Chapter 75

Cross-Brain AN: Before we start, muse over this, if you please. Our preview has confirmed that the arc after this is set in Marineford. Does that mean that Ace will definitely be taken as he was before?

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…well, you already know that we're going to change a few things. But who can say exactly what goes on in Hell?

Night of the Fifth Day

108 Hours Before the War

Scuttlebutt was an important part of the life of a Marine grunt, filling the idle hours of the day with talk of dating, cheating, hirings, firings, upgrades, downgrades, and whatever else caught the ear of a bored Marine. Sadly, as it is with all gossip, truth took a back seat to entertainment, and so the stories tended to grow… embellished.

So it was hard to say whether it was by accident or design that there were so many outrageous rumors about Amazon appetites that nobody considered the possibility of a stowaway. A good thing for the sisters, because the amount of food disappearing into their quarters was ridiculous.

In fact, it was starting to get on the crew's nerves.

"Salt pork again?" complained one of the many recently minted shellbacks who had celebrated their first Calm Belt passage on this voyage. He picked up his hardtack and, grimacing, tapped the maggots inside onto the table and lifted his mug to squash them.

"Ach, y'don't want to do that," one of the more experienced seamen remarked, waving his fork at him. "Good source of protein, maggots!"

"…you referring to us or the bugs?"

"Both!"

Grumbling, the sailor dunked his hardtack into his coffee mug, swirling it about. "We were on fresh food until we picked up those Amazons, and those bottomless pits they call stomachs…"

"Aye, 'tis a bit strange," another sailor piped up. "Served with Vice Admiral Doberman back when he was a veteran captain and I was just a wee pollywog."

Laughter rippled through the area; the sailor in question was craggy and weather-beaten with plenty of salt in his beard. "You were never a pollywog, Copeland!"

"Aye, I was, and don't you forget it!" Copeland roared back. "Where was I? Oh, right, Doberman. Ate a lot, let me tell you. Fresh meat, daily, so raw it was dripping! Thankfully, not much one for officer's biscuit. 'Twas a frequent reward for going above and beyond, had to do something with the stuff." He shook his head. "This, though? Even for two Carnivorous Zoans, this is ridiculous. And they're eatin' everything, not just the meat!"

"Mm…" another newly minted shellback nodded, cupping his chin thoughtfully. "One can only wonder what spectacular happenings are going on in that room at this very moment."

"…you do realize that one wrong glance at Boa Hancock could turn you into gravel, right?"

"Some sights are worth the price."

"Yeah, and others were never meant to be seen by mortal eyes."

"One can only wonder which this qualifies as."

-o-

"How does he even do this? Rubber can only explain so much."

"Trust me, sister, some things mortal minds are never meant to know." Sandersonia gave a leery glance toward her third sister, who was salivating almost as hard as the monkey in front of them. "No matter how much some might want to know them…"

Under normal circumstances, the spectacle of every mealtime would've been a welcome distraction from the oncoming storm to both the three sisters and their smuggled companion. Sadly, for the two who weren't madly in love with Luffy, it was a most unwelcome distraction. The sounds that they'd gotten very good at ignoring were just the tip of the iceberg.

"And the rumors that will result from this…" Marigold moaned, clutching her head. "I know that he's going to need all the energy he can get, but what will our crew think of whatever rumors that might result from this?!"

"They'll figure out the truth in two seconds flat and then spend the rest of the trip thinking of ways to rib us about it. I'd be more worried about what this does to our reputation within the Marines," Sandersonia smoothly replied, which from the groan of frustration that provoked from her sister was not a comforting thought. A sly smile crept onto her face, and she leaped onto her feet. "So I'm going to go make sure they apply it to just the bulkier Amazons instead of all of us and I need some air anyway, see you later!"

"Wait, what?!" Marigold squawked, panic written all over her features. "No, wait, WAIT!"

The snake-woman dove for her sister in an attempt to stop her from leaving, only for the door to slam right in her face. She immediately pressed herself up against the door, pleading.

"You can't leave me alone like this! Hancock's untouchable, it'll all fall on me! They'll think I'm a fat glutton!"

"And that's wrong... how, exactly?"

Marigold twitched stiffly, then turned around and roared with fangs bared, "AREN'T YOU SUPPOSED TO BE OUT OF YOUR MIND WITH INFATUATION!?"

Hancock didn't reply, too busy making googly eyes at the object of her infatuation.

Eye twitching, hands quivering, Marigold stared at her sister and empress for a long moment before dropping her head in her hands. "When was I left the sane woman standing…"

Salome, for her part, just kept hissing in amusement.

-o-

Standing on the edge of the battleship's weather deck, Sandersonia breathed in the fresh salt breeze and sighed in contentment. It was wonderful to be outside again after 36 hours cooped up indoors, though admittedly not as wonderful as being able to walk around a Marine battleship with impunity. Without the battleship being on fire. Or part of the Phantom Armada. It just wasn't the same without gawking Marines clearly torn between trying to run her off and just ignoring her and getting on with their duties.

Well. All but one, standing a few feet behind her and a veritable beacon in her Observation. Despite interrupting her moment of relaxation, Sandersonia didn't mind. This man represented both a bit more progress on the mission Cross had given her and a chance to vent her anger.

"Beautiful night, isn't it? Peaceful, calm, serene…" Sandersonia tilted her head to the side, just so. "Seems a real shame that the world won't see another night like this for a long time. Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't it the Marines' job to preserve the peace, or did you all just… redefine what that means at some point?"

The sudden thick, choking pressure in the air was more answer than any words.

Sandersonia widened her smile even more, before standing upright and turning around, so as to better grin down at the ship's commander. "Can I help you, Vice Admiral Momonga?"

"You are under acute suspicion of dereliction of duty," Momonga snarled out, blunt as a sledgehammer. "The only reason I haven't already arrested you is that your alibi is as ironclad as our evidence."

The Anaconda Zoan cocked an eyebrow, equal parts amused and incredulous. "And you… what, expect me to give you an excuse to arrest me? Are you familiar with the phrase 'does not compute'? Soundbite was tossing it around, I believe it applies here."

"You raised hell on Sabaody Archipelago," the Vice Admiral droned monotone, his voice cold, steady, and deadly. "Marines were attacked or cast aside while you ran rampant with pirates that, under your sister's contract, you were expected—obligated—to ally against. With this much suspicion and a negative track record, I could make one call and you'd never come out of Impel Down once we're inside."

By this point, Sandersonia was openly snickering.

"And your sister—"

But with that one word, her good cheer fled in the wake of seething anger. Her eyes flashed to slit pupils, and a reptilian hiss snaked out of her throat. None of this deterred Momonga.

"—wouldn't live a week past the war. So yes, I expect you to give me an excuse. Any excuse that could explain away your violation of her contract. Because unlike you pirates, I actually have a duty to uphold, and you will find me very unwilling to compromise it simply because of your relation to someone whose power we value." The Vice Admiral's palm ghosted onto the pommel of his sword, fingers lightly curling around the hilt. "You will either stop flaunting your crimes, or you will confess to them. To continue on your current path would be… unwise."

Sandersonia took in the lecture in silence. Even the hissing had gone away. And once he was done, something truly astonishing happened: all hostility fled in favor of blank placidness. Her hair shadowed her eyes, but the rest of her face was visible, and her whole body relaxed and unmoving.

For a moment, Momonga honestly believed that the Amazon had fallen asleep, just to spite him, and just as he opened his mouth to chastise her for it—

"Hiss-ss-ss-ss…"

Well, she was certainly awake. With a flick of her head, Sandersonia tossed the hair over her eyes out of the way, allowing a single, baleful, serpentine eye to shine out. "Well… you've made your demand. And that's your choice. Buuuut… I don't know if you've got the guts to follow."

The Amazon took a single step forward, shaking the planks beneath them. Momonga didn't step back, but his foot did slide back, his hand shifting down to properly grip his blade.

"Do you want to hear the truth? Or would you prefer something cleaner to pass up to your bosses? Because I'll tell you this much for free…" Abruptly, Sandersonia went hybrid, the better to loom over Momonga as she stared him in the eyes, mouth drawn into a truly evil grin. "I have never felt more alive than when I tore those four-walled hells down to their foundations."

Her smug tone, her threatening demeanor… they both set Momonga's teeth on edge. His temper demanded he cut the snake-woman down on the spot for her impudence. Maybe make a purse while he was at it. It was only a lifetime of discipline and training that let him shove that impulse down where it belonged.

"If you're truly confessing to your involvement," he said very evenly. "Then I'm going to require concrete evidence of your actions, thanks to your blasted alibi."

Her smile stretching several teeth wider, one of Sandersonia's hands reached down her shirt. When she pulled it out, she was holding a large stack of what looked like photographs.

"You want proof of what really happened?" she said, waving the stack in his face. "Take them. See exactly what your 'justice' is worth."

Momonga eyed the pages like they were… well, a live, venomous snake. This was a trap. Every instinct honed by decades of military service said so. And besides that, he was not comfortable about where she'd stored them. But to decline the photos was to ignore a possibility at justice, to be derelict in his duty. So he grabbed the photos, scanned them—

"What?!"

—and followed up that explanation with several muffled curses as he shuffled through the stack as fast as he could. As if the speed could somehow let him deny the impossible, wrong images he was seeing.

And what images they were. One photo showing a squad of Marines, taking aim at a group of disheveled and emaciated people, a motley band of what could only be pirates tumbling into the frame between them. Another, a family sobbing in clear joy and relief, clad in tattered rags and broken chains and cuffs lying at their feet. Another, a stream of people coming out of a dungeon, many of them unclothed and badly lacerated. And the money shot: a Navy Officer threatening a group of slaves at gunpoint, and a group of pirates posed behind him, an instant from striking him down.

And in all of them, Boa Sandersonia. Sandersonia, front and center and attacking a firing line of Marines. Sandersonia, wreaking havoc in a place with far too many chains and cages to be normal. And Sandersonia… transporting yet more refugees on her back, handing back a waterskin to a child looking at her with wonder.

Now calling on his discipline for an entirely different reason, Momonga looked up from the photos to the woman—demon, at this point—before him, fire blazing within his gaze. Her smile was gone and her stare's venom matched his fire.

"What kind of redacted report must you have received?" she wondered conversationally. "If you knew the first thing about our Sabaody Revolution, you would have expected something like this. If you knew the first thing about the flag you serve, then nothing would ever surprise you ever again."

Sandersonia took another step forward, looming over him once again. A spectre, watching him. Judging him.

"And yet, here you stand…" she continued, each word falling hard and heavy. "Surprised. The good man, blind to what's taking place ten inches in front of your nose. Truly, I don't know what you deserve more: my earnest pity, or my undying contempt."

And then, just like that, the moment passed. Sandersonia stood back up, turned, and walked off, waving dismissively over her shoulder. "Well, either way, you got what you asked for. Let me know how it goes for you."

She took one step away. Two.

"You expect me to believe this?"

She froze at the question, shaking with suppressed laughter. "Sss-sss-sss-sss-sss…wow. The power of denial really is amazing."

She spun around, exerting all of her self-control not to transform, and snarled at him.

"There's enough evidence there for a warrant. Show your superiors and see what they say to you. Then decide if you really care about the truth."

And with that, she left him, power walking back to her room.

-o-

For practically as long as the Navy had existed, it was a joke in the lower ranks that becoming a flag officer dropped your IQ by a standard deviation, though the men didn't actually use the term. These days, it was no longer a joke. Instead, it was the only sane explanation for the sheer madness command was planning to execute within a week.

At least the Marines on board Momonga's battleship could assure themselves they were not going to make flag officer anytime soon. The proof? They still had enough basic survival instinct left that the Marines delivering food to the Amazons got out of Sandersonia's way without a word said.

Despite the seething anger oozing from her every pore, the snake-Zoan still squeezed through the door rather than slamming it open, and was in and properly slamming it shut before anyone could take a peek. Naturally, this aroused the interest of the other three people in the room.

"I'll tell you one thing," she groused to no one in particular as she stalked over to and plopped into her seat. "If this actually works and he comes onto the Divine, I'm actively considering making him the Pisces to my Ophiuchus. Because I swear, that man has a steel rod upside his ass the size of his own—!"

"You kno~ow," Marigold interrupted, her voice carrying an undeniable sing-song quality as she folded her arms behind her head. "The others could get entirely the wrong idea if you did that. Barty has good money on how Cross and the swordfish really feel about each other. And the way you're talking, I can see where he's coming from."

Sandersonia froze, face pale in raw horror. In response, Salome let out a hissing chuckle, waving her tail in amusement. [See, this is why I put up with you humans. Soooo much amusement, and you even feed and clean up after yourselves!]

Having gotten over her shock, Sandersonia veritably melting into her chair, a miserable groan escaping her lips. "…right. Never mind, then… need to try letting it roll off my back…ugh." Her tongue flicked out as she bent over clutching her stomach. "I think I just threw up a little…"

Reluctantly turning away from Luffy, Hancock frowned at her middle sister. "Your… relationship with the Vice Admiral aside, did you achieve the desired impact?"

Sonia let out a scoff. "Oh, no, not yet. But if the Divine's correct about the current state of Marineford, and Ophiuchus's take on the man is even close to right?" She grinned widely, drooling a bit. "By morning, there's going to be enough meat to feed everyone on board."

"Good."

The amusement died at one word from Luffy, who had finished eating and was looking far more severe than anyone with a belly that bloated had any right to look.

"We need to be ready for what comes next. And… thank you again for all of this," he added, bowing in gratitude.

And while Hancock swooned, the two Zoans saw the hope in the gesture for what it was.

-o-

Momonga was ready to explode. A dozen calls and half a dozen faxes to every corner of Marineford had produced everything from common, stuttering grunts to irritable higher-ups. Everything except actual answers. Despite none of the aforementioned officers even approaching his rank, they still had the gall to tell him that they had their orders and to dispose of the pictures. His latest call had turned up a particularly suicidal underling on the other end, who simply said:

"Get with the program, you idiot. Nobody cares about justice if it makes the Navy look bad. How the hell did you get to your position and not realize that? Do yourself and everyone else here a favor: take your righteousness and shove it up your—HEY GET OFF M—ARGH!"

A clatter had come over the connection, followed by a very different and very panicked voice speaking over his colleague's protests. "Sorry, sir, he seems to be experiencing a bit of a mental breakdown and we're undergoing some rather extreme overload in general, please hold and we will call you back later. Good day! KA-LICK!"

The sheer audacity of an unnamed grunt talking down to him like that had left Momonga more bemused than livid. That was the kind of thing you only dreamed of getting the chance to say to your superiors. Tempers there must have been running higher than the Red Line.

It actually took him a minute to shake that off and try yet another number, though his snail rang before he could do so. Picking up the mic plastered an all-too-familiar smile on the snail.

"Hey, red-stripe. Hear you've been calling around here?"

"Yamakaji," Momonga replied, his jaw tightening. "What do you want? I'm busy."

The gastropod simulacrum's smile tightened up, and it chuffed out a heavy huff of smoke. "Yeah, I heard. That's why I'm calling. Because I was the highest-ranked guy on hand—" Momonga scoffed at the mere implication of being equated with the likes of Yamakaji. "—and tell you to drop it."

No scoffing that time. "I am going to do you the favor of assuming that you are joking, Vice Admiral Yamakaji," Momonga growled, spitting out the man's rank like it was a curse. "As I assume you are unaware of what I am trying to accomplish here, allow me to inform you: I am in physical possession of photographic evidence that Boa Sandersonia was part of the uprising on Sabaody Archipelago five days ago. But for reasons I cannot begin to comprehend, Judicial has been ignoring my requests for an arrest warrant. And now they're refusing my calls outright! I don't know what the hell they think they're doing, but—!"

"Yeah, I can see your problem there," Yamakaji grunted, shaking his head. "Lemme guess: your photographic evidence is part of a set, and this Boa woman is only part of it. The other pictures, they're… less than flattering in regards to the Marines, yeah?"

Momonga's brain tripped over the reply - how did he know? whispered a small part of him - but rationalization was easy. "They're clearly false," he stated. "Marines stopped protecting the slave trade 200 years ago. There couldn't be this many this far gone."

"Ahaah, yeah, no."

Momonga froze, gaping at the snail in naked shock. "…what?"

"Yeah, see, thing is? You're wrong. 'Bout those pictures being lies. Yeah, that's dead wrong," Yamakaji said, his shameless smile still in place despite the dead tone. "Those Marines were definitely defending those slavers, and we've known about them for years. Hell, you could even say we never stopped being ignorant of them."

A moment of silence passed, and then…

"WHAT?!" Momonga roared, slamming his hands around the impassive snail. "How could that be possible?! Such negligence is beyond—!"

"Negligence nothing, they were following their orders to the letter: accommodate the slavers and allow them to go about their business, provided they pay their dues. Simple enough, one of the easiest jobs possible - right up until the Straw Hats did their usual schtick and upset that apple cart."

As bad as the words were, it was their delivery that left Momonga poleaxed and unable to respond. To hear such blatant disregard for the founding principles of the Marines, delivered in such a matter-of-fact tone… Well, the Vice Admiral didn't want to believe it. Probably would have vehemently denied the truth staring in his face, if it weren't for the fact that Yamakaji didn't care enough to lie about something like this.

"Then that makes these photographs more important than ever!" the swordsman declared, firm in his convictions. "They are clear and undeniable proof of—!"

