Five minutes earlier.
The forest was drowning in pink.
A thick, suffocating gas clung to the air, wrapping around the trees, the ground, the lungs.
Roronoa Zoro stood in the middle of it, facing the Nomu.
Sandai Kitetsu rested in his hand. A mask covered the lower half of his face, filtering the poison creeping through the battlefield. His breath came steady, controlled, but heavier than usual.
The Nomu moved.
Metal screamed.
Zoro's blade met it without hesitation.
Tang!
Sparks burst through the pink fog, lighting his figure for a split second before vanishing again into the haze.
The gas dulled everything. Sight. Sound. Instinct. Like fighting underwater.
Then a sharp crack cut through the forest.
A gunshot.
Zoro's head tilted slightly. "Huh?"
Another second passed. His eyes narrowed behind the mask. "What the hell was that?"
Silence followed. But not empty silence. Something was happening somewhere else.
His grip tightened on Sandai Kitetsu as the Nomu lunged again, forcing him back a step.
"Tch. This thing."
The blade clashed again, steel grinding against steel.
He clicked his tongue. "I can't even move where I want."
Another strike. Another block. The pressure didn't let up.
And in that moment he understood. Not clearly. Not fully. But enough.
"They're stalling me."
His voice dropped. Cold. Deliberate.
He deflected the Nomu. But his eyes shifted, just slightly, beyond the fight.
"So that's it."
They didn't want him elsewhere. They wanted him here.
Then the air changed. Subtle. But real.
The pink began to thin. Slow at first. Then faster. The fog that had filled his lungs started to break apart, dissolving into the night air.
Zoro stilled for half a second.
He noticed. Of course he did.
His breath came in. Clearer. Lighter.
"Oh?"
The corner of his mouth lifted beneath the mask. A sharp, feral smile.
"So it's gone."
His hand reached up. He grabbed the mask. Pulled it off.
And let it fall.
It hit the ground with a dull sound, disappearing into the dirt and fading mist.
The air filled his lungs fully this time. Clean. Free.
His shoulders dropped slightly. Not in weakness. In release.
"Finally."
Sandai Kitetsu tilted forward. The stance changed. Subtle. But unmistakable. More relaxed. More dangerous.
"Now this is better."
The Nomu roared and charged again.
And this time, Zoro stepped forward to meet it.
The electric saw split the air with red sparks.
Zoro ducked in the last moment. A strand of his green hair snapped and fell onto the wet ground. Before it touched the dirt, Wado Ichimonji was already back in its sheath and Sandai Kitetsu was in his left hand deflecting the second strike.
The Nomu didn't stop.
Six mechanical arms moved all at once with no logic, no sequence. Saws and a hammer and a drill from every direction. Zoro turned three-quarters of a rotation, deflected two with Sandai and jumped over the third, then pulled back only to find the fourth waiting on his left side.
Tang!
The sparks lit his face for a second.
He held. But his empty right hand felt the absence of a familiar weight.
Still missing one.
Fighting the Nomu alone demanded his full focus. Strikes with no pause, no gaps, not a single moment to breathe. A machine built for destruction that knew no fatigue, no pain, no hesitation.
But while his ears tracked the sound of metal, something else reached him from above.
A breath. Human. Trying too hard to stay quiet.
His eyes didn't rise. He didn't break his defensive stance. But the rest of his focus drifted toward the trees above him like a silent radar.
Hah. That the one who got away earlier?
His lips pressed together. Not getting away this time.
The Nomu struck again. A saw from the right, the claw hammer from the left at the same time.
Zoro straightened, jumped forward instead of back, and passed under both strikes. A half-rotation in the air and Sandai Kitetsu hit a mechanical arm with a sideward blow that sent it reeling.
Then he stood.
And in the second he stood, in one single fluid motion, his right hand drew Wado Ichimonji and slowly pushed its blade between his teeth.
His mouth gripped the handle.
His right hand moved to Yubashiri and pulled it from the sheath.
Three swords.
From the trees above him, complete silence for two full seconds.
Then:
"Ladies and Gentlemen."
