Chapter 187: The Donquixote Family, Wiped Out
"Bastards."
Doflamingo spoke with his head lowered, every word soaked in venomous hate.
"You ruined my auction. You killed my family."
He suddenly snapped his head up. Behind the lenses, his eyes were bloodshot and locked onto Yamato.
"I am going to torture you to death, slowly. Piece by piece."
Before his voice even fell, his fingers twitched almost imperceptibly in the air.
Invisible strings dropped silently from above, shooting toward the back of Yamato's neck.
"Fuffuffuffu… Become my puppet."
"What are you babbling about?" Yamato said.
Without even looking back, she reached up and caught the strings in one hand, fingers closing around them like they were nothing.
She curled her lip, face full of disdain. "This kind of cheap trick does not work on me."
Her Observation Haki was not exactly weak.
"Cheap trick?" Doflamingo's eye twitched. At her words, something inside him tore loose; rage flooded him, hot and blinding.
"Then I will show you the real thing.
"A bounty does not show everything I can do.
"Five-Color Strings."
He spread his fingers. Five invisible threads shot from his fingertips with a shriek like tearing metal, whipping straight for Yamato.
Her eyes sharpened. A white mist of frost coiled around the kanabo in her hand.
"Divine Swiftness."
In the next instant, her body blurred, becoming a streak of white light skimming low across the floor.
Doflamingo's eyes shrank.
Fast.
"Divine Swiftness: White Serpent."
Her flat declaration cut through the air.
Before the strings could even touch her, they shattered against her charge.
At the same time, the kanabo wrapped in frost and Haki came crashing in with mountain-cracking force.
Bang.
Doflamingo had no time to dodge or properly block.
The club smashed straight into his face.
His sunglasses exploded into splinters. Bone crunched with a sound that made teeth ache, and blood fountained from his nose and mouth.
Freezing cold spread along the kanabo. Ice bloomed from his skull and raced down over his body.
He flew like a home-run ball, showering ice shards and blood across the hall.
Boom. Boom. Boom. Boom.
He punched through wall after wall in a chain of thunderous impacts, rubble and dust billowing up behind him.
His body finally vanished beyond the palace altogether, hurled somewhere outside.
"Doffy!"
"Young master!"
The Donquixote officers screamed, eyes wide with disbelief.
Impossible.
Someone as strong as their young master had just… had just been…
"Damn it!"
"Kill them! We will avenge the young master!"
Trebol's snot-slick body swelled as he charged, bawling, tears and mucus flying.
Behind him, Pica, Senor Pink, Jora and the other officers followed.
Fear gnawed at them, but loyalty to the family and their feelings for Doflamingo burned hotter.
Their eyes were red as they rushed to attack, even if the enemy was the infamous Beasts Pirates.
"Do not get carried away, you freaks!" Pica screeched.
His huge body sank into the stone floor.
"Watch out," Law warned at once. "He has the Stone-Stone Fruit. He can merge with rock and turn into a giant."
Jora, with her odd triangular glasses, turned at the sound of his voice, frowning.
"You look… familiar," she said.
A beat later, she found the matching image in her memory, anchored on those unmistakable eyes.
"You are that brat Corazon saved. You are still alive?"
If she remembered right, he had Amber Lead Syndrome. Everyone had assumed he would die before he turned thirteen.
"Not that it matters," she went on, lips twisting. "If you have chosen to stand against the Donquixote Family, then be ready to die."
A swirling cloud of multicolored, abstract "smoke" bloomed from her palm and hurtled toward Law.
"I will send those words right back at you," he said.
Kikoku rasped free of its sheath. One clean stroke split the strange vapor apart, scattering it before it could touch him.
"Today is the day I avenge Corazon."
He had spent three years inside the Donquixote Family. He knew exactly how their abilities worked.
Let that smoke touch him, and he would be twisted into whatever grotesque thing Jora imagined.
"Need a hand?" Yamato called over her shoulder, as if she did not even see Trebol and the others barreling toward her.