"Of what?" Yamakaji bluntly retorted, his perpetual smile not budging an inch. "Of Marines besmirching the Navy's 'honor'? In case this hasn't gotten through your skull yet, that's exactly why those pictures will never see the light of day. Any second, you'll be getting orders straight from the top telling you to destroy those pictures. Because everybody in the top brass knows, and nobody cares. Or if they do care, they're overridden by people even higher than them. The only reason anyone ever gives a damn about things like this is if they blow back on us. Which, frankly, means that four-eyed rookie owes Cross for not getting busted down to seaman… or worse."

"But… that… this… this doesn't happen," Momonga sputtered, before slamming his fist on the table. "This doesn't happen! We… We are Marines, we are Justice! This sort of dishonor would never be allowed, never be covered up—!"

"It's always allowed red-stripe, this happens all the time. It's allowed, because the people on top say it's allowed. That's how it works. It's called politics, and it happens every. Single. Day."

"I would have noticed—!"

"The hell you would have," the smiling man scoffed, huffing out a ring of smoke. "You're never at Marineford, and when you are you're only turning in bounties of the worst of criminal scum. You're a soldier on the frontlines, all you've ever cared about is your marching orders and the closest prey for you to hunt. Just following orders blindly, not a care in the world…" Yamakaji paused, and then out of nowhere, his smile took on a tinge of wistfulness. "…ta be honest, red-stripe? I've always been a bit jealous of you."

Momonga blinked, staring at the snail incredulously. "What are you—?"

"Why wouldn't I be? Red-stripe the loyal soldier boy, marching to battle without a care in the world. No need to worry about the politics, no need to worry about the rest of the world, just the next battle, the next fight. Everything's oh-so simple when you live and die by the sword. Heh… guess it's true what they say, ain't it? Ignorance really is bliss… or, well…" Yamakaji's mirrored face shifted slightly, taking on an overtone of vicious glee. "Was bliss, anyhow! Poor little soldier boy, left alone with the unvarnished truth. I wonder how long you'll be able to survive until that damn conscience of yours pushes you so far that nobody's gonna be able to ignore it. Gonna be fun to watch, at least, hahaha!"

A blue streak threatened to tumble out of Momonga's mouth. But the sight of his snail cowering, barely out of his shell and most definitely not smiling, stayed the tirade. Instead, he held up and examined the pictures again, thumbing through them one by one. The rage this kindled, he banked in a corner of his heart, where he could keep it hidden.

Until the day it would be unleashed for a righteous cause.

"Puru puru puru puru!"

And then, with a look of pure dread on its face, the snail began to ring again.

-o-

Outside Momonga's cabin, an unmemorable Marine was all but leaning at the door to listen. It was hard maintaining enough distance to get away quickly while still being close enough to eavesdrop, and Momonga's voice going quiet didn't help. At this point, all the Marine was sure of was that the Vice Admiral was talking- answering, from all the short responses.

This went on for about a minute, and then there was silence. Minutes more ticked by, the cabin quiet.

The bellow of rage loud enough to wake the whole ship startled him, sending him tumbling back. This was followed up by the wall being slashed out like a bomb had gone off.

And then, just as swiftly, there was silence again.

Silence, as Momonga stepped out of the wreck of his cabin and marched down the hall, head bowed and a grim shadow hanging over him. He summarily ignored the paralyzed soldier as he passed, and rounded the corner, gone entirely.

It took about a minute for the Marine to come to grips with the fact that he, miraculously, wasn't dead, and another to find the courage to peer into the decimated cabin.

As it turned out, apart from the wall, everything was untouched: a table with a trembling Transponder Snail on it; files, miscellaneous bric-à-brac and memorabilia, all neatly stacked. All aside from a pile of shredded papers, scattered across the floor.

Acting on a hunch, the Marine stooped down to examine the shreds. What he could make out sent his eyebrows crawling for his hairline. On another whim, he stood up and snapped his fingers, drawing the snail's attention.

"Hey, little guy. Mind making a call for me?"

Despite the trembling, the snail nodded. One number rattled off later, and the snail rung once, twice… and then…

"KA-LICK! Sagittarius."

"One of your arrows reporting, sir," the grunt said.

"Fly true," came the grim response.

"You were right. I don't know how you knew, but you were right: Momonga's straining hard, and something's about ready to snap. And, uh…" He warily looked at the wreckage of the wall. "From the looks of things? When he does, he's going to do it hard."

"That bad, hm?"

"Mm-hm. Apparently…" The Marine held up one of the scraps of photograph. "HQ ordered the pictures Anaconda gave him destroyed, and he was less than enthused about it. Either way, I recommend we bring him around to our way of thought. Before he gets himself killed."

"Heh heh… he never was one for subtlety or nuance, even back in bootcamp. Very well, then. Thank you for your service. But hold off for now and stay the course; we'll wait until the time is right."

"Yes, sir."

"Dismissed. KA-LICK!"

"Thanks a lot," the grunt said to the snail, receiving one in return as he left the office.

-o-

The New World was in a great state of turmoil; between the sudden departure of all of Akainu's forces and the Emperors' reactions to the declaration of war, no sea was more panicked than the most chaotic of them all. But of course, no place was this clearer than on the deck of the Moby Dick.

The instant the Vivre Cards burst into flames, long before Cross's own retaliation, Whitebeard had sent for everyone loyal to him. The newspaper that arrived later only confirmed his choice, as did Cross's broadcast. It was a pity, Whitebeard thought, that they hadn't wised up and released Ace in the face of that threat; the sheer shame would have been enough revenge for the old man.

But that didn't happen. And so they were preparing, around the clock, to re-enter Paradise with all of their forces and lay siege to Marineford. An endeavor helped significantly by the return of one of the Division Commanders, whose arrival caused quite the stir.

After all, all those in the crew capable of traveling between islands without a ship were already present when he arrived.

"Wha—Izo!? How did you get back here!?" Marco demanded as the onnagata came aboard, glancing over the side of the ship and seeing no other craft.

"Sea turtles," Izo impatiently threw out, sweeping right past Marco. "I need to speak to Pops immediately, and you need to be there. Come with me."

The crew of the Moby Dick smoothly flowed around Izo as he made a beeline for his captain's throne, the Phoenix hastily scrambling after him. Those already there parted as he approached, Edward Newgate himself leaning forward.

"Welcome back, Izo." His bones creaked very audibly as he leaned further forward, examining his son. "Is what I'd like to say, anyway. You seem troubled, far more so than the rest of us. Is there something more than this war weighing on you?"

Izo shook his head, jaw visibly clenched tight. "No, the war is very much what I'm worried about. Specifically, some key details could make all the difference to our efforts."

If Izo had had the Whitebeards' interest before, now he had their attention. A dense atmosphere settled over the quarterdeck, everyone present listening intently as their brother continued his explanation.

"Lola caught me before I left and passed on a message from Jeremiah Cross. He's discreetly gathered an impressive following of his own over the past year, and he has even turned several in the Navy to his cause. Those who are capable will be doing everything that they can to ensure that we succeed."

That set whispers about the crowd, the heavy atmosphere lightening somewhat with renewed hope.

"Cross himself… won't be present."

And the mood plummeted again.

"And neither will most of the Straw Hat Pirates. They've temporarily disbanded and gone into hiding to train for the New World. Luffy alone will be involved in this chaos and will be doing all that he can to save his brother before he goes underground as well. There's a chance—not a significant one, but a chance nonetheless that he may save Ace before he's even taken to Marineford."

"He's breaking into Impel Down!?" Jozu barked, eyes wide.

"Only the Straw Hats would be this reckless…" Marco sighed, pressing his fingers to his temple to try and head off a very old migraine flaring to life. "Frankly, I'm surprised that they had the good sense to only attempt it with their strongest member."

Izo's mouth twitched as he continued, though otherwise, his grim mood didn't shift. "That's not all. Lola confirmed your suspicions, Pops, that Cross's knowledge extends to future events. Not completely, but there's just no other way that he could know this."

At once, Izo's expression gained an unmistakable tinge of deep sorrow.

"You're planning to die there, no matter the outcome. Aren't you."

The only sign that Whitebeard had heard was a slight straightening of his back. Otherwise, he and Izo were impassive, the rest of the gathered Whitebeard pirates glancing between the two like watching a tennis match.

"And if I am?" Whitebeard rumbled.

Izo continued to hold his gaze with the elder pirate for several more seconds, before turning away and sighing.

"Well, after how Oden died, I'm the last person to tell someone how to live—or end—their life," he admitted. "But… If you're going to die, then it's best you go into this with all the information we have."

Thus the final strategy meeting of the Emperor and his division commanders commenced, and over the next few days leading up to the war, a singular fact cemented itself in every last one of Whitebeard's strongest sons: for this one act, Jeremiah Cross was as good as a brother to them.

Because whether Ace survived or not, whether they survived or not, he gave them the ultimate blessing in making their father's looming death known to them in the fleeting peace before the war: the blessing to ensure that nothing was left unsaid.

-o-

Fire is hot. Water is wet. And equally obviously, the atmosphere in Marineford was tense.

Less expected was that one of the biggest sources of the tension was currently sharing a drink with one person that was dealing with far too much tension already.

"Isn't it a bit…" Kong swirled his cup as he considered his words. "Inappropriate, to share drinks with your boss? I'm your superior, not your bartender."

"Well, first, it's not like you're going to be my direct superior for much longer, so fuck 'appropriate'," Sengoku spat, waving his own cup so hard some sloshed out. "And second, it's not like I have anyone else to drink with. Tsuru hates me, and I can't blame her, and Garp's both an idiot and getting right there with her. For the record, however this ends, you should expect his resignation soon, too."

Given the topic of conversation, Marineford was in legitimate danger of running out of booze.

"Not Tsuru's?"

"Oh, she'll stay. If only to spite me. Damn cantankerous hag, all righteous and full of piss and vinegar. God, I miss when I had her as a friend!"

"…how much did you drink before you stumbled your way in here?"

"Clearly not enough!"

Kong massaged his forehead and looked back at the soon-to-be-ex-Fleet Admiral. He made to say something, thought better of it, did it again, and paused again. Despite being rather sloshed, Sengoku still noticed and gave him an odd look.

"Something you'd like to say?"

"I was trying to think of an argument to convince you to come back to sanity for a bit, but I am honestly at a loss here."

"Welcome to my life after a year with Cross and his damned show!" Sengoku barked humorlessly, tilting back the bottle.

Kong observed the action… and then, with a stony expression, he went for broke.

"I don't believe that if he were still alive, Ro—"

The Commander-in-Chief expected an angry response. Maybe Sengoku would slug him in the face for bringing up the one elephant in the room the Fleet Admiral carried with him wherever he went, and then that would give him an opening to make the man reconsider his daft decision. Instead, he blacked out from an acute burst of Haki, coming to his senses five seconds later to hear the sound of debris falling. Glancing warily toward the source of the noise, he found a ragged hole where the wall had been.

Sengoku, meanwhile, remained seated in the same spot, his eyes on the bottle.

"I'm sorry, you were saying something?" he asked, his voice very quiet and his demeanor dangerously sober.

Kong exhaled, accepting defeat and the loss of a good ten years off his life once he got his heart rate back under control as he reminded himself why even he never brought that subject up.

"…I was asking if I need to post a detail on you to make sure you show up?" he sourly pivoted.

Sengoku snorted. "I'm not that far gone. Hell or high water, I still have pride in my uniform - for as long as I'm contractually obligated to. For better or worse, this is my last duty as Fleet Admiral. I'll see it through. And hopefully, it'll kill me."

Kong started to nod, before pausing as he re-ran that last line through his head. "You… do mean 'even if', right?"

Sengoku's response was a flat snort. "Depends on how I feel at the bottom of the bottle," he responded, tilting it back and drinking deeply.

-o-

One floor below, another officer brooded over a cup of hard liquor. In Akainu's case, it was a bottle of 21-year-old Ambassador rum, on the rocks. Truly a Navy man through and through. He took his liquor alone, seated to stare out the window over the bustle of Marineford as the gathered army hurried to finish the last preparations. The might of Absolute Justice, promising swift death to evil.

Then two things happened that bordered on inconceivable: the door swung open, admitting someone most definitely not one of his few superiors to disturb his rest. And that person, without hesitation, draped their arms over his shoulders.

"Brooding again, my Ulawun?" crooned a feminine voice.

The Admiral didn't bother to correct her; it suited his plans to have her think of him as her volcano god, and in any case, she wouldn't listen. He'd tried. Once.

"Hands off, Irian," he gruffly ordered.

Giggling, the woman withdrew, though not before flicking his ear on the way. Frowning, Akainu turned around to reprimand her. Instead, he raised an eyebrow at what she was wearing.

"I see you availed yourself of the tailors."

"Does it look good on me?" Irian said, spinning on the ball of her foot to show off the white three-piece suit she was wearing, the collar of the navy-blue undershirt unbuttoned low enough to show off considerable cleavage. "The grass skirt is traditional and all, but I figured if I'm going to be fighting here I should look the part!"

'It does resemble a flag officer's uniform,' Akainu noted. At the same time, with no insignia, she wouldn't be mistaken for an officer. "It does. It flatters you well."

"Those tailors," Irian declared. "Work magic, I swear. And the cloth they work with. First thing we need to buy once this is over is as much cloth as we can get!"

Still smiling, the priestess walked up to the window and gazed out on the artificial harbor.

"Truly astounding," she said softly. "You people are so rich. The temple to Ulawun isn't a tenth as magnificent, and it took us eighty years to build." She tapped the glass. "This is what I want for my people. All of it. And a chance to see what other wonders the outside world offers."

"And your island shall have it, once you join the World Government," Akainu interjected.

Irian looked over her shoulder, and for a moment Akainu saw the resolve, the sheer desire, that he had seen months ago on a beach of black sand. She would do what needed to be done. All that was needed was to point her in the right direction.

"Of course," Irian said, turning back out to the view. "I shall make this Whitebeard and his army dance."

Abruptly, Akainu found his fingers tapping along to an unheard rhythm on the arm of his chair. Turning, he reached out for the bottle of rum and poured a finger of the amber liquid over some fresh ice. "Drink?" he offered.

Irian heaved a put-upon sigh and spun around. "Oh, if I must," she said, taking the glass. Cautiously, she brought it up to her lips and took a dainty sip; her eyes widened. "Oh my, that's smooth."

The priestess took another sip, a proper one. Akainu said nothing, having gone back to staring out the window. The two stood in… not companionable, but at least content silence.

Then Irian spoke up again.

"I'd have thought you'd be happier about all… this, Ulawun," she said, indicating the harbor.

Akainu raised an eyebrow at the priestess, which she took as a signal to continue.

"I did listen to your explanation on 'Absolute Justice'," she explained. "All relentless pursuit of evil, no sacrifice too great and all that jazz. I'd think this execution would be right up your alley."

'Well, it isn't,' Akainu grumbled internally. His fingers began to tap on the armrest again. Should he tell her? She wouldn't inform higher command, or worse, his political masters. And frankly, he needed someone to talk to about this. Sengoku's hands were tied, as were Kong's. Kizaru wouldn't care. Aokiji wouldn't listen. And no way was he talking to anyone subordinate to him in the hierarchy. Not even Garp. Especially not Garp.

"The execution of Fire Fist Ace is Justice. Plain and simple," he said. "Making it this public? Practically inviting the strongest man in the world to attempt to intervene? That's not Justice. That's stupidity. If we were doing this before our resources were crippled from that brat and his snail, it might be different. But now…"

He shook his head. "Either he should have been put to death quietly or this should have waited until our resources were restored. As it stands, this conflict threatens to leave us unable to pursue Justice at all, whether we win or lose."

A brief silence fell, during which Irian gave him a searching look.

"Surely, you're selling yourself short. Even if the island itself were to crumble, and that's the worst-case scenario, the strongest of you would survive to pick up the pieces and rebuild."

"We shall see," Akainu replied, taking another sip of rum.

-o-

Meanwhile, in another example of a fearless woman disturbing a dangerous man's peace and quiet…

"Ohhh, my precious beasties!"

A large black devil suppressed a groan as a dominatrix in pink spandex came whining into his office.

Rather unfortunately for Warden Magellan, this wasn't the start to a particularly off-kilter joke. Instead, it was just another of many new developments that, over the course of the past week, had proven exceptionally taxing on the Warden's patience and sanity.

Case in point, Sadi once again barging into his office, bawling her eyes out over…

"What got mauled this time, and how much is it going to cost me to find a replacement?" Magellan groused, reaching across his desk for yet another copy of Form Z7-29-D: Fauna Procurement Request. A form that he had touched all of four times in all his prior years, and which he now found himself running out of.

SLAM!

Slowly, and with a gimlet eye, Magellan withdrew his hand. With Sadi face-first on his desk, sobbing into the woodwork, there would be no retrieving the paperwork for… a while.

"Nooo, you don't understa-a-and!" she wailed, hammering her fists in a painfully obvious tantrum. "Those heinous brutes! They didn't just attack another one of my pets! They hurt one of my ba-a-abieeees!"

"WHAT!?" Magellan roared, surging to his feet—

Grrrrmmmm…

—at which point the blue-ring octopus takoyaki he'd grabbed as a snack caught up with him. Clutching his stomach he plopped back into his chair. He ran a hand over his face. "Tartarus unholy—That's the third one this week! Which one?!"

