May — Year 1520, Sea Circle Calendar
The City in the Sky floated in silence above the clouds.
No storms reached this altitude. No Navy ships, no pirate sails, no Den Den Mushi signals from the surface world.
Only the wind existed here—and the quiet, purposeful sound of a sword being drawn.
El stood alone at the edge of the floating island's eastern cliff.
Below him, a sea of white clouds stretched to every horizon, lit gold by the afternoon sun.
He held Shusui in a loose, one-handed grip.
The black blade no longer looked the sa.
Where the old Shusui had possessed the quality of a Black Blade—that legendary permanent coating achieved only when a swordsman's will was so strong it stained the steel—this version was sothing more.
The surface of the blade was layered with faint, interlocking patterns that pulsed slightly under direct light. To the untrained eye, they would look like decorative engravings.
In truth, they were the crystallized pathways of a Press-Press Fruit—a rule-type Devil Fruit ability that had been dissolved, processed, and permanently fused into the tal itself by Carina's Munch-Munch Fruit.
In other words—
El was now holding a sword that was, simultaneously, a Float-Float Fruit user.
The Press-Press Fruit ability.
The More-More Fruit buff.
And a Black Blade forged through years of Haki coating.
All four layered into a single weapon.
El exhaled slowly.
Then he raised his sword and slashed.
"Float—Press: Gravity Collapse."
What erged from the blade was not a standard Flying Slash.
It was a crescent of compressed nothingness.
At the center of the arc, the Float-Float Fruit had already removed gravity from the air itself—a column of atmosphere roughly three hundred ters tall and two hundred wide simply ceased to fall toward the earth.
Then the Press-Press Fruit chanism inside the blade reversed it.
In less than a tenth of a second, the sa column of air that had just escaped downward gravity was now being crushed from above with a gravitational force fifty tis greater than normal.
The result was that the compression detonated outward at the speed of a cannon shell.
The shockwave crossed the cloud sea in an instant.
A sound like a continent cracking open rolled across the sky.
One kiloter away, the clouds the shockwave passed through did not part the way they normally did when a strong Flying Slash cut the air.
They simply ceased to exist. Vaporized by the pressure differential.
El watched the cleared sky with calm, analytical eyes.
"...As expected."
He lowered Shusui and tilted his head slightly.
His expression was not one of excitent.
It was the expression of a man doing arithtic.
The logic was simple.
The Float-Float Fruit alone allowed El to lift entire island chains and hurl them at opponents.
The More-More Fruit had already multiplied the output of that ability by a factor of one hundred when applied to mass—and twenty tis when applied to speed.
In the Asura Form with Carina, El also had indirect access to the Munch-Munch Fruit and the Rumble-Rumble Fruit.
But now the Press-Press Fruit added a third dinsion of control.
Where the Float-Float Fruit could make an object permanently weightless, the Press-Press Fruit could make the sa object exert force in any direction, at any magnitude El chose.
In short—El now possessed absolute dominance over the concept of gravity itself.
Not just one direction. Not just one scale.
Any direction. Any scale.
And all of it could be amplified a hundred tis by the More-More Fruit.
If Fujitora had been fighting at full strength back at that island—and El had used this technique from the start—then the outco would not have been a battle lasting twenty minutes.
It would have been settled in a single exchange.
El already knew this.
He sheathed Shusui without ceremony and turned back toward the manor.
Behind him, the hole his slash had carved through the cloud sea slowly, silently refilled with drifting white mist—as if nothing had happened at all.
The world below had no way of knowing that the strongest sword in existence had just been drawn and sheathed in private.
That was fine.
El had no interest in announcing it.
—
Inside the manor, the girls were in the middle of an argunt.
The argunt, as usual, had started over sothing completely trivial.
Carina had found Nami's hand in the pantry at precisely the sa mont Nami had successfully stolen the last jar of Carina's special fruit preserves.
The resulting chaos had drawn in Kuina, who claid neutrality and then imdiately ate a spoonful of the jam, which drew in Nojiko defending Nami, which drew in Violet apologizing for everyone while sohow making it worse.
Robin sat in the corner of the room with a book.
She had not looked up once.
El observed this from the doorway for two seconds, then quietly turned around.
"El-nii!"
Too slow.
Carina had already spotted him.
She imdiately abandoned the jam dispute and crossed the room to him with bright eyes and a deeply dangerous smile.
"You're back just in ti. Can you settle sothing for us?"
El looked at her.
Then he looked at Nami, who was hiding the jar behind her back.
Then at Kuina, who imdiately stared at the ceiling.
"The jam belongs to Carina," El said flatly. "Return it."
"Traitor!"
Nami's outrage was imdiate and sincere.
"Carina, don't let this settle any score."
"Of course it does!"
"No, it doesn't. You also took the last of Nami's moon-sugar candies last Tuesday. I saw you."
A short silence.
Carina's victorious expression collapsed into sothing guilty and extrely complicated.
Nami stared.
Then, with great dignity, she set the jam jar back on the table.
"We're even."
El turned and walked away.
Behind him, Robin finally looked up from her book.
"A wise ruling," she said pleasantly. "I've noted it."
—
Later that evening, El sat with the news from the New World spread across the table.
After the defeat of Fujitora, El had been deliberately quiet.
No moves. No contact with the outside world. Nothing to draw attention while he absorbed and consolidated the three-fruit integration.
But the world, as usual, had not stood still just because El was standing still.
The most significant piece of news was not about Fujitora.
It was about Marshall D. Teach—also known as Blackbeard.
Blackbeard had successfully escaped Whitebeard's pursuit.
After stealing the Dark-Dark Fruit by killing Thatch of the Fourth Division, he had vanished into the New World's fog.
The Whitebeard Pirates had spent nearly two months chasing him.
They had co close several tis—according to the intelligence Violet had gathered using her Glare-Glare Fruit.
But Blackbeard, with the Dark-Dark Fruit's ability to negate Devil Fruit powers on contact, had an extrely specific edge against Whitebeard's commanders.
Every ti the Second Division Captain Portgas D. Ace had closed the gap, Blackbeard had forced a situation where the Fla-Fla Fruit beca useless.
And Ace, for all his strength, had not been able to defeat Blackbeard in a pure close-range battle.
So Blackbeard was still free.
And that ant the clock had started.
El folded the paper and stared at the ceiling.
In the original story, Blackbeard's escape led directly to a chain of events that ended at Marineford—the war that divided the entire era.
That chain required one specific trigger: Ace's capture.
Which required Blackbeard to seek a Warlord of the Sea position.
Which required Blackbeard to offer the World Governnt a famous pirate's head in exchange.
The famous head Blackbeard intended to offer—
Was Monkey D. Luffy's.
El's eyes narrowed slightly.
Luffy had set sail only days ago.
He was currently sowhere in East Blue—a weakling's sea by New World standards. Blackbeard was in the New World, with no interest yet in chasing a complete unknown like Luffy.
But the course was set.
Sooner or later, those two would intersect.
And when they did, the entire world would be set in motion.
El tapped his finger once against the table.
He was not worried about Luffy.
The Son of Destiny had narrative protection so powerful it bordered on the supernatural—a fact El had co to accept as simply one of the rules of this world.
What he was thinking about was sothing else.
The Immortality Operation.
With the pure gold already secured and El's strength now settled at a point where no external threat could realistically threaten them, there was no longer any reason to delay.
The only remaining material requirent for the Op-Op Fruit's Immortality Operation was a willing surgeon of sufficient ability—and the Op-Op Fruit user himself.
Both of those were available.
El closed his eyes.
The last step.
Then—they would truly have all the ti in the world.
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