"No."
Law pressed his lips together, eyes locked on Jora. "I might not be strong enough yet to beat Doflamingo. But against the rest of them… I am more than confident."
He had not spent his years in North Blue just sightseeing.
Pica's shrill voice rang out again.
"You dare look away while fighting me?"
A stone fist half the size of the room came crashing down toward Yamato, intent on grinding her to dust.
She only hopped lightly backward and slipped out of its path.
Tilting her head, she glanced up at the ceiling.
There, a gigantic stone upper body clung upside down like a bat, arm still extended from the punch.
"Your power looks kind of boring," Yamato said, unimpressed.
She did not give him a chance to strike again.
She swung the kanabo up almost lazily.
Whoosh.
A blast of white frost shot up, slamming into the stone giant.
Pica's stone avatar froze in place.
In the instant the cold engulfed him, razor-hard white rime spread over every inch of rock, locking it all in solid ice.
I… I cannot move.
Panic flared in Pica's chest.
Hidden deep inside the statue, he forced his power with everything he had, trying to slip away.
Too late.
A black iron club punched through the stone giant and hammered into his true body.
His eyes rolled back, and his consciousness snapped.
The massive construct began to crumble. Pica's real body tumbled out of the breaking rock and hit the floor with a heavy thud, completely still.
"Pica!" Trebol howled.
Aside from Doflamingo, Pica was the family's strongest fighter.
And he had fallen this easily?
Yamato landed lightly and swept her gaze over the remaining officers, who were staring at her like she was a monster.
"Any other fun abilities?" she asked, sounding genuinely hopeful. "If not, I am just going to knock you all out."
Her answer was a storm of gunfire.
Rat-tat-tat-tat.
"Die for me!" Baby 5 shouted.
Cigarette in her mouth and maid outfit fluttering, she had turned both arms into guns and was firing nonstop.
Yamato, wreathed in her shining ice armor, still looked bored.
Every bullet flattened or ricocheted the instant it hit the thin, translucent layer of ice coating her body. It could not even scratch her, much less wound her.
"Let me break that shell of hers," an old man snarled.
"Hasshoken Supreme Secret Art: Battle Preservation Fist!"
Lao G's frail frame suddenly swelled like a balloon.
Muscles bulged and popped under his skin as his body packed on grotesque density.
In seconds, the decrepit elder had turned into a walking mass of corded muscle.
He shaped his arms into a capital G, stamped a foot down, and shot forward as a blur toward Yamato.
"G Stamp!"
As he closed in, a pair of big hands suddenly thrust out of the floor around Yamato's feet and clamped hard around her ankles like iron cuffs.
A man in a pink baby bonnet and pacifier rose out of the ground as if swimming up through water.
"Sorry. For the family's sake, I can only resort to a sneak attack," Senor Pink said quietly.
"It is fine," Yamato replied.
She actually lowered her head to look at him properly, her voice utterly serious. There was no hint of anger in her face, only respect for the fight itself.
"In battle, you are supposed to go all out. That is what it means to stake everything."
She spoke as if she had not even noticed Lao G closing in.
"Got you," Lao G crowed.
His hands slammed into Yamato's abdomen.
"This punch holds fifty years of my training. Let us see you block it."
Boom.
Ki exploded from his palms.
His smile froze almost immediately.
It felt like he had punched a glacier. The recoil numbed his arms.
At the same moment, white frost erupted from Yamato, surging outward.
Crack. Crack.
When the mist cleared, two perfect ice sculptures stood where Senor Pink and Lao G had been.
"Not bad. You actually cracked it a little," Yamato said, looking down at the fine fractures spidering across the ice armor over her stomach.
Then, under the steady wash of her own chill, the cracks sealed.
In seconds, the armor was whole again, smooth and flawless, as if nothing had ever touched it.
"You have got to be joking. We could not even break her armor?" Trebol whispered.
His expression crumpled into pure despair.
How were they supposed to fight that?
The gap between them and this woman was suffocating.
