This crushing weight was far worse than the pure psychological pressure Lord Im had previously inflicted on him. The defining difference was that Lord Im's presence merely suppressed his spirit; Drake's colossal cybernetic mecha strike, however, was a physical, unadulterated assault.
The single crushing stomp had come perilously close to pulverizing every bone in his body.
The raw force was simply too staggering, heavy as a massive mountain collapsing onto his chest. It directly choked the air out of his lungs, leaving him entirely unable to breathe.
"Ion Blast!" Drake roared from inside the command pocket.
The humanoid Going Guard seamlessly adjusted its massive frame into a rigid bracing posture, thrusting its hands forward to unleash a gargantuan beam of concentrated plasma energy.
Its target was the ancient engine of myth—Pluton!
Drake naturally recognized the black-robed titan anchoring the waves below; he was undeniably one of the supreme Gorosei ruling the World Government. The strategic intent behind his sudden field deployment boiled down to a single variable: Pluton.
Evaluating the layout, the World Government's desperate, near-religious obsession with locking this Ancient Weapon into their inventory struck a chord of genuine astonishment within Drake's mind.
But since their ultimate objective lay bare before his eyes, how could Drake ever permit their calculations to succeed?
Furthermore, Drake's operational goal from the very initialization of the clash had been the absolute destruction of Pluton. The sheer, world-shaking threat level commanded by this machine was far too deep; a mere handful of casual primary discharges had already sundered the Arabasta desert into a scarred wasteland.
Had this engine targeted a standard, minor island rather than a vast desert landmass, the geography mathematically wouldn't have sustained even two shots.
One blast to level a sovereign island—the ancient records spoke the unvarnished truth.
Once separated from the impregnable hull of the Going Guard, an apocalyptic offensive output of this tier was a variable that even Drake dared not look upon with a single fraction of carelessness.
ROAR... KABOOM!
The monumental column of plasma energy punched cleanly through the absolute core of Pluton. Because Drake's preceding talon strikes had already violently pulverized the ancient weapon's outer protective armor, this subsequent energy beam breached the interior systems with absolute zero physical resistance.
The spectacle looked exactly like a permanent, frozen monument of historical collapse. The legendary engine of destruction that had slumbered for eight centuries—the sovereign terror that struck absolute dread across the annals of time—was thoroughly reduced to melting scrap metal the exact microsecond it awoke.
Hurtling through the mid-air currents below, the bald Elder's eyes nearly exploded from their sockets in pure, unadulterated horror. His internal cognitive models completely failed to compute the visual data.
The mythical Ancient Weapon Pluton had just been ruthlessly blown into pulverized splinters right before his eyes...
The reality left his mind running a total blank.
How could a nightmare of this scale track as authentic data... No, this was an absolute illusion! The fractured framework sundered before his eyes mathematically couldn't be the genuine Pluton.
How could the legendary weapon recorded across the sagas suffer such an instantaneous, pathetic collapse?
It was an absolute lie!
Right at that threshold of despair, the bisected hull of Pluton executed a sudden, chaotic reconfiguration. Over a hundred automated secondary cannon barrels violently erupted from the buckling metal plates.
Blinding solar blooms ignited across the muzzles in rapid succession. Drake's optimized sensory arrays mapped a jarring anomaly: the atmospheric currents surrounding the battleship were being aggressively siphoned into the muzzles, vacuum-sealing the airspace as all one hundred barrels simultaneously condensed raw plasma energy.
Inside the burning compartments of the ancient weapon, the surviving white-robed agents projected expressions of absolute, iron-clad martyrdom. They had finalized a total, desperate resolution to exhaust 100% of their remaining structural life, throwing everything into a terminal, all-out barrage to forcefully vaporize the unmapped cybernetic monster before them into drifting ash.
They had witnessed the apocalyptic weight behind a baseline Pluton discharge; they mathematically refused to believe that the Going Guard could absorb a synchronized hundred-cannon cataclysm without sustaining terminal structural failure.
