-Real World-
The golden light dissipated.
Where the Sword of Promised Victory had struck — where Excalibur's thousand-meter beam had fallen with the weight of absolute judgment — there was nothing. The frozen ocean surface had been carved away entirely, replaced by open water that stretched down into darkness. The ice that Esdeath had created, the debris from the battle, the very space that had been occupied — all of it had merged with the sea, erased, removed from existence.
No traces remained.
Fleet Admiral Sengoku had been within the attack's range.
The golden Buddha, still trapped partially in Madara's genjutsu, had been standing directly in Excalibur's path when Artoria began her charge. Terminal damage would have been inevitable — a thousand-meter light pillar operating at Anti-Fortress output did not leave survivors when it made contact with flesh.
Fortunately, Sengoku's will had broken through the illusion at the critical moment.
His Armament Haki, compressed and refined over decades of combat, had rejected the false sensory inputs that the Mangekyō Sharingan had been feeding his brain. The process wasn't instant — genjutsu of that caliber required time to dispel, required conscious effort to recognize and counter — but his experience with mental disciplines provided the foundation. His eyes regained clarity. His consciousness reasserted control over his perception.
The moment his vision cleared, he began gesturing to Artoria.
No words — there was no time for words, and words would have been wasted communicating what his body language made obvious. His hands moved in the universal signal for don't worry about me, attack directly. The mission took precedence over his survival. Eliminating the threat took precedence over protecting the Fleet Admiral. If his death was the cost of removing Uchiha Madara from the battlefield, that was an acceptable exchange.
Artoria had understood and fired anyway.
After the sword strike completed, Sengoku escaped the attack's radius through application of every movement technique he possessed. The process was thrilling in the way that near-death experiences were thrilling — no margin for error, no room for hesitation, every moment carrying the knowledge that one miscalculation meant being erased by friendly fire.
He made it clear.
If he had truly been hit by that light pillar, the outcome would have been death or permanent disability. There were no intermediate states when struck by weapons operating at that scale.
The Buddha transformation released.
Sengoku's body began shrinking from its golden colossus form, the Hito Hito no Mi, Model: Daibutsu reverting to baseline as he withdrew its power. The majestic thousand-meter figure compressed, became human-sized, resolved into an old man whose beard was tied into a braid and whose expression carried the exhaustion that came from pushing Mythical Zoan transformations to their limits.
He stood beside Artoria and assessed the battlefield.
"I cannot sense Uchiha Madara's presence," he said, and his tone suggested he was conducting Observation Haki scan while speaking. "He should have been completely destroyed."
The conclusion was logical. Excalibur had struck Susanoo directly — Artoria's aim had been true, the output had been maximum, the technique had removed everything in its path. An energy construct and the man inside it should have been erased together.
Sengoku's attention turned to the blue-haired woman standing on Artoria's other side.
Esdeath. No question about her identity — the ice manipulation at that scale, the specific cold beauty of her appearance, the murderous aura that emanated from her even in stillness. She was Admiral Esdeath from the Sky Screen's future broadcasts, arrived uninvited to save the situation.
Which planted doubt.
If she truly wanted to join the Marine for ideological reasons, Fleet Admiral Sengoku would accept her with sincerity. The organization needed Admiral-class fighters, needed people willing to stand against Emperor-level threats, needed the kind of power that could freeze the Devil's Triangle solid in thirty seconds.
But if Esdeath had joined for purpose — if there was an agenda that the Sky Screen hadn't revealed, if her loyalty was conditional or temporary or directed toward something other than the Marine's institutional mission — then precautions would be necessary. Behind-the-scenes monitoring. Verification of her commitments. The kind of oversight that assumed potential betrayal rather than assuming devotion.
Not all Admirals possessed Aramaki's brainless-fan personality. Some people had complex motivations.
Artoria had not lowered Excalibur.
The sword remained raised, held in both hands, the blade still faintly luminous with residual energy. Her familiarity with the Sword of Promised Victory — the years spent wielding it, the battles where it had been her primary weapon, the specific sensation of connecting with a target versus missing — told her something was wrong.
This felt like Loguetown.
The first time, she'd failed to hit Buggy the Clown despite direct targeting. The second time, she was failing to hit Uchiha Madara despite direct impact. The pattern suggested evasion rather than survival, suggested that her opponents had methods for avoiding Excalibur's output even when the technique struck true.
"My sword move hit Susanoo," she said carefully, "but I cannot guarantee it hit Uchiha Madara's body."
