Weapon Arts. Purchase.
[ WEAPON ARTS Lv.3 — Next: 200,000 KP ] [ KP: 17,300 ]
The change was immediate, and profoundly strange.
Light swung his saber once at empty air, testing the weight. It felt different—not heavier, but more real. The mental gap between the blade and his intention had completely closed. The sword was no longer a tool he was holding; it was a biological extension of his own arm.
He looked around the blood-slicked docks for something metallic to test it on and found a rusted, heavy iron anchor chain hanging off a mooring post.
He didn't wind up. He just swung.
The saber passed through the thick iron links as if they were made of wet paper. There was no resistance, no jarring vibration up his arm. The severed chain simply slid apart and hit the cobblestones with a heavy clatter.
Light looked at the pristine edge of his blade. Then he looked at the chain. Then he looked at the three hundred surviving pirates scattered across the harbor, who had just watched a lone man casually slice through a battleship's anchor chain and were currently taking a collective, terrified moment to reconsider their life choices.
There was something else, too. His newly acquired Observation Haki was syncing with his Weapon Arts. He could hear them. Not just their panicked voices, but the actual rhythm of their breathing. All of them. Even the men hiding behind the ruined market stalls forty meters away. The shallow, ragged rhythm of frightened breath was distinct from the steady breath of a charging man. He didn't even need to look anymore; he knew exactly which direction an attack would come from before the attacker even twitched.
Cutting steel. Hearing the breath of all things.
It was incredibly useful. But the fundamental mathematical problem remained: he was still executing them one or two at a time in close quarters. The wide Force Authority pulls were handling volume, but they drained his stamina, and there were still thousands of men on this island. He was only one person.
He needed to hit more of them per swing. He needed Area of Effect.
He checked the panel. 17,300 KP. He was miles away from Level 4.
Time to grind, Light thought.
He sheathed the saber and went back to work with his bare hands. For the next ten minutes, he used Force Authority exclusively. Wide pulls. Devastating, bone-crushing pushes. The harbor became a terrible, invisible centrifuge of flying bodies and shattered timber. And the KP counter began to climb.
[ KP: 118,600 ]
He had been at this for nearly forty minutes. He moved like a shadow, taking full advantage of his dark clothing and the pitch-black night where only his Haki painted a clear picture. The harbor was completely unrecognizable. The dock road was a cratered ruin. Both warehouses were structural disasters, and the market stalls had been reduced to kindling.
In the distance, his Haki picked up two massive, dense presences. He heard a beastly, guttural growl and a booming roar echoing from the civilian town border. The bosses. He consciously avoided that sector for now. He needed to finish his harvest first.
There were still hundreds of men pouring into the harbor who hadn't been in the blast zones when he started.
He looked at the remaining cost. 200,000 KP for Level 4. He needed more.
A fresh group of about sixty pirates came sprinting around the far warehouse—reinforcements from the anchored ships. They rushed in, weapons drawn, and then stopped dead in their tracks at the edge of the harbor, staring at the absolute carnage.
"What... what happened here?" one of them whispered, the cutlass shaking in his hand.
"I did," Light said pleasantly.
Sixty pairs of eyes snapped toward the center of the dock road. They found a lone man standing under the moonlight, his white shirt stained entirely crimson from the shoulders down, his face a mask of complete, undisturbed calm.
One pirate dropped his sword and ran. Then three more broke. Then the entire group was scrambling backward over each other to escape.
Light raised his hand and pulled the entire group back into the meat grinder.
[ KP: 187,400 ]
Getting close.
More groups trickled in from the ships and the far ends of the island, woken by the screams and the crashing timber. Light processed every single one of them. The men who registered below the five-thousand threshold, he hit with the pommel of his sword—hard enough to concuss them, but leaving them breathing.
The ones above the threshold, he didn't.
The KP climbed in violent, bloody bursts.
[ KP: 214,900 ]
Light stood amidst a literal mountain of unconscious and dead men. He let out a slow, steady breath.
Weapon Arts. Purchase.
[ WEAPON ARTS Lv.4 — Next: 350,000 KP ] [ KP: 14,900 ]
This time, the physiological shift didn't just affect his grip. It traveled up his entire arm, seating itself deep in his shoulder and spine. It was a fundamental, biological understanding of kinetic force. His muscles knew exactly how to torque. His mind understood that a blade could carry far more than its own physical weight if pushed correctly. He realized that the air itself could become a cutting medium, provided you swung fast enough and put absolute will behind the steel.
He needed to try it immediately.
A fresh group of thirty pirates was charging him from the left flank, screaming war cries to mask their terror.
Light turned toward them. He didn't wait for them to close the distance. He drew his saber, planted his feet, and swung a full, horizontal arc with everything his Level 4 body could generate.
The saber didn't touch a single one of them. They were fifteen feet away.
But the air cracked.
