Unlike the chaotic mêlée raging along the New World's defensive lines, the marines aboard the Pluton were facing an entirely different kind of nightmare.
Not hordes of small to mid-sized alien bio-weapons.
But twelve titanic behemoths, each over a kilometer tall.
The marine elites, fearless as ever, had charged onto the colossal beasts' bodies to strike them down. Yet no matter how desperately they attacked, their blades could not pierce the monstrous defenses.
Every movement of the giants flung dozens of marines into the sea below.
And once overboard, the massive waves stirred by the beasts' movements swallowed them whole.
Only those with exceptional stamina and waterborne skill could manage to claw their way back toward the Pluton and scramble onto the deck again.
What was worse—
Even Admiral Kizaru, the Navy's strongest force present, couldn't inflict meaningful damage on a single one of the twelve giants.
Having already taken on his elemental form, Kizaru darted through the battlefield as a dazzling mass of photons.
A storm of light bullets rained down without end, faster than the eye could follow.
But whether they ricocheted harmlessly off tough hides, or inexplicably sank into the monsters' flesh and vanished, every shot was equally useless.
Barely two minutes into combat, nearly half of the elite forces had already been lost—
And not even a scratch marred the enemy.
One of the colossal beasts rolled gleefully through the sea again, sending every marine clinging to its frame tumbling into the murderous currents.
Kizaru's heart clenched.
"…Then I guess I'll just have to gamble it all."
Gritting his teeth, he tore away the sunglasses that had not left his face in decades. At once, he forced his Devil Fruit powers to their absolute limit.
"Lord Roya already warned us that fruit abilities would be nearly useless against these things… But martial arts were never my forte."
"…Call this the price I pay for all those wasted decades of slacking off."
In an instant, Kizaru's elemental body condensed—
Transforming into a single, blinding blade of light.
The legendary Totsuka-no-Tsurugi, born from his very body itself!
Armament Haki surged, coiling around the luminous blade.
With a flash of black and gold, the heavenly sword plunged toward the leviathan thrashing in the sea, its gaping maw still devouring the corpses of fallen marines.
For the first time, the strike drew the creature's attention.
It ceased its death roll, though it refused to stop gulping down the drifting bodies.
Instead, it buried half its head in the waves to feed, while awkwardly hunching its enormous back and swiping out a foreleg—
Short and stubby only in comparison to its main body.
From a human's perspective, that single limb dwarfed even Oars, the mightiest of giant kings, many times over.
The force of that swat was apocalyptic.
Even the gale preceding it carved a vast depression into the ocean's surface.
But the radiant sword slipped through the gaps between its talons with impossible agility—
The tip lunging straight for its left eye!
The beast's massive, gray-pupiled eye suddenly snapped to focus on the blade.
A moment later, a beam of gray-white light erupted from it—
Brimming with annihilation so absolute that anything grazed by it would be erased of all life, reduced to ash and void.
Kizaru felt its terror keenly, but retreat was no longer an option.
The Haki shielding his form melted like snow under the sun before that light, almost useless.
All he could do was keep burning his life force, wrapping more and more Haki around himself, staving off destruction one second longer.
A hundred meters stretched before him—an abyss wider than eternity itself.
At last, when his very soul was running dry, when even life itself had nothing left to burn—
He felt his blade's tip pierce the thin membrane of the beast's eye.
Kizaru's heart eased with satisfaction.
And then, darkness consumed him.
The leviathan roared in fury, its entire body convulsing violently—
Trembling over ten thousand times in an instant!
Every marine still clinging to its hide was instantly shaken into pulp, exploding into clouds of blood and gore.
A crimson firework burst across the monster's skin—
Only to be absorbed a heartbeat later, devoured by the beast's flesh.
Sengoku, who had watched Kizaru's desperate strike to the bitter end, felt his chest tear apart when the monster, in rage, butchered another thousand marines in an instant.
His own fruit powers were even less effective than Kizaru's.
Even if he sacrificed himself in a final attack, it would achieve nothing.
"Old man!"
From the waves below, Sentomaru once again surged up from the depths—he had already been knocked into the sea countless times.
Landing on the beast's tail, he sprinted furiously along its spine, charging upward.
Sengoku faltered, sorrow in his gaze.
Kizaru had fallen after a suicidal attack.
And now, a boy not yet a full-fledged marine—Sentomaru—was the Navy's strongest fighter left on this battlefield.
Quietly, he whispered:
"Lord Roya… It seems the Navy will disappoint you once again."
Then the bitter truth struck him—
It was Roya himself who had scattered the Navy's greatest forces. Some slain, others forced into retirement.
And Sengoku's heart ached with helpless grief.
"You damned fool, Kizaru! Couldn't you have slacked off just a little longer—until I got here?!"
The furious voice boomed across the sea.
Far off on the horizon, the ocean surface glittered blindingly—
An immense expanse of sea was freezing solid in the blink of an eye!
The former Admiral of the Navy, Kuzan—Aokiji—had returned.
"Ice Age!"
In barely seconds, kilometers of ocean around the Pluton froze over.
The twelve behemoths broke free of the ice almost instantly, but it didn't matter.
For the first time, the marines had firm ground beneath their feet.
They no longer needed to fear being cast into the depths and drowned by raging waves!
Hope surged.
The marines roared for justice and charged across the ice toward the giants.
The colossal beasts leapt up onto the frozen sea in turn, revealing their kilometer-high forms in full glory.
Monsters in every sense—true living weapons.
The bloodiest ground battle yet was about to erupt.
But then—
A piercing howl cut through the skies.
Sengoku looked up—
Hundreds of colossal meteors were descending, each as vast as a mountain, wreathed in flame and smoke, plummeting with apocalyptic might toward the monsters' backs!
"New recruit Fujitora, reporting for duty!"
Pls drop some power stones supper me at my
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