-Broadcast-
The seastone wall was doing what seastone walls were built to do.
The Multicellular form, embedded in it, felt the material working against it from every contact point — the drain of a Devil Fruit user in proximity to Seastone, the passive weakening that made abilities sluggish and physical strength fade at the edges. It had been a manageable inconvenience when the fight was going well. Now the fight was not going well, and the inconvenience had become a structural problem.
"I underestimated you," Black Sperm said, from the wall. Its voice retained the quality of something that was not yet admitting defeat so much as auditing what had gone wrong. "A man your age shouldn't have been able to push me to this."
Garp descended from the air in front of the embedded form. He had heard this kind of thing before — the moment an opponent started talking instead of fighting was the moment the opponent had started thinking about losing. He had no interest in the speech. He had interest in not wasting the window it represented.
He raised his fists.
The Jōmon's effect on speed was absolute at this level — not the speed of a trained fighter at peak condition, but the speed of physics being briefly renegotiated, the air around the fists struggling to move out of the way fast enough. When Garp began the sequence, the friction was immediate. The sparks followed within the first few punches. By the time the motion had reached its rhythm, the sparks had become something else.
"Asa Kujaku."
Morning Peacock.
The flames came from the friction between fist and air at a velocity the air wasn't equipped for. They were not hot the way fire was hot — they were hot the way concentrated force was hot, the way impact at this speed translated into thermal energy as a side effect of the physics involved. Each punch produced a bloom of it, bright and vivid, trailing behind the motion in an arc that built into the next arc and the next, until the pattern spreading from Garp's movement looked like something opening — a bird spreading its tail, luminous, filling the corridor with light that moved.
The fireballs reached the wall before the Multicellular form could do anything useful about them.
It tried. The options it had were limited by the seastone contact and by the fact that Garp's speed at the Jōmon stage was not something it had prepared for when it chose this wall. The fire hit, and the Armament Haki that moved with the fire hit, and the combination did what concentrated Armament Haki at this level does to things that cannot move away from it.
Garp's fists followed the fire in.
What came after was not elegant. It was methodical — punch after punch, each one landing because the previous one had established position and the speed of the Jōmon removed the possibility of adequate recovery time between impacts. The Multicellular form's body compressed around the assault. The seastone behind it accepted the transferred force in the way seastone did, which was to say it cracked, and cracked further, and the cracks propagated.
"It's not finished," Garp said, stepping back. He took one breath. Gathered everything the sixth gate currently had in reserve.
He moved.
The final punch went through.
Through the Multicellular form's body, through what remained of its cellular cohesion at the point of impact, through the seastone wall behind it — a hole opening between two sealed sections of Still Water Prison, rubble and dust and scattered Black Sperm units blown into the newly connected space. The units that had survived the Morning Peacock by virtue of not being in the direct impact zone were now in the hole and in no condition to consolidate into anything.
Shanks and Dragon stared at the hole.
They stared at it for long enough that the silence became its own statement.
"He punched through it," Shanks said.
"He punched through it," Dragon confirmed.
They held two seconds of wordless acknowledgment for whatever remained of Buggy's cadre. Then, because the hole was there and Garp had already gone through it, they followed.
The air on the other side was wrong.
They knew it before they fully entered the space — the quality of it, the color, the way it interacted with the light sources above. A red haze filled the environment at chest height, moving with the slow circulation of something that had been accumulating rather than dispersing, and the smell that came with it was the chemical wrongness of something designed at a biological level to unmake things.
Dragon and Shanks covered their mouths simultaneously. Instinct.
Garp was already pushing them back.
"Out," he said, the Armament Haki wrapping his own respiratory tract as a partial filter. "Both of you. Back through the hole. Your bodies can't handle this."
He was right. The Dead Water had been weakening them for months — their physical condition was not what it had been, and whatever Magellan's red venom did to a person in full health, it would do considerably worse to people already running a deficit. Dragon and Shanks retreated to the edge of the hole and stayed there, where the air mixed with the cleaner corridor atmosphere and became survivable.
The healing mechanism of the Gate of Wound worked against the toxin as Garp breathed — continuously, paying in lifespan for every corroded inch of respiratory tissue, maintaining him against an environment that was actively trying to render him non-functional. He kept his breathing shallow and looked at what was in front of him.
The poison giant's red skull construct — what had been a hundred meters of condensed venom skeleton earlier in the fight — was much reduced. Shattered down to perhaps a third of its original volume, the skull crushed and the remaining structure held together by Magellan's will and production capacity rather than any intact architecture. Magellan himself was partially exposed — the outer venom coating that had served as his armor had been stripped in sections, and what was underneath showed the evidence of a fight that had been going on since long before Garp arrived on this level.
Magellan was holding a dragon's head with his bare hands.
Momonosuke — red-scaled, the Uo Uo no Mi (Fish-Fish Fruit), Model: Seiryu (Azure Dragon) expressing itself fully — had coiled around the deputy director's body with the strategy of something that has decided constriction is more reliable than biting. His coils had Magellan's torso. His head was in Magellan's grip, Armament Haki at the palms, the dragon's mouth forced open wide and held there. The geometry of the clinch kept Momonosuke from closing his jaws on anything vital. The geometry of the coils kept Magellan from generating the full poison giant with his arms occupied.
A standoff. A painful, prolonged, mutually degrading standoff.
The dragon's eye, the one visible from this angle, was slightly glassy. The red venom that had been saturating the air for the duration of their fight was not entirely ineffective against Momonosuke's constitution — it was slower, and it was partial, but accumulation over time had been doing quiet work regardless. The grip of the coils was less than it had been an hour ago. The fire breath had stopped some time back.
"Let go," Momonosuke said, the words distorted by the forced-open jaw. "Release your grip and let me bite you properly."
"No."
They noticed Garp at the same moment.
They called out at the same moment.
"Help me—"
"—get over here—"
Behind Garp, through the hole, the sound of cellular activity resumed — the Black Sperm units that had survived, scattered by the Morning Peacock and dispersed by the final punch, finding each other in the new space and beginning the process of reconstituting into something with functional mass and will. Not the Multicellular form — not yet, possibly not again this quickly. But something. The sound of Black Sperm doing its accounting and deciding it had more left.
Garp stood in the middle of the space between a poison man holding a dragon's head and a reconstituting cell colony, in six gates of light, breathing as shallowly as the Gate of Wound would allow him to sustain.
He looked at all of it.
The melee on this level of Still Water Prison began.