Chapter 157: Whitebeard's "Seaquake"
The beer-gutted commander wondered briefly if he was hallucinating. Or dreaming. Maybe everything he was seeing — everything happening right now — was a dream, and none of it was real.
He knew Stand users existed. His nation's own power broker was one, and a formidable one at that. He himself was a Stand user.
But even in a world where Stands existed — inexplicable, rule-breaking, impossible by any ordinary standard — nothing explained a man six or seven meters tall. Nothing explained walking on open water as if it were a sidewalk. This was simply not scientific.
He pinched his own thigh. Hard.
Pain. Sharp and immediate.
Not a dream. Not a hallucination. Real.
He exhaled through his teeth. The fleshy face arranged itself into something between disbelief and grim calculation, and then a thought arrived:
Wait. A thousand soldiers, wiped out in an instant. Dozens of Stand users, all dead. They said it was beings from another world.
A man six meters tall, walking on the sea — that's one of them.
The cannon fire from the ship to his right interrupted the thought and snapped him back to the present. He turned and swore under his breath.
Idiots. Fire before you even know what you're dealing with.
Though if the man really was an enemy from another world, it didn't matter much. Orders from above had been clear: contact means engagement. Kill on sight. This was a war between civilizations — not about right and wrong, only about which side you were on.
Whitebeard felt the incoming shells through his Observation Haki long before they arrived. His expression didn't change, but his smile widened slightly.
"Gurararara — this old man arrived at just the right time. Wall-to-wall warships. Finally, a proper fight!"
A casual swing of the bisento — not even invoking his Devil Fruit ability, just the blade and the arm behind it. A narrow arc of slashing force shot forward and met the incoming shells several hundred meters out.
Each shell split cleanly in half.
Boom. Boom. Boom.
The detonations filled the air above the water between Whitebeard and the fleet — blooming like fireworks, each accompanied by a concussive crack that rolled across the waves.
The ship that had opened fire went silent.
Every person on its deck stared.
A shell. A live artillery shell. Cut in half by a man swinging a polearm. From hundreds of meters away.
Other ships registered the same sight and recalibrated.
Whatever this thing was — it was the enemy. That much was confirmed.
"General. Orders?"
The beer-gutted commander stared at the feed, then said it: "He's one of them. Something we don't have a framework for. We have to kill him. Coordinate with every ship in range — concentrate fire. All batteries, all angles. Take him down."
Orders went out. Every cannon mouth in the surrounding fleet turned toward the same target. The air above the water became very heavy.
"Fire."
The broadside erupted. Dozens of ships, thousands of rounds, the surface of the ocean disappearing under smoke and muzzle flash and the continuous hammering of guns.
In Whitebeard's Observation Haki range, it looked slow.
Very slow.
"My body's been brought back to its peak — beyond my peak, actually." His smile hadn't moved. "This level of firepower is simply not enough."
The bisento blade shimmered with pale light, the metal vibrating at high frequency. He swung — but the blade seemed to strike something invisible at the midpoint of the motion. A sound like shattering glass, and then cracks spread outward through the air in every direction, visible as fractures in space itself.
Every shell. Every bullet. Stopped.
The air was full of suspended ordinance, hanging motionless, and then —
Boom. Boom. Boom. Boom—
Chain detonations. The fleet's massed salvo turning into a sky full of explosions, none of them reaching their target.
Whitebeard lowered the bisento and looked out at the fleet.
"Gurararara — you've had two shots now. Fair is fair — it's this old man's turn." He set the bisento aside, balled one hand into a fist. White light gathered around his knuckles. The muscles of his arm corded and flexed, veins standing out across his forearm and up to his temple.
He was putting real effort into this one.
"Let me send something back to you!"
"SEAQUAKE!!"
The fist came down onto the surface of the ocean.
He was still walking the air — Moonwalk kept him above the water, so the strike delivered its force directly into the sea rather than sinking him.
One second.
Two seconds.
Nothing visible.
On the ships, the uneasy feeling started before anyone could name it.
The beer-gutted commander lowered his binoculars. "What is he doing? Why is he hitting the water? The fleet fire didn't even scratch him — all the shells detonated in midair again. Whatever power he has, if we could capture it—"
He stopped talking.
He stopped breathing, briefly.
The horizon was no longer flat.
A wall of water was rising. Slowly at first, then faster. He watched it climb. Twenty meters. Fifty. A hundred.
Still climbing.
He thought of the disaster years ago — a tsunami barely fifteen meters high, and the death toll in the tens of thousands, entire coastal cities stripped bare. He thought of the engineering studies that concluded no structure on earth could withstand a twenty-meter wave, that no ship could survive one.
This wave was two hundred meters tall. Its base stretched for kilometers.
And still climbing.
"Impossible. This — this can't be — this is a tsunami—"
The commander sat down. He didn't choose to. His legs simply stopped holding him.
We came here to take a world. To claim its resources. We thought the other side had some interesting power we'd need to deal with.
We had no idea.
No idea at all.
The wave came down.
The sound was not a sound so much as a physical impact — the kind that ruptured eardrums at range.
Warships that had survived world wars, reinforced against modern munitions, went over like bath toys. The fleet that had stretched across the ocean like a shoal of fish became wreckage.
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