"Yasakani no Magatama. Zero distance!"
A blinding cross of gold light converged at Kizaru's fingertips. The air shrieked with a high, metallic whine.
Sabo was too close. No time to slip away. He clenched his teeth, compressed every layer of high-grade Ryuo across his chest, and the Flame Dragon Staff's pink dragon head snapped back, bracing before him like a shield.
Boom.
The gold light swallowed Sabo whole. A massive golden mushroom cloud bloomed in the air.
"Sabo!"
Enel's roar tore through the chaos. His thunder staff became a lightning lance, hurled with a storm of current straight at Kizaru.
But on the far side of the battlefield, a deeper, primal scream drowned out every explosion.
That was Saturn's roar.
Saturn had fully transformed. His lower half was a mountain of legs, eight massive spider limbs covered in coarse black bristles, each a spear that could pierce steel. His torso remained human, but great bull horns sprouted from his skull. A ring of black, flame-like miasma coiled around his body.
Demonic Form: Gyuki.
"Insolent insect."
"Burn to ash before the pressure of a god."
Saturn's bestial pupils fixed on Ace. The spider legs slammed into the ground, and the colossal body shot forward with speed that defied its mass, right into Ace's face.
In that burst of motion, a strange red gleam flickered in Saturn's cold eyes.
The Gyuki's demonic power: Gaze Paralysis.
"Think you can trap me?"
A cold smile touched Ace's lips. A transmigrator who knew the story wasn't about to fall for the old monster's trump card.
The instant before Saturn's gaze locked, Ace's future sight already moved. He didn't meet those eyes. He flowed along the predicted arc, a smooth, razor-sharp sidestep that slipped clear of the invisible web of mental binding.
"Hm?" Saturn's eyes flickered with shock. His paralysis had missed.
"Party tricks that scare the rank and file don't work on me."
Ace closed the distance, sliding inside the giant spider's reach.
His right hand settled on the hilt of the Supreme Grade Sword at his hip.
Ace.
Shing!
A clear, ringing note cut the air. The famed blade, silent for twenty years, was drawn on the battlefield of Punk Hazard.
The moment the edge left the sheath, a visible cascade of dark crimson lightning erupted from the blade. This was not Ace's own Conqueror's Haki. It was the sword itself, the memory of its former master's will, waking to the presence of a kindred king.
"You want my will? Then take your fill!"
Ace laughed, and instead of resisting, he poured his own raging Conqueror's Haki into the blade.
Two wills, separated by two decades, clashed and fused along the edge. Ace's dark crimson lightning compressed, tightening into bands of living current that clung to the blade's long curve.
Conqueror's Coating.
"That Haki... and that sword..."
Saturn stared at the blade wrapped in black-red lightning. His ancient, unchanging face finally twisted.
As one of the Five Elders, he had lived too long not to know this sword.
"Gol D. Roger's blade, Ace?!"
Saturn's bull eyes bored into Ace. "So our deduction was correct. You are the continuation of that cursed bloodline. You are Roger's son."
"And if I am?"
Ace gripped the hilt with both hands. The muscles of his right arm swelled.
Guided by the residual muscle memory within the blade, Ace followed the faint thread of a familiar trajectory. His core torqued, and with all the compressed Conqueror's Coating, he swung a horizontal arc at the monstrous body before him.
"Divine Departure!"
A crescent of pure dark crimson Conqueror's lightning, hundreds of meters across, screamed through the air with a shriek that tore at space itself. It crashed toward Saturn with the force of an avalanche.
The same technique Roger had used to cut down Kozuki Oden in a single blow.
"Impudent brat!"
Saturn roared at the strike that could split a continent. The massive spider forelegs sheathed in deep black Armament Haki, and the same black-red lightning crackled along them.
The Five Elders were monsters who had mastered Conqueror's Coating themselves.
Boom!
Divine Departure and the Gyuki's Coated strike met in midair.
A shockwave like a hurricane tore outward. The entire plaza of the research facility collapsed in layers, as if a meteor had plowed through it.
