Gravity rolled off the edge of the Shindokuto in a dense, crushing wave. The outer wall of the God's Abode was a monument to absolute arrogance. It was built from thick, heavily reinforced stone, designed to overawe rather than defend, because the people inside had never once considered the possibility of a siege. Under the crushing pressure of the Gravity Blade, that magnificent architecture folded backward like wet clay. The soldiers stationed on the high battlements pitched forward, their bodies crumpling under an invisible, suffocating weight before their minds could even register the attack.
The wall came down. A massive section of the God's Abode's impenetrable first line of defense dissolved into a mountain of dust and broken rock in exactly two seconds.
Finn smoothly sheathed the Shindokuto.
"Let's see what they've been preparing."
Sakazuki, Borsalino, Gion, and Kuzan stepped through the settling dust, falling into formation behind him. Garp rolled his shoulders and took a step to follow, but Sengoku's heavy hand clamped down on his arm.
"Hina is holding the front line," Sengoku stated.
"Then there's no reason I can't go in there and—"
"There's no one coordinating the center." Sengoku turned his gaze to Tsuru, who acknowledged the silent assignment with a brief, sharp nod. "Tsuru manages the overall tactical operation from here. You stay back as the reserve."
Garp turned his head, his face twisting into the deep scowl of a man who had just been uninvited from a very promising brawl. "Reserve?"
"For situations we haven't accounted for yet. Which, considering how today has gone so far, seems like a necessary precaution."
Finn had orchestrated the forward assault, positioned the siege line, and directed the suppression of the lower city. He had not left anyone to hold the middle ground. Sengoku, who had been commanding battlefields since long before Finn put on a uniform, had quietly patched the hole in the formation before the argument could even start. It was a stark reminder of the gap in their experience, and both men knew it.
Garp stayed. He grumbled, but he stayed.
Crossing the threshold of the God's Abode was a historic moment for all of them. None of the Marines present had ever set foot on these grounds. The quiet irony was not lost on Finn as his boots hit the pristine courtyard paving. The Marines had been the bloody instrument of this place's power for generations, yet the very people who kept the machine running were strictly forbidden from seeing what they were actually protecting. The Celestial Dragons had treated this arrangement as the natural order of the world. It had remained the natural order, right up until this exact moment.
Beyond the ruined wall, the sprawling outer square was packed tight with heavily armed guards. They stood in dense, disciplined formations, rifles raised and artillery cannons dialed in. Whatever internal communication network the God's Abode used had given them plenty of warning.
"Open fire!" a guard general screamed, his voice cracking with panic.
The courtyard erupted into a wall of noise and smoke. Rifles cracked, cannons boomed, and every caliber of ammunition the World Government's endless budget could buy was hurled toward the small group of officers walking through the breach.
Finn ignored the incoming fire. He was looking down at a map.
"Is it here?" Finn held the crumpled paper toward Sengoku, tapping a smudged ink mark with his finger.
"How would I know? I've never been allowed in here either." Sengoku peered at the crude diagram, his expression souring into the mild disgust of a man handed a very poor forgery. "That is the second time I've looked at this drawing, and I somehow understand it less."
The map was Doflamingo's contribution. The core problem was that Doflamingo had drawn it purely from memory, and he had last been inside the God's Abode as a traumatized child fleeing for his life. He had not exactly stopped to take architectural notes. Factor in the massive renovations following Dragon's raid four years ago, and the Celestial Dragons' constant habit of redesigning their mansions on a whim, and the result was completely useless. The ink scribbles bore the same resemblance to the actual God's Abode as a child's finger painting bore to reality.
"Big Fire."
Sakazuki stepped forward and threw a punch.
The magma bomb that launched from his fist was not an exercise in precision. It didn't need to be. The molten rock expanded rapidly as it tore through the air, sweeping across the entire courtyard in a massive, blinding arc. It swallowed the incoming artillery shells whole, the ammunition detonating uselessly deep inside the liquid fire. The blistering heatwave rolled over the guard formations, melting weapons and breaking the defensive line in three seconds. It accomplished what a standard infantry regiment would have needed hours to do.
The square went completely silent, save for the crackle of cooling slag.
Kuzan leaned over Finn's shoulder to study the paper. "Based on the original layout, the main vault should be in this sector."
"We broke through the north wall," Finn said, pointing to a jagged line on the page. "That puts us here. The castle that matches this vague shape should be in the exact opposite direction." Finn rotated the paper ninety degrees, frowned at the new orientation, and turned it back. "Unless he drew north as east. Which, knowing him, is entirely possible."
"Why don't we just ask Doflamingo?" Gion suggested, her tone perfectly reasonable. "He is supposed to be out here with us."
They all looked up. High above the God's Abode, the faint, shimmering lines of the Birdcage stretched across the sky, confirming that Doflamingo had at least followed his primary order to lock down the airspace. However, the warlord himself was nowhere to be seen in the immediate vicinity.
Finn wasn't worried about Doflamingo switching sides. The man had burned all his bridges; his only path to survival ran directly through a Marine victory. He wasn't stupid enough to sabotage that. It was far more likely he had slipped away to hunt down a few Celestial Dragons on his own time, which was the only reason he had agreed to come to Mary Geoise in the first place. Finn made a quiet mental note to ensure Doflamingo didn't get himself killed before the job was done.
The map, meanwhile, continued to offer zero tactical value.
"Forget the map," Finn sighed.
