One Piece : Brotherhood Chapter 617

Fishman Island no longer looked like a kingdom. It looked like the aftermath of a god’s rage. The coral palaces—once glowing with gentle bioluminescent blues and pinks—now lay shattered, their shards drifting like dying embers in the ink-dark seawater. The great coral trees, ancient living monunts, had been crushed under the weight of battle. Their branches twisted like broken ribs, their light fading with every heartbeat.

The protective bubbles that kept the ocean at bay flickered erratically, rupturing in places with thunderous implosions that sent gales of water crashing through ruined streets. Whole districts had been erased—flattened by shockwaves or burned away by celestial flas from above. Blood clouded the water in thick, dark-red plus.

Bodies drifted everywhere. Fishn warriors, rfolk, mothers shielding their children, entire clans torn apart. Hundreds of thousands who had once laughed, trained, argued, and dread—now floating lifelessly in the current. The water reeked of death and gunpowder. Of fear. Of injustice.

Corpses of the World Governnt soldiers and Cipher Pol agents, torn and sinking like drowned sins, fluttered in the depths. And at the center of that devastation—at the very heart of the broken kingdom—a monster of fury stood like a mountain of wrath unwilling to subside. Edward Newgate, Whitebeard.

But not the old pirate the world once knew. This was Whitebeard unbound. His massive fra rose above the rubble like a titan carved from the sea floor itself. His skin was streaked with blood—so his, most not. His breath thundered through the water like storms trapped in a cage. Every exhale sent rippling tremors through the ruins.

His bisento was buried in the ground beside him, cracked coral and shattered seabed bowing around its blade. And behind him, rising like a battlefield monunt, was a mountain of dead World Governnt soldiers who had co to the elders’ aid—piled upon one another as if the sea itself had rejected them. Across from him, two figures drifted like shattered gods.

Fishman Island had already died. The only things still moving were monsters—and one of them was losing the right to be called human. Whitebeard was no longer Whitebeard. He was destruction given muscle and breath.

His silhouette towered in the gloom, hunched like a wounded beast yet radiating the wrath of an entire species. His breath ca in deep, ragged heaves. Every inhale pulled the currents toward him. Every exhale sent them screaming outward in quakes that pulverized anything still standing. And before him—sprawled like broken idols toppled from their shrines—lay two Elders of the World Governnt.

Warcury and Mars. Supposedly immortal. Supposedly untouchable. The highest authority of the World Governnt. Now they looked like corpses that the ocean had rejected. Warcury’s colossal fra—once hulking and monstrous—was mangled beyond recognition. His left arm was torn off at the shoulder, the bone snapped like driftwood.

His ribs jutted through his skin in jagged white spires. Half his face was hanging open, cheekbone shattered, teeth exposed. One eye was sealed shut by crushed muscle; the other flickered with the faint glow of a dying ember refusing to extinguish.

Mars was worse. The elder lay crumpled in a crater of crushed coral, his body twisted at angles that should have been fatal ten tis over. His spine bent like a crooked staircase. His legs were limp sacks of bone mush. His hair floated around him like seaweed, matted with blood. His chest cavity was caved in so deeply that his heart—still beating—was visible between splintered ribs.

Only immortality kept them conscious—barely alive, but functional—just conscious enough to suffer. And Whitebeard made sure they did. Warcury tried to push himself up. His lone arm trembled violently. He couldn’t even lift half his torso.

Mars tried to speak—he only coughed out water and blood, the sound bubbling like a drowning man. Whitebeard advanced again.

Stomp. The entire seafloor groaned, cracking further.

Crack... crack-crack... CRAAACK!

Tremor waves exploded outward, sending debris and corpses scattering in a spiral around him. His eyes—once warm, once fatherly—were now bloodshot holes of pure malice. No reason.

No restraint. Just grief sharpened into a weapon. The last shield around Fishman Island flickered violently—minutes from bursting—but Whitebeard didn’t care.

