The air on Little Garden tasted of iron and impending rain. Dorry's labored breaths were a bellows struggling to ignite a dying fire. Each one rattled in his massive chest, a testament to the brutal wounds hidden beneath his furs.
"Dorry, stop!" Vivi's voice was a desperate thread against the giants' thunder. She stood before his foot, a tiny blue-haired figure in the shadow of a mountain. "If you fight now, your injuries will kill you! This isn't honor, it's suicide!"
Dorry's single eye, clouded with pain, found her. A gentle rumble escaped him, softer than she thought possible from a being of his size. "Little princess of Alabasta," he breathed, the words stirring the leaves around them. "To die quietly in the dirt… that would tarnish my honor far more. My god watches. My vow remains. I must give Brogy a fight worthy of Elbaf."
Near the treeline, Usopp's hands were clenched into white-knuckled fists. He watched Brogy heft his colossal axe, the ancient blade catching the grim light. "You can do it, Brogy!" Usopp shouted, his voice cracking with forced bravado. "Show him… show him what a hundred years of fighting looks like!"
Nami's mind raced, a navigator calculating a storm's path. "This is madness. Usopp, we're going back to the ship. Now."
"And fight through a forest of dinosaurs?!" Usopp squeaked, his courage evaporating. He swallowed hard, meeting her gaze. "I… I can't. Not yet. But I swear, Nami, I will become a warrior of the sea one day. A brave one!"
"Your future bravery doesn't help us now!" Nami shot back, but her eyes softened. She looked at the determined set of Dorry's jaw, then at the distant plume of smoke from his campsite. "Luffy. He's our only chance to stop this. We go to him."
As they turned, the earth itself groaned.
Dorry, with a final, agonizing surge of strength, planted his hands against the cliff face beside him. Muscles, torn and bleeding, corded like ancient ship ropes. With a roar that shook the very roots of the island, he heaved.
The entire mountainside sheared away, an avalanche of rock and soil that crashed down with apocalyptic force, directly onto the clearing where Luffy was trapped.
"LUFFY!" Vivi screamed.
The dust cleared, revealing a tomb of stone. From within, a muffled, furious pounding echoed. Thud. Thud. THUD.
Dorry stood over the rubble, his breath coming in ragged gusts. "I am sorry, rubber man," he said, his voice thick with regret and resolve. "But this fight is not yours to stop. My god wills it. My life is the offering."
From within the stone prison, Luffy's voice, distorted but clear, boomed. "WHY?! Why die for a god in a fight that isn't fair?!"
Dorry turned toward the distant figure of Brogy, who stood waiting, axe ready. "Because," the giant said, a profound, unshakable peace settling over his scarred features, "you do not yet understand the highest honor of Elbaf. To stand for something greater than your own life."
The two giants locked eyes across the shattered clearing. A century of rivalry, of friendship, of a sacred, bloody ritual, hung between them. The air crackled with a tension older than the kingdoms of men.
Vivi stared, tears tracing lines through the dirt on her cheeks. She looked from the rubble containing Luffy to the mortally wounded giant walking to his doom. "He barely knows him," she whispered, awestruck. "Why does he care so much?"
*
Far from the giants' stage, in the damp, insect-choked undergrowth, a different kind of plot was crystallizing.
"Chaos is a ladder, my dear associates," Mr. 3 said, adjusting his glasses with a slender finger. He carefully laid out four wax-sculpted portraits on a flat rock: Luffy, Zoro, Nami, Vivi. Each was unnervingly perfect. "And the Straw Hats are currently in freefall, thanks to Mr. 5's delightful rum explosion."
Miss Goldenweek, munching on a rice cracker, dabbed her brush in a pot of yellow paint. "The color of betrayal," she murmured.
"Precisely!" Mr. 3 grinned. "We let the giants exhaust themselves. Then, we remove the more dangerous one—Dorry—while he's weakened. After that…" He tapped Nami's portrait. "We use the bait to lure the frantic little mice into a wax cage. A masterpiece of entrapment!"
In another part of the primordial forest, Zoro wiped sweat from his brow, a triceratops steak slung over his shoulder. The dense foliage played tricks on the light. He stopped.
Leaning against a giant kapok tree, arms crossed, was Nami.
A wave of relief washed over him. "There you are. Get lost, witch? Luffy's making a racket that way." He took a step forward.
The figure of Nami didn't move. Didn't greet him. Didn't yell at him for hunting when they were supposed to be regrouping.
A slow, sinister smirk spread across its waxen face.
Zoro's hand flew to Wado Ichimonji's hilt. That's not Nami.
Simultaneously, the real Nami was sprinting for her life, Usopp wailing behind her as a snarling theropod snapped at their heels. She burst into a small glade, and there, leaning casually against a tree, was Luffy.
"Luffy! Thank god!" she gasped, skidding to a halt.
He didn't turn. His straw hat was tilted low.
"Luffy? Did you get out? We need to stop Dorry!" She reached out, her hand closing on his shoulder.
It was cold. And hard.
The figure turned its head, the movement stiff and unnatural. It was Luffy's face, rendered in flawless, lifeless wax, its painted eyes staring vacantly through her. A tiny, cruel smile was etched onto its lips.
Nami's blood ran cold. A scream, pure and primal, tore from her throat and shattered the forest's calm.
Usopp heard it. The sound sliced through his terror of the dinosaurs. "NAMI!"
He spun, but saw only a wall of green and the flash of a scaly tail. He didn't see her. He didn't see the wax statue. He only heard the scream, and then… nothing.
Blind, petrifying panic took over. He ran, not as a sniper, but as a terrified boy, crashing through ferns and over roots until he exploded into the giant's clearing, falling at Vivi's feet.
"VIVI! LUFFY!" he sobbed, pointing a trembling finger back into the green hell. "It got her! The dinosaur… it just… Nami's gone! It ate Nami!"
He buried his face in his hands, his voice a broken whisper of shame. "I didn't look… I was too scared to look…"
Vivi's heart stopped. She looked from Usopp's crumpled form, to the mountain of rocks trapping Luffy, to the two giants beginning their final, earth-shaking charge at each other.
And then her sharp eyes caught a flicker of movement in the high branches of a nearby tree. A man with a strange, 3-shaped hairstyle, watching it all unfold with a painter's detached interest, while a small girl beside him finished a sketch of their terrified faces.
The trap wasn't just around them.
It was already sprung.
And as Dorry and Brogy's weapons met with a sound like a continent breaking, the waxen Luffy in the deep woods, its mission complete, began to melt away, leaving behind only Nami's fading scream and a single, ominous question hanging in the humid air:
Who was next?
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