Two days passed.
It was night, and the hour before dawn -- the deepest part of the dark, when the world offers nothing to the eye and even shapes at arm's length become guesswork. The stars overhead were the only light that mattered, and at altitude they were enough.
"Is that Beehive Island?" Finn asked, pointing down.
Far below, the sea was a flat sheet of black, and somewhere on it sat a dark mass with scattered flickers of fire dotting its surface. The lights of an inhabited place. Almost certainly an island.
Sakazuki was quiet for a moment, squinting. "That should be it," he said, with slightly less certainty than the situation ideally called for.
"There's only one island in this area," Finn said. "Unless we've gone completely off the chart, there's no other option."
Sakazuki pulled a monocular telescope from his coat and trained it downward.
"Hahaha, it's pitch black, you know. A telescope isn't going to do much for you."
Sakazuki said nothing. He kept looking. After a while, at the very center of the island's silhouette, a shape resolved itself from the darkness -- unmistakable once seen, a massive skull rendered in stone and iron, the architectural emblem of the Rocks era. A landmark from a different age, repurposed as a pirate stronghold. Lavish inside, according to every account. The kind of structure that survived because nobody with the means to tear it down had ever found a good enough reason to bother.
"It's Beehive Island," Sakazuki said. The certainty was there now.
Finn nodded. "Then we proceed."
"Let's give them a proper good morning," Sakazuki said, and put the telescope away.
They moved to the front of the deck together. The temperature around Sakazuki shifted first -- a low, volcanic warmth beginning to radiate off his body as the lava stirred beneath his skin. Finn pressed his palms together in front of his chest, and the dark power in him answered immediately, rising to the surface like something that had been waiting.
"Dark Sky."
He said it quietly. The effect was not quiet at all.
A deep, pervasive darkness poured outward from him in every direction, swallowing the visible sky in a spreading wave. It moved fast and continued moving, a canopy of absolute black rolling over the air above Beehive Island until the moonlight and starlight were simply gone. From below, if anyone happened to be looking up at that precise moment, it would have read as clouds. Weather was strange in the New World. Clouds at night were not a cause for alarm.
This gave them their window.
"Now," Finn said.
Sakazuki raised both arms and fired.
Meteor Volcano -- but not the contained, tactical application Sakazuki usually deployed. He had been storing this. The output that came out of him now was the full accumulation of everything he had held back, and it was spectacular in the way that only genuine overextension of power can be. Dozens of enormous lava bombs shot skyward in rapid succession, one after another, until the air above Finn's dark canopy was a churning ceiling of fire viewed from the wrong side -- light bleeding through in all directions, the sky above the darkness blazing like the inside of a furnace.
None of it fell. Not yet.
A faint purple shimmer pulsed through the air, almost invisible against the dark and the fire. Gravity, holding everything suspended, the entire impossible weight of Sakazuki's output hanging motionless in the sky while the dark canopy kept it hidden from view below.
Sakazuki fired a final volley, then stopped and drew a long breath. "Your turn."
"Don't worry about it," Finn said.
His expression had settled into something that wasn't quite calm and wasn't quite focus -- something that looked like both, but ran deeper than either. He raised one hand toward the sky. An invisible reach extended upward through the atmosphere, feeling for the right kind of mass at the right kind of altitude, and found it.
Two meteorites answered the pull. They entered the upper air already burning, trailing light, growing as they fell toward the waiting gravity field.
Heaven Shocking Star.
Then his eyes changed. The whites disappeared entirely, filled in by a spreading blackness that turned his gaze into something from a nightmare. The dark energy rolling off him thickened, almost visible now, a presence rather than just an absence of light. He looked down at Beehive Island, and his voice was very soft.
"Doomsday. Go."
The dark canopy stopped holding. It inverted, the suspended darkness becoming something else entirely -- a vessel tilting, pouring outward. What came down through it was not rain. It was the kerosene stores they had loaded onto the ship in preparation for exactly this, now released through the dark sky in a slow, pervasive flood, invisible in the blackness above the island, falling like weather.
Far below, a patrol team was making their rounds with torches, sweating despite the hour.
"Does anyone else feel that? It got warm."
"Right? It shouldn't be this warm at night."
"It's like something's cooking us from above."
They had not finished working out what was happening when the kerosene reached them.
"Is that -- rain?"
The first drops hit. Someone held out a hand, feeling the wet on their skin. "It is. It's actually raining. But why is it hot--"
The torch caught it first. The oil-drenched air around the flame ignited in an instant, and the man holding it became a column of fire.
"Kerosene!" someone screamed. "It's raining kerosene!!!"
Even then, the instinct was wrong. In the New World, strange things fell from the sky with enough regularity that the brain reaches for shelter before it reaches for comprehension. The patrol team scattered, looking for cover.
They did not find it in time.
The two meteorites and the full suspended weight of Sakazuki's Meteor Volcano had been following the dark canopy down from the moment Finn released them. They caught up with it now, striking it from above, and the dark sky -- which would not stop them, had never been meant to stop them -- simply tore open.
