High above the sea.
Ares' eyes burned, the fighting will behind them fixed squarely on Garp.
In the few heartbeats since that last exchange, he replayed frame by frame the earth-shaking punch Garp had unleashed. It jolted loose a memory: a "bug" of a skill he'd almost forgotten he possessed.
At the same time, taking that punch sparked a question:
If…
If he kept his whole body in a constant state of yielding and dispersing force, would his damage resistance climb through the roof?
He didn't know it by name, but what he was reaching for was that "force-dissipating" body trick let the impact in, bleed the shock outward fans of Baki would call it "taking the edge off." He'd trained forever to feel pain clearly and forge his body… but almost never thought about the inverse: how to lessen pain and injury when struck.
Time seemed to rewind a year. He heard Whitebeard Newgate again, the big brother who'd taught him how to fight. Threads snapped together in his mind
Two words for it:
Realization dawned.
Everything he'd lived through became seeds. Tonight, they bore fruit.
Light flashed in Ares' deep eyes. Excitement cracked across his face.
"Garp now the real fight starts!!!"
His bones rattled like drumbeats; cords of muscle and veins sprang out; the blood in him roared like a chain dragged tight. His skin gleamed with a tempered, dark-gold sheen, hard as cast steel.
"Come fight!"
Ares bellowed, both blood-red arms piling in like a twin pile-driver, hammering at Garp.
Garp wasn't about to back up. Killing intent burst behind his bull's eyes; his forearms knotted, and those spherical, compressed masses of Armament Haki flared as he threw in a storm.
"Fist Bone Meteor Shower!!!"
Thud
Thud
Thud
…
In a blink, the sky filled with muffled thunder.
Wind detonated; the air around them seemed sucked dry for an instant.
Shockwaves tore the sea into ravines, heaved mountains of water, and stripped trees from the island as if they were weeds.
Not even a minute and they'd already traded hundreds of blows.
Ares landed seven or eight clean shots.
Garp tattooed him several dozen times.
Neither man slowed.
Then Garp, blood at the corner of his mouth, felt something wrong. His pupils pinched. "No…"
"You little "
"You're bleeding off my power, aren't you?!"
If a punch that landed for six parts of damage before now landed for four, that was everything. Shock hit him hard.
Ares' base defense is monstrous, Garp thought, rattled despite himself. I've had to stack absurd Armament and raw power to make him feel it at all. Now he's unloading and dispersing force ten parts landing only do four.
With that freak regeneration in the mix, my fists are doing less and less.
This brat is terrifying!
He could feel it in the feedback from his knuckles his force meeting a strange, trained give, and slipping away.
A body like a siege wall, and now this yielding trick… killing him outright…
is going to be hell.
Now he understood why Ares had bared his teeth and said "the fight's only just getting started."
"Right!" Ares didn't even pause his punching. He admitted it cheerfully: "All that training, I never thought about reducing pain and damage."
"My goal's always been to make my body outstrip a Supreme Grade Blade!"
"But mid-fight, I finally got the trick. Credit where it's due, Garp "
" because I have to beat you!"
Their fists never stopped barking. Ares wanted to finish this in one sustained, rolling barrage.
With his fists.
In his head, he kept rewinding on slow-mo, feeling for every nuance in how he shed force how to make the "yield" most efficient. He was getting stronger in the clash itself, second by second.
Heat pounded through him. Every inch of iron muscle, every sluicing vein, every thick tendon poured brute, tyrannical power into his punches.
He grinned, fierce and elated. "Garp, a hundred of your punches aren't worth one of mine!"
"What are you going to beat me with?!"
His taunt cracked across the sky. Black-red lightning began to crawl off his frame
Conqueror's Haki.
"This guy " Garp's face tightened; shock flickered in those big eyes. "His Conqueror's gotten stronger again!"
The change weighed on his chest like a stone. Terrifying wasn't the half of it: even now, Ares was still getting stronger fast enough to feel it. The longer they fought, the less threatening Garp's punches became.
He allowed himself a single, private relief: Thank the seas he hasn't learned Conqueror's infusion. If he had, I couldn't take those fists at all.
Right then
Feeling Garp's shots flag, Ares barked, cocky as ever:
"Garp, are you scared?"
"Why are your fists getting soft?!"
Boom
Garp answered with a cannon of a punch. "Scared? Of you? These iron fists have never met a pirate they couldn't crush!!"
Power boiled out of that thick frame. He waded back in.
It was blood-and-iron fighting, brutally simple.
They both ate a ton of clean hits blows that would turn a normal man into paste in one shot. Fists that could break a battleship, exceeding even the famed strength of the giants.
On the warship, Zephyr's face cycled light and dark. He was seeing the same thing: the longer Ares fought, the hotter he burned.
"That monster… just when he was about to fall, he starts dispersing the force of Garp's punches," he muttered, uneasy awe in his voice. "Now it's stuck again."
He found himself finally moving. Worry flashed then hardened into resolve.
"If Ares keeps growing like this, who on this sea will stop him?"
"This time no matter what we end this monster."
"Or the Marines won't know a quiet decade again."
He ripped off his "Justice" cloak and dropped it to the deck. He was about to launch when the sky changed again and froze him where he stood.
Zephyr stared, eyes trembling.
"How…?!"
"How does Ares…"
" know Conqueror's coating no… wait!"
He blinked hard, mind catching up. "No that's not Conqueror's infusion."
"That's he's copied Garp's Armament trick?!"
"How does he learn something that advanced mid-fight and use it instantly?!"
It felt like a bad dream: unreal, and yet the terror crawled all over his skin.
Up above.
Garp's eyes almost popped. In that instant of stunned disbelief, his pupils filled with Ares' onrushing fist blood-red, and wreathed in a compact sphere of Haki.
It swelled in his vision
Crack
The world-lifter of a punch smashed square into his face. His features warped; a geyser of blood ripped from his mouth.
He skidded from the sky like a loosed arrow.
After hundreds of meters, Zephyr flashed up to catch him. "Garp! You okay?!"
Garp pried his eyes open. His head rang. His face stamped with a fist mark was wet with blood. He shook off the cobwebs and looked up at Ares, standing on a blaze-cloud like a war god, all storm and steel.
His gaze dropped to Ares' fist.
There it was: a blood-red globe of Haki wrapped around the knuckles the exact same Armament compression he'd unveiled moments ago.
Garp's bull eyes flared with fury. He ground the words out between his teeth:
"That brat…"
"Has no honor!"
"He stole my Armament technique off me and paid me back with one to the face!!!"
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