The colossal flame dragon's tail suddenly whipped around with blinding speed, smashing directly into the other Marine battleship.
KABOOM!
The draconic tail, heavily coated in Advanced Armament Haki, sundered the massive capital ship in two with a single strike.
The entire sequence transpired in a fraction of a second. Even the two Marine Admirals failed to register the sudden shift in tactical vectors before the blow landed.
On the deck of the newly bisected battleship, the six CP0 operatives and the baseline Marine soldiers stood completely paralyzed with shock. We were trading blows perfectly well over there; why did you suddenly target our ship? This complies with zero martial honor!
But Sabo paid zero mind to their complaints. His solitary objective was to lock down every single pursuer hounding his vanguard. Intercepting and permanently decommissioning their means of pursuit right out of the gate was the ultimate tactical choice.
WHOOSH!
Sabo swept his blazing wings, launching his frame forward as the warship anchoring Fujitora's boots rapidly broke the water's surface, ocean currents churning violently around the hull.
"All personnel... brace yourselves!" Fujitora commanded softly, tilting his head downward as massive gravity condensed along the edge of his shirasaya.
In the next microsecond, the entire capital warship levitated off the water, rocketing through the air directly toward Sabo's perimeter.
"Miserable pest!"
At that exact juncture, six silhouettes clad in pristine white robes and masked visages broke free from the collapsing wreckage of the sundered battleship. The lead operative featured a distinct, long, squared nose behind his mask.
"Our high-priority mandate is to capture Princess Vivi of Arabasta. We mathematically cannot afford to waste our resource margins here. The two Marine Admirals can handle the front line. Disperse!"
"Understood!"
The six CP0 agents split into two-man cells, scattering across the horizon at high velocity. Sabo's Observation Haki seamlessly mapped the behavioral shift.
BUZZ...
The colossal draconic manifest fractured and compressed once more. Sabo reverted to his human proportions, though thick, volatile columns of pure plasma continued to burn furiously across his back.
Suddenly, six magnificent wings of pure fire erupted from his spine, while six independent draconic fire claws spun out from his torso. Sweeping his wings, a blazing crimson trail sundered the sky. Brandishing his lead pipe with terrifying kinetic efficiency, he materialized right before the perimeter of the long-nosed operative in a fraction of a breath.
He drove the steel down in a brutal, crushing arc.
Saturated with a dense concentration of black Armament Haki, the pipeline's structural density reached a truly mind-boggling tier.
"Moonwalk!!" The masked operative's pupils shrank to pinpricks, his nervous system frantically coordinating a high-speed Moonwalk displacement to evade the blow.
But Sabo's absolute velocity parameters completely outclassed his tier. Left with zero operational windows, the agent was forced to cross his forearms in a desperate defensive block.
KABOOM!
The monumental kinetic impact rippled through the operative's frame, driving a colossal shockwave down to churn the ocean surface below.
CRACK!
The sharp cadence of splintering bone echoed across the void.
The opening strike cleanly fractured both forearms of the CP0 agent. Almost concurrently, the six draconic fire claws anchoring Sabo's spine lunged forward with explosive velocity, clawing directly for the operative's skull.
"Tempest Kick!!" Disregarding his ruined arms, the operative kicked his leg out with desperate speed, unleashing a razor-sharp flying slash.
Yet Sabo's reaction matrix was light-years faster. Tilting his physical vessel a fraction of a millimeter to let the cutting wind skim past his flank, he smoothly swung his lead pipe in a thoroughly unpredictable trajectory, smashing it square into the operative's face.
BANG!
The porcelain mask shattered into a thousand pieces.
The draconic fire claws plunged downward simultaneously, burying themselves deep into the agent's chest cavity.
"Iron Body: Steel!!" Kaku disregarded the blood saturation-bombing his focus, frantically mobilizing his ultimate defensive technique.
PUCHI!
The Haki-infused claws sundered his hardened flesh with zero physical resistance, plunging clean through his chest. Fresh crimson erupted from the exit wounds, only to be instantaneously vaporized into nothingness by the unbridled heat of the plasma. Thick torrents of blood cascaded down into the ocean below, permanently staining the pristine white fabric of his uniform into a deep, macabre scarlet.
Indeed, the countenance unsealed beneath the broken shards was none other than Kaku, a veteran asset of the former CP9. Throughout these two years, his independent combat metrics had scaled considerably, yet standing opposite Sabo, his defense was completely non-existent.
Three minimal moves sundered his survival metrics.
Sabo cleanly released his grip, and Kaku's biological asset fell vertically into the dark waves, generating a small, passing splash before sinking into the abyss.
The sheer velocity of the execution struck pure, primitive terror into the hearts of the remaining CP0 operatives. He's a monster!
Their capabilities sat in completely distinct dimensions. In a single, brief contact window, a top-tier combat unit whose active metrics trailed only behind Rob Lucci had been completely liquidated and dropped into the sea. This Dragon King Sabo was far too terrifying!
Previously, when their intelligence channels unsealed reports detailing how the Revolutionary Army's Chief of Staff had anchored a neutral front against two Marine Admirals alongside three Division Commanders, they had harbor deep, arrogant skepticism. They had openly mocked the two newly appointed Admirals as thoroughly incompetent, muttering that the Navy's structural quality was degenerating year after year.
