The next morning, the sun rose over the Kuri coastline.
Luffy and Kaido stood facing each other. Covered in blood, Luffy panted raggedly, his chest heaving with every desperate breath.
All through the night, he had collapsed and pulled himself back up, pushing his physical body to its absolute limits time and time again. Watching from the sidelines, Drake had spent the last twelve hours with his heart in his throat.
Beside him, little Tama kept her eyes clamped shut, burying her face into his chest, terrified to look up at the battlefield.
"Again!" Luffy roared through gritted teeth, slowly forcing the last of his strength back into his fists.
"Hmm?"
Across from him, Kaido looked thoroughly irritated. After a grueling night of non-stop combat, the Governor-General hadn't sustained any critical damage, but the sheer exhaustion of the ordeal was taking its toll.
He had beaten the brat into the dirt at least ten times, yet like a relentless cockroach, Luffy simply refused to stay down.
With every hour that passed, Kaido had grown increasingly unnerved. The boy's growth curve defied all logic. Merely witnessing Luffy deploy Advanced Conqueror's Haki Infusion had been shocking enough; after all, those capable of infusing their strikes with supreme dominance were an exceptionally rare minority among the strongest entities alive.
To possess a baseline aptitude that allowed someone to unlock that tier of power at such a young age was a terrifying anomaly.
Luffy was a freak of nature who explicitly thrived on the friction of a life-or-death struggle, evolving with every single trade of blows. Over the course of this single night against Kaido, his execution of Conqueror's Infusion had transitioned from a clumsy fluke to a fluid, instinctual weapon.
Even his Armament Haki had undergone a massive upgrade.
Drake's sensors had logged at least ten instances where Luffy unconsciously deployed the advanced internal-destruction properties of Armament Haki.
The frequency of these advanced strikes had spiked dramatically as the dawn approached, confirming that Luffy's brain was rapidly decoding the principles behind the technique. He simply lacked the fine motor control to unleash it at will.
Screeech—BOOM!
Right then, a brilliant crimson light erupted across the distant horizon, followed closely by a thunderous, concussive report that echoed through the clouds.
"Oh?" Drake raised an eyebrow, his eyes tracking the trajectory of the blast. The flare had been launched from the absolute heart of the Beast Pirates' sovereign stronghold—Onigashima.
Judging by the coloration and altitude, it was an emergency distress signal.
"What?!" Kaido's expression darkened instantly.
That specific frequency belonged exclusively to the high-priority distress flares utilized by his own high command. Its manifestation meant only one thing: Onigashima was under active military assault. This entire confrontation had been a diversion to draw him away from his base!
"You miserable brats deliberately locked my coordinates here to freeze my assets?!" Kaido bellowed, leveling a murderous, bloodshot glare at Luffy.
The strategic layout was glaringly obvious now. He had spent an entire night trading blows on this beach, leaving the central fortress completely exposed.
"What the hell are you rambling about? You're making zero sense." Luffy didn't hesitate for a single millisecond, driving a heavy fist straight toward the Emperor's face.
"Get out of my way!" Kaido roared, his vision tunneling into pure rage. He violently swung the Hassaikai through a catastrophic horizontal arc that tore the air apart.
"Thunder Bagua!!"
Sustaining deep structural trauma from the night's battle, Luffy's velocity parameters had degraded too severely to cope. Even though his Future-Sight Observation Haki flawlessly predicted the trajectory, his battered muscles failed to execute the evasion loop.
CRASH!
The iron club made direct, devastating contact with his jaw, sending a violent arc of crimson fluid spraying into the air as Luffy was blasted across the beach.
"Luffy!"
Drake's eyes flashed with a lethal light. In the space of a single heartbeat, he materialized directly in front of Kaido, driving a maximum-output fist straight toward his chest.
Sensing an instantaneous, life-threatening danger alert, Kaido's pupils contracted to pinpricks. He frantically brought the iron mass of the Hassaikai across his torso to form a crude shield.
BOOM!!!
The colossal kinetic displacement violently repelled Kaido, sending his massive frame rocketing backward through the air.
Mid-flight, the Governor-General violently expanded his cellular mass, converting back into his gargantuan Azure Dragon form. With a fierce whip of his massive tail, he shattered the spatial barrier Drake had used to cage Jack the Drought.
Swooping down, his massive talons clamped around Jack's collar, and he vaulted into the upper atmosphere, navigating at maximum acceleration toward Onigashima.
Drake instinctively prepared to launch a spatial pursuit, but the agonizing groans echoing from the sand caused him to abort the chase. Turning on his heel, he translated his position directly to Luffy's side, smoothly catching his brother's limp frame before it could slam back into the stone.
He settled onto his knees, his gaze lingering on the distant horizon toward Onigashima as his processors evaluated the shifting board.
