The air inside the Temple of Dawn's Echo turned brittle, each breath crystallizing into frost as Mirror Marcellus' glass shards spiraled into a suffocating kaleidoscope. Walls of warped reflections loomed, twisting the temple's Lunarian mosaics into mockeries of their former glory. Mihawk's stoic visage fractured into a hundred scowling Marine victims; Shanks' grin stretched grotesquely into Joy Boy's manic leer; Marya's mist writhed into the skeletal hands of her mother, Elisabeta, clawing at her ankles. The labyrinth hummed with the dissonant chime of shattering glass, a sound that prickled the skin like static charged with seastone grit.
Mercury-like droplets wept from the mirrors, sizzling as they struck the floor and searing scars that reeked of burnt hair. Bioluminescent fungi trapped within the glass pulsed erratically, casting jade shadows that slithered like eels across the walls. Echoes of the past haunted the air—Shanks' laughter warped into Roger's final, rasping words; Mihawk's critiques twisted into Perona's shrill mockery. Beneath it all, a distorted sea shanty droned, its melody fraying into screeches that clawed at the mind. The cloying sweetness of decaying star-metal clashed with ozone, coating the tongue like rancid honey. The glass walls shifted under touch—warm one moment, icy the next, their surfaces rippling like liquid before hardening into razored edges.
Marya stumbled as her reflection splintered into a younger version of herself—soft-faced, unmarked by Void veins. The girl mouthed, "You'll fail them too," as Elisabeta's ghostly hand reached from the mirror. Her mist recoiled, corroding the floor into smoking pits. Shanks halted before a pane showing his younger self at Marineford, Gryphon bloodied and Rayleigh's voice sneering, "Should've stayed a cabin boy." Golden Haki flared, cracking the glass, but the shards reformed into Buggy's tear-streaked face, whispering regrets. Mihawk strode down a corridor of endless Yorus, each blade notched with forgotten names. A mirror showed Zoro kneeling, Wado Ichimonji shattered. "Legacy's a noose," the glass hissed. Mihawk slashed it, only for the shards to reshape into a shadow wielding Eternal Eclipse.
The walls contracted like a ribcage, herding them deeper. Time warped—Marya's sprint toward a false exit slowed to a nightmare crawl, her breaths echoing like drumbeats. At the labyrinth's heart lay the mirror-pool, a liquid pane where reflections drowned. Those who peered too long saw their faces rot, replaced by World Government posters branding them traitors. Fish-like shadows swam beneath, humming Vegapunk's lullaby backward.
Outside, Benn Beckman blew smoke into Smoker's seastone-choked scowl, his rifle steady. "Family's messy," he drawled. "You'd get it if yours wasn't a flowchart."
Smoker's ash swirled into shackles. "You're protecting a Dracule."
"Protecting?" Benn smirked. "We're annoyed you made her late for dinner."
Nearby, Limejuice's electric staff clashed with Teivel's Gungnir, sparks raining onto disabled Pacifista husks. "Y'ever think," Limejuice grinned, parrying a thrust, "the WG's just pissed 'cause Nika out-partied 'em?"
Teivel spat. "Y'ever think shutting up?"
Gab and Building Snake flanked Captain Veyla, her brass eyepiece whirring despite its cracks. "Air blades?!" Gab whooped, slicing a Pacifista's legs. "Fancier than my ex's excuses!"
Veyla harpooned a Marine into a tidal mechanism, grinning. "Save the jokes—drown the dogs!"
Yasopp, perched on a petrified root, out-sniped Kai Sullivan's seastone round mid-air. "Kid," he called, reloading, "your scope's dusty."
Kai's glasses fogged—not from sweat, but shame.
Yasopp's rifle cracked. Nuri Evander's Arambourgiania wings crumpled mid-leap, the sniper's bullet finding the chink in his leathery membrane. "Tell Vegapunk his toys need polish!"
Lucky Roux carved through seastone nets with a butcher's precision, freeing refugees who clung to his apron. "Snack time later! Run now!"
On the beach, Benn Beckman lit a cigarette off Smoker's smoldering coat. "Family dinner's postponed. Send invites next time."
Smoker's growl faded as the mist swallowed the horizon. "This isn't over, Beckman."
"Never is," Beckman called back, already striding toward the Red Force
In the temple's ruins, the Eclipse Gate still pulsed. Void Moss glowed faintly in the cracks, whispering promises to the shadows.
Inside the labyrinth, Marcellus' voice oozed from the glass. "Yoru-chan~! Still sheathing your regrets?"