A compressed crescent of vacuum and sheer kinetic pressure tore from the edge of his blade. The Flying Slash crossed the gap in a fraction of a millisecond and took the entire front rank completely off their feet. Twelve men went down at once, cleanly bisected. The men behind them stumbled in horror over the falling bodies.
Light was already swinging again. A different angle. An upward diagonal slash.
Another twelve men fell.
Light swung a third time, simply because he could. The air shrieked. The remaining pirates who were still standing dropped their weapons, turned, and threw themselves screaming into the freezing ocean water.
Light laughed.
It didn't start as a polite chuckle. It started low in his chest and tore its way out of his throat—a loud, hysterical, unhinged sound. For the first time since he had drawn breath in this world, Light Yagami threw his head back and laughed at the night sky. It was the laugh of a man who realized that his godhood was no longer a theoretical concept. The body simply didn't wait to ask for permission; the euphoria demanded to be heard.
He pulled the fleeing swimmers back out of the water with Force Authority and swung again. A wide, low flying slash. He laughed between every swing. It was perfect. It was flawless arithmetic. Thirty people in one exchange, and the stamina cost was absolutely nothing compared to the close-quarters butchery he had been doing for the last hour.
"WHY IS HE LAUGHING?!"
"WHAT IS WRONG WITH HIM?!"
"JUST RUN! DON'T LOOK AT HIS EYES! OH GOD—"
He was still laughing when the building left the ground.
He felt it a split second before he saw it. His Observation Haki screamed a warning—a massive, overwhelmingly dense presence moving at impossible speeds from the far end of the harbor.
Light snapped his head up.
A two-story stone warehouse was flying through the air. The entire structure, ripped cleanly from its foundations, was rotating slowly against the stars, thrown at him with the casual ease of a man tossing a pebble.
Light dove hard to the left.
The warehouse obliterated the dock exactly where he had been standing. The resulting shockwave picked Light up and threw him fifteen feet through the air. He hit the cobblestones, rolled with his Level 2 Kami-e to bleed off the momentum, and came up on one knee. His ears were ringing violently, the air choked with pulverized stone and dust.
He stood up slowly, coughing, and wiped a smear of blood from his cheek.
As the dust cleared at the far end of the harbor, two figures stepped into the moonlight.
The first was a mountain of a man—easily six and a half feet tall, with arms as thick as iron mooring posts. He was shirtless, his torso mapped with thick scars, and he looked at the rubble of the warehouse with the flat, annoyed expression of a man who had expected a slightly better result.
The second figure was already transformed. It wasn't a hybrid state; it was a full Zoan beast. A massive, pitch-black stag standing four meters at the shoulder, with horns that looked like sharpened timber. Despite the animalistic form, a cold, human intelligence burned in its dark eyes.
[ Gareth — Pirate Captain ] [ Green: 540 / Red: 89,200 ]
[ Daro — First Mate ] [ Green: 210 / Red: 74,600 ]
89,200 and 74,600.
Light looked at the two massive, glowing red suns hovering above their heads, and he felt the unhinged smile slowly return to his face.
The Marine intelligence had explicitly stated there was one Devil Fruit user. Seventy million bounty. One captain.
The intelligence had been spectacularly wrong.
Gareth rolled his thick neck, the bones popping like firecrackers. He surveyed the ruined harbor—the blood pooling in the cobblestones, the shattered wood, and the hundred-odd surviving pirates who were currently trying to crawl as far away from the center of the dock as physically possible.
"You did this," Gareth stated. It wasn't a question. His voice was deathly calm, which was far more alarming than if he had been shouting.
"Most of it," Light replied, brushing the masonry dust off his dark jacket.
"How many of my men are dead?"
Light pretended to think about it. "A few hundred so far. I wasn't counting carefully."
Gareth went perfectly still. Beside him, the massive black stag exhaled a jet of hot air through its nose—a sound like a blacksmith's bellows. The cobblestones under its heavy hooves literally cracked from the sheer, condensed weight of its stillness.
"Who are you, you arrogant fucker?" Gareth growled, his voice dropping an octave.
"Marine Captain."
"Why don't you Marines mind your own fucking business, HUH?!"
Light leveled his saber, his dark eyes locked on the 89,200 above Gareth's head. "You both have an extraordinary amount of Bad Karma. It's genuinely offensive." Light glanced at the black stag. "Both of you."
Daro the stag stared at him. Then, a pulsing vein bulged on its furry forehead, and the beast actually let out a harsh, barking laugh. "HE-HEHE-HAHAHAHA! Sure. Whatever the fuck you say, Marine."
Gareth didn't laugh. He reached down, dug his fingers into the cobblestones, and ripped a chunk of solid masonry the size of a carriage wheel out of the earth. He hurled it at Light at a speed it had no physical business traveling.
Beside him, the black stag dropped its massive, timber-horned head. The ground violently shook as the four-meter beast charged.
"RRRAAAAAAAHHHH!" Gareth roared, the calm finally shattering. "I'M GONNA EAT YOU ALIVE, YOU FUCKHEAD!"
The harbor of Roca Island was no longer quiet.