The first warehouse held about eighty men.
Light stood in the doorway for a moment, letting the cool night air wash over him as he analyzed the glowing numbers floating above the sleeping heads. Most of them hovered well above five thousand. A few were scattered below the threshold—he memorized their exact spatial coordinates automatically and stepped past them into the dark.
He closed the heavy wooden door behind him. It clicked shut with a sharp, echoing finality.
He didn't draw his saber. The steel would be too slow for this many targets, and Force Authority was quieter.
He didn't pull one man. He didn't pull five. He mentally cast a wide, invisible net across the room and violently yanked twenty of them off the floorboards simultaneously. Bedrolls, crates, and human bodies dragged through the air toward him in a tangled, shouting mass of confused limbs.
Before they reached him, he inverted the flow. Push.
He hit them with a brutal, lateral shockwave, slamming the entire cluster into the far wall at highway speeds. The thick wooden beams of the wall cracked with a sound like cannon fire. Most of the men didn't get back up.
The rest of the warehouse was awake now. Men were scrambling in the dark, desperately reaching for cutlasses and flintlocks. Some charged blindly. Others scrambled over their comrades, trying to reach the door.
Light pulled the chargers into his orbit, his saber finally flashing out to dissect the cluster in a blur of Level 3 Weapon Arts. He spun on his heel and sent a localized, concussive wave of repulsion at the cowards fleeing for the exit. They slammed face-first into the reinforced door. Light walked over and cut through them, too.
Near the back of the room, a seasoned pirate actually managed to draw his sword and land a desperate, sweeping strike. The steel caught Light directly across the forearm. It bounced off the Tekkai-hardened muscle with a sharp CLANG, the kinetic rebound instantly shattering the pirate's wrist.
The man dropped his sword, falling to his knees and clutching his mangled arm in sheer terror, waiting for the killing blow.
Light paused, looking down at the number hovering above the shivering man's head.
"Your Red Karma is only four hundred," Light said smoothly, flicking the blood off his blade. "You pass. Stay down."
The man stared at his broken wrist, his mouth opening and closing in shock, and wisely decided not to argue.
Light finished the rest of the warehouse and walked back out into the cool night. He was painted red to both elbows.
⬛ ⬛ ⬛
The second warehouse was larger. A hundred and twenty men, maybe more, crammed into a space never designed for sleeping. They were entirely awake by the time he reached them—the dull thuds from the first building had carried across the quiet docks. Several dozen pirates had already formed a defensive wall near the main entrance, weapons drawn and shaking.
"THERE'S ONLY ONE OF HIM!" a massive pirate roared from the back. "JUST RUSH THE BASTARD!"
Light didn't give them the chance. He raised his left hand and pulled the entire front rank toward him.
Twelve men left their feet at once, flying forward across the length of the warehouse. Light moved through them before gravity could fully reclaim them. He drove his saber through the chests of three men while they were still suspended in mid-air, then unleashed a massive Force Authority repulsion, sending the remaining nine flying backward. They crashed into the ranks behind them like a tidal wave breaking against a cliff, shattering ribs and splintering crates.
Before the pirates could untangle themselves, Light pulled the entire crushed mass back in again.
For four minutes, the warehouse was deafeningly loud.
And then, it was absolutely quiet.
Light walked out. Behind him, the building groaned, the floorboards warped by the sheer volume of corpses and localized gravity distortions.
Outside, the dock road had fully awakened into a nightmare. Men were running from both directions—some rushing blindly toward the noise, others fleeing from it, and many who had just woken up and had absolutely no idea which way safety lay.
Light stepped into the center of the cobblestone road. He dropped into a low stance, extended both arms, and pulled.
Wide arc. Maximum reach. Thirty meters in every direction.
People flew. It wasn't metaphorical—they were literally ripped from the ground, yanked toward him from both ends of the street simultaneously. Thirty, forty bodies converging on the exact same point.
Just before the screaming mass collided with him, he pushed, exploding the sphere of bodies outward in a devastating shockwave. Then, he pulled again. The dock road transformed into a horrific, invisible meat grinder that processed pirates with brutal, mechanical efficiency. In and out, pull and push, and the saber never stopped moving through every cycle.
"WHAT IS THAT?! IS THAT A DEVIL FRUIT?!"
"CAPTAIN! SOMEONE GET CAPTAIN GARETH!"
"DON'T BUNCH UP! SPREAD O—oh god!"
Light waded through the dock road, his pleasant smile entirely gone, replaced by a mask of cold, terrifying concentration as his KP counter began to skyrocket.
[ KP: 52,400 ]
He moved into the market stalls. The pirates camped there had managed to scrape together something resembling a tactical defense. Fifty men stood shoulder-to-shoulder across the road, a shield wall bracing the front line, with several heavy crossbows leveled from the rear. Someone had actually done some thinking.
It didn't matter.
