Chapter 187: Madara vs. Kaido! (Part Two)
Blazing, apocalyptic flames towered wildly into the dark Wano sky, completely engulfing the central battlefield in a terrifying display of localized armageddon.
The sheer, absolute heat generated by Uchiha Madara's devastating fire jutsu was so intense that it violently distorted the air, making the surrounding environment look like a melting, surrealist painting.
The solid, jagged rocky ground of Onigashima, which had withstood centuries of harsh weather and pirate brawls, was rapidly turning into glowing, bubbling pools of molten slag beneath the inferno.
The fire sucked the oxygen from the atmosphere with a deafening roar, creating a suffocating vacuum that left the nearby combatants gasping for breath.
Within that roaring, sea-like inferno, Kaido's massive, imposing frame was reduced to nothing more than a blurred, violently burning silhouette.
Deep, profound shock still lingered heavily on the soot-stained faces of the nearby Beasts Pirates' officers and grunts.
For decades, they had worshipped the Governor-General as an indestructible deity, a creature that could fall from the sky and walk away without a scratch.
But as the hellish flames continued to burn their invincible leader, that initial shock was rapidly, violently replaced by a sickening mixture of cold, paralyzing dread and explosive, desperate fury.
"Lord Kaido! No! It can't be!"
"Bastard! What the hell did you do to Lord Kaido?! Kill him! Kill that arrogant human!"
The collective screams of the pirates merged into a cacophony of terror, their voices cracking under the intense heat and their own rising panic.
High above the melting earth, King the Conflagration's brows knitted tightly together beneath his dark leather mask.
His sharp, golden Lunarian pupils, normally calm and calculating, were locked dead onto the raging sea of flames below.
His heart pounded against his ribs with an unprecedented, sickening anxiety.
Even as a being born of fire, the sheer destructive intensity of Madara's flames made King's elite instincts scream in warning.
However, his momentary lapse in concentration—a fatal sin in the middle of a high-tier warzone—was immediately capitalized upon by an apex predator.
"You absolute, pathetic fool! You don't have the luxury to look away while fighting me!"
Esdeath's chilling, sadistically joyful laughter rang out, cutting through the roaring sound of the fire like a blade of pure ice.
Taking full advantage of King's distraction, the Empire's Strongest General launched a terrifying flurry of lethal, jagged ice attacks.
She moved with frenzied, bloodthirsty zeal, weaving massive spears of absolute zero cold through the air to intercept the soaring All-Star, forcing him into a desperate, high-speed evasive dance.
Not far off from that spectacular aerial clash, "Plague" Queen was in a state of absolute, unprecedented panic on the ground.
His mechanical eye whirred frantically, and heavy beads of cold sweat rolled down his plump, scarred cheeks, mixing with the dust of the battlefield.
He was still desperately, violently pummeling Albedo's dark Gothic armor with absolutely every single high-tech weapon in his extensive cyborg arsenal.
Lasers that could vaporize steel ships, explosive rounds that could level mountains, and hydraulic claw strikes that could crush sea kings—he unleashed it all in a blind frenzy.
Yet, he felt entirely frantic and completely powerless; he knew he had to finish this terrifyingly durable, winged woman quickly and rush back to help the Governor-General crush the arrogant, fire-breathing foe!
But Albedo simply stood there, an immovable, demonic mountain, her golden eyes regarding his desperate assault with utter, chilling contempt.
Just as everyone on the trembling island assumed Kaido had been gravely, perhaps even fatally wounded by the endless ocean of fire—
"Gurgle, gurgle, gurgle…"
A deep, incredibly eerie, and unnatural sound rose from the very heart of the blinding, orange blaze.
It sounded exactly like thick, viscous molten rock violently churning and boiling within the belly of an ancient, active volcano.
The sound was so low and resonant that it caused the loose pebbles on the ground to vibrate and dance.
