"Ahahaha! You pathetic trash actually thought you could bring down Lord Kaido? Talk about completely overestimating your capabilities!" the Beast Pirates yelled, their laughter echoing across the battlefield.
"The Akazaya Nine are completely finished! You samurai bastards better surrender right now! Ahahaha!"
"You bastards!" The Wano loyalists clenched their jaws, their features twisting with frustration.
"What's the panic for? Our hope hasn't expired yet!" Old master Hyogoro barked, his voice cutting cleanly through the noise to stabilize their discipline.
Every eye on the field instantly pivoted to lock onto Ace. The samurai held a clear index on the data that this man commanded a global title perfectly parallel to Kaido across the open seas.
They were looking at a monster anchoring a seat among the sovereign Four Emperors.
"Ace, every single retainer of the Akazaya Nine has sustained catastrophic mechanical trauma," Yamato noted, her heart sinking as her eyes swept across the blood-slicked stone.
The legendary samurai she had spent her entire childhood dreaming of meeting had finally materialized before her sensors, but they were entirely broken.
"Kaido!!" Yamato shrieked. Stamping her foot violently to shatter the stone beneath her boots, she launched herself forward into a high-velocity dash.
Scrambling onto a small, vacant boat moored along the shoreline, she propelled herself straight toward the massive dragon.
"Hey! Yamato!" Ace gasped, his voice tight.
Re-aligning his focus, Ace unleashed a massive wave of spiritual energy. Brilliant, white-hot flames erupted from his physical mass, instantly turning a full hundred-meter radius of the plaza into an absolute sea of churning fire.
Moving with slow, measured strides, he walked calmly toward the shoreline.
With every single step his boots took against the earth, a massive column of fire violently erupted around one of the fallen Akazaya retainers, forming a dense, cylindrical thermal barrier that completely enclosed their broken frames.
Within a handful of seconds, every single member of the Akazaya Nine was securely locked inside a pillar of radiating, intense heat.
From the interior perspective, the compressed flames delivered nothing more than a gentle, soothing warmth to stabilize their vital signs.
But to the external environment, the barrier was an absolute deterrent—not a single enemy asset could hope to approach the perimeter by a fraction of a millimeter without facing immediate vaporization.
"This protective shell will automatically log an offline timeout loop after thirty minutes. That should yield more than enough clearance to secure their safety," Ace murmured, slowly tilting his head upward before his silhouette vanished instantly from the spot.
The exact microsecond his position reset, he materialized smoothly atop the small vessel Yamato was navigating. Reaching down with a firm arm, he hauled her into a secure embrace, a massive burst of thermal energy erupting from his boots as he vaulted into the sky, charting a high-speed vector straight toward Kaido.
"Ace... your system... possesses flight parameters?" Yamato gasped. Her visual sensors had registered nothing but a brief optical blur before the violent, roaring friction of the air tracks began whistling past her ears.
Ace offered a slow, silent nod. With a sharp kick against the air currents, he brought their coordinates dead-center before the colossal face of the dragon.
"Kaido! Twenty rotations of the calendar ago, Kozuki Oden's life signs were systematically terminated by your choices! Today, our vanguard permanently finalizes that historic blood feud!" Without a single millisecond of latency, Ace focused a dense coating of flames across his right fist and drove a heavy punch straight toward the beast.
"Fire Style: Meteor Strike!"
"Fire Emperor Ace..." A booming, deep voice resonated from the leviathan's jaws as he opened his mouth. A massive sphere of compressed plasma ignited within his throat: "Bolo Breath!"
The two monumental columns of fire slammed together head-on, the catastrophic concussive feedback expanding through the upper atmosphere to warp the weather patterns of the entire sector.
BOOM!!!
Simultaneously, Ace violently wrenched his left arm, tossing Yamato upward through a precise trajectory to clear the blast radius.
"Kaido!!" Yamato shrieked from her high-altitude position. Wielding her massive spiked club with double-handed torque, she brought the weapon down with apocalyptic force.