He stepped forward, knelt on the scorched stone, and pressed both palms flat against the earth.
Darkness bled out of him. It did not erupt in the violent, focused streams he used for combat. Instead, it moved like a slow, patient flood. It poured over the ground, spreading outward in a massive, expanding circle. It hugged the contours of the courtyard, flowing over stairs, into craters, and around debris, moving with the quiet inevitability of rising water.
Sengoku watched the inky black tide reach the edge of his vision, sweeping across the manicured lawns and grand pavilions.
"Sink," Finn said. His voice was quiet, almost a whisper.
The nature of the darkness shifted instantly. It stopped being a shadow on the surface and became a void with infinite depth. It pulled downward. Everything resting on top of it went down with it. Intricate stone buildings, shattered rubble, the glowing remnants of Sakazuki's magma, melted artillery cannons, decorative garden walls, marble statues, and pristine paving tiles. All of it sank into the black abyss in a slow, silent procession. It was as if the earth itself had simply decided to stop supporting the weight of the last eight centuries.
The darkness swallowed it all. Then, it snapped back.
The shadows rushed inward, retreating into Finn's hands. When the courtyard cleared, everything within a three-kilometer radius was simply gone. There was no rubble. There were no ruins. There was only bare, flat red earth. The ancient bedrock of Mary Geoise, exposed to the open air for the first time in recorded history, stretched out in every direction.
And sitting alone in the middle of that vast, empty red plain, sitting diagonal to their current position, was a single structure. The darkness had deliberately spared it.
It was a towering, ancient castle built from heavy, blackened stone. It did not match the pristine, arrogant architecture of Pangaea Castle. It looked incredibly old, belonging to an era long forgotten, and it stood completely isolated on the cleared bedrock.
"That's it," Finn said, standing up and brushing the red dust from his hands.
Sengoku opened his mouth, likely to comment on the sheer scale of the excavation.
His body erupted in blinding golden light before a single word could leave his throat.
It was not a conscious choice. It was pure, primal instinct, the kind forged in decades of lethal combat that bypassed the brain entirely and hijacked the nervous system. The fact that Sengoku's mythical beast transformation had triggered involuntarily meant that whatever his Haki had just detected was moving too fast for a human mind to process.
Around him, the others reacted with the same terrifying speed. Gion's hand was already a blur as she drew Konpira. Sakazuki and Kuzan shifted stances.
The beam fired from the left wing of the black stone castle.
Given the distance it had to cross, there was roughly the span of a single heartbeat between their first spike of awareness and the moment of impact.
Back in the conference room, the attack had been forced to punch through walls, ceilings, and layers of structural reinforcement. Those obstacles had bled off a fraction of its speed and provided a microsecond of warning. Out here on the bare red bedrock, there was absolutely nothing between the weapon's barrel and their faces.
This was the first time any of them truly comprehended what they were facing.
It did not move like an artillery shell. It did not move like a standard energy attack. It moved with the impossible, instantaneous violence of Borsalino accelerating to maximum speed, and the blast radius was wide enough to vaporize all of them at once.
Borsalino's hands snapped up on sheer muscle memory. His fingers formed a familiar geometric frame, and a blinding prism of defensive light flared to life between his palms.
Gion was a fraction of a second behind him. Konpira's steel flashed, and a roaring column of highly compressed lightning tore from the blade in a straight, searing line.
Both counterattacks slammed into the incoming beam.
The three catastrophic forces collided in the dead air halfway between the ancient castle and the Marine officers. The energies ground against each other, locking in a terrifying stalemate that illuminated the entire plateau. That stalemate lasted for a fraction of a second.
It was exactly the fraction of a second Finn needed.
Finn stepped smoothly to the front of the group and threw both arms wide open.
"Dark Sky."
The void exploded from his body, rising up like a massive, physical wall. The darkness unfurled thick and absolute, stretching high above their heads and expanding wide enough to swallow the entire Marine vanguard in its shadow. It was not a refined or focused technique. It was raw power, throwing every ounce of his ability outward to create the largest possible barrier in the shortest possible time.
The three colliding energies finally reached critical mass and let go of each other.
The resulting explosion was not a clean, localized blast. The annihilating energy of Little Pluto, Borsalino's radiant light, and Gion's jagged lightning all fused together in the center. The detonation birthed a terrifying, multi-colored mushroom cloud that clawed its way into the sky above the God's Abode. The red bedrock beneath their feet groaned and fractured. The shockwave rolled forward, slamming into Finn's wall of darkness with the force of a hurricane hitting a seawall.
The darkness held. It did not just block the blast; it ate it. The churning inferno of light and heat was violently compressed, dragged inward, and devoured by the boundless black void until there was absolutely nothing left but the smell of ozone.
The silence that settled over the red plain was the specific, heavy silence of people who had just missed being erased from existence by a millimeter.
Finn slowly lowered his arms. The darkness receded.
"That," Finn said, his voice remarkably steady, "is considerably faster than I expected."
Beside him, Sengoku raised a massive, golden hand and wiped at his forehead, though there was no sweat there to wipe. His golden fingers were trembling ever so slightly. He did not point it out, and no one else mentioned it.
"Faster than I expected as well," Sengoku rumbled, his voice tight. He paused, his eyes fixed on the distant black castle. "It might actually be faster than Borsalino."
From his position behind the former Fleet Admiral, Borsalino straightened his suit jacket. His face settled into a very specific, deeply offended pout.
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