"My beloved little Rhino-o-o-ooo…" she lamented, yanking furiously at her hair. "It came out of nowhere, he didn't even stand a chance! Half his bones broken, internal injuries up and down his torso! He'll be laid up for months, and now my dear, darling Minotaurus is all aloooone! WAAAH!"

"Great…" Magellan scowled, pinching the bridge of his nose. "Like our medical bills for the first two weren't already bad enough…" His scowl then deepened sourly as Sadi's wailing hit a particularly unpleasant pitch. "And will you pull yourself together?!"

"WILL YOU!?" Sadi screeched back, Magellan leaning back in honest shock. "We wouldn't be in this mess if you had put your foot down and kept those limacious bivalves out! We had an accord, and you're letting them ignore it!"

"…I see that your thesaurus calendar has been put to good use."

"TAKE THIS SERIOUSLY! This is our home! Our prison! They have no right to do this, and yet here you are, their mangy lapdog!"

A deathly silence fell over the office, Sadi pale under the curtain of her bangs, clearly realizing just how badly she'd fucked up. Slowly, Magellan unfolded to his full height, looming over Sadi to engulf her in his shadow.

"I," he rumbled menacingly. "Am nobody's lapdog. This is my prison. This is my domain. And so long as I live, nothing and nobody may do as they please without my say-so! DO I MAKE MYSELF—!"

Knock-Knock.

"Ah, Warden Magellan?"

Caught mid-reprimand, the Warden hastily composed himself - an effort made difficult by his stomach rumbling again. By now more than a little eager to get this mess over with so that he could… handle his protesting bowels, he answered, "Yes, Domino?"

The door cracked open, and his Head Jailer poked her head into the office. "The Marines have arrived."

The tension in the air palpably thickened, an aggravated expression settling on Magellan's face. "…Which ones?"

"Tch," Sadi sneered vindictively, as though she'd won the argument.

And a traitorous part of Magellan couldn't deny the idea.

-o-

Dawn of the Eighth Day

"I really hope I don't have to do this again, this is so weird," Luffy grumbled as he inched his way back into Merry's duffel bag.

"You're more likely to go undetected this way then by clinging to me," Hancock reasoned - which was promptly followed by a luminescent blush that clashed horribly with her despairing expression.

"Aaaalright, that's enough," Marigold said, pressing Luffy's head in and sealing the zipper. "Let's get this over with."

"Agreed, let's go," Sonia replied.

Securing the bag beneath her clothes, Hancock and her sisters emerged from their quarters, a pair of guards that they recognized as Masons silently escorting them to the edge of the ship. As they walked, curiosity drew their eyes behind them. Almost as tall as the Florian Obelisks, the Gates of Justice towered over them and the entire island that they had come to. Exhaling and suppressing shudders they turned away and continued to the forecastle.

And there it stood: the world-infamous Underwater Gaol, Impel Down. What stood above the water, Hancock found to be paradoxically impressive and… well, rather underwhelming. A fortress sitting upon the water was inherently impressive, imposing and unassailable and a tremendous feat of architectural engineering. But by the standards of a world-class prison feared by all as 'the Pirates' Hell', it did not cut so ominous a figure. Still, Hancock knew—better than most, even—that surface impressions rarely told the whole story. Quite literally, in this case, as a single glance into the water showed the truth of the fortress: that it went down. Down, far down beneath the surface of the ocean, down into the aquatic abyss, like an enormous stone iceberg.

It was there, there and out of sight in that hidden abyss, that the true Hell awaited.

There that Monkey D. Luffy would soon endeavor to reach.

With well-disguised trepidation, Hancock and her sisters continued along the deck towards the gangplank. At the top of that gangplank stood Momonga, barring their path, and reluctantly the party slowed to a stop.

"The request that you presented was for you, Boa Hancock, to lay eyes upon Fire-Fist Ace before his execution," he declared, before leveling an unflinching glare at Marigold and, with much more venom, Sandersonia. "That remains the deal; you, and you alone, are permitted to enter and exit this prison. Neither they come with you, nor the snake. And!" he snapped his hand up the second Sandersonia opened her mouth. "I would advise against complaining to me about it, or in general. Warden Magellan is not going to relax security one iota beyond what the Government has commanded, and he's already not happy about relaxing it enough to let you in. And thanks to Jeremiah Cross, I'm sure you know the consequences of getting on that man's bad side."

Frowning, the two Zoans stepped forward, only for Momonga to hold up a hand in the universal sign to stop.

"You're worried about your sister in my company? I'm worried about my men in yours without me here to monitor you two. So why don't you just make this as simple as possible for both of us." Under his breath, "I have a bad enough migraine already…"

While Momonga was distracted, Hancock waved her sisters back. They reluctantly complied, along with Salome, and were off the gangplank and back on the ship when Momonga turned his attention back to them. Nodding curtly, Momonga turned his back on the ship and marched for the prison's entrance, with Hancock following two paces behind.

The pair walked in mutual silence, each content to pretend the other didn't exist. It wasn't like there was anything to talk about, anyway. The walk to the prison was as unassuming as the building itself: a normal pier, well reinforced and flanked by battleships. They were watched intently on all sides by scores of Marines, including officers.

The fact that the march was made in silence was rather off-putting to Momonga. The sadistic Warlord, quite in opposition to her typical mannerisms, was simply ignoring the wolf-whistles from on-looking Marines without comment, and more importantly, without petrifying hearts.

Nevertheless, once they reached the half-way point on the dock, he turned his head to address her. "Just so we're clear, it is only because of your position as a Warlord that a pirate like you is being allowed to even see this prison. As such, you will be under restrictions on this visit. Once you're inside, you will be searched, and you will not be allowed to set one foot inside the prison without wearing sea prism stone handcuffs. If you refuse these restrictions, we will be turning right back around and headed directly for Marineford. Are we clear?"

Hancock flinched at the reminder, moving her arm to shield the bag she had hidden under her coat. "So be it," she tersely replied.

Momonga nodded in reply as they came up to the portcullis that barred passage into the prison. At an unseen signal, it slowly clanked up, bar by bar, to reveal a bland brick hallway into the bowels of the prison. The path was flanked by two rows of Impel Down's wardens, clad in sharp, militaristic uniforms entirely dissimilar to the Marines'.

And while they did momentarily fall victim to Hancock's beauty, openly ogling her, they were just as quick to pull back into their professionalism, firing off picture-perfect salutes. Likely more due to Momonga's presence than her own, but nevertheless, any display of composure in the face of Hancock's beauty was worthy of a modicum of respect… and plenty of worry over what that professionalism meant for her beloved.

But most ominous of all were the doors. They were a simple pair of wooden double doors, reinforced with metal and big enough to allow a giant through. But when they creaked open, a cold, cold wind washed over the pair. A wind that reeked of malice, of pain…

And of Death.

These… were the true gates of Impel Down.

And this was where the world's fate would be decided.

48 Hours Before the War

"…what an oppressive atmosphere," Momonga muttered. Hancock found herself in agreement. Though nothing could hold a candle to what she'd gone through in the 'holy city', the atmosphere alone placed it in a firm second. At least Mariejois attempted, in most places, to maintain a veneer of civility. This place was a naked blade, rusted and worn with bloodshed, and no less deadly for it.

In an effort to distract herself from the unmistakable feeling of a scythe tapping at the underside of her throat, Hancock latched onto the one detail that wasn't directly related to the prison itself. "You've never entered yourself?"

He glanced back, visibly debating whether to answer. "Never had the 'privilege'. I just handed whoever survived fights with me off at the nearest available Marine Base."

"Then I suppose this experience will be educational for the both of us," Hancock said neutrally.

In short order, their guide appeared: a topless man taller than average with a round gut, a green and yellow headdress, and wide eyebrows resembling horns framing his face. There was a faint aura of patheticness around him—something about the expression and gut together—but Hancock was no green warrior. Underneath the fat and slouching was a capable fighter.

"Welcome… to my Impel Down," the man said, then shook himself. "Oh, excuse me, I said 'my' by mistake. I'm getting ahead of myself."

If perhaps not the smartest one.

A growl slipped out of Momonga, his hope to meet someone who wouldn't make a fool of themselves dashed to pieces. Suppressing his frustration, he shook the man's hand.

"Vice Admiral Momonga, I understand the circumstances. Is that the Empress Hancock?"

"Yes, and you would be wise not to let your tongue slip while referring to me," Hancock said coldly.

"My Empress Hancock?" Hannyabal repeated.

It was with visible reluctance that Momonga stuck his sword out to the side to intercept Hancock's attempt to kick Hannyabal's head from his shoulders, and equal indifference that the surrounding wardens allowed the act to pass without notice.

"A-Ah, I'm sorry!" Hannyabal said, waving his hands apologetically.

But as he continued to speak, Momonga and Hancock's attention wasn't on him. Rather, they focused on the very large, very ominous shadow that stepped out of the darkness and silently strode up unseen behind Hannyabal.

"Aheh, I must apologize," the pharaonic man chuckled. "I got ahead of—!"

THWACK!

"GYAAa-ah-ah-ah-ah…"

Hannyabal collapsed to the floor—flailing in agony briefly before his body locked up—to reveal a shimmering coat of liquid wrapped around a wide palm. And also a layer of the same, off-color liquid coating the back of the Vice Warden's skull.

Both Hancock and Momonga stiffened at the shadowed figure that stepped into the light, their animosity forgotten. For the conflicts they had with each other meant nothing in the face of the actual literal demon in a nice suit in front of them.

"I apologize for my Vice Warden's inability to keep his mouth shut. His ambition is paradoxically his most admirable trait and his most grievous failing," the demon rumbled, tall enough to effortlessly loom over the pair. "I am Warden Magellan, and it is within my Impel Down where you stand. Be aware: so long as you stand within these four walls, the only law which matters here is my word, and mine alone. And should either—either—of you infringe upon that law… then you will suffer for it."

Magellan's frame bent over, bringing his glowering visage even closer to his two 'guests'. His breath, rancid in smell and toxic in effect, washed over them.

"Are. We. Clear."

Both of the Warden's 'guests', though not ones to be intimidated, still shivered internally at the sheer, furious murder the Warden emanated. Hancock in particular was worried about more than just the intimidation display. She'd read Cross's letter to Luffy, and while she knew Luffy would face more than just what was outlined in it, she most certainly had not expected the first monkey wrench to get thrown in the works literally three steps in.

From the letter, Magellan was supposed to be polite and accommodating, outright worshipping her beauty. She hadn't even been supposed to meet him until well after she and Luffy separated. No, here he was, infuriated beyond all belief, to the point where her beauty didn't even have a chance to register.

The conclusion was inescapable: the changes extended beyond Amazon Lily and had already affected the Underwater Gaol. Whatever Luffy was headed into, it would not conform to what Cross had told him. He would be flying at least partially blind.

Nevertheless, for all that Hancock was concerned for her true love's safety, she was still a woman of strength and pride, and most certainly not one to be cowed for long.

As such, she steeled herself and shoved the trepidation down to meet Magellan. "I did not come here in search of a battle beyond that which the Government has forced upon me," she calmly explained. "Bring me to the root of their madness, and we will be done with each other."

Magellan regarded her with poorly-hidden aggravation. He snorted out a cloud of poison, prompting Hancock and Momonga to step back to be safe, and turned away, straightening up.

"Follow me. You will be searched, and then we will proceed with this farce as swiftly as possible."

The two followed the Warden into the prison, though only briefly before Momonga's desire for closure, for lack of a better term, surpassed his own desire to get this over with. "And your Vice Warden?"

"Kkk-gagh! Haahh…"

The visiting duo glanced over their shoulders at the source of the hacking cough: Hannyabal, scrambling to catch up to them, hopping the whole way to shake life back into one of his legs.

"I'm fine… used to it by now, working under this…" He paused, sucking on his lips and reconsidering his words. "…treatment."

"He'll live," Magellan grunted. "There isn't a single person under my purview who I do not trust to do their jobs to the fullest."

Their walk down the corridor was short, silent, and rather tense. Not just because the murderous aura surrounding the Warden, but also the rooms full of torture implements visible through the bars that made up the walls. If the sense of death from stepping into the prison was daunting, then the aura of pure malice misery originating from the room was ungodly.

Which, by comparison, made the doors they paused before at the end of the corridor so mundane it was almost painful. They were flanked by two women: one a blonde clad in the prison's warden uniform and wearing tinted shades, the other rather nondescript with her head down and her expression hidden by a Navy ball cap that effectively conveyed her allegiance.

"I am Vice Head Jailer Domino. We will be searching you one by one," the blonde announced. "Security levels have been escalated with the war alert, so we are expected to take every measure possible, even stationing Marines within the prison, as you can see. As such, Hannyabal and this officer here will assist me in searching Warlord Hancock. Vice Admiral, if you will remain outside while we do so?"

The Vice Admiral answered by remaining where he was, correctly surmising that the jailers' bitterness was in large part down to working with Marines. The whys of such an attitude were beyond him, though. Hancock, for her part, felt her unease grow. There was only meant to be one person looking over her, not two jailers and a Marine officer for good measure!

But she had no choice. When Hannyabal finally reached them, she stepped into the room, a plan of action already forming in her mind. She took note of the camera snail in the corner, glancing around the room to confirm that it was alone. Then, straying to the side a bit, she turned to face the three who were to search her.

"We don't suspect you, of course, but we have snail surveillance throughout the prison, so subterfuge is impossible," Hannyabal stated. "Now, if you'll please remove your cape… and then the rest of your clothes—"

"Love-Love Beam!"

The sneak attack petrified Hannyabal as well as the snail on the wall, as expected. Frankly, even if she hadn't needed to sneak Luffy inside, she would have probably still done that and made no apologies.

Unfortunately, Hannyabal's crass remark had offended the other two enough that they'd been more focused on him at the moment of the attack than her, and as a result, remained unpetrified. Domino went straight for her radio, faster than Hancock could fire again—

"CODE BLACK, CO—MMMPH?!"

—only for the Marine to wrap Domino up a chokehold, hand over her mouth - and the other keeping the receiver for her Baby Snail clamped down.

"Now!" said Marine hissed—at Hancock—as she wrenched Domino's eyes open and clenched her own shut.

"Love-Love Beam," Hancock intoned warmly, imprisoning the jailer in stone as well.

The Marine sighed in relief and released her hold on the statue. She ran her hand under her cap, through a short crop of blue hair, her other hand tightly gripping a sword.

"If the person I was last year saw me now, she'd chop me into pieces and mount my head on a pike," Lieutenant Tashigi groused wearily.

"Consider yourself lucky. Your old self would likely at least give you due process first, whereas the person I was allowed for no such luxuries," Hancock chuckled self-deprecatingly. "There are no other snails present?"

As soon as Tashigi shook her head, Hancock removed her cape and placed the duffel bag beneath onto the floor, swiftly unzipping it.

"Quickly, Luffy," she whispered. And before Tashigi's bemused gaze, a pair of rubber arms extended out and pulled a somewhat disheveled but otherwise fine Straw Hat out. Shaking his head, he rezipped the bag and swung it back over his own shoulder. Then he did a double-take at the sight of—

"Oh, hey! T.A.—!"

"Don't. Start. You know my name," she seethed, fingers twitching around Shigure's hilt.

"But I thought you liked being part of our crew," Luffy whined, visibly and literally deflating so hard Tashigi almost felt sorry for him.

Hancock, meanwhile, looked surprised. "Wait, you were on—?" Her brows shot up in recognition. "Ah, yes, I recall my sister speaking of you: the woman antagonistically attracted to Cross, yes?"

Tashigi's head, with the sound of a creaking spring, slowly rotated to stare at Hancock with somehow shadowed black. "…I'm going to do us both a favor. And forget that you just said that."

"Kyuuun," a familiar voice grunted out of Tashigi's jacket.

"NOT LIKE THAT!" she snapped, slapping the pocket her Baby Snail was in. "Anyway. Proper introductions. I am Lieutenant Tashigi, or Pisces. I'm here to help, along with—"

"Smokey!" Luffy laughed. "Wow, it's been so long since I've seen him, it'll be great… to…" He blinked in confusion. "Waaaaait. Cross said that I wasn't supposed to see either of you again for a while unless I got to Marineford! What are you doing here?"

"Has something gone wrong?" Hancock asked. Just the possibility of more changes…

"To answer Luffy first, we're here via as much string-pulling as we could manage without raising any flags," Tashigi sighed wearily, rubbing her eyes beneath her glasses. "We'd been trying to get someone in here for months already, it was just building off of a plan we already had to add Marine presence. Cancer and I just made sure we were the closest Marines of any significance to Impel Down so that we would be the first reinforcements."

"And to answer Hancock, maybe. We are not the only reinforcements present, Luffy. I don't know what's crawled down Magellan's digestive tract and died, but he's got the entire prison on pins and needles." Tashigi slid her glasses back into place, face grim. "Something's going on, something that's stuck in his craw and made him more ornery than he should be. I wish I could give you more, but we've only been here a few days and he's kept us at arm's length and under close scrutiny the entire time. As is, we've spent too much time here already. Cancer and I will help you as best we can, but if you're going to go, I suggest you do it now."

Luffy nodded at that suggestion, though now that he thought about it… "Uh… one problem: Magellan's right outside, and I don't think I can get up past him. Any other ways out?"

Tashigi blinked, a very comforting look of nervous terror spreading over her features. "Err…"

"Allow me."

Hancock swept by them, making for Hannyabal's statue. The two watched in fascination as she picked up the statue underarm.