"Ah!" Tama let out a terrified shriek, staring down at Luffy's mangled, blood-drenched body and his rolled-back eyes. "Luffy-aniki... he's... he's still breathing, right?"
Once she discovered that Drake and Luffy were Ace's sworn brothers, her childhood vocabulary had permanently filed both powerhouses under the trusted header of 'Big Brother.'
At this microsecond, Luffy's respiratory parameters were dangerously shallow, his limp limbs resting in Drake's arms like a completely structureless doll.
"Relax, he's far too stubborn to expire from a minor deficit like this," Drake said, casting a reassuring glance toward the trembling girl.
He laid Luffy flat onto the sand and retrieved a single Senzu Bean from his inventory. Under Tama's wide, fascinated stare, he gently slid the green bean past his brother's lips.
The exact millisecond the item was consumed, Luffy's entire physical frame went rigid.
Tama curiously leaned her head closer, running a diagnostic scan with her eyes.
"KAIDO!!!"
Without a single line of warning, Luffy shot upright like a released spring, his throat-shredding shriek echoing across the shore.
"Eek!"
The sudden, explosive burst of energy startled Tama so severely that her legs gave out, leaving her tumbling onto her backside on the sand.
"Huh?" Luffy blinked, momentarily dazed. He began running his hands up and down his torso, checking his limbs with a look of absolute bewilderment written across his face. "Eh? What's the deal here?"
"The internal damage is completely gone... nothing hurts anymore."
"Your vital signs are truly restored?!" Tama gasped, blinking her large eyes as she scrambled back to her feet, circling him as if inspecting a newly discovered continent.
"Mmm..." Luffy vaulted into the air, executing a series of high-speed stretches before nodding with absolute certainty. "One hundred percent operational!"
"Wow! That bean possesses an incredible restorative capability!" Tama cheered, her face filling with absolute awe as she spun to look at Drake.
"Excellent! Round two starts right now, Kaido!" Luffy barked, tightly clenching his fists as his battle lust re-ignited at maximum capacity.
He executed a rapid sweep of the sector, only to find the parched shore completely vacant. His brow furrowed in confusion. "Where did the giant lizard run off to?"
"He exited the grid," Drake noted calmly, walking over to join them. "Tell me, Luffy—how did that encounter feel to your system?"
"The next time we trade strikes, I'm permanently beating him into the dirt!" Luffy grinned, his signature wide-mouthed smile breaking across his face.
"Mmm." Drake nodded, his tone devoid of any doubt. He preserved absolute confidence in that outcome.
"Luffy, if your endgame goal is to successfully shatter Kaido's durability, mastering the highest tier of Armament Haki is a mandatory prerequisite."
"Your baseline output has undeniably expanded now that you can consistently deploy Conqueror's Infusion. However, that variable alone is insufficient to secure a victory."
"You need to force your Armament Haki to flow externally, constructing an invisible shell that bypasses the outer target to destroy their internal structure from within. Within the borders of Wano, the samurai designate this advanced manipulation as Ryuo. Your processors should already be familiar with the concept."
"During your duel against Kaido, my sensors logged several instances where your system unconsciously accessed the properties of Ryuo. It occurred because your sub-routines computed that standard Armament lacked the necessary penetration parameters to bypass his scales."
"Therefore, your instincts overrode your standard protocols, forcing the Haki to flow."
Drake was entirely certain his diagnostic scan of the battle was flawless.
"Huh?" Luffy tilted his head down by a sharp forty-five-degree angle, a look of pure, unadulterated vacancy smoothing over his features.
"Ugh... delete the explanation," Drake sighed, waving a dismissive hand.
Attempting to download complex, theoretical combat principles into Luffy's cognitive centers through standard verbal channels was an operational bottleneck that yielded zero efficiency.
To fully integrate the mechanics of Ryuo into his active coding, Luffy's architecture permitted a solitary optimization route: brute-force application through live combat.
Luffy was an asset whose physical execution parameters vastly outscaled his theoretical processing capacity. Expecting him to acquire a high-level attribute by listening to a lecture was pure fiction.
The only method to accelerate his mastery was to force his system through continuous, high-intensity sparring loops until his muscle memory locked onto the exact sensory feedback required.
Which meant Drake was stepping onto the board as his training partner.
"Luffy, from this millisecond forward, my system shall function as your primary adversary. We are initiating a high-intensity training cycle to hard-code Ryuo into your active files," Drake declared, his expression shifting into a mask of pure seriousness.
"Training?" Luffy blinked, surprised by the sudden shift.
"Precisely!" Drake slowly raised his right hand, keeping his left tucked casually into his pocket. "I am restricting my parameters: I will omit the utilization of Conqueror's Infusion entirely. If your offensive lines manage to force my system to deploy my left hand to stabilize my guard, the simulation logs a victory for your side."
"Furthermore, from this microsecond onward, my boots shall remain permanently anchored to these exact coordinates. I'm not moving an inch."