"What?! Pluton?" Luffy and the others widened their eyes, staring at the scene before them in disbelief.
"Are we too late after all..." Sabo's brow furrowed tightly. If the Ancient Weapon truly re-entered the global grid, it would be anything but good news for them.
"Don't panic just yet. It might just be their empty boasting," Drake said, taking a step forward as a peculiar expression crossed his face.
To tell the truth, deep down, he actually wanted to see Pluton awaken. He genuinely wanted to find out exactly what this legendary Ancient Weapon of myth looked like.
As for the underlying danger Pluton posed, he didn't allocate much processing power to worry about it. With the caliber of strength their vanguard commanded today, what could a single weapon realistically achieve even if it was resurrected?
The Ancient Weapon Pluton was ultimately a collective masterpiece engineered by the shipwrights of Water 7 in ancient times.
He simply refused to believe that a massive battleship built by a mere alignment of historical shipwrights could possess a tier of power capable of threatening individuals at their level.
Even if it did pose a threat, he harbored absolute zero fear.
Lest they forget, their current alignment numbered quite a few top-tier powerhouses. Backed by the synchronized combat mass of Luffy, Sabo, and himself, what corner of this maritime world was functionally untouchable to their trio?
All for a single battleship...
Furthermore, he possessed the ultimate baseline security protocol: the exact microsecond a crisis crested, he could simply unseal the entrance to his pocket dimension, allowing them to seamlessly withdraw into a secure, alternative space.
Under those parameters, regardless of how extreme Pluton's hazard metrics scaled, it would mathematically fail to inflict a single fraction of structural trauma upon them.
Granted, those were tactical alternatives for a later timeline.
The primary anchor driving his composure was Drake's absolute, unyielding confidence in his own capabilities. Exactly what was Pluton?
It was merely a battleship. No matter how terrifyingly high its raw destructive output scaled, it still required a biological crew to manually coordinate its navigation and weapons systems.
Commanding the reality-bending mechanics of instantaneous teleportation, wouldn't neutralizing the crew piloting the vessel be an exceptionally simple task for Drake?
Synthesizing all these operational variables, their unit faced absolute zero baseline danger. Looking upon the face of Pluton was far from a terrible proposition.
ROAR... RUMBLE...
While Drake and his companions were quietly running the calculations, the entire desert expanse initialized a violent, low-frequency earthquake. Countless tons of sand began flowing like fluid water, forcing numerous unmapped, bizarre desert organisms to break clear of the dunes simultaneously.
It looked exactly as though their primitive survival instincts had mapped a monumental existential hazard beneath the earth.
The colossal dune swelled higher and higher, and around its massive base, a sweeping, blood-chilling sea of white suddenly broke through the dust.
"Those are the phantom cells of CP0!" Sabo instantly decrypted the white-uniformed vanguard.
Was it not their eternal adversaries, the Cipher Pol Aegis 0?
Yet this afternoon, the sheer volume of the deployment struck a chord of genuine shock even within Sabo's mind. The regime's supreme shadow intelligence network—whose premier operatives were historically a rare sight across the waves—had suddenly materialized dozens of active units in a single sector.
Even for a resistance executive like Sabo, who continuously crossed blades with their network, he had to admit that the World Government had thrown its absolute, bottom-line financial and military reserves into securing this so-called Ancient Weapon.
And the deployment wasn't restricted solely to the ranks of CP0; even the active personnel of the former CP9 had been integrated into the front.
To ensure Pluton was firmly within their grasp, the Gorosei had essentially hollowed out their active military vault.
"Everyone, brace yourselves!" Drake's brow hitched as the sand surrounding their chassis initiated a massive, high-velocity displacement curve. "Going Guard, deploy defensive protocols."
"Acknowledged," a synthesized, mechanical confirmation smoothly cleared the chassis of the bizarre mechanical beast they were riding.
Exactly; this strange, predatory mechanical construct was none other than the Beast Form of the Going Guard.
The specialized asset had been unsealed as a premium achievement reward during one of his previous system updates. Initially, Drake hadn't allocated much tactical value to the blueprint. After all, under standard maritime parameters, it offered very little utility for their voyages.
Yet analyzing their active terrain, the asset was proving to be an immense, high-value modifier.
By weaponizing this quad-pedal beast configuration, their vanguard had navigated the unforgiving expanses of the desert dunes with absolute zero physical resistance, executing a direct blitzkrieg straight to the focal coordinate of the enemy's nest.
Throughout this compressed timeline, they had continually unsealed the Going Guard's macro-spatial warp functions.
Although the rapid sequence of teleportation jumps had aggressively siphoned a massive volume of energy crystals from his inventory, the absolute transit speed they achieved was thoroughly mind-boggling.
Even Sabo's internal models had sustained a profound shock from the performance.
During his historical cruise aboard the Going Guard two years ago, the ship's navigation systems had yet to unseal this specific application.
The performance was far too terrifying.
It completely sundered his baseline understanding of mechanical physics.