"Luffy, prepare to leave. Pisces, kindly open the door."

-o-

For the Warden waiting outside, patience had long since curdled into suspicion. Even a cavity search didn't take this long, and while Magellan wouldn't put that past Hannyabal Domino was a professional and would never allow it to go that far.

Momonga did not have this knowledge, so he turned to Magellan and asked, "…should this be taking so—?"

"I CONSENTED TO BE SEARCHED, NOT STRIPPED AND MOLESTED!"

Momonga's question went unfinished but still answered by the door slamming open, vomiting forth a potbellied statue. Magellan and Momonga both rushed to catch the Vice-Warden before he could hit the ground. As the door slammed back shut, neither they nor the guards at the door noticed a cyan blur zip through the opening and up into the rafters.

"I knew I should have asked Sadi instead," Magellan grumbled as he righted Hannyabal's petrified form, before grimacing as he thought through that statement. "Though that probably wouldn't have gotten a different result…"

Momonga glanced between the warden and his petrified lieutenant, noting that the former barely even seemed annoyed.

"I'm sorry, you're just going to accept that she did that?" he asked.

Magellan scoffed, waving his hand dismissively. "I may respect his ambition, but I acknowledge that my Vice Warden's personality could stand to be deflated a bit. So long as he isn't dead or maimed… frankly, if we were any less alert, I'd seriously consider leaving him like this for a few hours."

The professional side of Momonga dearly wanted to object to that, but the rest of him had known more than a few Marines who he would have loved to leave to the same fate for a few hours. Shaking his head, he went back to watching the door.

-o-

"Best of luck, Luffy," Hancock whispered, staring wistfully at the door. "Please… come back alive."

Tashigi, meanwhile, stared at her with no small amount of bewilderment. "You… like him a lot—EEP! " She slapped her hands over her mouth, realizing too late that she'd said that out loud.

Hancock turned around, but instead of an angry serpent, Tashigi was instead presented with the visage of someone literally madly in love. "With all of my heart."

'Funny how Cross didn't mention this…' Tashigi mused sourly to herself, before rolling her eyes. 'Actually, it makes perfect sense that he didn't. I swear, one of these days…' Her momentary fantasy over with, she shook her head and jerked her thumb at Domino's petrified form.

"Anyway, using the small amount of time that little scene bought us, I was hoping you could answer a rather important question: Have you made a decision regarding the Snake seat?"

That was certainly a proverbial bucket of cold water on the Empress. "Not yet," Hancock admitted, shaking her head. "I have given your offer considerable thought, and I am inclined to accept it, but not yet. I apologize, but I can take no chances nor concern myself with the rest of the world until I have secured my kingdom."

"That's fair. And far more selfless than most of the Damned, so you have that going for you." Tashigi shrugged and stepped aside, waving Hancock toward the statue. "Alright then, let's move this along before anyone suspects anything."

Hancock nodded and moved to do just that, before pausing. "On that note… were you not a bit slow in halting her call for help?"

The Marine grunted dismissively. "Don't worry, Popora took some swings at the observation room's staff earlier, and he's still in there keeping them from checking the monitor for this room. For the next few hours, 'Code Black' is the signal for all-clear."

Satisfied that all bases had been covered, Hancock nodded in acknowledgment and turned back towards the statue.

"Awaken," she breathed. Two heart-laden kisses wafted off her hand, reversing the stone on Domino and the snail on the wall at a touch, leaving them dizzied but normal again.

The jailer blinked and looked around, rubbing over her face in some wooziness, Tashigi 'innocently' fingering her blade's hilt behind her back. But once her befuddlement abated, Domino's only reaction was a look of confusion and mild suspicion. "Where is Vice-Warden Hannyabal?"

Hancock 'innocently' blinked before coughing into her fist. "…yes, my powers can cause mild amnesia. That man was getting… excessive in his searching, and you were standing next to him, and…"

"I was looking away at the time, I can confirm that that was all that happened," Tashigi concurred, the lie falling from her lips far too easily.

Eyes narrowed, Domino glanced between them, before smoothing her features and moving to Hancock to begin the search. The Empress gave no further resistance, much as she wanted to.

With matching professional masks, the jailer and Marine went to work. Tashigi thoroughly examined the cape that Hancock had shed for any hidden pockets, while Domino spread Hancock's arms and began gently but firmly patting her hands against her. And while the jailer's determined disinterest helped keep any flashbacks at bay, feeling hands patting along her body, including her neck, chest, and waist, still left the Empress profoundly uncomfortable.

In a bid to distract herself, Hancock posed a question that had honestly been eating at her. "I admit to curiosity regarding the Marines stationed in the prison. Outside of it is one thing, but does the Navy truly have enough forces to spare that they would defend a prison from an attack by Whitebeard? And frankly, Officer… Tashigi, is it? I doubt you could match one of my sisters in a spar, much less an Emperor's officer in a life and death battle."

Tashigi bristled and pinned Hancock with a very unhappy glare, completely unfeigned.

"And furthermore, I would expect that with the imposition, the prison guards would be subordinate to the Navy, not vice-versa. Even with how intimidating Magellan is." Hancock turned her unimpressed stare on Domino. "I find myself curious, Jailer: how is it that you have managed to force even the Marines to relinquish their self-entitled sense of superiority in favor of deference, or even, dare I say it, submission?"

Tashigi's glare didn't abate, though it was accompanied by a roll of her eyes to acknowledge the fact this time Hancock kinda sorta had a point.

"That's because you don't know the long history of this facility and the equally long history of its relationship with the World Government."

Domino paused in patting Hancock down to adjust her sunglasses just so, the light ominously glinting off of them.

"Oh, come on, I've been trying to pull that trick off for years and she just does it?!"

The Marine shrunk back sheepishly as both of the other women stared at her, and she hastily started another once-over of the coat. Just to be sure, of course.

Satisfied that her 'help' was sufficiently cowed, Domino resumed her inspection. "Let me enlighten you on the nature of Impel Down, Empress," the jailer explained. "This prison is the highest security detention facility in the world and has never been penetrated once since its inception. Nobody has ever broken in, and the only person who has ever broken out is now back in chains. Something I must thank you for."

"I would express gratitude, were my actions not required due to your own failures," Hancock drawled.

Domino bit out a sharp tsk. "Nevertheless, our track record compared to all other such facilities stands unblemished in one crucial regard: corruption. Any organization can become corrupt, provided entry is possible. And here in Impel Down, such a possibility is eliminated at the start. There are no outside elements that might corrupt us and no external influences that may affect us." A sharklike smirk came across Domino's face. "Not so long as we make use of the Drake Doctrine, at any rate."

The Warlord frowned thoughtfully at that. "The Drake Doctrine… I've heard of that—!" She sucked in a sharp breath at the memory. "Wait, Grove 77—! Are you implying that Impel Down is—!?"

"A sovereign state unto itself, allied with the World Government, yes," Domino sniffed, finishing the patdown. "True Justice cannot be bought or threatened. It is our duty to keep the world safe from the worst of its spawn to ever live, and we do everything in our power to fulfill it. Our independent status means that nobody short of those in the highest echelons of the Government have the authority to order anything of us and that our own laws supersede those typical of World Government islands. In this fashion, our methods are uncontested and our integrity is secure."

Domino's arm snapped up in an earnestly proud salute. "Impel Down has stood undaunted as a bastion of security against the forces of evil held within for the past 500 years, and we will continue to do so for the next 500 as well. Our duty, our vow, our promise."

There was a brief pause as the other two women in the room took in Domino's determination and zeal. And then the moment passed, and Domino turned away—with a spring in her step, no less—to extract a pair of sea prism stone cuffs from a desk. "Now then, if you'll please hold out your arms—"

"…that still does not explain the Marines stationed within your walls," Hancock pointed out.

SLAM!

There was another pause, only this time it was because Domino had just slammed her fist down on the desk, her entire frame shaking with impotent fury.

"Their presence," she hissed viciously, her every word as venomous as her superior. "Is an imposition by demand of the World Government, which none of us appreciate." Domino then whipped around, seastone cuffs open and clenched tight in her grip. "As is your own presence here, Warlord. Now, either put on these cuffs for the duration of your stay or don them for a more permanent residence. Either option is perfectly fine by us."

Hancock exhaled sharply but held out her wrists. "Very well then. Let's get this over with."

And with a harsh KA-CLANK, the cuffs slammed shut and the perilous voyage began in earnest.

-o-

Or, well, their perilous voyage would begin once one little bit of housekeeping was taken care of.

Specifically, once Domino, Tashigi, and Hancock exited the inspection room, they found Magellan looming over them, looking none too pleased. The Hannyabal statue posed next to him probably had something to do with that.

"Fix. This," the warden bit out.

Hancock stared at him blankly for a moment before holding up her cuffs.

Domino grunted in acknowledgment and unlocked the restraints, holding them open just enough so that they weren't touching her anymore.

"For the record," Hancock said haughtily, blowing a heart at the statue before letting the cuffs shut again. "I considered that to be a significant improvement."

"I will give your advice. All the consideration it is due," Magellan growled, his voice literally acidic, which sent everyone scrambling to get some distance.

And they all succeeded, too… save for the de-petrified Vice-Warden, whose first breath of fresh air turned out to be anything but.

"Gack, gagh!" Hannyabal wheezed, clawing miserably at the air. "W-Warden, your breath—!"

"Kindly take this as a sign, Vice-Warden, you're likely to live longer that way," Magellan grumbled back as he turned for the elevator.

The party followed briskly, Domino and Tashigi flanking Hancock and Hannyabal bringing up the rear. As tempted as they were, neither one of Luffy's allies looked up at the rafters to catch a last glimpse. Not that there was anything to see there.

Hannyabal, his prior bravado and enthusiasm long since expended, heaved a weary sigh from his rearguard position. "Let's… just keep this clean and fast, shall we? And then we can go about our respective days in peace."

Not five seconds later, a shrill klaxon rang out through the floor.

"Alert! Alert! A prisoner is attempting to escape from Level 1! Repeat, prisoner loose on Level 1!"

All eyes snapped around to glare at the suddenly-quailing Hannyabal.

"Ah… ahahaha… oops?"

-o-

"RAAAAAGH!" CRASH! "IS THAT THE BEST YOU HAVE YOU BASTARDS?! I CAME BACK TO THIS HELL-OCEAN CHASING A FLASHY MONKEY, YOU ALL MAKE GOOD PRACTICE! GYAHAHAHA! NOW OPEN WIDE!" KA-BLAM!

Buggy the Clown grinned madly as another Blugori fell. The inhuman guards had learned from last time; he'd counted at least a dozen when they'd come after him this time. Not that it mattered. He was barely winded and half of his pursuers were groaning lumps on the floor.

His prior… incident with the Blugori had given him a bit more insight into their weaknesses, and his increased renown and reputation from that incident had given him the resources he needed to exploit those weaknesses. The infamous jailers of Impel Down were redoubtable, to be sure, but not even they could stand up to the blast of a Mini-Buggy Ball. And thanks to his new 'friends', Buggy had balls to spare!

…Well, a dozen or so balls, anyway, but given the blast radius each projectile packed, that was nothing to scoff at!

Twelve Blugori chasing him merited use of one, he'd decided after a couple of minutes of running, and the explosive had worked like a charm. Now instead of twelve chasing him he had six much more cautiously pursuing.

Which, he decided as a thrown axe lopped off his arm, was starting to feel less like an improvement and more like lateral movement.

"Tch! Stubborn bastards…" Buggy groused as he rammed his shoulder back into place. No more Mini-Buggy Balls just yet, those had to be saved for harder targets. He glanced over his shoulder, finding the Blugori now few enough in number to chase side-by-side. Perfect.

Buggy let himself slow down just enough for the gorillas to catch up to him, and when one wound up a punch, he planted his feet and split into pieces, flowing around and behind the line of Blugori - and also shifted his feet to trip one of the beasts. It went sprawling, its cousins screeching to a halt and hastily trying to turn around, an endeavor made difficult by their forward momentum, massive bulk, and tight formation.

All of which meant plenty of time for Buggy to hook his floating hands under the rearmost Blugori's armpits and hurl it up into the air, speeding it along with his arms and torso.

'Gotta time this right,' he thought as he eyed the recovering Blugori. 'Three, two—now!'

The Blugori he'd tossed up came crashing down, right on top of one of the other Blugori. Hitting the stone floor didn't do much, he'd learned. You needed something harder and less yielding.

Like, say, another Blugori's skull.

As both the hulking jailers went down with pained gurgles, Buggy half-landed, half-leaped on top of them, recombining so that he could gleefully dance atop their bodies. "GYAHAHA! So that really is all you have to offer! I have to say I'm pretty disappointed with Impel Down so far! Second time fooled so shame on you, thanks to the flashy bastard that is me!"

"GO, CAPTAIN BUGGY!"

The lone cheer echoed out and died, but after the echo faded, a few other voices chimed in.

"YEAH, YOU GO, BUGGY!"

"SHOW THOSE BASTARDS WHO'S BOSS!"

"YOU'RE THE GREATEST!"

"Ahhh," Buggy sighed, grinning from ear to ear as he spread his arms wide and welcomed his adoring public's adulation. "Yes, that's it! Praise your hero more! Forget about that old fart Shiki, I'll be the next one out of here! GYAHA—!"

"EVEN THAT NOSE OF YOURS DOESN'T MAKE YOU ANY LESS AWESOME!"

"WHAT DID YOU SAY ABOUT MY NOSE?!" Buggy abruptly shrieked, spinning around and glaring Buggy Balls at the cells. An action made rather more menacing when he grabbed up one of the Blugori's axes and started wildly flailing it about. "SAY THAT AGAIN! STICK YOUR NECK OUT ONE MORE TIME SO THAT I CAN CHOP IT CLEAN OFF!"

Unfortunately for Buggy, making good on that threat meant taking his attention off the Blugori he was nominally fighting. And simple-minded though the beasts were, they weren't tactically inept. One hefted its axe—very pointedly turning the flat towards Buggy—and began to sneak up on him. Well, 'sneak'. Walking softly was not part of its minimal skillset, but Buggy's shouting made for a perfect cover. A pause to avoid his wild flailing, a second to raise the axe high—

TH-TH-TH-THWACK!

And then a minute of silence following the sound of several meaty impacts. Buggy spun back around, finally noticing the Blugori standing over him with its weapon raised.

…well, it was standing. The hulking brute slowly tipped backward and collapsed into a heap, revealing the remaining Blugori in a similar state of unconsciousness.

And, perhaps more importantly, that Buggy was no longer the only one out of his cell. There was someone standing over the Blugori, clearly responsible for the beatdown, their back to Buggy and no features identifiable. The figure turned to face Buggy, but that did nothing to tell him who the flashy hell it was.

They were as tall as Buggy with sandals on their feet, but a maroon robe covered everything from the neck to the ankles and a blue cloth was wrapped around their head, only leaving the eyes visible. Buggy stared at the new arrival, and silently, the figure pointed at one wall. Cautiously, Buggy followed the path of his finger to one of the Visual Snails. He looked back and saw the figure beckon, gesturing for him to follow.

However, for all that the assistance was appreciated, Buggy was no fool. As such, he brandished his appropriated axe and leveled a glare at his 'savior'. "Show me your face, or I'm chopping you into a carpaccio."

In response, the mystery person rolled his eyes in a blatant show of impatience, looking to be one more objection away from just grabbing him and running. Still, he at least complied, jogging up close to Buggy and yanking down the cloth over his face to reveal—

"Hey, Buggy, remember—?"

"STRAW—!"

A rubbery palm slammed into Buggy's face, cutting off the infuriated howl before it could get more than a word in. Oh, and as salt in the wound the arm the palm was attached to wrapped around his head, ensuring he couldn't just pull it off.

"Alright, I tried. Now we'll do it the easy way," Luffy said, re-securing the cloth on his face before leaping away, his iron grip around Buggy's mouth dragging the clown with him, axe and all.

And not a moment too soon, because he could see guards boiling into the area out the corner of his eye.

"I think they saw us—" Bullets whizzed by him and Luffy picked up the pace, ignoring Buggy's increased but muffled protests. "Yes! Yes, they did. Place to hide, place to hide…"

As they passed, prisoners bayed at them, throwing jeers and pleas to let them out. Luffy ignored them, too busy scanning over the structure of the prison, a helter-skelter stacking of cells in random geometries. It offered plenty of nooks and crannies, but those weren't what the rubber man was looking for.

"Okay, which way is the guards' room? Should I just start breaking walls?" Luffy wondered.

"MMMMMMMMMMMMPH!" Buggy howled through the rubber-man's fingers. Luffy looked down at him, prompting, with a livid roll of his eyes, the clown to jab a finger at a section of the brick wall.

"Oh, just that wall? Thanks!"

"MMMMMM—!" CRASH!

If Buggy felt any gratitude from Luffy listening to him, it was completely overshadowed by the rubbery idiot using the hand that was holding him—and by extension, Buggy himself—to smash the wall down.

Thankfully for both of them, the earlier ruckus Luffy and Buggy had caused was doing good work. The guardroom they entered was totally abandoned, thus granting them a second to breathe. A second during which Luffy tossed the clown into the room, finally relinquishing his hold and gag over him.

"Finally! Kefka below, I swear I'm going to have a crick in my spine for the rest of my life…" Buggy hissed, rubbing his back. He then pinned Luffy with the best glare he could muster. "Straw Hat! You flashy little bastard, just when I was starting to think this place wasn't literally Hell! What are you doing here?!" He then paused, outrage overshadowed by confusion. "…and what's with that flashy getup you're wearing?!"

