Punk Hazard Research Institute. Outer plaza.
Sentoki was pinned in a corner of the plaza by Sabo, his vaunted defensive barrier cracking under the relentless barrage of high-explosive blue flame.
"Brat! Don't get cocky!"
Sentoki roared. His massive double-bladed axe carved an exaggerated half-circle through the air, a dull sonic boom tearing in its wake as it came crashing down on Sabo.
"Axe Step: Lone March!"
"Too slow, fat man."
Sabo didn't block it. The compressed flames at his heels flared, and his whole body darted like a blue swallow, a sharp midair pivot letting the massive axe blade shear past the edge of his coat and into empty ground.
BOOM. The ground split open into a jagged rift over a dozen meters long.
Sabo was already above Sentoki's head.
He gripped the Flame Dragon Staff in both hands. The core, supercharged by extreme heat and pressure, glowed with a piercing blue radiance.
"My Observation Haki isn't on Enel's freak level, but the instant you started that swing, I already saw where you'd end up."
Sabo drew a deep breath. High-grade Armament Haki flowed like dark liquid down his arms and coiled around the staff.
"Flame Explosion: Fire Dragon King!"
A dragon's roar split the air.
Sabo's staff came down with catastrophic blue flame and internal destruction force, slamming straight into Sentoki's arms as he threw them up in a desperate block.
CLANG.
A visible shockwave erupted outward from the point of impact.
Sentoki's barrier, hailed as the strongest defense on the seas, let out a brittle, breaking wail under the combined weight of monstrous physical force, high-temperature flame detonation, and high-grade Armament Haki.
CRACK.
The invisible Haki wall shattered.
Blue plasma flame exploded across Sentoki's chest.
"GUAH!"
Sentoki felt like a meteor had caved in his ribs. His organs slammed against each other. He spewed a mouthful of blood, his massive body launched like a cannonball into the alloy wall behind him. His eyes rolled back. He was out cold.
"There. Done."
Sabo slung the still-smoking Flame Dragon Staff across his back and walked toward the main entrance.
Not far away, the astronomical-cost test units had already been reduced to smoking piles of scrap under Shark's iron fists and Urouge's lead pillar.
The outer science defense forces were shattered, scattering in every direction.
Up on the second-floor ventilation blind and the two watchtowers flanking it.
Three CP0 agents in white suits and grotesque masks gripped silenced Sea Prism Stone sniper rifles. They ignored the routing defense soldiers and locked their scopes onto the man in the dark red coat below.
"That idiot Sentoki folded way too fast..."
The lead agent ground his teeth, a cold sweat beading on his forehead beneath the mask. These Eclipse Pirates monsters had already blown way past every World Government intelligence assessment.
"Priority target: Portgas D. Ace. Take him out, and these pirates lose their head!"
"Understood."
The other two CP0 agents pulled their triggers in unison.
Pfft. Pfft. Pfft.
Three rounds tipped with Sea Prism Stone warheads broke the sound barrier, streaking toward Ace's skull and heart from three brutally tight blind angles.
But.
Bang. Bang. Bang.
A dozen meters before the bullets reached Ace, a pale green, translucent glass barrier unfurled in midair without the slightest warning and caught every single round.
"Caw! Try and snipe my boss? Not in this lifetime. Caw!"
Beli stood on Carina's shoulder, right talon still crossed, chest puffed with pride as he flapped his wings. The Sea Prism Stone bullets, rounds that could punch through steel plate, hadn't even left a scratch on the barrier. They just dropped to the ground, all their kinetic energy gone.
"What?!" One agent's voice cracked. "How the hell does a pirate crew have a Barrier-Barrier Fruit user?!"
"Pathetic little rats."
Carina let out a cold snort. On her full-map radar, those three hidden nests lit up like searchlights in the dark.
She raised the Eye of God. She didn't even glance at the scope. She just pulled the bolt, aimed from pure neural feedback, and fired, all in one liquid motion.
"Eye of God. Compressed Sniper Mode."
Pew. Pew. Pew.
Three bolts of deep blue laser fire, faster than the eye could track, hammered into the second-floor blind and the two towers with surgical precision.
The sheer piercing force melted three scorched, coin-sized holes clean through the research institute's alloy walls.
The three CP0 elites, so proud of their skill, didn't even manage a scream. Their heads were punched through by energy beams on par with Kizaru's lasers. Three corpses hit the floor.
"Wahahahaha! Carina, your aim just keeps getting sharper!"
Jeno hovered in midair on his back and leg thrusters, giving her a big thumbs-up and a wide grin. "Looks like that auto-calibration module I installed paid off!"
"Naturally. This rifle and I are practically one now." Carina smiled back.
Ace crossed the wreckage-strewn plaza and stopped before the enormous silver-white alloy blast door, over a dozen meters high and impossibly thick.
"Leonora. Open it up."
"On it, Captain!"
Leonora walked up to the door, reached out her left hand, and pressed it lightly against the massive alloy surface.
"Get moving."
A low hum.
A bizarre weightlessness flooded the space. The blast door, dozens of tons of locked-down, dead-bolted alloy, shed every ounce of its mass in an instant. It was nothing now but a toy in Leonora's Devil Fruit grip.
A grin tugged at the corner of Leonora's mouth. She didn't even pull hard. She just beckoned backward with her left hand, casual, midair.
The supposedly impenetrable, monumental alloy door, along with chunks of the surrounding wall, was carved smoothly and utterly free from the entire structure by raw, absolute-rule force. It floated in midair.
"Go on."
Leonora flicked her left hand to the side.
The massive metal door drifted like a weightless leaf, even twisting and folding once in the air in a way that defied physics entirely, before landing with a soft thud in the corner of the plaza.
A long corridor leading straight into the research institute's core area lay open before them, revealed with that single, elegant gesture.
"Whoa... Leonora's got style. That fruit ability is ridiculously handy." Jeno shuffled over to the alloy door debris and swallowed a few chunks.
"Let's go. Time to meet the genius old man."
Ace strode into the dimly lit corridor.
Kuma followed silently behind Ace. He glanced back at the custom mech holding Bonnie.
Then his gaze returned to that red-coated back, walking ahead at the front. To save his daughter, this man had brought his crew and carved a path straight into the place the World Government guarded like its own beating heart. He had even willingly taken the full, thundering fury of the Marines and the Five Elders onto his own shoulders.
On that face, always so unreadable, a terrifyingly complex emotion surfaced for the first time. Devotion. Fanatical, absolute. The resolve of a man who had already given his life away.
Bonnie was everything to him.
And for that reason, Bartholomew Kuma's life, his soul, his strength. Every last fragment of it was now, wholly and without reservation, given to this man named Ace.
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