The thick wooden hull of the World Government galleon was splintered into jagged shards. Deep within the crushed deck, Bartholomew Kuma slowly opened his eyes. The simulated defeat orchestrated by Ben had been physically harmless, but visually spectacular. To the Marines watching from the shore and the CP0 agents observing from the masts, it looked as though the Warlord had been brutally overpowered.
Kuma pushed a heavy beam of wood off his chest. He stood up, dusting off his black coat. He retrieved his worn Bible from the rubble, tucking it inside his coat.
His role as a covert ally was secure for now. But he still had to maintain his cover as a weapon of the World Government. He looked toward the western wall of Thriller Bark, where the sounds of artillery fire and crashing stone echoed through the fog. The pirate rookies—the Supernovas—were advancing.
Kuma raised his right hand, removing his glove to expose the soft paw pad on his palm. He took a single, deliberate swipe at the air.
BZZT.
In a flash of displaced atmosphere, Kuma vanished from the ruined galleon.
He reappeared instantly near the shattered western perimeter. The cobblestone courtyard here was swarming with marine soldiers, but they were being systematically dismantled.
Capone Gang Bege puffed on a cigar, laughing as he unloaded relentless cannon fire from his chest cavity into the undead ranks.
Trafalgar Law was calmly operating within a blue spherical Room, amputating zombie limbs without shedding a drop of blood, while Scratchmen Apoo blasted explosive sound waves through the graveyard.
Kuma landed silently on a stone archway overlooking the rookies. He didn't speak. He simply raised both hands, aiming his palms down at the chaotic battlefield.
"Pad Ho." (Pressure Cannon)
Kuma pushed the air. Dozens of paw-shaped bubbles of highly compressed air shot downward at supersonic speeds.
The air bullets slammed into the ground between the Supernovas. The force blew sent the pirate captains skidding backward.
Scratchmen Apoo dug his boots into the dirt to stop himself. He looked up, his eyes narrowing at the towering figure. "The Warlord! Bartholomew Kuma! Apapapapa! Finally, a real target!"
"Don't be reckless, Apoo," Law warned, gripping his nodachi. "He is not a normal human. His repelling power is absolute."
Kuma moved. He blurred, using his light-speed repel to appear directly in the middle of the Supernova formation. He didn't throw a lethal strike. He remembered his silent vow to the Magician. He would fight them, but he would not permanently maim them.
Kuma swept his arm in a wide arc. The resulting shockwave of compressed air hit Apoo, and Drake threw them backward into the ruins. It wasn't a lethal blow, but it carried the blunt-force weight of a falling boulder, effectively stalling their advance and keeping them occupied.
Unnoticed by the clashing Supernovas, deep within the shadows of the rubble left by Ben's earlier catastrophic punch, a massive, onion-shaped figure groaned.
Gecko Moria rubbed his bruised head, slowly peeling himself out of a cracked stone pillar. He peered through the thick fog, his eyes widening as he took in the sheer scale of the war unfolding across his island. Two Admirals, a Warlord, an army of Marines, and the Worst Generation were tearing Thriller Bark apart.
Moria realized immediately that he stood absolutely no chance in a direct confrontation. But he was a master opportunist.
"Kishishishi..." Moria whispered, a dark, desperate grin spreading across his stitched face. "Let them fight. Let them exhaust themselves."
He slinked deeper into the shadows, moving quietly along the perimeter of the battlefields. He utilized his Devil Fruit, sending his own shadow detaching and sliding across the ground like a serpent. Whenever a Marine or a pirate fell unconscious in the crossfire, Moria's shadow silently snipped their shadow away, absorbing it to stockpile strength.
Meanwhile, in the main courtyard leading to Moria's palace, Ben stood near the center of the crowd. He reached into his spatial storage pouch. He pulled out the original, heavily modified wooden caravel Going Merry, currently shrunk to the size of a toy model.
