Obviously...
Robin was nowhere nearby. She was using Liam's Hana Jizai ability to bloom one of his own ears right beside him, whispering directly into it from across the sea.
"Liam, just listen. Right now, I..."
Her voice laid out the situation. She had received the message passed along by the Dressrosa soldier Liam had hypnotized.
The ship Leo mentioned had barely dropped anchor before making immediate preparations to sail again just minutes later. Left with no other choice, she had slipped aboard in secret.
However, Robin quickly realized the crew belonging to the Antique Thieves Group were low-level grunts who knew next to nothing.
So, she decided to trail the vessel all the way to its buyer and dig deeper at the drop-off point.
For the moment, she had sprouted the ear just to keep him in the loop.
To prevent Liam from losing his head if she couldn't reach him via Hana Jizai later, Robin added a deliberate parting note:
"This is the only update you get for now. If you want to hear my voice again, hurry back."
A faint smile carried through her tone.
Then Liam felt the distinct pressure of soft lips brushing against the sprouted ear.
In the next breath, the connection snapped, and the ambient sounds of that distant deck vanished like smoke.
...…
The starlight blurred the horizon, locking sky and sea into a vast, dark expanse.
The bicycle skittered rapidly across the frozen crust of the ocean.
Behind his small, round sunglasses, Aokiji threw a sideways glance toward the rear rack.
"You're wearing shades in the dead of night," Liam said, crouching low. He had already pulled off his own sunglasses and hooked them into his collar. "Can you even see the ice?"
"..."
Aokiji didn't bother replying to the bait.
Liam didn't care anyway, pivoting to a more pressing issue.
"Still moving? You might not be hungry, but my stomach is scraping my spine. Let's pull over and find some grub."
Hearing this, Aokiji braced to release a burst of frost to spear a couple of passing Sea Kings.
Instead, he watched Giorno spring from his crouch on the rear rack, cutting an arc through the night before dropping silently into the black water.
Right. He doesn't have a Devil Fruit power at the moment.
Aokiji didn't ease off the throttle.
He knew that with Giorno's current physical specs, the kid's swimming speed could easily match his pace.
Did he purge his ability on purpose?
On the surface, this brat looks completely unhinged, but he's unexpectedly meticulous...
The thought flickered through Aokiji's mind.
Meanwhile, the ice-gliding bicycle had already covered several kilometers across the dark, rolling swell.
Back then...
Forget it...
Splash!
A massive black shape erupted from the water right alongside their frozen track.
With a lazy flick of his wrist, Aokiji flash-froze the creature into a solid monument.
Liam landed back on the rear rack, hoisting the frozen Sea Beast over his shoulder.
Just as he was eyeing the tight space, wondering where to sit and prep dinner, he felt Aokiji casually draw a ribbon of seawater from the wake beneath them.
The water whipped up, wrapping around both Aokiji and Giorno.
Flash-frozen by a spike of sub-zero air, it instantly formed a circular ice table right around the frame, complete with low frost railings to keep things steady.
Liam grinned. He ripped off a massive slab of raw Sea Beast meat, and with a sharp whoosh, ignited a brilliant fire in his palm.
The flames cast a sharp glare against the dark sea and night sky.
Even Aokiji turned his head to look. He had figured they were having sashimi. The wildlife in this sea was naturally rich, needing zero seasoning to taste decent. Sea Beasts tasted like a cross between prime game and fresh fish.
Liam held the chunk of meat directly over the open flame, and within seconds, a rich, greasy aroma cut through the salt air.
He dug in without ceremony.
After tearing through two massive portions himself, he roasted another cut and slid it across the ice table toward Aokiji.
Before long, the massive Sea Beast was stripped down to a bare spine.
Liam kicked the skeleton back into the dark water.
For a guy with his metabolism, that load barely took the edge off.
It didn't even count as a snack.
Morning broke.
The bicycle carrying the two men continued to slice through the New World waves.
Bored out of his mind, Liam was about to doze off while standing on the rack when Aokiji started barking orders to someone behind him, evidently talking into a Den Den Mushi.
After repeating the coordinates the snail rattled off, Aokiji yelled:
"Good! Keep the battleships at maximum range and use a rotating barrage to slow their ship down! The Big Mom Pirates have plenty of freaks, but they aren't all monsters. There are multiple Ability Users on that deck, they'll try to avoid getting bogged down by artillery. Just make sure the ships hold their distance! Stay at the edge of your firing line!"
Liam listened with half an ear.
Hanging up that line, Aokiji switched frequencies and hammered the exact same orders home.
"...Hold maximum cannon range! Slow them down! If you can force them to run in circles in that grid, do it..."
"...Do not close the distance! They'll slaughter you! Wait until I'm on-site before you make a move..."
"...Hello? Is this the G-3 Branch battleship? This is Aokiji..."
While keeping the bike steady over the swell, Aokiji's voice went heavy as he spoke into the shell.
"...I'll be on your position within the hour. Hold the line."
The Den Den Mushi's face stiffened, snapping into a rigid salute.
"Understood, Vice Admiral Kuzan!"
Once the line went dead, Liam finally asked, checking his assumptions:
"The Big Mom Pirates?"
"Yeah..." Aokiji muttered.
A fresh layer of frost began to roll off his skin.
"Hang on to your teeth. I'm opening the throttle."
"Which one of Big Mom's kids are we dealing with?" Liam asked.
Aokiji's eyes narrowed behind his glasses.
"Charlotte Katakuri..."
So it's Katakuri, Liam thought.
As if the bike had been kicked by an invisible boot, its speed exploded. It banked hard across the surface and shot forward like a bullet, leaving a massive, frozen wake that looked like a glacier carving through the open sea.
Somewhere in the New World.