Light raised his hand and pulled the heavy iron shields directly out of their grips—Force Authority cared absolutely nothing about how tightly an object was being held.
The rear guard panicked and fired the crossbows. Light extended his senses, tracking the heavy bolts, and applied a sudden, intense burst of attraction. He pulled the lethal projectiles straight out of the air mid-flight, dropping them harmlessly at his feet. He had never attempted to manipulate high-velocity projectiles before, and he was deeply pleased to find the physics held up perfectly.
Then, he pulled the entire, defenseless front line forward, smashing them into their own rear guard, and let his saber handle the resulting pile of flesh.
The men at the back of the line broke and ran for the hills. Light stood still, letting them run for exactly five seconds. They made it about forty meters.
Then, he pulled them back.
They dragged across the dirt, fingers clawing uselessly at the cobblestones.
"Please—" one of them gasped, flipping onto his back and staring up at the blood-soaked Marine standing over him. "Please, I only joined this crew last month! I swear, I haven't done anything yet!"
Light looked at the number hovering above the weeping man's head. 6,200 Red.
Above the threshold.
"Last month is long enough," Light said quietly. The saber flashed downward.
[ KP: 89,700 ]
He pushed into the inn next. Three floors, forty rooms, armed men in every single one of them.
He became a ghost in the corridors. He went floor by floor, room by room, door by door. Some tried to fight him in the narrow hallways, realizing they had nowhere left to run. Some tried to jump from the windows. Light simply grabbed their center of mass and pulled them back into the rooms before they ever hit the ground.
By the time he reached the second floor, he was starting to feel the physical toll.
The wide-area Force Authority pulls cost significantly more stamina than targeted, single-point manipulations, and he had been running his biological engine at maximum output for twenty straight minutes. He could feel the absolute ceiling of his Level 3 Life Force. His body was finally pushing back—his heart rate was hammering against his ribs, his lungs burned with every breath, and a deep, lactic heaviness was settling into his sword arm.
He checked his panel. He had enough KP.
It was time to expand the engine.
Life Force. Purchase.
[ LIFE FORCE Lv.4 — Next: 200,000 KP ] [ KP: 39,700 ]
The upgrade was instantaneous. The crushing heaviness in his limbs vanished, flushed out by a sudden, intense rush of cellular energy. His breathing leveled out perfectly. The ceiling of his stamina expanded outward, leaving him feeling as fresh as he had been standing on the cliffside an hour ago.
He smiled, finished the second floor, and walked up the stairs to the third.
⬛ ⬛ ⬛
When Light finally stepped back out of the inn, the dock road had reorganized.
Someone with actual tactical experience had managed to rally two or three hundred surviving men into a loose, wide formation on the open ground near the harbor. They were deliberately spread out this time, avoiding the dense clusters that made his wide-area gravity pulls so devastating. Someone had analyzed his killing pattern and come up with a partial countermeasure.
Light stood under the awning of the inn, his white shirt stained entirely crimson, and looked out at the three hundred pirates. He thought about the saber in his hand. He thought about the panel in his mind.
Weapon Arts was at Level 3. It had been sitting there for weeks. He needed 80,000 KP to max it out. He currently had 39,700.
He needed to process this formation first.
Fine. He walked slowly toward the vast sea of men. A pirate near the front—an officer type, likely the one who had organized this spread formation—raised a heavy cutlass and shouted something aggressively motivational. The entire formation roared and charged.
Light didn't wait for them. He pulled the left flank violently inward, stepped into their shattered lines, and cut through them with surgical precision. Simultaneously, he pushed the right flank backward, creating a massive, chaotic gap in their center, and charged directly into it.
He moved through the formation like a virus destroying a host from the inside out. He dismantled their ranks from within, his saber a blur of lethal efficiency, his Force Authority casually repelling anyone foolish enough to try and flank him. Pirates spun around, desperately trying to locate the threat, only to find their throats already slit.
The officer type finally found him in the chaos. He was a massive man with genuine, refined sword skills, coming at Light with a technique that belonged in the Grand Line, not the South Blue.
[ Unknown — Pirate Officer ] [ Green: 890 / Red: 31,400 ]
31,400. The officer swung hard, catching Light's saber in a heavy, two-handed bind that actually carried real kinetic force behind it. The man gritted his teeth and pushed.
Light simply smiled, letting the man's momentum carry through the bind. He pivoted smoothly, stepped inside the officer's guard, and drove his saber straight through the man's shoulder socket. It wasn't a kill strike—just an incredibly painful way to end the arm's functionality. The officer screamed and dropped his sword. Light casually ended it a second later.
Within ten minutes, the formation was gone. The harbor ground was slick and quiet.
[ KP: 97,300 ]
There it was. He had the points.
He looked toward the center of the camp, where the absolute largest concentrations of Red Karma were finally waking up. This was going to be a very long, very satisfying night.
Weapon Arts. Purchase.