"My crew's idea," he replied, suddenly solemn. "The guards'll realize it's me sooner or later, but this'll buy me some time. A mystery intruder will make them less worried than Straw Hat Luffy."

~o~

"I've kept these just in case we ever landed on another desert island like Alabasta," Vivi said, holding out a bundle of folded clothes that Luffy recognized at once. "Your desert robes, Luffy. They'll obscure your identity as long as you don't use your abilities where anyone can see, and they'll make Level 3 or any other dry heat you come across a lot easier to handle, too."

Luffy smiled warmly. And, realizing that this was possibly the last time he'd see Vivi for the rest of his journey, he hugged her close.

"Thank you, Vivi."

"I—!...O-Of course, Luffy."

~o~

Buggy blinked slowly. "…you weren't half this smart last time we met, Straw Hat."

The rubber-man's exposed eyes stared at Buggy, bordering on a glare. "Yeah," was all he said.

"Still, I'm surprised. I'd have thought the Wardens would have made a bigger spectacle about catching you."

Luffy tilted his head, confused. "Eh? They didn't catch me, I broke in."

"YOU—MMRPH!" Scowling, Buggy slowly removed Luffy's hand from his face. Again. "Sonnuva—you what?! You broke in to Impel Down?! Are you out of your—eh…" He trailed off, his mouth hanging open. "I mean are you an—er…" This time with a raised finger. Finally, he settled for scowling and crossing his arms. "Alright, I'll bite. What in the flashy hell are you doing here?!"

Luffy swung his duffel bag up and reached inside. After some rummaging, he plucked out a sealed envelope that he handed to Buggy. Then he tugged up the sleeve on his left arm.

Buggy's eyes popped at the armband he wore, flicking suspiciously between it, the envelope, and Luffy's eyes.

"Cross wrote that for you," Luffy pointed at the envelope. "You can have this-" He brandished his arm and the band. "If you read it."

Buggy, to his credit, didn't immediately jump at the offer. Instead, he stared at the letter in his hands as though it were liable to bite him (which, given the letter's origins, wasn't that impossible a notion). But another hungry stare at the painfully familiar band overrode his caution, and he ripped the letter open, swiftly scanning the words.

"Buggy:

Alright, clown, listen up and listen good: Yes, you're seeing what you're seeing and that is indeed the treasure mark to Captain John's Treasure. I know you were looking for it when you got pinched, and this will just be the first of many windfalls if you do the smart thing and actually listen to me. Read this letter carefully, because you know as well as I do that your only options here are getting out or getting very very dead—Magellan doesn't take kindly to escape attempts.

Here's the quick and dirty version: Luffy's infiltrated Impel Down for the purpose of saving his adopted brother, Portgas D. 'Fire-Fist' Ace, from being executed. And yes, your mind isn't playing tricks on you: Portgas. For however much it's worth to you, Roger got together with Rouge. Though frankly, the pogrom carried out on Baterilla probably should have clued you in. And yes, I know whose crew you served on, pick your jaw off the floor."

Buggy gurgled out a curse as he hastily reached down and did just that, the joint clicking back into place.

Thinking fast, he glanced up at Luffy. "Straw Hat, your…er, brother's father, was he really—!?"

"Your captain, according to Cross? Yeah," Luffy nodded, before his eyes crinkled in a clear smile. "Oh, by the way, thanks a lot for how you tried to kill me back in Logue Town! That was really nice of you!"

Buggy literally swallowed his tongue to keep from launching into a furious tirade, and instead returned to the letter.

"So, here's the situation: Ace is being held on Level 6—and yes, there are 6—of the prison. Your part in all this is to use all the means at your disposal to help Luffy get down there and, no matter what, get him and Ace out of this entire mess. Alive. And if you're thinking that any of this might be counterproductive for getting out of the prison, counterpoint: you're with Luffy. You help Luffy and then, assuming you survive, you'll come out of this all the better. And given how you managed to survive Roger's wild ride, I'm putting even odds on your skull being tough enough to make the trip.

And that's how it is. Stick with Luffy, help him and get him out of there alive, and you'll walk away with Captain John's treasure and whatever other side benefits you can reap along the way. Don't help him, and not only do you run a higher chance of biting it, but if by some miracle you ever make it out of that prison alive… well. I already make the World Government's life a living hell on a daily basis.

Don't give me an excuse to show you what I can do to one clown.

Jeremiah Cross

P.S. I'd apologize for my caustic tone, but in my defense, I'm not in what you'd call the best of headspaces right now.

…plus, you know, you tried to kill my captain. Twice. Fair's fair."

Buggy stared at the paper in his hands, his eyes revisiting random parts of it before he finally looked up at Luffy again.

"…let me get this straight. You broke into the world's most secure prison, to save your brother."

"Of course!"

"And you and your literally psychotic flashy tactician want my help to pull off this madness."

"Pretty much."

"…and if I do this for you. And I survive. I get the treasure marker?"

"Aaaand maybe more, I think?" Luffy tilted his head thoughtfully. "I forget the details, Cross just said things went really weird for you after the war."

"And now there's a war involved because of course there is, ngngngghh…"

Grinding his teeth, Buggy began to pace around the guardroom, mind working at a furious pace. The Straw Hats' track record spoke for itself: If he agreed to an alliance, the odds of him getting out of this with the secret of his past intact would be nil, but the odds of him getting out of this at all would increase dramatically. Add the treasure on top of that… and the fact that this was tied to his old captain…

…a feeling whispered in his blood that he hadn't felt in twenty-two years. And slowly, ever so slowly, his teeth-baring grimace became a smile. An utterly mad smile.

He spun around to face Luffy. "Alright, you're mad as hell and your tactician is even crazier, but as much as I hate to admit it, he has a point: my best shot of getting out of here alive is by keeping you alive! This goes against every fiber in my flashy body, but desperate times call for desperate measures!"

The clownish captain shot his fists up, cackling madly. "LET'S BREAK IN AND OUT OF THIS HELLHOLE!"

"YEEEAAAH!" Luffy roared, mirroring the action.

At once, every vis-snail in view swiveled around in their perches, pinning the two pirates with a sea of annoyed glares and vicious scowls through the broken wall.

A second after that, the alarm started wailing like they'd killed its husband, mother, and firstborn son. And a second after that, the sound of stomping boots could be heard. And if it was audible over the alarm, that had to be a lot of boots.

To this, Buggy had only one thing that he could say.

"…oops."

Luffy slumped in place, his head hanging to the side and eyes closed as if to stave off a headache. "You idiot."

"YOU'RE THE LAST PERSON I WANNA HEAR THAT FROM, NOW RUN!"

"RIGHT!" Luffy loosed his fist and broke down the guardroom's other wall with a resounding CRASH!

"NOT THAT WA—oh, right, going down first, because you're an idiot…" Buggy grumbled as the wall caved away to reveal the crimson forest sprawling below them. He hesitated briefly before heaving a final defeated sigh and slinging his newly acquired axe over his back by its rope-strap. "Alright, let's do this! Get… urgh, get on my back."

Luffy did so, and in short order was flying atop Buggy the Clown. As the blades of the Crimson Forest harmlessly passed through his feet, the two flew to the pit down to Level 2, paying no mind to the arachnids, guards, or other prisoners along the way.

Buggy paused at the edge of the hole, swallowing some as he peered down into it. The all-engulfing darkness sparked a final flare of weakness in his soul; not to mention that personally, he still thought—no, recognized that the entire thing was insane.

"…you know, Straw Hat, we can still turn back," he offered. "Brothers are so overrated, you know, and—GACK!"

That was due to the hand clamped around his neck, which was currently following the rest of Luffy down the hole.

"Or-I-guess-we-could-just-do-this-that-works-too!" the clown choked out.

The pair plummeted down into the dark abyss, truly beginning their quest into the depths of hell.

And it was there that the real trouble began.

-o-

Within three seconds of arriving in the 'Wild Beast Hell', it was obvious things had gone completely off the rails.

This conclusion was arrived at largely due to two pieces of empirical evidence: first, that they weren't immediately ambushed by Wild Beasts, nor could they hear any nearby. More than that, actually; Luffy had grown up dealing with wild animals, especially ones that were (often) bigger, (possibly) stronger, and (always) looking to eat him alive, and as such, he had what others would consider way too much experience telling when such creatures were nearby.

A feeling that was very conspicuously absent upon their arrival. Oh, Luffy could tell there were beasts all around them, he could hear and smell them no problem. But wherever they were, they weren't anywhere near them. Heck, if anything, they were hiding. And for a menagerie of what was supposed to be some of the strongest monsters in the world this side of the Red Line, that was weird.

And that was just the first thing. The second, and much more immediately concerning was the difference in the layout compared to the floor above, or what Cross had described it as. Mainly, how much damn liquid there was.

Every way Luffy looked, he saw as much water as stone. Saltwater, no less, twisting and turning and making the passageways just a bit trickier to navigate. Frankly, if it weren't for the stone roof, he'd have almost mistaken the place for a grittier version of Water 7!

"What's with all these rivers?" Luffy asked, squatting down next to one. "Cross never said anything about…wait a second." The rubber-man frowned and, in a move he was still reluctant to do, closed his eyes and put a hand to his head to think.

"Cross wouldn't have forgotten this, so he wouldn't have known about it… but he knew about everything else. But that means they must have changed it… but I thought that if anything was different, it was Cross's fault in the end…" His eyes opened and his head tilted, even as a trail of steam up through his hood. "So it's because of Cross that they put in these rivers?"

"They're canals, Straw Hat, but yes, and congratulations on grasping basic logic," Buggy drawled, clapping his hands sarcastically. "The general rumor is that after your flashy third mate spilled all of Impel Down's big secrets, they decided that knowing too much about it could, oh I don't know, HELP SOMEONE PLAN A BREAK-IN!?"

The pair immediately clamped up and tensed, bracing to be mobbed…

…But nobody came.

Finding that they were still relatively safe, Luffy gave Buggy his best 'You idiot' look, which he weathered with an uncomfortable cough. "A-Anyway… the point is that the Wardens revamped everything from Level 2 down. The general layouts are the same, as far as I know, but each floor has a little something 'special' thrown in to spice things up."

"Uhh…?" Luffy pointed up in confusion.

"Level 1 is a literal forest of blades that's been stained red with the blood of literally hundreds of prisoners and infested with venomous spiders. There's really no going up from there…plus, well…" Buggy waved his hand dismissively. "That section is more like 'special punishment', while everything else on that floor counts as general population."

"Yeah, good point… still…" Luffy scratched the top of his head as he leaned over to stare into the murky water. "Why rivers down here?"

"Like I said, Straw Hat, they're canals," Buggy testily said, inching away from the water.

"Ehhhh?" Luffy looked back at Buggy with a confused expression. "What's the difference?"

"The difference is that canals are designed for transportation and movement. And that's exactly why the Wardens put these in: so they could have a bigger variety of beasts."

Luffy slowly looked out to the murky waters again, a dawning sense of comprehension slowly coming over him. "…when you say 'variety'—?"

At that very moment, something very large burst out of one of the canal, water sloughing off to reveal the mottled white and black hide of a Sea Cow from behind. Luffy perked up at the sight, grinning fit to burst and forgetting all sensibility, something that made Buggy flinch and edge away even faster.

"Oh, hey, it's Mohmoo!" Luffy laughed, eagerly waving his arms over his head. "Hey, Mo—!"

And then the beast whipped its head around with a gut-ripping snarl, and Luffy remembered that he was, truly, in Hell.

Nothing that Luffy had ever come across, be it on his home island, over the course of his journey, or even his week on Merveille could have prepared him for this monstrosity and the nightmarish visage it displayed.

It was still basically a Sea Cow, but it was missing its face. Half its face, specifically; the entire left-hand side of the Cow's skull was smothered in an amorphous mass of a weird yellow shelf fungus Luffy remembered having seen from time to time, attached to trees on Mt. Corvo. Though the impaired vision didn't prevent it from suddenly roaring and lunging at him!

"Not Mohmoo, not Mohmoo!" Luffy yelped, turning tail and bolting after Buggy—the clown having long since made tracks. At least it was still a sea creature, so it couldn't follow him, right?

The monster picked that moment to leap out of the water and flounder after them like a demented bovine seal, teeth snapping at his heels. It was that made Luffy remember what he'd heard about Goza so long ago and—consequently—the fact that Sea Cows were amphibious.

"Really starting to get tired of all this running!" Luffy groused.

"Better question here: Why are we running?!" Buggy demanded as they legged it away from the maddened and monstrous cow. "You're Straw Hat—" His voice briefly dropped into an instinctual growl before going back to normal. "Shouldn't you be able to just punch that thing into next Tuesday?"

"Not without blowing my cover, and then Magellan will come down on our heads!" Luffy snapped back as he reached into his bag and rummaged through it. "Besides, I don't need my powers for this. I just need a little of Usopp's help!"

"Uso—your sniper!?" Buggy demanded incredulously, his eyes instinctively flashing around the ceiling before common sense reminded him that no, it was not possible for him to have been hiding all this time. In that second of distraction, Luffy's hands emerged from the bag, one withdrawing his pipe and the other dropping a pellet inside one end of it.

Twisting his body around, he leaped into the air and took aim.

"Gum-Gum…" he said softly before raising his voice to a bellow. "BLOWGUN!"

A burst of air through the pipe sent the projectile flying at the mutated sea cow's face. It reeled back from the impact - and then stopped entirely, howling and flailing in agony as tears streamed from its bloodshot eye. The monster reeled and thrashed miserably until finally it writhed its way into another canal. There was a brief burst of thrashing bubbles and churning foam, and then the bubbles streamed away, and the pair were left with a moment to breathe.

Buggy stared, blinking dumbly at the creature's trail, and then slowly turned to look at his 'companion', for lack of a better term. "…did your sniper become an expert in poisons when I wasn't looking or was that just the biggest, flashiest trick that I've ever seen in my life?!"

"Eh…" Luffy tilted his head thoughtfully as he slid his pipe back into his bag. "I… think I remember Cross saying something like 'a little of A, a little of B' or something like that. More importantly…" the rubber man's demeanor grew significantly more grim and serious. "That wasn't right."

"No, really!?" Buggy scoffed incredulously. "What was your first clue?!"

"I mean that that monster wasn't right," Luffy clarified. "That… stuff on its face… that was way too weird. Cross would have mentioned something like that, but he didn't. And it doesn't fit in with the changes to this floor either. There's… something else going on here."

"Oh, what does it matter anyway!? One monster that's bigger than the others, we've got a whole floor to make it through to get to the Starvation Hell!" Buggy snapped. "And it's gone now, so why do you care?!"

"ROOOOOOOOOOOOOAR!"

The clown paled at the sound very near to them, and Luffy immediately ducked into another incongruity nearby: a cell completely devoid of prisoners, the chains and shackles inside showing heavy and recent use. The door was even unlocked. Buggy immediately followed Luffy, allowing them to safely observe the beast that ran by them:

A gigantic chicken with the head of a crazed snake, eyes wild and tongue lolling out, utterly terrifying - and utterly terrified itself. And shortly behind it? A pack of what looked like lions with oversized, sagging heads. Marked, one and all, with more of that same fungus.

"Because we're going to have to get by all of that to get out of here," Luffy deadpanned, glaring after the rabid pack. "Get it now?"

"…I liked you better as a happy-go-lucky idiot, Straw Hat."

"So did I. Now, let's find the guard room and free the prisoners." Luffy looked around warily, grimly noting the claw marks etched into the inside of the cell. "If there are any left at this point."

Buggy actually shuddered at that statement. His life was forfeit no matter how this turned out if Impel Down had stopped caring about an entire floor full of prisoners. He followed after Luffy, who seemed to have decided that the best idea was to run after the monsters that they had passed them by.

A minute later, they came upon the basilisk backed up against a wall, the infected manticores tensing to pounce. Luffy… Buggy saw him take a handful of something out of his bag and shove them into his mouth before raising his pipe again.

"BLOWGUN GATLING!"

How he or anyone else could enunciate that with their mouth full was a mystery that Buggy had given up on answering years ago. So he totally didn't get briefly distracted by that before paying attention to the attack itself, which unfortunately had a scattershot rather than decisive effect. They turned away from the basilisk and right for them, which prompted Buggy to shake his head at the obvious outcome. Still...

"You know, we really don't have time for this if we want to get deeper into this place in any reasonable amount of time," the clown groused, even as he unslung his axe from his back.

"These things used to be friends," Luffy growled back, raising his fists. "Or at least, they lived together. This won't take long."

Buggy raked his fingers down his face in despair before redoubling his grip on the axe. With how fast they were charging, the fastest way out of this now was putting the beasts down.

"You won't need that," Luffy said without even turning around. And before Buggy could voice any protest, Luffy shot forward and slammed shoulder-first into the frontrunner of the pack, the momentum carrying through the rest of the beasts—

CRASH!

—and through the nearest wall. Which, of course, led to the guard's room.

CRASH!

Or, well, through the guard's room. Luffy's momentum carried him and his foes clean through the opposite wall and into the open space outside.

"…should I be happy or angry about his stupidly flashy luck?" Buggy grumbled to himself. He followed Luffy through the holes, keeping the freaking Basilisk that the rubber-brained moron had gone out of his way to rescue in his peripheral vision. Which proved to be wasted effort. For whatever reason, the birdbrain didn't seem all that inclined to return to its regular savagery. Instead, it seemed to be staring at the hole with a sort of… awe?

