'This world....' Light Yagami looked past the two approaching elite guards, his dark eyes locking onto the bloated, vacantly arrogant face of Saint Valerius. The blood-red numbers hovering above the World Noble's head—2,450,000—burned themselves into Light's retinas.
'...is ill.'
The air in Grove 1 did not merely grow tense; it became a suffocating weight. The World Nobles were not simply men; they were the living, breathing manifestation of an eight-hundred-year-old absolute law.
To look at them without permission was a crime.
To speak to them was treason.
To raise a hand against them was to summon the full, apocalyptic, world-ending wrath of the Marine Admirals upon whichever island was unlucky enough to host the transgression.
Hundreds of seasoned criminals, slave merchants, and heavily armed bounty hunters—men who had sailed the Grand Line, butchered rival crews, and slaughtered Marines without a second thought—kept their foreheads pressed desperately against the filthy cobblestone. They didn't dare breathe loudly. The collective fear radiating from the crowd was so thick it tasted like copper and ash on the back of the tongue.
In the center of the plaza, Saint Valerius sat perched atop his weeping human mount, his face obscured behind the thick, resinous curve of his bubble-helmet.
He pointed his golden riding crop at the small pink haired girl.
"Collar her." Valerius whined, his voice distorted and tinny through the suit's internal speakers, yet dripping with a horrific, casual cruelty. "I want to see how long it takes to break the spirit of a girl with pink hair. I have not done Pink yet. Hmm... maybe I'll have the surgeons graft pink fish-scales onto her face huhu... she will definitely look even better!"
The two elite, black-suited guards nodded silently. They broke away from the procession, their heavy leather combat boots clicking rhythmically against the stone. In their hands, they held an iron slave collar—a thick, rusted band of metal wired with a lethal explosive charge. Once clasped around a throat, stepping out of line meant instant, messy decapitation.
Bonney took a step backward. She possessed a terrifying Devil Fruit that could reduce these guards to crying infants in a matter of seconds. But her feet felt like they were cast in lead.
The biological, ingrained terror of the World Government—a fear drilled into every citizen of the world since childhood—paralyzed her muscles. The stories of what the Celestial Dragons did to their "pets" flashed behind her eyes in a horrific montage of dark basements, surgical tools, and screaming women.
She retreated until her back hit the solid, reassuring fabric of Light's pristine white coat. Her hands shot backward, gripping the heavy fabric with white-knuckled desperation.
"Light..." Bonney whispered, her voice entirely stripped of its usual brash, pirate arrogance. It was a genuine, trembling plea. Light had never told her any of his plans. She was begging.
"Mm... I'm here." Light replied.
"...wha-" hiccup "...what should I do?"
"Watch Big Brother be psycho again, what else."
The little girl started crying.
Light simply stood there, his dark, sterile eyes locked onto the two approaching guards.
For two weeks, he had used his Transmigration Gift as a blunt instrument. He had pulled massive ships from the water. He had pushed away compressed-air bombs. He had treated Force Authority like a crude sledgehammer, draining his Life Force stamina at a terrifying rate to generate massive, localized gravitational fields.
But over the last forty-eight hours, sitting alone in his dark office and contemplating the architecture of his power, Light had experienced an epiphany. He wasn't just manipulating gravity anymore. He had authority over The Force! He didn't need to push the guards away. He just needed to grip the space they occupied.
Light raised his left hand. He didn't shout an attack name. He merely pinched his thumb and forefinger together in the empty air, like a man catching a falling leaf.
Stasis.
The two elite guards froze.
The guard on the left was frozen with his combat boot hovering exactly two inches above the cobblestone, defying gravity entirely. The guard on the right was stuck mid-reach, his hand extended toward Bonney with the heavy iron collar, his face suddenly trapped in a mask of incomprehensible confusion.
They couldn't move their limbs. They couldn't blink. The fabric of their black suits hung suspended in mid-air, completely motionless despite the salty ocean breeze sweeping through the mangrove roots. They were trapped in invisible concrete.
Bonney slowly opened her eyes, peeking out from behind Light's arm. She stared at the frozen men, her jaw dropping as she realized they looked like statues carved from obsidian.
"W-What?" Saint Valerius stammered, slapping his riding crop against his gloved palm. He leaned forward on his slave's back, his bloated face twisting in petulant annoyance. "Why did you stop?! Are you deaf?! I told you to collar the girl! Do it! Do it now, or I'll have your families fed to the Sea Kings!"
The guards didn't move. Their eyes, wide and bloodshot, screamed with a silent, suffocating terror. They were trying to push forward, trying to obey their god, but the very air around them refused to yield.