He didn’t care that the remaining survivors were barely clinging to life, or at least his current state didn’t process anything about the safety of the remaining rfolk. He didn’t care that the pressure could kill him if the last barrier ruptured. He didn’t care that his lungs were leaking blood with every breath. All he cared about was making these two die.

Again. And again. And again. He roared—a sound so primal it shook the ocean itself.

"HOW MANY TIS DO I HAVE TO KILL YOU BASTARDS?!"

He drove his fist into the ground. The quake force tore through the seabed like a divine eruption.

A pillar of splintered stone erupted beneath Warcury, impaling his torso and blowing it apart in a burst of bone fragnts. His body knit itself together instantly—but only halfway—before Whitebeard was already upon him.

CRUNCH!

Whitebeard grabbed Warcury’s skull with both hands and squeezed, shattering it like an eggshell. Brain matter, blood, and chunks of divine flesh dispersed into the water. His skull began to reform—but sluggishly, struggling.

Immortality was no longer healing him quickly. It was stalling. Straining. Cracking. Mars tried to summon flas to reconnect to the abyssal circle. Nothing ca. His fingers trembled as he raised one broken arm—Whitebeard appeared in front of him.

He didn’t swing. He didn’t thrust. He tore. His bisento carved straight through Mars’s torso, splitting him nearly in half, the cut so violent it rippled up the Bubble Do itself. Internal organs and ichor spilled like dark ribbons. Mars’s eyes rolled back, his body twitching, trying—failing—to piece itself back together.

Whitebeard snarled. The quake force erupted from his fist again and obliterated the elder’s upper body. Shoulders. Neck. Head. Gone. Not even ash remained—just chunks. Mars’s lower half floated limply, spasming with dying nerve signals. But Whitebeard wasn’t done.

"GET UP!" he roared, veins bulging in his neck. "GET UP, SO I CAN KILL YOU AGAIN!"

The elders regenerated—barely. Every cell fought the very concept of death. Their immortality was no miracle. It was a curse. A torture. And Whitebeard’s grief-fueled rage broke them faster than they could reform.

He charged again—eyes wild, tears mixing with blood, hair floating like a white mane of fury—

a titan who had lost everything except the ability to hate. Warcury managed a whisper. Barely.

"This... this thing... is no man..." Mars croaked a response as his head half-ford, voice gurgling. "...he...he is a demon..."

Whitebeard’s fist erupted with a quake that tore the seafloor open like a wound. His roar shook the collapsing kingdom.

"I AM THE WRATH OF EVERY LIFE YOU STOLE!!!"

And he descended on them again—to kill them and kill them and kill them—until immortality itself broke. The apocalypse continued. The cycle of death and rebirth refused to end. And Whitebeard, blinded by grief and madness, refused to stop.

Warcury’s body was a ruin—raw flesh knitting together over split bone, divine tissue struggling to reform—but even in his tornted state, he heard Mars’s voice echoing directly inside his skull.

"Warcury... We need to get out of here..."

The telepathic whisper was faint, shaking, frayed by agony, and drowned in terror. It was the first ti in centuries—centuries—that Mars allowed fear to touch his thoughts.

The marks on their bodies, the powers granted by Imu, connected their minds as surely as chains. Through that bond, Warcury felt every wound Mars suffered—every mont of death and rebirth, every scream swallowed by bubbling seawater, every bone crushed and reford. And Mars felt Warcury’s tornt in return.

The agony had beco a loop, a prison with no end. They had always trusted in Imu-sama’s gift.

Immortality. The absolute, unbroken certainty that they could not die. But Whitebeard had found a loophole—the agony remained. And he forced them to drown in it, again and again.

Mars could no longer maintain the illusion of control. He trembled, even in his half-regenerated form, as he transmitted another ragged thought. "...this pain... I had forgotten... the fear of death..."

Warcury, stubborn even now, clenched his jaw. His newly reford tusks cracked under the pressure. For the first ti since they had been blessed by Imu, his legs shook. He did not deny the fear—he too felt the primal chill creeping through his ancient bones.

