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Chapter 427: Just Do It
The three ordinary Marines stared in horror at the empty doorway.
"Fleet Admiral!" one of them screamed, tears streaming down his face. "We haven't learned how to pull the cord yet!"
Not daring to disobey their commanding officer—even if he was currently in freefall—the three recruits blindly jumped out after him into the freezing wind, wailing all the way down.
Garp didn't care about pedantic safety regulations. Watching his old friend and the recruits plummet, he simply threw his head back and laughed.
"BWAHAHAHA! Sengoku is already ahead of us!" With a massive leap, Garp launched himself out of the cabin immediately after them.
The howling wind slammed into them like an invisible, massive stone wall. Sengoku's furious curses from below couldn't even last half a second before they were completely torn to shreds by the terrifying air currents.
Standing at the edge of the door, Akainu closed his eyes and took a deep breath of the thin, freezing high-altitude air. Snapping his eyes open, he took a massive step forward. Like a perfectly straight steel nail, he plummeted rigidly into the thick sea of clouds. Even reduced to a mortal, the dignity of the Marines' highest fighting force could absolutely not be discarded.
Kizaru and Aokiji exchanged a glance, sighed, and followed suit, jumping from the edge one after another.
Hawk Eyes Mihawk wore a standard, elongated canvas backpack issued by the system. His signature Black Blade Yoru couldn't be brought into this dungeon at all. Walking expressionlessly to the wind's edge, he let the gales whip at his black trench coat. Unhurried, as if taking a stroll in his own backyard, he lightly stepped off, his body plunging straight down toward the unknown ground.
As the countdown grew increasingly urgent, the number of people in the cabin dwindled. The members of the Red-Haired Pirates still stood firmly at the edge of the ramp.
Lucky Roux violently gnawed at a meat bone he couldn't seem to finish. Yasopp was strapping wind-resistant goggles to his head, muttering about needing to find a usable sniper rifle the moment they landed.
Shanks stood at the very front. The unobstructed, high-altitude gales whipped his conspicuous red hair into a wild frenzy. His newly restored left arm—a miraculous reward he'd received despite being instantly pulverized by Saitama in the previous dungeon—flexed instinctively against the freezing wind.
Shanks lowered his head, carefully studying the parachute equipment strapped to his chest. He stared at it for a very, very long time, specifically at the red pull cord meant to save his life.
The simplified diagram hung on the cabin wall illustrated it perfectly clearly. To successfully open the chute, one needed to firmly grip the black securing strap on their chest with one hand for leverage, while the other hand had to pull the red ring with all its might.
Shanks fell silent. In this mortal world where Haki couldn't be used, he was just a regular guy facing a terrifyingly cheap piece of equipment. He grabbed the pull cord with both hands and yanked with all his might. Nothing happened. He yanked again, his veins bulging. The metal clasp was completely jammed, rusted shut from whatever dilapidated warehouse Blake had scrounged these from.
Letting out a deep sigh, Shanks silently turned to look at Benn Beckman standing beside him. The cigarette clamped in Beckman's mouth had long since been blown out by the freezing wind.
"BECKMAN!" Shanks's voice was slightly hoarse in the wind. He pointed at the jammed mechanism on his chest, an exasperated expression on his face. "The damn thing is jammed. How the hell am I supposed to open this rusted piece of junk?"
The gale scraped past the cabin door like invisible razor blades. Standing at the edge, Shanks took a deep breath and glanced back at Beckman. "I really never thought there'd be a day I'd plummet to my death just because of a faulty zipper," Shanks chuckled bitterly.
Beckman spat out the half-smoked cigarette stub. The moment it left his lips, it was swept away without a trace by the wind.
"Stay close to me." Beckman didn't waste words, simply leaping backward out of the cabin.
Shanks hesitated no longer, launching himself into the void. The fierce wind mercilessly sliced at his cheeks, and the sensation of weightlessness hit him like a tidal wave. Shanks felt like his internal organs were about to be forced right up his throat. Normally accustomed to stabilizing his posture with Haki, he was now flailing in midair exactly like a torn burlap sack.
Beckman forcefully spread his limbs in midair, increasing his drag to slow his descent. He pressed tightly alongside Shanks, plummeting vertically together. The roar of the wind was deafening; they couldn't even hear their own breathing.
