Aokiji struggled to his feet, his pupils shrinking to pinpricks as his entire body froze solid at the sight of his attacker.
It wasn't the mysterious Im who stood before him, but the exceptionally muscular Elder!
My previous attack didn't incapacitate him?
How is that possible?
"Aokiji, did you truly believe that carrying the mantle of a Marine Admiral meant you anchored the absolute zenith of global combat power? Allow us to demonstrate our true, unbridled strength." The Elder drove his boot into the floor, fracturing the frozen stone and exposing the highly explosive density of his calf muscles.
Unleashing a terrifying burst of acceleration, he lunged forward like a striking cheetah, instantly breaching Aokiji's perimeter. Aokiji swept his ice lance forward, the sharp point burying itself directly into the Elder's shoulder.
Yet before he could log a single fraction of satisfaction, an even more jarring anomaly shattered his tactical assumptions: despite the lance impaling his flesh, the Elder failed to execute a single microsecond of hesitation, driving a brutal, crushing fist straight into Aokiji's face.
BOOM!
The monumental impact shattered the left hemisphere of Aokiji's face into loose shards, blasting his physical vessel backward like a falling meteor.
The moment he struggled back to his feet—before his fractured facial tissue could even optimize and restore its baseline parameters—the four Elders closed the distance, surrounded him with perfectly expressionless, deadpan countenances.
Every single one of the Elders bore varying degrees of operational trauma across their frames, yet not a single line of pain marked their features. They remained entirely mechanical.
The fresh crimson weeping from their open lacerations looked as though it failed to register as an active variable in their biology.
Something is fundamentally wrong here.
Aokiji had zero resource margins to waste on analyzing the puzzle. The exact microsecond the Elders closed the dragnet, he violently erupted into motion, driving his ice lance in a fierce trajectory targeted at the muscular Elder.
BANG!
Simultaneously coordinating the parry, Aokiji projected a colossal wall of dense glacial ice directly behind his spine, explicitly engineered to freeze the offensive vectors of the remaining three attackers.
"Aokiji, let us stress-test exactly what tier of capability you preserved after defecting from the Admiral registry," the Elder before him barked, his arm heavily coated in a polished layer of advanced Armament Haki as he matched the kinetic weight of the ice lance.
"Hmph..."
Following a rapid succession of high-velocity impacts, a dark, confident smirk slowly broke across the Elder's face.
"Does this mediocre output define your absolute capacity? It appears the might of a Marine Admiral amounts to very little in our presence."
"Is that so..." Aokiji's brow hitched. In that exact fraction of a heartbeat, the ice wall behind his back sundered into a thousand shards as the remaining three Elders ruptured his defense.
Exerting a massive, vertical surge of kinetic force through the length of his lance, Aokiji leveraged the feedback to vault high into the airspace. Staring up at the stone ceiling anchoring a mere three meters above his head, a sharp, calculating brilliance rippled across his eyes.
The combined combat mass commanded by these four Elders sundered all conventional probability; the raw strength of any single asset here was more than sufficient to comfortably stabilize within the tier of a Marine Admiral.
To think that these old men—who historically did nothing but lounge in their administrative offices, sipping tea—commanded this caliber of unrefined violence!
With all four operating as a synchronized alignment, even a Yonko-tier powerhouse would mathematically face an absolute, structural defeat within their perimeter.
Furthermore, this was merely the initialization phase of the conflict. Setting aside whatever classified abilities they had yet to pull from their inventory, the mysterious Im remained completely static atop his high throne.
He possessed absolute data verifying that his winning metrics today sat at a flawless zero; his solitary avenue was a total tactical retreat.
Attempting to clear the perimeter via the primary entry gates was structurally impossible. Currently, the solitary coordinate that remained entirely unmonitored by their tracking arrays was the ceiling!
That exact overhead boundary represented his solitary operational loophole to escape the zone alive.
Crossing both forearms to compress his stamina reserves, Aokiji unleashed the absolute, sub-zero capacity of his Logia fruit. Thick, volatile columns of white freezing vapor continuously poured from every quadrant of his frame as his eyes snapped wide.
"Glacial Pillar Blast!!"
Both palms unleashed a monumental torrent of freezing energy, and within a single millisecond, a gargantuan pillar of dense ice crystallized across the vertical space, anchoring itself against the floor.
The four Elders, who had launched their frames to intercept his coordinates, were violently hammered down to the terrain by the kinetic weight of the column. The ice pillar preserved its momentum without yielding a single millimeter, aggressively expanding upward to forcefully puncture the ceiling infrastructure.
CRASH! KABOOM...
"Catastrophic! The subversive seeks to clear the harbor!" The expressions of the Gorosei warped fiercely as they mapped the structural failure of their containment grid, the aura radiating from their vessels shifting into a terrifyingly suffocating, heavy domain.
"Phantom Blade: Sundered Path!!"
The Elder brandishing the legendary katana suddenly executed a spectacular, sky-splitting upward slash. A colossal wave of compressed flying energy sundered the path directly from the bedrock, cleanly bisecting the monumental ice pillar from its base to its apex.
The structural scaffolding of the column, which had just successfully hammered wide fissures across the ceiling stone, lost its equilibrium, collapsing down into a massive cloud of harmless frost and debris.
