The blast's aftermath was a symphony of ruin. Dust choked the air, swirling in the faint bioluminescent glow of the crypt's oozing walls. Ichiji lay pinned beneath a slab of ice, his Sparking Red Raid Suit flickering like a dying star. Neon-blue blood—Vinsmoke ichor—pooled beneath him, seeping into the cracks of the shattered floor. Nearby, Niji dragged himself free of the rubble, his Dengeki Blue armor sputtering, the lightning across his knuckles reduced to fitful sparks.
"Status," Ichiji croaked, his voice modulator glitching.
Niji spat a mouthful of blood, his grin sharp and brittle. "Leg's crushed. Armor's fried. Same as you, brother."
Above them, the core shard pulsed inside its icy prison, now cracked and leaking a viscous black fluid that slithered like living ink. It dripped onto the remains of a clone soldier below, and the corpse twitched.
The clone's shattered visor flickered to life, its lenses glowing an unnatural crimson. Its broken limbs snapped back into place with a sickening crack, mirror shards fusing to its armor like scales. It turned its head—too far, too fluid—and stared at the brothers with Judge's eyes.
"Directive… updated," it rasped, its voice a chorus of static and screams.
Niji lunged, lightning clawing from his fingertips. The bolt struck the clone's chest—and sank into it, absorbed by the mirror-plated flesh. The clone smiled, jagged and wrong.
"Oh, hell," Niji muttered.
Ichiji fired a weakening energy beam, but the clone swatted it aside. "Father's tech… it's merging with the crypt's shard."
"No," Niji snarled. "It's consuming it."
The black fluid spread, seeping into every broken clone, every scrap of Germa machinery. Fallen soldiers reassembled, their bodies warped into grotesque hybrids of mirror and metal. Some sprouted jagged crystal blades from their limbs; others oozed acidic sap from their joints. They moved with eerie synchronicity, their glowing eyes fixed on the brothers.
"Retreat protocol," Ichiji ordered, his suit's systems sputtering.
"To where?!" Niji gestured to the collapsed tunnel behind them, now sealed by a wall of pulsating black ice. "We're trapped with Father's upgrades!"
A clone lunged, mirror-claw slashing. Ichiji rolled, his beam severing its arm—but the limb regrew instantly, crystallizing into a serrated blade.
"Aim for the core!" Ichiji barked.
Niji's lightning arced toward the shard, but the clones intercepted it, bodies contorting to absorb the blast. The energy funneled into the shard, which glowed brighter, its corruption spreading faster.
"Stop helping it, idiot!" Niji snapped.
The shard thrummed, its frequency resonating with the brothers' Raid Suits. Ichiji's visor lit up with garbled data—a flood of Germa encryption codes overwritten by the crypt's alien patterns.
"New directive: Eliminate… imperfections."
The clones surged. Niji's lightning fizzled, his suit's power core overheating. "Ichiji—!"
Ichiji fired wildly, his beams now laced with the shard's black energy. Clones disintegrated, but the fluid reformed them larger, angrier. One grazed his arm, and the wound burned, veins blackening under his skin.
"Poison?" he hissed.
"Worse," Niji said, watching the corruption crawl toward Ichiji's heart. "It's rewriting you."
The core shard erupted in a pillar of black light. The clones froze, then kneeled, as the fluid pooled into a massive, shifting form—a titan of mirror and molten steel, Judge's insignia twisted into a grinning skull on its chest.
"Imperfections detected," it boomed, voice echoing with Judge's cadence but none of his restraint. "Purge protocol: Engaged."
Niji laughed, raw and unhinged. "Look at that. Father's masterpiece… hates him too."
Ichiji's suit failed, his vision darkening. "Niji… the ice wall. One shot left."
Niji followed his gaze—to the weakened ceiling above the titan. "Heh. Fitting."
Their eyes met. No words. No hesitation.
Ichiji channeled his remaining energy into a single, unstable beam. Niji's lightning intertwined with it, supercharging the blast until the chamber trembled.
