"Arrogant little girl! Who do you think I am!!!"
Shiki's iron jaw rattled violently as he forced his frame through the burning vacuum left by Leona's slash. He ignored the deep crimson gouge across his chest, the dual blades Oto and Kogarashi serving as his lower limbs spinning into a maddening, golden web of death.
"Lion: Thousand-Cut Valley!"
Clang! Clang! Clang!
Leona parried with deliberate precision, but without solid ground beneath her boots, the sheer kinetic fury of the old legend's final counterattack forced her backward. A localized streak of golden sword-qi bypassed her guard, tearing a deep, jagged line through the leather armor on her shoulder.
A low grunt escaped her lips as the concussive pressure drove her through the air.
"Die in my sky! Lion Majesty: Earth Roll!"
Shiki slammed his palms together. The structural soil and heavy rock formations of two neighboring islands buckled, twisting into colossal, earthen pythons that lunged from every quadrant to swallow her whole. Millions of tons of displaced earth compressed into a dense, suffocating sphere in the sky, intending to crush her bones to dust.
"One down," Shiki wheezed, his breath rattling in his throat as dark blood saturated the silk of his yellow kimono. Clutching his chest, his fingers flexed to contract the stone sphere even further.
Boom!
The surface of the massive rock mass suddenly ruptured with a blinding, red-gold divine fire. A fraction of a second later, the entire structure detonated from within, scattering a rain of burning stone and gray ash across the stratospheric wind.
Through the curtain of fire, a tall, imposing silhouette walked out, treading upon the empty vacuum. Ace held the unconscious, exhausted Leona securely in one arm, his Zoan half-beast state fully deployed. Broad, gold-fire wings rippled behind his dark red trench coat.
Ace directed a brief spark of healing fire into her shoulder before tossing her toward Sabo, who had just closed the distance.
"Clean work, Leona," Ace said softly. His voice held no volume, yet the coldness in his eyes signaled a lethal focus. "I'll close the ledger."
"The... The Outlier!" Shiki's bloodshot eyes contracted as he looked upon the gold wings.
"Old Lion," Ace said, his wings snapping once. He vanished.
When his form rematerialized, he was standing directly within Shiki's immediate perimeter, less than ten meters away.
"If you had spent the last twenty winters bleeding in the New World, your name might have carried some weight today. But you chose to rot in the weakest sea, playing in the dirt with animals. You lost your right to this sky a long time ago."
The muscles along Ace's right arm expanded, the density of his high-level Armament Haki coiling so tightly around his skin that it generated visible red ripples in the air. He drew his fist back, his aura scaling to an absolute peak as his feet locked into a familiar, violent stance.
Staring at that posture, Shiki's crazed eyes went blank for a single heartbeat.
Twenty-four years ago, in the paved plaza of Marineford, a Marine named Garp had moved with that exact same unreasonable, bone-crushing brutality, shattering his twin swords punch by punch until his ambition was buried in the deep dark of Impel Down.
"Garp..."
Shiki ground his teeth, the madness in his face fading into the profound, bitter sorrow of an old relic. Roger was gone. Garp was old. Yet the same nightmare was standing before him in the skin of a new era.
"You won't break my sky again! Not even Garp could!" Shiki screamed hysterically, channeling every remaining drop of his vitality into the steel of his legs.
"Take your legacy to the dirt," Ace said.
"Fist Bone Impact!"
The punch cleared the space between them instantly. The air before his knuckles was compressed into a dense, invisible wall of kinetic force, erupting into a pressure wave comparable to a category-twelve hurricane.
Shiki never had the chance to cross blades. The concussive wind tore through his guard, the internal destruction of Ace's Ryuo detonating within his thoracic cavity.
Crack... Bang!
Every rib in Shiki's chest collapsed simultaneously, his internal organs ruptured by the flowing impact. His eyes rolled back into his head, a torrent of dark blood spraying into the wind as the legend who had once challenged the world lost his hold on the sky, falling through the sea of clouds like a stone.
"Ace! The archipelago is losing its balance!" Carina shouted from the deck.
The authority of the Float-Float Fruit had died with Shiki. Dozens of massive, floating landmasses that had hung in the air for two decades suddenly regained their full gravitational mass. A deep, tectonic groan echoed through the stratosphere as the Merveille islands began a rapid, plunging descent.
"Little Eclipse! Maximum ascent! Clear the grid!" Sabo roared toward the bridge.
Ace didn't return to the ship. Moving through the air with Moonwalk, he swept down like a shadow, catching Shiki's broken corpse by the collar with his left hand while his right palm erupted with ink-black smoke.
"Dark-Dark Fruit: Deprivation."
Within seconds, a raw, formless orb of pale green energy was dragged from the dead man's heart by the black mist. Ace ignored the storage box; instead, he directed the mass straight toward Leona, who was being supported by Sabo.
"Open up," Ace commanded flatly.
Leona didn't hesitate, opening her mouth to let the formless energy slide down her throat. A bitter, oily taste exploded along her tongue, followed immediately by an unnatural sense of weightlessness, as if her bones had turned to hollow reed.
"Go," Ace said, letting Shiki's body drop into the cloud deck. "The prey is falling. Put it back where it belongs."
Leona took a deep, steady breath and closed her eyes. With a single thought, her frame stabilized in the empty air before she accelerated into a high-speed sprint toward the central landmass.
Boom!