Then, the very atmosphere of Onigashima violently shifted, the air pressure dropping so fast it popped the ears of the surrounding grunts.
"Buuurp…!"
A heaven-shaking, monstrous belch violently detonated from within the absolute center of the fire!
It was a sound so loud it physically hurt to hear, but more terrifyingly, it was incredibly thick with the suffocating stench of strong, fermented liquor and the overwhelming, crushing weight of Supreme King's Haki.
The invisible sound wave acted like a catastrophic, omnidirectional bomb!
"Boom…!!!"
The roaring remnants of the four ferocious fire-dragons, which had burned hot enough to effortlessly melt solid iron into liquid, were instantly, brutally blasted apart by that single, Haki-infused burp!
The walls of flame aggressively rolled back, shattered by the sheer force of the Emperor's will, turning into millions of harmless, fading sparks that vanished quickly into the darkening, smoke-filled Wano sky.
When the fire was finally violently cleared and the thick black smoke drifted away on the wind, a massive, imposing figure stood firmly in the center of the glowing, glass-like crater.
He was seemingly unscathed—no, upon closer inspection, he looked incredibly battered, but his monstrous spirit was entirely, absolutely unbroken.
Kaido's incredibly tough, resilient skin was streaked pitch black with thick soot, and hot wisps of white, acrid smoke curled off his massive shoulders and muscular chest.
Some of his hair had been singed away, and the air around him smelled heavily of burnt flesh and ozone.
But beneath the severe superficial burns, his fierce, beastly eyes blazed brighter and more dangerously than they ever had before.
The look in his eyes was frighteningly, terrifyingly lucid; the dull, unpredictable haze of his earlier drunken stupor had been completely, utterly eradicated.
He violently shook his huge, heavily horned head, the movement throwing off layers of ash, as if to casually fling the kinetic impact and pain of the flames away from his mind.
Then—
He grinned.
He slowly pulled his lips back, baring a mouthful of sharp, predatory teeth in a savage, blood-chilling smile that was far more terrifying than the visage of any mythic demon.
"Interesting… this is so damn interesting!"
Kaido's voice was exceptionally low and hoarse, vibrating the shattered, cooling rocks around his massive bare feet.
It was a voice brimming to the absolute, overflowing brim with a barely caged, predatory excitement and a thick, suffocating killing intent that made the weaker pirates clutch their chests in terror.
"Damn it, you little brat… you actually managed to make me hurt this much!"
He cracked his thick, corded neck, the resulting sound echoing across the silent battlefield like a sharp gunshot.
"This intense, burning feeling… it has sobered me up completely, you arrogant bastard!"
Before his rumbling, threatening words had even fully faded into the hot wind, his colossal, heavily muscular body began to violently, unnaturally shift!
"Crack-crack-crack-crack…"
The sickening, heavy sound of thick bones forcefully snapping, elongating, and violently reforming filled the tense air.
His massive muscles knotted, twisted, and bulged to grotesque, unbelievable proportions beneath his darkened skin.
Indestructible, deep azure dragon-scales aggressively burst forth from his pores, rapidly sheathing his thick forearms, his muscular neck, and the sides of his scarred, grinning cheeks.
The sharp, imposing horns atop his head thickened considerably, growing even longer, more jagged, and infinitely more savage.
A thick, scaled tail erupted from his lower spine, slamming into the earth like a heavy whip.
His overall physical frame actually shrank slightly compared to the sheer, mountain-like mass of his full Azure Dragon form, condensing his incredible weight into a more agile bipedal structure.
Yet, despite the reduction in sheer size, the terrifying, crushing pressure of his aura multiplied geometrically, pressing down on the battlefield like a tangible, physical weight!
Hybrid Form!
This was Kaido's absolute most lethal, terrifying state of existence.
It was the perfect, monstrous biological merging of advanced human martial arts and mythic, ancient dragon strength into the ultimate, unmatched one-on-one killing shape.
"Your little, flashy parlor tricks end right here, human!"
