A/N: I deeply apologize for the delay readers, I will finish writing the story by tomorrow so the updates will remain stable even if I'm dragged into another placement drive.
Recap: Light has just used Whitebeard's death as an opportunity to literally backstab Akainu, piercing his heart. And killing him. Both Whitebeard and Akainu are dead.
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"YAGAMIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII!"
The scream did not belong to a man.
It was inhuman.
Fleet Admiral Sengoku's voice tore through the paralyzed atmosphere of Marineford with the concussive force of a nuclear detonation. The sheer, unadulterated volume of his Haki momentarily changed colours from golden to red.
BOOOOM!
It rode the soundwaves, physically cracking the bedrock of the shattered plaza.
"AAAAAR!!!"
"KEU-!"
The surviving Marines, still frozen in absolute horror at the sight of Akainu's headless corpse, were violently thrown to their knees, clutching their bleeding ears.
The golden aura with increasing red radiating from Sengoku was no longer a symbol of hope or Justice. It was a suffocating, blinding storm of pure, unadulterated bloody wrath.
He pushed himself completely free of the thousand-ton boulders. He looked at the boy in the black coat. He looked at the dark saber dripping with the blood of the Navy's future.
Fifty years of rigid, absolute discipline violently snapped into a million irrecoverable pieces. The master plans. The political maneuvering. The preservation of Marineford. The execution of the Pirate King's bloodline.
None of it mattered anymore.
"ALL FORCES!" Sengoku's voice ripped the heavens, his golden eyes completely bloodshot, bulging with a hatred so profound it defied language.
"ABANDON THE CHASE!"
Across the impassable chasm, the retreating Whitebeard Pirates, dragging their weeping brothers, froze in their tracks.
"IGNORE THE SHIPS!"
"IGNORE THE REMNANTS!"
Sengoku bellowed, pointing a massive, trembling golden finger directly at the False Deity standing beside the corpses of the old era and the new.
"THE FALSE DEITY."
"DO NOT CAPTURE HIM!"
"DO NOT RESTRAIN HIM! BEAT HIM UNTIL HIS VERY SOUL IS ERASED FROM THIS EARTH!"
"ANNIHILATE LIGHT YAGAMI!"
The command was absolute. It was an execution order sanctioned by the highest authority of the world.
It left no room for doubts.
Deep within the thick, blue ice of the tsunami-glacier, Admiral Aokiji heard the roar.
A minute or two ago, the ice-man had been sitting there, suspended in the frost, resigning himself to the end of the war. He had sensed Whitebeard's death. He had waited for the inevitable silence to settle.
But then, his Observation Haki had caught the flicker. The impossible disappearance of Sakazuki's presence.
THRASH!
Aokiji violently ripped himself free from the glacier. The massive block of ice shattered into a million pieces as the Admiral landed heavily on the permafrost.
He looked toward the center of the plaza. He saw it.
The towering, headless body of Edward Newgate. And at its feet, the decapitated, slaughtered remains of the Red Dog.
"HA!"
Aokiji's breath hitched.
The freezing mist escaping his lips suddenly stopped.
Sakazuki was dead. The man he had trained with. The man he had argued with for decades. The man whose absolute, merciless dogma he had despised, yet secretly acknowledged his unending passion for Justice, to carry the heaviest burdens of the Navy.
They were polar opposites.
Ice and Magma.
Lazy Justice and Absolute Justice.
But they were Zephyr's students.
They were brothers forged in the same brutal crucible of the sea.
'And I let him fight alone.'
Aokiji thought, the realization hitting him with the force of a falling continent.
His hands began to tremble.
Not from the cold.
'I stayed in the ice. I watched him go.'
'Earlier... I knew he had lost cool.'
'His Observation Haki must have become weaker momentarily.'
'I was... lazy.'
A profound, suffocating wave of guilt and self-directed wrath flooded Aokiji's veins. His entire philosophy—his "Lazy Justice"—suddenly felt like a pathetic, cowardly excuse.
His inaction, his hesitation, his will to let Sakazuki do it and not him... it had gotten his brother killed.
"Ah..." Aokiji exhaled, his voice completely hollow.
Suddenly, he looked up.
And saw him.
The culprit.
Slowly, he reached up, grabbing the collar of his white Marine coat, and violently ripped it off.
He let it fall to the bloody ice.
"Yagami... Yagami... Yagami..."
"Ahh... Yagami."
The ambient temperature of Marineford did not drop. It completely ceased to exist. The very concept of heat was erased from the northern plaza. The air itself crystallized into a violent, jagged blizzard of pure, unadulterated killing intent.
Aokiji's face twisted into a mask of pure, demonic wrath.
"YAGAMIIIIII!" Aokiji roared, his voice cracking with a terrifying, unfamiliar ferocity.
...
High above the plaza, a flash of blinding yellow light pierced the ash-choked sky.
Admiral Kizaru materialized on the tip of a shattered stone pillar.
The golden Admiral, the man who had treated the entire Summit War like a mildly amusing inconvenience, looked down at the center of the ice.
The man made of Light had been late.
Borsalino's lazy, drooping eyes widened behind his yellow-tinted glasses.
For a single, suspended microsecond, the troll persona vanished. The apathetic, drawling monkey completely disappeared.
"Sakazuki..."
He saw the pitch-black saber. He saw the blood. He saw Sakazuki's head lying yards away from his body.
Borsalino slowly raised a hand, slipping a finger beneath the rim of his glasses. He quietly, secretly, wiped away a single tear that had escaped his eye.
Sakazuki. Kuzan. Borsalino.
The three monsters. The three pillars. Broken.
Kizaru lowered his hand and looked at the man in the black coat.
"This..." Kizaru whispered, his voice completely devoid of its usual sing-song cadence. It was flat, cold, and utterly lethal. "...is unforgivable."
Light Yagami stood in the center of the convergence.
He gripped his dark saber, his dark eyes calmly scanning the battlefield. He was ready for the expected retaliation.
He closed his eyes, instantly activating his Future Sight, peering 20 seconds into the future to map his escape route through the mob.
The vision flooded his mind.
"Ah..."
Light Yagami hurriedly looked at his Karma Points to see if he could manage to upgrade anything.
Nothing.
"...fuck."
It was bad.
It was really, really bad.
BOOOOM!
"DIE!"
Sengoku threw himself at Light, his streaks of black-red, akin to dried blood in his Golden King's Haki.
Light swung his obsidian blade, aiming to sever the Buddha's arm.
But Sengoku didn't dodge.
"GRRRR."
He intentionally let the pitch-black saber slice deeply into his golden bicep, ignoring the agonizing burn of the Haki, using his sheer mass to step directly inside Light's guard.
GRAB.
Sengoku's massive, golden hand violently seized the front of Light's pristine black coat.
"You think you are a god?!" Sengoku screamed, spittle flying from his lips, his face inches from Light's.
"I'LL SHOW YOU GOD!"
Sengoku pulled his massive golden forehead back, reinforcing his skull with the absolute maximum density of Armament Haki, and brutally, viciously headbutted Light directly in the face.
BOOOM!
CRACK!