-Broadcast-
From that point forward, Kozuki Momonosuke's existence narrowed to a brutal cycle: train in the sea, eat until his stomach hurt, sleep until someone woke him, repeat. No variation. No rest days. No mercy.
The routine was designed to break him or forge him. Nothing in between.
Zoan-type Devil Fruits granted enhanced physical capabilities—superior strength, accelerated healing, increased stamina. But those advantages didn't manifest automatically. They required development through relentless stress. The body adapted to demands placed upon it, or it failed and died. Simple evolutionary pressure applied with mechanical precision.
Day by day, Momonosuke's capabilities accumulated. Slowly. Painfully. But measurably.
Day 2: Failed He barely reached the waterway's base before exhaustion forced him back. The rushing current felt like a solid wall. His fish body couldn't generate enough thrust to make progress against it.
Douglas Bullet fished him out unconscious.
Day 10: Failed He managed ten meters up the incline. The victory felt monumental—ten whole meters!—until he realized the waterway stretched a thousand meters total. He'd completed one percent.
Bullet threw stones at him until he tried again.
Day 20: Failed One hundred meters. The slope's angle increased noticeably at this point, transforming from steep to nearly vertical. His fins ached from the constant motion. His gills burned from processing seawater mixed with his own blood—wounds from Bullet's "motivational" projectiles.
He sank. Was retrieved. Was thrown back in.
Day 30: Failed Five hundred meters. Halfway to the summit. The accomplishment should have felt encouraging, but Momonosuke understood the truth: the second half would be exponentially harder than the first. The final five hundred meters were steeper, the current stronger, the margin for error nonexistent.
He collapsed at the five hundred meter mark and slid all the way back to the ocean. Bullet waited at the bottom to drag him out.
Day 50: Failed Six hundred meters. The waterway's angle approached eighty degrees here. Swimming "up" felt more like climbing a liquid wall. Every fin stroke fought both gravity and rushing water. His muscles screamed constantly now—not just during attempts, but while eating, while sleeping, during every moment of existence.
Pain became the baseline. Everything else measured against that constant background agony.
Day 80: Failed Eight hundred meters. So close to the summit he could see the top clearly. Two hundred meters. Just two hundred more.
His body gave out at eight hundred ten. Muscles locked. Consciousness fled. He woke up on the beach surrounded by his own vomit, Bullet standing over him with undisguised contempt.
"Pathetic. You were close. That makes failing worse, not better."
Day 98: Failed Nine hundred meters. One hundred left. Momonosuke swam with desperate determination, pushing past limits he'd thought absolute. His vision tunneled. Blood leaked from his gills. But he kept moving. Kept pushing.
At nine hundred eighty meters—twenty meters from the summit—his body simply stopped. Not gradual failure this time. Just instantaneous shutdown. Like a machine whose power was cut mid-operation.
He fell from the waterway, plummeting ninety meters before hitting the ocean. The impact should have killed him. Would have killed a normal human. His enhanced Zoan physiology kept him alive, but the pain...
Bullet pulled him out. Threw him in the recovery room. Left him to suffer alone.
I was so close. So fucking close.
Day 99
Kozuki Momonosuke stood on the cliff overlooking the waterway in pre-dawn darkness. The sun hadn't risen yet. Most of Iron Island still slept. Only the sound of waves and his own breathing disturbed the silence.
Ninety-nine days, he thought, staring at the structure that had defeated him repeatedly. Three months and nine days. So many failures. So much pain.
Can I succeed today?
The question felt rhetorical. He'd asked it before. The answer was always the same: try and find out.
He shook his head, physically dispelling the doubts. Dwelling on past failures accomplished nothing. Each attempt was separate. Each day offered a fresh chance. Obsessing over yesterday's defeat would only guarantee today's.
I'm doing this for revenge, he reminded himself. For Father. For Mother. For Wano. Kaido will pay double for what he took from me.
The motivation felt distant now—abstract rather than visceral. After ninety-eight days of suffering, revenge had become background noise. The waterway itself was the enemy. Everything else was future concerns.
Momonosuke took a deep breath. Cold air filled his lungs, sharp and clarifying. Then he activated his Devil Fruit transformation, his human body compressing into the familiar pink carp form.