He set it gently on the cobblestones.
"Command T: Enlarge."
The air warped. The ship rapidly expanded to its full, original size.
"Merry," Ben called out. "Initiate launch sequence."
Mini Merry, standing nearby, nodded sharply. "Understood, Papa. Vanguard protocol engaged."
Merry hopped onto the deck. The ground shook. Everyone watched in awe as the Going Merry began to physically shift. The hull split down the center, folding outward to form two massive, reinforced legs. The side panels shifted into heavy, articulated arms, ending in massive fists.
In less than ten seconds, the caravel had transformed into a towering, thirty-foot-tall bipedal robot. Mini Merry sat securely inside a reinforced cockpit located in the robot's head.
"Mecha-Merry online," Merry's voice echoed smoothly through the robot's external speakers.
Meanwhile, on the eastern front of the island, Monkey D. Luffy was locked in a blistering, high-speed brawl with Admiral Akainu.
But as the thirty-foot-tall wooden robot rose above the ruined walls in the distance, Luffy paused. He looked over the battlefield, completely dropping his fighting stance.
"MECHA!" Luffy roared, his eyes turning into massive, sparkling stars. "SO COOL!"
"Fool," Akainu growled.
Seizing the blatant opening, Akainu thrust his fist forward. A glancing blow of blistering, molten rock grazed Luffy's shoulder.
"YEOOOW! HOT! HOT! HOT!" Luffy yelped dramatically, frantically patting out the singed fabric on his shirt and hopping from foot to foot.
Nearby, Zoro glanced over his shoulder, a vein throbbing on his forehead. "Pay attention, you idiot! You're losing concentration again! He's an Admiral, not a training dummy!"
"Sorry! My bad!" Luffy apologized quickly. He snapped his focus back.
Akainu fired a rapid volley of concentrated magma hounds—Meigo variants—directly at Luffy. Instead of stretching his arms to punch them, Luffy ripped a massive, twenty-foot stone pillar out of the ground. He coated it entirely in Haki, wound up his hips, and swung it like a baseball bat.
"Gomu Gomu no Homerun"
CRACK!
Luffy batted the magma hounds perfectly back at the Marine fleet in the bay. One of the hounds struck a distant galleon, its hull instantly incinerating as the ship began to sink under Akainu's own attack.
Back in the courtyard, Sunny tugged on Ben's coat. "Papa! Can I have one too?!"
Ben reached back into his spatial pouch and pulled out a metallic red-and-gold capsule. It unfolded instantly into the Hulkbuster armor.
"Get in," Ben instructed. Sunny ran forward, the front of the armor sealing shut around him.
"Listen closely, both of you," Ben said, looking at the two towering machines. "Take a look at your hands. I outfitted your knuckles with pure, marine-grade Seastone."
Mecha-Merry and Hulkbuster Sunny raised their massive fists, the dull grey stone gleaming.
High above the courtyard, the three agents of CP0 blurred, disappearing from the mast of a galleon using Soru. They possessed a mastery of Haki and Rokushiki that rivaled the power levels seen in the New World.
The agent in the Featureless mask moved fastest. Mid-air, he transformed into a massive, jagged stone demon. He had the Ishi Ishi no Mi, Model: Gargoyle.
He dove at Robin, his heavy stone claws extended. Robin didn't panic. She crossed her arms.
"Cien Fleur: Spider Net."
A hundred arms sprouted, woven together and coated in a deep purple, metallic sheen of Armament Haki.
CLANG!
The Gargoyle crashed into the Haki-coated net. Robin focused her will, sprouted massive arms from the ground, and grabbed the Gargoyle by his stone wings. With a sharp, sudden twist, she snapped the stone appendages mid-air. "Statues shouldn't try to fly," Robin stated coldly.
The remaining two CP0 agents—the Mirror-Mirror agent (Owl mask) and the Acid Logia (Smiling mask)—charged forward.