Light casually unclasped his right hand from his pocket. He took a slow, measured step forward, moving past the trembling Bonney. His polished boots clicked softly against the stone. It was the only sound in the dead-silent plaza.
"You!" Valerius shrieked, his voice pitching upward as his limited, pampered brain finally realized the handsome Marine was the source of the defiance. The Noble's vacant eyes widened in a mixture of profound outrage and disbelief. "What are you doing?! I am Saint Valerius! I am a descendant of the Creators of this world! You are a Marine! You are a dog meant to guard my property! Drop to the ground and lick my boots, you filthy, disobedient insect!"
Light didn't stop walking. The pleasant, golden-boy smile that had charmed the Sabaody press and the local garrison was gone. In its place was a look of absolute, chilling emptiness.
Panic finally pierced the Celestial Dragon's thick veil of unearned arrogance. Valerius dropped his riding crop. His fat, white-gloved fingers fumbled wildly at his hip, drawing his customized, gold-plated flintlock pistol. His hands were shaking so badly he nearly dropped it, but he managed to aim the heavy barrel directly at Light's face.
BANG!
The gunshot echoed like a cannon blast through the colossal roots of the mangrove trees. A thick cloud of acrid black powder smoke erupted from the muzzle. A heavy, jagged lead ball shot across the plaza at blinding speed, aimed perfectly between the Rear Admiral's dark eyes.
Captain Haas, kneeling on the ground twenty feet away, bit his tongue so hard he tasted blood to keep from screaming out a warning.
Light didn't dodge. He didn't use Soru to blur out of existence. He didn't even drop his hand to the hilt of his sword to deflect the projectile.
He simply raised his left index finger.
The bullet stopped dead in the air, exactly three inches from Light's right pupil.
The collective breath of Grove 1 was sucked away in a vacuum of sheer, mind-breaking horror.
The heavy lead ball hung suspended in the empty space, still spinning furiously. The friction of the air hissed audibly, the kinetic energy of the gunpowder struggling fruitlessly against the pinpoint, hyper-dense kinetic dampener Light had erected with a mere thought. The air around the bullet rippled like a stone dropped in a still pond, the heat of the lead radiating against Light's cold skin.
Light didn't break his stride. As he walked slowly forward, the bullet remained suspended in the air beside him, keeping pace with his face. He casually reached up, plucked the spinning, searing-hot lead out of the empty air with his bare thumb and forefinger, and dropped it onto the cobblestone.
It hit the ground with a soft, pathetic clink.
Saint Valerius let out a high-pitched, inhuman squeal. He scrambled backward, his boots slipping off the sweaty back of his weeping slave. The World Noble hit the dirt hard, his bubble-helmet bouncing against the stone. His golden pistol clattered away out of reach. The absolute, divine invincibility he had known since the day he was born—the lie that the world had fed him for decades—was shattering in real-time.
"G-Guards!" Valerius screamed, kicking his legs frantically, kicking his own slave in the face in his desperation to back away from the approaching Marine. "Kill him! Kill him now! Admiral! Somebody call an Admiral!"
The remaining four black-suited retainers behind the Noble drew their heavy cutlasses. They were highly trained assassins, conditioned to protect the dragon at all costs. With a synchronized shout, they launched themselves forward, sprinting toward Light with lethal intent, their blades glinting in the afternoon sun.
Light didn't even look at them. He kept his dark, sterile eyes locked entirely on the pathetic, sniveling Noble squirming in the dirt.
As the guards closed within ten feet, Light simply flicked his left wrist outward in a dismissive, backhanded motion, as if swatting away a foul odor.
Repulsion. It was a highly concentrated, razor-thin shockwave of spatial displacement. It hit the four elite guards with the concussive force of an exploding warship.
CRACK-BOOM!
The sound was deafening, a thunderclap that shook the very roots of the island. The guards didn't just fly backward; their ribs shattered instantly. Arms and legs snapped in unnatural directions as they were launched through the air at bullet-like speeds. They sailed completely across the massive plaza, crashing violently through the thick, reinforced brick facade of the Human Auction House. The stone wall completely caved in, burying the unconscious, mangled bodies of the retainers beneath tons of smoking rubble.
A thick cloud of dust billowed out from the destroyed auction house, drifting across the silent plaza.
Light stepped calmly over the terrified, trembling slave who was still chained to the ground. He stood directly over Saint Valerius. The shadow of the Smiling Reaper fell over the Celestial Dragon, cold and absolute.