Chapter 125: Instant Kill—Burgess.
Birdcage.
The Underground Chamber
"WEH-HA!"
Burgess's fist crashed against the Wind-Forest Fire with the force of a battering ram. Itachi's guard held—barely—but the sheer physical power behind the blow sent him skidding backward across the rubble-strewn floor. The Blackbeard captain's strength was monstrous, the kind of raw physical might that came from decades of brutal conditioning and an almost inhuman natural constitution.
"What's wrong, Hellfire?! Not looking so hot!"
Another punch. Another retreat. Itachi's arms ached from absorbing the impacts. His Sharingan tracked every movement, predicted every angle—but Burgess's speed, combined with his refusal to maintain eye contact, made counterattacking difficult.
"Robin." Itachi's voice remained level despite the pressure. "Go tend to Usopp. Your part in this is done."
"But this—"
"Leave it to me."
Robin hesitated for only a moment. Then she nodded and sprinted toward the center of the chamber, where Usopp was still being held aloft by his adoring congregation.
Itachi turned back to face Burgess—
And the Blackbeard captain was already there.
The punch caught Itachi in the chest before he could complete his seal. The impact was devastating—a full-body blow that launched him across the chamber like a stone from a sling. His body crashed through a crumbling wall, through a stack of broken crates, and into the stone floor with enough force to crater the ground beneath him.
"WEH-HA!"
Burgess threw his head back and laughed, his massive arms raised in triumph.
"The intel was right! As long as you don't look at his eyes, he's nothing! NOTHING! Weh-hahaha!"
He was already moving, closing the distance with ground-eating strides. His hand closed around Itachi's limp form, dragging him up from the rubble.
"Let's finish this nice and clean!"
The Champion's Over-Shoulder Throw was Burgess's signature technique—a grapple that had ended the careers of countless gladiators across the Grand Line. He locked Itachi's body against his shoulder, planted his feet, and hurled.
BOOM.
Itachi hit the ground head-first, the impact echoing through the underground chamber like a thunderclap. The stone split. Dust billowed. And Itachi lay still.
The surrounding pirates stared in stunned silence.
"The six hundred million berry pirate... taken out just like that?!"
"As expected of the Blackbeard Pirates' First Captain! His strength is absolutely monstrous!"
"WEH-HAHAHA!" Burgess raised both arms to the crowd, drinking in their awe. "Six hundred million?! Under my iron fist, even Hellfire is nothing but—"
He tried to take a step.
His feet would not move.
"What—?!"
He looked down.
The body he had thrown—the corpse he had been about to pose over for a victory display—was not a body at all. It was wood. Carved wood. A perfectly detailed wooden replica that was already crumbling into splinters.
And from that wooden dummy, branches were growing. Thick horizontal bars of living timber that had wrapped around Burgess's legs, his waist, his torso—encasing him in a coffin of unbreakable wood.
"WHAT KIND OF ABILITY IS THIS?!"
The pirates' heads swiveled, searching for the real Itachi.
Bartolomeo, however, was staring upward. Tears froze on his cheeks.
"This... this is that senior's true power?!"
"He didn't even bother fighting that guy himself!"
Itachi stood on a raised outcropping of stone above the chamber floor, his black cloak settling around him. He was studying the map the toy soldier had given him, his expression calm, his posture utterly relaxed. He had not looked at Burgess once since the wooden dummy had taken his place.
"The structural layout confirms my earlier assessment." He traced a line on the parchment with his finger. "The first priority is to collapse the access routes here, here, and here. That will sever the underground supply chain completely."
His eyes shifted—just slightly, just enough—toward the thing that had been Burgess.
The wooden sphere had grown. Crossbars and branches wove around the Blackbeard captain in an ever-tightening cocoon, each layer thicker than the last. Burgess's struggles were visible through the gaps—his massive arms straining, his fists pounding, his voice roaring muffled curses. The wood cracked and splintered under his assault.
New branches grew to replace them. Faster than he could break them.
"A resilient opponent." Itachi's voice was clinical. "The continuous reinforcement is necessary."
He raised one hand and formed a single seal.
