"BOOM!"
The world itself seed to reel as the shockwave tore across the coastline — the sea buckled, waves folding upon themselves, and the very cape of Water 7 split open under the sheer impact. Vergo’s hybrid form — a terrifying fusion of raw muscle, feral instinct, and haki-forged flesh — had been smashed deep into the bedrock by the monstrous swing of Kaido’s Kanabo. The impact crater stretched hundreds of ters wide, seastone and coral dust raining down in choking clouds.
For a long, dreadful heartbeat, nothing stirred. Then — a tremor.
Cracks spider-webbed through the shattered ground as Vergo’s arm twitched, the veins beneath his skin glowing faintly with Haki flow as his regeneration kicked in. His body, battered and mangled, slowly began to knit itself back together — muscle crawling over bone, wounds hissing as blood turned black under the hardening of Armant. But compared to Kaido’s awakened mythical regeneration, his recovery looked pitiful. Kaido’s wounds vanished like mist under sunlight. Vergo’s simply stopped bleeding.
Still, he rose.
His Marine uniform — or what was left of it — hung in tatters, charred and soaked with seawater. The Vice Admiral’s chest heaved, ribs creaking, one eye swollen shut. Yet the iron of resolve in his gaze had not dimd. The air around him vibrated faintly with Haki — a steady, invisible hum, like a storm just waiting for release. Above him, Kaido’s thunderous laughter rolled through the heavens.
"Worororororo! Is that all you’ve got, Marine? Co on! Get up! I know that’s not enough to put you down for good!"
He stood atop the ruined cliffside like a god of destruction — his massive, scar-riddled fra casting a shadow that seed to swallow the horizon. The Kanabo rested lazily over his shoulder, yet every fiber of his being radiated power, each exhale enough to warp the air. His Conqueror’s Haki rippled outward in waves, making the sky snarl and crackle.
Though he laughed, irritation coiled beneath that grin. This wasn’t amusent — it was anger. A single Vice Admiral, a "re human" in his eyes, had kept him from crushing Marineford’s second wave. He couldn’t even bla his missing fleet; he’d left them behind, charging alone in arrogance. But now, the longer this dragged on, the more it stung his pride.
And then — a golden streak descended. Kizaru appeared beside the crater, his form materializing from pure light, hands stuffed into his pockets even as his expression was grim beneath the lazy drawl.
"Vergo... are you still in one piece?"
Vergo spat into the dirt — blood, thick and dark. "Ptui... Hmph. Broken ribs, maybe two. Nothing that’ll slow down, Kizaru-san. I can still wrestle with that beast for a few more days..!"
He stepped out of the crater, shoulders squared, his body shimring faintly as he re-hardened his Armant coating. Even in his battered state, Vergo’s presence felt heavy, oppressive. His Haki clung to him like armor forged from black glass.
Kizaru adjusted his shades slightly, his tone casual but his eyes sharp. "My, my... don’t overdo it, Vergo-kun. If you fall, this old man’s gonna have to actually try, you know? And between you and ... I prefer keeping my hair unsinged."
Vergo smirked faintly. "Then keep harassing him from range, Vice Admiral. I’ll hold the front. The more we delay him here, the less chance he has of reaching the bay. Pirates are already spilling through the blockade — we can’t afford to let him add to that chaos."
Kizaru gave a low whistle. "Orders from Demon Fist Vergo, eh? Scary, scary..." But even as he joked, light began to gather at his fingertips, his entire fra shimring like the sun’s reflection on water.
High above, Kaido rolled his neck, muscles cracking like thunder. "Wororororo... don’t tell the both of you are giving up already?" he taunted, raising his Kanabo, its black iron glinting with veins of purple lightning — Conqueror’s Haki, alive and roaring. "I was just starting to enjoy myself!"
The air itself seed to recoil as his Haki exploded outward, shaking the sea and sky alike. "Well, if you won’t co to ... then I’ll co to you!"
