"A mere slip of a girl dares to speak of harvesting my life?!"
Looking at Leona suspended in mid-air, Golden Lion Shiki laughed out of sheer, bloodshot rage, a murderous intent flickering violently in his clouded eyes.
"Since you seek a grave, I'll start by carving yours! Zanpa!"
Without even a wide swing of his hips, the Excellent Grade blade Oto serving as Shiki's right leg trembled slightly. A massive golden crescent of sword-qi, hundreds of meters long, tore through the sky, driving straight for Leona's face in an incredibly swift and unpredictable trajectory. This was no longer a casual probe; it was a lethal slash delivered with the absolute authority of a veteran Great Swordmaster.
Facing a strike capable of cleaving the sea, Leona's feline vertical pupils constricted instantly.
"Special Observation: Anatomical Dead Line!"
In her heightened field of vision, the blinding golden energy slowed, revealing an incredibly thin, fragile red string threading directly through the center of the violent gale.
"There it is."
Leona gripped White Night with both hands, her lithe frame twisting at a perilous angle in mid-air as the cold edge of her blade precisely bit into the node of that red string.
Clang!
A deafening metallic explosion erupted between the clouds. Although she successfully diagnosed the structural weakness and split the golden energy in two, the sheer kinetic weight of the blow numbed her fingers. The impact hurled her backward over ten meters before her boots could find purchase in the sky.
"Oh? You actually severed my sword-qi?" Shiki's brow twitched in mild surprise, his lips curling into a cruel, jagged smile. "Then let's see how many times those fragile wrists can hold! Senpudaku!"
Shiki's legs blurred into a frantic whirlwind of steel as Oto and Kogarashi transformed into two blinding arcs of death. In a heartbeat, hundreds of fierce golden slashes poured down like a torrential rain, systematically sealing off every line of retreat available to the swordswoman.
Facing the desperate storm, Leona's mind grew incredibly still.
"I can see it... every single line."
The steel of White Night turned into a silver curtain of defensive light. Within her special perception, the structural flaw of every incoming strike was exposed. She danced on the edge of the blades like a hunting cheetah, each precise deflection shattering the velocity of the approaching energy.
Clang! Clang! Clang! Clang! Clang!
A rapid-fire cadence of clashing metal echoed through the stratosphere, scattering hot sparks into the clouds.
"Ace, that old man isn't even using Armament Hardening, so why is his steel so heavy?" On the deck of the Eclipse, Sabo's brow furrowed as he tracked Leona's defensive maneuvers.
"Because that is the pure, unfiltered foundation of swordsmanship, forged through decades of relentless life-and-death warfare," Ace replied, his arms crossed as he calmly observed the sky. "Leona's perception is a miracle; she can isolate the fatal flaws of all mass. But her Armament Haki is still an unrefined asset. Against a swordsman of his caliber, if she cannot force a qualitative shift in her defense, her stamina will bleed out in minutes."
Just as Ace calculated.
The high-altitude clash had barely crossed the five-minute mark, yet Leona's breathing had turned shallow and rapid, fresh crimson beginning to seep from the palms gripping her hilt.
"Jiehahahaha! Is this the extent of your horizon, little girl?!" Shiki mocked, treading the air effortlessly as he looked down at the panting swordswoman. "So what if your eyes are special? Before overwhelming, industrial mass, those parlor tricks are utterly meaningless!"
"Shishi: Senpudaku: Ranbu!"
Shiki abruptly altered the cadence of his steel. Utilizing his Float-Float Fruit to manipulate several massive boulders as floating cover, his silhouette moved like a phantom through the currents, unleashing a relentless barrage of close-range slashes from impossible angles. Leona parried frantically, but the old man's seasoned blade-craft left her completely locked on the defensive, unable to find room to counter.
"The throat is open!" Shiki grinned hideously, Kogarashi on his left leg sweeping toward her midsection at a bizarre, inverted angle.
Danger.
Her special perception screamed in warning, but her muscles, fatigued by the continuous impact, couldn't match the speed of the transition.
