Chapter 122: God! Usopp
The Corrida Colosseum — Final Stage
The duel platform had become a war zone.
Sabo moved through the chaos like a flame through dry grass—untouchable, unstoppable, his dragon claw tearing through every defense that rose against him. Burgess's Iron Wall Gauntlet lay in ruins. Diamante's fluttering blade had been shattered, reformed, and shattered again. Bartolomeo's barriers flickered at the edges of the fighting, protecting Rebecca from stray attacks and falling debris.
But Sabo's focus had shifted.
The Mera-Mera Fruit. Somewhere in the waters surrounding the arena, one of the six legendary Fighting Fish Kings carried the treasure chest containing Ace's legacy. Sabo had memorized its markings during the tournament briefing—a scarlet betta with iron chains wrapped around its dorsal fin, the chest secured to its back.
There.
His Observation Haki caught the disturbance beneath the waves. The Fighting Fish King was circling, waiting for the chaos to peak before breaching. Classic ambush predator behavior. But Sabo had spent years hunting things far more dangerous than overgrown fish.
"In that case..."
Armament Haki flooded both arms, the invisible armor hardening to gleaming obsidian that spread from his shoulders to his fingertips. He dropped into a low stance, both palms flat against the cracked stone of the duel platform.
"Dragon's Breath!"
The shockwave erupted from his hands like a subterranean detonation. Cracks spiderwebbed across the platform's surface—then widened, deepened, split the entire arena floor into a maze of crumbling stone and churning water.
"WHAAAAAT?!" The announcer's voice climbed to a shriek. "CONTESTANT LUCY IS—HE'S DESTROYING THE ENTIRE DUEL PLATFORM!!"
"IS THIS THE SAME TECHNIQUE THAT DEFEATED DON CHINJAO?! THE SHEER DESTRUCTIVE POWER IS UNPRECEDENTED!"
Burgess scrambled backward as the stone beneath his feet tilted and submerged. "YOU BASTARD! FIGHT ME DIRECTLY!"
Diamante fared worse. A wave of seawater—churned up by the platform's collapse—splashed across his chest. The Flag-Flag Fruit's power evaporated instantly, his fluttering blade going limp, his iron-cape drooping like wet laundry.
"Damn it... not now... I can't use my strength!"
Bartolomeo, who had been positioned at the edge of the platform with his barrier raised, suddenly found himself with nothing to stand on. He leaped—missed his footing on a tilting stone—leaped again—missed again—and finally managed to claw his way onto a floating chunk of debris by sheer desperate fingernail strength.
"OLD MAN! A LITTLE WARNING NEXT TIME WOULD BE APPRECIATED!"
What truly broke him, however, was not the near-drowning.
It was Rebecca.
The pink-haired gladiator, who had been standing behind his barrier when the platform shattered, had grabbed onto the nearest solid object to keep from plunging into the water.
That object was Bartolomeo's nose ring.
"YOU DAMN GIRL—LET GO—I'M GOING TO DIE OF PAIN—AAAAAGH!"
"Ah! I'm so sorry! I'm so sorry!"
"DON'T APOLOGIZE! JUST LET GO!"
"I CAN'T! I'LL FALL!"
The two Fighting Fish Kings breached simultaneously, their massive forms arcing through the air like scaled thunderbolts. One lunged at Sabo with jaws wide enough to swallow a ship. The other—the scarlet betta with iron chains wrapped around its fin—banked away, the treasure chest gleaming on its back.
Found you.
Sabo didn't bother dodging the first fish. His dragon claw caught it mid-lunge, armored fingers sinking into its scaled throat. With a twist of his hips and a surge of Haki-enhanced strength, he redirected the creature's momentum, hurling it past him into the churning water.
