"You won't dodge?" Zaraki tilted his head as his smile gained a chilling edge.
His right hand gripped Oto slow enough for everyone to see, but the instant his fingers wrapped around the hilt, a glossy, pitch-black color spread from his palm to cover the damaged blade.
Armament Haki: Hardening.
"Country bumpkin," Enel murmured.
Zaraki exploded from the spot in a ring of displaced air without any probing or extra nonsense.
He shot forward like a black cannonball to cross the ten-meter gap in an instant, his long sword splitting the wind as it slashed upward toward Enel's arrogant face.
Driven by pure killing instinct and Armament Haki, this strike could touch a Logia's real body.
Enel's mocking smile vanished as his Mantra screamed warnings and a chill rushed up his spine.
From that blade, he sensed a power capable of hitting his true body and ending his life!
'This is not a game, he can hit me!'
Enel's instincts moved faster than his pride, and just before the black edge touched his nose, his body burst into blinding lightning to retreat in a frantic, sorry state.
The blade still grazed him with the sound of pressure crushing the air itself.
The instant the Haki-coated edge touched his lightning form, Enel's elementalization was disrupted for a fraction of a second, which was more than enough.
He was forced out of his lightning state and blasted backward to slam into the ruins of an old temple wall.
Stone cracked and dust rose around a shallow but clear cut across his chest as thin blood flowed down his pale skin to stain the blue cloth at his waist.
The battlefield fell silent while Wiper forgot to breathe, unable to comprehend that the invincible god who made everyone tremble in fear had actually bled.
"Tch. Not only did you move, you ran like a coward too," Zaraki said, standing his ground with no intention of chasing him.
He shook the blood from his blade with eyes full of contempt.
"A one-minute game, and you didn't even last one second. Does this so-called god treat his own words like farts?"
Enel coughed from the ruins as he struggled to pull himself out of the stone wall.
Pain stimulated his nerves—a sensation he had almost forgotten since eating the Rumble-Rumble Fruit.
He shakily touched his chest, his pupils shrinking when he saw the blood on his hand.
"Blood..." His face twisted in fury. "A mortal actually wounded God's body…"
Above them, the clouds Zaraki had split open earlier began churning again as a power of thunder far more violent than before gathered overhead.
"Unforgivable…" Enel's voice dropped. "Unforgivable! I am the all-knowing, all-powerful God! I am the ruler of lightning!"
A massive lightning pillar crashed vertically down toward Zaraki's head without warning: El Thor.
Heat warped the surrounding air while Enel vanished and reappeared in Zaraki's blind spot.
His golden staff transformed into a sharp trident wrapped in dazzling electricity to stab toward Zaraki's back, as the humiliated god of Skypiea resorted to a sneak attack.
"This is your trump card? A feint?" Zaraki lowered his center of gravity without turning his head.
The violent spiritual pressure unique to the Kenpachi Zaraki template erupted from his body, not as refined Haki emission, but as something cruder and more violent: materialized Reiatsu forced outward and reinforced by Armament Haki to act as a temporary shell.
When God's Judgment struck the invisible pressure above Zaraki's head, the lightning scattered and burst apart into dozens of wild arcs that plowed scorched grooves into the cloud ground.
Several strands still struck Zaraki's shoulders and arms, reopening his old wounds as his muscles twitched from the electric current, but he remained standing.
Behind him, Enel's trident thrust was caught by a large hand covered in pitch-black Haki.
"Too slow," Zaraki said, turning his head as red light flickered in his eyes. "Since you like playing with electricity so much, I'll give you a gift too."
The hand gripping the trident exerted immense force, making Enel's eyes widen as Zaraki swung him and the weapon together to smash him into the ground.
Then the long sword in Zaraki's right hand swept out in a half-moon arc, sending Enel flying before he had time to scream.
The god broke three ancient stone pillars before crashing onto the deck of the unfinished Ark Maxim, the golden hull groaning under the impact.
"Bastard… bastard!" Enel crawled up with disheveled hair and no rationality left in his eyes before violently striking the thunder drum on his back.
His body expanded while electricity ran wildly around him as he roared, "Thirty Million Volts: Hino!"
A giant thunderbird formed from high-voltage electricity shrieked as it rushed toward Zaraki while Enel pushed his Mantra to the extreme to predict his movements.
"I see it! You'll dodge left, then counterattack the instant you land!" Enel stabbed his golden trident ahead of time toward the spot where he predicted Zaraki would move.
But his smile froze when Zaraki didn't dodge at all, facing the thunderbird that could melt steel, he advanced instead of retreating.
"Prediction? You predicted I'd want to dodge?" Zaraki curled his lip and let the thunderbird crash into his Haki-coated shoulder in exchange for closing the distance.
His body stiffened for a split second as blue electricity crawled across his skin and the smell of scorched cloth rose from him, but his feet did not stop.
"That's how weaklings think!"
The flash of the blade was faster than thought, relying on pure speed and power rather than exquisite sword technique
The thunderbird scattered as Enel's left shoulder exploded with pain, a deep slash opening from his collarbone down his upper arm to nearly disable the limb.
His golden bracelet split apart and flew into the air to spin in the light while Enel stared blankly at his trembling arm.
Two seconds later, the pain arrived, and his scream rang through the clouds as the lofty god clutched his injured limb and staggered backward across the golden ark.
Below, Gan Fall and Wiper were already numb, injuring a lightning body could be called luck, but resisting lightning head-on while ignoring Mantra predictions to force God into such an ugly state went beyond their understanding of battle.
"So noisy," Zaraki said, landing on the ark's deck and digging at his ear with his little finger.
That careless attitude made Enel break down even more than the wound itself as Zaraki continued, "Is this everything you've got? You don't even qualify to be Ace's whetstone! That kid may be reckless, but his bones are much harder than yours."
"You…" Enel's breathing became ragged. "You dare… compare me to some Blue Sea trash…"
He stopped clutching his wounded arm and stood, his pale face reflecting pain and blood loss while his eyes brimmed with desperate madness.
"I am God!" The thunder drums behind him shook violently as he roared, "I am the one true God!"
He used the pain of his wound to stimulate his mind and pushed the nearly out-of-control Rumble-Rumble Fruit inside his body toward its absolute limit.
"If a mortal body cannot contain divine power, then I shall let you witness…"
The sky darkened completely as the clouds pressed toward Enel's head, dropping the air pressure across the sky island until it became hard to breathe.
Countless thick lightning serpents moved through the clouds to pour entirely into Enel's body, causing it to break apart, reform, and swell while the unfinished Ark Maxim groaned under the waves of energy.
Zaraki narrowed his eyes to look seriously at the opponent before him for the first time, his right hand trembling faintly around Oto's hilt.
It wasn't fear, but an accumulated fatigue, the battle with Shiki, the fall from the sky, the thin air, and the repeated use of Reiatsu were finally starting to collect their debt.
But the smile on his face only grew wider!
This level of energy reaction is finally somewhat decent enough to take seriously!
"Yahahaha… regret it! Tremble, Blue Sea man!"
Accompanied by an inhuman roar, a huge blue-white thunder god wrapped in two hundred million volts of lightning stood from within the blinding light, his enormous body blocking the sun to cast a shadow over the entire cloud beach.
Zaraki rolled his shoulders as the damaged Oto hummed in his hand.
"Good." His grin turned savage. "At least now you look worth cutting!"