The air in God Valley carried the sharp scent of iron and a hint of ozone.
Rocks D. Xebec was still standing, but barely. His wounds crisscrossed his torso like plowed furrows, and blood gushed ceaselessly from a wound that ran down his side. Facing him, equally battered, Gol D. Roger and Monkey D. Garp stared, panting, their fists still clenched and their will still burning.
The three of them formed a triangle of destruction.
"Good!" someone shouted from the Marine ranks. "Vice Admiral Garp is winning!"
"Captain Roger! Hold on!"
At the other end of the island, the sky had been a private battlefield for several minutes.
Scopper Gaban landed on a rock, his feet planted like anchors, both axes in hand, his jaw clenched. On the other side, descending slowly through the clouds with his dragon wings outstretched, Kaido looked down at him with that perpetual bored expression that Gaban had always found the most irritating thing in the world.
"You're strong for a third-rate fighter," Kaido said, almost as a compliment. "You've already done more than most."
"Shut up and get down," Gaban replied, spinning his axes. Kaido came down.
He didn't glide. He didn't descend. He fell, like a mountain that decides to move, and the impact of his landing ripped cracks in the earth that stretched to the edge of the cliff.
The Kanabo described a horizontal arc, enveloped in Armament Haki so dense that the air around it vibrated like a bell before it struck.
Gaban blocked it with his two crossed axes.
The impact sent him sliding fifteen meters backward, his heels leaving furrows in the stone. He stopped at the edge of a crevice, his arms shaking and his teeth clenched. Strong.
"Too strong." He had fought monsters his entire life following Roger. But this was different. Every blow from Kaido didn't just hurt, it weighed heavily, as if the entire world were behind every movement.
He lunged forward. The axes traced two lines of Absolute Haki, one high and one low, seeking to open his left flank. Kaido leaned just enough, letting one pass that grazed the scales, and blocked the second with his forearm without even bothering to use the mace.
The metal crashed against his hardened skin, and the sound was like a cannon blast.
Gaban felt the impact reverberate up to his shoulder.
"That hurt," Kaido said, and for the first time, he sounded genuinely satisfied.
What followed was a storm. Kaido attacked without flourish, without elaborate strategy, just brute force applied with the precision of someone who had spent decades at the limits of human endurance. The mace fell, and Gaban dodged, counterattacked, searching for blind spots, the moments between blows.
He found two. He exploited them. The axes left real marks, deep cuts in Kaido's side that would have taken anyone else out of the fight.
Kaido barely frowned.
"Good eye," he muttered.
Then he struck Gaban with the back of his hand, sending him spinning through the air like a leaf in the wind.
Gaban, who had been covering the retreat of the wounded from Roger's side, saw him fall and leaped to intercept him before he hit the ground.
"Gaban!" He caught him. He checked the wounds in a second. Deep. Severe. Not fatal, but close.
"Damn spawn," he muttered through gritted teeth, looking at Kaido. "How is he still standing after everything we put him through?" Because that was the question no one on the battlefield could answer with certainty. Kaido had fought Roger.
He had exchanged blows with Rayleigh before Gaban intercepted him. And now he was still there, standing, with wounds that would have been fatal to any other living being, breathing with the slow, heavy cadence of someone who still had strength left.
On the dragon's scales, something was beginning to change.
The azure of the scales began to turn a thick, ink-like black, spreading from the center of his chest outward, covering scale by scale. A trail of clouds rose from his back, until the blue dragon was enveloped in an armor of Haki that made the air around him vibrate.
Whitebeard, still young but already impossible to ignore, watched from afar with narrowed eyes. He recognized that state. He himself had recently reached it.
The Awakening of the Devil Fruit the Uo Uo no mi model Seiryu Kaido had also reached that point a point that not even his canon counterpart could achieve.
That's when everything changed.
It wasn't a noise. It was a feeling in the air.
It spread across the battlefield like a shadow that needs no light to cast itself. The island's animals fell silent. The wind seemed to waver.
Roger frowned. Garp clenched his jaw.
The body of one of the Gorosei, Jaygarcia Saturn, froze, like a puppet whose puppeteer had just pulled the strings tight.
And then and Dark Cloud entered in him.
The presence that had spread across the entire island converged on that single body, and Saturno's eyes emptied of everything they had once been.
Saint Nerona Imu had arrived in God Valley.
Everyone felt it at the same time. Roger, Garp, Rocks, Newgate, Linlin, Kaido. Even the pirates looting on the fringes of the battle looked up, not quite knowing why, guided by the instinct that screamed at them that something fundamental had changed.
The being that now inhabited Saturn's body didn't attack immediately. First, it observed. With the calm of one who hasn't had to rush for centuries, its eyes scanned the battlefield: the dead, the wounded, the half-ruined mountains.
Then it began to move, and each step it took crushed marines and pirates alike. Without distinction. Without preference. With the indifference of someone sweeping the table before sitting down.
Roger saw two of his men fall before he reacted.
"Gaban," he said, his voice unmistakable. "Take the wounded to the ship. Take the treasure and get out of here."
"Captain."
"Now." Gaban gritted his teeth, carried those who couldn't walk, and began to move. Rayleigh had already brought Shakky ashore. The rest of Roger's pirates followed without being told twice.
Roger stayed.
Garp also ignored the warnings from his own soldiers about what it meant to face one of the Five Elders, about the decrees that would befall him, about the end that awaited him if he crossed that line.
He ignored them all.
Because what he faced was no longer a matter of pirates versus marines.
It was something much older.
Rocks, still on his knees, looked up at the approaching figure. And instead of fear, something akin to recognition was reflected on his face.
"Rocks." Imu's voice came from Saturn's motionless mouth, resonating directly into the bones of those who heard it. "Descendant of Davy Jones. You have reached the end of the road."
"You've been saying that to my family, Rat King, for eight hundred years," Rocks replied, spitting blood onto the ground. "And here we are."