With a deafening, draconic roar that tore through the clouds above, Kaido completely shattered the solid bedrock beneath his clawed feet!
His huge, azure-scaled form vanished from sight at an utterly absurd, physics-defying speed.
He was moving far, far faster than a creature of his immense size and weight had any logical right to move.
He reappeared high above the calm figure of Uchiha Madara in the very next instant, his massive silhouette completely eclipsing the dim, flickering light of the sky!
He raised his massive, signature spiked kanabō, the legendary weapon known as "Hassaikai," high above his horned head.
Jet-black, highly concentrated Advanced Armament Haki violently flooded from his palms into the heavy weapon, hardening the spiked iron far beyond the absolute limits of mortal steel.
Simultaneously, thick, violent, and erratic arcs of violet and black Supreme King's Haki crackled wildly around the weapon's spikes like localized, apocalyptic lightning.
The sheer density of the spiritual energy wrapping the club caused the air around it to hum with a sickening, destructive frequency.
The weapon carried a truly world-ending, apocalyptic kinetic force!
"Thunder Bagua!"
The devastating, iconic blow came down several times faster and vastly, exponentially stronger than his previous, drunken assault!
The very air was violently, brutally torn apart, shrieking in absolute agony as the heavy club descended toward the earth.
Space itself seemed to visibly warp and distort, creating a vacuum tunnel beneath the sheer, crushing pressure of the descending Hassaikai!
"It's over! The Governor-General has him now! He's dead meat!"
Every single Beasts Pirate watching the titanic clash shouted the exact same victorious thought in their frantic, hopeful hearts.
They had seen that specific attack instantly crush the absolute strongest warriors in the New World into unrecognizable paste.
Yet, facing this earth-shattering, seemingly inescapable strike from the Heavens, Uchiha Madara's pale face showed absolutely no ripple of fear, panic, or even mild concern.
He didn't even bother to tilt his head to look up at the descending shadow of certain death.
He simply stood firmly on the scorched, glass-like earth, his arms still arrogantly, casually folded across his crimson samurai armor.
His dark eyes remained perfectly calm, operating on a level of visual perception far, far beyond the pirates' limited understanding, as his pupils reflected the black lightning descending rapidly upon him.
"Let's see you try and dodge this one, you cocky brat!" Kaido's monstrous, echoing roar accompanied the supersonic strike.
"No—he won't need to dodge at all," Suzaku murmured softly from a safe, elevated distance.
A knowing, highly anticipatory smile graced the young captain's lips as he watched the clash of titans with keen, unblinking interest.
He knew exactly what the pinnacle of the Uchiha clan was truly capable of.
An absolute, infinitesimal microsecond before the violently spiked kanabō could physically touch Madara's spiky black hair—
"Clang…!!!"
A clear, ethereal, and completely unnatural crash rang out, vibrating violently and endlessly through the heavens and the trembling earth!
Blinding, highly concentrated blue spiritual energy, appearing as dense, heavy, and solid as pure crystal, aggressively erupted from Madara's physical body!
It didn't form a simple, flat energy shield; it formed a terrifying, divine anatomy.
One… two… several enormous, glowing blue skeletal ribs sprouted violently from the ground around the Uchiha, curving upward with absolute geometric perfection.
They rapidly interlaced and snapped shut tightly over his head in the literal blink of an eye.
They formed a savage, sacred, and entirely impenetrable bone-cage that shielded Uchiha Madara perfectly inside its divine, glowing structure!
Susanoo!
"Clang…!!!!!!!!"
The Conqueror-infused Hassaikai smashed directly, brutally against the absolute apex of the blue energy ribs!
This time, there was no massive, localized landslide. There was no obscuring, billowing cloud of dust to hide the impact.
There was only an ear-splitting, mind-numbing clang of absolute, unstoppable, contradictory forces colliding head-on.
