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With nothing more than a passing thought, Rosh materialized a weapon. Brilliant golden light flooded his right hand, rapidly condensing into a flawless, razor-sharp longsword forged entirely out of solid light. The blade didn't just glow; it practically hummed with an intense, blinding radiance.
Almost in the exact same heartbeat, Rosh casually swung the light-blade out to his side.
*CLANG!*
A sharp, metallic screech echoed across the courtyard.
To the rogue sorcerers watching, it looked like Rosh had just swung at empty air. But in reality, his sword had perfectly intercepted an attack that literally no one else could see coming: Frank Castle's combat knife.
The surprise assassination attempt had been flawlessly timed. Frank, along with all his tactical gear, had gone entirely ghost under the power of the Clear-Clear Fruit. For all intents and purposes, the Punisher had simply ceased to exist in the physical world. There wasn't a shadow, a sound, or even the slightest ripple in the air to give away his position.
Too bad his opponent was Rosh.
Sure, the Clear-Clear Fruit could bend light waves and trick the human eye, rendering the user completely invisible. But invisibility only works if your opponent is actually relying on their eyes to see. It couldn't do a single thing against Observation Haki. It doesn't care about visual sight. It bypasses the eyes entirely to sense life itself, every heartbeat, every breath, and every flicker of living intent.
Even if someone completely wipes their physical presence from the world, their life force still radiates into the environment like a beacon. To a master whose Observation Haki had reached Rosh's god-tier level, a cloaked Frank Castle might as well have been standing under a massive, neon spotlight. Trying to sneak up on him using standard invisibility was like trying to hide a fireworks show in a dark room. It just wasn't happening.
*BANG!*
Without even bothering to look back, Rosh casually spun on his heel and drove a brutal kick straight into Frank's ribs.
The sheer impact launched the invisible assassin backward through the air. Frank skipped violently across the rain-soaked stones like a flat rock thrown across a pond, rolling to a heavy stop dozens of meters away.
As the trauma of the kick shattered Frank's concentration, the Devil Fruit's cloaking effect glitched out. The transparent figure flickered, gradually bleeding color back into the world until the Punisher was fully visible again, lying entirely motionless on the cracked pavement. Just like the six Zoan users before him, he was out cold. Alive, but completely scratched from the fight.
*SWOOSH!*
Before the rogue sorcerers could even process Frank's takedown, the next strike was already mid-flight.
Stick, the blind old warrior, had been patiently playing the waiting game. The exact second Frank's ambush failed, Stick unleashed his own trump card. A pale, violet beam of energy shot toward Rosh at breakneck speed.
This was the power of the infamous Slow-Slow Fruit. If that strange beam so much as grazed you, your entire body would be locked into a devastatingly slow crawl, leaving you utterly defenseless.
Rosh didn't bother dodging; he didn't even take a step back. He simply raised his left hand.
Golden light surged into his palm instantly. In the blink of an eye, the photons knitted themselves together to form a perfectly smooth, crystal-clear mirror floating right in front of him. It gleamed flawlessly beneath the afternoon sky.
*FLUNG!*
The violet beam slammed hard into the light-mirror. But instead of shattering it or passing through, the energy left no scratch. It bounced right off the polished surface, pulling a complete U-turn and racing back along the exact trajectory it had come from.
Stick's face twisted in pure shock. In all his years of combat, he had never imagined someone could whip up a flawless, functioning mirror out of pure light in the dead center of a high-speed battle. There was zero time to move. The reflected beam slammed dead-center into Stick's chest.
Instantly, the old man froze. Every single cell in his body slowed down to an absolute, painful crawl. Even the simple act of trying to lift his weapon became a grueling chore, as if time itself had decided to reject his existence.
*BOOM!*
Trapped in slow motion, Stick couldn't even brace himself as the leftover momentum of his own charge finally caught up with him. He crashed heavily into the shattered stone courtyard, his grip failing as his weapon slipped away with a loud—
*CLANG!*
The legendary blind warrior now lay sprawled out on the pavement, completely helpless and utterly defeated by the exact same power he had hoped would take Rosh down.
The smoke hadn't even cleared from Stick's crash when Danny Rand and Colleen Wing launched their assault. Moving in perfect sync, they struck like a two-headed snake.
Danny's fists flared to life, blazing with brilliant, molten Qi energy that carried enough raw power to pulverize solid stone. Right beside him, Colleen's katana whipped through the air, drawing a lethal arc meant to cut off any chance of escape.