Beckman strained his vocal cords to the absolute limit, roaring directly into Shanks's ear.
"GRIP THE STRAP! USE YOUR BODY WEIGHT AND PULL THAT RING AGAIN!"
Fighting against the gale, Shanks struggled to open one eye. The immense air pressure violently distorted the skin on his face, his red hair whipping wildly above his head like a tangled mess of seaweed.
Gathering every ounce of strength, he tucked his arms in, firmly gripping the main chute's rip cord with both hands, trying to arch his body and rip it free.
He couldn't budge it. His body swung violently back and forth in midair, completely out of his control. Every time he managed to get a grip, a sudden gust of air would blast him backward again, preventing him from leveraging his strength against the rusty mechanism.
Shanks opened his mouth to speak, instantly swallowing a massive mouthful of knife-like, freezing wind. Coughing violently, he screamed at the top of his lungs.
"I CAN'T! THE WIND RESISTANCE IS TOO STRONG! IT'S COMPLETELY STUCK!"
The ground below rapidly magnified in their vision. At first, they could only see massive expanses of green forests and beaches. Now, they could clearly make out a sprawling, gray-and-white container yard. Those metal boxes looked like gaping metallic maws waiting to devour them.
Far off in the distance, a white parachute had already steadily deployed. It was Yasopp. He was currently hanging leisurely from his parachute cords, looking their way through a pair of military binoculars he had swiped from the cabin.
⌁ "Holy shit!" ⌁ Yasopp directly cursed over the team comms channel—a radio system forcefully given to them by the system before boarding the plane.
⌁ "Boss! What the hell are you two doing!? You're under three hundred meters! If you don't pull the chute now, you're both gonna be smashed into red-haired meat paste!" ⌁
The sound of Lucky Roux gnawing on a bone also echoed over the channel. ⌁ "Vice Captain, just open your own parachute, ignore the Boss! We can't play this game without a sniper and an assaulter! If the Boss lands to his dead, so be it, but don't throw your life away with him!" ⌁
Beckman paid absolutely no mind to the ghost-like wailing of the two clowns in his earpiece. He glanced down at the altimeter on his wrist. The red danger light was flashing frantically, the piercing beeps warning him that the optimal altitude to open his chute had already passed.
He completely abandoned any intention of pulling his own cord. Tucking his limbs tightly, Beckman curled his body into an aerodynamic shape. The drastically reduced wind resistance caused his falling speed to skyrocket. Like a cannonball fired from its barrel, he hurtled straight toward Shanks below.
The two slammed together violently in midair, the impact nearly making Shanks's eyes roll back in his head. Reaching out with both hands, Beckman locked his arms into a death grip around Shanks's waist.
"ROLL LEFT!" Beckman roared.
Shanks instantly used the momentum of the impact, twisting his body in tandem. Locked in an embrace, the two violently spun a full rotation in midair. Utilizing the brief centrifugal force generated by the spin, Beckman freed his right hand. Like a pair of iron pincers, his two fingers precisely hooked onto the red pull ring on Shanks's chest, adding his own brute strength to Shanks's pulling motion.
"Hold on tight!" Beckman let out a low growl, his waist erupting with power as he violently yanked outward.
Bang! A muffled thud rang out overhead as the jammed mechanism finally popped open. An immense pulling force instantly surged through their bodies along the sturdy parachute cords. The extra-large white parachute unfurled with a roar above them.
Going from freefall to sudden, extreme deceleration created an utterly unreasonable kickback. Both of them felt as if every bone in their bodies was agonizingly creaking.
Shanks let out a muffled groan, a piercing numbness shooting down his spine. Gasping heavily for air, he violently shook his blood-engorged head.
"What a damn ghost game." He looked down, wiping a layer of sweat from his brow with lingering fear. "We're saved."
The battle royale had barely just begun, and a majestic Emperor of the New World had nearly plummeted to his death directly off spawn simply because of a defective parachute. If this news made it back to the New World, that bird Morgans would probably be laughing for a year straight.
"Don't celebrate just yet," Beckman's voice was dark, carrying a hint of resignation. He pointed a finger straight down at the mountainous stacks of metal containers. "To help you open the chute, we missed the optimal landing zone. We're completely off course."
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