"When your sword struck," Esdeath added, and her voice carried the specific certainty of someone reporting sensory data rather than speculation, "I sensed through the ice crystal feedback that the enemy was still under my control. The ice hadn't released him. Susanoo was frozen solid at the moment of impact."
Esdeath's confidence in her ice manipulation was absolute.
She understood her ability intimately — knew exactly how much force was required to break her constructs, knew when something escaped versus when something shattered through, knew the difference between losing control and maintaining it. In the state she'd created, Susanoo could not break free through brute force. It could only remain frozen, a fish at the mercy of those holding the net.
But Artoria was not a king who lied about combat results.
If she said she didn't hit the target, she didn't hit the target. Which meant Uchiha Madara had gone somewhere in the moment between Excalibur's descent and its impact. Not destroyed. Relocated.
Faking death and fleeing didn't match his demonstrated personality.
Reality provided the answer quickly.
At the location where the enemy had disappeared — where the ocean had swallowed the ice Excalibur destroyed — space began distorting. Not the same distortion as his arrival, not the spatial technique that had deposited him on Sengoku's flagship initially, but a different quality of warping. This one suggested emergence from elsewhere rather than translation from nearby.
Uchiha Madara's figure appeared again.
He looked considerably worse than his previous appearance.
The armor he wore was torn — not damaged, torn, as though something with enormous force had grabbed it and ripped sections away. His face showed no wounds, no blood, no visible injuries, but the Uchiha clan's traditional hairstyle — which had remained unchanged throughout the battle, which had maintained its shape through Wood Release and fire ninjutsu and Susanoo manifestation — was disheveled. Hair that had been carefully arranged now moved freely in the wind.
The moment Susanoo shattered completely under Excalibur's assault, Madara had been struck by the technique's aftermath. Not the full output — if the full output had connected, there would be no body to discuss — but the peripheral energy, the shockwave that propagated outward from the impact point, the residual force that existed even when the primary beam missed.
His body had entered the Kamui dimension in that instant.
Not through choice — through reflex, through the specific survival instinct that decades of combat had refined into automatic response. The Mangekyō Sharingan technique that granted intangibility, that created a pocket dimension where the user could retreat, that made death avoidable even when struck by overwhelming force.
It prevented him from dying on the spot.
But it meant he'd revealed a card he might have preferred keeping hidden, meant Artoria and Sengoku now knew he possessed spatial evasion in addition to spatial teleportation, meant that killing him would require either preventing his escape or striking faster than he could activate the technique.
He would not give Artoria Pendragon a second clean shot.
"I, Uchiha Madara," he said, and blue light began blooming from his body, "will fight with full power."
The aura and energy emanating from him reached their peak.
This wasn't the preparation for another technique. This wasn't the buildup to ninjutsu or the channeling of chakra for a specific attack. This was transformation — the ancient ninja's body becoming a conduit for power that had been held in reserve, that he hadn't needed against any opponent in decades, that marked the boundary between holding back and committing completely.
His hair rose on ascending air currents, lifted by the energy pouring off him in waves. The ocean responded to his presence — the water that had replaced Esdeath's ice began forming a vortex, spiraling around his position as though gravity had shifted and he'd become the center.
"Whether you are Admiral or Emperor," Madara continued, and his voice carried across the battlefield with the weight of someone making a declaration rather than a threat, "everything is futile before Perfect Susanoo."
The transformation completed in the time it took to finish speaking.
The blue light that had been blooming from his body exploded outward and upward, constructing the energy giant not through stages but through singular manifestation. There was no skeletal phase, no muscle-layer development, no progressive building from incomplete to complete. The Perfect Susanoo simply appeared — fully formed, fully armored, one thousand meters tall.
It was like a mountain.
Not metaphorically like a mountain — literally comparable in scale to geological formations, a figure so massive that perspective became difficult to maintain. The construct wore samurai armor that had been rendered in blue-white energy, every detail visible despite the scale, every plate and joint and ornamental element present as though someone had taken a traditional Wano Country warrior's outfit and enlarged it to apocalyptic proportions.
The aura it exuded was overwhelming.
Every step it took shook the earth — not the ground, the earth, the planet itself responding to the weight and force of something that size moving. The frozen ocean cracked under its feet, massive fissures spreading outward from each footfall. The air pressure changed, became difficult to breathe, the atmosphere adjusting to accommodate an entity that displaced this much space.
Its existence felt like an insurmountable barrier.
Artoria, Sengoku, and Esdeath stood at its feet looking upward. The scale comparison was absurd — they were ants before a colossus, humans before a god, combatants whose power operated on a completely different magnitude than what they were witnessing. They had to crane their necks to see the construct's head, had to process that the thing they were looking at was mobile and hostile and being controlled by a single person.
