"Hey, System, what do you mean by that? Are you saying I can actually use my own moves while piloting the Going Guard?" Drake asked excitedly.
Drake didn't care at all about the attacks coming from the outside; it was completely impossible for them to breach the Going Guard's defenses. From the very beginning, this battle had been an absolute foregone conclusion.
However, the words of the system successfully piqued Drake's interest. The circumstances right now were unique; if the Going Guard's power was limited only to this, the amplification to his overall strength wouldn't be very significant.
But if he could still seamlessly unleash his own techniques and abilities in this state, then the entire equation changed completely.
For him, it would undoubtedly be a qualitative leap!
[SYSTEM NOTIFICATION: To reach the level of freely wielding your own power, you must achieve a state of perfect unity between man and machine with the Going Guard.]
[The specific details remain for the Host to discover independently.]
"Unity of man and machine..." Drake murmured under his breath, his eyes lighting up with an increasingly brilliant shine.
Though he didn't quite understand the mechanics behind it, the concept sounded exceptionally alluring.
"System, then how exactly do I achieve this unity of man and machine?" Drake asked in his mind, his face filled with eager anticipation.
After a long silence, Drake's smile gradually froze.
"Conned by the system again! You absolute bastard, pulling a vanishing act on me once more!"
Exasperated as he was, Drake was already well-accustomed to this behavior. Given the system's toxic nature, the fact that it had voluntarily disclosed the existence of the man-machine unity was already an exceptionally rare miracle.
"Clear the sector!" Drake roared, piloting the Going Guard as he continuously swung the massive mechanical arms. The colossal strikes repeatedly swatted down the white-robed agents who were frantically scrambling through the air using Moonwalk.
While Moonwalk was far from slow, compared to the Going Guard's reality-bending instantaneous warp mechanics, it was pathetically sluggish.
They mathematically lacked the capacity to evade Drake's offensive output.
As Drake unleashed strike after strike, a petty thought crossed his mind: I might be completely powerless against that damn system, but do you really think I can't thoroughly discipline you little pests?
BOOM!
The destructive weight behind the Going Guard's strikes was simply not something these agents could endure. Before long, only two hostile targets remained standing across the sky.
The bald Elder of the Gorosei, and the lead white-robed operative.
"Guernica! How are your operational metrics holding up?" the bald Elder barked, rotating his focus to the agent flanking him.
Guernica was the name of the lead white-robed agent, the elite asset who had stepped up to assume the mantle of CP0 Chief after Rob Lucci's liquidation.
For his vessel to survive under Drake's continuous onslaught up to this hour verified that he genuinely possessed a formidable tier of capability.
At this juncture, outside the flagship, only Luffy and Sabo remained in the open airspace, having refrained from entering the Going Guard. The two brothers and the massive cybernetic mecha stared at the bald Elder and Guernica with highly amused expressions.
Across the undulating surface of the ocean, the silhouette of Pluton was no longer visible anywhere. The ancient engine of destruction that had slumbered for centuries had completely, permanently vanished from the global grid.
Returned to the deep ocean abyss.
The massive contingent of CP operatives the World Government had deployed for this campaign had been virtually wiped out in this single theater of war.
And this monumental climax was cleanly captured by the hidden lenses of watching spotters. Ever since the initial updates verifying the crisis in Arabasta had saturated the communications network, the global news tycoon, Big News Morgans, had been entirely incapable of calming his mind.
He had immediately funneled 100% of his press resources to monitor Drake's perimeter.
A significant registry of field journalists had kept their surveillance arrays locked onto the scene, desperate to transmit this monumental, reality-bending headline back to their respective headquarters at the first available fraction of a second.
A news dispatch possessing more than enough mass to force the entire civilized world to violently tremble was something they mathematically could not afford to miss.
Currently, it wasn't merely Drake's theater drawing global focus; the high-stakes campaign initialized by the Revolutionary Army launching a direct blitzkrieg against the World Government at the Holy Land of Mary Geoise was synchronously riveting the attention of the entire planet.
"Urgent dispatch to Chief! A monumental headline! The Ancient Weapon Pluton... has been completely sunk!!"
"WHAT THE HELL?!"
Within minutes, every major press syndicate erupted into a frantic hurricane of absolute chaos once more.
"Frantic knots! Broadcast to all four seas..."
Before long, the entire planet boiled over with pure, unadulterated shock, every single soul locked in a state of absolute disbelief.
Because a verified global dispatch had just cleared the networks.
The newly awakened Ancient Weapon Pluton had been ruthlessly pulverized into shattered splinters by the synchronized forces of the Emperor Drake and Straw Hat Luffy along the coast of Arabasta, plunged permanently beneath the waves.
An intelligence log of this scale was simply too staggering to process.
The mythical engine Pluton had been directly demolished by the vanguard of the New Era's rising powerhouses.
Who could logically digest a reality of this tier without experiencing a profound shock?
Initially, the civilian populations and minor factions harbored deep doubts regarding the parameters; after all, executing the physical destruction of an Ancient Weapon was a narrative that sounded far too preposterous to track as authentic fact.
