Garp's booming voice rolled across the splintered landscape of the main island of Merveille, and as his thick, burly frame advanced through the clearing, a suffocating, lethal weight of pure physical pressure locked the entire quadrant.
"Cough... Cough... that old monster is an entirely unreasonable bastard."
Sabo wiped a thick smear of crimson from the corner of his lip, using his metal pipe as a crutch to forcibly hoist his weight from the dirt. He cast a rapid glance toward Enel, Urouge, and the remaining officers who were pushing past their fractured bone tissue, his voice echoing with absolute urgency through the mental channel:
"Break the engagement! We cannot stabilize this perimeter! The old man's Haki is an unfathomable well; if we continue to trade blows, he will systematically break our bones! We must coordinate an immediate extraction!"
"Yahahaha! The vanguard is supposed to run from a mortal?!"
Enel ground his teeth, arcs of erratic, manic blue static skittering across his split skin. Yet, the physical reality of his broken cheek and disrupted elemental state served as a stark reminder that staying in this yard meant certain defeat.
"Sabo, define the vector!"
"Leona!" Sabo bypassed Enel's rage, shouting straight through the telepathic grid to the swordswoman who had been hurled from the plateau. "Can you still anchor the fruit's matrix?!"
"I'm still on the line..."
Leona's weak, shallow voice drifted back through the mental channel, accompanied by the heavy rasp of damaged lungs.
At that exact moment, she was drifting thousands of meters above the primary landmass, her internal organs severely jarred by Garp's internal-destruction fist. Yet, relying on pure, unadulterated will, she had managed to stabilize her gravity vectors using the Float-Float Fruit, suspending her body in the upper currents to avoid a terminal drop into the sea below.
"Carina, Jeno!" Sabo distributed the parameters without a second's delay. "Secure Brook and Buggy! Drag them to the absolute boundary of the ridge immediately! Enel, Urouge, Shark—we unleash our highest output to buy Leona ten seconds of clearance!"
"Acknowledged!"
Without a single redundant word, the seamless tactical coordination of the Eclipse Pirates under extreme, life-or-death pressure manifested across the field.
"Oh? You still have enough timber to arrange a final defensive line?"
Garp observed the four vanguard fighters dragging themselves back into their combat stances. He grinned, his right fist turning ink-black once more as a dense coat of high-tier Ryuo sealed his knuckles.
"200 Million Volts: Super Thunderclap!"
Enel emptied his remaining vital reserves into a single, frantic electrical discharge. A massive, volatile sphere of pitch-black lightning—dozens of times more dense than his previous constructs—knitted together directly above Garp's crown, carrying a concussive heat that threatened to liquefy the entire mountaintop as it dropped.
"Karma: Great Buddha Strike!"
Ignoring the agonizing friction of his fractured jaw, Urouge expanded into his five-meter-tall muscular state. Wrapping his arms in a thick, concentrated layer of Armament Hardening, he launched himself forward like a runaway rhinoceros, targeting Garp's left flank in a suicidal sprint.
"Fish-Man Karate: Nine Thousand Tile Ocean Current Shoulder Throw!"
Shark's arms churned through the high-altitude air currents, forcing the ambient vapor to condense into a spinning, vertical waterspout that mirrored the velocity of a coastal tsunami.
"Old man, swallow this! Emperor Yan: Dragon's Breath!"
Sabo closed from the front like a streak of blue fire, his heavy fist wreathed in advanced Ryuo. The strike carried every ounce of his understanding of Haki over the past six months, backed by the full thermal expansion of his flames, as it drove straight for Garp's chest.
Faced with the synchronized, lethal onslaught of the crew's four primary fighters—each moving with reckless, unyielding ferocity—a flash of genuine seriousness finally entered Garp's wrinkled eyes.
"Fist Bone Meteor Shower!!!"
Boom boom boom boom boom!!!
In a fraction of a second, Garp's hands transformed into a dense canopy of dark afterimages. Every single punch was accompanied by a terrifying sonic boom that ruptured the eardrums, backed by the internal destructive properties of his Haki.
