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Within Luffy's Domain, Doflamingo hadn't stood a chance.
Ninety-nine percent of his core value had been absorbed—ripped away by the Domain's fundamental laws. When the mountain-sized Kong Gun fell for the final time, the arrogant Heavenly Demon was reduced to half a head, sent flying across the sky like a discarded piece of trash.
By cruel coincidence, that half-head crashed directly into the King's Plateau—the highest point of the royal palace. It tumbled through rubble and shattered stone until it came to rest before a structure that hadn't existed hours earlier.
A tomb made entirely of ice and snow.
Doflamingo's single remaining eye struggled to focus. Through the haze of approaching death, he studied the architectural marvel before him. Elegant ice sculptures. Crystalline walls that caught and refracted light like frozen starlight. Artistic beauty far beyond anything his palace had ever contained.
This wasn't here before, he thought distantly. Someone built this during the battle. But who—?
CREAK.
The tomb's door—a massive slab of compressed ice—began to open from within. Frigid air rushed out like the exhalation of winter itself, dropping the temperature by dozens of degrees in seconds. Frost spread across the stones where the cold wind touched.
And from that tomb emerged a figure Doflamingo never expected to see.
A young girl—no more than five years old—with silver-white hair that seemed to shimmer with its own internal light. She wore an elegant blue dress that looked more suited for a queen's court than a battlefield. Her expression was carved from ice itself: hard, cold, utterly merciless.
But it was her presence that truly staggered him.
The girl radiated authority that made even dying Doflamingo's instincts scream danger. Conqueror's Haki—nascent but undeniable—pulsed around her in invisible waves. This was a ruler in the making. Someone born to command, to dominate, to stand above all others.
And Doflamingo knew her face.
"Elsa...?" The word came out as barely a whisper.
The Ito Ito no Mi (String-String Fruit) responded to its user's desperate will, weaving white threads from nothing to reconstruct his mouth and jaw. The process was agonizing—flesh forming from string, nerves reconnecting—but he needed to speak. Needed to understand.
What happened to you? he wanted to ask. What did this battle do to transform my daughter into... this?
Because this wasn't the haughty but ultimately innocent child who'd played in the palace gardens. This wasn't the girl who'd argued with Senior Pink about sneaking out. This was something else entirely—someone who'd been forged in the fires of tragedy and emerged as cold and unyielding as diamond.
Elsa stared down at her biological father's ruined form with eyes as expressionless as a doll's. When she finally spoke, her voice carried all the warmth of a midwinter blizzard:
"Doflamingo. I didn't expect you to be such a waste."
The words were surgical in their cruelty, each one precisely placed for maximum impact.
"You couldn't protect my mother. You couldn't protect Anna. And in the end, you couldn't even protect yourself." Her lip curled in contempt. "Look at you. Pathetic."
If Doflamingo's heart still functioned properly, those words would have stopped it.
His own daughter—his flesh and blood—looked at him with less emotion than she might show a crushed insect. There was no grief. No horror at his condition. No desperate pleas for him to hold on.
Just cold, absolute judgment.
She's right, a distant part of Doflamingo acknowledged. I failed them all. I failed everyone.
Elsa had been brilliant since birth. Sharp-minded enough to understand her situation from a young age, to recognize that she and her mother were possessions rather than family. She'd never expected love from Doflamingo, had never been naive enough to hope.
It was Senior Pink who'd given her what little paternal affection she'd known—the perverted gentleman in a baby bonnet who'd protected her during her escape attempts, who'd warned her of dangers, who'd actually cared about her wellbeing.
And that made her hate Doflamingo even more.
If I'd been born to an ordinary family, Elsa thought distantly, none of this suffering would have happened. Anna and I could have had normal lives. Mother wouldn't have been trapped. We could have been... happy.
But she'd been born a Donquixote. And that curse had poisoned everything.
"You know why I never got close to you?" Doflamingo's reconstructed mouth finally functioned well enough for full sentences. His voice was weak, fading, but determined. "Why I kept my distance from you and Anna?"
Elsa said nothing. Just stared with those frozen eyes.
"My father..." Doflamingo's face twisted with ancient pain. "My saintly, idealistic father gave up his Celestial Dragon status. Walked away from paradise because he wanted to 'live as a human.' And what did that idealism get us?"
The memories flooded back—vivid despite his dying state. The poverty. The hatred from ordinary people. His mother wasting away from illness on a broken bed because they couldn't afford medicine.
"Mother died screaming," Doflamingo whispered. "In agony. In squalor. Because Father's principles mattered more than her life. So I killed him. Put a gun to his head and ended the man who'd destroyed our family."
His single eye stared at nothing, seeing only the past.
"Years later, Corazon came back. My little brother. I loved him, Elsa. Loved him. And he betrayed me. Was a Marine spy the entire time. So I killed him too. Put a bullet through his heart."
The twisted logic that had governed Doflamingo's life spilled out in his final moments:
"The two people closest to me—my father and my brother—both betrayed everything I tried to build. So I learned not to love my family. Learned to treat my subordinates as family instead, because at least they'd earned their place through loyalty rather than blood."
