"The God's Abode seems to lean far more heavily on advanced technology than Devil Fruit power," Sengoku observed, his eyes locked on the faint shimmer of the barrier.
They stood only a few meters from the energy shield now, close enough to study it. It was nearly perfectly transparent, visible only by the faint, luminous distortion at its surface. It carried the distinct, humming quality of something that had been meticulously engineered rather than organically grown. Finn reached out and pressed a finger against it. The surface yielded slightly under the pressure, bowing inward like a taut membrane rather than a solid wall of stone, but it didn't give way.
"Does the Science Corps have anything remotely like this?" Finn asked, not taking his eyes off the shield.
"Nothing." Borsalino shook his head slowly. "I've never seen it. I've never even heard whispers of it."
Sakazuki had been listening to the technical analysis for long enough.
"Hell Dog."
He stepped forward, his entire right arm instantly converting to boiling magma mid-swing. He threw his full, crushing weight behind the punch, driving a massive surge of Armament Haki into the molten rock. It was the exact same dense, concentrated strike that had once taken off half of Whitebeard's face.
The magma fist slammed into the shield.
The barrier flared violently. A sharp, terrifying crack echoed across the plateau, and visible fractures spiderwebbed outward from the point of impact, looking exactly like a shattered windowpane.
Then, the cracks faded. The surface smoothed over. The shield held.
Sakazuki lowered his smoking arm. He stared at his fist, then back at the unbroken barrier, his face twisting into a rare expression that was equal parts genuine shock and deep, personal offense.
Sengoku stepped up beside him.
"Buddha's Wrath."
The former Fleet Admiral drove a massive palm strike directly into the center of the shield. The blow carried a devastating, rippling shockwave wrapped in blinding golden light—the absolute maximum output of a Mythical Zoan ability, refined by decades of mastery.
The shield flashed white. It rippled violently under the kinetic force. But it held.
"It blocked all of us," Finn said. His tone wasn't panicked; it was the calm voice of a man who had just confirmed a very interesting scientific hypothesis. "Gion's maximum output, Sakazuki's Hell Dog, and a direct strike from the Fleet Admiral. And it's still standing. I have to admit, that is a genuinely spectacular piece of engineering."
"We need to concentrate our fire on a single point," Sengoku stated, rolling his shoulder. "If we hit it simultaneously, our combined output should exceed its maximum tolerance limit."
"We could do that." Finn looked thoughtfully at the humming barrier. "Or, you could all just step back and let me handle it."
"The Magma-Magma Fruit possesses the highest raw, concentrated attack power of anyone standing on this field," Gion said bluntly, offering a tactical assessment rather than an argument. "In terms of pure, localized destructive firepower, Sakazuki is the gold standard. Your gravity and darkness are incredibly versatile, Finn, but they aren't more destructive than his magma on a single point. Unless you're planning to use the Infinite True Void?"
Finn didn't dispute the point. Military analysts had long considered Sakazuki's offensive power to be the absolute ceiling of the Marine forces, and in a simple, head-to-head destructive contest, they were right. But Finn wasn't thinking about Devil Fruits, and he certainly wasn't planning to use the Infinite True Void.
"Step back," Finn repeated.
No one moved immediately.
"Further."
"How far?" Kuzan asked lazily.
Finn was already walking backward.
He cleared fifty meters. Then a hundred. Two hundred. He was approaching the four-hundred-meter mark when Sengoku's voice finally drifted across the open expanse, carrying the distinct, heavy exasperation of a man whose patience was entirely spent.
"How far back do you need to go? You're practically out of sight!"
Finn stopped walking.
The air behind him warped and tore open. A massive curtain of pitch-black darkness unfolded like a doorway to a nightmare. From that absolute void, sliding slowly and heavily into the open air of Mary Geoise, came a cannon barrel.
It was impossibly large. It was old, but not in a way that suggested decay; it was old in the way that mountains are old. It was built to a scale that made it painfully obvious its creators had never once cared about portability.
The group of Marine officers standing near the shield went dead silent.
"Is that..." Sengoku started, his voice dropping to a cautious whisper. "...Pluto?"
Gion put the pieces together faster than the rest of them. "I completely forgot he had that," she muttered, which wasn't an answer to the question, but it was entirely accurate.
