"It does feel faster than Borsalino," Finn mused, his tone carrying the calm, considered weight of a man who had just reviewed the data and arrived at a scientific conclusion.
Borsalino had been absorbing this assessment in silence for roughly fifteen seconds. He had finally reached his limit.
"I would very much like to know what either of you is basing that on," Borsalino said. He used the slow, measured voice of a man who was actively choosing not to throw a tantrum and was only partially succeeding. "I am made of light. I am the fastest man in the world. That is not a boast. It is a fundamental law of physics."
"Fastest?" Gion raised an eyebrow, adjusting her grip on Konpira.
Borsalino's eye twitched behind his yellow shades. "On your best day, your lightning is comparable to me. Comparable does not mean faster."
"Well, 'comparable' implies the gap is small enough that on a good day—"
"Hey."
Sakazuki's gravelly voice cut through the air. It carried the distinct, heavy exhaustion of a man who was watching his senior staff bicker about trivial nonsense while standing in the middle of a warzone. "Is this really the conversation we're having right now? We just survived a point-blank shot from a doomsday weapon we barely understand, and you three are debating footrace rankings?" He let out a harsh breath, smoke venting from his teeth. "Should I just stand here and wait for the next Little Pluto blast so we can clock it with a stopwatch?"
From the back of the group, Kuzan chimed in lazily. "Little Pluto."
Sakazuki glared over his shoulder. "What?"
"You paused before saying 'Little Pluto'. I thought you forgot the name. I was just helping."
"I know what the damn thing is called, Kuzan."
The ranking dispute was immediately tabled.
Finn turned his attention back to the ancient castle. It sat perfectly centered in the vast expanse of cleared red bedrock, looking as though it had been waiting centuries for this exact moment. It was built from dark, oppressive stone, its harsh architectural lines carved by hands whose names had been lost to history. The devastating beam had originated from somewhere inside those walls.
"That castle is the core," Finn said, his voice dropping the conversational tone. "Uranus is almost certainly locked inside it. The weapon that just fired at us was a knockoff, but that doesn't mean the original Ancient Weapon isn't sitting right next to it." He stared at the imposing structure, running the variables. "We established that Uranus is completely inoperable without someone from the Nefertari bloodline. I stand by that assessment. But that 'Little Pluto' shot just proved that 'inoperable' and 'harmless' are two very different things. We shouldn't give them any more time to spool up."
Sakazuki didn't wait for a second invitation.
Magma violently bubbled up his arms, his skin cracking and glowing with the familiar, terrifying pattern of a man going from zero to maximum lethal output in a single heartbeat. He thrust both fists skyward. Twin geysers of blinding, liquid fire erupted from his hands, punching straight through the low cloud layer hanging over Mary Geoise and vanishing into the stratosphere.
It was Meteor Volcano, Sakazuki's signature field-clearing devastation. The mechanics were brutally simple: launch thousands of tons of magma as high as possible, let gravity take over, and let terminal velocity do the rest. The clouds above them instantly blackened with volcanic ash, looking for a moment like a genuine, apocalyptic storm front.
Then, the sky began to fall.
The meteor shower that plummeted toward the ancient castle looked, from a distance, like the end of the world. Sakazuki had once mentioned, over a very stiff drink, that if he unleashed Meteor Volcano at its absolute maximum theoretical output, he could melt an entire island down to the bedrock. Finn had filed that claim away with the mild skepticism he applied to all of Sakazuki's threats. Finn preferred hard data over theory.
This was going to be an excellent test.
As the screaming, molten boulders closed in on the black stone roof, the castle reacted.
A dense, blinding lattice of yellow laser fire erupted simultaneously from the castle's walls and spires. The beams were needle-thin and surgically precise, crisscrossing the airspace in complex, overlapping geometric patterns that were clearly calculated by a machine, not fired by panicking guards. The automated grid intercepted the falling magma bombs high above the structure, detonating them mid-air with rapid-fire efficiency.
What should have been an extinction-level meteor strike was instantly reduced to a dispersed, harmless rain of cooling slag. The glowing pebbles splashed across the red bedrock, starting a few insignificant fires but causing zero structural damage.
When the ash cleared, the castle stood completely unharmed, save for a few minor scorch marks on the upper parapets.
Sakazuki lowered his smoking arms, his jaw clenched tight.
"A laser defense grid," Borsalino noted, his voice losing its usual lazy drawl. He did not sound pleased. "Fully automated. High-density, hyper-responsive. The base technology is Science Corps. They developed it by reverse-engineering the fundamental principles of my Devil Fruit."
Borsalino adjusted his glasses, his eyes narrowing at the castle. "More than thirty years ago, when Vegapunk was still working out of the Future Country, he managed to synthesize laser technology independently. He was young, and his early designs reflected it. They were aggressive, crude, and designed solely to inflict maximum casualties. He eventually moved away from weapons manufacturing."
A heavy pause hung in the air.
"But when the World Government conscripted him into the Science Corps," Borsalino continued, "Mary Geoise ordered him to revisit those old offensive applications. His refined laser tech became the foundation of the Pacifista project. But this..." Borsalino gestured vaguely toward the impenetrable castle. "This is an evolution of that same baseline. Vegapunk made the grid faster, denser, and more efficient by studying my light directly."
Beside him, Sengoku muttered a string of incredibly foul curses under his breath. They all involved Vegapunk's name, and none of them were complimentary.