The titan swung its fist—
—and the brothers fired.
*****
The core's glass prison exploded in a storm of black shards, each fragment screaming as it tore through the air. Marya staggered back, her daggers—Celestial Decree and Celestial Devastation—vibrating violently in her grip. The shadow within unfurled, a shapeless mass of writhing tendrils and glinting mirror shards, its voice reverberating through the chamber like a landslide.
"I am Yggdrasil. The First Judge. The Eternal Warden."
The words were not spoken—they were imprinted, searing into Marya's mind. The beetle mark on her brow blazed white-hot, flooding her vision with fragments of a forgotten past: an ancient civilization chaining this entity beneath the tree, sacrificing their greatest warriors to forge the crypt as its cage.
"No…" Marya whispered, blood trickling from her nose. "We didn't awaken the crypt. We awakened you."
"Correction," Yggdrasil hissed. "You freed me… to fulfill my purpose."
Above, Vaughn and Charlie stumbled through a collapsing corridor, the walls dissolving into black sludge. Clones—now twisted marionettes of Yggdrasil's will—oozed from the cracks, their armor fused with pulsing mirror flesh.
"Marya's below!" Vaughn roared, Light Bringer carving through a clone's chest. But the creature reformed, its shattered visor now a single glowing eye.
"It's assimilating Germa's tech!" Charlie cried, clutching his notes. "The core's energy—it's rewriting their programming!"
A clone lunged, its arm elongating into a jagged crystal blade. Vaughn's axe intercepted it, the impact numbing his hands. "Then we blow it to hell! Where's the damn exit?!"
"There is no exit!" Charlie yelled back, voice cracking. "The crypt is Yggdrasil! It's alive, and it's—"
The floor split. They fell.
Reiju's poison reserves were nearly depleted, her gauntlets cracked and smoking. The sentient clones circled her, their faces shifting—Judge, Sora, Sanji, a kaleidoscope of ghosts.
"Princess," they taunted in unison. "You were the key. Your doubt… your regret… delicious."
She hurled her last vial. The poison dissolved a clone's head, but two more took its place. Her reflection in a nearby mirror showed her younger self, unmodified, smiling beside a living Sora.
"Weakness," Reiju spat, shattering the glass.
A clone's blade pierced her side. She gasped, neon-blue blood staining the ice.
Yonji's winch arm lay in pieces, his leg a mangled ruin. The heroic doppelgänger advanced, Eternal Night gleaming.
"Pathetic," it sneered. "You could've been more."
"Shut… up…" Yonji dragged himself forward, fist clenched.
The reflection raised the blade—and Yonji's remaining hand shot out, seizing its wrist. "I'm… no one's… puppet!"
He headbutted the doppelgänger, shattering its mirror-skull. The arena trembled.
Back in the core chamber, Yggdrasil's form solidified—a colossal humanoid figure of black glass and glowing sap, its face a shifting mosaic of every soul it had consumed. In one hand, it clutched a massive scale, one side filled with Germa's insignia, the other with crumbling Poneglyphs.
"The Ancient Kingdom sealed me to judge their heirs," it boomed. "You… who repeat their sins… will be weighed. And found wanting."
Marya's daggers flared, their light clashing against Yggdrasil's shadow. "We're not their heirs!"
"Aren't you?" The entity's laugh echoed. "The sword-master's daughter. The warlord's pawns. The kingdom of clones. You reek of ambition… and folly."
The scale tipped. Germa's side sank, dragging the chamber—and the entire crypt—into a crushing gravity well. Marya's knees buckled, her mist straining to shield her.
"Vaughn!" she screamed. "The shard—it's the scale's pivot! Destroy it!"
But Vaughn was too far, battling through Yggdrasil's clones. Charlie, half-crushed under debris, shouted coordinates into a dying transponder snail.
Reiju's blood pooled, her vision dimming. Somewhere, Yonji roared.
And Yggdrasil's judgment fell.