And worse... They both sensed sothing monstrous in Whitebeard—sothing growing, sothing mutating. The more they refused to die, the deeper he descended into madness. The more they endured, the more he seed determined to tear their souls apart.

His wrath was feeding itself. The sea vibrated with every exhale he made. Water pressure bent unnaturally around him. The ocean itself seed terrified of him. He was becoming sothing that even the Elders had no na for. Warcury swallowed thickly, tasting blood and seawater.

"Our only chance..." he ground out, his thought wavering, "...is to bury this island beneath the sea. Collapse the do. Let the pressure crush everything."

Mars understood imdiately. The barrier around Fishman Island—fractured, trembling, barely held together—needed only a final push to shatter. Once gone, ten thousand ters of ocean would descend in an instant. Everything—coral, stone, bodies, ruins—would be pulverized in the abyssal jaws of the deep.

Even Whitebeard... perhaps even he would die. They prayed, not to gods. Not to Imu. They prayed for luck. To the sea. To anything that would save them from this demon.

Warcury gathered what remained of his strength. His body expanded, bones stretching, muscles rippling as he forced himself into the Fengxi form again. The process crushed him internally—his lungs burst, his spine cracked—but he endured, regaining a monstrous silhouette.

Mars did the sa, shifting into his hybrid form, spine flaring like jagged wings. Warcury roared—more pain than fury—and charged. Mars shot toward the barrier, whipping through the water like a torpedo, claws extended.

The plan was perfect. Whitebeard was focused on Warcury. He would not notice Mars until it was too late. But—Whitebeard vanished. One mont he stood amid rubble and corpses. The next—he blurred into streaks of distorted water pressure.

Soru.

Even the Elders—their senses honed over hundreds of years—could barely track him. Mars’s eyes widened as Whitebeard materialized directly in front of him, blocking the path to the barrier. And Whitebeard’s voice—ragged, guttural, soaked in grief—echoed like cannon fire.

"Do you think I would let you run...?"

His teeth bared, a beast’s snarl breaking through the words.

"No."

The ocean trembled. The very seafloor trembled.

"THIS ISLAND WILL BE YOUR GRAVE!!!."

Whitebeard swung his naginata. This was not a slash. It was an execution designed by a god of war. The blade glowed with white fissures—the light of a quake given shape, fractures in reality itself crawling along its edge. Black lightning from his Conqueror’s Haki exploded outward—tendrils of tyranny, of dominance, of pure murderous will—turning the water around them into a storm of crackling darkness.

The strike howled through the void. When it landed, the world broke. A vertical shockwave tore through the ocean, a cleaving line of gravitational distortion that split the water, split the coral, and split the seabed—and split Mars.

From crown to pelvis, the elder’s body divided cleanly into two drifting halves, each side twitching, organs spilling like ribbons of light and blood. His bones shattered like exploding crystal. His immortal flesh tried—and failed—to regenerate, too overwheld by the continuous quake vibrations still ripping through him.

The barrier behind him cracked in terror—but did not shatter. Only Mars did. Whitebeard’s eyes glowed with madness and sorrow. His growl was low and feral.

"Get up." The sea quivered. "Get up so I can kill you again."

Mars’s severed halves spasd violently as immortality struggled to stitch them together, but Whitebeard raised his naginata slowly and brought it down brutally.

Whitebeard raised his naginata again—a demon of vengeance ready to resu the cycle of death... But then—the world itself scread. Not taphorically. Not symbolically.

Fishman Island—what remained of it—vibrated as if the entire ocean suddenly rembered it was a god and all mortals below were nothing but dust. Every creature, every stone, and every drifting corpse froze.

The water around Whitebeard shuddered violently, rippling like a living thing recoiling in fear.

His own Conqueror’s Haki—once blazing like a dying star in supernova—flickered. A candle against a hurricane. A lantern before a sun.