And with that roar, his massive silhouette began to distort. Bones snapped and expanded; muscles swelled and twisted; scales erupted across his body like obsidian armor. Within seconds, Kaido’s hybrid form unfolded into the full might of his Azure Dragon — his body coiling across the sky, massive enough to blanket half of Water 7 in shadow.
A guttural rumble rolled through the air as his serpentine body writhed, storm clouds forming instantly above. The heavens darkened. Lightning raked the sky. The wind carried the reek of ozone and death.
Down below, Vergo clenched his fists, dark purple veins of Armant crawling up his arms. Kizaru’s light intensified, his entire body becoming a pulsing star.
"Wororororo! The ancient weapon is mine!" Kaido’s voice shook the very atmosphere. "Anyone who dares to stop , I’ll tear them apart!"
Then he inhaled — a monstrous gale that drew the sea upward in a spiral — and opened his maw. Energy began to churn within it, white-hot plasma forming a sphere of annihilation.
But before he could fire, his pupils shrank.
His Kenbunshoku Haki flared, sensing sothing — an anomaly, a threat, no, a predator’s killing intent. But it ca too fast. Too alien. Too silent.
The sky scread. A beam of light — no, an energy projectile so bright it turned the clouds molten gold — slamd into Kaido’s face with a sound that wasn’t a sound but a cataclysmic crack of space and thunder colliding.
"BOOOOOOM!"
The impact shattered the heavens. The sea below erupted upward in walls of steam and fury as Kaido’s massive head snapped back, his roar cut short. The colossal dragon stumbled midair — impossible, unthinkable — before his entire body slamd into the island below.
The explosion that followed was apocalyptic. The shockwave leveled everything in its path — trees, cliffs, structures — all pulverized in an instant. Water 7’s outskirts cracked like glass, the tides recoiling before rushing back in as tsunamis.
For a breathless mont, the world held still. Even Kizaru froze, his usual smirk fading as the golden light of the beam still burned across the horizon — a radiant wound in the sky that stretched for miles.
Vergo’s eyes widened, his battered fra illuminated by the glow of the blast. "What... what was that...?"
The clouds above had been burned away, leaving a hole clear through the storm, revealing the stars beyond. Every Marine, every pirate, even Kaido’s beastly lieutenants hundreds miles away turned to stare at the heavens — where the lingering afterimage of the shot still crackled with electric fury.
Kaido’s massive form lay half-buried in the island, the terrain around him fractured and glowing red from residual energy. Steam and debris poured off his scales. For the first ti in this battle, his laughter had stopped.
"Worororo... what the hell..." Kaido growled, shaking his head as his wounds — yes, actual wounds — smoked with molten ichor. "Who dares... interfere...?"
Down below, Kizaru’s voice was barely a whisper. "That wasn’t one of ours..." His eyes flickered toward the direction of the shot — far, far beyond the horizon. "That was... an orbital strike? No... too focused... too fast..."
Vergo’s gaze followed his, his instincts screaming. "No... it ca from the sea. Not above."
The silence stretched, broken only by the distant hiss of boiling waves. And then — from the far horizon — a faint hum began to rise. Deep, resonant, chanical. It wasn’t thunder. It was a charge.
The Marines on the bay turned their heads, eyes wide, as a second streak of light began to glow sowhere beyond the mist, aid directly toward the battlefield.
Kizaru’s pupils contracted. "Oh... this just got interesting."
The hum built into a shriek, air splitting apart as the weapon fired again — a beam of energy roaring across the sea like divine retribution. It wasn’t light. It wasn’t fire. It was judgnt incarnate.
Kaido’s eyes went wide — fury, disbelief, and exhilaration all clashing together. "WORORORORO! NOW THIS IS A FIGHT!"
The second blast hit — and the world turned white. The very seas buckled. The sky split. The sea boiled. From St. Poplar to the San Faldo, even the distant watchtowers of the Cipher Pol on Enies Lobby felt the shockwave.
The air still tasted of cordite and salt. For a long, suspended beat after the second beam struck, silence reigned — broken only by the coughing hiss of steam and the distant groan of fractured earth. Then the wreckage convulsed.
