"That kind of slash actually gets my body excited… but it's still not enough."
Tengetsu Ares grinned, all confidence and audacity. "If we're talking slashing, I'm several times stronger than you."
He sank his weight, knees bending into an imperfect horse stance but those thighs, packed with hard, faceted muscle, hit like a visual hammer. The cords stood out in a lattice across his legs; power pooled there, pressurizing the air at his feet until dust skittered outward in a ring.
A gust licked across every onlooker's face. For a heartbeat they all stared, hollowed out, as if their souls had been reeled away by ghostly wardens.
Charlotte Linlin stepped from the rubble, confusion and anger warring in her eyes. "Ares, spare me the big talk!"
"My slashes outclass even a great swordsman's!"
She'd fused Giant techniques into her art; even Whitebeard and the Golden Lion treated it with care. For Ares to boast about being "several times" stronger with the blade right to her face was beyond arrogant.
Linlin's grin went feral. "I'll show you what power is!"
"Zeus!"
"Prometheus!"
At her bellow, the thundercloud and the fireball Homies streaked in and fused to the long blade in her hand. Lightning, flame, and steel each alone disastrous now braided into something far more catastrophic.
Ares' eyes flashed. He could feel it: her next strike would dwarf the last. Excitement rose in him like a tide.
The next instant
"No-Sword Style Draw-Cut!"
He vanished with a crack, becoming a red meteor knifing through the sky. The ground he'd stood on collapsed into a several-meter-deep bowl.
This "Draw-Cut" belonged to his No-Sword Style: body-as-blade. No flourish, no scabbard only extreme speed, savage strength, and overwhelming Haki. Pure velocity wedded to brute force.
Linlin moved in the same heartbeat, as if their instincts had synced.
"Mingguang Blade!" she roared.
Thunder bloomed into blinding radiance; flame knitted into the cut until it became a circular laser of a slash, meters wide, air shrieking as it spun. It met the red streak in midair only that red "light" was Ares himself, arrow-straight.
He punched through her strike like a piling through surf; the "laser" split askew as if it had a forked stream. Fire, lightning, and cutting force raked his body… but a year of tempering in flame had turned his physique monstrous, and his blood-red Armament drank the worst of it.
Even so, thin wounds opened; the blood that welled out hissed to vapor at once.
Then
WHUMP.
Ares' forehead smashed into Linlin's torso. The clear, awful crack of bone carried to every ear.
Unstoppable momentum bore her away. Air rippled outward in rings.
She plowed through buildings again and again.
One hundred meters.
Two hundred.
Five hundred.
A thousand
and still sliding.
Nearly two kilometers later, the drive finally bled off. Ares dropped back to the street, steady as a piledriver. The sword-marks across his body were already knitting shut high-handed, unreasonable regeneration.
Linlin fell from the sky and cratered the ground.
"Kaido is a brother I recognize," Ares said, eyes on the dust, ears tracking her breath. His voice sharpened to a cold edge. "No one forces his will. No one bullies my little brother."
A big hand pushed out of the smoke, slapping to the earth. Linlin staggered up, gray with dust, a ribbon of blood at her lip. Power rolled off her in choking waves black-violet lightning crackled around her frame.
Conqueror's Haki, expressed not as mere intimidation but as lashing arcs of will.
Her mouth curled into a wolfish smile. "Ares, do you know how badly that brat Kaido wanted that Devil Fruit? He obeyed Mama because of it."
"A man with a body near my size and decent talent should breed with Mama to make children with even better gifts."
"If Whitebeard and the Golden Lion hadn't meddled, I would've eaten you already."
The fixation ran down to her bones that was how Ares read it. But what she said next left him silent.
Linlin's expression softened, almost girlish, a fragile longing showing through. "Mama was abandoned as a kid. All I ever wanted was a big table where the whole family could sit and eat together."
"Good food. Sweet cake."
"But they're all too small," she said, voice tilting again, a feverish smile spreading. "So Mama will bear children who grow seven, eight meters tall, and we'll sit at the big table together."
Then the mania took her eyes. "Mamamama… and one day I'll make everyone in this world as big as me."
"Then everyone will be my family!"
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