The massive muzzle of the ancient weapon began to glow. It wasn't charging like a standard Pacifista laser or a Devil Fruit technique, drawing energy from a localized point. It was acting like a black hole. It was actively pulling from the surrounding environment, drawing the ambient dark element generated by Finn's Devil Fruit and violently compressing it into the firing chamber. Back in Alabasta, this charging sequence had taken Crocodile's sand five agonising minutes to complete. Fueled by the sheer, infinite density of Finn's darkness, the weapon reached critical mass in under sixty seconds. The dark element wasn't the fuel Pluto was originally designed for, but its sheer, crushing weight made it terrifyingly efficient.
Finn fired.
The beam that erupted from the massive barrel was not comparable to the 'Little Pluto' that had nearly killed them. It wasn't comparable to anything any of them had ever witnessed on a battlefield.
It struck the energy shield. For a terrifying second, there was absolutely no sound. There was only a blinding absence of light as the annihilating beam connected with the barrier. And then the sound hit them—a deep, world-ending roar that rolled across the entirety of the Red Line, shaking the very bedrock of Mary Geoise.
The impenetrable shield screamed. It bowed inward under the apocalyptic pressure of Pluto's beam, the glowing surface shrinking rapidly as it desperately tried to concentrate its remaining defensive power into a smaller and smaller area. The logic of the automated system was flawless: smaller surface area meant denser protection. It was desperately trying to buy time the only way it knew how.
Then came the sound of breaking glass.
It didn't come from the point of impact. It came from deep inside the structure of the shield itself—the rapid, catastrophic propagation of microscopic failures tearing through a material that had been pushed far past its absolute breaking point. The cracking sound was almost musical, a chaotic sequence of high, shrieking notes that overlapped until they formed one continuous, deafening whine.
And then Pluto's beam punched clean through.
The resulting explosion wasn't clean. It was the violent, uncontrolled release of everything the shield had been holding back, detonating all at once. The shockwave ripped outward in every direction.
But Finn's darkness moved faster. A massive tidal wave of black void swept forward from his position, acting as a massive net. It caught the apocalyptic backblast before it could incinerate the Marine officers, greedily swallowing wave after wave of destructive energy until the air finally cleared.
The silence that settled over the plateau was absolute. It was the silence of total victory.
"The shield is down," Kuzan confirmed, his voice slightly tight.
The black stone castle stood exposed beyond the drifting smoke. Its outer walls were heavily scorched, and one of the towering spires had partially collapsed, but the structure itself remained. The impenetrable barrier, however, was gone.
High above, inside a lavishly appointed room set in the northern face of the castle, Lord Im stood at a window and watched the smoke clear.
Her expression had not changed. She maintained the same cold, absolute stillness she always carried. She had been watching the Marines' assault since the conference room collapsed, observing the chaos with the detached interest of someone evaluating a grand experiment.
She acknowledged quietly to herself that the 'Little Pluto' was, in fact, a deeply flawed imitation. She had known the theoretical limits of the weapon for years, but watching the true Pluto casually erase a defensive grid that the knockoff couldn't even scratch made the massive gap in power painfully obvious.
"Only ancient weapons can truly defeat ancient weapons," Im murmured, her voice carrying to no one but herself.
There was a strange tone to her voice. It wasn't quite resignation, and it wasn't quite admiration. It was something cold and ancient that sat squarely between the two.
"Go," she commanded softly, not turning away from the window. "All of you. Stop them. Buy me time."
Behind her, four broken men knelt on the polished marble floor.
The surviving Four Elders had dragged themselves here after the conference room collapsed. With their empire burning around them and the Marines tearing through the gates, their options had violently narrowed down to this single room and the god standing in it. Eight hundred years of absolute conditioning had brought them to her feet.
They hesitated. It was a brief, visceral hesitation.
The monsters marching toward the castle had just casually deployed an Ancient Weapon, survived a point-blank blast from another, and routinely used attacks that turned islands into slag. Marching out the front door to fight them was not a mission with a high probability of survival.
But the alternative was sitting in the room with them, and she was far more terrifying than the entire Marine vanguard combined.
"Yes, Your Holiness," they rasped in unison. They rose and left the room.
Im's gaze remained fixed on the ruined courtyard below. Her pale hand rested on a small, unadorned control panel set into the window frame. Her long fingers brushed lightly over a single button.
