The path between the mangrove roots had gone tense and still.
One moment, it had only been three Marines moving through Grove 21 with the confidence of men who believed the net was tightening.
The next, they had come face-to-face with something entirely unexpected.
Benn Beckman stood with one hand in his coat pocket and the other resting loosely near his pistol. At his side was Building Snake, posture straight and cautious, his eyes moving sharply between the three Marines ahead of them. And just behind them, relaxed in a way that made the situation even more absurd, stood Silvers Rayleigh.
The old man wore the faint smile of someone who had just walked out of a marketplace, not escaped an auction house.
Vice Admiral Tokikake was the first to break the silence.
He pointed, his face halfway between annoyance and disbelief. "You've got to be kidding me. First I let Shanks slip through my grove while I was asleep, and now I run into the Dark King on foot?"
Rear Admiral T-Bone's jaw tightened in alarm and admiration all at once. "Silvers Rayleigh…! A legend of piracy walks before us!"
Rear Admiral Strawberry said nothing at first. He simply tightened his grip on his weapon and studied the men in front of him with quiet seriousness.
It was Beckman who spoke first.
"You've found us," he said calmly.
Tokikake clicked his tongue. "That's one way of putting it."
Then his expression shifted.
Something serious entered his eyes.
"Shanks has already been located," he said. "Admiral Aokiji is intercepting him."
That wiped the last trace of ease from the group.
Building Snake's shoulders stiffened immediately. "What?"
Beckman's eyes narrowed. "Kuzan is with Shanks?"
"Not just with him," Strawberry said. "He's engaging."
Rayleigh's smile thinned.
The air around him didn't change much. It didn't need to. There was something in the way he looked up, in the way his posture subtly aligned itself, that made even the Marines across from him feel it.
Danger.
Rayleigh looked at Beckman and Snake.
"You two will take care of these three."
Building Snake blinked. "What?"
Beckman glanced sideways. "And you?"
Rayleigh smiled faintly.
"I'm going to go back up Shanks."
Tokikake reacted first. "Like hell you are!"
He lunged forward, but before he could fully commit, Beckman's pistol was already out.
He shot at the space around them.
Bang.
Bang. Bang.
The bullets hit the mangrove path and railings in a precise spread, each impact exploding splinters and forcing the three Marines to halt and adjust their footing. One round clipped the brim of Tokikake's cap and sent it spinning backward.
The pause was all Rayleigh needed.
He moved.
One step, then another, and then he was already gone down the adjoining root path, coat fluttering lightly behind him.
T-Bone shouted, "Stop him!"
Strawberry shifted to pursue, but Snake stepped in first, drawing both swords in a fast crossing motion that forced the Rear Admiral to stop short or lose his hands.
Tokikake snarled and took a half-step after Rayleigh anyway, only for Beckman's pistol to level directly at his face.
"You move again," Beckman said, voice cool and flat, "and I stop missing."
Tokikake froze.
The grove went quiet.
The Marines and pirates stared at one another for one heartbeat, then two.
Then T-Bone raised his blade and roared, "For justice!"
And the path exploded into motion.
---
Elsewhere, in Grove 31, the fight between Shanks and Kuzan had already torn a clean street into something unrecognizable.
The carnival district was gone.
In its place stood a frozen battlefield of broken rides, shattered stalls, mangrove root splinters, and jagged ice. The ground cracked underfoot where freezing waves had spread and then been broken apart by Haki-laced sword strikes.
Kuzan stood with one hand lowered and the other turned slightly outward, cold vapor spiraling from his fingers.
Across from him, Shanks held his saber low at his side, shoulders loose, eyes bright and focused.
Neither man looked tired.
But the damage around them said enough.
Kuzan exhaled slowly. "You're troublesome."
Shanks smiled. "I get that a lot."
Kuzan raised his hand.
"Ice Block: Partisan."
Five long ice spears formed at once, hovering beside him before launching forward with lethal speed.
Shanks moved.
His blade flashed once, two spears split apart.
A second flash, another shattered.
He stepped through the gap between the last two, twisting his body just enough to let one scrape past his coat while he cut the other from the air. The pieces exploded into cold mist around him.
Then he was already in Kuzan's space.
Too fast for ordinary men to even track.
Shanks swung upward, Haki surging along the edge of his sword as the slash tore a violent arc through the air. Kuzan met it with an ice saber formed instantly from his arm.
