"Let's go down," Finn said, glancing at Sakazuki. "If we stay on the ship any longer, they'll find it and tear it apart."
"Understood," Sakazuki said. And then, without any further discussion, he stepped off the edge of the deck.
Finn watched him go. He hadn't anticipated that.
Could Sakazuki fly? Thinking about it -- if you shot magma in the opposite direction at sufficient pressure, you could generate enough thrust to approximate something. It wasn't flight in any clean sense, but it might get you to the ground without simply falling. Still, Finn hadn't expected him to just step off like that.
He was still processing this when Sakazuki, already dropping through the dark air below the ship, began to change.
His silhouette swelled. The heat spreading from him was visible even at distance, a corona of orange and red in the darkness, growing as his body expanded and shifted. By the time he was a hundred meters below the ship, Sakazuki had ceased to be a person and had become something else entirely: a meteorite. A single mass of compressed, superheated magma the size of three or four of the meteorites Finn had called down earlier, glowing white at its core and trailing fire, descending toward Beehive Island with the particular finality of something that had no plans to stop.
"Heavenly Fire -- Explode!!!"
The roar carried up even from that distance.
The full power of a Marine admiral was not something that got displayed often, and it was rarely described accurately by the people who had witnessed it. This was a reasonable demonstration of why.
Below, Newgate had already moved to meet it.
He saw what was falling. He had seen Sakazuki operate before -- not like this, but enough to understand the category of threat -- and the sight of that descending mass made something sharpen in his eyes that was equal parts rage and respect. He raised his arm, and the tremor force that erupted from his fist was not a casual thing. It tore the air apart as it traveled, a visible concussive wave moving at speed toward Sakazuki's descending mass.
The impact was audible from the ship. The magma meteorite shuddered -- visibly, measurably -- and did not stop.
Deep inside the glowing mass, Sakazuki had the full output of the Magma-Magma Fruit concentrated around him like armor, and he used all of it to absorb Newgate's strike and keep moving. The momentum barely slowed.
Kaido had transformed. The Blue Dragon was in the air now, massive and furious, and it roared -- a sound that moved through the body like a physical force. The wind shears that followed shredded the air around Sakazuki's descent, trying to redirect, to break the angle, to find some purchase against something that gave nothing back.
When that wasn't enough, Kaido changed tactics. Flame Clouds -- great churning rings of them -- rose from below and wrapped themselves around Sakazuki's mass, the levitating power of the clouds fighting against the gravitational pull, slowing the descent to something approaching manageable.
It held for a moment. Just a moment.
Then the pressure increased again, sharply, and Kaido looked up.
Finn had stepped off the ship.
He didn't fall the way Sakazuki had fallen -- no transformation, no growing mass of fire, nothing dramatic. He descended the way a person with complete confidence in the physics around them descends, gravity shaping itself around him rather than pulling him, his movement through the air more like riding a current than dropping through one. He reached out one hand as he fell and pressed it flat against the back of Sakazuki's magma form.
The gravity field expanded to encompass both of them.
Sakazuki felt the boost land and immediately responded -- a massive directional burst of magma shot out from the back of the meteorite, equal and opposite, a calculated thrust that added to the gravitational push and turned the already-unstoppable descent into something with genuine terminal intent.
"I'm right behind you, watch where you're spraying that--!" Finn pulled sideways, narrowly clear of the eruption pouring off Sakazuki's back. "You absolute idiot!"
Together and separately, they hit Beehive Island.
It was not like the first meteorite strike, the one that had punched a clean pit through the rock. That had been precision. This was something different. Sakazuki's magma form hit the ground and then spread -- outward, in every direction at once, a wave of superheated liquid rock surging away from the point of impact in a twenty-kilometer ring of obliteration. It moved like a tide, overrunning everything in its path, filling every depression in the terrain, consuming every structure that the first strike had left standing.
Anyone on the island who had survived the initial assault, who had found a wall or a cellar or a stretch of open ground to shelter on, found that their shelter was now underneath a wave of magma.
There were not many survivors of the second wave.
Newgate punched through it.
He drove his fist into the advancing magma wall and the shockwave that came out the other side was enough to clear a corridor through the liquid rock, forcing it back, holding it at bay. He stood at the edge of the hole he had made and stared through the settling steam and fire toward the figure emerging from the center of the destruction.
Sakazuki walked out of the magma that was still dripping from his body in long, slow rivulets. He walked without urgency. The island was burning behind him and around him and ahead of him, and he looked entirely at home in it -- because he was.
The Magma-Magma Fruit was a Logia. That distinction mattered here, and it mattered for a specific reason. Its users didn't just fight in environments that happened to contain their element. They created their element and then existed inside it, making any battlefield their battlefield within moments of engaging. Beehive Island, which had been a pirate stronghold an hour ago, was now a sea of fire and magma. It was Sakazuki's home ground. He would fight anyone here with full confidence, and he would be right to.