From the crater where island had been carved raw, sothing enormous flexed and rose. Kaido’s dragon body heaved itself up from the smoking hole, his serpentine body ragged, scales smoking like coal under ash. A great, jagged breach yawned along his flank — a wound that, for the first ti since the start of the battle, refused to simply vanish.
Flesh knitted and reknit, veins of molten ichor crawling to seal the rent, but each stitch ca with a terrible cost: the dragon moved slower, every motion laced with pain. The beam had been more than kinetic. It had been touched by will — tinged with Haoshoku — and even Kaido’s awakened regeneration felt the burn.
He roared, a sound that made cliffs shudder. The great form trembled; scales hissed as seawater boiled from the heat of his renewal. He could not remain aloft long. With a tortured, thunderous motion he reverted — the dragon folding in on itself — and, with a monstrous wrench of bone and sinew, Kaido sank back into his hybrid shape.
The transformation was ugly and brutal, a man-beast becoming more beast than man: claws lengthened, joints reconfigured, and the sheer bulk of him beca a landscape of rippling muscle. Regeneration accelerated, but the wound remained a dark, angry scar.
"Piripiri... piripiripiri..." Kizaru’s compact transponder snail chirped on his wrist, the small sound absurd against the enormity of the battlefield. He didn’t need to pick it up to know what the ssage carried. The pattern of the strike, its precision, the way the light had burned an afterimage into the sky — all of it made him narrow his eyes.
He’d at first assud the blast was one of Doflamingo’s toys, so monstrous contraption from the Donquixote’s blacksmiths. But the energy signature had a different fingerprint: cold, magnetically honed, and carrying a crown of Haoshoku that had dug into the dragon’s soul.
Kizaru’s mouth thinned into a line. "No," he murmured. "Not them."
Kaido’s patience snapped like a rotten mast. "SCARLETT, YOU BITCH! I WILL KILL YOU!" he bellowed, voice full of a fury that eclipsed even his usual thunder. The two Vice Admirals who had been caging him with speed and steel beneath his feet were suddenly irrelevant; a greater predator had arrived. The Bloodsteel Armada — a blade across the seas — was bearing down on Water 7, and its spear was lodged at the head: Scarlett D. Lachlann.
Far out on the horizon, a shadow detached itself from the line of ships and slid forward: the flagship of the Bloodsteel Pirates. From its prow stood Scarlett D. Lachlann, half of her silhouette fused to monstrous, gleaming chanics.
Her lower torso and right arm had been transmuted into the sleek, guntal form of a railgun — barrels hot and still spitting sparks from the last discharge. Magnetic plates ringed her shoulders and wrapped along the deck, humming with residual field energy. She was a queen of iron and storm, and she looked like a warhead made flesh.
She observed Kaido with the avarice of a collector who had finally found the rarest trophy. "Tch," she said, as annoyance flickered across her features — a fake disappointnt that only sharpened the edge of her presence, "Kaido’s got thick skin."
The red heat from the barrel reflected off her pupils. Even a hundred miles away, her magnetic Devil Fruit let her bend ordinance to her will; range was only a matter of calculation and field strength. The railgun had been honed not by so naive tinkerer but by a woman who thought in trajectories and ruin.
At her side, Katakuri stood like a cliff. His expression was unreadable, but his Kenbunshoku reached so far that even the ruptured air over Water 7 lay open to him like a map. "That was expected," he said in a low voice, the future-sight of his observation assuring him that the blast had not been a fluke. "It damaged him, but it did not fell him."
Scarlett’s smile was hard and precise. "I don’t care if it takes a thousand shots," she said. "I will have that blueprint." Her tone carried an absolute: nothing on the sea would stand between her and her prize. She raised a hand and the railgun’s barrels ward, the magnetic coils singing like a chorus of wires.
