The fight tore through the waterfront without ever leaving the ground.
Weevil smashed through walls, vaulted over broken streets, and used the reach of his bisento to turn entire sections of the town into weapons.
Zaraki pursued with Nozarashi's released form held low at his side, meeting the attacks he could not avoid and using brief flashes of Future Sight to step away from the ones that would have driven him back toward the harbor.
Weevil's strength was monstrous.
That part of Buckin's boasting had not been a lie.
When the bisento struck the ground, buildings jumped.
When Weevil swung horizontally, compressed air ripped roofs from warehouses and cut trenches across the road.
His body absorbed blows that would have left most pirates unconscious, and even after Nozarashi opened his shoulder, he continued moving as though pain were merely another order he had not been told to obey.
But his technique was a mess.
Every attack began in his shoulders.
Every change of direction followed Buckin's voice. He used more strength than the movement required, overcommitted whenever Zaraki retreated, and relied on the durability of his body to survive mistakes that a better opponent would punish.
Zaraki understood the type.
Mihawk had accused him of the same thing only days earlier.
The resemblance irritated him more than Weevil's attacks did.
Weevil brought the bisento down toward his head.
Zaraki raised Nozarashi and caught the blade along the cleaver's broad flat. Armament Haki reinforced his hands and forearms as the impact forced both weapons downward.
The broken street beneath his boots collapsed, and he sank to one knee inside a fresh crater.
The bisento remained several inches above his forehead.
No invisible barrier stopped it.
No mysterious force held the weapon away from his skin. Nozarashi took the full weight of the attack, while Zaraki's arms trembled beneath the strength behind it.
Weevil leaned forward, mucus and blood running over his mouth.
"Mama says I have to split your head."
Zaraki looked up at him, golden eyes bright with amusement.
"You've got enough power to try, but you announce every attack like you're asking permission first. If that old hag stopped shouting, would you even know which direction to swing?"
Weevil's face twisted.
"Mama always tells me!"
"That wasn't the answer you thought it was."
Zaraki shifted one foot, changed the angle of Nozarashi, and let the bisento slide from the cleaver's flat.
The weapon buried itself in the crater beside him.
He rose with the movement and drove his shoulder into Weevil's chest.
The giant stumbled back.
Nozarashi followed in a sweeping cut.
Weevil ripped the bisento free and blocked with the shaft.
The chipped cleaver bit halfway through the wood and metal reinforcement but did not sever it completely.
The collision sent a violent shock through Weevil's right arm, fracturing the wrist and tearing several muscles along the forearm.
He screamed and lost his grip with that hand.
Zaraki kicked him in the stomach before he could recover.
Weevil flew through the remains of two buildings, still holding the damaged bisento in his left hand, and crashed into a stone tower near the central square.
The upper half of the structure collapsed over him.
Nozarashi pulled at Zaraki's strength.
'He is weakening.'
'Give me more!'
The woman's dissatisfaction pressed through the blade, but Zaraki kept the flow controlled.
His breathing had grown heavier, and fresh blood was beginning to show beneath the bandages around his torso.
Law's repairs had held through the submarine journey and the first exchanges, but this battle was pushing them again.
Behind him, the blue edge of Law's ROOM flickered across the harbor.
One by one, wounded recruits vanished from floating wreckage and reappeared inside the Polar Tang or aboard the surviving lifeboats.
Shachi and Penguin worked with Ain to clear the infirmary, while Bepo helped stabilize Zephyr under Law's instructions.
The two decoy ships had lost their masts to precise Marine cannon fire, and Heart Pirates were already moving toward their holds to free the captured townspeople.
Zaraki sensed all of it at the edge of his awareness.
For once, he did not resent the distraction.
Mihawk's voice returned to him.
Decide what the cut is supposed to accomplish before you swing.
He looked toward the harbor, where Marines and civilians still crowded the water.
The next cut could not be allowed to pass through them.
On the small boat beyond the pier, Buckin had reached the same conclusion from a different direction.
She saw Weevil buried beneath the tower, the damaged bisento, and Zaraki still standing despite the blood on his bandages.
Fear had finally overwhelmed greed, but she had spent too many years controlling Weevil to admit it openly.
"Weevil!" she screamed. "Get up! He's trying to humiliate you in front of the whole world! If you lose here, Whitebeard's name will belong to someone else forever!"
