The air inside the burning courtyard of the Kozuki estate was rapidly running out of oxygen. Thick, black pillars of carbon-heavy smoke twisted upward into the night sky, illuminated from below by the roaring orange inferno of the collapsing mansion.
Marco hovered three feet above the dirt floor, his arms completely transformed into magnificent wings of swirling blue and yellow fire. His gaze was sharp, tracking every single movement within the chaotic battlefield. He did not have the luxury of launching a full offensive. Every single time he prepared to fly forward and engage King, a stray volley of laser beams or high-caliber rounds would rain down from Queen's heavy artillery weapons, forcing Marco to immediately drop his altitude to act as a living shield for Toki and the weeping Hiyori.
The flames of regeneration danced across Marco's chest, instantly closing a deep, smoking laceration that King's heated katana had just carved into his flesh. But while the physical wounds healed instantly, the constant expenditure of energy was beginning to take a subtle toll on his stamina.
King materialized from the smoke cloud above, his massive black wings tucked tight against his back as he dropped into a high-velocity dive. His blade radiated a white-hot Lunarian flame that distorted the very air around it.
Marco intercepted the strike, crossing his legs in a rapid aerial guard, his feet transforming into heavy phoenix talons to catch the burning edge of the katana. The physical impact sent a massive shockwave tearing through the dirt yard, throwing up a colossal wall of dust.
"Get back, Toki!" Marco shouted over the roar of the wind, his teeth gritted as he pushed against King's immense physical leverage. "I can hold them off, but you need to find an opening through the perimeter."
Before Toki could even take a single step backward, the loud, theatrical laughter of Queen echoed from the western side of the courtyard.
Queen was in his massive hybrid form, his gargantuan brachiosaurus neck swaying wildly while his mechanical tail swung like a heavy iron wrecking ball. His gatling gun arm whirred to life, the barrels glowing with a volatile energy.
"Do you honestly think you can look away from me, Phoenix?" Queen bellowed, his voice filled with manic amusement. "Take this! Sparking Queen!"
A barrage of hyper-compressed laser beams erupted from Queen's mechanical augmentations, tearing across the courtyard in a zigzag pattern. The beams pulverized the remaining stone lanterns and ancient trees, completely cutting off the eastern escape route. Marco had to instantly disengage from King, rocket downward, and spread his fiery wings completely over Toki and Hiyori to absorb the explosive kinetic force of the lasers. The detonations threw him back against the burning wood of the estate entryway, his breath catching in his throat.
On the other side of the courtyard, the situation was even more desperate.
Kawamatsu the Kappa forced his heavy, rounded frame up from the dirt. His ribs were completely shattered from King's previous devastating kick, and every single breath he took felt like a hot iron blade twisting inside his lungs. Blood poured continuously from his mouth, staining his green skin and his tattered clothes. Yet, he held his wide-bladed katana tightly with both hands, his small eyes burning with an unyielding samurai resolve.
Standing directly in front of him was Hanafuda. The towering, heavily armored high-ranking officer of the Beast Pirates stood with a massive, spiked club resting on his shoulder, his dark eyes looking down at the injured vassal with absolute indifference. Behind Hanafuda, hundreds of heavily armed Beast Pirate foot soldiers stood in a dense formation, their weapons raised as they slowly closed the circle.
"You are a walking corpse, Kappa," Hanafuda said, his voice flat and devoid of any emotion. "Your lord is dead. Your country is ours. There is absolutely no honor in dying in a ditch for a lost cause."
Kawamatsu spat a thick glob of crimson onto the grass, taking a low sumo stance despite his trembling legs. "The samurai of Kozuki Oden do not know the meaning of surrender, invader. As long as I draw breath, not a single one of your faceless soldiers will lay a finger on Lady Toki."
Hanafuda lowered his massive club, his muscles bulging beneath his ornamental armor. "Then die with your delusions."