The impact boomed.
A black crack of Haki surged across the white frost of Kuzan's weapon, and the ice blade split down the middle. Kuzan slid backward on a trail of ice, reforming another weapon before the shards had even hit the ground.
Shanks chased.
Another clash.
Then another.
Their weapons collided in bursts of white vapor and black sparks, each exchange heavy enough to rattle the mangrove structures nearby. Shanks fought with a fierce, fluid rhythm.
Kuzan, by contrast, remained almost lazy.
His body bent with the flow of the fight, dissolving into ice when needed, reforming where he wanted, using the battlefield itself as part of his defense.
Then Kuzan's hand shot out.
"Ice Ball."
A sphere of compressed freezing force rushed toward Shanks.
Shanks didn't retreat.
He stepped forward into it and brought his blade down in a two-handed slash infused with Haki. The sphere split apart and burst around him in a storm of razor-cold fragments, but he emerged from the mist unharmed, red hair blowing back, eyes sharp.
Kuzan's gaze narrowed slightly.
Shanks laughed.
"Gonna need colder than that."
Kuzan sighed. "You pirates are always troublesome."
Then the Admiral drove both palms toward the ground.
"Ice Age."
The entire street screamed under the weight of it.
Ice spread like a tidal wave, leaping over broken stalls and crawling up the roots, swallowing debris and shattered wood in a single glittering rush. The cold devoured everything in its path.
Shanks jumped onto the wreckage of a ruined carnival stall, used it as a springboard, then leaped again, narrowly clearing the front edge of the freezing wave. Midair, he twisted his body and sent a Haki-infused downward slash at Kuzan that carved a trench through the advancing ice and struck the Admiral squarely across the shoulder.
Blood sprayed.
Kuzan's body half-broke into ice, but not fully. The Haki had forced the hit through.
He touched the wound once and looked at the blood on his glove.
Then he smiled faintly.
"Good."
Shanks landed and rolled his shoulder.
"I was about to say the same."
The next moment, the two of them vanished again, moving through the frost-covered street in blinding bursts of motion. Shanks' saber rang again and again against Kuzan's ice-forged weapons, each collision sending tremors through the district.
One exchange drove Kuzan through the frozen shell of a game booth.
Another forced Shanks across a slick of ice where he nearly lost his footing before re-centering and answering with a wide Haki slash that split a mangrove root bridge in half.
Kuzan reappeared behind Shanks and drove a freezing palm toward his back—
Shanks twisted, caught the wrist on the flat of his blade, and glared.
"I told you already," he said.
Black Haki surged.
Kuzan's hand stopped.
Shanks smiled without warmth.
"Hands off what's mine."
Then he shoved the Admiral backward and stepped in, drawing his sword back with both hands.
For a heartbeat, the street seemed to go silent.
Even Kuzan saw it.
The set of the shoulders.
The weight shifting into the front foot.
The Haki gathering.
"Divine Departure."
The slash erupted forward in a violent storm of Supreme King's Haki, a sweeping black-red arc that tore the frozen street open from end to end.
Kuzan's eyes sharpened instantly.
He crossed both arms and generated an immense wall of hardened ice in front of himself.
The attack hit.
And the wall exploded.
Ice burst across the grove like shattered glass under cannon fire, and Kuzan was driven backward through two frozen stalls and into the base of a mangrove root. Frost and debris rained down around him in a storm.
Shanks stood where he had swung, exhaling once, blade humming faintly.
Then Kuzan pushed himself out of the wreckage.
Bruised. Bloody at the mouth. Still calm.
"…That one," he said, brushing ice from his shoulder, "was very troublesome."
Shanks grinned. "Oi oi, you survived that!"
---
Far from the main street now, Giovanni finally came to a stop.
He landed on a lower root path, slid a short distance, then planted his foot and turned.
Vice Admiral Gion stepped into the open path with her golden saber drawn, posture straight, expression composed.
Unlike the Marine mob, she wasn't winded.
Unlike the Marine mob, she wasn't afraid.
She looked ready.
Giovanni straightened, sword in hand, then smiled.
"Well," he said lightly, "you've been following me for a while now."
Gion raised her blade.
Giovanni's grin widened just a little.
"What is it?" he asked. "You got a thing for me or something?"
---
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