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After a three-second stalemate, Chinjao's massive body was sent flying.
BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM!
He was a cannonball, launched a thousand meters into the distance before crashing into the sea, sending up a colossal pillar of water.
"GRANDFATHER!" Sai and Boo screamed.
"LEADER!" the Happo Navy officers cried out in disbelief.
Their leader, their pillar... sent flying by a single punch again??
Jin flipped in mid-air, using Moonwalk to slow his descent, and landed lightly on the deck of the carrier below.
"Quick, Ai! Go! Snatch the bodies! All those soul crystals..." Jin's eyes were gleaming.
The Kraken's Tongue crew had over three thousand men.
This one haul would make him rich.
To avoid any further conflict with the Happo Navy, he had Ai broadcast a message.
"PROFESSIONAL SALVAGE AND CORPS-RECOVERY SERVICES NOW IN OPERATION. OUR TARGET IS THE KRAKEN'S TONGUE. ALL UNAFFILIATED PERSONNEL, PLEASE CLEAR THE AREA. THANK YOU."
The message repeated over a loudspeaker.
The Happo Navy stared, dumbfounded.
What the hell?
Hey! Those are our prisoners! Our spoils of war!
A pirate crew, getting their loot jacked by another pirate crew?
Sometimes, you really just want to call the cops...
But with Chinjao knocked into the sea and Sai and Boo busy trying to fish him out, the Happo Navy was leaderless. All they could do was watch as the strange ship happily devoured everything in its path.
"What is that thing??"
"It's a monster! A demon with an insatiable hunger!"
Jin had Ai filter out the Happo Navy bodies to avoid conflict. It wasn't that he was afraid—he just had his fill with the Kraken's Tongue crew. And besides, he was interested in visiting the Kano Country. He'd heard they had Haki techniques even more advanced than those in Wano.
After all, a man like Chinjao, in his prime, could have held his own against the strongest of the Scabbards. And his Happo Navy was just one of several official pirate crews from the Kano Country. There were others of comparable strength. It spoke to the power of the nation as a whole.
But like Wano, it was a closed country, difficult for outsiders to enter.
And finally, he had no real beef with them. There was no need to make an enemy. A good fight was just a way of getting to know someone.
Once the looting was done, the demonic carrier came to a stop.
The sea was calm.
Jin glanced at the ship's interface.
——————
[Primary Authority: Captain Jin]
[Hull Data: Length 48m | Width 22m | Height 12.6m | Weight 150 Tons]
[Internal Space: 2.5 x 1.2 x 0.5 km³]
[Abilities: Munch-Munch | Mushroom-Mushroom | Candy-Candy | Hell's Red Serpent | Calm-Calm | Triceratops-Triceratops | Bomb-Bomb | Spring-Spring | Kraken-Kraken]
[Armaments: Main Cannons (56) | Heavy Cannons (325) | Firearms (12,068) | Blades (11,564)]
[Crew: Bartholomew Kuma (Cook) | Sir Crocodile (Boatswain)]
[Next Evolution Requirements: Soul Crystals (3562/2000) | Refined Steel (50,000 tons/2000 tons) | Gold (13/10 tons) | Silver (37/30 tons) | Rare Earth Metals (368/300 tons) | Biological Matter (6/10)!]
——————
Excellent.
The soul crystals were more than enough. The other materials were also taken care of, thanks to the loot from all the pirate crews he'd defeated.
He was only four Biological Matters short of his next evolution. And with Capone Bege's Castle-Castle Fruit on his to-do list, that was really only three.
Not many at all.
—————————
Half an hour later, Jin, having revealed his status as the king of a member nation, was being warmly entertained by a revived Chinjao.
His gesture of returning a portion of their supplies and the bodies of their fallen comrades had earned him the goodwill of the Happo Navy.
Chinjao was a magnanimous man. He held no grudge over his defeat and, upon hearing that Jin wished to visit the Kano Country, readily agreed to help.
As they were drinking, a thought occurred to him. "You know, that punch of yours... it reminded me of an old acquaintance. A Marine Vice Admiral... 'Garp the Fist'."
"Garp trained me," Jin said.
Chinjao's cup stopped halfway to his lips.
"I also heard him mention you," Jin added quickly. "He said you were one of the strongest opponents he'd ever faced."
"Oh?" Chinjao's eyes glazed over. "That arrogant bastard... he really said that?"
His obsession with Garp was purely due to the fact that the man had, with a single punch, destroyed the "key" to his treasure vault—his pointy head. The treasure was now trapped in an ice sheet that only his drill-like head could break.
Every day, he would look at his inaccessible mountain of treasure and despair. It was like marrying a goddess, only to find out you'd been castrated.
"I've heard the story," Jin said. "Perhaps... I could try to break open that ice sheet for you."
Jin's punch hadn't been able to restore Chinjao's head. Luffy had been able to do it, likely because the properties of his Gum-Gum Fruit, combined with the clash of Haki, had unintentionally released a sliver of his awakened power. Otherwise, how could a punch make something pointier? It wasn't scientific.
But in the world of One Piece, trying to apply science was the most unscientific thing you could do.
"You?" Chinjao looked at him. "Your Haki and your potential are immense, but the Treasure Ice Sheet is not so easily broken. It requires a special technique, a way to focus all of your power onto a single point, like a nail, and drive it into the steel-hard ice. Then, you have to create a destructive force from within. It's a living, explosive power. We call it Piercing Impact."
He held up a finger an inch from the mast and, with a sharp flick, sent a shockwave through it.
"A master carpenter can drive a nail with a single blow—" he explained.
"—That's a living force. If you just hammer away at it, the nail will bend, the wood will split, and you'll get nowhere. It's the same with fighting. Speed, precision, power... if you master this, even a master of Armament Haki won't be able to block you. There is also another technique, Internal Destruction. It's a penetrating force. One punch, and the outside is untouched, but the inside is shattered. You need to combine both to break the Treasure Ice Sheet."
Jin's eyes lit up. He had been fumbling in the dark with his Haki, lacking a systematic approach. Garp's training had been focused on the basics, on fighting. But Chinjao's words had opened a new door for him.
Haki was just a form of power.
Different nations, different fighters, had different ways of using it. The Six Powers of the Marines, Fish-Man Karate, the Happo Navy's Hasshoken... they could all be integrated.
He humbly asked Chinjao to teach him.
Chinjao, out of a certain sense of rivalry, was eager to show this student of Garp's his own techniques. He began to teach him Piercing Impact and Internal Destruction on the spot.
Jin was a quick study. He already had his own understanding of Haki, and combined with Chinjao's instruction, he picked it up with astonishing speed, grasping the basics in a single day.
Chinjao, Sai, and Boo were all stunned. These techniques took normal people ten, twenty years of hard training to master.
Chinjao then took him to the Treasure Ice Sheet.
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