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Elsa huddled in the darkness of her stone prison, her small body curled into the tightest ball possible. Tears streamed down her dirt-streaked face as she buried her head against her knees, trying desperately to make herself disappear into the rubble.
"Senior Pink," she whispered through hitching sobs. "Where are you? I'm so scared. Please come back. Please..." Her voice broke. "Eren... anyone... I'm so scared..."
But no rescue came. Senior Pink was already dead.
She was alone with a monster wearing her grandfather's face.
Outside her refuge, King Riku's patience had run dry. He paced in front of the gap like a caged animal, his mind racing with paranoid calculations. What if someone comes? What if someone interferes? I'm too weak to fight a real opponent. Years of imprisonment stole my strength. I can barely handle children and women now.
The thought filled him with self-loathing, but he pushed it down. This had to be finished. Quickly. Completely.
He tossed aside the empty pistol with a gesture of disgust. The weapon had been scavenged from a dead jailer during his escape—useful then, useless now. And it was stained with Anna's blood, making it feel cursed in his hands.
"Elsa!" His voice took on a cajoling tone, false warmth masking murderous intent. "I've lost my patience, child. These stones won't stop me. I'm coming for you right now. Make this easier on yourself and come out. You're going to die either way—it's not your fault you're Doflamingo's bastard spawn."
If I can't beat him, I'll settle for beating his child, King Riku thought with grim satisfaction. The righteous king had died somewhere in Doflamingo's dungeons. This creature wearing his skin was something else entirely—something petty, vindictive, and willing to slaughter the innocent to feel powerful again.
He gripped the largest boulder blocking the entrance and pulled. His muscles screamed in protest, his joints popping audibly, but desperation granted him strength beyond his diminished capacity. The stone—easily three times his body weight—shifted with a grinding scrape of rock on rock.
One down. Keep going.
Another boulder. Another surge of adrenaline-fueled strength. Blood seeped from splits in his skin where sharp edges had cut deep, but he barely noticed. Pain was irrelevant. Only the goal mattered: reaching the girl, silencing her forever, erasing Doflamingo's legacy from the world one small corpse at a time.
Inside her hiding spot, Elsa pressed her hands tighter over her ears, squeezing her eyes shut in a futile attempt to block out reality. But she couldn't escape the sounds—the scraping of stone, the labored breathing of her pursuer, the steady approach of death.
She'd thought herself clever for squeezing into this gap. But she'd made a fatal error: it was a dead end. No exit. No escape route. Just a small chamber formed by collapsed architecture where she could do nothing but wait for her execution.
Her whole body trembled violently, fear reducing her to pure animal terror. How could I fight him? I'm five years old. He's a swordsman. What can I possibly do?
"Mama," she whimpered, her voice barely audible even to herself. "I'm scared. Where are you? Mama, please..."
But Mama was dead on the cottage floor, her neck broken, her eyes staring at nothing. And even if she'd been alive, Violet couldn't have saved her. No one could save her.
It's all Doflamingo's fault, Elsa thought with sudden, crystalline clarity. If not for him, we would have been happy. Mama wouldn't have been his prisoner. Anna would still be alive. None of this would have happened.
The seed of hatred planted itself deep in her young heart, finding fertile soil in her terror and grief.
The scraping sounds stopped.
A hand reached through the darkness and grabbed her ankle with bruising force.
"I'm sorry, Elsa," King Riku said without a trace of sincerity. "Don't blame me for being cruel."
He yanked, dragging the screaming girl from her refuge with effortless strength. She clawed at the ground, her fingernails breaking against stone, but it was useless. Within seconds, she was pinned beneath him, his shadow consuming what little light remained.
"Grandpa, please!" Elsa sobbed, abandoning all pride in favor of desperate pleading. "Let me go! If you hate Doflamingo, go kill him! I have nothing to do with him! He's not my father! Please, please, I don't want to die!"
"You carry his blood," King Riku replied coldly, positioning himself to maximize his mechanical advantage. "That's all that matters."
His forearm pressed down across her throat, cutting off air with professional efficiency. Elsa's survival instincts exploded into frantic action—she kicked at his groin with all her strength, scratched deep furrows into his arms with her fingernails, thrashed like a wild animal caught in a trap. But a five-year-old girl's desperate strength meant nothing against a trained warrior three times her size.
King Riku shifted his weight, pressing his knee into her chest to fully immobilize her small body. Both hands closed around her throat, squeezing with methodical pressure. His tears had long since dried. "Goodbye, Elsa. I'll come join you and your sister soon. I promise."
