I... I am Sengoku, the Head of the Marines.
To be the Fleet Admiral of the Navy Headquarters was to carry the entire, suffocating weight of the world upon a single pair of shoulders.
My position was not a position of glory, nor was it a mantle of untethered freedom.
To my mirth, it was a position of agonizing, perpetual sacrifice.
It meant looking upon the endless, chaotic expanse of the oceans and forcing it into a rigid, bloody order. It meant making decisions that condemned thousands of my own men to death so that millions of innocent civilians might sleep peacefully in their beds. It meant serving masters in Mariejois whom I knew to be fundamentally corrupt, simply because the alternative—absolute, unbridled anarchy—was infinitely worse.
I, Sengoku the Buddha, have borne this heavy cross for decades!
I HAVE SACRIFICED MY YOUTH!
MY PEACE!
MY MORALITY!
EVERYTHING!
EVERYTHING FOR THE SAKE OF JUSTICE!
But as I hovered in the tearing atmosphere a hundred meters above the shattered plaza of Marineford, my golden body battered and bleeding, I felt the crushing reality that my life's work was unraveling before my very eyes.
"Huff... huff..."
Every drawn breath is a searing agony.
The deep, smoking trench across my collarbone burned with the lingering, explosive residue of the that boy's Internal Destruction Haki.
Blood—rich, red, and completely at odds with my divine golden form—dripped steadily from my chin, vaporizing instantly as it hit the hyper-pressurized air surrounding me.
I stared at the boy floating just across the sky from me.
"What... what are you?" I breathed, the words forced out through gritted teeth.
The False Deity had changed.
The transformation, it felt like something unnatural.
The pitch-black Armament Haki coating the boy's body and blade had densified to an impossible, light-absorbing extreme, taking on the luster of pure obsidian.
The spiritual pressure suffocating the sky was so thick that I could physically taste the ozone on my tongue.
Thick, jagged streams of crimson and black lightning tore through the heavens, completely dwarfing the Conqueror's Haki I myself had just displayed.
What is he.
I lament for the men that lost lives because I was incapable.
The master plan—the strategy I had meticulously crafted for a month alongside Tsuru to entirely eradicate the Whitebeard Pirates and sever the Great Pirate Era at its root—it was in tatters.
I remembered standing in my office, looking at the blueprints.
The encirclement walls, forged of impenetrable steel and designed to rise from the bay to trap the pirates in an inescapable kill zone.
My failure!
They were completely useless now. Whitebeard's tectonic strike had shattered the foundation, and the massive gears and mechanisms were crushed under the displaced bedrock.
Admiral Akainu's Ryusei Kazan, the sky-fire meant to boil the trapped pirates alive within those impenetrable walls, had been scattered and neutralized. The psychological warfare, the careful manipulation of Squard to betray Whitebeard, had failed to even materialize.
MY FAILURE!
And then, there was Garp.
A profound, agonizing sorrow twisted deep in my chest, a pain that briefly eclipsed the burning of my physical wounds.
Monkey D. Garp. My oldest friend. My eternal rival. The man who had stood shoulder-to-shoulder with me against the legendary monsters of the old era—Roger, Shiki, Rocks. I had known, deep down in the darkest corners of my mind, that placing Garp on that execution scaffold alongside his adopted grandson was an act of profound psychological cruelty.
But I had believed!
Truly believed, that when the final moment came, Garp would choose the coat!
He would choose the millions of lives that depended on the Navy.
He would choose Justice!
Instead, I had watched from the sky as the Hero of the Marines intentionally lowered his Haki. I had watched him close his eyes and let a rookie punch him off the platform.
'You fool', I thought, the bitterness tasting like ash in my mouth.
'You let family cloud your duty. You abandoned the world for the sake of a single life.'
'What was the point of all our sacrifices, Garp, if you were just going to throw it all away at the end?'
This... this was my failure too!
Gritting my teeth, the golden light around me flaring with renewed, angry brilliance. I could not rely on the old guard anymore. Garp was gone, buried in the rubble of his own broken resolve.
But as I looked deeper into the shattered plaza, past the fleeing pirates and the collapsed buildings, my eyes found the epicenters of absolute elemental destruction.
Aokiji.
Kuzan was alone, standing amidst the crumbling ice, entirely holding the line against the dying, apocalyptic wrath of Edward Newgate. Kuzan, the lazy, conflicted pupil who had always questioned the extremes of our duty, had finally stopped hesitating. He was bleeding, his ice was shattering, and he was being pushed to the absolute brink, but he was holding the Strongest Man in the World at bay.
And deep within the bottomless chasm that had split the island in two, I saw a blinding red glow.
The bedrock was melting. The earth was violently bubbling. Admiral Akainu was not dead. Sakazuki was crawling his way out of hell, his absolute, uncompromising dogma refusing to let him perish while the Emperor still drew breath.
A sudden, fierce surge of pride swelled within my battered chest, momentarily washing away the despair.
'The old era is crumbling', I realized, a profound sense of clarity washing over me amidst the chaos.
'I am failing.'
'Garp has broken.'
'Whitebeard is dying.'
'But the Navy... the Navy will endure.'
Sakazuki's absolute ruthlessness. Kuzan's unyielding defense. Borsalino's lethal precision.
They were the true pillars of the world. They were the future. As long as they survived, as long as they stood together to enforce the law, the World Government would never fall. Justice would never die.
My resolve crystallized into an unbreakable diamond. I did not need to win the war by myself. I just needed to ensure the future survived today. I had to keep this apocalyptic anomaly, this "False Deity," away from the Admirals until Whitebeard was dead.
"SENGOKU!"
[3rd POV]
The cold, terrifying voice snapped Sengoku's attention back to his immediate front.
Light Yagami did not give him another second to mourn. The False Deity blurred into motion.
It was undoubtedly the apex of speed. He crossed the hundred meters of open air instantly, his boots kicking off invisible platforms created by his strange Devil Fruit power, generating sonic booms that shattered the falling snow.
He swung his obsidian saber in a devastating horizontal arc aimed directly at Sengoku's neck.
"AAAAAA!"
CLANG!
Sengoku brought his golden palms together, catching the dark steel between his hands. The sheer kinetic impact of the strike sent a violent tremor through his massive arms, threatening to dislocate his shoulders. The air around them violently rippled, exploding outward in a shockwave that flattened the smoke rising from the plaza.
"You are strong, Light!" Sengoku roared, the red lightning of his Conqueror's Haki grinding against Light's.
"But Justice!"
"ISN'T SO EASILY BROKEN!!!!"
Swish!
He violently twisted his hands, attempting to wrench the saber from Light's grasp. At the same time, he stepped forward on the air using Geppo, driving a golden knee directly toward Light's abdomen.
BAMMM!!!
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A/N: Well, F Sengoku.
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