Yet now, the strongest operative among their cells had failed to secure the basic right to parry an exchange before being permanently erased from the matrix. The technical disparity was too monumental to compute.
"DISPERSE IMMEDIATELY!!" one of the masked operatives screamed at the top of his lungs, his eyes wide with frantic panic.
But Sabo had already initiated his subsequent movement vector. The absolute acceleration yielded by his six blazing wings defied standard physics; the operatives trying to coordinate a escape via Moonwalk looked like infants trying to run against a world-class sprinter.
One sat at the absolute apex of the heavens, while the other crawled along the dirt!
SIZZLE...
Within the span of a single heartbeat, two alternative white-robed silhouettes plunged out of the upper sky to crash heavily into the waves.
Sabo's gaze turned lethally sharp, his presence condensing into a crushing aura as he stabilized his frame directly over the island's airspace, effectively anchoring himself as an immovable barrier before the final three CP0 agents. Not a single asset possessed the raw courage required to cross his perimeter.
ROAR...
The levitating capital warship tore through the sky currents, and Fujitora locked his blind focus onto Sabo's silhouette, his face hardening into an expression of supreme gravity.
Granted... his biological eyes lacked sight...
"Your vanguard must unleash its absolute arsenal now," Fujitora noted softly. He recognized that relying exclusively on his independent gravity manipulation would mathematically fail to neutralize Sabo.
"Indeed. Does every single entity anchoring the lineage of the Legendary Four Brothers command this caliber of combat mass? If the active data tracks along this line, the exact microsecond all four cross coordinates to form a unified front... the World Government itself will lack the capacity to enforce its will," Ryokugyu remarked, a profound layer of tactical caution weighing down his words.
Fujitora preserved a heavy silence. According to highly classified intelligence logs, not a single weakling existed among the four fraternal brothers; even if their raw destructive output trailed a fraction behind the Revolutionary Army's Chief of Staff, the disparity remained microscopic.
Even if three Marine Admirals mobilized simultaneously... they would still lack a definitive winning percentage.
Because the Legendary Four Brothers... numbered four independent sovereigns!
This was a unified alignment that possessed more than enough structural mass to directly challenge the World Government in an all-out war. Evaluating this precise data layout, the intense panic currently fracturing the highest echelons of the global regime became entirely logical.
Ryokugyu shook his head gently with a bitter smile. This was an exceptionally grueling assignment.
Slowly raising his bare hand, he compressed his fingers into a tight fist. A bizarre, specialized energy domain instantly enveloped his physical vessel, while layer upon layer of thick, aggressive vegetation began expanding violently across the bedrock beneath Sabo's feet.
This was far from their initial engagement. His systems had meticulously calibrated their parameters for this specific target.
The entire island executed a catastrophic shudder as colossal fissures ripped through the terrain. In a matter of milliseconds, a dense army of massive vines erupted from the cracked stone, the baseline diameter of each primary trunk measuring a staggering ten meters wide.
The vegetation sprouted countless secondary thorned tendrils, and within a single breath, a limitless thicket of wood had swarmed Sabo's coordinate, plunging toward his frame from all four cardinal directions.
Yet the exact microsecond the wood neared Sabo's burning perimeter, the residual heat of his plasma ignited the fibers, reducing the massive vines to harmless clouds of ash before they could even register a connection.
Sabo's analytical models had fully mapped the parameters of Ryokugyu's Logia fruit. His capability enabled him to manipulate the biological fabric of the earth, generating a limitless volume of predatory vegetation to saturate a massive combat theater.
Just like this active sector; within the duration of a few brief syllables, the entire surface of the island had been transformed into an absolute forest of thorns.
"Horizontal Gravity!!"
Fujitora executed a violent, lateral sweep of his blade, projecting a massive wave of invisible gravitational pressure that literally sundered the atmospheric grid.
Sabo swept his six wings to trigger maximum acceleration, barely weaving out of the path of the distortion before redirecting his trajectory to hunt down the escaping CP0 cells.
During that brief tactical interval, the remaining agents had leveraged the distraction to breach his containment line, fleeing across the coast. Sabo recognized their objective remained the absolute neutralization of Vivi's extraction group. Consequently, he threw his entire resource mass into maximizing his pursuit, completely disregarding the catastrophic drain on his stamina reserves.
CRASH! KABOOM...
A thunderous, deafening screech suddenly detonated from the upper atmosphere as a massive volley of colossal, burning meteors broke through the cloud cover, plunging straight down toward his coordinate.
And it wasn't a localized strike! This was a monumental meteor shower!
The space-born boulders pounded the skies, raining down upon Sabo's trajectory in a continuous, apocalyptic sequence. Yet Sabo had already pushed his velocity metrics to their absolute terminal apex; to his refined spatial perception, the downward speed of the meteors appeared sluggish and unrefined.
The falling bedrock failed to graze a single thread of his garments.
Trading a silent, knowing look, Fujitora and Ryokugyu launched their frames into the upper sky currents simultaneously, locking their vectors to pursue the blazing Sovereign.
Below their boots, the once pristine, tranquil island was being systematically reduced to a scarred, pulverized wasteland of ash and broken stone.