The kerosene-saturated air above Beehive Island met the meteor fire.
The entire sky turned red.
It happened in a single instant. The meteorites punched through the collapsing dark canopy and continued toward the island. The magma rounds from Meteor Volcano fanned out across every quadrant of the sky above the island. And the kerosene, still hanging in the air in vast unburned quantities, ignited all at once in every direction. The horizon above Beehive Island became a solid sheet of fire, a blazing ceiling falling toward the ground.
Below, everything stopped.
The pirates of three Emperor-level organizations stood in the open and looked up. Some of them had time to understand what was happening. Most of them did not.
In the skull building at the island's center, Newgate came awake and threw open the window. He looked out at the sky that had become fire and was, for one full second, completely still.
Then anger replaced the shock, and he raised his fist and punched.
A powerful shockwave burst outward from his knuckles -- tremor force, raw and immediate. It was a hasty attack. There was no time to build into it the way he normally would, no time to compress and aim. The meteorites were already a hundred meters up, falling fast with Finn's gravity accelerating the descent, and Newgate's shockwave wasn't enough to stop both.
One meteorite shattered. The fragments continued falling regardless, raining destruction across the eastern half of the island.
The second struck clean. It hit the center of Beehive Island with the sound of something ending, and the ground opened under the impact into a pit that had no visible bottom.
Then Sakazuki's Meteor Volcano arrived.
Rounds came down across the entire island in an overlapping curtain, systematic coverage from every angle, the skull building struck and partly collapsed, Newgate running and not quite fast enough to stay ahead of the rain. Kerosene that hadn't yet burned was ignited by the falling lava on contact, and Beehive Island -- pirate haven, former seat of the Rocks crew, stronghold of three Emperor-level organizations -- became a single connected conflagration. Fire to the horizon in every direction. Ships in the port burning at anchor, then underwater. The screaming of people who were on fire was everywhere, mixed with the sound of structures collapsing into their own foundations.
The order of the coalition dissolved inside of thirty seconds.
Experienced cadres moved immediately to organize a response, rallying people, clearing paths. They kept most of their organizations from complete collapse. It wasn't enough. The fire was everywhere, the smoke was everywhere, the heat was a physical pressure, and people who had been elite pirates twenty minutes ago were now simply people trying not to die.
Newgate found a position with slightly more defensible ground. He pulled himself to full height and drove his fist into the air.
The tremor force tore through the smoke and fire in a straight line, blasting a corridor of breathable air through the chaos.
Survivors converged on it immediately, pouring through the gap he had made, some of them barely moving, some of them on fire. He kept it open, kept the path clear, scanning the chaos with eyes that were furious and calculating at the same time.
Then the ground beneath his feet simply came apart.
The stone cracked and dropped, and an invisible weight descended on everything within the island's perimeter simultaneously. Not the fire, not debris -- something pressing down from above with the specific, all-encompassing quality that had no natural explanation.
He knew exactly what it was.
"FINN!!!"
The roar went up from somewhere deep in his chest, rage and recognition together.
Aboard the assault ship still high above, Finn had drawn Shindokutō. The blade was in his right hand, and through it the gravity elements flowed -- concentrated, shaped, pushed outward into the island below in a single coherent domain. The Dark Sky was gone now, its function complete, but the Gravity Domain had taken its place over the entire island.
Sakazuki watched the island from above and saw it clearly: every person on Beehive Island pressed under a weight they could not fight, the corridor Newgate had burned open with his tremor force now meaningless because the gravity didn't care about open air. It pressed through everything.
Shindokutō came down in a single slash.
"Gravity Domain -- Flame Binding."
The fire was already there. The gravity locked it into place, not letting it rise or dissipate, pressing it down and inward. The corridor Newgate had made closed. The fire filled every space the blast had cleared. From above it looked like watching a trap complete itself.
Then something moved through the fire.
A shape emerged from the sea of flame -- massive, serpentine, a dragon's form that the kerosene coating should have destroyed and hadn't. The fire clung to the scales and kept burning, but the dragon didn't acknowledge it. Its head came up, and out of its throat came something vast and superheated, a breath that moved like a wall of pressure straight up toward the ship.
Kaido.
"Finally," Sakazuki said, and the magma in his hands ignited. He stepped forward with the specific kind of enthusiasm of a man who has been waiting his turn.
But before he could move, Finn looked at the incoming breath. He didn't move his sword arm. He didn't set his feet. He just looked at it with his black-filled eyes, and dark aura extended outward from him like a living thing, reaching into the breath as it rose, threading through it.
The darkness spread through the heat the way dye moves through water. The superheated breath, which had been a wall of destruction a moment ago, went black. Then it twisted. Then it was gone -- collapsed inward and swallowed, not deflected or absorbed but unmade, the energy taken and disappeared, like a candle snuffed between two fingers.
The entire process took no longer than a blink.
Sakazuki lowered his hands.
"I didn't even get to move," he said.