The voice descended from between the branches, unhurried, carrying the deliberate weight of a performer who had just found something worth announcing.
"I must offer my sincerest apologies." Compress stepped slightly into view on a thick bough, one hand pressed to his chest in an exaggerated gesture of composure barely maintained. "I planned a perfectly structured performance this evening. And then you went and placed the sword. In your mouth."
He tilted his head. "I confess this was not in the program."
Zoro turned slowly toward the sound.
The Nomu's arms paused for a second, as though the pressure directing them had paused too.
"Thirty years of appreciating the art of misdirection," Compress continued, his voice recovering its smoothness, "and I have never seen a technique introduced quite like that. You have, I'll admit, genuinely surprised me. That is not a small thing."
"You've had too much free time." Zoro said it with the handle between his teeth, the words coming through clearly regardless. "Come down."
"Come down?" A small pause, as if genuinely considering it. "No. I think I prefer the view from here. A good magician always controls his stage." His fingers produced a small marble. "Speaking of which..."
He threw it.
Zoro saw it falling in the same moment the Nomu charged from the front.
One moment. Two targets.
His defense split. Sandai Kitetsu deflected the Nomu's front arm, and Yubashiri in his right hand spun fast to strike the marble in midair.
But the marble didn't break.
Tang. It bounced back like a stone.
And in the next second, not the marble but what was inside it burst and a massive boulder materialized at full size directly above his head.
Boom!
The weight and compressed air hit him simultaneously. Yubashiri in his right hand drove into the boulder and split it in two, dust spreading everywhere. But from inside the dust the drill came straight at his chest.
No time to block.
Yubashiri turned half a rotation and deflected the drill with the flat side of the blade.
But the force reached him. Thrown back a full meter across the dirt.
Blood ran down his right hand from a cut on his forearm.
Above, Compress watched with the quiet attention of someone taking notes.
"Interesting." His voice carried genuine curiosity rather than provocation. "Something black spreading across the blades. Not rust. Not a coating. Something I don't have a name for yet." He tapped his chin lightly. "A magician who cannot explain what he sees is a magician already behind."
Zoro rose and shook the dirt from his shoulder. "Not your concern."
"Quite the contrary, I'm afraid." Compress produced another marble, slower this time, testing. "Everything I cannot explain concerns me deeply. This color. Is it energy? A form of reinforcement? Some secret of the trade you'd rather keep?"
"A killing dragon." Same flat tone. "Get any closer and you'll understand."
"How wonderfully cryptic." The marble left his fingers. "Allow me to respond in kind. Abracadabra."
The marble burst. A massive tree trunk dropped from the sky.
And in the same moment the Nomu attacked from behind.
The black began to spread.
Slow at first. Yubashiri first, then Sandai Kitetsu, then Wado Ichimonji between his teeth. The Haki rolled across all three blades like ink in water.
And in that same moment, the taste of copper filled his throat.
Not blood from a wound. A price. The price of pushing energy all at once through three blades instead of two. His teeth pressed harder on Wado's handle.
First time coating all three at the same moment. He'd understood the cost in theory. The actual feeling of it was something else entirely.
The Nomu attacked. Two saws from the right and the hammer from above all at once.
Sandai Kitetsu stopped the first saw. Yubashiri deflected the hammer. Wado between his teeth, with a single movement of his neck, turned the second saw aside with the flat of the blade.
Three strikes. Three swords. One moment.
But both arms trembled beneath the combined weight.
Above, Compress watched the three blades with their dense black coating and found himself going very still.
"Now that..." Something shifted in his voice, the showman quality thinning into something more genuine. "That is a color I have not encountered in this world before. Not an emitter-type Quirk. Not physical enhancement in any form I recognize." A brief pause. "A good magician never reveals his secrets. But I find myself very curious about yours."
"Glad?" Wado didn't move from Zoro's mouth as he blocked a new strike. "When I cut you, you'll understand it better."
"Perhaps." Three marbles appeared between Compress's fingers now. "But I've noticed something first. This color of yours. It fades. Slowly, yes. But it fades."