The tower exploded.
Weevil emerged with his right arm hanging badly and blood covering most of his upper body.
He still held the bisento in his left hand, though the shaft was cut halfway through where Nozarashi had struck it.
"Mama... I'm the strongest."
"Yes, my precious son. You are. So stop holding back and kill him!"
Weevil stared at Zaraki.
The confused obedience in his face hardened into something more desperate.
He caught the damaged bisento with his injured right hand despite the broken wrist, wrapped a torn length of cloth around the grip to keep the fingers closed, and forced both arms into position.
The movement made him scream.
He did it anyway.
Zaraki's grin slowly widened.
"That's more like it. Not the screaming—the part where you finally decided to keep fighting after the orders stopped being easy."
Weevil bared his teeth.
"Mama said I have to win!"
"You're still ruining it."
The giant charged.
His first swing came from the left. Zaraki saw it a heartbeat early through Future Sight and stepped inside the arc, cutting across Weevil's side.
The bisento reversed without finesse, driven by pure strength, and the blunt section of the shaft struck Zaraki across the shoulder.
The impact hurled him into a wall.
Stone collapsed over him.
Weevil followed immediately and thrust the damaged blade into the rubble. Zaraki rolled clear, rose inside the dust, and brought Nozarashi down against the bisento's edge.
Metal screamed.
A long crack opened through the weapon's blade, but Weevil refused to let go. He swung again, forcing Zaraki backward toward the open square.
The strength behind the attack had grown more violent as his body deteriorated. There was less control, less balance, and no concern for what would happen after the next strike.
Weevil was spending everything he had because Buckin had told him that losing was impossible.
Zaraki recognized the danger.
Not to himself.
To everyone behind him.
He jumped backward onto the remaining stone platform overlooking the harbor.
Weevil stopped in the square, planted both feet, and raised the damaged bisento over his head.
Black Armament Haki coated the blade.
A green-tinted arc of compressed force gathered around it, expanding as Weevil poured every remaining trace of strength into the attack.
The injured muscles in his right arm tore wider. Blood ran down the shaft, but the pressure continued growing until the surrounding buildings began collapsing inward.
Buckin's voice rose above the wind.
"That's it, Weevil! Use everything! Split him, the Marines, and the whole harbor apart!"
Zephyr heard her from inside the Polar Tang's infirmary.
He tried to rise from the operating table.
Law forced him back down with one hand.
"If you tear open this repair, I will remove what remains of your shoulder myself."
"That attack is aimed at the harbor."
"Zaraki knows."
"You trust him?"
Law looked through the infirmary window toward the distant figure standing alone on the stone platform.
"No," he said. "I trust that he hates losing more than he hates listening."
Outside, Ain stood on the Polar Tang's upper deck beside Bepo, watching the green arc grow until it seemed to cover half the town.
"Can he stop that without sending it through us?"
Bepo swallowed.
"He split the giants' attack on Little Garden."
Ain looked at him.
"The giants?"
Bepo realized he had said too much and lowered his head.
"Sorry."
In the square, Weevil swung.
The final slash erupted from the damaged bisento as a colossal green arc nearly a hundred meters long.
It tore through the road, drove a trench into the shallow sea, and split the smoke above Hells Island as it descended toward Zaraki and everything behind him.
Zaraki planted his feet and raised the chipped cleaver with both hands.
He could feel the old wounds reopening, the sword drinking from the channel he allowed, and the pressure of Weevil's attack bearing down on the harbor.
He chose the purpose before the swing.
Split the attack.
Keep both halves away from the people in the water.
Defeat Weevil.
Nothing else.
The green torrent swallowed the stone platform.
For an instant, Zaraki vanished inside it.
Then dark-gold light appeared at the center of the destruction—not a bolt of lightning and not a solid creature, but arcs of concentrated pressure crawling through the storm around Nozarashi's raised edge.
The light spread through the smoke and spray, tracing the impression of a colossal skeletal figure behind Zaraki.
It possessed no flesh, no independent movement, and no substance of its own; it was only the shape taken by the force gathering around him, an image so vast and savage that everyone watching felt as though something ancient had opened its empty jaws inside the storm.
From the center of the green destruction came Zaraki's laughter.
Not the laughter of a man standing still and allowing himself to be crushed.
The laughter of a swordsman who had finally decided exactly where his next cut would go!