BANG. BANG. BANG!
"GUHH--"
"YAAA!"
"KILLLLL!!"
The frozen bay of Marineford was no longer a place of logic or strategy. It was a hellscape where the legends of two eras collided, and the ordinary soldiers caught in the middle could do little more than pray.
On the eastern flank, the air was a strobe light of violence. Every time Silvers Rayleigh's obsidian-black blade met Admiral Kizaru's sword of pure light, a shockwave rippled through the ice, violently knocking over Marines and pirates alike.
"You're breathing a bit heavy, Rayleigh-san," Kizaru drawled, his face illuminated by a dozen glowing light-clones hovering in the air.
"Perhaps retirement was the better choice after all?"
Rayleigh didn't answer with words. He adjusted his glasses with his free hand, his eyes sharp. He could feel the weight of his years, the way his stamina wasn't quite what it was when he sailed the Grand Line with Roger. But his spirit was unyielding. He had seen the image of his Captain's son in chains.
To Rayleigh, this wasn't just a war—it was a final, sacred duty to his Captain long gone.
High above, Portgas D. Ace watched the carnage with a hollowed-out expression. His heritage had been stripped bare before the world. He was the "Devil's Son," a curse to be purged. But as he looked down at Rayleigh—a man who had stood by his father—and Whitebeard—the man who had become his father—a crushing guilt threatened to drown him.
'Why?' Ace thought, a single tear freezing on his cheek as he strained against the Seastone cuffs.
'Why would you all throw your lives away for me? I'm just a mistake... I shouldn't have been born.'
Down on the chaotic ice, amid the roaring cannons and the clashing steel, an off-pink haired soldier was having a panic attack.
Petty Officer Coby.
His knees were shaking so violently he could barely stand. He held his standard-issue Marine cutlass in front of him, but his knuckles were entirely white. The sheer, overwhelming Haki of the monsters fighting around him was suffocating.
"COBYY! COBY!!!"
Helmeppo was shouting something next to him, but Coby couldn't hear it over the ringing in his ears.
Coby looked up, desperately seeking a brief reprieve from the blood and the screaming. He looked at the thick, grey clouds hanging over Marineford.
Suddenly.
He saw a tiny black dot.
Coby blinked.
'A bird?' he thought numbly.
'But it isn't moving like a bird?'
It was getting larger. The dot expanded into a silhouette, and a strange, low, guttural whistling sound began to hum into the atmosphere.
"Helmeppo..." Coby whispered, his voice trembling. He pointed a shaking finger at the sky.
"What in the world..."
ZNNGH. ZNNNGH.
ZNNNNNNGH!
Other Marines around them began to stop fighting, their heads tilting upward. Even the pirates paused, confused by the sudden shift in the Marines' attention. The low whistle was escalating into a terrifying, mechanical shriek. The air pressure in the plaza began to change.
Dracule Mihawk stopped his casual slaughter of the Whitebeard affiliated subordinates. He lowered his black blade, Yoru, his hawk-like eyes narrowing to dangerous slits as he looked straight up.
"This presence..."
Donquixote Doflamingo let out a sharp, hysterical cackle, though his forehead was suddenly beaded with cold sweat.
"Fufufufu....FUAHAHAHAHA!"
"Oye OYE!... Sengoku!"
"Is this a new Marine weapon?! Because if it isn't, we're all in a lot of trouble you know!"
HUMMMM.
The black silhouette broke completely through the lowest layer of clouds.
Coby's cutlass slipped from his numb fingers and clattered onto the ice. His jaw dropped in terror.
It wasn't a boulder. It wasn't an ice block.
It was a Marine galleon. A hundred-ton behemoth of reinforced wood and iron, fully armed with cannons and steel plating.
And it was falling. But that wasn't the problem.
The problem was its speed. It was plummeting straight down at them at an unnatural speed—sixty, perhaps eighty kilometers per hour.
The behemoth was nose-diving, propelled by an invisible, crushing telekinetic force. The rigging snapped and whipped wildly. The heavy canvas sails tore to shreds under the sheer air resistance. Fast enough to turn thousands of tons of mass into a cataclysmic weapon.
"BATTLESHIP!" Coby screamed, his voice breaking hysterically.
ZNNNNG.
BANG. BANG. BANG. BANG. BANG!
"THERE'S A BATTLESHIP FALLING FROM THE SKY!"
Total panic instantly seized the plaza.
"RU- RUNNN!"
"GET AWAY!"
CLANK. CLANK.
Men dropped their weapons and trampled each other, desperately trying to run from the massive shadow rapidly eclipsing the battlefield.
"...It's him" Admiral Akainu growled.
'But more powerful.'
It was well said that the enemy knew you best.
Light had indeed used the rest of his points to push his Life Force to Level 20. And as he had expected, Level 20 upgrade was a big one.
CRACK- DRIP...
TSSSSSS.
Akainu remained seated in his chair just below the scaffold, his magma-covered hands gripping the armrests so hard the wood instantly turned to smoking charcoal. He recognized that strange Devil Fruit. He remembered the terrifying feeling of being drowned by getting the ocean thrown over him in the Saboady.
"Defend the scaffold (execution platform)!" Sengoku roared.