Enel's black lightning sphere was brutally shattered by a straight right, dissolving into a harmless spray of blue sparks across the sky. Urouge's multi-ton impact was met by an extremely precise strike to the shoulder joint, the kinetic feedback sending his massive bulk hurtling backward into the drifts. The exact millisecond Shark's water tornado made contact with Garp's knuckles, it was vaporized into a harmless cloud of white mist. Sabo, meeting Garp's iron fist head-on, felt his right arm collide with a hydraulic press, his boots sliding backward dozens of meters through the dirt before he could stabilize his core.
Just as Garp broke through the perimeter and prepared to pursue the retreating figures, the air currents along the edge of the island buckled.
Buzz!
A violent surge of pale green fruit energy shot into the stratosphere from the southern cliff face.
"Hm?" Garp raised an eyebrow, his eyes lifting.
Leona hung suspended in the upper air, her dark red garments saturated with fresh crimson, her hair loose against the wind. Yet, her feline vertical pupils burned with a manic, unyielding focus. She drove the point of White Night deep into a massive fragment of rock before her boots, her eyes flaring red as she extended her hands to rip the entire structural foundation of the Merveille islands apart.
"Float-Float Fruit: The Burial of All Things!!!"
Rumble—!
Under Garp's astonished gaze, aside from the tiny, ship-sized shelf of rock where Jeno and Carina had secured the wounded, the entire massive main island along with dozens of surrounding floating landmasses lost their gravitational anchors simultaneously.
Guided by Leona's exhaustive, all-out manipulation, the massive islands didn't fall toward the sea below. Instead, they converged upon Garp's position from every vector, closing in like a massive fist of earth. Thousands of tons of ancient soil, masonry, palace ruins, and screaming beasts collapsed inward, forming a dense, artificial planetoid designed to bury the Marine Hero within a tomb of solid stone.
Staring at the environmental disaster unfolding before his chest, Garp let out a booming roar of pure laughter.
"Hehehahaha! This little girl can actually manipulate that old fool Shiki's fruit with this much flair!"
Garp's voice was completely swallowed as the mountains of stone closed over his position. The pile of gravel certainly wouldn't crush his biology, but breaking through the structural mass of dozens of combined islands would demand a clear expenditure of physical effort.
"Now! Full throttle! Break out!" Sabo roared hoarsely through the mental link.
The four vanguard fighters transformed into streaks of light, lunging across the gap toward the tiny, isolated rock shelf where the support detail was waiting.
"Secure your holds!" Jeno shouted, his mechanical fingers clamping onto the bedrock as Carina, Buggy, and Brook dropped flat against the stone.
"Three! Two! One! Discharge!"
"Fire Blast: Rapid Propulsion!"
"Lightning Explosion!"
"Flame Jet: Maximum Output!"
"Fish-Man Karate: Water Dragon Thrust!"
Boom!
The entire complement of the Eclipse Pirates unleashed their remaining Haki, fruit capabilities, and mechanical power cells in a single, coordinated rearward blast. Driven by the immense reaction force, and coupled with Leona's weightless calibration of their rock platform, the massive stone shelf shot forward like a supersonic meteor. It left a blinding white friction trail across the sky as it fled the airspace at breakneck velocity, heading straight for the empty horizon.
Rumble!
Barely twelve seconds after their departure, the massive planetoid encasing Garp ruptured from within, torn apart by a series of blinding, black-and-red Haki lightning flashes. A moment later, the entire man-made star was violently blown to splinters by an unreasonable iron fist, turning into a shower of broken meteors that cascaded into the sea miles below.
Garp stood tall in the empty sky, his boots stepping lightly through the air with Moonwalk as the dust swirled around his floral shirt. His sharp eyes locked onto the small speck vanishing over the horizon line.
He didn't give chase. Not because his boots lacked the velocity to close the distance, but because at that range, keeping those kids on the board would require him to deploy his true, lethal options—a result that transcended the boundaries of a common grandfatherly intervention.
"Phew... youngsters nowadays, their methods for clearing the field are getting increasingly devious," Garp grunted, picking his nose as a bright, satisfied smile touched his lips.
"That brat Ace has truly gathered a pack of incredible monsters for his deck. This ocean is going to be quite a sight once they clear the margins!"
Turning on his heel, Garp stepped leisurely through the air with Moonwalk, drifting down toward the dog-headed warship anchored on the distant sea.
This unexpected encounter had thoroughly shattered the unrefined pride of the young outlaws, but it had planted an absolute, burning hunger for the zenith of high-tier Haki deep within their bones.
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