"FIRE THE BATTERIES!!" the lead CP0 agent shrieked, his vocal cords tearing as his features warped into a mask of pure, manic frenzy.
BOOM! BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!...
In a fraction of a millisecond, countless incandescent beams of destructive energy erupted in a massive, sweeping upward trajectory, completely saturating the airspace to hermetically lock down the Going Guard's coordinates.
Facing a dense, area-of-effect cluster bombardment of this tier, alternative vessels anchoring this ocean would have encountered an absolute dead end. The Going Guard, however, was fundamentally different.
It possessed the reality-bending mechanics of long-range spatial warp jumps; weaving clear of this network of fire was an elementary calculation. Except... directly behind its rear vector sat the sovereign territory of the Arabasta Kingdom.
Should Drake command the flagship to execute a warp jump to dodge the line, this apocalyptic volley would descend directly onto the mainland of Arabasta. A single microsecond of impact would ensure that not a single blade of grass remained alive across the nation!
He was mathematically forbidden from weaving clear; his vanguard was required to parry the absolute totality of the barrage!
Drake drew a long, deep breath. Throughout the chronicles of his cruise, his memories archived numerous logs of this nature; Luffy was an individual whose operational profile consistently involved executing high-risk maneuvers of this tier.
He had never simulated a timeline where the mantle of a self-sacrificing hero would materialize above his own boots. Drake had systematically verified within his personal ideology that he harbored absolute zero desire to play the hero for this world.
Yet the parameters of this afternoon sundered his personal preferences.
He had to lock down these beams. As for whether the global press cataloged the performance as a heroic monument—who gave a damn!
"Ion Cannon Matrix!!"
A blinding light erupted from Drake's eyes, the optical sensors of the humanoid Going Guard synchronously flashing a fierce crimson as massive energy crystals siphoned from his vault flooded the primary drive engine.
A monumental wave of blue-white plasma screamed from the mecha's extended palms, sweeping across the airspace in a rapid, continuous blocking vector. He was going to forcefully intercept every single oncoming beam!
ROAR... KABOOM!
The plasma beams managed by Drake maintained a continuous, high-velocity sawing motion, successfully neutralizing a massive registry of the incoming artillery. Yet as the constant output pushed past the limits of the interval, Drake suddenly registered a critical anomaly within his independent biological pathways.
Discharging the Ion Cannon matrix siphoned the foundational fuel native to the Going Guard's core engines, but at this exact threshold, Drake physically felt his own physical stamina and internal energy levels entering an exponential, steep decline.
His biological vessel was rapidly hitting its absolute structural ceiling.
Exactly what variables initialized this status?!
This sudden, unmapped failure of his internal reserves struck a sharp chord of panic within Drake's mind. His calculations failed to decode the anomaly.
"System! Provide immediate telemetry! Why do my personal energy reserves feel as though they are experiencing a total blackout?!"
[SYSTEM NOTIFICATION: Flagship Piloted Combat Mode functions by executing a flawless biological, psychological, and spiritual integration between the Host's vessel and the core scaffolding of the Going Guard. This synchronization permits the user to project an offensive output that comfortably sundered their personal parameters.]
[Concurrently, the energy siphoning arrays operate symmetrically; the operational cost is drawn simultaneously from both the Host's biological reserves and the flagship's internal fuel vaults.]
What the hell?!
Drake's eyes snapped wide into absolute circles. He had entirely failed to simulate a reality where this piloted configuration enforced a biological taxation of this extreme tier.
Had his analytical processors deciphered this parameter beforehand, he would have flatly refused to deploy this specific combat matrix. The engineering was far too toxic!
The absolute combat mass generated by this mecha merely stabilized along a parallel tier opposite his personal offensive output; it simply leveraged the flagship's impregnable defensive shielding while allowing him to indulge in a bit of theatrical flair. To think it demanded this depth of biological sacrifice.
This layout trailed far beneath the efficiency of him deploying on foot.