On the decks of the fleet surrounding the flagship, the Bloodsteel fleet fell into a disciplined motion — heavy war galleons aligning, smaller vessels zig-zagging to form firing corridors. Ships in the armada flexed their own smaller traditional gunpowder batteries, preparing to feed the chaos the mont they entered the battlezone. The sea itself seed to bristle as Scarlett’s weapon’s influence spread; iron filings in the wake of each bow shimred, attracted and ordered by that invisible force.
Kaido, half-beast, half-mountain of wrath, stared toward the pinprick of distant light that had beco a wound. His laugh had broken into a snarl.
"Wororororo! You think you can steal from ? From the heavens?" He stamped, and the ground replied with fractures. He gathered the scarred strength of his hybrid form, claws sinking into the scorched earth. Around him, the sky darkened with an answering thunder — but this thunder had a human architect.
Kizaru’s eyes stayed locked on the far-off flare of energy pulsing from Scarlett’s flagship, his expression unreadable but his mind running faster than the light he commanded.
"She’s nearly perfected that toy of hers," he said, voice asured, almost conversational despite the carnage. "Even my full-powered laser beams might not be as effective, I suppose... really scary." A lazy hum escaped him, but it didn’t mask the edge of unease beneath.
"She’s taken the Donquixote family’s energy weapon designs and turned them into sothing alive. Paracia fruits are dangerous enough — but once awakened..." He trailed off, eyes narrowing, his Observation Haki expanding outward, stretching over the ocean like an invisible net. "Even monsters can fear science when it’s backed by will."
The air shimred faintly around him, his Kenbunshoku haki brushing the massive flagship at the edge of the horizon. It was like staring into the eye of another predator — one that was watching back. "She’s aware of us," Kizaru murmured, tone turning sharp. "And she doesn’t miss."
He sighed, half amusent, half tension. "I just hope these pirates tear at each other instead of targeting us..."
Vergo let out another low laugh, his chest still heaving from the last exchange. His marine coat was little more than rags, the insignia burned away by Kaido’s breath, yet the weight of his presence hadn’t diminished in the slightest.
"Don’t get your hopes up, Kizaru-san," Vergo said, rolling his neck as bones cracked like breaking stone. "You think a beast like Kaido will let himself be distracted for long?"
"As long as we keep him out of Water 7, that’s all that matters..." Kizaru muttered, dragging his hand across the transponder snail on his wrist to check the status of their forces still battling both on the seas and on the island itself.
****
The air inside the floating fortress of the world governnt was unnaturally still — a silence so heavy it pressed against the lungs like deep water. Outside, the world was chaos incarnate: Kaido’s roars shook the heavens, Scarlett’s railgun tore the sky apart, and the seas below Water 7 boiled under the wrath of gods and monsters alike. Yet within this single chamber, it was as if ti had frozen.
The interior of the Gods’ Knights’ sanctum within the world governnt’s command ship was steeped in opulence and dread in equal asure — ancient oak walls carved with celestial sigils, a grand table of black obsidian veined with gold, and a faint hum that resonated through the room like a heartbeat.
Three of the Gods Knights sat there, unmoving each carrying out their own activities to kill ti: Saint Gunko, the short-haired commander with heterochromatic eyes that glowed faintly in the dim light; Saint Somrs, slouched lazily against a marble column, his uniform half undone; and Saint Killingham, sharp-featured and coiled like a blade awaiting its sheath.
Despite the raging war beyond the fortress walls, they looked... bored.
Somrs sighed dramatically, his crimson cloak fluttering in the still air. "You sure you want us to keep sitting here, Gunko-chan? My blade’s getting dull just listening to those beasts scream out there." His grin was feral, teeth glinting like polished ivory. "Let stretch a little, yeah? I’m sure one of those so-called Emperors could give a decent workout."
Gunko didn’t even look up from the dossier in her hand. "Our orders are clear," she said, her voice calm — almost gentle — but carrying an undercurrent of authority that silenced the room.
"I have told you already we’re not here to indulge your bloodlust, Somrs. There are still several factions waiting to reveal their hands. We move before that, and we upset the balance the Elders have planned and our target is simply the ancient weapon blueprint and its holder."