"RAAAAAGH!"

Buggy cursed and refocused because the sounds of that rampage were likely bad news for him. Honestly, he just didn't understand why Straw Hat gave half a damn about any of the damned souls in this hellhole, they were all way beyond hope any—!

The clown-captain skidded to a halt in the wreck of the guardroom, staring at one of the walls.

Specifically, at the keyrings hanging on the wall.

Buggy slowly tilted his head to the side.

"I don't know whether to jump with joy over this fan-tastic opportunity…" he muttered to himself. "Or curse that flashy tactician to every hell I know of for somehow being three steps ahead of me without even being here!"

KA-CRASH!

"RAAAGH!"

"Opportunity it is, then!" Buggy yelped, swiping the keys and booking it out of the room. Now, how best to take advantage of this opportunity…

-o-

"GYAHAHAHA! THAT'S RIGHT, PEONS!" Buggy cackled, standing on the railing with his arms spread wide as he soaked in the raucous cheers of the liberated prisoners. "WHO'S THE ONE WHO SAVED YOU ALL? TO WHOM DO YOU OWE YOUR FREEDOM!?"

"BU-GGY! BU-GGY! BU-GGY!" the prisoners chanted, pumping their fists.

Off to the side and sitting on top of the pile of infected Manticores he'd pummeled, Luffy tilted his head. "Huh. Cross was right, he does put on a good show." He watched the cheering and cheer-garnering for a few seconds more before frowning. "Cross does it better."

Abruptly, his head snapped up and to the side, something unseen holding his full attention. He only broke it to declare, just loud enough to be heard over the cheering, "Hey, Buggy! You're gonna want to get down for a second!"

"Ehhh?" the clown sneered down at Luffy, his ego clearly inflated by his newfound audience. "Why the hell would I want to do that you flashy bastard? You want the spotlight now or something?"

"No, just saying you should dodge."

Buggy blinked in confusion. "Huh? What the hell are you—?"

"SKREE!"

"AGH!"

With absolutely no warning, a black-and-yellow blur shot through the ruins of the guardroom and took Buggy's head clean off. More specifically, it rammed into Buggy's torso and swept it clean out from under him, leaving his legs and head where they were.

The blur slammed down into the center of the courtyard, the prisoners hastily scattering in an effort to avoid getting crushed. Now that it was standing still for more than two seconds, it could be seen that the thing was the shell of a Puzzle Scorpion, except its carapace was more fungus than chitin. More importantly, it was doing its damnedest to try and chew Buggy's torso to shreds.

"Ow, ow, YE-HE-OW!" the clown's floating head howled, his legs kicking and flailing in a panic. "CRAP, THAT HURTS! HEY, LU—GAH, STRA–STRANGER, SOME HELP DOWN THERE!?"

Luffy landed on the scorpion's back, all too happy to oblige, and grabbed its wildly flailing stinger. In one smooth motion he slammed it down—

CRUNCH!

"SKREE-kreee-krerhghh…"

And through the top of the beast's head. The shell let out a dying screech and jerked and bucked furiously, but quickly devolved into a wet gurgle, before collapsing into an unmoving lump.

"Gurgh…" came Buggy's voice from under the shell. His head and legs hopped down and reattached themselves, allowing him to squeeze out from under the dead insect. "Took your damn time! What took you so long!?"

Luffy shrugged indifferently. "I thought you could handle it."

"What?! No! DON'T ASSUME THAT AGAIN!"

"Eh, no promises."

Buggy let out a noise similar to a steam whistle, his fingers twitching as if to strangle something. The prisoners, meanwhile, were all staring at the ex-scorpion in shocked silence. Luffy looked them over, mentally counting down until—

"RAAAAAGH!"

—the assembled prisoners abruptly erupted in a blaze of rage and fury wait what the hell? Luffy could only blink in shock at the sudden aura of outrage and bloodlust radiating from the mob.

"GET THE WEAPONS!" one of the larger—as in, easily two heads taller than most others larger—prisoners roared, pointing up at the guardroom. "LET'S WASTE THESE MONSTERS!"

The mob roared again in agreement and swarmed out in search of armaments. Half of them went to work raiding the guardroom and its attached armory, arming themselves with swords and other half simply tore makeshift weapons out of the prison wholesale: balls and chains, metal bars either snapped in half or with chunks of stone still attached, even one particularly musclebound bruiser hefting a sink above his head.

And they went to work. Within a minute, they had charged off down every corridor attached to the courtyard to the tune of carnage and war cries. Steel sang, gunshots rang, and inhuman shouts of pain filled the air. Man had struck back against the beasts, and were proving that they needed them there for a reason.

Which quite honestly, was the last thing Luffy had been expecting.

"This… wasn't what I thought was gonna happen…" Luffy said deadpan.

"Eh?!" Buggy exclaimed, whipping his head around to boggle at the rubber-man. "The hell did you think was gonna happen? They're finally free, of course they're gonna raise hell!"

Luffy grunted in annoyance, almost pouting. "Cross said that they'd rather stay behind bars than take their chances with the monsters on this floor. Most of them, anyway. Even after you talked them all up. They were only supposed to riot after we took down the biggest monster on the floor…" He scratched his scalp under his hood, confused. "So why are they rioting after they just got reminded of what they have to fight?"

"Because that's the safer choice at this point, Straw Hat. I'd be joining them if not for these handcuffs."

Luffy snapped around, ready to deny and lie as best he could, but immediately relaxed a bit upon seeing the speaker. Or rather, the 3-shaped knot in his hair.

"…Wax-guy," the rubber-man grunted. "How'd you know it was me?"

Galdino let out a derisive snort. "I would think you would be familiar by now with people who fight with brains above brawn. A fighting style that reckless coupled with authentic Alabastan desert robes? Obvious to someone of my intellect. More importantly..." he raised his wrists and shook his cuffs impatiently. "I don't suppose you have a lockpick in that bag?"

"Ehhh…" Luffy's hand drifted to his bag. "Noooot one you'd wanna use, but Buggy should have the key," he hedged, nodding at the clown. Said clown hemmed and hawed for a second before pulling out the keyring with a mutinous grumble and getting to work trying keys. "Anyway, what were you saying?"

"The circumstances you described were accurate, Straw Hat, at least for the past few months since you relegated me to this wretched pit," Mr. 3 drawled, his tone dripping with contempt that Luffy wholly ignored. "Before the last few weeks, most of the beasts didn't bother trying to get into the cages, they just waited for any idiots from Level On or here to try their luck, or for when the Wardens force us out for some 'exercise'. Hence, it was smarter and safer to stay in our cells."

The cuffs suddenly clicked off, and Galdino heaved a sigh of relief for the first time in months. He rubbed his wrists, a flame springing to life atop his hair. He let out a wry chuckle as his arms started to drip with wax.

"Oh, I have missed this feeling…"

"Hey, hey, wa—Galdino," Luffy interjected, snapping the ex-Officer Agent's attention back to him. "You said that was how it was. What changed?"

Galdino's demeanor instantly darkened, and his fists melted into molten lumps. "A week ago," he bit out. "The Wardens… they introduced a new monster to this floor. That's nothing new, that bitch Sadi always loves nothing more than to introduce us to her pets, but this one... that thing was different. Apparently, not even the Wardens wanted it in here, but for some reason, they had no choice but to bring it in. And I can certainly see why they didn't want it. The entire time it's been here, it's attacked everything that moves: prisoner, Warden, or monster, and all with the exact same results—" Galdino spat the word as he glared at the fungus-covered scorpion. "—you see before you. And it didn't have the decency like the other beasts to wait to be fed."

Galdino shook his head. "Mark my words: the other beasts we were content with simply avoiding. But that one? Better to die as rioters than sitting ducks!"

Luffy leaned forward, a very real sense of dread growing within him. "So, uh… what's so bad about 'that one'?"

And then the entire floor was blasted with noise.

A roar, a shriek, a cry… it was all of those and none, but in the end, the best descriptor for it was pure, primal, evil noise.

It shook every person who heard it straight to their core. But Luffy? It hit Luffy differently.

"SHKREEEEAAAAAARGH!"

It hit Luffy right in his memory.

"…oh," he whispered weakly. "That one."

-o-

"SHKREEEEAAAAAARGH!"

Hancock's head snapped up at the very familiar sound. A spike of ice sprouted in her heart. "…that is the kind of monstrosity you keep in this place?" she hissed out.

Tashigi blinked at the Warlord in confusion, which left her the odd woman out. The Wardens and jailers scowled, their emotions crossing the range of outrage and disgust, which choked the cramped elevator with even more tension.

"No. That particular monster is not one of ours," Domino said snippily.

Hancock asked, as the elevator decelerated, "Then whose is it?! You said nobody could order you to do anything except—"

The elevator abruptly shuddered to a halt and its doors ground open, disgorging a wave of hair-curling heat, and a snide, arrogant voice that was almost as annoying as the air was scorching.

"—the highest authorities in the World Government?"

The new voice heralded a young man with a smug look on his face, thoroughly unconcerned with the dark looks almost everyone on the elevator gave him. In fact, despite the negative attention from the wardens all his attention was focused on Hancock alone.

"Yes, it was on their orders that my masterwork was introduced to this…" He hissed and rolled his wrist in search of an appropriate term. "Maggot's nest, for further testing and evaluation, it having been determined that the human waste rotting here would make for fine fodder. And after a week's testing, I can say quite confidently that the experiment has been nothing short of a rousing success. Quite fortuitous for the sake of our mutual employer, no?" the glasses-wearing weasel concluded with an ear-to-ear grin that just radiated arrogance.

It was now painfully clear exactly why Magellan was in such a bad mood if he'd had to put up with this for the last week. And as such, Hancock took the only logical course of action available: she summarily ignored the pest before her.

"Why are we pausing here? Were we not going directly to Fire Fist's cell?" she asked, indicating the visible pillars of flame that gave away which level they were on. But Magellan was already accompanying them, so—?

"Portgas D. Ace is being kept on the bottom-most Level of Impel Down," Magellan explained as the jailers piled out - and also ignored the bespectacled weasel frozen in the entrance. "A Level which can only be reached via the elevator through use of a key that is always held in the Warden's office when not in use. A small detour to retrieve the key, and then we shall proceed."

Outwardly Hancock sighed, very quietly, at the inconvenience, but inside she allowed herself to feel relief. Every second Magellan was occupied with her was another moment he wasn't looking for Luffy. Still, appearances had to be maintained, so…

"Very well. Let's just get this over with." And with that, she marched out of the elevator after him.

"H-hey now," the self-important prick cut in, his smile twitching more towards a scowl. "I'm right here, you know. You can't just ignore me, I'm—!"

THUD!

"GAH!" the man yelped as Hancock walked right into him, knocking him on his ass. "Hey, what the hell do you think you're—!?" CRUNCH! "GYAAAAGH!"

Rather than go around the prone pest, she just continued straight on. Her every step hit and crunched bone as if he was nothing more than a rug on the floor.

Tashigi, still lagging behind a bit, couldn't help but gape at the twitching figure Hancock had left in her wake. "You, uh… don't you have… anything to say, a-about—?"

"Hm?" Hancock reared her head back haughtily. "I have never before paid any heed to any foolish enough to stand in my way, be they man or animal. Why, then, would I pay attention to an insect?"

Tashigi blinked, glancing down at the pile of quivering man-flesh before shrugging and quickening her pace. "Fair enough."

The party continued forth uninterrupted, ignoring the pained sounds of the man behind them, as well as the sounds of him struggling his way to his feet and limping after them.

"My name… is Ratchet," he bit out, glaring daggers at all their backs. "Rightful ruler of Mecha Island…and world-class genius of mechanics and engineering. Someone. To be treated. With respect. "

Hancock, of course, paid him all the respect she believed him due and kept walking.

"And this field test is going far better than the previous one… for the BioMEGA project."

Those last two words had the desired effect. Hancock stopped cold, the truth of the roar from earlier sinking into her bones. She wasn't afraid of this man, no, the mere idea was laughable, but there was an acute sense of threat hanging about him, now that she knew why he was even here. And with Hancock stopped, the entire party came to a screeching halt.

"Heh. Thought that'd get your attention," Ratchet smirked malevolently, though his swollen eye and missing tooth significantly undercut any sense of gravitas he might have been going for. "If you want to know more? You'll have to ask me."

Hancock twitched viciously, very visibly contemplating cold-blooded murder. "…what does it stand for?" she hissed out, plainly reluctant to say even that much.

Ratchet allowed an arrogant smirk to crawl across his pummeled face as he casually strolled (read: limped) his way in front of Hancock, raising his chin at her. "That's better… buuut not quite what I'm looking for. What're the magic words, hm?"

Hancock glared down at the vicious little man, vividly imagining each and every way she could summarily end his wretched existence even while still handcuffed. But then she closed her eyes, let out a calming sigh, and applied all the diplomatic knowledge she had learned from listening to Princess Vivi.

CRUNCH!

"GYAH!"

Which is to say, her knee shot up and buried itself in the little bastard's crotch. Notably, neither the Warden nor the Vice Warden nor even Momonga winced. The Empress knelt down over the man and his renewed twitching with a grim expression.

"If I have to ask again, I will do so by applying my heel to your neck. Now talk."

Ratchet coughed and wheezed a second more, before slowly raising his head so that he could glare back at her with arrogant (or more likely delusional) defiance.

"The BioMEGA Program…" he bit out. "Or, to call them by their full name… Biological Mechanically Enhanced… Genocide Armaments."

And that got the full attention of the entire group. Apparently, nobody had bothered to inform the Wardens of the precise nature of the monsters they'd acquired.

"Truly, pinnacles of modern science one and all. Fusions of the mightiest beasts, as provided by such hacks as Indigo and Hogback, and the most glorious technological might known to man, designed by the revolutionary genius that is I. No fear, no hesitation, no remorse. Just sheer. Unrelenting. Devastation. Far superior to Vegapunk's tawdry Pacifista line, I assure you."

"Superior?" Magellan snorted. "How do you claim that? I seem to recall the agent who delivered you here claiming that Vegapunk perfected and finished these weapons after you finished the design phase."

"They are still mine, and nothing will change that!"

'Another insufferable genius with too much misplaced pride in his wretched craft,' Tashigi thought, rolling her eyes.

"And what are they doing here?" Hancock cut in.

"Why, testing, of course! We can't rightly release these marvels into the world without making sure they're effective, now can we? Honestly, I don't understand why the Wardens are griping. Prisoners have been undergoing just this on Punk Hazard for years now! Well, until the recent 'incident', anyway."

"Those were prisoners we explicitly released, and it never occurred in our prison itself," Magellan rumbled dangerously.

"Whatever," Ratchet waved off. "In any case, I look forward to witnessing their growth. The initial prototype was glorious as it was."

Ratchet's eyes deliberately locked with Hancock's once more, and her eyes narrowed in cold fury at the silent gloating.

"What happened to this… prototype of yours?"

A sour look passed over Ratchet's face, before morphing into a smug grin. "A field test that ended with… less than optimal results. But no worries, it was only the prototype, that's what it's for. I assure you, the field models deployed here? Are much, much more effective. Of that, I give you my word."

The empress and the engineer stared each other down for several seconds more before someone else chimed in.

"Excuse me, but the name is… confusing," Tashigi said carefully, obviously dreading the answer and withering just enough under the look Momonga sent her way to seem real. "These weapons, are they intended to prevent genocides? Or cause them?"

"Hm hm hmm…" Ratchet chuckled. "Like any great work of art, the interpretation is, of course, left up to the viewer - and, more importantly, the sponsor."

"I see," Hancock stated in a tone that would have frozen helium. "Well, let me demonstrate my… appreciation as a viewer of your art."

And with that, the air trembled as Hancock glared at him, and her will smashed into Ratchet's mind. Or perhaps more accurately, Ratchet's mind smashed against her will with all the effectiveness of a certain Admiral against the Red Line.

Consequently, his mind shut down, foam cascaded out of his mouth, and his boneless body flopped against the floor, smacking his head against the hard brick.

That done, Hancock huffed and turned back to her party. "You don't need him awake anytime soon, do you?"

"Preferably not ever, but we unfortunately have…" Hannyabal glanced up at Magellan before looking away with a scowl. "Orders to keep him alive, so—!"

Magellan made to slap him, but his palm met only air as this time, Hannyabal ducked. Everyone blinked.

Well, almost everyone. The Warden just took it in stride. "…oh, I missed. Well, you should still learn when to watch your tongue. Now, Empress, shall we?"

Despite his ever-present scowl, the Warden's mood was very clearly lifted by what had just happened. The jailers were used to their Warden's mercurial moods. Tashigi seemed conflicted, from the grimace on her face. And Hancock...

Hancock, for her part, paid them no mind. She was busy staring up and through the ceiling, silently praying for the safety of her beloved against the unforeseen horrors he was now facing.

'Please, Luffy, however impossible a request this might be… stay safe…'

-o-

"Okay…" Luffy breathed, closing his eyes and slapping his hand to his face. "Okay… okay, that's really not good. But!" He snapped his head up with a firm nod. "Maybe we can avoid it. Oi!" the rubber-man shouted at the escaped inmates. "Hey, prisoner-guys! Do any of you know where that thing is right now? I gotta get down to Level 3, and I don't want it to try and take my head off on the way!"

