The clash of Haki immediately put the pressure on Doflamingo.
Giorno's Busoshoku Haki... How many years had this kid even been training? Wasn't this strength a little ridiculous?!
The two met between midair and the ground, their blackened feet colliding with a violent shockwave.
Doflamingo's eye twitched, while Liam remained completely calm.
The muscles in Liam's leg suddenly bulged.
BAM!
Doflamingo was kicked backward. As he spun through the air, he casually flicked his hand, sending five razor-sharp strings slashing toward Liam.
Liam simply leaned to the side. Doflamingo's Goshikito, Five Color Strings, swept past him, silently carving five deep, parallel gashes into the ground.
Busoshoku Haki.
Liam reached out and caught the Five Color Strings with his bare hand. He yanked them toward himself with a hard pull!
Doflamingo landed with the strings still attached to his fingers, stumbling from the sudden tug. He immediately released them and used the momentum to flip forward.
Pink feathered coat billowing behind him, Doflamingo leaped toward Liam. Thin strings extended from the back of his leg, forming a cutting edge like a guillotine blade as it came crashing down toward Liam's head, the very technique Doflamingo had used to sever Law's right arm.
Instead of blocking the string blade, Liam took a step back. He raised his elbow, coated it in Busoshoku Haki, and slammed it directly into the sole of Doflamingo's pointed dress shoe.
BOOM!!
For a split second, Doflamingo almost felt like he'd been launched by a mountain.
In that fraction of a second, he whipped his hand around, wrapping several loops of string around Giorno's neck and torso.
Fuf fuf fuf fuf...
The harder Giorno was knocked back, the tighter those strings would pull. They'd snap his neck and slice through his torso all the cleaner... Even your Busoshoku Haki would, huh?!
As Doflamingo flew backward, however, he felt no resistance from the strings in his hand.
He suddenly realized that Giorno's body, wrapped in layer after layer of thread, had somehow turned into something like a smooth, weightless sheet of paper...
Liam simply let the strings slide off his body. Doflamingo was carried farther away, dragging the loose strings along with him...
"Almost forgot. Fuf fuf fuf..."
Doflamingo slapped a hand against the ground, flipped upright, and landed cleanly on his feet. He brushed off his pink feathered coat, his sunglasses reflecting Giorno as the boy shifted from that paper-thin form back to normal.
"I heard you were an expert in Rokushiki... I didn't expect you to be so proficient not only with Rankyaku, Geppo, and Tekkai, but even Kami-e, which is notoriously difficult to master... No wonder Jora's Art-Art Fruit couldn't touch you!"
Liam barely reacted. He simply tightened his grip on the Five Color Strings he had caught earlier, coated his hand in Busoshoku Haki, and pulled hard.
They didn't break.
Liam raised an eyebrow. "These strings... they're absurdly tough."
Thinking about it, this wasn't limited to the Birdcage. Even Fujitora, Zoro, and Kin'emon working together couldn't do anything to those threads. In the original series, it didn't seem like any of Doflamingo's strings had ever actually been cut or broken by anyone, not even the victims controlled by his Parasite String.
"Fuf fuf fuf fuf..." Doflamingo laughed. "Isn't it perfectly natural for strings created by a Devil Fruit to be indestructible?"
"That's actually a fair point." Liam casually tossed the Five Color Strings aside, letting them drop to the ground.
There were plenty of ridiculous things in this world, after all. Poneglyphs, for one. Seastone, for another... Everywhere you looked, there were things that simply couldn't be destroyed by brute force.
The resistance of Luffy's rubber body to electricity seemed practically infinite, even Enel's high-voltage lightning couldn't heat him up at all. Virtually none of the current could pass through Luffy's body; it simply flowed around him, making him a perfect insulator that should only exist under ideal theoretical conditions...
So the fact that strings created by Doflamingo's Ito Ito no Mi were indestructible wasn't all that unreasonable. Without that property, the ability would actually be pretty useless in certain respects. If the strings were just ordinary thread, what would even be the point?!
Doflamingo's fist, packed with dense Busoshoku Haki, crashed against Liam's incoming strike, accompanied by a burst of Haoshoku Haki that erupted from Doflamingo with a furious roar.
...
Meanwhile, Robin casually walked into the ruined city.
Ahead, a massive lump of thick, mucus-like liquid clung to the side of a steep slope. The man who had previously appeared alongside Doflamingo emerged from within it. His true body turned out to be a middle-aged man thin enough to look skeletal, wrapped in a coat made entirely of sticky slime. He had likely generated even more of it when he crashed into the mountain to cushion the impact. In other words, his Devil Fruit ability was...
Robin mentally flipped through the Devil Fruit encyclopedia, remembering one called the Stick-Stick Fruit, a Paramecia.
She then looked up at Machvise, who floated in midair like a balloon. One of his arms was bent and twisted at unnatural angles, cold sweat pouring down his pale face.
An ability that could decrease and increase weight... Robin quickly ran through the possibilities. It might be the Kilo-Kilo Fruit, or perhaps its superior counterpart, the Ton-Ton Fruit... Either way, another Paramecia.
"Is this the grave you've chosen for yourself?" A shrill voice piped up from behind. Robin turned to see the towering, heavily built Pica glaring at her with a grim expression.
"Giorno actually left you here alone to face the four of us..."
Nearby, the rubble of a ruined house suddenly transformed, turning into countless flag-like ribbons of stone that fluttered lightly in the air. Striding through them was Diamante, whom Robin's giant arm had punched into the debris earlier.
Diamante strolled through the fluttering stone flags, his sword twisting along with them. "Looks like he's willing to sacrifice your life just to buy himself enough time to defeat Doffy!"