But thinking of all the years the family had spent building their empire, of the comrades already lying on the ground, he clenched what passed for his teeth and forced his viscous body to boil.
Blobs of thick mucus launched from him like cannonballs, hurling toward Yamato.
Fine. If he could not beat her, he would at least disgust her.
And he did manage to make her frown.
Yamato's brows drew tight as she looked at the glistening projectiles.
"Gross," she muttered.
"At the same time!"
A fat blond man leaped into the air.
Instead of falling, he floated like a balloon, drifting up directly over Yamato.
"Hell's Ten-Thousand-Ton Vise!"
An instant later, his body went from weightless to impossibly heavy, plummeting like a meteor toward her.
This was Machvise, user of the Ton-Ton Fruit, able to adjust his own weight up to ten thousand tons.
"Die!"
In that same heartbeat, Dellinger—horns on his head, fins on his back, red heels flashing—shot toward Yamato like an arrow.
"Guillotine Heel!"
His right leg whipped at her neck.
The unmodified, normal-sized Monet attacked too.
"Blizzard," she cried.
She drew in a deep breath, gathering cold in her chest, then exhaled it in a ripping gale.
"Exploding Hair."
Another officer in a dark blue coat and top hat shouted.
His long hair swelled and hardened, punching through his hat before launching outward in a storm of spines.
This was Gladius, whose power let him turn anything he touched into a bomb.
Attacks came from every direction.
Yamato's grin widened.
"Good. Come on," she said.
Haki and frost surged into her kanabo.
"You all ready to get knocked flying?"
"Divine Fang."
Her body became a streak of white lightning, too fast for the naked eye.
In a heartbeat, she wove through every gap between the Donquixote officers and their attacks.
Slash. Slash. Slash. Slash.
In the space of a blink, frost flooded the room, freezing every assault and every body where they stood.
When the white haze faded, the chamber had become an icefield.
Statues of ice stood everywhere, perfect down to the last detail, each locked in the last instant of their charge or swing.
Even Monet, with her Snow-Snow Fruit, was no exception.
What were a few snowflakes next to Yamato's cold?
"That… that is it?" Law said.
He stood there, Jora's severed head still cooling on his blade, staring at the frozen scene.
He had always known the Donquixote Family would lose one day.
But he had never imagined it would be this fast, or this absolute.
In the span of a few minutes, the mountain that had loomed over his heart for years had been smashed to pieces.
"With Yamato's strength, this is about right," Viola said.
Arms folded, she sounded quietly proud.
A raw, hateful roar suddenly ripped through the frozen air, like a wounded beast howling.
"Trebol! Pica!"
Doflamingo staggered into view.
He was drenched in blood and caked with ice and dust. His face was so mangled it was barely recognizable. Even his signature red sunglasses were shattered, one lens gone.
He looked like a demon clawing its way out of hell—battered, but unbowed.
The fallen king had returned, twisted with rage.
He could not accept it.
In just a few minutes, the subordinates he prized as family had all been destroyed.
"Unforgivable. Unforgivable."
He had killed his father. He had killed his brother. But he still cared about those he called family.
"I will tear you all to pieces."
As his scream hit its peak, everything around him began to change.
With him at the center, the floor, walls, ceiling—everything his eyes could see—shivered and unraveled into strings.
In seconds, half the palace had turned into a seething sea of threads.
"What do we do?" Law asked, unable to hide the flicker of panic in his eyes.
He had never seen anything like this in the North Blue.
"Do? We sit and watch," Viola said with a shrug. "Relax. All we have to do is enjoy Yamato's show."
Law swallowed his shock and forced himself to look back at the battlefield.
At the eye of the storm, Yamato's expression had not changed much.
Her eyes were just a little more focused.
Doflamingo awakening his String-String Fruit was impressive, sure.
But real strength was not just about how far you could push your Fruit.
Still, this version of him had earned a sliver of her respect.
White fur sprouted over her skin in a rush.
Her hybrid beast form had arrived.