BOOM!
BOOM!
The thunder of heavy artillery rolled across the water.
Shell after shell trailed smoke toward a pirate ship cutting through the waves.
Stamped across the main sails and the black flag fluttering from the mast was a skull wearing a massive bicorne hat over a pair of thick, red lips, the unmistakable mark of the Big Mom Pirates.
"Cannonballs are coming~"
"More cannonballs are coming~"
Though it was supposed to be a wooden figurehead, the ship's bow suddenly chirped in a high, melodic voice.
And it wasn't just the prow.
The tables, chairs, plates, and dozens of other fixtures across the deck opened their mouths. Just like the hull beneath them, they cried out in high, sing-song voices.
Some sounded panicked.
Some stayed perfectly calm.
Some sounded downright thrilled.
Blended together, their voices sounded like a twisted nursery rhyme.
A black wall of artillery rained down.
Several figures leapt from the deck to meet it.
The Charlotte Family's sixth daughter, Castard, drew her blade and blurred through the air, unleashing several flying slashes that minced the incoming iron spheres.
Her twin sister, Angel, vaulted up right behind her. With a single sweeping strike, she detonated a cluster of shells simultaneously, painting a wall of fire across the sky.
The ninth son and Minister of Cheese, Mont-d'Or, threw both hands toward the clouds.
A massive book materialized out of thin air.
The pages slammed open, swallowing several live shells instantly into the pocket dimension bound within the parchment.
Yet despite their quick work, a couple of rounds slipped through the defense and smashed into the hull.
The Homies fused into the wood by Big Mom's Soul-Soul Fruit shrieked in pain, their voices turning into a discordant chorus.
"This is getting annoying, Brother Katakuri!" Mont-d'Or barked toward the towering figure standing motionless at the prow. "There are too many battleships boxing us in, and they're staying way outside our counter-attack range!"
"..."
Wrapped in a heavy scarf with a black, punk-style leather vest studded with spikes, the five-meter-tall second son of the family stood like a statue.
At thirty-five years old, he was at the absolute peak of his lethality, reigning as the undisputed strongest of the Four Sweet Commanders:
Charlotte Katakuri.
After a cold silence, Katakuri flicked a single jelly bean out of his pouch and snapped his wrist.
Whoosh...!
A heavy shell screaming through the air collided directly with the tiny piece of candy.
The jelly bean punched clean through the iron.
The shell blew apart instantly in midair.
While his younger siblings continued to argue behind his back, Katakuri kept his lower face buried in his scarf, showing only a pair of calm, piercing eyes.
He tracked the distant line of Marine battleships circling them, noting how they maintained their precise, safe perimeter.
"They're stalling for time," Katakuri said, his voice muffled slightly by the wool.
He was about to layout their escape route.
After all, they had just hit a World Government member state and leveled half its capital. It was inevitable that Marine Headquarters would deploy a heavy response to cut off their retreat.
But before the next word left his mouth, his Advanced Observation Haki, a sensory technique refined to the point of tearing open a window into the immediate future, flashed an image into his mind.
His head snapped violently toward a flank of the open sea.
Castard, Angel, Mont-d'Or, and the rest immediately followed his line of sight.
They saw nothing but empty water.
Yet a heavy shadow settled over Katakuri's brow.
"Aokiji..." he spat. "He's here."
The siblings looked confused for a fraction of a second.
Then Angel pointed out across the water, her voice rising.
"The ocean is locking up!"
"The ice is racing right at us!"
"It really is Aokiji!"
"An Admiral-level threat?" Mont-d'Or and the others immediately tightened their grips on their weapons, recognizing the scale of the disaster.
They spun and screamed at the wood beneath their boots.
"Turn the ship now! If the rudder gets frozen in, we're sitting ducks!"
"Turning the ship~"
"Shifting the sails~"
"Hard to port, hard to port~"
The Homie ship complied instantly, throwing its weight into a hard bank.
A minute later, the lookout noticed something off.
"The battleships stopped firing..."
"Are they breaking off the pursuit?"
"The ice is tracking us again!"
A helmsman screamed from the main deck.
"Mochi! Harder! Stay clear of that frost!"
The pirate vessel hummed another childish tune as it threw its own rudder over, adjusting the canvas to catch the wind.
It put massive distance between itself and the white sheet of ice chewing up the sea behind it.
But every time they changed course and thought they had slipped the trap, the frost line would adjust.
And close the gap.
"I see..." Katakuri murmured, his tone dropping an octave. "There's land ahead."
His voice went deathly cold.
"Aokiji is deliberately herding us toward that deserted rock."
Only then did the crew scan the bow and spot the target.
"Look!"
"Landfall ahead!"
Thunk.
Thunk.
Thunk.
Katakuri's heavy, studded boots thudded against the wood as he walked toward the stern.
His eyes locked onto a tiny black speck rapidly eating up the distance from miles away.
His Observation Haki pushed out across the water.
Across the miles of gray ocean.
Across the expanding sheets of white ice.
The distant silhouette resolved itself with violent clarity.
It was a man bleeding cold air, pedaling a bicycle straight toward their warship at an impossible speed.
And standing right on the rear rack...
Was a tall, lean brat.
The exact millisecond Katakuri's Haki focused on them, the kid on the back suddenly flashed a grin.
It was a direct hit, as if their eyes had met right through the invisible threads of the Haki scan itself.
Whizz...!
Katakuri's pupils shrank.
His right arm dissolved, turning into a thick, swirling mass of sticky mochi.
From deep within the dough, a massive, three-pronged spear slid into his grip, its steel gleaming.
Bracing the weapon across his chest, he spoke in a tone that silenced the deck:
"Everyone..."
"Prepare for battle."
(End of Chapter)
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