"Big Mom's been beaten?"
"No way—she just showed up. Was it Red Hair?" Koby collapsed onto the ground.
Not that he had any particular feelings for a woman he'd never even seen before. It was the battlefield itself—far crueler than anything he'd imagined—that had simply exceeded what he could endure.
"No. Red Hair's not a Devil Fruit user." An unnamed Vice Admiral crouched beside him. "Take a look behind you, kid."
Only then did Koby turn.
The formidable Navy HQ had transformed into something else entirely—like a sandbox game's procedurally generated building, with the upper and lower sections no longer lined up.
"Are you alright, little one?" Hancock, unable to contribute anything to this level of combat, took the opportunity to remind everyone she was there.
Yimi didn't acknowledge her. Unlike with Shanks or Big Mom, she was the vessel herself. Her body and soul were being scoured over and over by enormous divine force, and in that state she operated on pure optimal decision-making.
"Task complete. Reward distributed."
"System—if I take out the Fleet Admiral and the Admirals too, is there an extra reward?" The cat said something uncharacteristic.
"No."
"Mm."
Ignoring the strange looks from Shanks and the others, Yimi jumped off the ship and walked straight toward where the Spear of Longinus had fallen—the golden fissures that had been raking across the earth trailing after her as she moved.
"Fuffuffuffu—how interesting, Hawk-Eye. You actually went and produced a monster like this?" Donquixote Doflamingo, one of the Seven Warlords of the Sea, turned to Gecko Moria—also a Warlord—and stirred the pot. "Aren't you going to try cutting her shadow? I seem to recall you want revenge on Kaido."
"Are you joking?" Moria was already backing away, drenched in sweat.
"What does that brat want? Seven Warlords—stop her!" A Marine had noticed that since the Warlords arrived, they'd collectively killed a handful of grunts and nothing else.
Doflamingo and Moria pretended not to hear.
Even Bartholomew Kuma simply stared at the distant scenery—not from fear, but from a genuine unwillingness to put his hands on a small girl.
Whether it was seeing Big Mom's condition or something else, Marine after Marine along the battlefield was stepping back, clearing the path for this figure walking among them like an angel descended from the heavens.
"Well now. This is really something." As an Admiral, Kizaru couldn't keep up the act indefinitely. He stopped his glittering footsteps and let blazing light gather at his fingertips, aimed toward Yimi.
Standing beside him, Benn Beckman—conflicted—leveled his gun at Kizaru's head. "Don't move, Kizaru."
"Oh my, Beckman." Kizaru immediately raised both hands.
Why conflicted? Because Beckman hadn't moved his feet at all. Purely by coincidence—or was it the spatial compression at play—Kizaru had walked directly into his line of fire and still wasn't looking at him.
The war was drawing to a close. As the revelation Yimi had just received began to play out around her, Garp made the decision that fractured his decades of conviction at the very last moment.
He pulled Sengoku aside. "Whitebeard—I'll be your opponent today!"
"Garp?" Sengoku knew exactly what that meant.
Garp coated his fist in Armament Haki and charged barehanded straight into Whitebeard's Murakumogiri. Just as anyone might have predicted, the old man was already a guttering candle—everything he'd shown in this battle might well be the final performance of his life.
Garp could almost feel it: he might actually win here.
"Old man!"
He could even hear Ace's furious cursing.
Garp laughed through his irritation, looking at the face of the man in front of him. "What spell do pirates cast that makes my own grandson happily call you father?"
"You old bastard..." Whitebeard chewed on that for a moment. The more he thought about it, the worse it sat—and he couldn't even find a rebuttal.
In his irritation, Whitebeard pressed harder. That was exactly when Garp deliberately folded, let himself get launched by the impact, and went flying a hundred meters before slamming down dead center in what was left of Navy HQ. A graceful exit—entirely by design.
"Vice Admiral Garp!"
"This war needs to end quickly." Whitebeard glanced toward Yimi, still walking.
That little monster—the one who had casually taken out Big Mom without blinking—was a walking time bomb, steadily shrinking the ground anyone could stand on. When enough of it was gone, every Devil Fruit user here was finished.
And of course it was at this most critical moment that the micro-Den Den Mushi Aokiji had kept hidden started ringing. The one Sengoku had handed over when he was promoted to Fleet Admiral—a direct line to the Five Elders.
Aokiji had no intention of picking up.
Meanwhile, with no one in her way, Yimi retrieved the spear without incident. She drew in the Love Train that had carved away two-thirds of the battlefield, and with it her emotions returned.
"Don't release your power so carelessly." The Saint's final piece of advice.
"I didn't mean to." The cat offered a halfhearted defense, then looked back at the wreckage behind her.
She opened her small hand again. Supreme King Haki—true Emperor-grade—rolled out across the entire battlefield. And—
Every eye was on her. No one dared move. In truth, the number of people watching was far greater still—tens of thousands of times more at the very least: this war was being broadcast live to the entire world.
After today, the title of one of the Four Emperors would have no room left for dispute.
What kind of power was that?
No one could understand it. But the Five Elders—already worn to the bone after Akainu's assault on the Celestial Dragons—were finally afraid.
If Akainu's report was accurate, the thing that looked like Pluton had been this girl's doing. And today she was radiating something seemingly like Joy Boy's light—with Aokiji unable to even spare a hand to take their call.
So they reached a Marine planted in a corner of the battlefield: a man whose real identity was a World Government direct operative—CP0.
"You. Kill that cat-eared freak for me."
"Me?"
The order was unreasonable by any measure, but CP agents were simply machines that obeyed—even orders that cost them their lives.
No matter how powerful a Devil Fruit user was, one thing would never change: seawater was always their weakness.
The operative checked the bomb strapped to his body—prepared before the war ever started. A Vegapunk special; large enough to send half of what remained of the battlefield skyward. Originally a Five Elders failsafe, in case the Emperors actually walked away with everyone intact.
He took an inconspicuous route toward Yimi. Then lit the fuse.
Hiss—
A jet of water killed the flame instantly. Yimi's water gun.
CP0: ?
This thing called a bomb—Yimi knew it all too well. Sometimes when her mom went to school, grandma would put on horror movies to scare her. There was a blue cat in one of those movies that always got blown to charcoal. Very scary for cats.
The little girl turned an unfriendly gaze on this scheming human. Supreme King Haki radiated outward again.
Under the bewildered, disbelieving stares of the Big Mom Pirates, she opened her mouth and spoke—in crisp, childlike English:
"Flesh or life?"
Big Mom's Soul Pocus.