He jumped.
The water embraced him with its usual hostile indifference. But after three months of daily immersion, he'd learned to read the ocean's moods. Today felt... different. Not easier, exactly. But less actively malicious. The current's pressure seemed fractionally reduced. Or perhaps he'd simply grown strong enough that normal difficulty felt manageable.
He swam toward the waterway's base with practiced efficiency. No wasted movement. No unnecessary energy expenditure. Every fin stroke deliberate and controlled.
Five hundred meters is routine now, he observed clinically. The first half doesn't challenge me anymore. Only the final five hundred matter.
The thought should have been comforting. It wasn't. Because the final five hundred had broken him ninety-eight consecutive times.
He entered the waterway at speed, momentum carrying him through the initial incline. One hundred meters. Two hundred. Three hundred. Four hundred. Five hundred.
The angle steepened dramatically. Seventy degrees. Eighty degrees. The transformation from swimming to climbing became complete. Water rushed past him with enough force to tear scales loose. His fins worked frantically, finding purchase in the current through sheer determination.
I can do this. I can do this. I WILL do this.
The mantra repeated in his mind, drowning out pain and doubt. Six hundred meters. Seven hundred. Eight hundred.
Nine hundred.
His body began protesting in familiar ways. Muscles burning. Lungs aching despite breathing water. Vision narrowing as blood flow prioritized essential functions over sensory input.
Nine hundred ten. Twenty. Thirty.
Every meter now felt like its own individual battle. The waterway was nearly vertical here—perhaps eighty-five degrees, close enough to perpendicular that the distinction barely mattered. Swimming had become irrelevant. He was essentially pulling himself upward through pure muscle power against rushing water that wanted nothing more than to blast him back to the ocean.
Nine hundred fifty.
Sixty.
Seventy.
Eighty.
Twenty meters to the summit. Twenty meters that felt like twenty thousand. His fins moved on autopilot now, muscle memory functioning while conscious thought fractured into incoherent fragments.
Then his body began failing. Not the sudden shutdown of Day 98. This was gradual—strength bleeding away like water from a cracked vessel. His fins stiffened. Coordination deteriorated. The perfect rhythm that had carried him this far stuttered and broke.
No. No no no. Not now. Not when I'm THIS CLOSE.
But his fish body didn't care about proximity to goals. It had reached its absolute limit. The biological machinery that kept him moving was shutting down whether he consented or not.
He could feel himself beginning to slip. Backward. Down. The current that he'd been fighting pushed harder now that his resistance weakened. In seconds, he'd lose position. Start sliding. Fall from this height just like every previous attempt.
I can't accept this, his mind screamed in impotent rage. Success is RIGHT THERE. Twenty meters. TWENTY.
And in that moment of absolute desperation, his thoughts fled to the one place they always went when nothing else remained.
Mom.
Lady Toki's face materialized in his mind with perfect clarity. Her gentle smile. Her patient voice. The way she'd looked at him during his childhood—like he mattered, like he was worthy of love despite being weak and small and helpless.
If Mother were alive, she'd encourage me. Tell me I could do this. Help me overcome my limitations.
The memory shouldn't have changed anything. Memory was just neurons firing, chemicals triggering emotional responses. It had no physical power. Couldn't restore depleted energy reserves or repair exhausted muscles.
But something shifted anyway.
The sun broke over the horizon at that exact moment—pure coincidence of timing, nothing more. The first rays of morning light lanced across the ocean and struck the waterway, illuminating Momonosuke's struggling form.
Warmth spread across his scales. Like a mother's hand stroking his head. Like being embraced by someone who believed in him unconditionally.
She's not really here, he knew that. This is just sunlight. Just photons and heat. Nothing mystical.
But it felt like a message anyway. Like Lady Toki reaching across the boundary between life and death to tell him: You can do this. Just a little more. I believe in you.
Strength returned. Not much—just enough. A final reservoir of energy that shouldn't exist but did. His fins began moving again. Coordinated. Purposeful. Driving him upward.
Ten meters.
Five meters.
Two meters.
One final push. Everything I have. NOW.