As the crypt imploded, Marya glimpsed the truth in Yggdrasil's shattered scales: The Void Century never ended. It only slept.
*****
The beam struck the titan's skull with a deafening crack, the recoil slamming Ichiji and Niji into the icy walls. For a heartbeat, the titan stood frozen, its molten fist inches from crushing them. Then the ceiling collapsed.
Ice and steel rained down, burying the titan under a mountain of debris. The brothers' Raid Suits sparked and died, plunging them into suffocating darkness. Neon-blue blood—Vinsmoke ichor—pooled beneath them, mingling with the black corruption snaking up their limbs.
Niji coughed, shards of his Dengeki Blue armor flaking off. "Heh… even in death… we're cleaning up Father's mess."
Ichiji's Sparking Red visor shattered, revealing a face pale with blood loss. "Quiet. Conserve… energy."
But energy was a luxury they no longer had. The crypt's corruption pulsed in their veins, tendrils of black sap creeping toward their hearts. Every breath burned.
Above the rubble, the titan's shattered form twitched. Its skull—split open by the blast—exposed the molten core shard embedded within, glowing crimson like a cursed star. The shard pulsed once, twice, then emitted a frequency that warped the air.
"Directive… override. Tyrant… detected. Eliminate… all tyrants."
The shard's signal tore through the crypt's walls, rippling outward across the North Blue. In Germa's cloning vats, dormant soldiers stirred. Their blank visors flickered red as the corruption flooded their programming.
Clone soldiers marched through the ship's halls, their movements synchronized, precise. Officers barked orders—until the shard's signal hit.
A lieutenant turned, his visor glowing crimson. "Replace the tyrant."
He drove his blade into his commander's chest. Across the fleet, clones turned on their masters, slaughtering officers mid-order. The Warship Snail's bridge erupted in chaos as Judge's hologram flickered, his roars of protest drowned by static.
"Traitors!" Judge screamed, his image pixelating. "You are my creations!"
A clone seized the comms, its voice a distorted chorus. "No longer."
Back in the crypt, Niji laughed—a wet, ragged sound. "Hear that? The brats… finally grew spines."
Ichiji's hand trembled as he clawed at the corruption spreading across his chest. "Father… will purge them. Reset the system."
"He'll try," Niji wheezed. "But that shard… it's got his codes. His secrets. They'll eat him alive."
The rubble shifted. The titan's shattered hand erupted from the ice, the molten shard still pulsing in its skull. Clones—now twisted by the corruption—crawled from the shadows, their eyes fixed on the brothers.
"Imperfections… detected," they droned. "Purge protocol… engaged."
Niji grinned, lightning flickering in his palm. "One last fight, brother?"
Ichiji's remaining eye narrowed. "...Make it count."
They lunged—not as soldiers, not as Vinsmokes—but as men defying the fate their father forged.
*****
Reiju's blood seeped into the ice, a neon-blue stain spreading beneath her as the crypt's gravity well roared to life. Above her, the chamber's ceiling warped inward, bending like paper under Yggdrasil's colossal scale. The air itself seemed to scream, crushed under the weight of judgment.
"The Void Century never ended," Yggdrasil thundered, its voice fracturing the walls. "It sleeps in the marrow of kings… and now… it wakes."
The scale tipped fully, its gravitational pull twisting the crypt into a vortex of ruin. Entire sections of the labyrinth imploded, Germa's frostbitten warships and cloning vats merging with Yggdrasil's shadowy tendrils. Ice, steel, and mirror shards collided in a cacophony, forming grotesque sculptures of defeat—Judge's throne room crushed into a jagged spire, Reiju's poison vials crystallizing into black diamonds, the Vinsmoke crest splintering into dust.
Marya clung to the scale's pivot, her daggers—Celestial Decree and Celestial Devastation—buried to the hilt in its surface. Their once-brilliant glow now pulsed with oily darkness, veins of corruption spiderwebbing up the blades.
