Year 1510, Sea Circle Calendar — Impel Down, Starvation Hell bleeding into Blazing Hell.
The air was poison.
Magellan stood in the sea of corpses, the haze of venom curling around him like a crown of death.
Ryoku Vale's puppet shell staggered at the edge of the crimson mist, his human senses already cut away, his flesh screaming under the cursed art.
He had severed himself from his own body.
What remained was a hollow thing—an empty vessel piloting a dead man's limbs.
This was no technique of glory.
This was survival.
Magellan exhaled, the venom mist hissing from his breath.
"You don't understand, little rat.
There is no escaping the sea of poison."
The floor beneath his feet ruptured as venom surged forward in thick rivers.
Ryoku didn't speak.
Puppets surged forth from behind him—ten white-robed figures, manipulated by chakra threads woven from the cursed seal itself, their faces blank as death masks.
They charged into the toxic fog without hesitation, cleaving through the rivers of poison with brutal efficiency.
For every puppet that fell, another replaced it.
But the air itself turned against them.
Every breath, every inch of skin exposed to Magellan's touch meant death.
Ryoku's severed mind understood that coldly.
Flesh would fail here.
Only the puppet would endure.
Magellan snarled, unleashing a roar of venom-dragon constructs, their gaping maws swallowing the corridor whole.
Ryoku's hollow body responded.
Three puppets joined together, spinning into a violent spiral of suction and crushing winds—dragging the dragons into their vortex, compressing them into a ball of lethal vapor... before hurling it back toward its creator.
The prison trembled.
For the first time, Magellan stepped back.
Not out of fear—but calculation.
He couldn't let this drag on.
He advanced through his own suffocating mist, stepping over the dead, ignoring the few prisoners still alive, crawling like worms.
Ryoku saw him coming.
There would be no tricks left.
Only death.
His body was already at the edge of collapse.
His flesh would not survive another clash.
But his hands—those cursed, puppet-wielding hands—still moved.
He would bleed this prison until his bones gave out.
Far below.
Infinite Hell.
Domino stood before the cold, iron door that held the monster.
Even here, where the worst of the world's filth rotted away in silence, she felt... something worse than fear.
The prisoners in these cells weren't just criminals.
They were erasures.
Monsters so abhorrent the World Government had erased their names from the seas.
Even Domino—a woman forged in Impel Down's darkness—trembled as she stood before the shadow beyond the bars.
"Shiryu of the Rain," she said quietly, the keys heavy in her shaking hand.
Footsteps echoed from within.
And then... he appeared.
"About time," Shiryu said, his voice like steel scraping bone.
"What kind of rat made Magellan need me again?" he asked, though his tone carried no curiosity—only cruel hunger.
Domino swallowed hard.
"A prisoner... from the Crimson Hell. He's carved through the prison like a curse. The Warden is fighting him now."
Shiryu smiled thinly.
"The old man must be in real trouble to swallow his pride."
From the shadows of the neighboring cells, laughter drifted—cold, mockery laced with venom.
Catarina Devon's voice slithered through the bars.
"Looks like the prison's finally cracking, Shiryu.
Careful... you might have competition."
"Stay silent, witch," Domino hissed.
But even she couldn't muster strength behind the words.
They were already too late.
The tide was shifting.
And the monsters of Infinite Hell...
Were watching.