That looked like the Hira Hira no Mi... Robin glanced at him, wondering inwardly, 'Not a single Logia among them?'
"Behehehe..." Trebol lumbered over, draped in his sticky coat once again. "Let's finish her off quickly and go help Doffy~~"
"That's right!" Machvise floated down to join Diamante, Pica, and Trebol, surrounding Jolyne Cujoh from four directions. With one arm crippled by B.I.B., he gritted his teeth through the pain, cold sweat dripping down his face. "I'll increase my weight to ten thousand tons and smash her into minced meat... Ngh, my arm hurts! It hurts so much... Fine, twenty thousand tons!!"
"Behehehe..." Trebol raised a hand with a malicious grin, manipulating the sticky coat covering his body to launch dozens of mucus blobs. "All right, I'll pin her down for you, Machvise..."
The blobs flew toward Robin. She frowned, there was no way she was letting that stuff touch her.
She casually raised a hand. Petals erupted from the ground in front of her, forming a huge, muscular figure. Standing behind her, Pica widened his eyes and shrieked, "What is that?! Why does it look like me?!"
Splatter, splatter, splatter...
As Trebol's barrage of mucus was blocked by a duplicate of Pica, which had suddenly bloomed into existence, Pica felt the unmistakable sensation of slime hitting his own body.
Before he could even react, Diamante suddenly shouted, "Trebol!!"
"Behehe?" Trebol was still wondering how Pica had somehow gotten in front of Jolyne to block the attack for her when petals burst from the ground behind him, forming a clone of Diamante. Expressionless, the duplicate swung its sword.
A flash of steel! A single slash sent Trebol's head flying from his shoulders just as he turned around in confusion.
"Wha... what's... happening... What is this...?"
The world spun rapidly before Trebol's eyes. His severed head hit the ground with a dull roll, and only then did he realize what had happened. He blinked twice before the light faded from his eyes.
Robin crossed her arms and calmly looked around at the three remaining officers, who were either stunned speechless or glaring at her with murderous fury. "Are you truly prepared to kill me together?"
"You bastard!!" Diamante, Pica, and Machvise roared, charging at Robin all at once.
...
Black-and-red Haki lightning erupted across the snowy ground, accompanied by a barrage of punches infused with Ripple. Wild animals wandering through the snow suddenly rolled their eyes back, foamed at the mouth, and collapsed, limbs twitching uncontrollably.
Doflamingo's fist trembled as Liam slowly forced it backward.
"So that's all your Haoshoku Haki amounts to?" Liam smiled faintly. Catching Doflamingo's fist with his free hand, he reared back his head, his forehead coated in pitch-black Haki.
THUD!!!!
For a few seconds, Doflamingo felt as though the entire world had gone silent. Then came the warm trickle running down his forehead...
He whipped out his Five Color Strings, but Liam caught him by the wrist and drove his elbow ruthlessly into Doflamingo's chin.
'Pfft...'
Doflamingo's head snapped back, spitting blood. He gritted his teeth and tried to counter, but whether in speed or power, he was completely outmatched.
And it wasn't just physical strength, his Haki was a level below Liam's as well. Liam was like a humanoid combat monster. Once he closed the distance, he treated Doflamingo like a punching bag. Doflamingo struggled to land any meaningful counters, and even when his attacks did land, the damage he inflicted was pitiful compared to the beating Liam was handing out.
Whenever Doflamingo tried to retreat and steal a moment to breathe, Liam closed the gap at speeds invisible to the naked eye, as if possessing infinite stamina. His attacks poured down on Doflamingo like a relentless storm.
It wasn't just that Liam found Doflamingo's close-combat skills slightly inferior to Haiyna's from back then. Even if Doflamingo had matched Haiyna's level, against the Liam of today, he would still be utterly suppressed.
"Pfft!"
Doflamingo had lost count of how many times he'd been forced to cough up blood. Gathering every ounce of strength he had left, he whipped his long leg toward Giorno.
BAM!
Liam's leg, still coated in seemingly undiminished Busoshoku Haki, slammed directly into the kick.
Doflamingo gritted his teeth. The hand he'd kept hidden behind his back had finally finished preparing his trap. With a roar, he unleashed a thick whip formed from dozens of tightly twisted strings, slashing it ruthlessly toward Liam.
"Overheat!"
The attack descended like a beam of white-hot light. Liam dodged aside as the Overheat sliced past him.
BOOM!
Nearly half of the island section where it struck was cut clean through.
KRA-KOOM...
A corner of the snowy island split apart. Outside the Birdcage, Marines stared at the seemingly bottomless trench carving across the ground toward the coast, struck speechless. What the hell was that?!
"The battleship!" a Marine screamed. "The battleship was cut in half!"
Everyone turned in horror. The sudden beam of light hadn't just sliced through the island, it had cut straight through the battleship anchored offshore as easily as a cake. With a tremendous crash of waves, the two halves began to sink. Marines scrambled on deck, diving into the freezing sea.
...
"Not bad!" Liam wiped at the raw wound on his shoulder, his hand coming away bloody. "That attack... feels even stronger than the strings of this cage." He gestured toward the dome covering the sky.
Doflamingo used the brief pause to leap backward and put distance between them. He didn't answer. Instead, he calmly pressed both hands flat against the ground.
"...Awakening."
BANG!!
The ground on both sides of Liam warped, surging upward like towering waves of white thread. Their tips sharpened into razor-like points before thrusting inward from both sides.
(End of Chapter)
You can read ahead up to 30 chapters on my patreon https://www.patreon.com/marvel6395