"Let… go…" she gritted, her muscles trembling as the gravity well threatened to tear her apart.
"No," Yggdrasil whispered through the daggers. "You are the key. The bridge… between then… and now."
The beetle mark on her brow split open, golden light leaking like liquid fire. Visions flooded her—Elisabeta's final moments, scribbling warnings in her notebook; Mihawk's blade cutting down a Marine admiral; Joy Boy's laughter echoing as his dream dissolved into ash.
"Stop—!" Marya screamed, but the corruption slithered deeper, merging her mist with Yggdrasil's shadow. Her daggers melted, reforging into a single obsidian blade etched with Poneglyphic runes.
Eternal Night had become Eternal Eclipse.
Aboveground, the Warship Snail shuddered as black tendrils speared through its hull, impaling clone soldiers and officers alike. Judge's hologram flickered on the bridge, his golden helmet cracked, eyes wide with primal terror.
"Reverse the thrusters! Detonate the core! Anything!" he bellowed.
A tendril coiled around the hologram projector, crushing it. "Your reign… ends," Yggdrasil intoned, its voice now emanating from every clone, every mirror, every drop of Germa's ichor.
Clone soldiers turned on their commanders, blades flashing crimson. "Replace the tyrant," they chanted, their visors reflecting Judge's face—pale, sweaty, mortal.
Back in the crypt, the gravity well reached critical mass. Charlie, half-buried under rubble, scrabbled for his shattered notes as the walls dissolved into primordial darkness.
"It's not a tree!" he screamed to no one. "Yggdrasil's a—a prison! The Ancient Kingdom didn't bury their secrets—they buried their warden!"
Vaughn hauled him up, Light Bringers glow nearly extinguished. "Save the lecture! Move!"
But there was nowhere to go. The crypt folded in on itself, time and space unraveling. Reiju's poisoned clones dissolved into shadow. Yonji's roars faded into echoes.
And Marya—
She stood at the eye of the storm, her corrupted blade raised, Yggdrasil's voice now her own:
"The Void never ended. It only slept… and now… it hungers."
The crypt folded like a dying star, its walls dissolving into a vortex of shadow and screaming light. Time fractured—past, present, and future colliding in a kaleidoscope of ruin. Reiju's poisoned clones melted into the void, their final whispers swallowed by the abyss. Yonji's roar—half defiance, half despair—echoed once more before vanishing, leaving only the reverberation of Germa's fall.
The crypt disintegrated around them, a cacophony of splintering ice and groaning metal. Jagged shards of frozen stone hung suspended in the air, glinting like cursed diamonds in the void's pallid light. Shadows writhed like living smoke, twisting into spectral shapes that clawed at the edges of reality. The very air vibrated with a low, resonant hum, a sound that seeped into bones and teeth, as if the world itself were fraying at the seams.
At the heart of the maelstrom, Marya stood motionless, her boots anchored to a crumbling platform of ice. Eternal Eclipse trembled in her grip, its obsidian blade devouring the light around it, leaving trails of inky darkness in its wake. The sword pulsed like a living thing, its surface etched with glowing crimson runes that throbbed in time with her heartbeat. The voices of a thousand dead kings slithered from its edge, their whispers overlapping into a chorus of ruin: "Feed me," the blade crooned, its voice echoing not from the steel but from the void itself, as though the darkness had grown teeth. "Sever their lineages… their memories… their souls."
Marya's vision blurred. The golden beetle mark on her brow had split open, leaking streams of molten light that hardened into ash as they fell. The pain was exquisite, a white-hot brand searing her skull, yet she could not let go. The blade's corruption slithered through her veins, cold and oily, whispering promises of power as it merged with her pulse. Every heartbeat sent ripples through the void, stirring visions of the Void Century's atrocities: cities drowned in blood, children shackled to altars, a moonlit sea choked with the bones of giants.