Momonosuke gathered every remaining scrap of strength into his fins and PUSHED. His fish body exploded upward with the last burst of energy he possessed—launched himself into the air above the waterway's summit.
I did it. I actually—
His consciousness registered the achievement: he'd passed the waterway's peak. Cleared the final meter. Reached the top.
Success on Day 99.
Then his body began changing.
The transformation started subtly—a tingling across his scales, a pressure building inside his chest. Then it accelerated violently. His fish form expanded rapidly, mass increasing beyond what should be physically possible. Fins elongated and split, becoming clawed limbs. Scales thickened and spread, covering his entire body. His head stretched, skull reshaping into something reptilian and ancient.
The tender pink color that had marked him as incomplete, as artificial, as lesser... began shifting. Deepening. Maturing under the sunrise.
Red spread across his body like dye in water. Not the pink of youth and inadequacy. True crimson—the color of blood, of fire, of earned power rather than borrowed imitation.
Auspicious clouds materialized beneath his newly-formed claws. Not consciously summoned. Just appearing in response to his transformed state. Eastern dragons walked on clouds—that was fundamental to their nature. And now Momonosuke possessed true dragon nature rather than counterfeit approximation.
His fear of heights—the psychological limitation that had crippled him before—vanished. Gone as if it had never existed. Because dragons didn't fear falling. The sky was their domain. Clouds their stairways. Wind their ally rather than enemy.
His body continued expanding. Fifty meters. Seventy. One hundred meters of serpentine length, every inch covered in brilliant red scales that gleamed in the morning light.
Power. The thought crystallized with absolute certainty. This is what power feels like. Real power. Not borrowed. Not artificial. MINE.
Joy surged through him—pure, overwhelming, childish joy. He'd succeeded. Against impossible odds, through unimaginable suffering, he'd achieved the goal.
Momonosuke opened his dragon mouth and ROARED.
The sound tore across Iron Island like thunder, carrying triumph and defiance and relief. It echoed off buildings, bounced between tents, rattled through the entertainment equipment that littered the landscape.
Every pirate still asleep was violently awakened. Crew members stumbled from their quarters cursing, ready to murder whoever had disturbed their rest. Then they looked up.
A one-hundred-meter red dragon coiled through the morning sky, scales blazing in the sunrise. Majestic. Terrifying. Impossible to ignore.
"...what the hell is that?"
"Is that the brat?"
"Since when could he do THAT?"
Somewhere in central compound, Buggy the Clown stood on a balcony, observing the dragon's flight with satisfaction.
"Kozuki Oden," he murmured, "your son does have talent. One step faster than I expected. That replica of his can finally compete with the original."
His mind conjured images of the future: blue dragon versus red dragon, Kaido versus Momonosuke, original versus copy. The battle would be spectacular. And if Momonosuke died in the attempt... well, he'd at least die as a warrior rather than a fish.
"The Yonko won't see this coming," Buggy continued quietly. "Kaido thinks he killed every threat to his power. But Oden's son will give him one hell of a surprise."
The clown's grin widened.
-Broadcast-
Three Months Later
Momonosuke's dragon transformation marked the end of one nightmare and the beginning of another.
With his Devil Fruit finally evolved to its complete state, Buggy shifted his training focus from survival to combat. Douglas Bullet became his instructor—a role the Devil's Heir accepted with disturbing enthusiasm.
"Zoan fruits enhance physical combat," Bullet explained on the first day. "Using that power for anything except close-quarters fighting is wasteful. So that's what we'll train. Every day. Until your body moves correctly without conscious thought."
He cracked his knuckles. "Any questions?"
Momonosuke barely managed to ask "How will we—" before Bullet's fist crashed into his face with enough force to shatter his jaw.
The lesson had begun.
Bullet's teaching methodology could be summarized as: "Get beaten until you learn not to get beaten." He taught Busoshoku Haki (Armament Haki) by coating his fists and breaking Momonosuke's bones. He taught Kenbunshoku Haki (Observation Haki) by attacking without warning until the boy's survival instincts developed precognitive awareness.