"If you don't want your steel to break, make your will harder than his," Ace's calm voice echoed directly within her consciousness.
Under the absolute pressure of impending death, a wild, feral ferocity erupted in Leona's vertical pupils.
"Don't look down on me, you ancient fossil!"
The microsecond before Kogarashi could shear through her leather gear, an ink-black, highly concentrated energy surged from her palms, instantly coating the pristine steel of White Night and her own abdomen.
Armament Haki: Hardening.
Clang!
Sparks erupted in a violent shower. Leona didn't just absorb the fatal blow; she channeled the sudden density of her Haki to drive her blade forward, forcibly knocking the legendary pirate back half a step.
"Armament?!" Shiki's expression froze. Due to the lingering trauma of his brain injury, he hadn't been able to mobilize his own Haki for decades. Seeing a young girl break through her limits in the middle of a struggle felt like an insult to his history. "Don't get cocky, brat! You think a coat of black paint means you can stand before a lion?!"
Shiki roared, pushing the spiritual authority of the Float-Float Fruit to its absolute limit.
Rumble!
A small, displaced island floating below them buckled and turned over, hurled upward toward Leona and the Eclipse like a massive, mountain-sized meteorite. This was no longer a contest of swordsmanship; it was pure, unadulterated suppression through mass.
"Not good... that rock is too massive!" Sabo gripped his staff, his boots flexing to leap from the deck.
"Stand down," Ace commanded, his dark eyes fixed on the sky. "Let her clear her own path."
Watching the sun-blotting mass crash down upon her position, Leona felt the air thin under the immense pressure. She knew that if she faltered, the ship that had given her a place among monsters would be caught in the collapse.
"My steel was forged to dissect the most vicious creatures on this sea."
Leona gripped White Night—now turned void-black by her Hardening—with both hands. She didn't drop her altitude. Instead, she took a single, deep breath as she faced the falling mountain. In her mind, the memories of her wild hunts in the deep forests flashed away, replaced by the uninhibited, dominant freedom of the crew she had sworn to follow.
The Captain and the others could break an Admiral... How can my path be blocked by a crippled relic hiding in the clouds?!
Hum!
Deep within Leona's frame, a blinding, tyrannical aura erupted, as if to split the very vault of the sky. This invisible, terrifying will rippled outward like a physical shockwave, tearing a massive, circular hole through the thick cloud deck above. Even the furious Golden Lion across from her experienced a brief fraction of a second where his mind went blank, his limbs trembling under the kingly weight.
Conqueror's Haki: Awakened.
"What?! Haoshoku?!" A flicker of absent-minded nostalgia crossed Shiki's bloodshot eyes.
In that single microsecond where the legend lost his focus, stunned by the kingly pressure:
"Special Observation: Anatomical Dead Line... Maximized!"
In Leona's sight, the massive falling island and the old man behind it, whose defenses had dropped due to shock, were unified by a single, blood-red line of absolute structural failure that pierced through both targets.
"One Sword Style: Shura Dissection Chamber!"
Swish!
Leona's form transformed into a high-speed afterimage, trailing a fierce, clean ribbon of sword-light a thousand meters long across the sky. White Night, wrapped in black Haki and carrying an indestructible, diamond-sharp edge, flashed along that blood-red dead line.
Boom!!!
The massive floating island was silently halved in mid-air, the cut surfaces so perfectly smooth they mirrored the light like glass.
And behind the falling stone, Golden Lion Shiki stood motionless in the empty air. His eyes, which had looked down upon the sea for decades with absolute arrogance, were now wide with an unreadable disbelief.
"My ambition... broken by a child..."
Pffft!
A clean, thin line of red slowly manifested across Shiki's chest. Then, a geyser of hot blood sprayed across the open sky.
The legend of the old era, who had once vied with the King for the sovereignty of the world, had his spirit shaken for a single heartbeat—and that heartbeat was all the swordswoman needed to find his end. His body collapsed, falling through the endless sea of clouds below like a kite with a severed string.
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