Immediately following the horrific sound, a visible, highly destructive ring-shaped shockwave violently spread outward in a perfect, rapidly expanding circle!
It was like a localized, invisible hurricane of pure kinetic energy.
Wherever the terrifying, roaring wave passed, the solid rocky ground of Onigashima was effortlessly, brutally gouged several meters deep!
The weaker Beasts Pirates foot-soldiers, who had been cheering just a second prior, were instantly swept entirely off their feet, screaming in sheer terror as they tumbled helplessly through the air like discarded ragdolls.
Even Yamato, possessing the incredible physical strength of an Oni, who was rushing close to join the chaotic fray, was violently forced to halt.
She had to hastily cross her thick arms in front of her face and was still sent skidding forcefully backward by the wild, roaring gale, her heavy geta sandals digging deep, parallel trenches into the shattered rock!
When the atmospheric smoke, the blinding light, and the flying debris finally, slowly cleared, the sight at the battlefield's absolute center froze every single breath on the island.
Kaido the Beast, the invincible Emperor of the Sea, was completely suspended in mid-air, still locked entirely in the highly aggressive, forward-leaning posture of his downward swing.
His Conqueror-wrapped, legendary club, vibrating with the force of a meteor, was entirely, absolutely blocked by a skull-shaped construct of pure, glowing blue energy.
The point of impact sparked with violently clashing red, black, and blue lightning, but the defense held firm.
No matter how furiously the Yonko roared, his draconic vocal cords tearing, and no matter how much monstrous, biological strength he poured into his heavily muscled, scaly arms, the kanabō would not budge a single, solitary millimeter!
It was perfectly, infuriatingly, and absolutely stopped.
Beneath the glowing blue ribs, bathed in the ethereal light of his own power, Uchiha Madara stood perfectly, eerily still.
His arms were still casually, arrogantly folded across his chest, and not a single fiber of his dark clothes was unruffled by the world-ending impact that had just occurred mere inches from his skull.
He lifted his head slowly, his crimson Sharingan spinning dangerously, reading the very flow of the world's energy.
He gazed up through the glowing, translucent gaps in the blue energy ribs at the massive creature the world so arrogantly called the "strongest."
He looked directly at the straining, sweating, vein-popping Yonko above him with the exact same dead, uncaring eyes one gives to an annoying, buzzing insect that has flown against a thick glass window.
"…"
Kaido's vertical, golden draconic pupils shrank rapidly down to deadly, trembling needle points.
His battle-hardened, vicious mind went completely, entirely blank for a terrifying fraction of a second.
"This is impossible… this absolutely can't be real!!!" Kaido roared frantically in his own mind, his primal beast instincts flaring wildly in sheer, unprecedented alarm.
"What the hell is that thing?! Bones made of pure, solid, impenetrable energy?!"
His arms trembled under the immense recoil of his own blocked force.
"Why… why can it completely, effortlessly stop my Thunder Bagua?!"
"My strike was one that even that bastard Kozuki Oden couldn't block head-on without taking massive internal damage! My strike shatters mountains!"
"What kind of cursed, unknown power is this?! Is this a Mythical Zoan Devil Fruit ability? Paramecia?! Or something else entirely?!"
Kaido's primal, beast-like instincts screamed at him from the deepest, darkest recesses of his soul, violently warning him that the tiny, armor-clad human standing calmly before him was lethally, profoundly dangerous!
"K-Kaido-sama's ultimate attack… it was actually stopped dead?"
A nearby pirate grunt stammered, his eyes bulging as his voice shook so hard he almost bit his own tongue off.
"You've got to be kidding me… that's Kaido-sama in his absolute strongest Hybrid Form! He used Conqueror's Haki!"
"What the hell is happening?! What kind of absolute, reality-breaking monster is that human?!"
The collective morale of the Beasts Pirates took a devastating, irrecoverable psychological blow as they watched their living god fail to crush a single man.
