Finn's dual-fruit ability was one of the most carefully kept secrets in the Marine.
Only a handful of people close to him and a select few senior officers knew about it. He had used the Dark-Dark Fruit's power once before, back in Alabasta, but that situation had been so thoroughly chaotic that no one had been in a position to isolate and examine any one detail of what Finn had done. Afterward, there had been questions about the strange dark power that had appeared in Alabasta, but no one had arrived at the correct answer. A person with dual Devil Fruit abilities was outside the range of what most people considered possible. As long as Finn didn't volunteer the information himself, the conclusion was effectively unreachable.
Katakuri was extremely sharp, and he was still confused about it.
He had other problems at the moment. The whole island was a sea of magma and fire, courtesy of Sakazuki operating at full and unrestricted output, and Katakuri's Mochi-Mochi Fruit was not built for this environment. Sticky in nature, sensitive to heat -- in this temperature, his ability would bake solid the moment he tried to extend it. He was effectively fighting with one hand behind his back just by being on this island right now.
He had found a patch of ground that the lava hadn't reached yet and was standing on it, watching the situation develop with Future Sight and trying to calculate the least catastrophic version of the next few minutes. He couldn't take Sakazuki -- the magma environment alone made that a losing proposition before the power differential was even factored in. He had fought Finn before and knew what that felt like. Finn had been stronger than him then, and whatever had just happened to Marco suggested that the gap had not narrowed.
His options were: organize an evacuation, maintain whatever order remained, and stay well away from either admiral.
Then Marco appeared and was gone in the space of one exchange.
Katakuri watched it happen from across the burning field. He had never seen Marco taken out of a fight that quickly. The blue flames that should have been regenerating everything just... hadn't. Something in what Finn had done had reached inside Marco's ability and turned it off.
He was still processing this when Finn finished sealing Marco, floated the sphere into the air, and turned around.
Their eyes met.
Finn's eyes had no whites in them. Just black, all the way through, with something moving in the depths of them that Katakuri's observation Haki hit like a wall. The Future Sight triggered immediately and showed him what came next in absolute clarity.
He was dead. Not injured, not overwhelmed -- dead, in the next instant, without being able to raise a hand.
Katakuri did not waste a single moment being brave about this. His feet pushed off the ground hard and he was already moving before his conscious mind had finished receiving the signal, diving sideways across the open ground in a flat sprint, covering distance between himself and his previous position as fast as his body could manage.
The ground where he had been standing erupted. A dark power detonated upward through the rock, and earth and debris shot into the air in a Planetary Devastation formation -- smaller than usual, precisely sized, intended for exactly one person. It found nothing.
Finn blinked. He was, briefly, genuinely surprised.
Katakuri was not at the level of Newgate or Kaido. But he was, by any honest accounting, one of the strongest combatants alive. For a man like that to take one look at him and run -- not hesitate, not posture, just turn and sprint with no attempt at a parting threat -- was new information about something.
He was curious what he looked like from the outside, these days.
Still, "I'll let you run" was not a sentence that formed itself in Finn's head.
"Katakuri! Get back here and fight!" He was already moving, Geppo propelling him across the sky, the night air and firelight blurring around him as his speed climbed.
Ahead of him, Katakuri was running hard, and running with good technique -- low center of gravity, efficient strides, eyes fixed forward. He was not looking back. Looking back would cost him a fraction of a second he clearly did not feel he could spare.
"Why is it me?!" Katakuri's internal monologue was not being shared with anyone, but if it had been, it would have been considerably angrier. "Kaido is over there losing his mind! Go deal with Kaido! Why are you chasing the one person who made the correct decision and started running?!"
The ground under his feet dropped away.
A radius of fifty meters around him simply came apart, earth and stone rising into the air, pulled by an invisible force centered on him. Even his own body began to drift upward, drawn by the same pull.
He turned as he rose, looking back at Finn with an expression that combined fury and resignation in roughly equal measure. He started to say something.
"Planetary Devastation!" Finn pressed his palms together and pushed.
