The ocean surrounding the Sabaody Archipelago had always been calm, held in check by the roots of the massive Yarukiman Mangroves. But as Light Yagami extended his severely burned, trembling hands toward the bay, the water began to scream.
It started as a low, unnatural hum that vibrated through the bedrock of the island. Then, the water level violently receded.
Admiral Sakazuki stopped his relentless advance. The magma pooling around his boots hissed as the wet cobblestone suddenly dried out. He narrowed his remaining, unblinded eye, staring past the ruined Marine at the bay.
The ocean was retreating, exposing the muddy, ship-strewn floor of the harbor. Millions of gallons of seawater were being pulled away from the shore, not by a tide, but by an invisible, omnipotent hand.
Light's chest heaved. Blood poured freely from his mouth, staining his chin and the charred remnants of his white coat. Pushing his Level 10 Life Force to its absolute, breaking zenith was tearing his newly healed cells apart as fast as they could regenerate. But his god-complex burned brighter than the pain.
"You are a creature of the earth, Sakazuki" Light rasped, his voice echoing with an unnatural, terrifying resonance.
"Try this."
Light tensed his empty left hand and violently made a grabbing motion, as if uprooting something.
"Hand of God."
Light whispered.
The ocean lifted. A colossal, roaring wall of seawater—millions of tons of crushing, dark blue mass—violently erupted from the bay. It defied every law of nature, ripping into the sky in a sheer, vertical cliff of water.
But it wasn't only the sea that was lifted.
With a deafening groan of buckling steel, the colossal Marine warship that Akainu had arrived on was ripped violently from the muddy harbor floor. The battleship, weighing thousands of tons, was suspended perfectly in the center of the floating ocean, hovering hundreds of feet in the air like a lethal steel spear inside a watery canon.
The ship floated on the uprooted sea, its inhabitants desperately jumping away to not get caught in the crossfire.
"JUMPPP!"
"SAVE YOURSELFF!"
"-BANDON SHIP!"
"I REPEAT!" "ALL HANDS! ABANDON SHIP!!"
The experienced ones held the ones paralyzed in fear, saving their lives. They felt as if they had angered God.
The hundreds of cubic metres thick ocean lifted by the Hand of God blotted out the sun. A massive, apocalyptic shadow fell over Grove 1.
Akainu's head snapped up. For the second time that day, a flicker of genuine, primal dread crossed the Admiral's ruined face.
It was seawater. And there was an entire ocean of it, weaponized with a battleship, hovering directly above his head.
"YAGAMI!" Akainu roared, panic finally bleeding into his genocidal fury. The Red Dog unleashed everything he had. Both of his arms transmuted into colossal pillars of blinding, white-hot magma, shooting straight up into the sky to vaporize the threat before it could crush him. "DAI FUNKA!"
The volcanic pillars struck the bottom of the floating ocean. Massive clouds of steam instantly erupted, boiling the water on contact.
But it was a simple matter of volume. Akainu could melt a mountain, but he could not instantly evaporate a sea.
Light's manic, bloodstained smile stretched across his face. He clenched his raised hands into fists and drove them downward.
"Drown."
The ocean fell.
It was not a wave; it was the sky collapsing. Millions of tons of seawater crashed down onto Grove 1 with the concussive force of a continent dropping from the heavens. In the center of the deluge, the Marine warship plummeted nose-first like a massive javelin.
The impact was cataclysmic. The remains of the Human Auction House were instantly pulverized, washed away into nothingness. The massive mangrove roots snapped under the sheer, crushing weight of the water and steel.
The localized tsunami and the battleship slammed directly into Admiral Akainu.
The Red Dog's magma fought violently for a fraction of a second, hissing and hardening into thick black obsidian armor, before the warship crushed him directly into the bedrock and the ocean completely swallowed him. The sheer physical pressure of the water and steel crushed the Admiral deep into the earth, while the sea's curse instantly paralyzed his Logia body, stripping him of his terrifying strength.
A colossal, blinding explosion of white steam and boiling water erupted across the entire grove as the extreme heat met the extreme cold. The resulting thermal shockwave ripped through the archipelago, creating a dense, impenetrable fog bank that covered three square miles.
Light didn't stay to watch the Admiral drown.
He knew Sakazuki was a monster. The water and the ship would suppress him, bury him, and maybe injure him, but the Admiral's durability was very high. The Red Dog would eventually dig his way out of the mud.
Light released his grip on the ocean. He immediately inverted the Force around his own body, ignoring the blinding agony in his shattered ribs and burned flesh.
He launched himself into the sky and flew.