The broad service chamber of Level 4—Blazing Hell—had transformed into a bubbling, violet furnace. Thick, corrosive venom poured from the overhead pipes like a viscous tide, pooling across the industrial iron flooring and hissing violently as it dissolved the lower plating.
Magellan stood at the center of the toxic sea, his towering, winged silhouette radiating a suffocating aura of lethal authority. Purple venom slithered across his massive shoulders and dripped from his extended hands, saturating the air with a blinding, vaporized sting that burned the lungs with every breath.
Behind a raised, fireproof threshold at the far end of the chamber, Robin, Hongo, and Limejuice kept themselves and the medical supplies clear of the spreading poison while the heavy ventilation shutters remained choked with soot. Two maintenance workers remained stranded on an upper catwalk, cut off from the protected threshold by the spreading venom.
"The vapor density is too high," Hongo shouted over the roar of the boiling poison, his eyes watering behind his respirator. "Haki won't seal your pores against this. Every breath you take down there is a gamble!"
Shanks didn't look back. His right arm, slick with fresh blood from his reopened gash, gripped Gryphon tight. Beside him, Giovanni stood with his bound right arm pinned to his chest, his left hand resting on the hilt of Ace. Every expansion of Giovanni's cracked ribs sent white-hot spikes of agony through his torso, but his dark eyes remained fixed entirely on Magellan.
"He's controlling the surface flow," Giovanni muttered, coughing against the superheated, chemical air. "We can hit him, but every inch of ground we take turns into a trap."
"Then we don't give him the floor," Shanks replied quietly.
Conqueror's Haki rolled off Shanks in a suffocating wave. At the same time, black-red lightning wrapped Gryphon as Advanced Conqueror's Haki coated the blade. Launching himself upward into the superheated air, Shanks swung from above.
The flying slash tore through Magellan's outer venom screen and drove him backward across the iron floor, forcing him to thicken the poison around his body before the edge could reach cleanly through.
Yet Magellan didn't fall. With terrifying resilience, he planted his heavy boots into the melting iron floor, his arms sweeping upward.
"You think brute force can help you?" Magellan bellowed, his voice vibrating through the chamber.
From the pools of accumulated venom at his feet, three massive, serpentine heads of poison—his lethal Hydra—reared up, hissing and snapping like liquid dragons. The venomous beasts lunged simultaneously along the raised catwalks, cutting off Shanks's landing zone and forcing the captain to twist mid-air, deflecting the corrosive fangs with bursts of Haki-infused strikes.
"Gio!" Shanks shouted as he touched down on a narrow overhead pipe.
Giovanni didn't hesitate. Ignoring the blinding fire in his ribs, he sprinted along the buckling perimeter rail. Drawing Ace one-handed, black-red lightning crawled along the Supreme Grade blade as he forced Advanced Conqueror's Haki into the edge.
"Sea King Slash!"
The flying cut tore through the rusted intake housing of a massive emergency drainage valve embedded in the cliff wall, splitting the iron gate open. Thousands of gallons of boiling water and diluted poison rushed into the outflow trench, temporarily dropping the liquid level at the center of the chamber.
"He's draining it!" Limejuice called from the threshold.
"No," Robin corrected sharply, her eyes darting across the mutating fluid dynamics. "He's adapting to the outlet."
Magellan didn't try to plug the gap. Instead, his body swelled with a fresh surge of dark purple venom, thick as tar. He redirected the main current of his discharge directly toward the open drainage trench, thickening the fluid until it clogged the iron grate with a dense, hardening sludge that choked off the outflow entirely.
From behind the threshold, Robin kept her eyes on the primary inspection hatch. An eye bloomed beside the control housing, and two arms sprouted beneath it to seize the manual levers, hauling them down with clinical speed.
With a deafening shriek of rusted gears, the intake turbines roared to life, pulling a massive draft of fresh air down from the upper levels and blowing a temporary corridor of clear space through the dense purple vapor.
At the same time, Limejuice jammed the iron tip of his electrified staff into the warped track of a jammed service shutter. Electricity snapped along the metal as he kicked the release housing, then wrenched the staff sideways with both hands. The heavy steel plate tore free and crashed inward, opening a side maintenance corridor that gave them airflow and a vital retreat path back toward the protected threshold.
It was a lifeline, but it didn't make the chamber safe. Magellan's hydra-masses multiplied, surging up the walls to block the newly opened vents with dripping barriers of venom.
"Keep pushing!" Shanks ordered.
A venom head smashed through the upper catwalk. One of the stranded maintenance workers lost his footing and pitched over the railing toward the boiling pools below.
Giovanni moved before Shanks could call out. He slammed Ace back into its scabbard and lunged, catching the man with his left arm and twisting to fling him backward toward the threshold where Robin's sprouted arms caught him safely.
The motion put Giovanni directly beneath the collapsing venom mass. A heavy splash of purple poison caught his left forearm.
The skin reddened and blistered almost immediately. Numbness crawled from his wrist toward his elbow, making his fingers twitch and forcing a raw grunt from his throat. His vision blurred at the edges as the poison began to compromise his control.
"Gio!" Shanks roared.
Before Magellan's serpent-heads could strike, Shanks dropped from the overhead pipe, placing his body directly between Magellan and his wounded comrade.
With Giovanni staggering backward toward the threshold, Robin's sprouted arms reached out from cover to haul him across the fireproof sill and out of the active chamber.
Left alone against Magellan, Shanks became an immovable wall.
The master of poison unleashed a torrential storm of venomous spikes and crushing hydraulic pressure. Shanks stood his ground on the narrow iron platform, Gryphon flashing in a continuous, blinding blur of Haki-streaked steel. Every Haki-backed swing split or knocked the incoming venom off-line, but the sheer volume of corrosive poison kept closing around him, eating away at the edges of his coat and searing his boots.
Inside the medical room, Hongo slammed the metal crate onto the steel table, ripping open the antitoxin vials and pressing a neutralizing compress directly into Giovanni's sizzling forearm.
"Hold still," Hongo snapped.
Giovanni bit down hard, his breathing coming in shallow, ragged hitches. The antitoxin didn't cure the poison. It slowed the spread enough that the numbness stopped racing up his arm, but the toxin remained in his system.
"It's slower," Hongo panted, wrapping the arm tightly in sterile gauze. "That's all. Keep using that arm and it'll keep spreading."
Giovanni didn't speak. He forced himself up from the medical bench, his left hand gripping Ace. His forearm was blistered, raw and swollen beneath the poison burn, and dizziness threatened to drop him back to the floor, but the service route outside remained blocked.
"I'm moving," Giovanni rasped, staggering back out into the blistering heat of the chamber.
Through the swirling purple haze, Shanks was holding the line. His breath was heavy, sweat and blood mingling across his forehead, but his grip on Gryphon remained absolute.
As Giovanni limped back onto the scorched iron platform beside his captain, Magellan's body convulsed, pulling the scattered pools of venom back into his core until he stood wrapped in a dense, shimmering mantle of concentrated corrosive destruction.
Across the chamber, the ordinary stone staircase leading downward began to buckle and dissolve under a fresh wave of purple runoff, sealing the physical descent route completely.
Magellan raised his venom-dripping hands, his gaze fixed on the two pirates who refused to fall.
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