BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!
Right at that moment, dozens of massive cannon barrels suddenly protruded from every quadrant of the approaching Pluton. Countless pools of unknown energy condensed rapidly at the muzzles before erupting outward.
"Long-range warp, now!" Drake ordered sharply. These guys certainly had fast reflexes.
[System Notification: warp sequence initializing. Temporal buffer: ten seconds...]
The moment the automated prompt cleared the ship's audio arrays, Drake cut it off instantly. "Execute immediately!"
At the same time, Drake felt utterly speechless. The Going Guard was flawless in every other metric, but it had this incredibly annoying habit of running a countdown timer before executing any vital maneuvers. It would be brilliant if he could casually control it with his mind.
The exact microsecond that thought surfaced, Drake asked internally, "Going Guard, is this the absolute highest tier our Combat Form can achieve?"
[System Notification: Captain, the Going Guard's Combat Form features two distinct operational matrices. The first is Autonomous Combat Mode; the second is Piloted Combat Mode.]
"Two modes?" Drake murmured, slightly perplexed.
By this time, the Going Guard had already successfully warped ten miles clear of the hazard zone. The cataclysmic shockwave initialized by Pluton's rapid-fire bombardment tore across the sea, its violent residual energy buffeting even the Going Guard at this distance.
As for the native territory of Arabasta along the perimeter of the desert, it sustained a truly catastrophic, devastating wave of destruction. The localized sector was instantaneously transformed into a sterile, desolate wasteland devoid of all human life.
"Ah..." Vivi stared at the sweeping destruction mapped across the display. Clamping her hands over her lips, she burst into a sudden, heartbroken fit of weeping, hot tears continuously cascading from her eyes.
She could not bring herself to believe that this horrific sight was real. A short while ago, this land had been populated by ordinary citizens living their lives in absolute tranquility. But now, everything had been violently erased, leaving behind nothing but a sprawling expanse of smoking rubble.
Meanwhile, Pluton had successfully navigated to the absolute outer boundary of the desert expanse, its massive hull on the verge of plunging into the open ocean channels. Aboard the command deck, the white-robed operatives were all gasping for breath, their expressions deeply shaken.
Naturally, their psychological distress wasn't driven by a single shred of raw guilt regarding the mass liquidation of innocent civilian lives.
Rather, the world-shaking terror projected by the Going Guard had carved an immense, permanent psychological shadow across their minds.
The flagship was simply too horrifying!
"Backed by a bombardment of that magnitude, that cybernetic alpha beast has undoubtedly been reduced to pulverized dust..."
"That is a statistical absolute. Facing a continuous cataclysm of that scale... regardless of how impregnable its metallurgy was, it mathematically could not survive..." The agent's voice abruptly cracked and died mid-sentence, looking exactly as though a solid chunk of stone had suddenly lodged itself deep inside his throat.
"Hey, what variable has sundered your speech?" The operative standing beside him turned a highly perplexed glance toward his flank.
Yet in the very next microsecond, his own cognitive functions ground to a sudden, absolute halt as he froze dead on the spot.
The jarring behavioral breakdown of these two spotters rapidly drew the collective focus of the command deck. In the next fraction of a heartbeat, every single agent broke into a chorus of frantic, wide-eyed screaming.
"This sundered all mathematical algorithms!"
Far out across the water, the Going Guard had materialized directly before their navigational vector out of thin air once again.
Inside the flagship's core, a brilliant brilliance ignited across Drake's eyes. Limitless arrays of intricate, reality-bending geometric energy lines suddenly illuminated the open air surrounding his physical frame, pulsing with a radiant, rhythmic light.
At this current juncture, the familiar silhouettes of Luffy and the others were completely absent from his immediate perimeter. The environmental parameters of the space no longer bore any resemblance to the standard interior cabins of the Going Guard.
Yet his biological vessel was undeniably resting within the absolute core of the ship.
Drake crossed his forearms in a fierce motion, his limbs executing a succession of rapid, highly synchronized kinetic movements. Outside, the colossal cybernetic beast configuration of the Going Guard perfectly mirrored Drake's physical displacement curve in a fraction of a millisecond.
Drake drove a heavy fist forward, and the flagship unleashed a devastating talon strike.
KABOOM!
A monumental volume of pure kinetic pressure sundered the air currents. At this exact threshold, Drake registered an anomaly within his pathways—it felt as though an inexhaustible, boundless pool of pure force was surging through his veins. The raw destructive weight behind every single strike sundered all of his own previous baseline calculations.
His conscious mind felt as though he was barely exerting a fraction of his personal muscle mass, yet he could physically feel the absolute, apocalyptic devastation the Going Guard's attacks were writing across the field.
This was the Piloted Combat Mode Drake had only just unsealed. According to the foundational data files provided by the system, this specialized matrix permitted the captain to experience a flawless, immersive combat synchronization.
It felt exactly as though his independent biological vessel was personally trading blows against the enemy.
Initially, Drake had struggled to rationalize the structural mechanics of the mode, but the exact microsecond his consciousness integrated into this anomalous spatial pocket, the engineering became flawlessly clear.
The sensation closely mirrored donning a massive, reality-bending suit of high-tech armor. Claiming his internal thoughts weren't burning with pure, unadulterated excitement would be an absolute lie. Drake had entirely failed to simulate a reality where the Going Guard's blueprints archived an administrative function of this magnificent tier.
This was... thoroughly light-years ahead of standard naval engineering.
"Bwahahaha! Come then, Ancient Weapon Pluton! This afternoon, let our vards finalize exactly which vessel qualifies as the true, ultimate sovereign of the high seas!" Drake erupted into a proud, boisterous laugh, launching his frame forward to initiate another direct charge toward Pluton's line.
