"Brace your ribs, you little rookies! The iron fist of love is clearing the field!!!"
With Garp's boisterous, violent declaration, his already massive physical frame exploded forward.
Bang!
Before a single eye could trace the trajectory, the solid flagstones beneath Garp's heavy boots dissolved into fine powder. He didn't deploy a single complex sequence or intricate martial stance; relying entirely on a raw, primitive burst of muscular power, he transformed into an unreadable blur, charging straight toward Sabo at the front of the line.
"The velocity... it outpaces Borsalino's standard displacement!"
Sabo's Observation Haki delivered a frantic, high-frequency alarm through his nervous system. Without a fraction of a second's hesitation, he engaged his Sky Walk matrix. High-pressure blue flames spewed from his heels with a concussive pop as he attempted to clear the path and establish a defensive radius.
Yet, the raw momentum Garp generated completely ignored standard limitations.
"Why are you breaking formation, you little brat! Let your grandfather see how much mass you've added to your bones over the winters!"
Garp's thick palm cleaved through the vacuum, tearing effortlessly through the backflow of Sabo's defensive blue fire to reach directly for the brim of his top hat.
"Don't look down on the sky, you old relic!"
Boom!
The microsecond before Garp's fingers could clamp down on Sabo, a brilliant, sky-tearing column of blue electricity descended from the stratosphere, striking the old man's outstretched right arm with absolute kinetic weight.
"200 Million Volts: Thunder Dragon!"
Enel hovered within the upper air currents, his entire frame skittering with blinding, high-frequency electrical arcs. The Golden Thunder Staff in his grip pointed directly toward the flagstones, guiding a massive dragon forged of pure, high-voltage current whose gaping jaws radiated an intense thermal discharge designed to liquefy steel on contact.
"Yahahaha! Marine hero or not, drop into the dirt under nature's wrath!"
Enel's arrogant laughter vibrated across the courtyard. As the undisputed ruler of the sky islands, he possessed one of the most destructive Logia classifications known to the four seas. Aside from an unreasonable, reality-breaking entity like Captain Ace, he refused to believe a common mortal destitute of a fruit could survive the unmitigated heat of a two-hundred-million-volt discharge.
The lightning billowed, gouging a massive, smoking crater into the center of the flagstones where Garp stood anchored.
However, as the blinding static slowly dissolved into the gray air, Enel's laughter died instantly within his throat.
"Oh? The Rumble-Rumble Fruit?" Garp's gravelly voice carried through the smoke. "Now that's a beautiful asset to carry."
In the center of the deep pit, the old Vice Admiral remained perfectly anchored. Though his tropical floral shirt had been scorched and reduced to charred ribbons by the current, his skin—resembling a chassis cast from industrial iron—bore zero traces of thermal degradation. A thick, fluid layer of ink-black Armament Haki covered his frame like an invisible suit of armor, completely insulating his biology from the lightning's voltage.
"The voltage has decent weight behind it, but your Haki is far too thin!"
Garp grinned, showing his teeth as his thick knees bent a fraction of an inch.
"Shave."
Whoosh!
Garp vanished from the pit entirely.
"What?!"
Enel flared his Mantra to its absolute limits, his perception finally catching a trace of that violent, heavy aura materializing directly over his crown. Without a heartbeat of delay, he instinctively attempted to dissolve his tissue into pure current, intending to utilize his elemental shifting to slide out of the line of fire. In terms of pure reaction velocity, he feared no entity on the sea save for light itself.
"Don't get the impression that turning into electricity keeps my knuckles out of your jaw, brat!"
Garp's deep roar vibrated against Enel's eardrums. He used no ornate form—only a straight, brutal punch thrown from the shoulder. But the kinetic displacement behind his fist carried a density that caused the sovereign's very soul to lock in panic. It was the absolute limit of high-tier Ryuo, a force engineered to bypass external durability and detonate within the internal organs.
Bang!
The dull, heavy thud resonated within the chest of every officer present.
Enel's proud Logia shifting was reduced to a thin sheet of paper before Garp's iron knuckles, which were thoroughly insulated in top-grade Armament Haki. His elemental state was brutally and systematically interrupted as Garp's massive fist slammed squarely into his left cheekbone.
Pffft!
Enel's eyes bulged from their sockets, a spray of dark blood and shattered teeth erupting from his lips. Before his limbs could register a counter-maneuver, the velocity of the blow hurled him toward the stone courtyard below like a falling star.
Rumble—!
The immense physical impact caused the entire bedrock of the floating island to shudder. Enel's frame sheared through more than a dozen thick stone pillars before finally embedding itself deep into the granite face of a neighboring hill, creating a massive, spiderweb-like fracture across the rock.
"Cough... Cough!"
Spitting mouthfuls of fresh crimson, Enel struggled to lift his head, only to find that his sovereign body had been thoroughly broken by that single, unadorned strike. His brain was a nest of static, and even gathering a few sparks of current required an agonizing expenditure of will.
A single punch.
With one straight blow, the sovereign who commanded an apex Logia and had known only absolute dominance was stripped of half his combat capabilities.
"This... this old monster hasn't lost a single pound of mass!" Buggy's jaw dropped completely open, his separated torso scrambling frantically to wedge itself into a narrow crevice between the fallen rocks. "Even that freak Enel was dropped in one frame! This old relic isn't human!"
"The old man's knuckles are heavier than they were during our winters on the mountain," Sabo said, his fingers locking onto his staff as a line of cold sweat ran down his neck. He recognized the mechanics behind that punch perfectly—it was an explosive concentration of Armament Haki compressed to an absolute point of impact.
"Hey, you little brat throwing sparks around," Garp said lightly as his boots touched the flagstones. He paused to pick his nose, looking over at Enel's broken position in the cliffside with a merciless scowl. "No matter how much mass your Devil Fruit carries, if you treat the ability like a crutch, your muscle and your Haki will turn into useless water! On this true ocean, only the Haki forged through pure, unadulterated training can rise above all metrics!"
"Heh... don't look down on the sky, you old fool!"
Enel's eyes were completely bloodshot with rage. His extreme pride refused to accommodate a humiliation of this magnitude. With a guttural roar, the blue current along his shoulders surged wildly once more, his massive lightning avatar beginning to knit together through the dust for a desperate, final counter-strike.
"Stand down, Enel. Your current Haki cannot clear his defensive line."
A crisp, razor-sharp voice cut through the wind from the upper air.
Clang!
With a diamond-clean sword chime, Leona's dark red ponytail whipped against the gale. She hung suspended directly over Garp's position, her vertical pupils locked onto the target like an apex predator monitoring its prey. Her right hand maintained a light grip on the silent edge of White Night; her left held the ink-black, massive frame of Meteor, fresh from Jeno's forge.
"Since Haki is the baseline currency here..."
Leona's lips thinned into a dangerous line as she looked down at the old man who stood at the absolute zenith of physical power. "Let me use these two newly refined edges to diagnose exactly how hard the legend's iron fist truly is!"
A fluid, concentrated layer of pitch-black Armament Haki slid down the steel of her twin blades like flowing water.
The swordswoman brought her twin edges down in a swift, violent trajectory toward the crown of the Marine Hero.
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