Funny Valentine hadn't slept.
Not a minute. The entire night.
He sat with a cup of bitter coffee going cold in his hands, staring through the window at a clear morning sky. Nine o'clock. He hadn't eaten. He'd been running on coffee since six, which was the only thing keeping his eyes open.
The news from yesterday had made sleep impossible.
The usual composure was gone. He looked like a man who'd spent the night hunched over a gaming screen — hollow-eyed, wilted, stripped of the self-possession that normally defined him.
He set down the empty cup and shook his head.
"We underestimated them. Badly underestimated. Maybe the whole thing was a mistake from the start." He rubbed the bridge of his nose. "Why did I keep feeling that urge — that compulsion to send a full army through? That's not how I think. That's never been how I think."
He had no answer. He still didn't.
He knew the battle footage had been synced in real ti. He'd watched Whitebeard with his own eyes, through live video — that crescent-mustached figure walking on the open ocean, swatting artillery shells out of the air, and then driving his fist into the surface and raising a two-hundred-ter wall of water.
No Stand. No visible ability. Just the body.
If that fist hit land instead of ocean — half a city gone.
And he's one of four.
"Conventional weapons don't touch him. The only things that might are the ones you can't deploy arbitrarily." He exhaled. "If he ca to my territory... could I stop him?"
He already knew the answer.
He'd be dead before he got close.
He sat with that for a while, then stood up, cracked his stiff face, and reached for the comm panel.
"Get the others on a call."
A few minutes later, the screen divided into four.
Sa four faces as last ti. Different atmosphere entirely.
Valentine looked like the most functional person in the room, which said sothing.
He spoke first. "Over a hundred thousand dead."
A weathered voice: "This was a catastrophic miscalculation. We committed the most personnel. We took the most casualties. I'm done. This is not a ga I can afford to keep playing." The feed cut.
A third face, briefly: "I need to assess our losses. The other side struck back but didn't press into our territory — there may still be a path to negotiation. I'll be pursuing that." Gone.
The fourth, watching both departures: "And then there were two." A pause. "Do you consider this a defeat? A hundred-thousand-plus dead is still less than the opening casualties of a world war."
Valentine tapped the table. "The hundred thousand died in under five hours."
Silence.
"You know what the potential gains are."
"I know my country can't match them. Not these people."
"So?"
"I'm out."
Valentine cut the connection himself.
When the word "out" left his mouth, the weight that had been sitting on him since yesterday dropped away. He felt it go physically.
He thought of sothing from decades back — two bombs, each carrying a na, that hadn't killed enormous numbers by the standard of the war. But they'd ended it anyway. The psychological weight had done what the casualty count alone hadn't.
Was that what was happening to him?
Because standing against a force that could raise a two-hundred-ter tsunami whenever it chose — in his waters, over his coastline, over his cities — he could not even construct the feeling of resistance. The math didn't allow it.
He let out a long breath.
The screen he'd just shut off ca back on.
He went still. His Stand slipped out of his body into a ready position.
"Hello, Valentine-san. Boss of [your country]. I believe you know who I am — this old man hasn't been hiding his face." A laugh, broad and unhurried. "Gurararara! Interested in sitting down for a talk? With one of the Four Emperors? Co now, young man."
Funny Valentine stared at the screen.
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