Mihawk cleaved the mirror, but the shards reshaped into Guillotine Gereon's chain-scythe, Karma's seastone teeth gnashing. The CP0 agent stepped through, his mask leaking shadow.
Marya's beetle sigil flickered, Void veins pulsing. "We're not your puppets," she snarled.
Shanks laughed, Gryphon gleaming. "Nah. We're the strings."
The labyrinth shuddered—Nika's drums thrummed in the distance, defiant. Somewhere, a mirror shattered right.
The Temple of Dawn's Echo shuddered violently, its Lunarian-crafted spires fracturing like ancient bones. Shards of solar-tech rained down, glowing faintly as they pierced the earth like fallen stars. The air reeked of scorched stone and smoldering mangrove sap, the jungle's once-vibrant canopy now a lattice of embers and ash. Onyx crouched behind a petrified root, her fingers slick with sweat as they gripped Starfall's dials. The weapon hummed in her hands, its Vegapunk enhanced Skypiean tech vibrating with latent storm energy—a cold, electric thrum that mirrored the chaos in her chest.
"Burn the jungle. Leave no survivors."
Casimir's order clawed at her mind, his voice venomous even in memory. She'd heard it before, in the sulfurous halls of Marineford, when he'd demanded she raze a rebel village in the East Blue. Back then, she'd obeyed, her hands steady, her heart numb. But now—
Now, two children huddled in the crossfire.
Tavi and Kip pressed themselves against a moss-caked boulder, their moth-eaten pirate hats singed at the edges. Tavi's freckled face was streaked with soot, her tricorn askew, while Kip clutched his wooden sword, Seastinger, like a lifeline. Their eyes—wide with terror, yet sharp with defiance—locked onto hers. They reminded her of herself, years ago, hiding in Marineford's barracks as cannon fire shook the walls.
"Stupid…!" Onyx hissed, not at them, but at the part of her that still wavered. Her thumb jammed the storm dial.
The sky ripped.
Rain erupted in a vertical deluge, dousing the Pacifistas' flames with a hiss of steam. The twins gasped as the downpour soaked them, their laughter—bright and disbelieving—piercing the din. For a heartbeat, Onyx forgot the battle. She forgot the Vanguard, the Dracules, the blood on her boots. All she saw was Kip's gap-toothed grin, Tavi's makeshift treasure map clutched in her tiny fist.
"Onyx!"
Casimir's roar shattered the moment. He stood atop a crumbling aqueduct, his Velociraptor talons glinting, remaining eye blazing with fury. "You treasonous worm—!"
Before she could react, Teivel barreled into her, Gungnir's haft deflecting the seastone net hurled by a Marine. Barbed wires ensnared him instead, slicing into his shoulders. Blood bloomed across his shirt, mingling with rain as he crumpled.
"Run, Stumblebunny!" he growled, though his voice trembled. "These heels… slow you down… enough already."
Onyx froze. Stumblebunny. The nickname he'd given her the day they met, when she'd tripped over her own uniform boots during a Vanguard drill. Back then, he'd laughed—a rough, grating sound—but steadied her with a hand calloused from years of spearplay. "Aim your feet like you aim your shots," he'd said. "Less wobbling, more shooting."
"Why?!" she cried now, voice breaking. The storm dial slipped from her grip, its gears sputtering.
Teivel grinned, blood staining his teeth. "'Cause you still… can't lace your damn heels… without face-planting."
The truth struck her like a cannonball. He'd always shielded her—from Casimir's scorn, from her own doubts. Not because she was weak, but because he'd seen the flicker of conscience she tried to bury. The same flicker that now burned in Tavi and Kip's eyes.
Casimir lunged, talons slashing, but Onyx was already moving. She snatched Starfall from the mud, dials whirling. "I'm done… burning for you," she spat, rain and tears blurring her vision.
The jungle, the temple, the war—it all faded as she turned the storm dial one last time. For the children. For Teivel. For the girl she'd once been, who'd never had a choice.
The sky answered with thunder.
Onyx's defiance wasn't born in that moment, but in the quiet cracks of a thousand orders followed. It was in the villages she'd razed without question, the prisoners who'd begged for mercy she couldn't grant. It was in the way Casimir's talons had twitched when she'd once asked, "Why kill them all?"
"Because weakness spreads," he'd replied, "like rot."
But Tavi and Kip weren't weak. They were sparks in the dark, stubborn and bright. And as the storm swallowed Casimir's rage, Onyx realized—she'd rather drown in the tempest than let those sparks die.