Hanafuda charged forward with a velocity that defied his massive size, swinging his club in a brutal, downward arc. Kawamatsu raised his katana, channeling the absolute maximum of his remaining Ryou into the steel.
"Kappa Style: River Current Parry!" Kawamatsu roared.
The two weapons collided with a sickening metallic crash. The sheer physical weight of Hanafuda's strike drove Kawamatsu's knees straight into the dirt floor, the pressure causing the wounds in his chest to burst open, spilling fresh blood across his clothes. Kawamatsu gritted his teeth, using the curved design of his blade to redirect the momentum of the club, sliding underneath Hanafuda's guard to deliver a rapid upward slash that cut a shallow groove into the officer's armor.
But the numbers were simply too overwhelming.
As Kawamatsu recovered his stance from the counter-attack, three separate Beast Pirate soldiers lunged from his blind spots, their spears plunging into his shoulders and sides. Kawamatsu bellowed in pain, spinning his massive frame to cut the attackers down, but the distraction allowed Hanafuda to deliver a brutal, short-range elbow strike directly to the side of his head.
Kawamatsu staggered backward, his vision turning completely blurry as he fell to one knee, his katana slipping slightly from his grip.
The defense line had completely shattered.
With Kawamatsu incapacitated and Marco dangerously pinned down by the synchronized aerial assaults of King and Queen, the remaining infantry saw their opening. Around five hundred armored Beast Pirates broke through the perimeter, their faces twisted into sadistic, bloodthirsty grins as they surged past the smoke clouds, their blades pointed directly at the defenseless figures of Toki and Hiyori.
Hiyori hid her face inside her mother's robes, weeping uncontrollably as the sea of iron approached them. Toki stood tall, her eyes closed as she prepared for the inevitable conclusion, her arms wrapped tightly around her daughter.
The soldiers raised their swords, the cold steel reflecting the orange glare of the burning estate.
Then, the world completely stopped.
A sudden, cataclysmic shockwave of pure spiritual pressure exploded from the southern border of the forest. It was not a physical wind, but a raw, suffocating manifestation of absolute willpower that completely saturated the atmosphere in a fraction of a millisecond.
The air grew freezing cold. The roaring flames consuming the Kozuki mansion were momentarily snuffed out, the fire flattening against the wood under an impossible weight. Massive, jagged bolts of dark purple and crimson lightning arced violently across the sky, tearing through the smoke clouds.
The five hundred soldiers who were inches away from executing Toki instantly froze. Their eyes rolled back into their heads, their weapons slipping from their paralyzed fingers as they collapsed face-first into the dirt like a row of dominoes.
Beyond them, across the entire perimeter of the estate, the remaining five hundred soldiers under Hanafuda's command dropped simultaneously. The regular infantry was completely wiped out in a single, unmitigated burst of supreme dominance. Even Hanafuda staggered backward, his hand clamping against his forehead as he fought the intense vertigo threatening to claim his consciousness.
Marco's eyes snapped toward the forest line, a wide, instantly recognizable smirk breaking across his face.
'We have to break through the eastern flank,' Marco thought, calculating the quickest path of flight to get Toki and Hiyori clear of the infantry. 'If I can draw Queen's heavy fire, Kawamatsu can slip through the baseline. But it looks like I won't need to.'
Through the thick curtain of rising dust, a lone figure dragged his feet forward.
Norwell D. Giovanni stepped into the courtyard. He looked like an absolute disaster. His left arm hung completely limp at his side, obviously dislocated and broken in multiple places. His white medical bandages were entirely shredded, soaked in a mixture of his own blood and soot from the Flower Capital plaza. He was using the hilt of Ace to steady his balance, his breath coming in ragged, painful gasps.
Marco landed lightly on the ground near Toki, crossing his arms as he looked the pirate up and down. "Well, well. Look what the sea dragged in, yoi. You look like you got run over by a regular old Sea King, Giovanni."