The advanced technique—Haoshoku Haki (Conqueror's Haki) infusion, where spiritual pressure coated physical attacks—was taught through demonstration. Bullet would wrap his fists in black-red lightning and proceed to shatter whatever bones Momonosuke had healed from the previous day.
Every training session ended with multiple fractures. Ribs. Arms. Legs. Fingers. Even his skull cracked on several memorable occasions. The enhanced healing from his Zoan fruit kept him alive and relatively functional, but the pain remained constant.
This is what combat training means in the Buggy Pirates, Momonosuke realized grimly. Suffering as pedagogy. Trauma as curriculum.
But it worked. Against all logic and decency, the brutal methodology produced results.
Week 1: He learned to see attacks coming fractionally before they landed—Kenbunshoku Haki awakening through desperate necessity.
Week 4: He successfully hardened his arms with Busoshoku Haki, reducing fractures from three per day to one.
Week 8: He managed to dodge one of Bullet's attacks. Just one. But it was progress.
Week 12: He lasted five minutes before being beaten unconscious. Previously, he'd been lucky to last thirty seconds.
The growth was measurable. Undeniable. But also frustrating, because Bullet grew stronger alongside him. Every time Momonosuke improved, his teacher adapted and escalated. They formed a dynamic equilibrium—the student chasing the teacher, the teacher maintaining distance by continuously raising standards.
I'll never surpass him, Momonosuke concluded after a particularly brutal session. Not unless he dies. And even then, Buggy is stronger still. I'm surrounded by monsters who make my achievements look trivial.
The realization was humbling. And strangely liberating. He stopped trying to compete with legends and focused on becoming marginally less pathetic than yesterday's version of himself.
Small improvements. Incremental progress. Surviving to train another day.
That was enough.
The Sky Screen's broadcast began shifting focus. The detailed training sequences gave way to rapid montage—images flashing in quick succession:
Kozuki Momonosuke meeting Monkey D. Luffy. Two young men grinning at each other with instant recognition of kindred spirits.
Eating together—both of them consuming impossible quantities of food while laughing.
Sparring together—Luffy's Gomu Gomu no Mi (Gum-Gum Fruit) powers versus Momonosuke's dragon abilities.
Growing stronger together—training that pushed both beyond their limits.
The scenes conveyed camaraderie that transcended their brief acquaintance. These were people who understood each other instinctively. Who shared fundamental values despite different backgrounds.
So that's his future, viewers thought. Alliance with the Straw Hat Pirates. Fighting alongside Luffy against common enemies.
But those scenes were brief. Fleeting. The Sky Screen's focus was shifting toward something larger.
-Real World-
Buggy island population had increased dramatically over recent months. New faces arrived daily—pirates, mercenaries, revolutionaries, information brokers. Each one vetted by Buggy's inner circle. Each one recruited for specific skills or resources.
The island's carnival atmosphere intensified. More entertainment. More food. More laughter and chaos. But beneath the festive surface, serious preparation was occurring. Weapons being stockpiled. Ships being retrofitted. Strategies being refined.
Something big was approaching. Everyone could feel it.
The conspiracy Buggy the Clown had been brewing for five years—carefully positioning pieces, gathering allies, waiting for the perfect moment—was finally ready to execute.
And its target was the holiest place in the world.
The Sky Screen's broadcast concluded with a single line of text appearing in blood-red characters:
NEXT: THE MARY GEOISE INCIDENT
Silence fell across the world as viewers processed that announcement.
Mary Geoise. The holy land. Home of the Celestial Dragons. Seat of the World Government.
Buggy the Clown is going to attack THAT?
The implications were staggering. Mary Geoise had stood inviolate for eight hundred years. Protected by the Marines' strongest forces. Defended by CP0. Home to the World Government's deepest secrets.
Attacking it wasn't just ambitious—it was suicidal. Impossible. Insane.
Which meant Buggy had a plan. Some angle that made the impossible plausible. Some strategy that gave him confidence where everyone else saw only certain death.
What is he planning? How does he think he can succeed? And what happens to the world if he actually pulls it off?
The questions hung unanswered as the Sky Screen faded to black.
Leaving millions of viewers desperate for the next broadcast.
Desperate to see how Buggy the Clown intended to shake the world to its foundations.