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The sight was immediately familiar to Onigumo.
His fighting style depended entirely on his hair. Hair was soft by nature, and opponents had cut it before. He had always had a solution for that: stimulate the scalp with Life Return and let it grow back rapidly. It was a technique so central to his style that he could produce it without thinking.
What Ikki was doing right now looked exactly like that.
It was no wonder Onigumo had assumed Life Return. And when Ikki tossed four of the borrowed swords into the air and caught them with his newly lengthened hair, that assumption hardened into certainty.
"Life Return, Six-Sword Style?" Zephyr read the scene aloud, his voice carrying open surprise. "He can actually use the same technique as Onigumo?"
The resemblance was not superficial. The two of them stood there looking as though they had been shaped from the same blueprint. If Ikki had only used Life Return to animate his hair without the rest, Zephyr might have written it off as coincidence. But the sword aura emanating from Ikki's stance was the same as Onigumo's. Not similar. The same. That was what told Zephyr it was not imitation but mastery.
Mihawk glanced at Gion, curious for the same reason as Zephyr and quietly certain she would know more than anyone else present.
"Ikki is the finest swordsman I have ever seen." Gion spoke without hesitation. "Not only in the power of his own technique, but in how quickly he can transmit his swordsmanship to others. The same ability runs in reverse. He learns other people's styles just as fast."
"He learns other people's swordsmanship?" Zephyr's brows rose. "They only crossed swords once. How is that possible?"
Mihawk's eyes lit with quiet recognition. "Like the gorillas."
He had encountered creatures before that could absorb swordsmanship through observation. On his home island, the gorillas carried that gift as a racial trait. A swordsman would face one in battle, and before the fight was over the gorilla would already be turning the swordsman's own techniques back against him. It was a remarkable ability. Mihawk had never heard of a human possessing it.
At least not until now.
"This keeps getting more interesting." He kept his eyes on Ikki. "If we were to fight, I wonder whether he would absorb my swordsmanship too."
Hancock and Gion both tensed at those words without making it visible.
Nami, Nojiko, and Vivi, standing nearby, reacted differently. They had already heard Ikki's own thoughts on Mihawk before arriving at Headquarters. The prospect of that particular match did not worry them the way it worried Hancock and Gion. What the three of them were more alert to was the possibility of the Marines or the World Government deciding to make Ikki's visit complicated.
Across the training ground, Onigumo had recovered from his initial shock and moved.
He did not believe anyone could genuinely replicate his self-developed Six-Sword Style. But the moment the exchange began, that disbelief started to crack. Ikki was using the same techniques. Not an approximation. The same techniques, executed with the same precision.
"Impossible." Onigumo's voice came out sharp and shaken. "Absolutely impossible."
Something close to desperation entered his movements as he drove forward, his six blades pressing in from every angle in a fierce storm of steel. For a moment Ikki was at the center of it, surrounded.
Then Ikki's hair moved, and the storm changed hands.
"Your Six-Sword Style, stated plainly, is six limbs controlling six blades to attack from all directions at once. Against an ordinary swordsman that passes for sophistication. But for anyone who has genuinely mastered refined sword technique, it reads as a trick. Once you have Life Return, the mechanics are not particularly difficult."
Ikki laughed as he said it, unhurried in the middle of the exchange.
He had acquired the Six-Sword Style when he defeated Onigumo the first time. What he carried now was a complete copy, identical in every technical detail. But his current depth of understanding went further than pure replication. He could build on top of it, layer elements into the framework that Onigumo's original version had never contained.
He did exactly that now. Water Breathing flowed through the Six-Sword Style as he pressed the attack, and Onigumo felt the ground shift beneath him. The cuts came in relentless, deepening waves, each one pulling him further under, the pressure mounting without any point of resistance. The sensation was of being dragged into open water with no bottom in sight.
The word forming in Onigumo's mind was defeat.
"Impossible. How am I losing this fast?!"
Red flashed in his eyes. All six blades turned black with Armament Haki. Observation Haki sharpened his perception. He threw everything he had left into it.
Ikki's expression shifted. He released four of the hair-held blades and let them drop, keeping only the single sword in his right hand.
"Sun Breathing, Thirteenth Form."
The words were quiet. What followed was not. Flames erupted across Ikki's body, and a continuous cascade of slashes came down on Onigumo without pause, one flowing into the next without gap or breath. Onigumo's sword moved constantly, his Armament Haki and Observation Haki both active and fully deployed.
It was not enough. He could not find an advantage anywhere in it.
The final blow came with the back of the blade. It caught Onigumo across the chest and sent him skidding across the ground. The flames that had coated the sword did not care that Ikki had used the blunt edge. They clung, and in an instant Onigumo was burning.
Zephyr stepped forward immediately, frowning, and worked quickly to beat out the flames.
Onigumo looked up at him, still dazed. "Teacher Zephyr? What are you doing here? The fight isn't over."
Zephyr sighed and pointed to the scorch mark where Ikki's final blow had landed.
"It is over, Onigumo. If he had used the edge instead of the back, you would not be standing up right now."
Onigumo looked down at his own chest. A long, thin burn traced across it. The pain arrived a moment after the sight did, sudden and sharp.
"Hmph." Hancock's voice cut across the training ground. She had one hand on her hip and the other pointing squarely at Zephyr. "The Marines certainly have their nerve. Onigumo broke the terms of the match the moment he used Haki, and now you're calling it a defeat by Ikki's slash? Are you trying to cover for the fact that he cheated?"
Zephyr's lips pressed together. There was no good response to that. He had watched it happen. Onigumo had activated both Observation Haki and Armament Haki mid-fight, in a match explicitly called as a pure swordsmanship contest, and Ikki had still dismantled him without reaching for either. If word of that reached the new recruits in full detail, the effect on morale was not difficult to predict.