Neither of them moved.
The forest had burned itself out around them. What remained were blackened trunks, scorched ground, and smoke sitting low between the trees. The fire had eaten through the cover and the light was flat and grey across what was left.
Lucien lowered his arms slowly. Heat still ran from his wrists to his elbows and his hands had gone partially numb. He opened and closed his right fist once. Functional. Barely.
Sakazuki walked toward him.
Lucien pushed a sound from behind, sharp and close. Sakazuki didn't turn. Lucien sent the sense of weight forward from the right, committed. Sakazuki shifted his guard and waited. Lucien came in from the left, and Sakazuki was already there, a wall of magma meeting him before he'd closed half the distance. Lucien broke off and took the heat across his forearm as he cleared it.
He landed hard and put a hand down to catch himself.
Sakazuki had stopped reacting to the reads. He wasn't ignoring them, Lucien could feel them landing, but he was holding position through them instead of committing. He'd spent enough time in the fight to understand the pattern. Every false read now bought half a second at most before Sakazuki corrected and settled back into his stance, waiting for the real attack to follow.
Lucien tried a sound distortion from directly above. Sakazuki glanced up, then looked straight back at him.
"You keep using the same pretty little tricks," Sakazuki said.
Lucien didn't answer. He pushed a false approach from the right and came in from the left. Sakazuki met him with a straight magma punch that caught his guard and drove him back three metres through scorched earth. The impact rang through both arms.
He looked at his hands. The Haki had held. The cost of that single block hadn't, as the haki just kept disappearing.
He tried one more exchange. Full false read, low approach from behind, completely committed. Sakazuki turned halfway, caught himself, and met Lucien's actual approach with a counter that caught him across the shoulder and spun him sideways. Lucien hit the ground, got up, and stood still.
That was enough of that.
The exhaustion had moved inward. His legs were heavy in a way that wasn't going to improve. The Armament Haki was costing him more per use than it had at the start, and the drain had stacked across the whole fight into something impossible to ignore. He had maybe one clean exchange left in him. Maybe.
He needed it to count.
Borsalino stood at the edge of town and looked at what was left of the northern tree line.
Burnt trunks. Scorched earth. Smoke still rising in thin columns where the fire had been hottest. Three houses on the edge of town were gone entirely. Two more had lost walls. The market stalls along the northern road were black frames.
He exhaled slowly through his nose.
Someone was going to have to file paperwork for all of this. Civilian compensation requests, structural assessments, at least one formal inquiry into proportionality. His name on all of it.
What a mess.
He put his hands in his pockets, and then he moved.
Idris put the last Marine down with a shot to the knee and was already reloading when he saw it. A beam of light crossed the sky above the rooftops, fast and clean, aimed at the northern forest. No arc. No hesitation.
Borsalino was moving.
Idris finished reloading, checked that Law was behind cover, and looked at him.
"Stay close," he said.
"I know," Law said.
Idris moved.
He crossed the burnt houses at a run, cleared the last row of buildings, and came out onto the scorched ground at the forest's edge. He slowed, taking in the picture. Burnt trees, cooling slag, smoke flat across the ground, and in the middle of it, Lucien and Sakazuki standing across from each other, both of them moving like men carrying serious damage.
Borsalino was already there, a few metres to his left, hands in his pockets, watching with the relaxed attention of someone who saw no need to involve himself. He glanced at Idris once, noted the rifle, and looked back at the fight.
Idris looked at Borsalino. Then at the fight. Then he stayed exactly where he was.
Sakazuki's eyes hadn't moved from Lucien.
Lucien looked at the scorched earth between them. The patterns weren't working. The Haki drain sat heavily across his whole body. One exchange left.
He stopped trying to hide what he was doing.
He walked forward at a measured pace, Armament Haki flooding both arms, and threw a straight right hand at full commitment. No distortion. No misdirection. Nothing underneath it. Just a punch, exactly what it looked like.
Sakazuki read it clean and stepped in with a magma counter aimed at Lucien's chest.
Lucien pushed everything he had left into the fruit at that exact moment. Not a sound, not a false position, nothing he had used before. Something deeper, something he hadn't reached for deliberately. He felt it leave him like the last of everything.
Sakazuki's body betrayed him.
He had read the punch correctly. His Haki had the angle, the timing, the weight behind it. He stepped forward and his body stepped back. He drove the magma counter forward and his arm pulled it inward, the attack folding toward his own chest before he caught it. Half a second of complete disconnect between what his mind told his body and what his body did.
Half a second was enough.
Lucien's fist connected with Sakazuki's jaw with everything left behind it, Armament Haki burning across his knuckles at full output.
The hardest thing he had ever hit.
He felt it travel through his arm, into his shoulder, and then the drain arrived. Everything that had been accumulating across the entire fight, all at once. His legs stopped working. He was aware of the ground coming up before he felt it, and then he felt it, eyes still open as he hit the scorched earth.
Across the clearing, through the smoke and flat grey light, he watched Sakazuki go down.
Neither of them got back up.
Chapter Title: Something New
************************************
1 Chapter For Every 50 Power Stones. Please Do Support.