The one exception to that calculation -- and Sakazuki privately acknowledged it -- was Finn, whose Dark-Dark Fruit was a somewhat unreasonable thing to have to account for. But Finn was not his opponent today.
"Arrogant," Newgate said, and the intent in his voice was not just anger. It was something quieter and more serious.
Sakazuki smiled. "Is this a grand enough send-off for you, Whitebeard?"
The magma around him surged, and the two of them clashed.
From a distance, Marco had seen his opening. While Newgate occupied Sakazuki, he came in fast -- blue flames trailing from his wings, a long sword clutched between his taloned feet. He crossed above Newgate and released it, the sword falling cleanly into Newgate's outstretched hand. The blade was Murakumokiri, one of the Twelve Supreme Grade swords, and the moment Newgate's fingers closed around it, a ring of transparent tremor force materialized along its edge like a visible frequency.
No hesitation. No wind-up. Newgate drove into the magma with Armament Haki under his feet and brought the sword down at Sakazuki with everything he had.
They were into it properly now, the two of them. Both were among the toughest combatants alive, and neither was holding anything back. Black lightning cracked from the collisions between Newgate's vibration force and Sakazuki's magma output, the Haki clashes visible in the air around them as pressure distortions that warped the light. In the original Marineford confrontation, Sakazuki had fought with one hand behind his back -- restrained by the knowledge that full output in the middle of Marine Headquarters would level the facility before it leveled the enemy. No such constraint applied here. The island was already gone. He could burn it as many times as he needed to.
Newgate was in better condition than usual as well. No recurring illness today. No medicine. Just the former strongest man in the world, fighting at something close to full capacity, and even so -- the environment was working against him.
Marco peeled away from the exchange, looking for a useful angle, and turned directly into Finn.
"You--!" Marco's eyes flashed.
He didn't hesitate. The Phoenix fruit made him nearly indestructible and he had always known it. Even against someone of this caliber, that invulnerability gave him angles that most combatants didn't have. He went at Finn directly, blue flames rising around his arms, feet already shifting into raptor claws dense with Armament Haki.
Finn grinned. "Coming to your own funeral already?"
Marco threw a kick -- a full-rotation sweep with the talons of his transformed feet driving hard into whatever Finn tried to block with. The Armament Haki in the strike was heavy and precisely applied, the technique of someone who had spent decades developing it.
Finn raised his palm and said, "Dark Binding."
The darkness that erupted from his hand wasn't a physical barrier. Marco's kick went into it and found nothing solid to push against -- just a strange, clinging resistance, like wading through something that wanted to hold on. Before he had fully registered the sensation, the darkness had already changed shape. It wrapped around his legs like rope, and the chill that traveled up from the point of contact was not cold -- it was absence. The power in his legs simply began to leave.
His feet were human feet again. The transformation had unwound itself without his permission.
"What--" Marco stared at his own legs. This had never happened. Not to him. Not like this.
He had no time to think further about it. Finn was not interested in giving him time.
The dark aura tightened and expanded simultaneously, enveloping Marco completely -- and then the gravity answered it, earth and stone and debris from the wrecked island rising from below, drawn up into the darkness, compressing. In moments, a sphere had formed around Marco, the combination of Dark-Dark Fruit and Press-Press Fruit sealing him inside something that felt, from inside, like it was getting smaller.
Gravity Domain: Planetary Devastation.
It was not the same technique it had been when Finn had first worked it out. The version that Katakuri had once been able to break through with sufficient force was a memory. What the Dark-Dark Fruit added to it was not just more weight -- it was suppression. The fruit's nature nullified whatever was inside it. Between the gravity and the nullification, there was no longer a mechanism by which Marco could recover. The blue flames that should have been regenerating found nothing to work with.
"The Phoenix's Mythical Zoan," Finn said, almost to himself. There was genuine interest in his tone. "That's a good one. I'll take it."
The sphere held.
On the far side of the burning field, Katakuri stood in an open stretch of ground that the magma hadn't quite reached, watching.
He knew Marco. Knew his capabilities in detail -- they had been on the same side for years, had trained alongside each other, had fought back to back in situations that had pushed both of them to the edge of what they could do. Marco's invulnerability was real. It was not a bluff or a technique with obvious counters. His mother had once attacked Marco at full output and failed to end it quickly. The blue flames simply restored whatever was destroyed, endlessly, as long as Marco was conscious and unrestrained.
And yet.
What Katakuri had just watched was Finn engaging Marco, exchanging one exchange with him, and depositing him inside what looked like a compressed rock formation that was continuing to shrink. The whole sequence had taken no longer than it took Katakuri to blink twice.
He looked at the sphere. He looked at the man floating in the air above it, already scanning the battlefield for the next thing that needed his attention.
What kind of power was that?
He knew Finn used the Press-Press Fruit. That was not the Press-Press Fruit. Or if it was, it was something that had been combined with something else, and the combination had produced something that Marco's invulnerability simply didn't answer.
What was Finn?
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