"Usopp! Shishishi, it's alright! Losing a round is no big deal. You were definitely a bit too reckless trying to loose a multi-shot barrage all at once," Luffy chimed in, rushing over to comfort him.
To the rest of the crew, it appeared glaringly obvious that Usopp's structural defeat stemmed entirely from trying to fire a simultaneous multi-shot barrage. This wasn't a standard pistol where you could squeeze off rounds consecutively; discharging fourteen independent projectiles at the exact same microsecond demanded far too much from a sniper's processing capacity.
What their analytical models failed to account for, however, was that a technical challenge of this tier posed zero issue for top-level snipers.
"Exactly, Usopp! You mathematically cannot permit your vessel to lose its drive," Chopper materialised beside him, frantically adding his own words of comfort.
Amidst the cadence of their voices, the rest of the vanguard closed ranks around them. Suddenly, a blinding crimson flash rippled across Luffy's eyes, his pupils executing a violent contraction as his jaw dropped in absolute shock.
"Ah..." Luffy opened his mouth, yet his vocal cords completely failed to articulate a single sentence.
"What's wrong, Luffy?"
The surrounding companions looked on with a trace of confusion.
The corners of Luffy's lips slowly curled into a smirk. Shaking his head, he murmured, "I'll let them outline the data parameters for you."
"The definitive reality is... I lost this exchange."
While the alliance stood locked in deep bewilderment, a sudden voice resonated across the perimeter, snapping the absolute focus of the crowd.
In the next microsecond, a dense wave of total astonishment painted the faces of the spectators.
Because the individual who had formulated that verbal concession was none other than the vanguard sniper of the Red Hair Pirates—the Sniper God, Yasopp!
"Yasopp, what manner of calculation leads you to claim you suffered a defeat? Your network must log the reality that even though Usopp is your biological son, he stands before you as a pirate."
"He requires zero sentimental concessions from your vanguard."
The individual driving the administrative inquiry was none other than the Chief First Officer of the Red Hair fleet, Benn Beckman.
Yasopp shook his head slowly, remaining tight-lipped as his boots tracked toward a specific coordinate—the exact spatial zone directly underlying the trajectory where the Falcon-Birds were circling the sky.
Arriving at the precise coordinate, Yasopp extended his bare palm into the air currents. Within a breath, the spectators mapped a microscopic grey flight feather lazily drifting down to settle against his skin.
"The biological properties of the Falcon-Bird dictate that its plumage detaches at twilight. The timeline preceding that shift represents the absolute, terminal apex of their velocity curves," Yasopp explained smoothly, his voice low and deliberate. "And during our exchange, their speed metrics were sitting at that precise terminal maximum. This specific feather clearing their wings is not a product of chronological data hitting a baseline; it was forcefully stripped from the frame by a manual intercept!"
The collective vanguard gasped in unison, their analytical metrics regarding Usopp executing an immediate vertical leap.
Yasopp continued his breakdown: "To sever the flight plumage while ensuring the Falcon-Bird's aerodynamic stability sustains zero disruption yields only a solitary logical conclusion: the asset drifting across my palm is none other than the absolute first feather slated for natural detachment today."
"Mapping the feather, intercepting the feather, and withholding a single fraction of structural trauma from the target—to the extreme degree that the bird's own sensory systems failed to register a single anomaly... this sniper duel concludes with my absolute defeat," Yasopp conceded with unvarnished, open pride.
The baseline physics verified his analysis. Under those extreme performance metrics, even his own fully optimized combat systems couldn't guarantee a 100% success rate. Yet Usopp had executed the calculations flawlessly.
As his syllables settled, the comprehension filters of the crowd finally unsealed, tracking the reality that not a single Falcon-Bird had aborted its flight pattern to escape the zone. It was as if the preceding high-velocity barrage had never even materialized across the void.
To execute a non-lethal intercept with that level of absolute, silent concealment—completely bypassing the primitive warning arrays of a hyper-velocity raptor—was a feat that bordered on a structural impossibility. This performance metric alone sundered all conventional understandings of Usopp's capability.
"Which means... Usopp secured the absolute victory!" Chopper wept tears of pure, unbridled joy. "Whoa! Usopp, your talent is completely out of bounds!"
Regarding the legendary reputation of Yasopp, his own memory files contained exhaustive logs—the supreme architect of marksmanship anchoring the Red Hair Pirates. Ever since his name had initialised across their tracking networks, his record in high-stakes sniper combat had thrown back a singular, untouchable axiom: zero structural failures.
An unblemished chronicle of absolute victory. That was the Sniper God, Yasopp.
Yet today, his combat systems had sustained their absolute first defeat. And the sovereign entity who had delivered that failure was none other than his own flesh and blood—the Great God Usopp of the Straw Hat vanguard!
A radiant smile illuminated the features of every single member of the Straw Hat crew. For their vanguard to command a sniper whose metrics had stabilized at this legendary tier was an immense structural asset for their impending campaigns. Luffy and Chopper remained the most intensely expressive, their grins stretched wide since the final data unsealed.