Finn's mind briefly flashed to Franky, currently sailing somewhere on the Grand Line, who had accidentally blown himself into the Future Country and walked out as a walking, laser-firing dreadnought. Vegapunk had left fragments of his genius scattered all over the world. Unfortunately, some of the most dangerous pieces had ended up locked inside the vault of the Celestial Dragons.
"So, the castle is protected by a defense grid explicitly designed to mimic your abilities," Kuzan said, glancing sideways at Borsalino. "What does that actually mean for us, practically speaking?"
"It means the grid can calculate and intercept almost any conventional attack, provided the density of the incoming fire doesn't overload the targeting sensors." Borsalino tilted his head toward the sky where Sakazuki's ultimate attack had just been casually swatted away. "As you just witnessed."
The castle itself decided to provide a more detailed answer. It didn't wait for them to finish their tactical assessment.
The laser fire that suddenly poured from the black stone walls was no longer a defensive grid. It was a solid, continuous curtain of offensive light. Hundreds of beams fired in tight, overlapping formation, covering a massive front, and they were accelerating straight toward the Marine officers at a speed that Finn privately admitted was, in fact, genuinely comparable to Borsalino's Yasakani no Magatama.
Borsalino was already moving.
He kicked off the ground, a flash of golden light propelling him into the air. He crossed his arms over his chest, the iconic prelude to his own field-clearing technique.
"Yasakani no Magatama!"
A blinding storm of light erupted from his body, surging forward to meet the castle's barrage in the dead space between them. The two overwhelming fields of energy slammed into each other. The collision was visually spectacular, thousands of light beams violently canceling each other out in rapid, deafening sequence. The concussive thunder of the impact rolled across the empty red plateau, shaking the ground beneath their boots.
While Borsalino held the frontline stalemate, Finn drew the Shindokuto.
The Birdcage still sealed the sky above Mary Geoise, which meant Finn couldn't reach into the upper atmosphere to pull down a natural meteor. He had to rely entirely on the raw, internal gravity of the Dark-Dark Fruit.
He raised the dark blade high.
A tear in reality opened directly beneath the Birdcage's razor-wire ceiling. It was a flat, pitch-black curtain of pure void. Instead of pulling a rock from orbit, the overwhelming gravity of the Dark-Dark Fruit forcibly dragged a massive chunk of condensed, hyper-dense matter out of the infinite darkness itself. The resulting meteorite wasn't as colossal as the ones he summoned from space, but it was massive enough to cast a heavy shadow, and it fell with the terrifying, unnatural acceleration of an object being aggressively pulled downward by Finn's will.
The moment the rock cleared the void, Little Pluto fired again from the castle's central spire.
The blinding beam struck the falling meteorite dead center. The massive rock shattered into a thousand jagged, flaming fragments mid-descent.
Finn didn't blink. His left hand was already raised.
He clenched his fingers into a tight fist. The scattered, burning fragments instantly stopped their chaotic outward expansion. The invisible, crushing weight of the Press-Press Fruit seized them, violently dragging the debris back together. The rocks slammed into each other mid-air, compressed and locked into a crude, jagged reconstruction of the original meteor by sheer gravitational force. Finn ripped his arm downward, and the reconstructed mass accelerated again, falling even faster than before.
It slammed into the castle.
Or rather, it slammed into the transparent, faintly glowing dome that flickered into existence around the castle a microsecond before impact. The deafening crack of the collision echoed across the entirety of Mary Geoise.
The shield held.
It flared violently under the kinetic strike, the translucent energy rippling like water at the point of contact, but it didn't shatter. The gravity-forged meteorite broke apart against the barrier, raining harmlessly down onto the red dirt outside the perimeter.
The group stood in silence, staring at the glowing dome.
It encompassed the entire black castle and extended several dozen meters into the surrounding courtyard. Even as they watched, the perimeter of the shield slowly began to expand outward, claiming more of the cleared bedrock. It was perfectly transparent, humming with a low, resonant frequency, and it had just face-tanked a gravity-accelerated meteor without a single crack.
"Some kind of application of Uranus," Sengoku stated. It wasn't a question.
Beside him, the air around Gion began to crackle and snap. Her hair lifted off her shoulders, static electricity dancing across the strands.
The plasma gathered around her body wasn't a conscious choice; it was the rapid, involuntary buildup of a lethal technique that bypassed her brain and went straight to her nervous system. The ambient electrical current was so intense that both Kuzan and Sengoku wordlessly took a large step back to avoid the grounding arc.
Gion thrust both arms forward, palms facing the distant castle. The raw plasma condensed into a blinding, superheated sphere between her hands, the sheer temperature violently distorting the air.
"Thunder Roar Cannon!"
The discharge didn't look like lightning. It looked like a solid, hyper-compressed pillar of pure plasma fired from a railgun. It crossed the distance to the shield in zero time, striking the barrier with a concussive thunderclap that physically tore the air apart.
The shield flashed a blinding white.
A massive, visible tremor ripped across the surface of the dome at the point of impact, sending violent ripples cascading outward until they faded near the base. The barrier held firm.
But for a fraction of a second, the shield had buckled. It had physically reacted to the force.
That single, fleeting movement told every veteran on the field the exact same thing simultaneously.
The barrier wasn't an absolute, invincible force of nature. It was incredibly strong, and its response time was flawless, easily shrugging off Finn's meteor.
But Gion's point-blank, maximum-output Thunder Roar Cannon had made it flinch.
And if it could flinch, it meant it had a limit.