch who had lorded over Wano's wealth for decades, Shogun Kurozumi Orochi, had had his vital signs terminated with zero fanfare, completely blind and unmapped at the absolute threshold of death.
Following his deletion, his remains returned an absolute blank on the priority radar of the world; not a solitary soul in the room could be bothered to allocate a single pixel of attention to his frame.
This was the ultimate, tragic definition of a weakling's end!
Throughout his entire timeline on the throne, Orochi's structural survival had been completely dependent on the external military leverage of the Beast Pirates and Kaido; his independent physical attributes were remarkably pathetic.
In a global ecosystem where raw, individual power metrics dictated absolute authority, an asset of Orochi's caliber was inevitably reduced to a minor particle of dust blowing through the wind.
Even Kenshin, whose entire childhood had been twisted by a profound desire for vengeance against this specific entity, found his interest metrics returning a total zero upon completing the execution.
This variance wasn't merely a reflection of the massive disparity separating their baseline stats; it was definitive verification of an evolved psychological realm.
Having finalized a full twenty-four-month training timeline under Drake's flag, Kenshin's underlying calculation of the Way of the Sword had scaled to a profound, near-infinite depth, leaving his internal stability completely unbothered by external metrics.
Having successfully expunged Orochi from reality, his internal servers recorded absolute zero turbulence.
The Path of the Blade
Meanwhile, across a separate quadrant of the Wano territory, Zoro's navigation software had experienced another severe calculation error. Following the unauthorized misappropriation of his signature black blade, Shusui, he had completely severed his tracking link with the Straw Hat extraction unit, drifting far off-course to recover the weapon and secure fresh steel.
During his solo transit through the wilderness, his coordinates had intersected a young woman accompanied by a tiny girl. Through a bizarre sequence of environmental variables, he had ended up sharing a localized shelter and a shared blanket with the beauty—a data point that would undoubtedly trigger a massive wave of extreme envy across the global database if leaked!
And this woman was no random native asset; she was the legendary Oiran Komurasaki whose death had just fractured Orochi's composure—and her true biography identified her as the biological daughter of Kozuki Oden, Kozuki Hiyori!
Interfacing with the swordsman, she downloaded a critical piece of national data: Shusui functioned as the absolute sacred treasure of Wano Country—a monumental spiritual anchor for the populace. She requested that his system return the blade to its rightful ancestral resting grounds within the territory.
To balance the transactional ledger and provide a high-value compensation, she offered to transfer ownership of a legendary named sword that had historically belonged to her father's private inventory—the masterpiece blade, Enma!
"The legendary steel that successfully carved a permanent laceration across Kaido's anomalous scales... Enma!" Zoro murmured, his hand instinctively tightening into a rigid fist as a sharp, unyielding glint of intense anticipation flashed through his eye.
"As long as my system integrates a replacement asset of that caliber... I accept the trade parameters!"
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