Running was no longer an option. Slardar knew it this foe now swam faster than he did in the open sea. Escape was a fantasy.
All that remained was a fight to the death.
His features hardened with a fatal resolve. He poured out everything his body could give if only it would be enough to kill Tengetsu Ares.
Ares, for his part, felt the weight of those tides. The third breaker hit harder than the first two, enough to prick his danger sense and that flicker of danger only stoked his excitement.
"Fights with a foregone conclusion are dull," he murmured, lips curling. Blood thundered through him like a river in flood; his frame rang like clashing chains as a feral pressure erupted off his body, making the surrounding sea shudder. Even Slardar felt it an suffocating heaviness, a looming beast.
Vast Armament Haki surged out of Ares and condensed before him into an invisible, iron-walled bulwark.
KRAKOOM!
The boom rolled across the abyss. Shoals scattered; even massive Sea Kings fled in panic.
The projected Haki wall met the third tide and held.
Then came the fourth. The fifth. No breath between them.
KRA-BOOM!
KRA-BOOM!
…
Wave after wave hammered down until hairline cracks crazed Ares's Haki barrier; then, like shattering glass, it blew apart.
Slardar's face lit with savage delight. "Can't hold it, can you? If you can't hold "
" then drown!"
The thrill of it lent him phantom strength. He whipped up the sea still harder, riding the high of imminent victory.
The collapse of his shield didn't faze Ares; he'd only been playing with projected Armament for a handful of days. It had already exceeded his expectations.
He smiled into the next roaring wall. "Don't celebrate yet. Let me show you what I'm best at."
What was he best at
Blade work?
Devil Fruit?
Martial skill?
None of those, not exactly.
It was his body.
In this ocean, where does "strength" end? With giants? With the monstrous might of Charlotte Linlin? With Haki itself?
No one can say. But Ares's strength forged day by punishing day had become something terrifying. Layer Haki and a Mythical Zoan atop it, and the result was overwhelming.
"I'll tear apart the technique you're so proud of." A wild light flashed in his eyes.
In the next instant the vast cerulean dragon hundreds of meters long flushed a deep blood-crimson. Armament Haki, dyed a sinister red, sheeted over every scale. In both quantity and density, his Haki reached a magnitude ordinary men couldn't imagine.
Slardar's pupils pinholed. "His color what is he ?"
Blue had been awe; crimson was dread. The red dragon looked less like a beast than a calamity.
He didn't understand the change, but every instinct screamed that a finishing move was coming
Right on cue.
Ares's serpentine body straightened, arrow-true, like a titanic blade.
"No-Blade Style Crimson One-Slash!"
That blood-red mass blazed like a warning star, stirring a nameless fear.
"Rrrrraaaaugh!"
The dragon's roar punched through the deep like a shockwave. Slardar, who had faced Sea Kings without blinking, felt his heart jolt as if the whole sea had lurched. Old terror, primal and cold, climbed his spine.
Monster.
That was all the mind could offer.
Ares's body began to spin. His features vanished into a whirling crimson pillar.
The next breaker swallowed him whole.
Slardar didn't grin. His jaw set; he clenched harder and forced the sea to keep coming. "I don't care how strong you are. Let's see you outlast this. If ten waves won't do it then a hundred."
"A thousand!"
He knew he wouldn't beat Ares easily; Destroying Tidal Surge was his one path to a killing blow. He wrung his body dry, every last drop of power and Haki thrown into the tide engine.
Inside that engine, Ares spun faster and faster, his rotation shedding the breakers like a washer on the final cycle. "Clever. There's a trace of Soru's logic in this," he noted, almost pleased.
The technique was a man-made disaster: wave upon wave, each driven by the one before, each stronger than the last like Soru's chained steps, building an explosive final burst.
For Ares, Rokushiki truly was a treasure trove and for that, he owed Admiral-Designate Zephyr. In this era, Shiki and Newgate were in their blazing prime, and their "lessons" were mostly bruising sparring. Zephyr had handed him principles.
Back to the present
Ares's spin climbed toward a shriek, "Crimson One-Slash" taking on the character of a drill. You can't birth a tornado underwater, but you can be one: an engine of force in the shape of a man.
A weapon made of flesh.
He bored through the breaking sea, ripping the tidal wall to rags, arrowing straight for Slardar.
"Your tides are fierce and the later ones stronger but if I wreck the chain before the power stacks, it's just… water," Ares said, calm and utterly sure.
He ripped through three, four surges in the space of a few breaths. Slardar loomed just twenty meters ahead.
"I… lost," Slardar whispered, despair washing his face. The enemy had unraveled his ultimate. He had nothing left that could bite.
He had crushed countless challengers over the years; today he tasted defeat. It tasted like the deep cold and endless.
He shut his eyes. There was no time to run.
A dry wind slapped his face impossible this far down and for a heartbeat he felt as if he'd broken the surface, salt air on his skin.
It was the vacuum dragged in the wake of Ares's spin the sea itself peeled back.
When Slardar braced for the impact, a voice sounded at his ear:
"Hey. You're strong. Interested in coming with me seeing the world above?"
"There are fighters out there who'll push you higher. A lot of them…"
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