*****
The labyrinth's glass walls had become a prison of twisted memories. Mirrors reflected not just flesh and steel but the ghosts of choices unmade—Zoro's ambition curdling into obsession, Shanks' laughter sharpening into Roger's dying rasp, Marya's mist devouring her from within. The air itself felt poisoned, thick with the cloying sweetness of decaying star-metal and the acrid sting of seastone dust. Every step Mihawk took echoed with the dissonant chime of fracturing glass, the sound burrowing into his skull like a parasite.
"We're the strings," Shanks had said, that infuriating grin plastered across his face even as Marcellus' mirrors warped his reflection into Joy Boy's manic leer. The words clung to Mihawk's mind, grating and persistent. Strings. As if they were puppets in a cosmic farce.
Mihawk's grip tightened on Yoru. The blade hummed, not with the metallic song of tempered steel, but with a deeper resonance—a frequency that devoured. It had always been more than a weapon; it was an extension of his will, forged in the silence of a thousand battles. Today, it hungered.
"Enough theatrics," he muttered, not to Shanks, but to the labyrinth itself. To the illusions that dared mirror his regrets.
He raised Yoru, and the world stilled.
The blade drank.
Light bent toward its edge, warping into jagged halos before vanishing. Sound followed—Marcellus' taunts, Gereon's chains, the distant screams of Pacifistas—all swallowed into a vacuum. Even the labyrinth's oppressive hum died, leaving only the drum of Mihawk's pulse in his ears. For a heartbeat, there was nothing but the stillness between Yoru's edge and the inevitability of its cut.
"Black Blade: Singularity."
The strike was not a slash but an unmaking.
The mirrors imploded first. Marcellus' prized illusions shattered not into shards but into stardust, crystalline fragments glowing faintly before dissolving like embers in a gale. The ground quaked, fissures spiderwebbing through petrified mangrove roots as the temple itself recoiled. Gereon's chain-scythe, Karma, froze mid-whirl, its seastone links crumbling to black ash. The CP0 agent staggered, his executioner's mask splitting with a sound like a ribcage collapsing, revealing a sliver of scarred flesh beneath—a wound Mihawk recognized. Marineford. A younger swordsman. A lesson.
Shanks' laughter cut through the settling dust. "Dramatic bastard," he said, though his usual levity frayed at the edges. His gaze flicked upward, where the temple's fractured ceiling revealed a sky choked with Marya's Void-born mist. "Could've warned me before redecorating."
Mihawk sheathed Yoru, the blade's hunger momentarily sated. "You'd have dodged."
Around them, the labyrinth lay in ruins. Glass dust shimmered like false snow, settling on the remnants of Lunarian mosaics—their once-proud depictions of sunlit rebellions now reduced to fractured eyes and broken hands. The air tasted of static and iron, the aftermath of a vacuum reborn into chaos.
Marcellus crawled from the debris, his porcelain mask half-shattered, kaleidoscope eyes dimmed. "Y-You… ruined it," he rasped, voice stripped of its lyrical malice. "My masterpiece—"
"Was tedious," Mihawk interrupted, turning away.
Shanks chuckled, but his hand rested on Gryphon's hilt, knuckles white. The mist above churned, tendrils of Void-black and Nika-gold twisting like serpents in a death spiral. "She's losing herself in there," he said quietly, the words heavy with a history Mihawk didn't care to unravel.
"Then stop gawking," Mihawk replied, already striding toward the temple's heart.
Behind them, Gereon stirred, his shattered mask revealing a milky, sightless eye. "The Gorosei… will claim you… both," he hissed, but the threat rang hollow, drowned by the temple's dying breaths.
The Singularity had cut more than glass. It had carved a path through the labyrinth's lies, leaving only the raw, trembling truth: Marya's fight was theirs now.
And Mihawk loathed owing debts.
The Eclipse Gate loomed like a maw of forgotten gods, its archway crusted with luminescent barnacles that pulsed with the rhythm of Marya's faltering heartbeat. The air reeked of petrified ozone and the metallic tang of Void Moss—a parasitic vine that slithered up her legs, its tendrils burrowing into her skin like serpents claiming a host. The moss glowed faintly, a sickly greenish-black, its bioluminescence warping as it merged with the scarab sigil etched into her brow. The symbol, once dormant, now throbbed like a second heart, its light bleeding into the mist that poured from her body in suffocating waves.