"Showtime, as they say."
He threw all three.
Boom! Boom! Boom!
Three massive tree trunks fell from the sky like meteors. Zoro cut the first with Yubashiri, deflected the second with Sandai. The third forced him to dive under it, and Sandai Kitetsu struck the ground instead of the sky to slow his fall.
And in the moment he returned to his stance, the saw was waiting.
Dakh!
It buried itself in his left shoulder down to the depth. Blood flew through the air.
Everything went silent for a second.
Zoro remained standing, the saw buried in his shoulder, blood falling slowly to the ground. His head was low. The breath leaving his nose rising as vapor in the cold forest air.
His vision dimmed for a full second. Its edges went hazy like daylight behind a thick cloud. He ran his tongue and tasted the copper still there.
The Haki on all three blades was visibly fading now. Yubashiri was almost ordinary. Wado in his mouth was still black but with less density than before. Only Sandai Kitetsu remained thick.
I can't maintain all three of them anymore.
Above, even Compress had gone quiet.
After a moment, his voice returned. Lower than before. More careful.
"So that is the reason." Not triumphant. Analytical. "The black color. The more it covers all three at once, the faster it disappears." A pause that felt like watching someone place the last piece of a puzzle. "It comes from you. Not from outside. From your own physical reserves."
The Nomu's arm tried to pull the saw back to sever the shoulder completely.
Zoro's hand seized the mechanical arm.
Crack.
The sound of iron beginning to warp under the grip. His head rose slowly.
"Clever." Wado didn't move from his mouth. "You're right."
Compress paused.
"But knowing the truth," he said carefully, "does not change the outcome."
"No." His teeth pressed on Wado's handle. "I change it."
His left hand released Sandai Kitetsu for one second, not to strike, but to grab the mechanical arm and break it with a single concentrated Haki pulse through the grip alone.
The arm flew. Sandai returned to position.
And in that moment, he decided.
One sword coated. The strongest one. Everything that's left, focused in one point.
The Haki on Yubashiri and on Wado began pulling back gradually. But on Sandai Kitetsu it erupted with twice the density it had carried before, deep black and stable and absolute.
The air around the blade trembled.
Compress felt something move across his skin. Not cold. Something heavier than cold, the kind that doesn't warn you, it simply arrives.
"This..." For the first time all night, the performer in his voice was gone entirely. "Nomu. Get away from him. Now."
The Nomu responded. But its heavy body wasn't built for the speed required.
Zoro stepped back once. His knees bent into a low stance, Wado in his mouth and all three swords aimed toward a single forward point.
"Santoryu..."
Compress twisted his body to flee.
"Rengoku Oni Giri!!"
Three blades. One moment. One point of intersection.
Shwooooom!
The entire forest went silent.
The saws stopped. The mechanical arms slid from the Nomu's body slowly, heavy and hollow. Then:
Crash!
The Nomu split apart. The trees behind it cracked in intersecting lines for dozens of meters. Even the ground opened fissures at the point where the strike had launched.
Silence.
The Haki vanished from all three swords in the same moment.
Yubashiri fell from his right hand first. Its sound on the dirt was heavy.
Then Wado came slowly out of his mouth and stayed in his hand with a trembling grip.
His left knee hit the ground. Sandai Kitetsu was placed before him to brace against. The blood from his shoulder hadn't stopped, dropping onto the dirt in heavy red points.
His vision dimmed again. This time longer. Its edges stayed hazy for three full seconds before returning.
"Hah... hah..."
He tried to raise Wado. The arm didn't respond. The Haki was gone completely.
But one eye stayed open.
"Still..."
A light wind moved the leaves.
Compress's copy was descending between the branches slowly, his steps nearly silent. The smile on his face remained. But something in it had changed. Not confidence. Closer to the particular respect of a man who has just watched something he cannot fully account for, and found that unsettling.
"He's reached his limit."
.
.
For Advanced Chapters:
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When Storms Collide
Events are raging and the atmosphere is tense inside the Nomo factory in Kamino.
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