Even if he exhausted his stamina executing continuous spatial warps on his own, his systems would mathematically never plunge into a hazard window of this severity.
If the progression maintained this trajectory, let alone successfully parrying the totality of the bombardment, whether his independent vessel could even safely clear the harbor was becoming a highly critical equation!
True to the data, Drake felt completely hollowed out, a profound wave of sheer exhaustion seizing his muscle groups. Outside of his historical duel against Akainu during the Summit War of Marineford all those years ago, his biological pathways had never logged this tier of fatigue.
He had never crossed horizons with it since. To think that unsealing a piloted configuration would enforce this depth of drain was something Drake struggled to accept.
"Dammit!" Drake gasped as his tracking arrays unsealed a critical warning: the primary plasma beam radiating from the mecha's palms was beginning to shrink, his internal power grids failing to sustain the output!
Yet across the upper airspace, a dense, apocalyptic canopy of flashing light beams continued to descend with world-shaking velocity.
Should these remaining payloads connect with the mainland, the absolute totality of the Arabasta Kingdom would be systematically reduced to a pulverized wasteland of smoking rubble.
When that hour struck, not a single citizen anchoring the cities would preserve their survival metrics. It would signify an absolute, unparalleled slaughter of innocent lives!
Just as Drake's internal calculations neared a state of complete, dark despair, a succession of familiar silhouettes suddenly materialized directly before the armored viewing frame of the Going Guard.
Standing shoulder-to-shoulder across the open sky were Luffy, Sabo, the core companions defining the Straw Hat Pirates, and the optimized elites anchoring the Dragon Flag vanguard... Every single powerhouse preserved a proud, sweeping smirk, their unblinking gazes locked squarely onto the sky-wide canopy of descending apocalypse.
The Holy Land of Mary Geoise.
Countless thousands of individuals clad in unrefined civilian tunics and heavy traveling cloaks were scaling the sheer, vertical precipices of the Red Line in a manic, hyper-velocity ascent.
Automated, high-clout lifts engineered by hidden resistance cells, self-constructed primitive gliders, and localized flight mechanisms.
These specialized engineering assets—which were historically an exceptionally rare sight across the four seas—were materializing across the stone cliffs in an endless, chaotic sequence. Hovering smoothly above the clouds, a gargantuan cybernetic bird construct carried a premier delegation of dozens of senior resistance officers who stood upon the upper deck house with cool, unbothered countenances.
Anchoring the absolute vanguard of the platform, the chief silhouette bore a highly distinctive, angular red tattoo across the left hemisphere of his face. His long, untamed black hair danced freely across the wind currents, his sharp features entirely clear of a single ripple of emotional instability.
He was none other than Luffy's biological father—the Supreme Commander of the global resistance, Monkey D. Dragon!
Standing firmly behind his boots was a high-volume deployment of the Revolutionary Army's elite executive branch, comfortably clearing the several-dozen mark.
Directly flanking Dragon's right wing anchored the focused frame of Koala.
"Clear all defensive obstacles managed by the regime's border divisions. Optimize our tracking vector to execute a total, maximum-velocity blitzkrieg onto the absolute zenith of Mary Geoise!" A high-altitude gale swept past, sending Dragon's long hair streaming across the void.
"Understood! Supreme Commander!"
Out from the dense ranks flanking Dragon's spine, five premier executives stepped forward, unsealing their specialized flight configurations as they rocketed into the upper sky currents to clear the path.
Before a brief interval could elapse, a massive registry of Marine defensive guards began falling from the high battlements like autumn leaves, a frantic hurricane of chaotic alarms and clashing steel echoing down from the summit.
The bodies of the regime's soldiers tumbled past the flanks of the colossal mechanical bird. Yet Dragon's gaze remained immovably fixed to lock onto the white marble spires of the Holy Land of Mary Geoise.
From this historic afternoon forward, the global timeline would permanently redact the tyrannical, corrupted dominance of the Celestial Dragons from existence!