The frozen bay of Marineford, already a fractured landscape of blood, ruin, and shattered pride, held its collective breath.
In the dead center of the plaza, surrounded by the screaming, dying masses of the world's greatest war, a localized sphere of absolute, suffocating silence had formed. The colossal cross-shaped crater, carved into the ice by the cancellation of their previous strikes, smoked and hissed as the freezing ocean water churned within it.
The mild, passing curiosity that had initially prompted Dracule Mihawk to draw his weapon had vanished. In its place burned the electrifying intensity of a predator who had spent over a decade sitting on a lonely, desolate throne, only to finally see a shadow cast across it.
On the other side stood Light Yagami. The False Deity's pristine black coat billowed gently in the freezing, ozone-scented wind. He held his pitch-black saber loosely in his right hand. His face was a mask of cold, profound annoyance. He was an executioner on a strict schedule, and this Warlord was an unforeseen, towering obstacle blocking his path to the true rot of the world.
Up until this moment, not a single word had been exchanged between them.
The language of their introduction had been spoken entirely in the apocalyptic collision of flying slashes.
But words were no longer necessary to initiate the slaughter.
Mihawk smirked and-
BOOM.
He vanished.
There was no battle cry. No preparation. The thick, solid ice where the Warlord had been standing violently exploded, sending a geyser of frozen shrapnel a hundred feet into the air.
SLICKKN!
He crossed the fifty paces separating them in a literal half-second. The colossal Yoru, a blade as tall as a man and heavy enough to cleave a galleon in two, descended in a devastating, two-handed diagonal cleave aimed directly at Light's neck.
SWISH!
Light didn't dare to blink. Relying on the absolute mastery of his Level 5 Weapon Arts, Light slipped entirely off the center line. He pivoted sharply on his lead foot, his body violently twisting to the right just as the Black Blade descended.
The Hawk and the God locked eyes.
SHHHHAAAA!
A violent wind escaped the two men's domains.
Yoru sheared through the empty air where Light's collarbone had been a millisecond prior. The sheer air pressure of the miss tore a massive, jagged trench into the ice, traveling outward for half a mile and violently bisecting a group of thirty fighting Marines and pirates caught in the crossfire.
SPLTCHHH!
The combatants were torn apart into clouds of crimson mist before they could even register the sound of the swing.
"My turn." Light whispered.
He was already moving.
Having slipped the massive strike, Light was completely inside Mihawk's guard. He engaged his hips, driving the momentum from the ice upward, and thrust his pitch-black saber forward in a blinding, hyper-compressed stab aimed directly at Mihawk's chest.
"BREAK!"
BOOM!
The thrust broke the sound barrier, generating a local sonic boom that threatened to shatter the eardrums of anyone within a hundred yards.
'Fast!'
Mihawk's golden eyes widened a fraction. With a violent, impossible jerk of his wrists, Mihawk arrested the downward momentum of his colossal sword, forcefully dragging the massive flat of Yoru upward to intercept the stab.
CLANG!
SPARK! SPARK!
The tip of Light's saber struck the flat of the Supreme Grade blade. The collision generated a spherical shockwave of pure force that ripped outward in a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree radius.
BANG!
The ice beneath their boots completely gave way. A new crater, a hundred yards wide, was instantly vaporized, exposing the churning, dark ocean water below. The surrounding elite Marine officers and New World veteran captains were violently thrown backward by the atmospheric pressure, their bodies skipping across the ice like thrown stones, their ribs shattering upon impact.
But this time, neither man yielded a single inch.
Light pushed forward with his saber, his muscles straining against the sheer, overwhelming physical mass of the Warlord. For the very first time since he had unlocked the upper echelons of the Karma System, Light felt a genuine, physical wall. The man standing before him was not a rotting coward or a lumbering brute. He was a Yonko-tier powerhouse.
Mihawk gritted his teeth, pushing back against the black saber. He felt the terrifying, hyper-condensed force threatening to pierce his defense.
"NOT BAD!"
With a roar of exertion and a smirk still on his face, Mihawk broke the deadlock.
Then- SLASH!
He spun his body entirely around to generate a terrifying amount of centrifugal force, swinging Yoru in a massive, horizontal sweep meant to cleanly decapitate the False Deity.
SWISH!
CREEEAAAAAAAAK!
Light ducked under the massive arc of the Black Blade like a boxer slipping a wild hook. As Yoru screamed over his head, tearing another apocalyptic flying slash into the distance that effortlessly sliced a Marine watchtower in half, Light brought his saber up in a brutal, rising uppercut cut.
"Ittoryu..."
"RENGOKU!" (One-Sword Style: Purgatory).
Mihawk brought the heavy cross-guard of his massive sword down, desperately parrying the rising strike.
"Hahaha! HAHAHAHA!!"
The blades locked again. And then, the melee truly began.
"WHAT A SURPRISE!"
"FALSE DEITY!"
BOOM. BOOM. CLANG. SLASH.
"PEAK!"
Their forms had already started blurring.
BOOM!
The naked eye couldn't see them anymore.
And Mihawk slowly seemed to be losing his mind.
"YOU'RE AT THE PEAK!"
It was an absolute, world-breaking catastrophe. It was a high-speed collision of natural disasters. Light and Mihawk stood over the vaporized crater of the ocean, suspended by their own spiritual gravity, trading blows at a speed that rendered their blades entirely invisible to the naked eye.
To the terrified spectators watching from the periphery, there were no men in the center of the plaza. There was only a terrifying, expanding dome of blinding sparks, overlapping shockwaves, and the deafening, continuous ringing of colliding steel that sounded like the bells of the apocalypse.
And the radius of the destruction grew wider with every second.
Every single time Yoru and the pitch-black saber clashed, the environment paid the ultimate price.
BOOOOM!
A downward strike from Mihawk, expertly deflected by Light, sent a shockwave plunging into the exposed ocean, creating a massive, localized tsunami that surged outward and swallowed a dozen pirate galleons anchored near the bay.
CRACK!
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