Most of the prisoners were too busy either rejoicing or taking keys to other parts of the floor to answer, but a few stopped to give Luffy sympathetic looks. Well, either sympathetic or 'are you really that much of an idiot?!' looks, same difference.

"Give it up, man! This time of day, it's squatting right next to the stairs that go even deeper into this hell!" one shouted. "Ain't no way you're getting past it!"

"Monkeyfeathers," Luffy spat, snorting out his frustration. He then turned to Galdino and Buggy. "Alright, this is gonna suck, but… Wax-guy, which way to those stairs?"

Galdino's eyes widened in dawning realization and outright terror. "Straw Hat, you might be an idiot but not even you can be so stupid as to want to fight that thing!" he squawked.

"I'm sorry, which Straw Hat Luffy are you thinking of?" Buggy deadpanned.

Galdino briefly thought that over before knocking his head against the nearest wall. "Yes, I see your point." He whipped his head back around to glower at Luffy. "Well, seeing as I'm, you know, sane, I'm having no part of it! You heard what I said, Straw Hat: I'm not dying as a sitting duck to that thing, so why the hell do you think I'd run right into its slavering jaws?!"

"I didn't ask you to fight, I know you and Buggy are cowards," Luffy replied in a perfectly matter-of-fact voice, ignoring both of their incensed sputtering. "Go ahead and sit it out, I don't mind. I just need to get there."

Galdino's sputtering slowly subsided, and he resorted to massaging his throbbing temples. "I cannot believe you're making this sound so reasonable…" Finally, after a long moment of contemplation, he dropped his hands and stared at the pirate, his expression grim but resigned. "Fine. Fine! I'll lead you to it, go ahead and die, Straw Hat! But I'm running the other way the second you can find your own way!"

"Yeah, that's fine," Luffy bluntly replied, drawing out a renewed round of sputtering from the ex-Agent.

"Well, I'm with you 100% of the way, Straw Hat!" Buggy declared as he shot his fists skywards, his show of confidence not quite hiding his knocking knees. "Safest place in this hell is right next to you!"

"Thanks, Buggy," Luffy nodded, walking past him to follow where Galdino was petulantly pointing. "But feel free to run, too."

Buggy's face muscles twitched as he followed closely behind Luffy and Galdino, wishing that he didn't know how little of a choice he had in this matter. His fate had been sealed the moment he'd agreed to fight with Luffy. Which, now that he thought about it, likely meant that the poor drip shuffling ahead of him was probably already in the same boat.

Frowning in contemplation, Buggy's head flew ahead of the rest of him to talk to the other prisoner. Galdino did a double-take, shook off the oddity just as fast, and then asked, "And what makes you think that you're safer being at ground zero than finding a place to watch and wait?"

"Oh, I don't like it, but even this close to the middle of the mess, he'll be taking most of it. I just need to play support in the background until he punches a way out."

Galdino frowned. "I acknowledge his capabilities. Underestimating him was a mistake I won't repeat. But I still say that this is a bad idea! How likely is it that we'll actually—?"

Their progress came to an abrupt halt as they prepared to jump a canal, only for an eel-like sea king to surface, uninfected with fungus but as deadly as any other Sea King—

CRUNCH! THUD!

—which meant one firm whack from Luffy laid it out flat.

Buggy's head rejoined his body, and he shrugged. "I call it 50/50, and that's better than anything that I could manage alone."

"Did you account for the fact that Straw Hat recognized and was worried about the monster wreaking havoc on this floor?!" Galdino hissed back.

"…okay, I'll admit. That skews the numbers a bit. But still—GRK! "

Galdino and Buggy's talk came to a premature end as Luffy grabbed their throats and dragged them behind a corner. When he released them, his only response to their glares was to point back around the corner. Still pissed, but also somewhat confused, they both peeked their heads out. What the saw made their blood freeze.

"Okay…" Buggy wheezed. "That hurts the odds more than a little."

The party had arrived at their destination, and the sight there was… not particularly encouraging. Actually?

"SHKREE-KEE-KEEEEE!"

"GRAAAAARGH!"

It was downright horrific.

Obviously, the fact that the two beasts they'd been dreading were right there and visibly blocking the stairs they needed to take to get down a level was bad enough on its own. The beasts themselves made matters even worse… or at least, one of them did. One was 'just' a massive lion with the face of a man, which after all the strange beasts all three had seen thus far, barely moved the needle.

The other, though. The other beast was the true problem.

In fact, it didn't just move the needle, it cranked the needle to eleven and then ripped it clean off the instrument. Because quite frankly? The thing wasn't a beast. It was an outloud monster.

At its base, the entity was insectoid. The bloated abdomen, four madly twitching legs, mandible pincers, and bright red lenses for eyes bore resemblance to the biggest, meanest ant that they could imagine. Two pairs of top-most legs were missing, while in their place were two pairs of sickles that belonged on praying mantises. Or they would have if they didn't have serrated blades made of actual metal grafted onto their trailing edges. And that was where the 'insectoid' comparison fell to pieces, as everything from the 'thorax' down was serpentine in nature. And not figuratively, there were definitely scales on the tube supporting the monster's bulk, where there wasn't metal plating.

Its jaws, jagged and as large as two girders, were buried in the sphinx's back to the tune of agonized, soul-rending wails of pain as the lion ineffectually flailed to get out from under the thing. But the most grotesque feature was the off-yellow growths of fungus covering the exoskeleton and sprouting in obscene organic shelves from the thing's back and from between the seams of its metal plates. Almost none of the creature's 'natural'—for lack of a better term—black and green hue was visible.

Still, the growths didn't hinder it at all. It moved with disturbing fluidity for its size and twitching, skittering gait as it effortlessly wrestled its bulk atop the sphinx to keep it in submission. Completing the horrifying picture was its tail, raised high with a metal stake jutting out and leaking a very unhealthy-looking yellow fluid.

"Well, too bad!" Galdino declared, abouting face with a petrified smile plastered on his face. "Looks like there's no way we're getting past that thing, we should just—"

"Aaaaand he just ran in."

Galdino followed Buggy's finger and blanched. Luffy had, indeed, just ran out of his cover, much faster than he remembered the brat being.

"GET—!" the pirate bellowed as he leaped at the monster, his shout drawing the misshapen monstrosity's attention before he pulled something out of his pocket and slammed it into the thing's chest. "OFF!"

THOOM! "SKREE-KREE-KREE!"

The air rippled visibly from whatever it was Luffy did, sending the monster reeling back from its prey as it chittered in aggravation. The monster's head snapped down to lock its incandescent glare on Luffy and, in the process, diverted its attention and the bulk of its body from pinning its prey. The sphinx took whole-hearted advantage of the lapse and clawed out from under the monster before bolting for and around the closest corner it could reach.

The two titans squaring off ignored the fleeing mega-feline in favor of their seething hatred for one another. For a moment, they squared off, poised to rend each other limb from limb. And then, as one, they lashed out.

The insectoid monster reared up, slashing its blades at its new enemy. Luffy flipped and rolled around the strikes as he accelerated towards his target, before sliding as 'under it' as he could manage. Another scythe lashed down to try and impale him to the stone, a move that he only just managed to roll out of the way of. In response, Luffy wound up his pipe and slammed it into the blade as hard as he could manage.

It didn't budge in the slightest.

Luffy's eye twitched viciously at that result. "Oh, this is gonna hurt."

The monster made good on that statement when it used its buried scythe as an anchor point to somehow wheel around the entirety of its bulk and slam the full weight of its tail into Luffy, blasting him into the nearest wall—

"Sonnuva—OH, CRAP!"

—where, in spite of not being hurt, Luffy had to hastily ram his pipe into the wall to avoid taking an impromptu and very final dunk in the canal right below him. And while his perch kept him high and dry, it made him an all-too-easy target for the monster, which was why no time to slash and strike with its forelimbs as fast as possible.

"We need to help him!" Buggy declared as Luffy leaped and climbed his way through the onslaught.

"Are you out of your mind?!" Galdino demanded, gawking at the clown like he was crazy. Well, crazier than he already looked, leastways. "We'd die if—!"

"Oh, hell no, I don't mean that fight!" Buggy retorted, indicating the battlefield, where Luffy had managed to take a flying leap that landed him square on the bug's skull, a position he immediately put to good use by taking hold of the thing's antennae and yanking as hard as he could manage. Whether he was aiming to rip out the antennae or rip off the head wholesale, he was certainly doing something to it. The monster began flailing frantically, thrashing and slashing as though it were in the midst of a seizure.

Buggy barely even flinched as a wild lash of its tail slammed a hole clean through a nearby wall. "Yeah, no. We'd die in ten seconds flat. No…" Buggy shifted his finger to the side as he unslung his axe. "I mean handling those things."

Once again, Galdino followed Buggy's finger, this time to a pack of infected beasts that were starting to slink out of the corridors and rise from the waters to encircle the fight. Certainly a lot more manageable, albeit potentially a problem if they distracted Straw Hat.

"You know what," the wax-man said, his power bubbling from his hands. "I could use a bout of stress relief."

"Just to be sure," Buggy grunted as he rolled his shoulder. "It was pretty obvious that that thing's stinger was what turned those things into crawling corpses, but can those things also…?"

Galdino grunted in denial as he solidified his wax into gauntlets. "From what I've seen, no. Whoever made this thing appears to have had just enough brains to make it so that that thing is the only point of infection. Though for the record, nobody's really survived long enough after getting jumped by one of those things for any real conclusions to be drawn, so… just don't let them sink their fangs into you if you can help it."

"NOT IF I SINK MY AXE INTO THEIR SKULLS FIRST! LET'S GO, EUTHANASIA FOR EVERYONE! C'MERE, BEASTIE!"

"GROOOOOAR!"

-o-

One thing Luffy was beginning to understand about the new monsters the World Government was creating, and something they shared with Pacifistas: they were stupidly tough. His pipe had a dent in it, and as impossible as it was, he could feel a headache coming from all the slamming against walls and floors the thing was doing to him. Slamming him against anything it could manage, frankly.

The only silver lining of the situation was that this one wasn't nearly as fast as the mongoose had been. Tough and more flexible, to be sure, but it wasn't quite the greased lightning that particular monstrosity had been. So none of the monster's flailing was quite capable of whipping Luffy free, nor of breaking his iron grip. But a battle of attrition was not to his favor. He had too far left to go to waste more stamina than necessary playing rodeo with an oversized bug. At least the Sphinx had gotten away.

Taking a deep breath, Luffy scrunched his eyebrows and ran through everything he had picked up on the monster: how it moved, how its parts moved, any areas it was being careful about, and most importantly, the pace of its movements from fast to slow. And from there, Luffy brainstormed some potential openings.

Seeing his chance for one of them, he allowed the monster's momentum to swing him forward before finally letting go of one of its antennae so that he was flung upward. Its glaring lenses fell on him and it stabbed one of its sickle-arm out at him—

"HOMERUN!"

—which is when he released the other antenna and spun forward, slamming all of the force he could muster through his pipe and into its sickle. The increased momentum accelerated the arm further on its path and stabbed it right into its own body, the blade easily sinking a good few feet into the monster's torso.

"SHKREEEE!"

Good news: it penetrated, and from the pained screech that produced, did some serious damage. Bad news: the monster's instinctual reaction was a twist-and-flex combination that hit Luffy in midair and batted the rubber-man away. Luffy bounced once before landing on his feet, but well out of melee range. Which, judging from the cloud of spores and rancid yellow fluid leaking out of the gash instead of blood, might have actually been a good thing.

"Argh… this is worse than that one tiger with rabies," Luffy groused. He tightened his scarf around his mouth and nose, crouching to leap back into the fight—

"MROOOOO!" CRUNCH!

—but a black-and-white blur shot in out of nowhere and rammed into the monster's side, propelling it clean into—and halfway through—a wall.

Luffy blinked, tilting his head in confusion. "Ah… what?"

The bug-beast was in much the same state of confusion, chittering and screeching as it yanked its upper torso out of the stonework, swinging its scythes wide—

KA-CRUNCH! "SHKREEEEE!"

But was interrupted by a mighty impact to its left limb, which rendered it a non-factor by way of mangling it into a pulp. The spiked club that had delivered the impact remained stuck, until the wielder planted a boat-sized hoof on the monster's chest and pulled it out with a disgusting squelching noise.

"MROOOO!"

Luffy couldn't help himself. He gaped in naked shock at the giant… cow-person—Minotaurus, right, that was what Cross called it!—bellowing its supremacy. It raised the club again and laid into its opponent with all the grace—and effectiveness—of a happy toddler in a china shop.

Well, Luffy might have been dumb, but he sure as shit wasn't dumb enough as to pass this up. "Guys!" he called out to Galdino and Buggy, who were surrounded by a few piles of battered infected beast bodies. "Time to go!"

"Go where?!" Buggy demanded as the two jogged up. "They're still going at it, and even if there are any guards anywhere near here, I don't see them opening the gates to a pack of convicts!"

"I can handle that!" Galdino offered, coalescing the outline of a key in his palm. "Just get me at the lock and—!"

"Not the stairs!" Luffy interrupted with a chop of his hand, his other one digging through his bag. "They'll have a small army waiting for us in there by now, we can't go down that way!"

"Wha—Then how do you suggest we get even deeper into this place?!" Buggy demanded.

SMASH!

"Preferably before one of those things kills the other, and then comes to kill us!"

Indeed, that was an all-too-real threat they faced. Despite being thoroughly tenderized, the insect-monster had pulled itself together enough to retaliate, which put the two back on equal terms despite the missing limb. Bestial horn and iron club were matched blow-for-blow by rancid claw and jaw. Blood and spores flew, neither beast even bothering to dodge or block, only to rip one another apart limb-from-limb that much more efficiently.

Despite themselves, Buggy and Galdino found themselves holding each other and quivering at the scene.

"We do what we did last time: we go down. Straight down," was all Luffy said as he withdrew his hand from his bag, the panicked protests of his companions washing over him. Out came a shell, which he carefully held in his palm. He kneeled, pressed it down to the floor—

WHUMP!

And forcefully choked down a blue streak born of pain and more than a few shows that Cross probably wouldn't have liked Soundbite sharing.

~o~

Conis stepped forward, gingerly placing a vaguely familiar box on the table.

"This is the Reject Dial that Wiper gave me. You'll get a lot better use out of it than I will; your rubber powers should minimize or even neutralize the recoil. If you're running low on energy or else you need to conserve it, use this instead of punching. It'll be at least as strong as you normally are."

Luffy nodded, carefully extracting the shell and flexing around it. He slammed his other fist into it, aimed it out of a window, flexed, and hissed in pain when it fired.

"Are you all right?" Conis asked, alarmed.

"Ugh… it's nothing I can't handle. Just feels like it almost took my arm off.."

"THAT'S NOT SOMETHING TO TREAT… ah… casually… er…" Nami trailed off. Nobody needed to say that the current circumstances were anything but casual.

Securing the shell back in its box, Luffy nodded and smiled. "Thanks, Conis. I'll be careful with it."

~o~

"Gnnneeeeergh…" Luffy ground out as he clutched his throbbing shoulder. "Still feels like Arlong's chewing on me again…"

Gritting his teeth, Luffy pushed past the pain and took in the results. Certainly, the floor was nicely cratered, but there was very visibly not a pit in the floor, no path below, and no way down to the next Hell. In spite of the sheer impossibility of it all, Impel Down held strong.

"Oh, come on!" Luffy groaned, very much dreading the idea of having to do that again. "How the hell was a Sphinx stronger than this thing?!"

Buggy shook his head, trying his best to un-ring his bell from the delirium the blast had slammed him and Galdino with, then tensed furiously at something just past Luffy's shoulder. "No clue, but I'd suggest you figure it out fast before we get PASTED!"

Luffy snapped his head around and immediately tensed in terror.

The source of said terror was the clash of titans that had just concluded, the Minotaurus the one left standing. The demi-bovine was bleeding from a dozen and ten wounds, not to mention a steady stream of blood from its slack jaw; had several visible compound fractures; and was panting heavily, but at least it was standing.

The invading monster, in stark contrast, could only be described as a mess, a crumpled heap of shattered metal and oozing, slightly twitching fungus. Incoherent, disturbingly fluid wheezes were the only sign of life, besides the spasmodic twitches that were its attempts to get up.

The victor of the brawl locked eyes with Luffy, staring, the two bruisers taking the measure of each other.

The minotaur broke the lock first, snorting balefully. It raised its hoof and took a ground-shaking stomp towards the infiltrate-ees.

Luffy tensed in preparation for a fight, and then tensed further at what was going on behind the beast. The Minotaurus's own fight wasn't quite as done as it apparently thought.

Visible above the horns the monster's head and tail could be seen rising, stinger extended and poised to strike oh crap—!

"DUCK!" Luffy roared, flinging out a projectile from his pocket. Whether it was the missile or Luffy's warning, the cow-man did duck, allowing what Luffy threw to slap against the monster's face:

One of the emergency snacks he'd smuggled in, a sea king steak.

The entire room seemed to freeze over. The Minotaurus, the monster, the other escapees… heck, even Luffy himself, to an extent, all went stock still.

"…Straw Hat," Buggy grit, hands twitching as he slowly reached for Luffy's throat. "I. Am going to give you one chance to explain to me… what in the flashy hell that was supposed to—!?"

"GROOOOOOARGH!"