"The Mera-Mera Fruit belongs to the Blackbeard Pirates!" Burgess's roar echoed across the shattered arena as he launched himself from his floating platform toward the treasure-carrying fish. "STRAW HAT! YOU'LL NEVER—"
Diamante's hammer, still solid despite his current weakness, swung toward Sabo's blind spot. "We have no intention of surrendering that fruit to anyone! It stays with the Donquixote Family!"
Sabo didn't look at either of them.
He was already in the air, his trajectory intersecting perfectly with the Fighting Fish King's arc. One hand closed around the treasure chest. The other formed a dragon claw and ripped the lid from its hinges.
"There is no doubt!"
The announcer's voice was barely audible over the crowd's roar.
"The final fighter standing on what remains of the duel platform!"
"The champion of this tournament!"
"The undisputed dark horse—LUCY!!!"
Sabo landed on the largest remaining section of the platform. The treasure chest was open in his hands.
Nestled within, pulsing with an inner light that seemed to breathe, lay the Mera-Mera Fruit. Its surface swirled with patterns of orange and crimson, like fire frozen in time.
Sabo raised it to his lips.
"Ace."
His voice was too quiet for the crowd to hear. Too quiet for anyone to hear.
"I accept your power."
He bit down.
The Spectator Gallery — Shadow's Edge
Itachi watched Sabo swallow the fruit.
The transformation was immediate and unmistakable. Fire kindled at Sabo's fingertips—not the black flames of Amaterasu, but something brighter. Warmer. The flames of a brother who had been lost and found again.
Finally.
The fruit of Luffy's other brother. The legacy he was so desperate to protect.
His gaze shifted to the arena's edge, where Bartolomeo was dragging himself onto solid ground, Rebecca still clinging to his nose ring with the desperate strength of someone who had decided that dignity was a secondary concern to survival. The barrier user was sobbing. Rebecca was apologizing profusely. Neither of them appeared to have noticed that they were both still alive.
The girl is safe. The fruit has been claimed. Sabo will see her to safety when this is over.
Itachi allowed himself a single, fleeting moment of satisfaction.
Then he vanished from the gallery.
The Colosseum — Staff Lounge
The attendant never saw him coming.
One moment, the man was organizing contestant files at his desk, muttering about the chaos in the arena and the pile of paperwork awaiting him after the finals concluded. The next moment, cold steel pressed against his throat and a pair of crimson eyes filled his vision.
"Don't struggle. This will be easier if you don't struggle."
The genjutsu took hold before the attendant could scream.
Itachi's questioning was methodical. Precise. The attendant's mind yielded its secrets layer by layer—memories extracted, examined, and filed away with the clinical efficiency of an ANBU captain conducting a field interrogation. Within minutes, Itachi had everything he needed.
The colosseum's dark truth.
All defeated contestants—every gladiator who fell in the arena and survived—were brought to the infirmary in the name of "treatment." There, under the guise of medical care, they were sedated. Restrained. And then...
They were dropped.
A hidden switch in the infirmary floor. A chute that led directly to the underground levels. To the Toy House. To Sugar.
The Donquixote Family didn't just use the colosseum for entertainment and profit. They used it as a harvesting ground. Every strong warrior who entered the arena and lost became raw material for Doflamingo's toy army. Their strength, their skills, their memories—all transformed into obedient labor, erased from the world's consciousness.
That's why I saw so few injured fighters. The iron cages held only the most recent casualties. Everyone else...
Everyone else had already been processed.
Itachi's suspicions, first aroused during his infiltration through the mud-fluidized wall, were now confirmed. The ground beneath the colosseum had felt wrong—too soft, too yielding, as if the earth itself was hollow. And now he knew why.
Beneath this arena is one of the cores of Doflamingo's underground operation.
He pressed the switch.
The floor irised open beneath his feet, revealing a dark shaft that plunged into the depths below. Cold air rushed up from the darkness, carrying the faint scent of metal and sweat and something that might have been despair.
Itachi pulled the cat-face mask over his features.
He jumped.