Compressing a massive torrent of plasma energy within his synchronized palms, the mechanical beast jaws of the Going Guard opened wide to discharge a colossal beam of concentrated light. The monumental kinetic impact fiercely hammered Pluton, violently forcing the three-hundred-meter battleship backward across the terrain.
Prior to unsealing this offensive pacing, Drake had just intercepted an urgent, high-priority request from the Arabasta Princess, Vivi.
She had begged them to forcefully steer the enemy's engine of war out into the deep ocean channels; otherwise, the internal survival metrics of her country would face absolute structural failure. Actively prioritizing the preservation of the Arabasta civilian population, they mathematically could not tolerate transforming this sovereign land mass into an active war zone.
BANG!
Enduring the high-velocity, long-range bombardment, Pluton's massive frame was cleanly blasted clear of the Arabasta coastline, crashing heavily onto the open ocean surface.
Sweeping his arms to optimize his vector, Drake maintained an aggressive forward acceleration, the Going Guard executing continuous spatial warps to pursue their line.
Weaponizing its massive cybernetic talons as fists, the flagship drove a brutal punching combination straight into the target.
KABOOM!
A gargantuan fist smashed squarely into the hull of Pluton. The structural scale disparity separating the Going Guard and the ancient weapon closely mirrored a predatory lion standing opposite a massive bull elephant.
Yet the Going Guard didn't merely leverage its long-range spatial warps to achieve a mind-boggling velocity advantage; the combat techniques it unsealed were thoroughly fluid and unpredictable. Pluton, conversely, remained completely restricted to a single, unrefined offensive methodology from the initial exchange to this current hour—its primary cannon batteries.
Following a prolonged sequence of brutal, grinding collisions, the hull of the Going Guard failed to log a single scratch or scoring mark. Pluton, by contrast, had its outer armor riddled with countless jagged, bleeding structural wounds.
Granted, those structural damages were strictly limited to Pluton's exterior shielding; analyzing the core internal drive engines, the weapon had avoided any terminal trauma.
Evaluating this specific performance metric, Drake's mind harbored a deep trace of genuine professional respect for the ancient shipwrights who had constructed Pluton.
The unyielding willpower and sheer engineering intellect possessed by that ancient collective comfortably sundered all ordinary human limits. Setting alternative variables aside, the absolute structural density and hardness parameters achieved by this exterior protective shielding were genuinely beyond reproach.
Compounded by that apocalyptic cannon array.
For an ancient civilization to forge a gargantuan engine of destruction that was practically devoid of operational flaws centuries ago was a milestone that commanded absolute admiration.
High above the ocean channels, the Going Guard ignited its high-velocity thrusters, transitioning seamlessly into an unrestricted aerial dogfight. The spectacular telemetry completely sundered the internal sanity of the CP0 operatives piloting Pluton.
Initially, the exact microsecond their hull had cleared the coastline to drop into the deep ocean channels, a wave of arrogant bravado had flushed their cells. They assumed their vessel had finally breached an environment where the mythical Ancient Weapon Pluton could comfortably unleash its authentic, world-shaking power.
Yet the Going Guard's subsequent performance delivered a brutal, crushing blow straight to their collective heads.
What manner of demonic entity is this flagship?! It actually commands independent atmospheric flight parameters!
Under the completely paralyzed, wide-eyed stares of the agents, the Going Guard initialized another massive configuration shift. The four cybernetic claws smoothly retracted into the chassis as the mechanical frame expanded vertically.
Humanoid Form!
Precisely; through a highly complex matrix reconfiguration, the Going Guard had seamlessly converted its structural mass into a gargantuan, reality-bending cybernetic mecha, thick columns of brilliant propulsion fire continuously screaming from the thruster arrays anchoring its lower limbs.
"HOLY HELL THE SYSTEM?! WHAT IN GOD'S NAME IS THAT?!" The lead white-robed operative completely lost his professional decorum, a vulgar exclamation escaping his vocal channels as his mind entirely failed to process the incoming data.
Set aside the enemy agents—even the companions anchored inside the secondary observation bridges of the Going Guard, including Luffy's vanguard, found their cognitive faculties completely grinding to a halt.
In the very next fraction of a second, the pupils of every single Straw Hat pirate ignited with a brilliant, blinding light, their faces completely saturated with a pure, unadulterated wave of fanatical excitement.
"A GARGANTUAN CYBERNETIC MECHA机器人!!"
"Ahahahaha!..." Chopper and the others kept their eyes glued to the internal display monitoring the Going Guard's exterior geometry, their psychological stability completely melting away.
"This... this performance parameters comfortably outclass all baseline common sense..." Jinbe and the two Revolutionary Army Division Commanders murmured in a daze, staring blankly at the flagship's optimized manifest.
From the exact milestone their boots had crossed the threshold of this ship up to this current afternoon, the Going Guard had continually pulverized their cognitive parameters without a single moment of rest. Every single time their minds rationalized that they had finally mapped the ship's ultimate ceiling, the subsequent variable unsealed by the system loudly informed them that the progression was light-years from its conclusion.
And looking upon this humanoid configuration, the spectacle had officially, permanently rewritten their foundational worldview.
It was far too magnificent. For a reality-bending piece of engineering that completely defied all standard mechanical laws to exist upon this ocean was a true miracle.
"Sovereign Headbutt!!"
Drake compressed his palms together in a synchronized, locking motion, the gargantuan cybernetic mecha of the Going Guard mirroring the trajectory as it plunged down from the absolute zenith of the heavens, driving its massive armored crown straight into the absolute apex of Pluton's command bridge.
KABOOM!!
The ocean channels violently churned under the monumental weight of the impact, massive, skyscraper-sized waves rocketing into the sky.