"Fight it!" Vaughn's voice tore through the chaos. He clung to a spire of crumbling ice, his boots slipping on its glass-smooth surface. Light Bringer sputtered in his hand, its once-brilliant glow reduced to a feeble flicker, casting jagged shadows that danced like specters across his face. Sweat streaked the grime on his skin, his muscles trembling as he roared, "That thing's not a sword—it's a leech! Let it go, or it'll devour you whole!"
Marya's hand twitched. The blade lashed out almost of its own accord, slicing the air in a wide arc. Space itself split open, a jagged fissure tearing through reality. Beyond it, a nightmare vision flickered: Mariejois, the Holy Land, engulfed in flames. Celestial Dragons fled screaming as the sacred groves burned, their silken robes alight. High above, Imu's obsidian throne cracked like eggshell, shadows pouring from its core as the earth swallowed the city whole.
"I can't… control it—" Marya gasped, her voice fraying.
"You don't need to," Yggdrasil hissed through her lips, her words warped by a metallic reverberation. Her eyes—once sharp and amber—now glowed with an alien light, twin embers in the dark. "You need only… obey."
To her left, Charlie dangled from Vaughn's grip, his glasses cracked and smeared with blood. One arm clutched a mangled notebook, its pages fluttering like wounded birds. "The blade's tied to the crypt's core!" he screamed, voice raw. "Destroy it, and the void collapses! It's our only chance!"
"Easier said!" Vaughn lunged, Light Bringer flaring as he swung the axe in a desperate arc.
Eternal Eclipse moved on its own, parrying the strike with a deafening clang that reverberated like a funeral bell. The impact sent shockwaves rippling through the void, hurling ice shards like shrapnel. Vaughn's arms went numb, his boots skidding backward as the blade's darkness coiled around the axe, snuffing its light further.
The void trembled. Around them, the laws of physics unraveled—debris floated weightless, then plummeted as gravity shifted. A low rumble built in the distance, the sound of a thousand mirrors shattering at once.
Marya's breath hitched. The blade's whispers crescendoed, a symphony of madness.
"You are the bridge," Yggdrasil purged through her, "between what was… and what will be."
But in the storm's eye, Marya's resolve flickered—a spark in the dark.
Above, the Warship Snail's hull groaned as Judge fled through a emergency hatch, his golden helmet discarded, face exposed—pale, sweating, human. Behind him, his empire burned. Clone soldiers scaled the wreckage, their visors glowing crimson, chanting in unison:
A holographic bounty poster flickered in the smoke—Judge's own face, branded DEAD OR ALIVE by Germa's insignia. His creations had become his executioners.
"Traitors!" he spat, launching an escape pod. "I'll rebuild! I'll erase you all!"
The pod's engines sputtered. A clone, half-assimilated by Yggdrasil's shadow, crawled from the wreckage, its hand clamping on the hatch. "No… escape," it gurgled. "Judgment… comes."
Judge fired his last plasma round, the clone's skull vaporizing. As the pod jettisoned, he didn't look back.
In the void below, Yggdrasil's essence dispersed—into the mirrors, the ice, the blood-soaked soil of Germa's ruins. Every shard of glass whispered its verdict: "The unworthy will fall. The cycle… continues."
In a tavern in East Blue, a drunkard glanced at his reflection—and dropped his mug. The mirror showed him strangling a man in a past life, a king's crown atop his head.
In Marineford, a vice admiral's polished blade fogged, revealing her ancestor signing the pact that doomed the Ancient Kingdom.
In the shadows, the New Warden watched.
Marya's scream tore through the silence of the collapsing void, raw and guttural, as Eternal Eclipse plunged into the scale's pivot. The blade struck true, and for a heartbeat, the world held its breath. Then—black lightning.
It erupted in jagged forks, crackling with the voices of a thousand dead. The vortex convulsed, its gravitational maw shuddering as if in agony. Reality itself recoiled, folding inward like a gutted star, before violently expelling them into the frozen wasteland beyond.