And barely a second later, the canal behind the monster erupted and a particularly toothy Sea King locked its jaw down on the monster's head, thrashing and yanking viciously in a concerted effort to remove the thing's cranium.

There was another moment of (relative) silence until Luffy smirked and crossed his arms. "All according to cake…or whatever it is Soundbite says when he's being smug."

"THE HELL IT WAS!" Galdino snapped, forming a large hammer with his powers just to slam it against Luffy's rubber skull.

And, at the same time, the Minotaurus saw the opportunity for what it was. Given a choice between the humans and the monster, his mind focused on the invader whose compatriots had intruded on its territory and brought down the rest of its pack. And with it unable to strike, he raised his club once more and brought it down with all of his strength, right onto the stinging tail.

With a most grotesque and satisfying squelch, the appendage collapsed in on itself, its means of corrupting more of his fellow beasts crushed beyond all repair.

"MRRRROOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!" the Minotaurus roared, loosing a cry that shook the floor. Or rather, 'the Floor'. It was a statement of triumph, echoed by an echoing wave of bestial roars and howls from the entire rest of the floor.

The distant sounds of footsteps and brawls slowly crescendoed as the ones responsible drew closer, every last beast on the floor converging to put an end to their oppressor. And every able-bodied prisoner charged in alongside them, mutual enmity put aside in the face of a greater foe.

The inhabitants of the Beast Hell, willing and unwilling, flooded into the room, a tide of furious flesh that descended on the monster's broken body in a moshpit of vicious, unadulterated primal violence and started to—

"SHKREE-KREE-KREEGHRGHHH…!"

…well. The words 'to shreds' and 'limb from limb' were perhaps rather more literal this time around. The brutality was… excessive.

The infiltrate-ees could only gape at the hellish mauling, really trying to come to terms with whatever in the hell it was they were watching.

"Ahh…s-so…" Buggy weakly said. "You, er… you think this'll finally kill that thing?"

"Well—" Luffy hedged.

"GRAO-ARGH!" the returned Sphinx yowled, clamping its jaws down on the monster's thorax and pulling. Pulling and pulling…

SCH-KRACK!

Until the monster, well, became half the creature it had been ten seconds earlier.

Buggy's face turned green, audibly dry-heaving. "Never mind—hurp—never mind, then, that thing's death was as flashy as it is."

"Err…" Luffy hedged again, scratching the back of his head.

"Oh, you are kidding me!" Galdino barked, jabbing his finger at the flying chunks of eviscerated flesh. "That thing's been torn in half, emphasis on the 'torn'!"

"Yeah, and I saw one of these things get up after losing its head, so I'm not really holding my breath," Luffy grunted darkly. "What they need to kill is—oh, hang on a sec." He cupped his mouth and raised his voice. "HEY, THAT THING WON'T DIE UNLESS YOU TAKE OUT THIS BIG UGLY BALL OF—!"

SHKRUUUUUNCH!

There was another wet rip of flesh and metal, and then a pulsing sphere of meat and Tartarus knows what else was tossed out of the fray, messily landing and rolling to Luffy's feet.

"…huh, that's actually it," Luffy blinked in surprise before grinning and popping a thumbs-up. "YEAH, THIS IS IT! DON'T WORRY, I'LL—!"

"Moo."

Luffy looked up from the hellbeast's core, butterflies in his stomach at the Minotaurus standing right in front of him. Luffy looked up at him, meeting the beast's eyes. They stared for a moment…

"Uh… hi?" Luffy waved with a nervous grin.

In response, the Minotaurus snorted, spun its club into a reverse grip, took hold of it with both hands, and thrust the tip downwards.

SKRUNCH!

The impact smashed the beast's heart to smithereens, and thus ended its reign of terror on the Wild Beasts' floor.

The rubber-man considered the action, surprised and more than a little wary. "Uh… thanks… for that? So, uh…" He surreptitiously started to reach for his pipe. "Are we going to fight now, or…?"

Krr… kreee…

All present froze at the creaking that suddenly filled the plaza. They looked around for the source of the noise.

Kruuuunch...

Right as it intensified… coming from below them.

"…oh, this is going to hurt," Galdino whimpered miserably, his eyes wide, full of terror, and aimed down.

KRRRRASH!

And with that final temptation, the floor dropped out from under the pirates, dropping them into the abyss without another word.

Well, almost without.

"WAAAAAAAGH!" "OH GOOOOOD!" "WOOHOOHOOOO!"

But with the limited point of impact, it wasn't hard for the Minotaurus to step back from the edge of crumbling mortar. When the stone settled into a stable hole, the Minotaurus cautiously stepped forward to look down the hole, scratching at his head.

A giant-blooded prisoner grunted as he walked up to the Jailer Beast, patting his shoulder comfortingly. "Don't worry, they'll be fine. They're tough as nails, those three!"

"Mooooo," the Minotaurus grunted back, nodding in agreement.

They stared down in solemn companionship.

"Moo."

Aaaaand then the bovine beast's fist lashed out and blasted the prisoner into the nearest wall.

He then wheeled around to face the moshpit of beasts and prisoners and hefted up his club with a howling roar as it charged back into the fray, concussing whoever or whatever he could get his hands on.

"MROOOOOO!"

And like that, all was at least momentarily right with the second Hell again.

-o-

Level 3 was the quietest of the levels of Impel Down. There were no howling beasts like in Levels 5 and 2, and none of the pained screams of Levels 1 and 4. It was simply… hot. Not even a heat that burned or scorched, merely a heat that sapped energy, both psychologically and in the form of massive amounts of salt and water that the jailers did only the bare minimum to replenish. And only if they were feeling particularly generous. Or more commonly, particularly cruel.

The changes to come to Impel Down over the last week had not done all too much to change this. Well, up until some of the ceiling crumbled to pieces and delivered several tons of rock, two pirates, and one ex-agent onto the sandy dunes.

For a moment after their landing, the silence returned.

And then all three humans burst out of the sand, sputtering fit to burst.

"Grrrrgh… you wanna know something, Straw Hat? I hate sand," Galdino spat, shaking grains out of his hair. "It's course, and rough, and gets everywhere." Wiping sweat from his brow, he held up his hand and tried to form some wax. Key word being tried, because the wax 3 he made immediately sagged out of shape. "And it's hot enough to melt my wax. Because of course it is."

"Then why did you try to take over Vivi's country?" Luffy asked bluntly as he shook out his cloak.

"Money, and if Crocodile was ever good at one thing, it was inflating someone's ego to the point you'd do the dumbest things," Galdino grumbled as he yanked the last of the sand he could manage out of his hairdo.

"Must have been a lot of money, then…" the Straw Hat mused.

"…I really miss when you were a dumbass."

"Join the club. And ugh, nasty environment here," Buggy spat. Literally spat, brushing the sand off of his tongue. "Never thought I'd be coming here remotely willingly, but we're making great progress. Just a little longer like this and we'll be free as birds!"

Luffy snapped his head around to glare at the clown through his outfit. "Don't say that yet. Whenever Cross or anyone else says that things start getting bad. And the last two times, it was the same Warlord."

Buggy paused in the process of brushing sand off his tongue. His head slowly separated from his neck and slowly turned around to display a grin that could only be described as 'shit-eating.'

"Come on, Straw Hat. What's the worst that could happen? It's not like Magellan is here yet, and nothing else in this prison could stand up to you."

"…Buggy—"

"I'm having the best day of my life, things couldn't get any worse than they have been already!"

"Buggy—!"

"And it's not like anyone else has the balls to attack Impel Down, or like we'll have to deal with any more of those monsters that you smashed up, you already know most of the tricks—"

"BUGGY, I SWEAR I'LL—!"

"AND BESIDES, NOTHING EXCITING EVER HAPPENS HERE, THE VOLCANOES HAVE BEEN DORMANT FOR YEARS, THE WALLS HAVEN'T BEEN BREACHED IN CENTURIES, AND I'M TWO DAYS FROM RETIREMENT WITH A WIFE AND TWO FLASHY KIDS! GYAHAHAHAHAHAHA—!"

-o-

In an intact guardroom one floor below, a sea of deadpan glares watched the scene on the security screens.

"He's going on suicide watch when this is over, isn't he," one of the guards watching the mayhem deadpanned.

"That's if he survives that long," another answered.

"Which he won't once Warden Magellan gets his hands on him, of that I assure you."

The guards all hastily scrambled to their feet and snapped up salutes as a diminutive demon strolled to the front of the crowd, his bored gaze locked intently on the screen with the cackling clown on it.

"At ease, men," Saldeath stated dismissively, patiently tapping his pitchfork in his palm. "And report: what are the positions of our troops on the Starvation Hell? As well as the location of…" His neutral frown dipped down further. "The BioMEGA at the moment."

"Um…" Another watchman started scanning the screens. "Guard contingents are forming up as we speak, Blugori are en route to encircle them, and… the BioMEGA actually looks to be clear on the other side of the Level."

"Mmmmmm…" Saldeath hummed low, his frown deepening and his voice full of intoned disapproval.

"That doesn't sound like the response of a man whose plans are proceeding apace, Guard Saldeath."

The demon-man's grip on his pitchfork twitched slightly, and he glanced up at the coat-wearing man who'd stepped up alongside him. A man who all the other guards in the room were glaring at, both subtly and not.

Still, much as the man's presence annoyed him, he wasn't boorish enough to leave him hanging. "That's because matters are most certainly not what they appear, Commodore Smoker."

"And how's that, huh?" Smoker said, blowing out a cloud of smoke as he regarded the shorter man with a brow cocked inquisitively. "You heard it yourself, your men are on their way, and the clown's words are about to get shoved down his throat."

"Except that they won't be by us."

Smoker's perpetual frown deepened at the self-deprecation, however minor. "What do you mean?"

Saldeath raised his pitchfork and jabbed its tines at the screen. "That fool's statement is sure to invite retribution down upon him, but consider the following." He swept his weapon over the other screens. "It won't be delivered at our hands. It can't be, our men aren't close enough or in enough force to deliver the appropriate karmic balancing. If Warden Magellan or even the Warlord Hancock were to come upon them—"

Luckily, nobody knew Smoker enough to read the kink in his smoke cloud for the twitch it was.

"—then it might be appropriate, but under the current circumstances? The clown's comeuppance isn't going to be delivered by us. Which begs the question…"

Saldeath outright scowled, the grip on his pitchfork's shaft leaving his knuckles white as snow.

"What is about to happen?"

And it was then, right then, that the world proved that this particular retribution required two-factor authentication.

Retribution that was delivered…

KRA-BOOM!

With a blast that shook the entire floor—nay, the whole of Impel Down, throwing guards clean off their feet and knocking the Central Visual Snail off-kilter badly enough that over a dozen of its screens were fuzzed out. In a credit to the Snail's breeder, and the design of the Vis-Snail network itself, those screens quickly righted themselves, though the picture quality was a good deal spottier.

"And there it is!" Saldeath spat, leaping back to his feet and swinging his pitchfork out. "Status report! What was that and what in Tartarus is going on?!"

"Receiving reports now!" one of the guards back on his feet called out, pressing his snail's speaker to his ear. "Several instances of damage and minor riots, but nothing major! Getting a number of green lights! Level 1, secure! Level 2, riot! Level 3—!"

"Red alert from Level 3! I repeat, Red! Alert!" another guard barked in a panic.

"Details, now!"

"I—panicked reports coming from the airlocks, some sort of an explosion, but the structural integrity hasn't been—! Wait, what?!" The guard fell silent for a bit before paling. "What do you mean, 'reports of gunfire'?!"

Smoker and Saldeath both froze at the implications of those, and as one they said a word that had now officially been stated the one time it had ever been said in Impel Down.

"Invasion."

-o-

Fear was a foreign emotion to the blugori. They preyed on Sea Kings and guarded individuals that were as threatening or worse. Revolutionaries or pirates, Devil Fruit or not, it didn't matter: the blugori faced them all with silent violence and ironclad determination.

But even so, within the beasts there remained one last instinctual fear in the face of the unknown. One example of such was anything that lacked a solid and powerful body and showed significant sapience and/or power. Logias were rarely captured alive, after all. And when they were, they never spent a moment away from the equalizing touch of Seastone.

All of which only meant that an unfortunate blugori was left very scared when its attempts to move away from the hulking submarine that had breached their hunting hatch were foiled by something pulling it in. It felt something without a body sucking it into a bottomless depth, its incredible strength useless to break free or damage the mass.

Of course, there was also the fact that of the many hells in Impel Down, one environment that was not featured, that they could not have been prepared for…

"Kehihihihi! What a wonderful start!"

Was a swamp.

"Yeeeeees my new pet, coooome to papa!" the swamp-man leered viciously, drawing in the ensnared primate further and further into his murky depths until its grasping fist vanished entirely. "Kehihihi! Oh, this job is turning out even better than I'd dreamed! Cross might have struck hard against Sabaody, but there's not a chance in hell he'll put Caribou Trafficking out of business! Especially not when we can just raid hell itself! Kehihihiiii! Would you not agree, Coribou?"

"Uh… uh-huh, uh-huh," a wall-eyed fatso nodded blearily as he wandered around nearby, a Gatling gun clutched in his arms. "Whatever you say, Brother Caribou, you're right, Brother…"

"OF COURSE I'M RIGHT, BROTHER!" Caribou cheered as he flung his sleeved arms out wide, his tongue lolling out. "FOR ONLY A GENIUS SUCH AS I COULD—!"

"Move your ass, you snot-nosed hitchhiker."

"GWAH!" Caribou yelped as he was shoved aside. Given his lanky build this would not have been a surprising occurrence, were the shover not a four-foot woman with more wrinkles in her than a paperback novel.

"Honestly," the woman sneered, shoving her coke-bottle glasses up as she glared down at the indignant Logia. "Did we have to bring this pack of leeches along with us? We certainly have enough men of our own for this, you know!"

"Aye, maybe so," a larger man wearing overalls and goggles and toting a cubic hammer scoffed as he carelessly stepped over Caribou, a company of pirate foot soldiers spreading out behind them. "But you heard the deal, same as me: We only got the blueprints to this pit if we brought them with us. Besides, it's not like we'll be dealing with them much longer."

"Agreed," a blue giant—or rather, wotan, the tip of his fin scratching against the airlock's ceiling—rumbled as he crawled out of the submarine, stooping so that he could fit. "So let's just get this over with: they'll do their job, we'll do ours, and then we leave, get our payment, and never speak to one another again. Agreed?"

"Fine by me, you washed-up wastrels," Caribou scoffed, pulling himself up by way of his brother so that he could properly glare at them. "Honestly, did nobody ever tell you that corpses belong in graves? Kehihihi…" He jerked his head at his brother. "My brother here could help you with that, couldn't you, Coribou?"

"Dig the grave, dig the grave…" Coribou slurred, unslinging a shovel from his back and planting its tip into the ground. Well, trying to because, you know, stone. "…can't dig, Caribou, can't dig."

"NOT NOW, YOU IDIOT!"

"Sorry, brother, sorry…"

"That's quite enough!"

Both parties turned their attention to the final person who'd emerged from their ride, the brothers with annoyance and the seniors with respect and concern. The individual was a diminutive old man, wearing a Viking helmet and with several plastic tubes running from his arms to the bag he wore on his back, and he looked at them one and all with solemn determination.

"Our business here is far too important to risk over petty quarreling! Kindly stow your attitudes, and let's get about it!"

While Caribou crossed his arms and mutinously looked away (and Coribou looked in the wrong direction entirely), the old woman took a tentative step towards the even older man, her arms raised placatingly. "Captain, please, remain on the ship. It's not safe for you here, and—!"

"Nothing doing, Nightin," the old man huffed as he shouldered his bag. "I know it's dangerous, and I know I could die, especially in my state. Why, odds are even good that I'll be an outright hindrance, but I'm afraid I don't have another choice. I wasn't there for him years ago, I have to be here for him now! So, I'm sorry, but this is how it is!"

He held his head high and marched past her and all his other crewmates, and glared down the passage that led into Impel Down.

"No matter what happens, no matter how much this hellish prison throws at me, I won't stop. Not until I save my brother! Or my name isn't Byojack World!"

-o-

Red in the face and visibly trembling with his blazing outrage, the diminutive master of the blugoris slammed his pitchfork against the floor and stalked for the door, Smoker silently following him after a sidelong glare from the midget.

"Issue the following order by my authority!" the devil-man barked.

The anger shown from the usually unflappable Saldeath had every guard listening intently.

"Unless or until you hear otherwise from Vice Warden Hannyabal or Warden Magellan, the escaped convict Buggy the Clown is not to be recaptured alive."

"SIR!"

"NOW MOBILIZE AND STOP THOSE INVADERS! MOVE!"

"SIR, YES, SIR!"

-o-

Buggy's head slowly peeked its way out of the fresh pile of stonework that had crashed down onto him, fearfully eyeing his surroundings. "…I'll shut up now."

Galdino, meanwhile, just stood in place crying miserably (and quite pathetically), his tears disappearing as quickly as they impacted the sand. "I'm surrounded by suicidal idiots…"

And as for Luffy? He was steaming, one hand dragging down his face and the other twitching in a desire to strangle the clown to death for hurting his chances to save Ace this much.

"And of course, things just got a lot more complicated…"

Patient AN: Just for the record, if it seems like we're demonizing Yamakaji? Our reasoning is rather simple.

Xomniac AN: Any man who can smile while bringing down a Buster Call… cannot be good in my books.