On the deeply cratered, ruined battlefield, Uchiha Madara watched Kaido's scarred face fill with a highly entertaining mixture of profound shock, confusion, and rising, impotent rage.
The Ghost of the Uchiha slowly, deliberately curled his pale lips into a smirk of supreme, unrivaled contempt.
"Is that all you have?"
Madara finally spoke, his voice completely, utterly unbothered by the sheer physical exertion happening inches above him.
He delivered the taunting words in a tone so incredibly flat and devoid of exertion that it was almost excessively cruel.
"This is the pathetic, meager power that this world so arrogantly calls the 'strongest creature'?"
He scoffed, a short, sharp sound of amusement, shaking his spiky head slightly in mock pity.
"You are utterly… disappointing."
"…What did you just say to me, you little brat?"
Kaido felt his immense, Emperor-level pride—a pride built on decades of unbroken slaughter and victory—being carelessly ground to fine, meaningless dust beneath those casually mocking words!
He let out a deafening, furious, and humiliated roar.
The thick, corded muscles in his scaly arms swelled to their absolute maximum biological limit once again.
He bit down so hard his gums bled, as he desperately tried to crush the accursed blue ribs with even greater, bone-breaking, world-shattering force!
The black lightning of his Haki flared violently, desperately trying to find a crack in the divine defense.
Yet, Uchiha Madara had completely, definitively lost his patience for this entirely pointless test of physical strength.
"If that is truly the absolute, pathetic limit of your physical strength, beast, then it's my turn to play."
The very instant those cold, mocking, and definitive words left his mouth—
"Crack… crack-crack-crack…"
Thick, glowing vein-like strands of highly concentrated blue chakra suddenly raced rapidly across the smooth structure of the blue ribs like surging electricity.
The energy rapidly condensed, solidifying with a sickening crunch, and a far larger, terrifying skeletal arm violently sprouted from the right side of the protective ribcage!
The massive, glowing blue bone-hand spread its thick, jointed fingers wide.
Moving with an unstoppable, divine momentum that ignored the laws of physics, it reached up and firmly, inescapably seized the spiked end of Kaido's heavily descending kanabō, "Hassaikai"!
"!"
Kaido gasped loudly, his golden eyes widening in sheer, unadulterated shock.
He felt an overwhelming, utterly immovable, and titanic force suddenly surge through the metal shaft of his club, running straight up his arms.
He instantly planted his heavy, clawed feet into the air using Geppo and desperately, furiously tried to yank his signature weapon back out of the skeletal entity's glowing grip.
But the kanabō might as well have been permanently, magically welded to the very fabric of the earth itself!
It didn't budge a single millimeter!
"You… let go of that!"
Kaido snarled in sheer shock and blinding, humiliating fury, opening his massive, fanged maw, about to shout a deadly curse or unleash a Blast Breath—
When another, equally colossal blue skeletal arm rapidly, violently grew from the opposite, left side of the glowing energy construct.
The massive fingers of this second arm tightly, threateningly clenched into a massive, heavy fist.
The skeletal hand was now rapidly being plated with thicker, denser blue energy armor, forming the beginnings of the Susanoo's terrifying, artificial musculature.
Standing perfectly calm and untouched at the Susanoo's absolute, protected center, Madara coldly regarded Kaido.
He looked at the struggling, roaring Yonko exactly as one would look at a helpless, trapped fly that had already been hopelessly caught in a predator's sticky web, merely waiting for the killing bite.
"Let me properly show you, you ignorant beast, the true, absolute power of the Uchiha…"
Madara murmured, his crimson Sharingan glowing ominously in the dark shadow cast by the towering monster above him.
The next second—
That titanic, heavily armor-plated blue fist, carrying a truly mountain-shattering, apocalyptic might born of divine chakra, violently tore through the air.
It broke the sound barrier instantly with an ear-shattering crack and slammed straight, without a single microsecond of hesitation, directly toward Kaido's horrified, scaly face!
[Akarin Note:
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