However, the global newspapers saturating the stands carried a definitive, high-resolution photographic print. Backed by the absolute visual evidence of that single photograph, the entire world erupted into manic fervor.
The frame vividly mapped the exact microsecond the humanoid configuration of the Going Guard discharged its Ion Blast to cleanly punch through the hull of Pluton.
Staring at the visual data, the shock fracturing the features of populations across all four seas was completely beyond reproach.
The legendary Pluton had been bisected by a solitary, concentrated energy discharge from an alternative vessel!
Exactly what classification of humanoid machine was that cybernetic titan? No one could unearth a stable answer to deliver to the public.
Because even the chief editors operating inside the central press rooms possessed absolute zero data decoding its structural blueprints.
They merely logged data verifying that this anomalous asset was strictly tied to the Emperor Drake. After all, historical records verified that Drake had been the explicit architect who initially brought this vessel onto the sea, before his coordinates temporarily vanished from the grid.
A baseline analysis suggested that Drake's biological vessel was actively anchoring the interior core of that mysterious mechanical framework.
The Germa Kingdom.
Judge and his elite progeny stared immovably at the printed report, a highly specialized, burning light rippling across their pupils.
Although their internal databases lacked the parameters to identify what manner of machine this humanoid configuration simulated, their intellect cleanly isolated a core variable: this was invariably the supreme manifest of pure, advanced technology!
The reality-bending miracles engineered by the power of pure technology could occasionally prove even more mind-boggling than the absolute limits of Devil Fruit parameters. This display struck an exceptionally familiar chord within their minds.
It closely mirrored the engineering principles governing their own Germa Raid Suits; while the underlying algorithms were remarkably complex, the active combat mass they generated was staggeringly powerful.
"That construct is undeniably the manifest of an advanced technological tier our vanguard has never historically crossed horizons with!" Judge declared with absolute, iron-clad conviction.
A massive column of fanatical fervor ignited within his gaze—the raw, unrefined lust an elite engineer allocates toward an unmapped, supreme technological masterpiece.
Historically, he had comfortably assumed that the specialized Raid Suits engineered by Germa represented the absolute pinnacle of global technology. Yet analyzing the field this afternoon, the reality loudly proved that there would perpetually exist an alternative zenith sundering one's parameters, a sky beyond the sky.
"Germa 66! Optimize all navigation vectors—advance upon the Holy Land of Mary Geoise!" Judge swept his arm in a grand command, launching an immediate deployment decree.
Concurrently, across a completely isolated, desolate quadrant of the open sea, the three brothers firmly locked down the escape vectors of their remaining adversaries, hermetically sealing their coordinates.
Trapped within the massive mechanical fist of Drake's mecha, the bald Elder of the Gorosei desperately mobilized his raw muscle mass to struggle against the compression, yet his efforts yielded absolute zero efficiency.
A brief timeline prior, he had simulated a strategic premise assuming that if he and Guernica synchronized their combat mass to form a unified front, they would comfortably preserve at least a baseline winning percentage against the three brothers.
Yet looking at the field now, that hypothesis had thoroughly dissolved. His physical vessel was being pinned down like a static object, tightly squeezed within the unyielding grip of the Going Guard.
A solitary, crushing punch from the flagship had come perilously close to fracturing his foundational sanity.
As for Guernica, his structural status was even more wretched. Facing the synchronized, unrestricted offensive output of Luffy and Sabo simultaneously, his networks had been flatly denied a single fraction of an operational window to parry, enduring a brutal, one-sided sequence of absolute liquidation.
By this current hour, his entire frame was thoroughly charred black by Sabo's flames, fresh crimson continuously weeping from countless deep lacerations across his body, his presence reduced to a thoroughly pathetic wreck.
"This sundered all mathematical algorithms! Exactly what classification of force does this machine command? How could my independent vessel be rendered this pathetically weak?!" the bald Elder ground out, his internal psychology still violently refusing to accept the reality that he had been completely broken and subdued within a mere handful of exchanges.
He had simulated variables where he might sustain a direct kinetic impact from the Going Guard's chassis, but his calculations had entirely failed to project a reality where a single contact would completely redact his capacity to execute basic motor commands.
The weight behind that attack was far too monumental; a raw physical mass of this tier was something his databases had never historically logged across the seas.
"Exactly what classification of force do your own analytical models project it to be?" Drake countered, throwing the inquiry straight back into his face.
In truth, Drake's internal thoughts harbored a significant trace of genuine astonishment. This bald Elder had actually weaponized the raw structural density of his independent human frame to absorb the crushing kinetic strikes of the Going Guard head-on.
Under conventional parameters, an ordinary powerhouse absorbing the absolute maximum ceiling of the flagship's mechanical output would see their survival metrics permanently erased on the spot.
Yet this supreme sovereign of the global regime had successfully endured three consecutive, full-strength punches!
His physical scaffolding was remarkably hard.
Granted, following those three crushing strikes, he was currently being suspended inside Drake's palm like a thoroughly broken hound.