He focused on Elsa again, and something like regret flickered across his ruined features.
"I was afraid. Afraid that if I let myself love you and Anna, you'd betray me like the others did. Or worse—that my love would curse you the way Father's cursed us." His voice cracked. "So I kept my distance. Thought I was protecting you. And instead, I condemned you to the same fate I suffered."
The irony was almost funny. Doflamingo had spent his entire life running from his family's tragedy, only to inflict the exact same wounds on his own daughters.
Fate playing tricks, he thought bitterly. Always playing tricks.
The Ito Ito no Mi made one final effort, weaving enough tissue for Doflamingo to speak clearly. This was his last chance. His final words before the darkness claimed him.
"Elsa. If you don't want to fail like I did, keep getting stronger." His voice gained a fraction of its old authority. "This sea shows no mercy to the weak. The only person who ever believed otherwise died at Marineford."
Elsa's icy expression flickered—just for a moment—with something that might have been confusion.
Become stronger? For what purpose? To what end?
She was adrift. Untethered. The battle had destroyed everything she'd known, and she had no path forward. Only cold emptiness where direction should be.
Doflamingo saw the uncertainty and laughed—a weak, pathetic sound that dissolved into coughing.
"Fufufufu... Listen well, girl. Wine, love, fame, power, gods, family, kings, dreams, children—something drives everyone. We're all slaves to our obsessions, whether we admit it or not." His eye gleamed with dying intensity. "Find what enslaves you, Elsa. Find your obsession. Only then will you have purpose."
Is that what I should do? Elsa wondered, feeling something stir beneath the ice surrounding her heart. Find something worth pursuing? Something worth living for?
Doflamingo studied his daughter—this cold, powerful creature he'd helped create through neglect—and felt a terrible hope kindle in his dying mind.
My dream... the one I couldn't accomplish... perhaps she could...
He was running out of time. The Ito Ito no Mi's power was fading fast, the Devil Fruit preparing to leave its dying host and respawn somewhere in the world. But Doflamingo had one last gift to give.
One last chain to bind his daughter to his legacy.
White threads emerged from his ruined body, weaving together in intricate patterns. They formed into a scroll—paper made of compressed string, covered in dense text that appeared as if written in blood.
The moment the scroll completed, the last of Doflamingo's Devil Fruit power vanished. His mind cleared with the terrible lucidity that comes in death's final moments. He had seconds left. Maybe less.
"That scroll..." His voice was barely audible now. "Contains the secret of the Celestial Dragons. The real secret. The reason the Five Elders let me live despite knowing I'd betray them eventually."
Elsa's eyes widened slightly—the first genuine emotion she'd shown.
"You're confused. You have no path forward." Doflamingo's ruined face managed something like a smile. "Then follow mine. Use that knowledge. Shake the foundations of—"
The words cut off mid-sentence.
Donquixote Doflamingo, the Heavenly Demon, King of Dressrosa, Joker of the Underworld—died with his eye still open, staring at his daughter with an expression caught between hope and malice.
Elsa stood motionless for several heartbeats, studying the corpse.
No tears came. Not a single one.
He doesn't deserve them, she thought coldly. He never earned the right to my grief.
But even in death, the bastard tried to control her life. Tried to chain her to his ambitions, to his dreams, to his path of revenge against the world.
"Typical," Elsa muttered, a bitter smile ghosting across her face. "Couldn't be a father in life, but you'll haunt me from beyond death. How perfectly Doflamingo of you."
She didn't bother closing his eye. Let him stare at nothing for eternity.
Instead, she bent down and retrieved the scroll, unrolling it with careful fingers. Curiosity overcame her disgust—what secret could possibly be important enough to keep Doflamingo alive despite his blackmail of the Five Elders?
Her eyes scanned the densely-packed text.
And widened with each paragraph.
Impossible. This can't be....
The Donquixote lineage had apparently dug deeper into the Twenty Kings' legacy than any other Celestial Dragon family. Information that should have been destroyed eight hundred years ago had been preserved through oral tradition, passed from generation to generation in the bloodline's darkest corners.
And now Elsa held that knowledge in her hands.
"There are people in this world who have lived for eight hundred years." The words came out barely above a whisper, but they seemed to echo across the frozen plateau. "No wonder you were always obsessing over the Ope Ope no Mi (Op-Op Fruit). You wanted eternal life. Wanted to be like the original Celestial Dragons—immortal rulers standing above the flow of time."
The scroll detailed the Surgery. The World Government's true structure. The secrets of Mary Geoise's deepest vaults. Names that shouldn't exist anymore. Powers that officially didn't exist at all.
Knowledge that could topple nations if wielded correctly.
Or get her killed if anyone discovered she possessed it.
Elsa finished reading and immediately made her decision.
Ice spread from her fingertips, crawling across the scroll like living frost. The paper crackled and crystallized, turning brittle and fragile. She crushed it in her fist, and it shattered into glittering fragments that dissolved into mist.
Within seconds, no trace of the scroll remained.
The secret of the Celestial Dragons existed now in only one place: Elsa's perfect memory.