The Fleet Admiral didn't hesitate. He knew that if that massive ship hit the platform at that speed, the symbol of absolute Marine authority would be erased in an instant, taking Ace, Garp, and himself with it.
ZOOMMMMM.
A blinding, golden radiance erupted from his body. Sengoku grew to ten times his normal size, his skin transforming into solid, polished gold.
BOOM!
The Golden Buddha utilized Soru and Geppo in an unnatural fashion and leaped into the air.
"Mad...IMPACT!"
KRA-BOOOOOM!
Sengoku's massive, glowing palms met the prow of the falling battleship head-on. The collision unleashed a deafening, golden shockwave—a concussive blast of pure force that instantly shattered the remaining glass windows of the Marine Headquarters building behind him.
The hundred-ton battleship groaned agonizingly in mid-air. Its structural integrity entirely failed as the Buddha's shockwave rippled through its hull, pulverizing the galleon into a million splinters of wood and twisted scrap metal.
Thud.
"HA.... HA...."
The debris rained down over the execution scaffold like lethal, jagged snow. Sengoku landed heavily back on the platform, his golden form steaming in the freezing air, his breath heavy.
Down below, Coby shielded his head with his arms as pieces of wood clattered against the ice around him.
"He... he stopped it!" a Marine cheered desperately, tears streaming down his face.
"Fleet Admiral Sengoku stopped it! We're alive!"
A collective wave of relief washed over the battlefield. The pirates were stunned, the Marines were thanking the heavens, and everyone assumed the bizarre, terrifying nightmare was over.
Then, the sky screamed again.
SCREECH. ZNNNNNNNGH.
The relief instantly evaporated, replaced by a suffocating dread.
A second battleship broke the clouds. It was descending at the exact same terrifying speed of nearly eighty kilometers per hour, the wind howling violently around its colossal hull. But this one wasn't aimed at the Marines.
It was aimed further back, right toward the center of the Whitebeard fleet.
"YOU DARE?!!"
Whitebeard's voice was a tectonic event, filled with a father's absolute wrath.
THUD. GRIP.
The Strongest Man in the World didn't use a local shockwave. He planted his boots firmly on the deck of the Moby Dick, gathered the very air around his massive fist, and created a glowing white orb of vibrational energy pulsating with the power to crack the world itself.
CRACK-KA-BOOOOM!
He punched upward.
The atmosphere literally cracked like a pane of glass. The second falling battleship slammed into an invisible, vibrating wall of shattered space.
CRASH-KA-BOOM.
For a heartbeat, the massive galleon hung there, suspended in mid-air—and then it simply exploded outward. The sheer frequency of the Gura Gura no Mi reduced the massive ship to a cloud of fine dust and splinters before it could crush his allied captains.
"You sons of mine..." Whitebeard rumbled, his eyes narrowed as he scanned the grey sky above.
"Stay behind me!"
The pirates were terrified.
SCREECH.
"NO! NO! NOOOO!!", someone screamed.
The third ship arrived.
The nightmare was relentless. This one came from a slightly different angle, aimed directly at the Marine front lines where the elite Vice Admirals and the Giant Squad were holding back the pirate vanguard.
Step. Step.
"Enough of this nonsense!"
Admiral Akainu finally stood up. His presence was like a volcano finally venting a decade of pent-up pressure. He didn't jump like Sengoku, and he didn't strike the air like Whitebeard. He simply raised his arm, which violently transformed into a churning, massive hound of molten, bubbling rock.
"Inugami Guren!" (Dog Bites the Red Lotus!)
BANGGGGGGGG!
The magma dog leaped into the sky with a terrifying roar, its heat so intense it instantly turned the falling snow into scalding steam. The molten beast collided with the third battleship head-on. The sheer temperature melted through the iron hull and the reinforced wood like a hot knife through wax. The ship didn't just break; it was entirely incinerated, turning into a rain of molten slag that hissed violently as it hit the frozen bay.
Akainu stood there, his magma dripping onto the platform, his eyes burning with a focused, singular hatred directed at the sky above.
"COME OUT!"
"YAGAMIIII!"
The battlefield was silent except for the terrifying Admiral's scream.
Three powerful men of the sea had stopped three falling ships. But the psychological toll was already setting in. Coby was on his knees, hyperventilating. The Marines were looking up in sheer disbelief at their own warships being used as orbital artillery. The pirates were paralyzed by the sheer, overwhelming force required to simply survive the last thirty seconds.
Was there...? Was there more?
"... Interesting." The World's Strongest Swordsman muttered to himself as he had seen something interesting that would soon follow.
Sengoku, Whitebeard, and Akainu stood in a triangle of immense power. All of them were breathing with a steady rhythm of combat. Their heads simultaneously tilted back, their Observation Haki flaring as the whistling sound returned to the sky.
But this time, it was indeed different.
Three massive shadows began to expand over the frozen bay, identical, synchronized, and plunging downward at a hundred kilometers per hour.
At that speed, if they hit the ground, perhaps beside the strong ones, no one would remain alive. Hundreds of thousands would die.
The "meat grinder" had completely stopped. Every single man on the ice, from Petty Officer Coby to the Dark King himself, looked up at the sky and felt the exact same, chilling sensation:
Insignificance.
.
.
.
A/N: WARRRRRR! RAAHHHHH!
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