Ben stepped into their path.
The Smiling mask agent activated the San San no Mi, his body dissolving into bubbling green acid. He lunged at Mecha-Merry's leg. The hull, reinforced by Ben's enchantments, completely ignored the corrosive liquid.
"Rocket Punch protocol!" Merry's voice boomed.
The giant robot's right fist detached from the arm, propelled by a blue thruster. It flew across the courtyard, slamming the Acid agent directly into a stone wall before magnetically flying back and reattaching to the arm with a satisfying click.
Simultaneously, the Owl mask agent activated the Garasu Garasu no Mi. He slammed his hands onto the cobblestones, and a forest of jagged, translucent glass spikes erupted around Hulkbuster Sunny, enclosing the massive armor in a crystalline cage.
"Initiating blunt force trauma!" Sunny announced.
Sunny didn't try to navigate the maze. He overclocked the Arc Reactor in his chest, coated his Seastone fists in blue energy, and simply punched the "air" so hard the entire glass structure shattered like a dropped chandelier.
The Owl mask agent tried to transform into a swarm of razor-sharp glass needles to fly through Sunny's armor joints, but Sunny's fist was already there. The Seastone knuckles made contact with the agent's chest. The agent's Devil Fruit power instantly short-circuited as he was forced back into a solid state. He was launched backward by the multi-ton impact, crashing through several brick walls before falling unconscious.
Ben watched his crew work. His Advanced Observation Haki spiked.
Yata no Kagami.
A blinding yellow light pierced the fog. An Admiral was moving at the speed of light directly toward the island.
"Hold the line," Ben ordered. Ben's body lifted off the ground, shooting straight up into the sky like a missile.
High above the island, a beam of pure light materialized into Admiral Kizaru.
"Moshi moshi..." Kizaru drawled. "You look much scarier in person, Magician."
"Speed is weight, Admiral," Ben replied, his silver hair blowing in the thin air.
"Indeed it is," Kizaru raised his leg, it began to glow. "Have you ever been kicked at the speed of light?"
Kizaru vanished. A beam of light shot at Ben's head.
Ben's golden armor flared to life, Haki-coated and radiant. He tilted his head a fraction of an inch, the beam grazing his visor, before catching Kizaru's leg mid-air. The shockwave cleared the clouds for miles.
"Have you ever been hit by a mountain?" Ben countered.
Ben swung his left fist, the space around it warping with gravity. Kizaru dissolved into light, reforming thirty feet away. "Arara... making light heavy? That's quite troublesome."
Kizaru used his Yata no Kagami, creating a beam of light to bounce off floating atmospheric debris, attacking Ben from multiple angles at light-speed.
Ben didn't move. His golden eyes glowed. "Ruler's Authority."
With a casual wave of his hand, Ben used his telekinesis to instantly rearrange the floating debris in the sky into a closed, circular loop. Kizaru, already in his light-beam form, found himself bouncing infinitely in a perfect circle of his own making.
Kizaru was forced to manually cancel the move, reforming mid-air, looking slightly dizzy. "Arara... did you just make a pinball out of an Admiral? The youth these days have zero respect for their elders."
"The World doesn't wait for your nap, Admiral," Ben said, his voice deep and resonating through his golden armor.
Kizaru sighed, adjusting his glasses. "I suppose I should stop slacking. Ama no Murakumo."
He drew a long, gleaming sword made of pure light. He vanished again, appearing in front of Ben in a blur of yellow. The two collided, a sequence of strikes happening so fast the air itself began to ignite from the friction.
CLANG! CLANG! CLANG!
Ben's armored fists met the light-blade, black lightning and yellow photons spraying across the sky like fireworks. Every time Kizaru tried to blitz, Ben's gravity fields pulled him off balance, forcing the Admiral to fight a stationary, heavy opponent who refused to budge.