Their teamwork was flawless. One came dead-on from the front; the other sliced in from the blind spot on the side. Against any ordinary opponent, this was a textbook checkmate.
The attacks landed, or at least, they definitely should have.
The exact millisecond Danny's glowing fist and Colleen's steel blade made contact with Rosh, his body simply dissolved. There was no sound of tearing flesh, no metallic clang against bone. Instead, Rosh's physical form shattered into millions of shimmering, dancing particles of golden light.
The fist and the sword tore right through the empty space where his torso had just been. There was zero resistance. No impact. Nothing. It was exactly like trying to punch a sunbeam.
"...What?!"
"How is that even possible?!"
Kaecilius's icy, unbothered composure finally cracked wide open. His eyes stretched wide with shock, and for the first time since he had planned this entire grand operation, real, unfiltered disbelief washed over his face.
Behind him, Lucian and the remaining rogue sorcerers stood completely frozen, their jaws slack. Every single one of them stared blankly at the space where Rosh stood, their brains stalling out as they tried to process the absolute absurdity of what they were looking at. 'What the hell was his body made of?'
After a few seconds of stunned, agonizing silence, the terrifying truth finally clicked in their minds.
No... it wasn't just that Rosh could control light.
He was light itself.
His entire physical anatomy could instantly convert into pure photons, allowing physical attacks to pass right through him as if he were a ghost.
Once that reality sank in, a cold dread settled deep into the stomachs of the rogue sorcerers. A heavy, suffocating question hung in the air: How are you supposed to fight a guy like that? You can slash open flesh, fracture bones, and burn skin to ash, but how do you cut a laser beam? How do you throw a punch at something that isn't even solid?
The answer was brutally simple: You can't.
Against a Logia-type power like this, ordinary physical combat was entirely pointless. It didn't matter how hard you could hit or how sharp your sword was. The only thing that mattered was a fact they couldn't ignore; they couldn't even touch him.
*BANG! BANG!*
While the rogue sorcerers were still trapped in their collective panic attack, Rosh casually reformed into solid matter. Without a single hint of rush or effort, he threw out two lightning-fast strikes.
One tapped Danny; the other clipped Colleen.
To the untrained eye, the hits looked almost gentle, like a casual shove. But the kinetic force behind them was staggering. Danny and Colleen were launched backward like weightless ragdolls, skipping across the ruined courtyard. They skidded for several meters over the jagged cobblestones before rolling to a definitive, lifeless stop. Just like everyone else before them, they were completely out cold.
In a matter of mere moments, every single one of Kaecilius's hijacked Devil Fruit users had been utterly dismantled. Not a single one of them had even managed to leave a scratch on Rosh's jacket.
A thick, heavy silence choked the plaza. The very air felt dense, weighed down by an impossible pressure. A single drop of cold sweat slowly traced its way down Kaecilius's neck. Behind him, his followers could barely force air into their lungs, pure terror quietly spreading through the ranks.
The young man standing quietly before the sealed gates of the London Sanctum didn't look like a business manager anymore. He looked like an anomaly, an existence that defied the very rules of the universe.
Nobody understood the strength of those brainwashed Devil Fruit users better than Kaecilius's squad. After all, they were the ones who had tracked, hunted, and captured them in the first place. They knew firsthand just how terrifying those enhanced warriors could be on a battlefield. Any single one of them could have turned a regular military deployment into a meat grinder. Together, they were supposed to be an apex force capable of leveling a Sanctum.
And yet, that same unstoppable army had just been casually swept aside like dust by one man.
The gap between them wasn't just wide. It was a completely different world.
An army capable of throwing the entire global order into absolute chaos... neutralized in a matter of minutes.
It wasn't even a proper battle; it was a cleanup job. One by one, every single Devil Fruit user had been dismantled with terrifying, effortless precision. Not a single one of them had managed to force Rosh to break a sweat. Not a single one had even made him take a defensive stance.
Every single encounter had ended the exact same way: a single, casual movement from Rosh, followed by an immediate knockout.
The staggering, impossible gap in power left the surviving rogue sorcerers completely speechless. What kind of spell could possibly bridge a chasm that wide? What kind of strategy could defeat an opponent you couldn't even touch?
The answer was staring them right in the face: there wasn't one. This wasn't a difficult fight. It was a completely unwinnable one.
*SIZZLE!*
Even Kaecilius, with all his dark ambition and arrogance, finally cracked under the weight of reality. The grand vision that had driven him all the way to the doorsteps of the London Sanctum evaporated into thin air, replaced by pure survival instinct.