Saturn's bristled spider legs held the terrifying slash in place. His colossal form only shuddered, and the slash's force was deflected, carving a deep abyss into the ground behind him.
"Relying on the lingering will of a blade to mimic Roger's prime?"
Saturn sneered. All eight spider legs drove him forward, a living volcano, and he was on Ace in an instant.
"Don't get too full of yourself, pirate!"
Boom! Boom! Boom!
Saturn's spider legs, coated in the highest grade of Conqueror's Coating, rained down on Ace from every angle. Each strike carried suffocating pressure and corrosive poison.
Ace didn't retreat.
He gripped the Supreme Grade Sword Ace in both hands and met the onslaught. Every clash of blade and spider leg detonated with blinding black-red lightning in the air.
It was a pure duel of Conqueror's Coating.
But under that pressure, Ace's dark eyes only burned brighter.
With every collision, he felt the way the sword's residual will guided, compressed, and bound Conqueror's Haki to the edge like a living sheath. This "flowing will of a king," pressed into him by the life-or-death struggle, was etching itself into his muscle memory.
"So that's how it works..."
After blocking another heavy, brutal strike, the light in Ace's eyes was solid.
"If you compress your own will to the extreme, and coat it across any part of your body like Ryuo..."
Ace's left hand opened slightly.
"Where are you looking, brat!"
Saturn's senses caught the lapse. A rear leg, dripping with poison and black-red lightning, whipped toward Ace's side with a sonic boom.
Ace ignored the words. His left fist clenched.
Without the blade's guidance, fine threads of dark crimson Conqueror's lightning suddenly wove into being across the surface of his left fist, coiling, compressing.
In the pressure of this clash, he had fully mastered Conqueror's Coating.
Boom!
Ace's left fist, wrapped in black lightning, met the spider leg head-on with no flourish.
Two supreme wills ground against each other, the air screaming.
"You learned Conqueror's Coating in the middle of a fight!"
Saturn stared at the black lightning on Ace's fist, his killing intent thickening to a lethal haze. This brat's growth was more terrifying than Roger's had ever been.
A self-evolving monster like this, if not crushed here, would become the World Government's greatest calamity.
"Die, cursed blood!"
Saturn's fury erupted.
He abandoned all restraint. The Gyuki's massive body lunged forward, the ring of black miasma around him surging. An ocean of corrosive, poisonous demonic aura crashed down on Ace.
"Warm-up's over, old man."
Ace didn't meet the full onslaught with Haki.
From his left palm, a black fog darker than night billowed out.
"Dark Water."
Whoosh.
An irresistible gravitational pull locked onto the airborne Saturn.
"What?!"
Saturn felt his body wrenched forward, helpless. Worse, the proud demonic aura around him faltered and dissolved the moment it touched the black fog.
His Devil Fruit power was being suppressed.
"Got you, you old monster."
Ace used the pull of Dark Water to close the gap instantly.
His right hand gripped the blade Ace. Jet-black Ryuo and dark crimson Conqueror's Coating surged into the sword. Then, a golden flame that could vaporize steel in an instant, the Vermilion Bird's divine fire, coiled and compressed along the wide blade.
Pure, absolute heat layered atop the highest Haki, compressed to a heart-stopping crimson-gold.
"This one's a gift for the World Government."
Ace held the blade with both hands and, as the momentarily powerless Saturn was pulled into range, brought it down without reservation.
"One Blade: Cremation!"
Shhhk!
A compressed, terrifying arc of crimson-gold flame and dark crimson Haki, like a falling sun, slammed into the Gyuki's colossal form.
Rumble!
In the instant the Dark-Dark Fruit suppressed the demonic defenses, this single slash of Conqueror's Coating and Vermilion Bird fire tore through Saturn's Haki barrier and blasted his mountain of a lower body apart.
"AAAAAARGH!"
Saturn's scream was ragged and raw. Most of his spider abdomen and two rear legs were burned to charcoal. The internal organs beneath were pulped by the destructive force of Ryuo. Green toxic blood and black ash sprayed across the sky.
The enormous wreck of his body crashed into the ruins, throwing up a wall of dust.
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