Her mismatched eyes — one amber, one ice-blue — lifted slowly, fixing on both n with a gaze that seed to strip them down to their bones. "Our duty isn’t to play. It’s to execute."
Saint Killingham leaned back in his seat, his fingers drumming idly on the hilt of his sword. "You talk like an Elder already, Gunko. I just hope your restraint doesn’t make us miss our cue."
A faint smile crossed Gunko’s lips — humorless, razor-thin. "You’ll know when it’s ti, Killingham. You always do." But before Killingham could retort, the temperature in the room shifted.
A low, guttural hum began to rise from the far end of the cabin — faint at first, like the whisper of a storm over the horizon. Then it deepened, resonating through the walls, through their armor, through their very bones. The lights flickered.
Every head turned toward the adjoining chamber — a massive wooden hall connected to their quarters by reinforced steel doors. Etched into the floorboards was a ritual circle, its design older than the World Governnt itself. The sigils were carved in concentric layers, intertwining celestial glyphs and runic words of power — lines that seed to move when looked at too long, bending the air around them.
And then the circle began to glow. A pulse of light surged through the cabin — first gold, then crimson, before settling into a deep, oily black that devoured the room’s illumination entirely. Symbols flared one by one, like stars igniting in a dead sky, and tendrils of dark mist began to leak from the carvings, snaking across the floor with an almost sentient hunger.
Somrs straightened imdiately, his grin fading into sothing closer to forced subserviance. Killingham’s fingers froze mid-motion, his pupils narrowing. Even Gunko rose from her seat, but unlike the other two she seed casual. Gunko was soone who didn’t even feel reverence towards their supre commander , the only person she truly bent her head to was Imu sama themselves.
A tremor rippled through the entire world governnt flagship. The ritual circle flared once more — brighter this ti, the black mist boiling upward in violent spirals. And from within that storm of shadow, a silhouette began to erge.
At first, it was formless — a distortion in reality itself, bending light and air like molten glass. Then ca the outline of horns. Massive, curling horns, carved not from bone, but sothing darker — sothing that seed to pulse faintly with life. A pair of heavy boots touched the edge of the glowing circle, and the air grew thick with the scent of brimstone and ozone.
When the last of the darkness peeled away, the chamber fell into absolute stillness. There, standing amidst the still-swirling tendrils of shadow, was Saint Jaygarcia Saturn — one of the Five Elders, the highest authority of the World Governnt, and the man that even the Gods’ Knights called Superiors.
His eyes burned a deep carmine, ringed with black sigils that crawled faintly like living ink. His hair, long and ashen white, frad a half burned face lined not by age, but by power — the kind of power that had seen centuries pass and civilizations burn.
He wore no ostentatious armor, no crown, only a dark black tailored suit and he carried a wooden staff that tapped lightly on the wooden fllor as he stepped out of the ritual circle. Yet his very presence was suffocating — as though the concept of hierarchy itself bent to his existence.
The ritual circle beneath his feet still sparked faintly, struggling to contain the raw force that had just passed through it. The wooden boards hissed where he stepped, charred black by the re pressure of his aura. When he finally spoke, his voice was calm — soft, almost — but every word carried the weight of divine judgnt.
"You all seem restless," Saturn said, his gaze passing over the three Knights like a shadow gliding over graves. "It seems like the gift of immortality that Imu-sama has gifted us all is making you complacent... Tell , Somrs, do you think you are invincible just because of your immortality...? Or have you forgotten that so of those so-called monsters out there are capable of harming you despite your invincibility..."
Somrs bowed his head, every trace of his earlier arrogance gone. Killingham giggled, seeing that Somrs was being humbled and that he had been spared from the sermon, while Gunko lowered her eyes with a soft nod, acknowledging the truth in Elder Saturn’s words.
"Elder Saturn," Somrs greeted quietly, his voice betraying the faintest hint of annoyance. "We weren’t expecting your presence here personally."
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