"Let's see," she whispered, her voice tinged with genuine, morbid curiosity, "exactly how far you manage to go."
She pressed the button.
Down in the courtyard, the smoke from Pluto's blast was still thick enough to choke the air when Finn's Observation Haki flared, registering sudden, heavy movement dead ahead.
"Incoming," Finn warned sharply. He paused, his brow furrowing in genuine confusion. "But... they aren't alive."
"Two targets," Gion called out instantly. "One flanked left, one flanked right."
A massive figure stepped out of the swirling smoke directly next to Sakazuki. It was nearly six meters tall, its shoulders impossibly broad in a way that spoke of heavy industrial engineering rather than human biology.
And it wore a face that every Marine present recognized instantly.
The face of Bartholomew Kuma.
"Pacifista," Borsalino breathed, speaking before anyone else could react. For the first time in his life, the Admiral sounded genuinely rattled. "But that's impossible. Those are still in the prototype phase. The production models aren't supposed to be—"
The massive cyborg's hand slammed down toward Sakazuki.
Sakazuki was not a man easily caught off guard. But he was caught off guard now. The sheer, overwhelming physical mass of the strike, combined with the impossible speed of the ambush, drove the Fleet Admiral to his knees before his Haki could fully harden.
But it wasn't the kinetic force that made Sakazuki's eyes widen in shock. It was the material.
The moment Sakazuki's boiling magma flared to melt the attacker, the fire sputtered and died. The terrifying, absolute nullification of a Devil Fruit user's power washed over him, pinning him to the earth.
"Seastone," Sakazuki grunted, the word forced out of his lungs.
The Pacifista's other massive arm locked around Sakazuki's throat, pinning the strongest man in the Marines to the cracked bedrock. The cyborg's mouth dropped open, and a blinding, familiar yellow light began to condense in the back of its throat.
The second Pacifista lunged out of the smoke toward Borsalino at the exact same moment. Having the benefit of watching Sakazuki get tackled a second earlier, Borsalino vanished in a flash of light, avoiding the immediate takedown. But he rematerialized a dozen yards away, his face pale as he realized he couldn't just kick the machine; he had to actively avoid touching it.
Gion didn't hesitate for a microsecond.
"Thunderbird!"
A blinding, jagged column of highly concentrated lightning tore from Konpira's blade. It struck the first Pacifista squarely in its open, glowing mouth before the laser could fire. The detonation was entirely internal and catastrophically violent. The cyborg's head was violently blown apart, exposing a charred mess of sparking wires and dense mechanical circuitry before its combat processors even registered the attack.
"Frozen Time Capsule."
Kuzan's voice was as calm and lazy as ever. A terrifying wave of absolute zero erupted from his lips. The localized blizzard slammed into both the headless Pacifista pinning Sakazuki and the second unit advancing on Borsalino. The ice didn't just cover them; it penetrated their armor, freezing the internal moisture, seizing the mechanical joints, and shattering the circuitry. The seastone plating offered no protection against extreme temperature drops. Both machines froze solid in less than three seconds.
"That specific technological upgrade was absolutely not in any of the Science Corps reports I've ever read," Borsalino said, staring hard at the frozen, headless cyborg that had nearly killed his oldest friend. He sounded deeply, personally offended by the glaring lapse in intelligence.
"Solid seastone construction," Sakazuki rumbled. He forcefully shoved the frozen metal arm off his throat and dragged himself to his feet, rolling his neck until it cracked loudly. "Whoever authorized the assembly of these units knew exactly what they were building them to fight."
Finn was already processing the tactical implications of a Seastone Pacifista army and was opening his mouth to issue an order when the third attack came.
It whipped out of the smoke—a blindingly fast, lethal slash aimed directly at his throat.
There was no time to physically draw the Shindokuto. Finn didn't even try. His Devil Fruit did the work for him. The crushing gravity of the Press-Press Fruit violently yanked the dark blade from its scabbard, snapping the steel into a perfect defensive guard a fraction of a second before the attacker connected.
Sparks screamed as steel clashed against steel. The sheer kinetic force of the impact drove Finn back half a step, his boots grinding against the rock. The smoke parted slightly, revealing the face of the attacker on the other side of the blade.
Finn stared at it.
"That," Finn said softly, his eyes narrowing, "was also not in any report."
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