The debris field closed around Katakuri from every direction. A stone caught him in the face before he got a full sentence out, and then the rest of it followed -- earth and rock wrapping around him, compressing, and then the dark power seeping in through the cracks, threading through the stone, reaching for Katakuri's ability and beginning the process of nullifying it. The sphere sealed. It rose into the air to keep company with the one containing Marco.
Finn was turning back to the main engagement when the magma below him split open.
Something came through it fast -- moving through the sea of fire from beneath, shielded from the magma by the sun-fire of Prometheus burning around her like a protective shell. She had been down there waiting, buried in the heat, patient, watching for the right moment. And the right moment was clearly this: Finn with both hands occupied, focus divided between sealing Katakuri and tracking the wider battle.
Charlotte Linlin erupted from the magma, her whole body wreathed in flame, the Emperor Sword already in motion. She brought it up in a rising slash, angled directly at Finn from below.
"Ikoku Sovereignty!!!"
The technique was genuine. The timing was genuine. Linlin had assessed the situation with the strategic clarity that made her dangerous -- she wasn't hoping to kill Finn, she was hoping to hurt him badly enough to matter, and she had chosen the single best window available to attempt it. The killing intent in the sword was real and enormous.
Finn turned his head.
His completely black eyes found her over his shoulder, just as the strike was coming in.
Charlotte Linlin looked into those eyes and felt something crawl up her spine that she hadn't felt in decades.
Dark power detonated in the air between them. It didn't deflect the slash or block it -- it spread through it the same way it had spread through Kaido's breath attack, threading into the technique like a dye, saturating it, and then the space around it twisted and collapsed inward, and the Ikoku strike, which should have connected, was simply gone. Swallowed. As if it had never been launched.
Katakuri's sphere sealed itself and floated upward.
Finn turned fully to face Linlin.
"You rotten old woman," he said, with the specific tone of someone who is not actually that surprised but is still irritated about it. "You really thought you'd sneak up on me?"
Charlotte Linlin hung in the air above the magma field, staring at the space where her technique had disappeared, genuinely unable to account for what she had just witnessed. Thirty meters. The Ikoku's range covered thirty meters easily in every direction. There was no position Finn could have been standing in from which a clean dodge was possible. She had timed it herself. She had been watching from underneath the magma for this specific configuration of factors.
And the attack was gone. Not blocked. Gone.
Before she could finish working through it, Finn raised one hand and grabbed at the air.
His fist was empty. But something reached out of it.
Charlotte Linlin felt the pull begin. She recognized it -- gravity, she thought, Finn pulling her in with his Press-Press Fruit -- and she began pushing back against it. At her size and her level of Haki investment, resisting a gravity pull was a matter of output, and her output was not small.
It didn't work.
The resistance she was applying was the right kind for gravity. This wasn't gravity. It was something older and stranger than gravity, something that reached past physical force and past Haki reinforcement and simply pulled. The Dark-Dark Fruit's attraction toward ability users didn't negotiate with strength. It pulled regardless.
She was moving toward him whether she pushed back or not.
Linlin was not a person who panicked, and she didn't panic now. She armored herself instead -- Armament Haki flowing over her entire body in a surging wave, dense and layered, the kind of defense that had earned her the name Iron Balloon. If she was going to close the distance, she would arrive protected.
She crashed into Finn's hand.
She was too large to be grabbed, which was not a circumstance that usually helped her opponents. Finn didn't try to hold on. With his other hand, he drove his fist directly into the top of her head with the full combined output of Armament Haki and compressed gravity behind it.
The Iron Balloon had never been iron against someone whose Haki was stronger than hers.
The layered armor shattered inward. The punch continued through it and landed on her nose with the specific cruelty of someone who had aimed for the nose deliberately. The gravity element in the strike detonated on contact.
Charlotte Linlin, for just a moment, went head-heavy. She flipped in the air, top-heavy, her massive body rotating backward under the force, and then the trajectory finished itself and she went down -- through the magma surface, into the rock beneath it, digging a crater that closed over her as the lava flowed back in to fill the space.
The fire and magma poured in after her.
A brief silence settled over that patch of the battlefield.
Then Finn rolled his shoulder, shook out his hand, and looked around for what was next.