Before long, three of the world's absolute Emperor-caliber armates re-consolidated their lines along the rocky coast. The exact fraction of a second their collective resolve achieved stabilization, they prepared to unleash their absolute resource mass. This was the definitive nature of a pirate.
The Thousand Sunny and the Going Guard cleared the harbor, setting sail once more. Throughout their multi-day summit, their intelligence channels had successfully verified that the final Road Poneglyph was not archived within Red Hair's territory. Consequently, tracking the ultimate coordinates would require their vards to navigate alternative sectors of the ocean.
Securing the historical bedrock was an equation that could never be resolved via an instantaneous leap; they had to navigate the data chronologically, step by step.
At this precise juncture, the tactical isolation of Sabo and the global crusade against the resistance remained the supreme, high-priority crisis demanding their attention.
Executing their final farewells to the Red Hair Pirates, Luffy and Drake steered their armadas back onto active cruise vectors. Their internal processing units registered that clearing this harbor meant entering a timeline where their paths might mathematically fail to cross for an immense duration. The Red Hair fleet mirrored their own configuration, maintaining zero static Strongholds across the globe, processing their existence entirely across a perpetual maritime cruise.
Unearthing their exact coordinates on this afternoon had been a product of pure, low-probability coincidence, enabled solely by a stray intelligence feed detailing Red Hair's localized deployment across this sector. When the tides would permit another alignment remained an unresolved equation.
However, Luffy harbored absolute zero anxiety regarding those tracking variables now; his palm held a piece of Shanks's Vivre Card, and the Emperor concurrently retained his own. Should his command structure require a re-alignment, they simply needed to follow the physical orientation of the paper to ensure their trajectories crossed without a single fraction of error.
Summit meetings between Yonko-level entities were highly complex matrix shifts; ordinary predictive models projected their next interaction to rest across an incredibly distant horizon. Yet Luffy's calculations failed to map the reality that a remarkably short timeline would elapse before his vanguard would look upon the sails of the Red Hair Pirates once more.
Deep within the primary deck of the Going Guard, Drake and Mitian stood positioned side by side, their eyes tracking the perfectly tranquil, unmoving expanse of the ocean as their internal minds processed their respective, hidden conflicts.
Before long, Drake sundered the silence, his tone carrying a measured weight. "Your vanguard... has genuinely finalized this classification of choice?"
Mitian slowly rotated her neck, her eyes unblinking, locking her gaze directly onto Drake's face.
"Ahem... I have processed the data parameters," Drake muttered, completely unable to sustain his composure under her intense focus as a sheepish smile broke across his features.
Staring out at the distant waves, a complex web of deep emotion took root within Drake's mind. Mitian's absolute decree dictated she would align her combat mass exclusively alongside his vanguard. To be perfectly frank, his analytical models had entirely failed to project that she would execute a total paradigm shift of this magnitude.
Throughout their condensed timeline together, his databases had compiled a reliable log charting her historical background. From the dawn of her early childhood, she had formalised her enlistment within the Navy's infrastructure. The exact microsecond her Mythical Zoan Fruit had achieved full awakening, her classification had been updated to an absolute black-budget asset of the Marine high command, deploying across countless high-stakes operations.
Due to the extreme trauma characterizing her early youth, her worldview had historically maintained a state of absolute, unyielding hatred toward the pirate population. Daolang had verified this exact dataset during their talk; the genesis of their institutional bond had initialized the precise microsecond the old man had rescued Mitian and her mother from a catastrophic shipwreck.
Initially, her psychological profile viewed pirates with absolute loathing, given that her biological father had been brutally liquidated during a pirate raid.
While Daolang's intervention had forced her to rationalize that a microscopic percentage of the demographic could preserve their humanity, it failed to mean she accepted the systemic existence of pirates. To her analytical mind, the old man represented an extreme statistical anomaly; the overwhelming mass of the pirate population was a cancer that demanded absolute, global sterilization.
Yet today, she was choosing to align her vessel directly with his alliance.
As the Legendary Four Brothers prepared to launch a total, unrestricted war to shatter the Navy's front, she had cleanly waived her institutional allegiance to anchor his flank without a single fraction of hesitation.
The sheer depth of her devotion was a variable Drake's strategic models had completely failed to simulate.
While Drake and his alliance were driving their fleets along the vector charted by the Vivre Card, a massive vanguard of capital warships had successfully closed the distance to Sabo's coordinate.
The silhouettes of the Marine cruisers rapidly materialized across the horizon.
Tracking the approaching armada cutting through the distant waves, the facial parameters of Sabo and his Division Commanders instantly hardened into masks of supreme severity. They had continuously operated under the tactical assumption that the regime's chase teams would inevitably lock onto their position, yet their predictive models had completely failed to map a threat matrix of this staggering magnitude.
The two Marine Admirals they had engaged back in the Holy Land had executed a synchronized, high-speed chase to corner them here!
Furthermore, anchoring the decks of the trailing warships was an elite alignment of masked operatives cloaked in pristine white robes. To an ordinary voyager, their identities would remain shrouded in total mystery.
But to the intelligence networks of the Revolutionary Army, their visual parameters were deeply familiar.
The direct shadow vanguard of the Celestial Dragons—CP0!
Their absolute, eternal adversaries!
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