The solid iron connected squarely with the absolute crown of Kaido's skull.
BANG!!!
The sheer weight of the impact forced Kaido's gargantuan serpentine body to slide downward through the air tracks. Yet, right as his underbelly was on the precipice of slicing into the ocean surface, he violently killed his momentum. Wrenching his massive hips, his colossal dragon tail whipped through the air like a localized meteor, delivering a brutal counter-strike directly against Yamato's midsection.
CRASH!
An intense spray of crimson fluid erupted from Yamato's lips as her structural integrity sustained a severe deficit.
As the board stood at this microsecond, her wrists were still heavily locked within the constraints of Sea-Prism Stone handcuffs, preventing her internal processors from accessing the full capacity of her baseline stats.
"Yamato!" Ace's velocity loops triggered instantly, his arms smoothly catching her falling frame before she could plummet into the sea.
By a bizarre turn of physical variables, Kaido's crushing tail strike had delivered a direct hit centered right on the seam of the Sea-Prism Stone shackles. The exact millisecond Ace locked his embrace around her, the internal mechanics of the handcuffs reached total instability, triggering a high-priority demolition loop.
BOOM!!!
A monumental, earth-shattering explosion detonated from her wrists.
Under the paralyzed, wide-eyed stares of the entire battlefield, Ace and Yamato were instantaneously swallowed whole by a catastrophic, blinding vortex of pure demolition fire.
"This... Ace-san... he was actually..." Old master Hyogoro and the remaining samurai stood completely dumbfounded, their tactical planners hitting a severe processing error.
How could a world-class powerhouse navigating an optimum combat loop suddenly succumb to a random explosion?
In stark contrast, the low-tier infantrymen of the Beast Pirates were intimately familiar with the properties of that blast. The data verifying that Young Master Yamato had been permanently fitted with high-yield, explosive handcuffs from childhood was a standardized file logged by every single soldier in the garrison.
They had cleanly witnessed Kaido's tail drive the shackles past their failure threshold.
An imperial scout looked across at the sheer magnitude of the shockwave—which was powerful enough to violently shake the foundation of Onigashima's fortress even from that immense distance—and swallowed his saliva in pure awe.
The raw destructive footprint of that explosion was terrifying.
"The newly crowned Yonko, Fire Emperor Ace, has had his life signs permanently deleted just like that?! Ahaha... aha-ha-ha!" The collective morale of the Beast Pirates exploded into an immediate wave of pure ecstasy.
"What brand of modern Emperor...? Hahaha, his individual capabilities completely failed to survive a casual interaction against our Lord Kaido!"
"Precisely! A mere unproven rookie commanding a seat among the Four Emperors... it is definitive verification that the administrative units of the World Government are losing their efficiency!"
"Ahahaha...! Victory belongs strictly to the Beast Pirates!"
The imperial garrison's fighting spirit experienced a spectacular, roaring surge.
The Wano samurai, meanwhile, let their expressions sink into absolute stone. They had completely failed to project a scenario where an allied Emperor would be systematically wiped from the board by an underhanded trap of that nature.
To their worldview, Ace had sustained a fatal deficit due to a surprise explosive deployment engineered by the enemy's design.
There was zero doubt that the detonation was caused by a real, maximum-yield bomb.
Vrumm...
Suddenly, right in the dead center of the thick, billowing shroud of black smoke, a lone spark of pristine fire ignited, expanding in volume with terrifying speed.
The flames violently skyrocketed, carving a massive, blinding column of light that anchored itself into the marine grid below while its upper limits pierced straight through the highest clouds of the sky.
A lone figure took a slow, deliberate stride out from the heart of the inferno. His entire silhouette was framed by an elegant, flowing cloak of pure fire. Clutched firmly within his iron grip was a long, blood-red lance of concentrated thermal energy, his eyes projecting a blinding luminescence that looked capable of slicing through the dark.