For an asset of this immense physical volume to seamlessly coordinate continuous, long-range spatial warps while transporting a multi-unit vanguard—rationalizing the reality through conventional logic made it sound like an absolute, wild fairy tale.
Along the entirety of their transit vector, the Going Guard had ruthlessly pulverized the cognitive parameters of the crew time and time again.
By this current hour, their minds had effectively built up a total biological immunity to reality-bending anomalies.
Since an impossibility as absolute as instantaneous spatial warping could exist right before their eyes, even if the Going Guard suddenly unsealed an alternative capability that completely shattered their worldview, their composure would mathematically refuse to fracture.
Consequently, witnessing the flagship smoothly reconfigure its chassis into a mechanical beast stabilized well within their bounds of cognitive acceptance.
Drake, conversely, was genuinely enamored by the engineering. The flagship had effectively transformed into an absolute, all-terrain cruising monument that could seamlessly conquer any hostile environment on the planet.
The technological tier was simply magnificent.
"Initializing defensive shielding matrix..." A brilliant, high-density ring of translucent energy gradually expanded from the chassis, hermetically sealing the entirety of the Going Guard within a flawless spherical barrier.
The specialized barrier was so absolute it effortlessly restricted even the high-velocity flow of the cascading desert sand from grazing the hull.
As the central sand mass continued its violent vertical expansion, a pitch-black, gargantuan rectangular structure heavily scarred by centuries of jagged rust slowly broke into their visual fields.
With the dry sands continuously falling away from the frame, the monumental geometry of the ancient machine gradually unrolled before the gaze of the vanguard.
The unsealing initialized from the absolute apex of the hull, revealing a massive, elliptical tower configuration that strongly resembled an ancient, armored command bridge for a massive crew alignment.
"The Ancient Weapon... Pluton!!"
Aboard the deck, Franky's facial parameters violently warped, his eyes blinking frantically as his gaze locked onto the colossal, unidentified monument of steel.
"Pluton... Franky, are your technical diagnostics absolute? Can you verify that this construct is definitively the mythical Ancient Weapon Pluton?" Robin stepped forward, her voice heavy with supreme solemnity.
Although her historical databases had long since verified Pluton's burial within the subterranean depths of the Arabasta desert, she possessed absolute zero visual files detailing what manner of geometry the weapon actually preserved.
Franky, however, was the solitary living individual who had thoroughly analyzed the authentic engineering blueprints of Pluton. Since his memory files archived the absolute blueprints of the ship, unravelling the physical identity of the construct was an elementary equation.
"The resurrection of an Ancient Weapon... this invariably logs as a catastrophic, world-ending threat matrix for humanity. Our vanguard must systematically neutralize their operation!" Franky stated, his gaze sweeping across his companions.
Having run a comprehensive diagnostic on the blueprints, he understood Pluton's raw destructive output with absolute clarity. A single discharge from its main battery was a variable that standard human mass mathematically lacked the capacity to parry.
"Franky, according to your technical parameters, does Pluton's raw output genuinely stabilize at that terrifying level?" Drake questioned, testing the limits.
"A single discharge possesses the kinetic mass to completely level a sovereign island!" Franky answered, his voice dripping with an absolute, unvarnished gravity.
"WHAT THE HELL THE FORCE?!" Usopp, Nami, and Chopper froze in unison, their minds completely shutting down under the weight of the data.
"Vaporizing an entire island?!"
"The data tracks perfectly. The ancient records etched into the Arabasta Poneglyph archive the exact same metrics," Robin added, dropping her head in a heavy nod.
Gasp... The collective assembly let out a sharp, unified intake of breath, their composure thoroughly chilling.
Leveling a massive, sovereign land mass with a solitary pulling of a trigger was far from a joke. Exactly what classification of reality did that output map to? Claiming it possessed the necessary mass to destroy the entire civilized world was far from an exaggeration.
"According to your current parameters, exactly how does that destructive profile cross-reference when placed opposite the combat metrics Luffy and Red Hair displayed during their duel?" Drake pressed further.
"This..." Franky's facial parameters shifted uncomfortably, a vivid memory file rapidly unrolling within his mind detailing the reality-shattering, apocalyptic collision that had initialized when Luffy and Shanks crossed blades. "The comparative analysis is highly unstable... Luffy and the Emperor were executing a disciplined duel; their metrics weren't deliberately funneled to maximize the structural destruction of the surrounding global geography. However, parsing the raw kinetic output, I project their destructive potential stabilizes along an identical tier."
"Except..." Right then, Franky altered the trajectory of his analysis, his expression turning remarkably grim as he delivered the terminal variable: "The automated weapons arrays anchoring Pluton possess the capacity to coordinate high-velocity, continuous volleys across a massive area. It is mathematically forbidden from being restricted to a single shot per interval!"
"WHAT?!" The pupils of the entire vanguard violently contracted, pure, unadulterated horror saturating their eyes.
On this afternoon, as they locked their focus onto the massive silhouette of Pluton gradually shedding its ancient shroud of sand, their internal hearts were completely choked by a suffocating, icy dread!