Her palms slammed into the rock face of the primary island.
"Float-Float Fruit!"
The green authority raced from her fingers, spreading through the stone matrix. The massive downward momentum stalled with a groaning shudder. Though her control was still unrefined, she successfully countered the island's gravity, anchoring it in place before moving systematically to touch and stabilize the remaining landmasses.
The Eclipse settled gently onto the edge of the central plateau. Leona flew back onto the main deck, carrying the two blades she had sheared from Shiki's limbs—Oto and Kogarashi.
She strode over to Jeno's assembly station. "Jeno. I need an alteration."
She laid the two swords onto the workbench, her vertical pupils sharp with a new concept. "Melt these down. Add the densest composite alloy we have in the hold, and reforge them into a single Greatsword."
Jeno pushed his goggles up, his mechanical eye whirling in confusion. "Big Sister, you always said heavy iron slows down the precision of your dead-line cuts. That's why you use White Night. Why go back to a heavy blade?"
"Because the sky belongs to me now," Leona said, a thin smile showing her teeth. "The moment I handle the hilt, the metal will be as light as a feather. I'll use the extreme velocity of a light blade to bypass their guard, and the exact microsecond the steel touches their skin, I drop the fruit's power, letting the metal regain its full, multi-ton mass."
Sabo, standing by the console, let out a low whistle as the tactical logic hit him. "The speed of a fast blade combined with the crushing force of a heavy dreadnought... if that connects, even an Admiral is leaving a piece of himself in the dirt."
"Consider it done!" Jeno patted his metal chest, his gears whirring. "My stomach furnace will forge you something monstrous." He glanced at the blade at her waist. "Want me to rework White Night too? I can line the hilt with moon alloy and throw a micro-thruster into the pommel—guaranteed to increase your draw speed."
Leona drew White Night, flicking the flat of the blade with a fingernail. It let out a clean, silent hum.
"No need. White Night is one of the 21 Great Grade Swords; its balance is already perfect, and its swing leaves no sound in the air. I have a different way to refine it."
Her eyes flashed red, and a smooth, fluid layer of ink-black Armament Haki slid down the steel like liquid oil. "One day, my Haki will turn this into a true Black Blade."
Ace walked through the splintered stone of the palace ruins. In a corner of the terrace, Dr. Indigo sat huddled over a reinforced metal case, his oversized spectacles fogged with sweat as he trembled.
"Don't process me! I'm just the research asset!" Indigo blubbered, dropping to his knees and holding the case up with both hands. "This is the SIQ serum! It forces the violent genetic traits of animals past their biological limits! Take it all, just keep the knives away!"
Ace snatched the box, passing it down to Chopper without a glance.
Chopper pulled his goggles down, cracking open one of the glass vials to sample the scent before dipping a hoof into the liquid to taste it. Within seconds, his brow furrowed into a tight, analytical scowl as he glared at the scientist. "This is a crude cellular stimulant. It forces the body to borrow against its own lifespan. The genetic matrix will collapse into complete cellular death within three winters. If a human ingests this, their nervous system will liquefy on the spot."
"W-well... the Admiral only ordered me to make the beasts strong enough to level the East Blue!" Indigo stammered, trying to find his footing. "The longevity profile wasn't part of the contract!"
"Then your research was garbage from the first equation," Ace said down to him. His voice held no heat, yet the weight of it left the scientist gasping for air. "But the baseline data has some value."
Ace pointed a finger at Chopper. "From this hour, your laboratory belongs to the Eclipse. Your only task is to assist my ship doctor in stripping the toxins from this formula. Combine your chemistry with Chopper's medicine. I want a clean, stable strengthening serum that unlocks human potential without borrowing from the lifespan. Falter, and I'll drop you into the lower sea to see how long you can swim."
"An assistant... to a reindeer?!" Indigo's mouth fell open in protest, but after looking at Ace, and then at Leona idly shifting the weight of a massive stone pillar with a single finger, his academic pride dissolved. He scrambled forward, clamping both hands around Chopper's leg. "Doctor Chopper! I am entirely at your disposal! Let us conquer this genetic puzzle together!"
"Eh? D-Doctor Chopper?" Chopper's fur instantly fluffed out, his body twisting in a comical, wavy-lined dance of pure embarrassment as he yelled, "Even if you call me a genius, I won't give you any candy, you idiot~!"
"Since the arena is clear, we anchor here for a while," Ace announced to the officers. "The wild beasts on these islands have decent aggression profiles. Perfect for training. Before Chopper finishes the serum, I want every man familiar with their Haki upgrades and fruit metrics."
The crew responded with a collective shout.
Leona dedicated her hours to mastering the spatial navigation of the Float-Float Fruit; Jeno ran the metallurgy for her new sword while expanding his neural link with the lunar automation nodes; Shark and Buggy pushed their perception limits through continuous combat drills, while Sabo and Enel polished their Ryuo output through high-intensity sparring.
Deep within the lower quarters, Brook sat in continuous meditation, anchoring his awareness in the underworld currents of the Revive-Revive Fruit. Carina remained at the center of her web, casting her signed contracts into the lower ports while tracking the global movements of the world powers.
And at the apex of the crew, Ace sat in the silence of the palace ruins, stabilizing the boundary of his newly awakened Future Sight while refining the theoretical framework for Conqueror's Haki Infusion within his mind. The era was burning, and they were forging the steel to rule it.
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