Cradled securely within his arms, a peerless beauty with long, white-and-green gradient hair kept her eyes locked onto his face, her gaze refusing to drift for even a single microsecond.
During that brief fraction of a second when the countdown hit zero, her internal processors had genuinely calculated that her life signs were facing total deletion. That absolute bastard of a biological father had actually hard-coded a genuine, lethal bomb of that magnitude into her shackles.
The monster had truly intended to execute his own blood if she ever breached the boundaries of his cage!
Initially, as the spark initialized, her survival algorithms had prepared to dump maximum volume into a final, throat-shredding curse to permanently sever her lineage from Kaido before her vital stats hit zero.
She had been entirely ready to embrace the end.
But right at the matrix of impact, Ace had violently hauled her mass against his chest, pivoting his own spine to face the blast.
The entire, mountain-shattering weight of that apocalyptic detonation had been single-handedly absorbed by Ace's body alone!
Yamato's cognitive centers had caved into absolute, paralyzed silence. Throughout her isolated biography, her thoughts had never held a significant reason to value her own survival; from her childhood to this current timeline, her existence had been restricted to a state of perpetual imprisonment.
If her internal planners could have mapped an ideal future... she had simply desired to set sail across the open sea...
But did an asset of my broken history truly possess the clearance to unlock a destiny like that...?
The exact microsecond she witnessed Ace throw his own structural safety into the fire to preserve her frame, she computed that her future... had been permanently rewritten.
She would breach the boundaries of this nation and claim the open sea! There was absolute zero doubt remaining in her files!
Staring up at the completely flat, unbothered expression structuring Ace's features, Yamato's mind was flooded with an intense, burning curiosity.
She had never logged a profile of Ace commanding an aura this monolithic. Unknowingly, her delicate hand slowly rose through the air tracks, her fingers gently coming to rest against the side of his burning cheek.
"Your system... exactly what reason prompts you to execute a sacrifice of this magnitude for my sake...?"
"Yamato, my baseline integrity records absolute zero damage from a minor firecracker of that tier," Ace noted smoothly, a warm, reassuring smile breaking through his serious facade.
An explosion of that caliber lacked the necessary energy metrics to bypass the elemental defense arrays of his active Fire Emperor form!
Pivoting his head, the warmth in his eyes dissolved into a shelf of absolute, arctic frost as his gaze locked onto the emerging form of the dragon. His decibel track dropped to a freezing, terrifying pitch: "Kaido, today, out of strict administrative courtesy for the loyalty your daughter preserves, I grant your life signs a temporary clearance from absolute deletion!"
"But keep this track hard-coded into your servers: after the sun completes its rotation today, the faction designated as the Beast Pirates ceases to exist within the global database!"
Before the final syllable had fully cleared his jaw, Ace violently hurled his arm forward. The blood-red thermal lance shot through the air tracks like a high-velocity railgun projectile.
Mid-flight, the lance underwent a radical structural expansion, scaling its mass exponentially until it materialized before Kaido's coordinates as a gargantuan, mountain-shearing spear measuring dozens of meters in size.
Kaido slowly forced his massive reptilian eyes upward, his internal danger-radar triggering an unprecedented, crimson alert as he analyzed the kinetic density of the incoming weapon.
His analytical models returned a bleak result: if his scales sustained the full torque of this execution strike head-on, his physical systems would suffer a severe, structural deficit!
Initially, when mapping the strategic hazards of this campaign, his planners had Hard-coded Vale D. Drake as the absolute peak threat on the board—after all, his sensors had logged Drake single-handedly caging Jack with zero effort.
That individual's capabilities were an unmapped, bottomless abyss.
Yet right now, the crisis index before his face had spiked to an even more terrifying peak, and a world-erasing strike was already screaming through his immediate perimeter!
"This is statistically impossible... Exactly what brand of weapon is that?!" The remaining infantrymen of the Beast Pirates instantly suffered a total collapse of their rational logic loops, their minds freezing into absolute, paralyzed terror as the red light swallowed their vision.