Even in his madness, Whitebeard’s breath caught. His pupils shrank. His heart lurched. This wasn’t him. This wasn’t his quake. This was sothing else. Sothing higher. The pulse of that will hit the world like a celestial hamr.

BOOM...BOOM...BOOM.

Each impact felt like a heartbeat—a divine heartbeat—shaking the ocean floor, the currents, the water pressure, and even the light itself. It wasn’t directed at them. It wasn’t even ant for this world. But the aftershock of the clash between two monstrous wills radiated outward... and crushed everything in its path.

Whitebeard turned slowly, every instinct screaming danger, every scar burning. His Observational Haki—refined by decades—strained until blood leaked from his ears. His Conqueror’s Haki curled inward, trembling before sothing older, deeper, and impossible.

And then he felt it—a will he had only sensed once in his life—so long ago he still questioned whether that mory had been real. On God Valley. But this ti... it was not hiding behind the shadows of Mary Geoise.

And then another presence—equally divine, equally monstrous—clashing head-on like two gods fighting for dominion of the heavens.

Whitebeard whispered, voice hoarse: "...what... are you?"

But the elders—Mars and Warcury—scread. Not aloud—their lungs were still trying to regenerate—but in pure psychic terror. Because they recognized that pulse.

No—they worshipped it. They bowed to it. It was burned into the deepest corners of their souls.

Imu-sama.

The true ruler of the world. And the second will... that titanic force that crashed against Imu like a rival deity... That, even they did not know. And that terrified them even more.

The ocean around Fishman Island began to twist—bending, warping, and compressing. Not because of physical pressure. Because the wills of those two beings were so overwhelming that the laws of the sea bent to accommodate them.

Cracks spiderwebbed across the already damaged barrier. Whitebeard felt the structure groan. The ocean itself seed to hold its breath. The Elders’ eyes bulged with horror.

Because now they understood—Imu-sama hadn’t summoned them back because Imu had left the Throne. Imu-sama was fighting. Truly fighting. Against sothing equal.

Warcury’s teeth chattered. Mars’s regenerating organs stilled mid-pulse. Their immortality ant nothing before that descending presence. Then—the last barrier broke. Not shattered—obliterated, atomized into glowing fragnts of light and pressure.

The sound was like the cracking of a planet. A white hole opened where the barrier once stood—

a vacuum of force sucking everything inward. And then—ten thousand ters of ocean collapsed downward. The sea ca in as a titan descending, a rciless wall of abyssal weight. The pressure alone could have crushed an island of steel.

The shockwave of the two divine wills—still colliding far above—accelerated the collapse, turning the downward surge into an extinction-level event. Coral forests snapped like twigs. Entire districts shattered like porcelain.

The once-beautiful dos of Fishman Island folded inward like wet paper. Stone, bodies, debris—all swallowed by the roaring blackness. Whitebeard dug his naginata into the ground, veins bulging, muscles tearing, trying to anchor himself—but the ocean didn’t care.

The sea took everything.

Including the last remnants of what once was Fishman Island. The fall of the island into the abyss echoed like a catastrophic bell through the deep. A sound not of destruction—but of annihilation.

****

Further away from Fishman Island, where the abyss itself had shattered, where the clash of divines had reshaped the ocean floor into a new, unknown landscape. I stood victorious, the only survivor of the battle.

Each exhale felt like molten iron spilling from my lungs. My chest was a carved canyon—a diagonal gash ripped so deep I could see glimpses of bone beneath. The cut hadn’t simply torn flesh; it had burned, as if divine haki had reached inside and tried to erase my very existence.

Even the God-Fruit’s regeneration—usually smooth, fluid, and absolute—was stuttering and faltering, knitting tissue in trembling pulses instead of clean waves.

Blood poured down in thick sheets, steaming where it touched the shattered seabed. The entire landscape around groaned, still collapsing from the force of our clash. I steadied myself, Akatsuki in hand—its blade humming with a hungry, residual bloodlust, a predator still savoring the taste of Poseidon’s divine essence.

