Below, the battlefield was packed tightly with figures, and Violent Bear's expression remained unwavering as he stared at the descending blue sphere. Within it, a terrifying amount of compressed energy was silently accumulating.
Every eye on the battlefield was fixed on him.
They were all waiting.
Waiting to see whether Violent Bear could actually withstand that thing.
But doubt already filled most hearts. Anyone who had witnessed Marshall D. Teach unleash the Star of Destruction knew exactly how absurd its destructive power was.
It had not even exploded yet.
And that was precisely the most terrifying moment.
At this stage, all its energy was compressed into a single unstable core. It was silence before annihilation.
Violent Bear's muscles tightened like forged steel. His upper body, already heavily exposed after his earlier battle with Charlotte Katakuri, was wrapped only in torn remnants of cloth. Thick black hair covered his chest, but no one spared it a glance.
His entire presence changed.
A colossal bear manifestation erupted from him, tens of meters tall, like a primordial beast that should not exist in the modern world.
He stomped down onto the final ice pillar.
It shattered instantly.
The force launched his massive body into the air.
On the side, Kuzan remained crouched on the ice, breathing heavily. Maintaining large-scale environmental control had drained him significantly. Even for him, this level of intervention was exhausting.
He could only watch now.
The rest was on Violent Bear.
And whether the world survived depended on that single moment.
Violent Bear closed in.
Just a few meters remained.
At that distance, he could finally feel it.
Not just pressure, but distortion itself. Space around the sphere twisted subtly, as if reality was being bent inward.
There was no room left for hesitation.
His massive body curled inward.
And he embraced it.
He wrapped the Star of Destruction into his torso as if trying to contain it within his own body.
The action looked absurd for a brief instant.
Almost childlike in its simplicity.
But no one laughed.
Because the next moment, the world collapsed.
The sphere detonated.
A blue gravitational field exploded outward instantly, forming a vast rotating domain hundreds of meters wide. Everything inside it was pulled into a single catastrophic center.
Violent Bear was thrown immediately.
Blood erupted from every orifice.
His massive body twisted under impossible force, bones cracking and internal organs tearing under gravitational distortion. His form spun helplessly around the core of the explosion, no longer under his control.
Even so, he remained conscious.
Just barely.
His body began to thin under the pressure, as if the very mass of his existence was being drained away.
The gravitational field expanded further.
The sea fractured beneath it.
Ice shattered and rose.
Over one hundred thousand Allied Forces members were caught in the collapse almost instantly. Bodies lifted into the air without resistance, dragged toward the blue vortex.
Some tried to hold onto ice fragments.
It meant nothing.
Everything rose.
Screams filled the battlefield.
Even distant observers could hear them clearly, carried through the collapsing air currents.
Then came the sea itself.
Massive volumes of seawater were pulled upward. Those who had jumped in to escape were dragged out along with it.
One thousand meters.
Two thousand meters.
Three thousand meters.
The sphere expanded to five thousand meters in diameter, a colossal floating mass of seawater, ice, and trapped creatures. Sea Kings could be seen struggling inside the rotating mass, unable to escape the gravitational lock.
From a distance, it looked like a floating blue planet formed in half a minute.
And inside it, everything was being erased.
World leaders, kings, pirate captains, all those watching across the seas, felt their breathing tighten.
No one spoke.
No one dared.
Because instinctively, they understood one thing.
This was not just power.
It was extinction.
And it had been demonstrated fully, from start to finish.
On the battlefield itself, Dragon and Gaia had already paused their confrontation, their attention briefly drawn to the disaster unfolding in the sky. Even Shiki and Kong were forced to shift their battlefield further away under its influence.
Kong watched helplessly as thousands of his men vanished into the gravitational storm. His expression darkened, grief mixing with rage.
Elsewhere, pirates who had once been confident now felt cold fear creeping into their bones.
This was no longer a battlefield.
It was a calamity zone.
Violent Bear's body continued to be torn apart inside the sphere.
Then, suddenly, the expansion stopped.
Silence returned for a fraction of a second.
And in that silence, the sphere collapsed inward.
Compression reached its final stage.
In less than a heartbeat, the massive gravitational construct vanished completely.
Only a hollow void remained, rapidly filling with seawater from all directions.
Clouds above churned violently as air rushed to fill the vacuum, forming unnatural spirals in the sky.
And within the water, faint traces of red spread.
No one needed to guess what that meant.
From above, Marshall D. Teach observed the result calmly. His expression was composed, but a faint flicker of surprise passed through his eyes.
Not at destruction.
But at scale.
Had Redyat not intervened with his shadow space ability, the pirate side itself would have suffered catastrophic losses.
Even Teach, for a moment, realized something important.
This move was not just powerful.
It was uncontrollable on a world-scale battlefield.
Below, the surviving Allied Forces were fewer than a tenth of their original number. Those still alive were scattered, wounded, and fleeing without direction.
The sea itself was still unstable, waves surging into the newly formed void before slowly beginning to recover.
Then the real chaos resumed.
Shiki and Dragon immediately seized the shifting battlefield conditions.
Shiki forced Kong toward the sea, manipulating surrounding water with his Float-Float Fruit ability. Kong, a Devil Fruit user, was instantly dragged into the oceanic suppression zone.
His body sank.
His strength faded.
And for the first time, true danger closed in on a Marine Fleet Admiral.
Kuzan reacted immediately, freezing large portions of the sea in an attempt to create an escape path. Ice pillars rose rapidly, forming a fragile bridge toward Kong's position.
But Shiki did not allow it.
Golden slashes tore through the frozen structures, shattering them before they could stabilize.
Each attack was precise.
Not destructive.
Restrictive.
Kong was trapped underwater, unable to move freely, his Devil Fruit ability suppressed completely.
He struggled to breathe as seawater pressed in from all sides.
Then Kuzan reached him.
A hand extended through the ice, grasping Kong and pulling him into a frozen channel formed within the sea itself.
But Shiki's attacks intensified.
Over a hundred slashes descended in a single moment, forming a dense golden net in the air.
Kuzan's movement slowed.
Kong's escape path vanished.
And in that instant of unavoidable impact, Kuzan managed only a partial evacuation.
Kong's left shoulder was severed completely.
Blood dispersed into the sea and vanished into the chaos of currents.
Kuzan's voice carried a rare heaviness.
"I tried my best."
But even he understood.
This war had already crossed the threshold of what anyone could fully control.