The Underground — Scrap Heap
The shaft deposited him in a cavern of discarded things.
Broken weapons. Torn banners. Shattered arena props. And toys. Dozens of toys, cracked and damaged, tossed aside like garbage. These were the ones who hadn't been strong enough to serve as laborers. The ones deemed too weak to be useful. They had been thrown here, into the dark, and forgotten.
Itachi moved through the debris in silence, his Sharingan piercing the gloom.
No living presences nearby. No guards posted—why would there be? This was a graveyard. No one was expected to climb back out.
He pressed forward.
Voices reached him. Distant at first, then growing clearer as he navigated the winding passages. Not the harsh commands of Donquixote officers. Not the frightened whispers of enslaved workers.
Cheers.
Celebration.
"—and when he raised his slingshot, I knew! I KNEW he was someone special!"
"You should have seen it! The way he stood up to that monster!"
"He saved us! All of us! If it weren't for him—"
Itachi's brow furrowed beneath his mask. He rounded a corner, stepped through a crumbling archway, and emerged into a vast underground chamber that had been transformed into something resembling a victory celebration.
Warriors from a dozen different nations filled the space. Gladiators in torn armor. Pirates with broken shackles still dangling from their wrists. Soldiers who had been missing for years, their faces weathered by hardship and hope. And at the center of it all, lifted high above the crowd on the shoulders of a giant—
Was Usopp.
"OUR HERO!"
The giant's voice boomed through the chamber.
"HIS NAME—HIS GLORIOUS NAME—IS CAPTAIN USOPP!!"
The crowd erupted.
"CAPTAIN USOPP!!"
"USOPP! USOPP! USOPP!"
"WE WILL NEVER FORGET WHAT YOU'VE DONE FOR US! NEVER! FOR AS LONG AS WE DRAW BREATH!"
Itachi stood at the edge of the chamber, utterly motionless.
His Sharingan confirmed what his common sense refused to accept. The man being lifted above the crowd—the man whose name was being chanted by hundreds of hardened warriors as if he were some kind of messiah—was definitely, unquestionably, without any doubt, Usopp.
The same Usopp who had hidden behind him during the Green Bit landing.
The same Usopp who had nearly fainted when Itachi mentioned decapitation.
The same Usopp whose primary combat strategy, as far as Itachi had observed, consisted of running away very quickly while screaming.
What exactly happened here?
As if in answer to his unspoken question, the ground above them rumbled. Cracks spread across the ceiling. Chunks of stone and mortar rained down—and then, with a thunderous crash, a section of the cavern roof collapsed entirely.
Sunlight poured through the breach.
Real sunlight. Golden and warm and blinding after the darkness of the underground. It fell upon the crowd like a benediction, illuminating their upturned faces, their tear-streaked cheeks, their expressions of naked, reverent awe.
And at the center of that shaft of light, still raised on the giant's shoulders, was Usopp.
"A MIRACLE!"
The voice that rose from the crowd was barely human—choked with emotion, trembling with something that went beyond gratitude into genuine worship.
"HE BROUGHT DOWN THE CEILING ITSELF! HE PARTED THE DARKNESS!"
"HE IS... HE IS NO MERE HERO!"
"HE IS...!"
The giant fell to his knees.
"HIS NAME IS... GOD USOPP!!"
The chamber shook with the force of the response.
"GOD USOPP!!"
"GOD USOPP!!"
"GOD USOPP!!"
Itachi stared at the scene before him. The kneeling giant. The weeping warriors. The shaft of providential sunlight. And at the center of it all, Usopp—his expression frozen somewhere between abject terror and desperate bravado, clearly having absolutely no idea how any of this had happened.
Slowly, very slowly, Itachi reached up and removed his mask.
He needed to see this with his own eyes. Unfiltered. Unassisted.
The scene did not change.
"...I see."
His voice was very, very quiet.
I don't see at all.
(End of Chapter)
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