I spat blood to the side and let out a hoarse laugh.

"Not so godly now, are you...?"

Before lay the ruin of Poseidon’s body—or rather, the ruin of the vessel Imu had desecrated.

Her once-legendary form was now a nightmare tableau of divine collapse; her skin was cracked like sun-baked stone, glowing fissures leaking pale blue divinity. Her figure was twisted at unnatural angles, bones shattered beyond recognition. Her sea-green hair—once flowing like eternal tides—was drenched in blood and dust. Her ornate scales and divine markings had fractured into floating shards that drifted like dying embers.

She was no longer Poseidon, ruler of the seas. She was a broken altar, a vessel that had tried to contain a god and been pulverized for it. The ocean around her churned and roared in mourning for the loss of their king.

Yet her eyes still stared at . That swirling, concentric abyss. Those rings did not belong in this world. Those were Imu’s eyes.

Cold. Eternal. Unblinking. Burning my image into eternity. Even as Poseidon’s body withered...

even as her divine organs failed... Even as her life bled away into the trembling earth... Imu did not blink.

And then—the voice ca. Not from her throat. From everywhere. Like the whisper of a dead universe.

"...We will et again..." And then the Abyss vanished.

The concentric rings dissolved. Her pupils returned—weak, fading, and full of agony and clarity. Poseidon collapsed like a puppet with its strings severed, divine blue ichor spilling into the crater.

I stood there, bleeding and trembling, my chest gouged open by a wound deep enough to kill lesser gods—and yet sohow, in the vast quiet left behind, all I felt was an ache in my soul. She looked small now. Small, fragile, and shivering on the broken seabed.

Her breathing was so faint it barely stirred the air. And then her presence touched mine. Not through words. Not through breath. Through the Voice of All Things, that ancient current that flows beneath the world. A soundless resonance.

A pulse that entered my bones, my veins, my haki, and my very will. It wasn’t language. It wasn’t thought. It was a feeling. A single, crushing wave of aning that hit like the entire sea collapsing at once: Release .

And beneath that—another layer, deeper: Do not let the cycle bind again. End completely. Let my soul return to the currents. Do not let Imu reclaim my corpse, my power, or my na.

Her divinity flickered like a dying lantern. For a mont, I felt her entire life—the weight of eras, the responsibility of a god, the agony of being possessed, controlled, and warped into a vessel for an entity beyond comprehension. Her suffering flowed into through the voice, and it was bottomless. She showed no images. No scenes.

Just pure emotion: exhaustion. Pain. Sha. And finally... peace.

A quiet plea. Let go.

My fingers tightened around Shusui’s hilt. It felt heavier than any weapon should—as if the blade knew what I was about to do. I stepped toward her. She did not flinch. Her dimming eyes followed —not begging, not resisting, only accepting.

Thankful. She lifted one trembling hand, just barely off the ground. Not reaching for . Reaching away from herself—a gesture I understood instantly; she didn’t want to die clinging to life.

She wanted to die free.

My breath shook. There is no training for this. No haki. No divine fruit. Nothing prepares you for ending a being who no longer wishes to suffer. I lowered myself beside her. Her aura brushed mine—soft, fading, lighter than a sigh.

I raised Shusui.

The Voice whispered one last ti, faint as drifting foam on a quiet tide: ...Thank you...

A soft pulse. A final heartbeat. Then—

shff—

My blade slid through her heart in a single clean motion. No scream. No convulsion. Just a long, slow exhale—a release so gentle it felt like watching a wave recede from shore. Her body glowed for an instant—pale, calm, and beautiful.

Then the light went out.

Poseidon, Goddess of the Sea, returned to silence. I raised the blade slowly, Shusui dripping divine ichor. And for the first ti since the battle began... the ocean felt truly empty.

Her final thoughts fading into the world’s will were barely audible. "I beg you... protect her... let her grow... free..." And then, she was gone.