"This is..." Sengoku's fists clenched involuntarily, "this is the real Susanoo."
His voice carried nervous tension.
He didn't dare make aggressive moves. The worldview he'd constructed over decades — the understanding of what was possible in combat, the hierarchy of power that placed Admirals near the ceiling, the assumptions about what techniques could and couldn't do — was shattering. Perfect Susanoo represented a category of capability he hadn't known existed.
It could stabilize an energy construct of this scale, could complete the shaping of a thousand-meter giant in near-instantaneous time, could render details with the precision that the appearance demonstrated. The construct wore a Tengu mask in the style of Wano Country's Crow Tengu — the long nose, the fierce expression, the aesthetic that traditional oni artwork used to depict divine guardians and vengeful spirits.
A pair of enormous wings extended from the construct's back, suitable for flight. Four arms were positioned at different points on the torso — two at the shoulders, two lower, all of them looming and deadly, each one larger than most buildings. Two samurai swords waited at the construct's sides, sheathed but ready, weapons that when drawn would be hundreds of meters long.
Blue flames wrapped the entire figure, giving it the appearance of something that was burning without being consumed, that existed in a state between solid matter and pure energy.
The presence created unprecedented suffocation.
"Is the gap so extreme?" Artoria whispered, and cold sweat appeared on her forehead despite the surrounding temperature. "Who can defeat such a monster?"
The Knight King felt powerlessness again — not the powerlessness of political constraints or institutional limitations, but the fundamental powerlessness of realizing that the enemy operated at a scale where her strongest techniques were insufficient. Was she going to repeat her old failures here? Was this how it ended?
The Sky Screen had shown that Uchiha Madara lived this long through methods it hadn't fully explained. Before his eventual resurrection, Madara had been defeated by someone from his era — a contemporary strong enough to thwart his conspiracy, powerful enough to ensure he didn't achieve his goals, capable enough to kill him despite Perfect Susanoo.
But that person wasn't here.
"The only one who could compete with me," Madara said from his position on the construct's forehead, and his voice carried no mercy for the weak facing their deaths, "was him. But he is no longer present. Perhaps this is fortunate for you — at least your deaths will be swift."
The Perfect Susanoo drew its first sword.
The weapon was a divine blade carrying immense power. As it cleared the sheath, energy released instantly — not gradually, not building to a peak, but present the moment the draw motion began. The output formed a destructive shockwave that was visible as distortion in the air, as pressure waves propagating outward at speeds that eliminated reaction time.
The shockwave moved like a furious light dragon, rushing forward at speeds that made evasion a question of prediction rather than response. It struck Esdeath's frozen ocean surface with a deafening impact — not the sound of ice breaking, the sound of ice detonating, massive chunks exploding upward and outward like glass subjected to overwhelming force.
The shockwave's power was not limited to the ice.
It spread in all directions, the penetrating force tearing through anything in its path. The frozen sea that had extended horizon-to-horizon began violent turbulence, the ice that remained intact lifted by the energy passing beneath it, waves forming underneath and pushing upward.
The sea itself began surging.
Water that had been locked under ice erupted as the frozen surface shattered, currents that had been suppressed by freezing suddenly released and moving chaotically. The force of the shockwave propagated downward and outward, and eventually the ocean began rising on both sides of the impact point — lifted by the energy displacement, forced upward into walls that climbed higher and higher.
The sea split.
Not metaphorically — literally parted, two massive walls of water forming on either side of a channel that extended to the seabed, dividing the ocean into separate sections in a demonstration of power that made observers question whether they were witnessing a technique or a natural disaster.
The incomparable power of Perfect Susanoo brought visual impact beyond conventional measurement.
Marines on the distant warships — those who'd successfully evacuated the frozen battlefield, those who were watching from what they'd believed was safe distance — felt their capacity for speech fail them. This was the power of God. Uchiha Madara, capable of splitting seas with a single sword draw, could no longer be called human.
Artoria, Esdeath, and Sengoku scattered immediately.
They moved in different directions the moment the shockwave approached, creating distance from each other and from the impact point, using every evasion technique they possessed to avoid being caught. The calculation was simple: if they could dodge one strike, they could dodge a second. If they could avoid ten, they might survive long enough for reinforcements or for an opening.
But if they could dodge one sword now, how would they dodge the tenth? The hundredth? The five hundredth strike from a construct that didn't tire, that operated at this scale, that could continue attacking until its targets were exhausted and could no longer move?
The wisdom from the Sky Screen echoed in every observer's mind:
Everyone below King-level is an ant.
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