Giovanni stopped, leaning his weight heavily against his good leg as he glared at his friend. "Shut up, Marco. You try trading blows with a twelve-foot draconic psychopath who uses Advanced Conqueror's Haki like it is a regular old baseball bat. The bastard completely ruined my favorite arm."
Toki blinked through her tears, looking at the broken blonde youth in absolute bewilderment. "Marco-san... who is this young man?"
"This is the idiot I was telling you about, Toki," Marco chuckled softly, adjusting his glasses. "He is the one who insisted we sail into this isolationist hellhole to save you in the first place."
Giovanni let out a sharp, painful sigh, adjusting his grip on his sword. "Yeah, and I am currently regretting my life choices. My entire body feels like it is on fire."
From the center of the yard, a loud, grating sound broke the brief silence. Queen was shaking his massive head, his mechanical jaw clicking rapidly as he looked around at the one thousand unconscious soldiers littering the ground. His small eyes locked onto Giovanni, his face contorting into an expression of intense, mocking arrogance.
"Mamma-mia! Look at this pathetic piece of trash!" Queen shouted, bursting into a loud, dramatic sequence of laughter. "So you are the absolute moron who thought they could go against Kaido-sama in the capital! Look at you! You are practically a walking corpse already! You should have stayed in the dirt where our Governor-General left you, rookie! Die!"
A massive, hyper-concentrated volley of laser beams erupted from Queen's cannons, tearing through the air at light speeds, aimed directly at Giovanni's chest.
Giovanni did not move his weapon. He did not even shift his stance.
He simply blinked.
In the exact millisecond before the lasers could impact his body, Giovanni completely vanished from Queen's sight. The space where he had been standing was entirely empty, the laser beams crashing into the empty forest behind him and causing a massive series of distant explosions.
Queen's jaw dropped, his observation haki completely failing to register the movement. "What? Where the hell did he go? He was right there!"
"He is right in front of you, you fat lizard," Giovanni's cold voice echoed from the open air.
Queen's head snapped forward.
Giovanni had appeared directly in front of Queen's massive face, hovering mid-air through a single, invisible Sky Walk. His golden eyes were completely cold, devoid of any of his previous sarcastic humor. Despite his broken left arm and his shattered ribs, the dark-patterned steel of Ace was completely enveloped in a blinding, hyper-compressed line of dark purple and crimson spiritual lightning.
The aura was perfectly refined, structured in a way that mimicked the precise, elegant compression of the Dark King himself. Giovanni had spent three years observing Silvers Rayleigh's movements back during his training, and he had finally locked the mechanic into his own muscle memory.
"Red Spider Lily," Giovanni muttered.
He unleashed a single, lightning-fast vertical slash.
The Advanced Conqueror's Haki did not just blast forward; it exploded from the tip of the blade in the distinct, jagged shape of a blooming spider lily, the crimson lines of energy resembling the delicate petals of the flower of death. The internal destruction property bypassed Queen's ancient zoan hide entirely, detonating directly inside his mechanical and organic chest cavity.
BOOM!
The absolute force of the technique generated a colossal shockwave that tore the remaining roof off the Kozuki estate.
Queen did not even have time to scream. His small eyes rolled completely back into his head as a massive fountain of blood burst from his mouth. His gargantuan, multi-ton hybrid frame was launched horizontally across the entire length of the Kuri region, crashing violently through seven separate brick walls before flying entirely out of the estate borders and disappearing into the distant mountains.
The silence that followed was absolute.
King stood perfectly still at the edge of the courtyard, his hand tightening on his katana hilt as he stared at the empty space where his fellow All-Star had just been standing.
Giovanni landed heavily back on the dirt road, his right knee buckling slightly from the sheer physical backlash of the movement. He used his sword to steady himself, letting out a sharp, irritated breath as he wiped a trail of blood from his nose.
"I have never liked that guy," Giovanni muttered, his voice dripping with pure annoyance. "He is so incredibly loud."
---
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