Witnessing his terminal escape vector systematically pulverized by the swordsman's line, Aokiji's expression turned exceptionally dark and heavy. His internal models finally unsealed the definitive reality: on this afternoon... his vessel was mathematically incapable of escaping the dragnet!
"Aokiji, freeze your coordinates!!"
The four Elders launched their frames into the upper airspace simultaneously, every single asset mobilizing the absolute maximum output of their respective arsenals. Aokiji compressed his stamina to throw a dual-palm blast straight into their oncoming line.
ROAR... KABOOM!
Waging a one-against-four war, a limitless hurricane of violent pressure and sub-zero frost sundered the interior grid of the chamber. Ultimately, the combined kinetic weight of the Gorosei's offensive shattered Aokiji's defense, blasting his battered frame heavily out of the sector.
THUD!
His airborne body crashed square into the pre-existing fissures his ice pillar had hammered across the ceiling, the sheer velocity of the impact punching a clean hole through the stone scaffolding as his vessel was thrown right out of the secret chamber.
"Unacceptable! Aokiji is breaking our line!" The four Elders gasped in absolute shock, frantically coordinating their motor functions to give chase across the breach. Yet there existed an asset whose displacement velocity completely outclassed their vanguard.
"Useless, incompetent trash!"
The mysterious, robed Im—who had historically remained completely motionless atop the empty throne—materialized directly at the lip of the newly fractured exit hole in a fraction of a heartbeat.
Currently, Aokiji's upper frame had already cleared the exterior boundary of the chamber. Initially believing that his survival metrics had hit an absolute dead end, a sudden flash of profound joy illuminated his thoughts.
A truly accidental loophole had yielded a flawless escape vector.
Yet in the very next microsecond, his enthusiastic expression froze solid, every single hair on his body standing completely on end in primitive panic.
An unmapped force had aggressively clamped around his ankle, permanently locking down his motor functions.
He possessed absolute clarity verifying the variable... the mysterious Im had manually anchored his frame...
A monumental, world-shaking volume of pure kinetic force erupted from the grip, violently dragging his physical vessel back through the breach to hammer him flat against the chamber floor below.
KABOOM!
The terrain sundered violently under his weight, a massive, crater-like depression fracturing the solid stone.
"Cough... ugh..." Aokiji dragged his broken frame out of the center of the dust cloud with extreme difficulty. Staring up at the elite containment ring closing around his perimeter, a heavy, unvarnished solemnity painted his features.
"My, my... it appears my cruise has officially run out of operational loops today..."
While a geopolitical crisis of this monumental scale was sundering the internal layout of the Holy Land of Mary Geoise, the Arabasta Kingdom—anchored along the first half of the Grand Line—was concurrently being sucked into a catastrophic vortex of total devastation.
Roughly twenty-four hours prior, an unmapped, black-budget military armada had materialized out of the horizon, initializing a total, unrestricted search matrix across the entire expanse of the desert sectors.
The systematic deployment left the entire population of the nation locked in deep bewilderment.
Furthermore, every single localized law enforcement unit or ordinary citizen who attempted to freeze their advance or demand operational data was seamlessly, ruthlessly liquidated on the spot. Concurrently, the royal palace had issued an absolute sovereign decree commanding the citizenry to cede absolute passage to these white-robed syndicates.
The military arm of the state preserved a perfectly static, unmoving posture.
The ordinary civilian population possessed absolute zero data decoding exactly what strategic calculations their King was executing, yet their deep devotion to the crown forced them to rationalise that his highness would never casually permit these marauders to trample their lands without a profound reason.
His administrative choice invariably cloaked an untouchable necessity.
Nevertheless, an alternative piece of intelligence had already saturated every single town square across the Arabasta Kingdom: their beloved Princess Vivi had been targeted and captured by the dragnet of the World Government.
As of this hour, her active status remained entirely unmapped.
This structural deployment struck an intense, burning chord of pure fury across the hearts of the population. Registering that the white-robed marauders belonged directly to the shadow wings of the World Government, a high volume of citizens flatly waived the palace's lockdown decree, aggressively marching into the desert sectors to forcefully demand a resolution from the operatives.
Within the short duration of a single day, a massive registry of ordinary Arabasta citizens had already seen their survival metrics permanently erased by the blades of the CP0 vanguard.
A volatile, incandescent fire of absolute revolt was burning furiously within the collective psychology of the Arabasta people.
Deep within an untamed, completely isolated sector of the open desert, a highly specialized, reality-bending mechanical construct was cutting through the heavy dunes at extreme velocity.
Anchoring the frame of this mechanized transport, the silhouettes of Luffy, Drake, and Sabo continuously adjusted their postures to maintain equilibrium. The machine's four mechanical legs executed a series of lightning-fast, rhythmic strides across the sand, the locomotion speed so extreme it reduced their lower chassis to a passing blur of residual tracking lines.
Right then, the spatial parameters of the desert directly ahead underwent a total transformation. The boundless expanses of sand suddenly bulged and shifted violently, a gargantuan, monument-like dune rising out of the earth to dominate their visual fields.
"The Ancient Weapon... Pluton!!" A sudden cascade of frantic, chaotic shouting sundered the air currents from the crest of the ridge.
The vocals projected a tier of pure, unbridled euphoria that comfortably sundered all baseline metrics.