"You're fast, Admiral," Ben grunted, catching the light-blade between his palms and crushing the energy with a pulse of Haki. "But light still has to travel through space. And space belongs to me."
"How scary," Kizaru murmured, his expression finally losing its lazy edge.
The two of them pulled back, charging their respective energies—one a blinding sun of yellow light, the other a collapsing star of golden gravity. They lunged forward one last time, colliding in a silent, world-shaking explosion of light and gravity high above the fog.
Meanwhile in the Eastern side
Luffy and Akainu were no longer holding back. The ground between them had turned into a literal lake of fire. Akainu's presence alone was melting the stone walls of the castle.
"You're a persistent brat, son of Dragon," Akainu growled. He lunged forward, his entire body liquefying into a massive wave of magma. "Inugami Guren!" (Dog-Bite Red Lotus).
Three massive hounds of molten rock erupted from the wave, snapping their jaws as they lunged at Luffy from three different angles.
Luffy's eyes flashed red. He didn't jump. He leaned his body back at an impossible angle, the first hound passing over his chest. He pivoted on his heel, the second hound missing his shoulder. For the third, he threw a high-speed kick, his leg coated in Haki.
KRA-POW!
"I told you!" Luffy yelled, "I'm the Captain! You can't catch me!"
Luffy disappeared. He appeared directly above Akainu, his arms retracted so far back they looked like coiled springs. "Gomu Gomu no... Red Roc Gatling!"
A torrential barrage of Haki-coated, fire-infused punches rained down. Each strike created a small sonic boom. Akainu raised his magma arms, the two forces clashing with the sound of a thousand hammers hitting an anvil.
"Absolute Justice will not be denied by a fluke of nature!" Akainu roared, his magma turning a blinding, volatile white. "Ryusei Kazan: Hellfire!"
The sky rained liquid death as Akainu unleashed a concentrated version of his meteor shower, aiming to trap Luffy in a cage of falling lava.
---
Zoro and Sanji were a blur of green and yellow against the frozen backdrop of Aokiji's Ice Age. The Admiral had completely frozen the eastern harbor, turning the sea into a crystalline battlefield.
Aokiji stood calmly, his hands creating a long, jagged spear of ice. "Ice Block: Partisan."
He hurled it at Sanji. At the same time, he sent a wave of frost creeping across the floor toward Zoro's feet. "Ice Age: Floor."
Sanji spun mid-air, his right leg glowing with a heat so intense it turned the air into steam. "Poêle à Frire: Spectre!" He unleashed a flurry of kicks, the flaming shockwaves melting the ice spears before they could reach him.
"Don't get too close to the ice, Marimo!" Sanji yelled, landing and immediately launching a low sweep that sent a wave of white-hot fire toward Aokiji.
"Worry about your own suit, Cook!" Zoro retorted. He drew Shusui and Sandai Kitetsu. He stepped into the creeping frost, his Haki flowing through his boots to prevent them from freezing to the ground. "Santoryu: Karasuma Gari!" (Three Sword Style: Crow Hunt).
Zoro moved with a jagged, unpredictable rhythm, his slashes cutting through the freezing mist Aokiji used for cover. The air around Zoro seemed to vibrate with a demonic, purple aura. He met Aokiji's ice-sword head-on.
CLANG!
The ice held against the Haki-coated steel for a heartbeat before shattering, but Aokiji simply reformed it instantly.
"Arara... you're both very energetic," Aokiji sighed, though his eyes were sharp. "Ice Ball."
He exhaled a massive cloud of freezing vapor, aiming to encase the duo in a giant orb of absolute-zero ice.
Sanji and Zoro didn't retreat. They stood back-to-back.
"On three?" Sanji asked, his leg flaring to life.
"Whatever," Zoro grunted, crossing his swords.
They launched a massive, coordinated counter-attack, a cyclone of fire and steel that tore into the center of the blizzard, the clash of elements creating a massive, pressurized dome of steam that obscured the entire coastline.