Marya stood at the epicenter, her boots rooted to cracks spreading like spiderwebs through the ancient stone. The mist screamed—not a sound, but a vibration that gnawed at the edges of reality. Light dimmed, shadows deepened, and the very concept of hope seemed to unravel as the Void's influence spread. Lunarian carvings along the gate's pillars—depictions of sunlit rebellions and Mink moon-dances—blistered and peeled, their gold leaf curling into ash.
"Marya—!"
Mihawk's voice cut through the cacophony, fraying at the edges, a blade dulled by desperation. He'd never raised his voice, not truly—not when Zoro had challenged him at Kuraigana, not when Perona's ghosts had wailed through his castle. But now, her name tore from him raw, stripped of its usual ice.
She turned.
Her left eye blazed with the molten gold of Nika's dawn, but the right—swallowed by the Void—was a starless abyss, pupil dilated into a yawning chasm. Veins of black ichor pulsed beneath her skin, branching from the scarab sigil like roots of a cursed tree. The ground beneath her splintered further, shards of stone levitating as the Void's gravity inverted.
"It's… louder… than before," she rasped, voice layered with a hundred discordant whispers—the Void's chorus, clawing at her throat.
Around them, the battlefield twisted into nightmare. Pacifistas staggered, their seastone-reinforced frames dissolving into black sludge that hissed and bubbled like tar. Marines collapsed, clawing at their eyes as Void mist infiltrated their lungs, their screams cut short as the corruption reforged them—flesh warping into grotesque hybrids of bone and shadow. Smoker's jitte disintegrated in his hands, the seastone dust he wielded now a weapon against him, eating through his gloves as he roared, "Fall back! Retreat—!"
Mihawk moved.
He'd always been fast—preternaturally so—but this was not the graceful lethality of the world's greatest swordsman. This was a storm. His black coat billowed like a wraith's shroud as he closed the distance, Yoru still sheathed, his Conqueror's Haki a physical force that parted the mist.
"Fight it," he commanded, voice steel wrapped in silk, a tone he'd used only once before—when a younger Marya, trembling after her first kill, had asked him if the weight of the blade ever lessened.
"Can't…!" Her hand snapped out, seizing his wrist. The Void Moss surged toward him, tendrils snaking up his arm, burning like acid. His skin blistered, but he didn't flinch.
In her golden eye, he saw it—the flicker of her, buried beneath the Void's static. A memory flashed: Marya at twelve, stubbornly parrying his strikes in the rain, refusing to yield even as her knees buckled. "You don't get to lose," he'd said then. "Not to anyone. Not even yourself."
"You will," he growled, and unleashed his Haki.
Not as a blade. Not as a weapon.
As an anchor.
The air detonated. Gold-and-crimson light erupted from Mihawk, a supernova of willpower that clashed with the Void's devouring dark. The ground beneath them screamed, fissures deepening as the two forces warred—a tempest of liberation against a glacier of oblivion. The Void Moss recoiled, hissing, its tendrils shriveling as Marya's golden eye blazed brighter.
"Enough!" Mihawk's voice shook the temple.
For a heartbeat, the Void faltered.
Marya's knees buckled. The scarab sigil dimmed to a dying ember, the mist retreating like a wounded beast. She collapsed forward, but Mihawk was already there, his arms locking around her, Yoru clattering to the ground—a sound he'd never allowed in a lifetime of discipline.
"Hongo's on his way," Shanks barked, skidding to a halt beside them, Gryphon dripping with seastone residue and Pacifista oil. His usual grin was gone, replaced by a grim line. "She stable?"
Mihawk didn't answer. His coat—singed, torn, burning at the edges where the Void had gnawed—wrapped around Marya, shielding her from the acid rain now pelting the ruins. Her breaths were shallow, her fingers curled into his shirt like a child's.
"For now," he finally said, the words ash in his throat.
Above, the sky churned, the Void's laughter echoing in the distance—a low, grinding sound, like stone on bone. The battle had paused, but the war was far from over.
And in the silence, Mihawk's fear lingered—a quiet, venomous thing. Not of the Void, nor death, nor loss.
But of failing her, again.
Tavi and Kip crouched over a half-sunken mosaic, their treasure map now a charcoal smear. "Next time," Kip whispered, clutching his wooden sword, "we'll stab the Marines!"
"Duh," Tavi said, adjusting her tricorn. "Adventure's just paused."
Far above, Nika's drums faltered—but did not fade.
The dawn had been bought, not won.
And in Mihawk's arms, Marya dreamed of chains.