"Shatter."
Inside the wooden sphere, the branches changed direction.
They grew inward. Sharpened tips—hard as steel, fine as needles—pierced through Burgess's defenses from every angle simultaneously. Through the gaps in his armor. Through the joints of his gauntlets. Through flesh and muscle and whatever lay beneath.
The scream that emerged from the wooden cocoon was not human.
It was the sound of a man who had never, in all his years of violence and victory, experienced anything that could properly be called suffering. The sound of absolute physical dominion meeting absolute physical agony and discovering, too late, that there was no contest between them.
Blood seeped through the gaps in the wood. Thick. Dark. Arterial.
The screams faded.
The wooden sphere grew still.
Itachi returned his attention to the map.
The pirates who had been cheering Burgess moments ago stood frozen, their faces drained of color. Several of them had dropped their weapons. One had fallen to his knees, his lips moving in what might have been a prayer.
Bartolomeo made a sound that was somewhere between a whimper and a moan of religious ecstasy.
Robin, who had reached Usopp's side, glanced back at the wooden cocoon with clinical detachment. "The Spirit of the Tree World... he's already mastered it to this extent?" Her brow furrowed with academic curiosity. "It's only been days since Rilke Callender. His adaptation speed is remarkable."
Itachi folded the map and tucked it into his cloak.
The response to Fujitora's plan was clear in his mind. The tactical requirements, the positioning, the timing—all of it had been calculated and recalculated during the brief exchange with Burgess.
What concerned him now was a different variable entirely.
Luffy. Zoro. Kin'emon.
How far have they reached?
The Donquixote Family Palace — Outer Wall
Zoro slid Sandai Kitetsu back into its saya with a soft click.
Behind him, the unconscious bodies of Donquixote soldiers lay scattered across the corridor like discarded dolls. Their weapons—shattered. Their Haki—insufficient. Their collective ability to impede a man who had trained under the world's greatest swordsman—absolutely nonexistent.
"Where the hell did that castle guy go?"
The walls had been shifting. Corridors that had led forward suddenly led sideways. Doors that should have opened into grand halls now opened into solid stone. The entire palace was rearranging itself around them, a labyrinth controlled by some enemy who refused to fight directly.
For Zoro, whose sense of direction was already legendary for all the wrong reasons, this was a special kind of hell.
"Luffy. Which way did we come from?"
"Huh? That way, obviously."
"That way."
They pointed in completely opposite directions.
"See? We agree."
"WE DON'T!"
What Zoro did not know—what none of them knew—was that the palace's defenses had already been breached by another force entirely.
The toy soldiers. Former toys, now restored to human form. Led by a man whose legend had been erased from history.
The man who had once been Dressrosa's greatest gladiator.
The Palace — Throne Room, Moments Earlier
The former toy soldier moved through the palace like a ghost returning to haunt its killers.
He had not been a toy for more than an hour. The sensation of having a real body—flesh and blood, bone and muscle, a heart that beat with its own rhythm—was still overwhelming. Every breath felt like a gift. Every step felt like an act of defiance against the fate that had been forced upon him.
He had infiltrated the palace through passages he had mapped during his years of wandering Dressrosa as a forgotten plaything. He knew every guard rotation. Every hidden door. Every weakness in the Donquixote Family's defenses.
And he knew, with the desperate certainty of a man who had lost everything and been given one chance to reclaim it, that King Riku was somewhere within these walls.
Hold on. Please. Just hold on a little longer.
He found the former king in a cell beneath the throne room—emaciated, beaten, but alive. The Donquixote Family had been using him as leverage, a hostage to ensure the cooperation of those few citizens who still remembered the truth.
"Your Majesty."
King Riku looked up at the man who had once been his most loyal soldier. His eyes, dulled by years of suffering, slowly widened with recognition.
"...Cyrus?"
"It's me." The former toy soldier—the legendary gladiator, the unbeaten champion of the Corrida Colosseum—knelt before his king. "I've come to bring you home."