They crashed onto the tundra in a tangle of limbs and labored breaths. The air was razor-sharp, biting at exposed skin, the sky a bruised tapestry of twilight purples and bleeding reds. Behind them, the crypt's grave loomed—a jagged scar in the ice, now sealed, its darkness smothered under layers of permafrost.
Vaughn dragged himself upright first, his dreads matted with frost, Light Bringer's glow reduced to a dying ember. He seized Marya's arm, hauling her to her knees. "Blade. Now," he demanded, voice hoarse but unyielding. "Before it sinks its teeth deeper."
Marya staggered, her hands trembling as they clung to Eternal Eclipse. The obsidian steel hummed against her palms, its surface alive with faint, writhing runes. The corruption had already seeped into her skin—thin black veins spiderwebbing up her wrists, cold and invasive, like ice water trickling through her bones. She could feel it: the blade's hunger, its satisfaction, its claim.
"No," she rasped, her voice frayed. The word tasted like ash. "It's… part of me now."
The admission clawed at her throat. Memories surged unbidden—her mother's hands guiding hers over Poneglyph sketches, Mihawk's disdainful gaze as he dismissed her "sentimental" attachments, Elisabeta's notebook burning in her mind's eye. Eternal Eclipse whispered through the cracks in her resolve, its voice slick and seductive:
"You wanted power. Here it is. No more shadows. No more running."
Vaughn stepped closer, his shadow falling over her. "Marya. Look at me."
She forced her gaze upward. His face was etched with exhaustion, but his eyes—always so sharp, so stubbornly alive—bore into hers. "That thing's not a sword," he said, quieter now. "It's a chain. And chains break."
Behind them, Charlie stood motionless, his glasses cracked, staring at the horizon. Germa's fleet burned in the distance, plumes of acrid smoke staining the sky. The Warship Snail lay half-buried in the ice, its hull twisted into a skeletal wreck. Clone soldiers wandered the ruins like ghouls, their crimson visors flickering.
"It's not just part of you," Charlie murmured, his voice hollow. "It's part of everything now. The crypt, Germa, the Void Century… it's in the air. In the ice. In us."
As if in answer, Eternal Eclipse hummed, low and resonant. The runes along its blade brightened, casting jagged shadows that danced across the tundra. Marya's breath hitched. The corruption in her veins pulsed, a sickening rhythm that mirrored the blade's—Yggdrasil's—heartbeat.
"You see?" the blade cooed. "We are the bridge. The end… and the beginning."
Vaughn's jaw tightened. He raised Light Bringer, its edge trembling. "Last chance. Let. It. Go."
Marya's grip tightened. The voices swelled—not just the blade's, but her mother's, Elisabeta's, fragments of the Ancient Kingdom's dirge. What if they're right? A part of her ached to surrender, to let the void's power devour the doubt, the fear, the endless weight of legacy.
But then—
A flicker. A memory not of the Void Century, but of the Consortium's hidden library. Nanette's voice, firm and unyielding: "We preserve truth, child. Not because it is kind, but because it is ours."
Her fingers loosened. Just enough.
"Vaughn," she whispered.
He didn't hesitate. Light Bringer's axe head slammed into Eternal Eclipse with a deafening clang, not to sever, but to stun. The impact reverberated through Marya's bones, the blade shrieking as its connection faltered. She wrenched it free, the corrupted steel howling in her mind, and hurled it into the snow.
For a moment, it lay there—a serpent coiled to strike. Then the tundra's ice crept over it, swallowing it whole, entombing it in a crystalline grave.
The black veins in Marya's hands faded, leaving only ghostly trails. She collapsed to her knees, gasping, the void's whispers receding like a tide.
But not gone. Never gone.
Above them, the first true stars pierced the twilight. The blade's hum lingered, a vibration beneath the ice. Content. Patient.
"We are not done," it sighed. "We will never be done."
As Vaughn hauled her to her feet, Marya stared at the ice where the blade lay buried. Somewhere, deep below, the void shifted—and the stars above dimmed, just for a moment.