The pressure increased. Elsa felt her windpipe collapsing, her lungs screaming for air that wouldn't come. Her face flushed crimson, then began turning purple as oxygen deprivation set in. Her vision darked at the edges, consciousness flickering like a candle in the wind.
I'm dying. This is what dying feels like.
But beneath the physical agony, something deeper stirred. Rage. Pure, incandescent hatred for this world that had shown her nothing but cruelty from the moment of her birth. She'd hurt no one. Threatened no one. Existed as nothing but a child who wanted her mother's love and her sister's laughter.
Yet here she was, being murdered by her own grandfather for the crime of being born.
With the last breath in her collapsing lungs, Elsa forced out words saturated with venom: "I... hate... you... I hate... everyone... in this... world..."
King Riku felt it before he understood what he was feeling—a surge of raw power emanating from the dying child beneath him. His eyes widened in recognition and disbelief.
"This... this is impossible!"
The power erupted.
Conqueror's Haki exploded outward from Elsa's small body with the force of a bomb detonating. Red and black lightning crackled through the air, visible manifestations of willpower so overwhelming it warped reality itself. The shockwave radiated in all directions, hurling away loose rubble and—most importantly—throwing King Riku backward like he weighed nothing.
The crushing weight disappeared. Air rushed back into Elsa's starved lungs in a desperate, ragged gasp. She rolled onto her side, coughing and heaving, tears streaming down her face as her body fought to recover from the brink of death.
What... what was that?
King Riku crashed into the rubble several meters away, his body tangled in broken stone. But unlike ordinary people who would have been knocked unconscious by such a blast of Conqueror's Haki, he remained awake—barely. As a former king of a New World kingdom, he possessed basic Armament Haki that provided minimal protection against the assault.
But consciousness brought no comfort. Only horror.
"Conqueror's Haki," he whispered, staring at the small girl struggling to breathe. "She has the qualities of a king. But... but why? Why would Doflamingo's child possess this power?"
The irony was excruciating. Conqueror's Haki—the mark of those destined to stand above others, the rarest form of Haki that couldn't be taught or learned, only awakened in those with the natural disposition to rule. One in millions possessed this gift.
And he'd just tried to strangle one of them to death.
"A demon birthed a demon's spawn," King Riku muttered, pulling himself upright with trembling limbs. His body felt wrong—exhausted beyond what the brief fight should have caused. His joints ached. His skin felt tight. "Leaving you alive would be a disaster for this world."
He charged again, abandoning technique in favor of brute force. If he could just reach her, just get his hands around her throat one more time, he could finish what he'd started. The newly awakened Haki might have delayed him, but it hadn't changed the fundamental reality: predator versus prey.
Elsa saw him coming. Her body had barely recovered, her throat still burning, her vision still spotted with darkness. But somewhere in the animal part of her brain, instinct took over.
She raised her small hand, palm outward, toward the charging man. The strange power from before—that overwhelming presence that had thrown him away—she reached for it desperately, not understanding what she was doing, only knowing she needed it to work.
"GO TO HELL!" she screamed with a voice that shouldn't have been possible from a five-year-old. "GO TO HELL! GO TO HELL!"
The Conqueror's Haki answered her call.
But this time, something was different. The crimson and black lightning that erupted from her palm carried a quality that shouldn't exist—a wrongness that violated the natural order. The concentrated beam of willpower struck King Riku mid-charge, and his body reacted in ways no Haki should cause.
"What... what's happening?" King Riku's voice cracked as he looked down at his hands.
His skin was changing. Tightening. Wrinkling. Age spots bloomed across the backs of his hands like fast-forwarded time-lapse footage. The muscles beneath began to atrophy, strength draining away as his body cannibalized itself.
"No... NO!"
He took another step toward Elsa, but his leg buckled. The muscles had weakened to the point of uselessness. His skin continued to dry out, cracking like ancient parchment to reveal the network of blood ships and nerves beneath. His organs began failing in sequence—heart struggling, lungs laboring, kidneys shutting down.
In mere seconds, King Riku aged decades. His hair turned from gray to pure white and began falling out. His spine curved. His teeth loosened. Every system in his body accelerated toward its inevitable end, compressed into a nightmarish parody of natural aging.
"How... how can this be?" he gasped, collapsing to his knees just meters from Elsa. "This isn't... normal... Conqueror's Haki..."
His vision dimmed. His final thought was bitter irony: he'd come so close. Just a few more steps and he could have reached her, could have completed his mission.
But those few steps might as well have been miles.
King Riku Doldo III collapsed face-first into the rubble, his body continuing to decompose even in death—skin turning to leather, flesh desiccating, time claiming its due payment all at once.
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