Without wasting breath on a single word, he thrust his hand forward, his Sling Ring cutting through the air. Golden sparks erupted into life, spinning rapidly until a circular portal tore open right in front of him.
There was no hesitation. No dramatic villain monologue. No desperate, last-ditch attack. Kaecilius straight-up dove through the gateway.
Lucian and the rest of the rogue sorcerers didn't need to be told twice. Knocking each other out of the way, they rushed headfirst through the portal, abandoning the battlefield as fast as their legs could carry them. At that moment, they didn't care about ascension, history, or power. They only wanted one thing: to escape.
Rosh didn't lift a finger to stop them.
He didn't fire a laser beam through the portal. He didn't launch a parting attack. He just stood calmly among the neatly stacked, unconscious bodies of his premium customers, casually watching the fleeing sorcerers scramble into the glowing gateway.
His golden eyes were entirely placid, completely indifferent.
Why would he rush? He already knew how this story ended.
Outrunning a master sorcerer was possible. Outrunning a god was difficult. But outrunning light itself? That was a physical impossibility.
Rosh slowly closed his eyes.
Deep within his consciousness, his Observation Haki flared, expanding outward like a massive, invisible sonar wave. It moved at a speed that defied comprehension, sweeping across cities, tearing over oceans, and cutting through dense forests and jagged mountain ranges. In the blink of an eye, his sensory grid blanketed the entire planet.
Thousands of miles away, several familiar, frantic energy signatures spiked within his mental map.
Kaecilius, Lucian, and every single rogue disciple who had just fled the courtyard. Their exact coordinates were instantly locked in.
*SHING!*
The very next millisecond, Rosh's physical form shattered once again into billions of brilliant, dancing photons. His human shape vanished entirely. A dazzling, blinding beam of pure golden light shot straight into the sky, piercing through the heavy London clouds before streaking across the horizon at an unimaginable speed.
All that was left behind above the London Sanctum was a fading, glittering trail of gold.
Meanwhile, thousands of miles away...
Hidden deep within a jagged, remote mountain range far removed from any modern civilization, a circular ring of orange sparks violently tore open the quiet of a dense forest.
Kaecilius stumbled through the portal first, nearly losing his footing on the rough terrain. Lucian and the remaining disciples tumbled out right after him, practically collapsing onto the dirt of their hidden sanctuary.
Several of them lay flat on their backs, desperately gasping for air as if they had just run a marathon. Others leaned heavily against the damp rocks, their faces completely drained of color, shaking with exhaustion and lingering adrenaline.
The supreme confidence they had carried into London was gone, completely obliterated.
No matter how hard they tried to block it out, a single, terrifying image kept replaying in a loop in their minds: a calm young man standing perfectly still, both hands casually shoved into his pockets. They couldn't forget the effortless, bored manner in which he had dismantled an army powerful enough to conquer a mystical fortress, or those cold, golden eyes that had looked at them as if they were nothing more than insects.
Just remembering that look made their muscles tense up instinctively. Every primitive survival instinct they possessed was still screaming at them to keep running.
The feeling left them drowning in a toxic mix of frustration and raw humiliation.
For years, these rogue sorcerers had waged a shadow war against Kamar-Taj. They had fought battle-hardened Masters of the Mystic Arts. They had crossed spells with legendary defenders of the Earth. Hell, some of them had even survived direct, terrifying encounters with the Ancient One herself.
Yet, despite all that combat experience, never, not once in their lives, had they been so utterly, thoroughly overwhelmed that the very concept of fighting back was completely wiped from their brains. Against Rosh, their courage hadn't just been shaken. It had been completely, systematically crushed into dust.
Lucian took a few long, ragged breaths, desperately trying to force his racing heart to slow down before he finally found his voice.
"The Manager... he's just too powerful," Lucian stammered. His voice was still visibly shaking, but the sheer distance from London had finally allowed his brain to clear up enough to think straight. "We have to drop the Devil Fruit operation. Immediately."
This time, absolutely no one argued.
After watching Rosh completely dismantle an enhanced strike team without even taking his hands out of his pockets, every single rogue disciple in the clearing understood exactly where they stood. As long as Rosh was acting as the personal bodyguard for those Devil Fruit users, pulling off another kidnapping was a literal suicide mission. Trying it again wouldn't just be difficult; it would end with all of them in a body bag.
With their shortcut to power completely cut off, they were forced onto the one path they had desperately been trying to avoid.