There was no time for long reunions. The palace was in chaos, the Donquixote officers scattered across multiple fronts. Cyrus moved through the corridors with King Riku supported on his shoulder, his sword clearing a path through anyone foolish enough to stand in their way.
He reached the throne room just as the Straw Hats breached the outer defenses.
And he saw Doflamingo.
The Warlord was standing at the center of the chamber, his pink coat billowing despite the absence of wind. He was speaking to someone through a Den Den Mushi—his voice cold, controlled, utterly without his usual manic affect.
"—understood. Proceed as planned."
He hung up.
And Cyrus moved.
The speed was inhuman. The technique was flawless. The blade that had made Cyrus the undefeated champion of the Corrida Colosseum—the blade that had not been swung in over a decade—carved an arc through the air that ended at Doflamingo's neck.
The head separated from the body.
Baby-5 screamed. Buffalo stumbled backward, his spinning powers faltering. Gladius stared in shock, his explosive abilities momentarily forgotten.
Luffy, who had just arrived with Violet's help and was fumbling with the Seastone key to Law's shackles, looked up at the commotion. "Whoa! You got him!"
"Luffy-dono! Your hands are shaking!" Kin'emon pointed out.
"OF COURSE THEY'RE SHAKING! THE KEY'S MADE OF SEASTONE TOO! I CAN'T FEEL MY FINGERS!"
But Law was not celebrating.
His eyes—exhausted, bloodshot, still sharp with the desperate acuity of a man who had spent years planning this moment—were fixed on the severed head rolling across the throne room floor.
"Something's wrong."
"Huh? What do you mean?" Luffy's trembling fingers finally managed to insert the key. "He's dead, right? His head came off. That usually means dead."
"No."
Law's voice was hollow.
"That's not how Doflamingo dies."
A laugh pierced the throne room.
"Fu fu fu."
The severed head was laughing.
"Fu-fu-fu!"
The headless body was still standing.
"EEEH-HA-HA-HA-HA!"
Every eye in the throne room locked onto the impossible sight. Doflamingo's severed head, lying on its side in a pool of spreading crimson, was grinning. His eyes were wide. His tongue traced across his upper lip.
And then the head spoke.
"You've been much more capable than I anticipated."
The body took a step. Then another. The neck was already reconnecting—strings, thousands of strings, too fine for the naked eye to perceive, weaving flesh and bone back together with the casual ease of a puppet-master repairing a broken marionette.
"The toys are human again. The country is in chaos. The Revolutionary Army seems to have infiltrated as well." The head was reattaching itself, the strings pulling it back into place on the shoulders. "And that useless Admiral... that trash Navy that would rather negotiate with pirates than uphold their precious justice..."
The grin stretched wider.
"If I'm going to solve all of this at once..."
Strings. Everywhere. They spread from Doflamingo's fingertips, from his palms, from his very being—countless threads of transparent death that shot upward, outward, through the walls, through the ceiling, through the foundations of the palace itself. They erupted into the sky above Dressrosa, and from that central point, they began to spread.
A dome. A cage. A predator's web closing around its prey.
"There's only one solution, isn't there?"
Law had gone pale. His entire body was trembling—not from his injuries, not from exhaustion, but from a terror so deep and so old that it had become part of his cellular memory.
"Don't tell me..."
"Oh, you remember, don't you, Law?" Doflamingo's voice was almost affectionate. "The Birdcage. You watched it happen once before. You know exactly what it can do."
"BIRDCAGE?!" Luffy looked between Law and Doflamingo, his expression shifting from confusion to dawning alarm. "What's a Birdcage?!"
"It's..."
Law's voice cracked.
"It's a cage of strings. Indestructible. Inescapable. It covers the entire island and contracts. Slowly. Inexorably. Cutting everything in its path. Buildings. Trees. Animals."
His eyes met Luffy's.
"People."
"The only way to stop it is to defeat the one who created it. And the only way to defeat him..."
Doflamingo's laughter rose to a shriek.
"Is to find me before everyone in Dressrosa is sliced to ribbons! Fufufufu! FUFFUFFUFFU!"
Above Dressrosa, the strings began to fall.
The Birdcage was closing.
(End of Chapter)
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