If they still wanted enough magical juice to pull off their grand designs, they had to pivot back to their original plan: to infiltrate the heavily guarded library of Kamar-Taj, steal the restricted, forbidden scrolls tied directly to the Dark Dimension, contact Dormammu, and strike a deal to borrow his primordial power.
It was an incredibly reckless gamble, far more dangerous than hunting down stray superhumans. But as the rogue sorcerers looked around at each other's pale, terrified faces, they all realized the exact same thing.
Facing the wrath of a dark, cosmic entity felt infinitely safer than stepping onto a battlefield against Rosh ever again.
Unfortunately for them, fate had already punched their tickets.
Before Kaecilius could even open his mouth to map out the Kamar-Taj heist, every single nerve ending in his body suddenly flared with a white-hot, agonizing sense of danger. His hardwired survival instincts exploded into absolute panic.
Something was coming, and it was moving at a speed that defied reality.
"...What?" Kaecilius whispered, his eyes snapping toward the sky.
The other disciples instinctively followed his gaze, and the second they looked up, their expressions completely froze.
A brilliant, blinding golden light was rapidly bleeding across the clouds directly above their mountain sanctuary. Pure, unadulterated disbelief washed over every single face in the clearing. It didn't make any sense. Only a few minutes ago, they had escaped through a magical Sling Ring portal that had physically transported them thousands of miles away from the UK. This hideout had been their best-kept secret for years, completely hidden from world governments and Kamar-Taj alike.
How had Rosh tracked them across an entire ocean in a matter of seconds?
Before anyone could even attempt to guess the answer, the entire sky caught fire.
*SHING! SHING! SHING! SHING!*
In a terrifying display of raw power, thousands upon thousands of glowing, golden spheres materialized overhead. Each individual orb burned with the fierce, concentrated intensity of a miniature sun, turning the heavens into a seamless ocean of blinding light.
The rogue disciples stared up at the sky in absolute horror. Every single one of those thousands of glowing missiles was locked directly onto their coordinates.
There was nowhere to run, there was nowhere to hide, and there wasn't even enough time to trace a basic defensive rune in the air.
Rosh didn't waste his breath on a dramatic villain speech. He didn't offer them a chance to surrender, and he didn't announce their execution. He simply raised a single hand from his pocket and flicked his fingers downward.
Then the sky fell.
*BOOM! BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!*
The entire mountain range violently exploded.
An endless, deafening chain reaction of photon detonations tore through the landscape like a localized apocalypse. The ground shattered into a million pieces, towering granite cliffs collapsed like sandcastles, and ancient forests were instantly vaporized beneath waves of cascading, golden energy. Within a fraction of a single second, everything within a several-hundred-meter radius was completely swallowed by an overwhelming, blinding storm of pure destruction.
When the blinding light finally receded and the echoes of the blasts died down, the mountain peak simply didn't exist anymore.
In its place sat a gargantuan, smoking crater. The intense, sci-fi heat of the photon blasts had completely melted the solid stone, which quickly cooled into massive, glittering sheets of smooth black glass.
Kaecilius... Lucian... and every single rogue sorcerer who had escaped London... had vanished from the face of the Earth.
They hadn't even been given the chance to throw up a magical shield. Their defensive spells, their Mirror Dimension escapes, their Sling Rings, and their decades of rigorous magical training, none of it mattered. Faced with the absolute, crushing weight of Rosh's power, every single defense they possessed was effortlessly erased right along with their physical bodies.
Not a single trace of them was left behind.
Just like that, Kaecilius, the man who, in a different timeline, was destined to shatter Earth's mystical protection network and orchestrate the tragic fall of the Ancient One, was permanently erased from history before his grand plot could even get off the ground. His story ended in total, absolute silence.
His greatest mistake hadn't been plotting against Kamar-Taj. It had been trying to steal from the wrong businessman.
Up in the air, Rosh floated quietly, looking down over the massive, glass-lined crater. After using his Observation Haki to double-check that every single hostile signature had been thoroughly wiped out, he gave a small, satisfied nod.
The problem was solved. The people responsible for touching his premium clientele would never be a threat to his business ever again.
Golden light began to swirl around his body once more as he geared up to flash back to his storefront in New York. But right as he was about to move, his Observation Haki suddenly spiked.
Something was appearing directly in front of him.
A strange, fluid ripple brushed through the empty air. Space itself twisted and bent, slowly unfolding into a flawless, shimmering golden portal, and someone... was patiently waiting for him on the very other side.
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Next Chapter: Ancient One Comes Knocking
Next Next Chapter: The Ancient One is No Longer a Threat
Next Next Next Chapter: The Luck of a Future Captain America
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