Light pushed the massive chunk of masonry aside mid-air with Force Authority, and it exploded against a dock post behind him in a blinding shower of pale dust.
The stag was already moving.
His Observation Haki gave him exactly half a second of warning—a spike of enormous, fast-moving pressure at the edge of his awareness. But half a second wasn't much when the thing bearing down on him was four meters of solid muscle and sharpened bone moving at a full charge.
Daro's massive chest hit him like a fortress wall falling sideways.
The impact sent Light skidding backward across the harbor stones, a trail of sparks igniting under his steel-toed boots. He dug his heels in, bleeding off the momentum with his Level 2 Kami-e, and was back on his feet before he had even fully stopped sliding.
The stag had already wheeled around, its timber-like horns lowering for a second pass.
Light didn't wait for it. He used Force Authority to exponentially multiply the kinetic pull of his own sprint and went straight at the beast.
He closed the gap in a fraction of a millisecond, diving low under the sweeping horns. He drove a Haki-less, raw physical Shigan directly into the thick muscle of Daro's neck three times in rapid succession before violently repelling himself backward to avoid a trampling hoof.
The stag screamed—a strange, horrible sound with a distinct human edge to it that felt entirely wrong coming from an animal's throat. Dark blood ran fast and thick down its neck. Daro tossed his massive head wildly, his horns sweeping the empty air where Light had just been.
Then, Gareth's fist arrived from the blind spot on the right.
Light snapped his arm up and triggered Tekkai, but it didn't matter as much as it should have. Gareth's Strong-Strong Fruit didn't just amplify physical strength; it made the kinetic force behave like pressurized water searching for a crack in a stone wall. The impact pushed straight through the hardened muscle.
Light was thrown ten feet through the air. He landed hard, feeling the concussive force settle deep into his ribs like a permanent, agonizing bruise. He gritted his teeth and stood back up.
Gareth was already grinning through the blood smeared across his face from Light's earlier flying slashes. "There you are, you slippery rat," he growled. He charged again, the cobblestones literally cracking under his boots.
⬛ ⬛ ⬛
They traded blows in the ruins of the harbor.
Gareth swung the massive iron anchor chain he had ripped from the docks. The heavy links caught Light squarely across the back with a sound like a thunderclap. The iron bit through the dark jacket and tore into his skin. The pain was blinding and immediate. Light stumbled forward two steps before he caught himself.
He answered by pivoting and unleashing three Level 4 flying slashes directly across Gareth's chest. The compressed air cut deep. Gareth bled profusely, but he barely even blinked. The Devil Fruit was clearly doing something unnatural to his pain threshold alongside his strength. Light cut him across the arms, the shoulders, and the face. Gareth bled from a dozen places and kept swinging his fists as if the bleeding were happening to someone else.
Daro came in from the left while Light was mid-slash. The stag's massive shoulder caught him at hip height. It wasn't a clean hit, but it was enough to spin him entirely off his feet. Light hit the dock hard, rolled to his feet, and had to take Gareth's next earth-shattering punch on a raised, Tekkai-braced forearm.
The sheer force of the blow drove Light's own arm back into his jaw. His teeth clicked together violently, and his mouth filled with the hot taste of copper.
He dropped to one knee, panting.
"Getting tired?" Gareth asked. The massive captain had finally slowed down, watching him, his massive chest heaving as he caught his own breath.
Light spat a mouthful of blood onto the cobblestones and stood up. "A little," he admitted pleasantly.
He quickly checked his internal panel. He had been passively pulling in the surviving pirates who tried to flee during the gaps between exchanges—dragging them into the crossfire with Force Authority and cutting them down with flying slashes whenever Gareth swung wide. The KP had climbed steadily without him paying it proper attention.
[ KP: 298,600 ]
He needed Daro down first. The stag was too fast, constantly disrupting his angles of attack. The absolute second Light stopped moving to spend his points in the System, those timber horns were going to impale him.
He analyzed the beast. The right eye. Daro had been subtly favoring his left side ever since Light's Shigan strikes had ruptured the muscle on the right side of his neck. He was keeping his right eye turned slightly away. It was pure biological instinct, protecting the weakened flank.
Checkmate.
Light intentionally took three glancing blows from Gareth's fists—eating the kinetic shock on his raised arms, keeping his footing, and allowing the immense physical pressure to push him backward into the exact spatial coordinate he needed.
Then, he moved. He pulled himself violently forward with Force Authority, while simultaneously applying maximum gravitational attraction to Daro.
The two of them converged in the center of the harbor far faster than either pirate expected. At the absolute last microsecond, Light twisted his body sideways, slipping past the lethal horns, and drove his saber directly into the stag's right eye with both hands and the entirety of his Level 4 Weapon Arts behind it.
The reaction was immediate, violent, and entirely beyond his control.
Daro's neck snapped upward on pure, agonizing reflex. The massive Zoan body reacted before the human brain could catch up—thousands of pounds of animal muscle thrashing without thought.
Light's left arm was still locked on the hilt of the saber when the stag threw its head back.
The fracture happened somewhere in the middle of his forearm. It was a sound Light felt before he actually heard it—a deep, sickening CRACK that radiated up through his elbow and directly into his shoulder socket. His grip failed completely and involuntarily. He was thrown through the air, hitting the harbor stones and rolling to a halt.
He came up on his knees, his left arm pressed flat and useless against his ribs. Just breathing sent a wave of white, blinding static up to his shoulder.
The saber remained buried deep in the stag's skull. He could still wiggle his fingers, which meant the bone wasn't a clean break—just a severe fracture—but using that arm for combat was entirely out of the question for the rest of the night.
Daro dropped to its front knees. Then, it collapsed onto its side. The remaining dark eye went glassy, then entirely empty, and the enormous black body settled into the blood-stained stones and was completely still.
Light reached into his jacket with his good right hand, drew his Marine dagger, and checked the panel.
[ KP: 318,400 ]
Enough for the final Life Force upgrade. He spent it without hesitation.
Life Force. Purchase.
[ LIFE FORCE Lv.5 — Next: 300,000 KP ] [ KP: 118,400 ]
The fracture in his arm stayed. The agonizing pain stayed. But what lifted was absolutely everything else. The deep, pooling exhaustion in his legs vanished. The crushing heaviness in his chest evaporated. The terrifying sensation that his biological engine was tearing itself apart disappeared. It didn't heal his broken bones, but it exponentially raised the ceiling of what his body could endure before shutting down.
Right now, that was exactly what he needed.
He turned around.
Gareth was on his knees next to Daro's massive corpse. He had one massive, scarred hand resting gently on the stag's bloody neck, his head bowed. He stayed like that for a long moment. The harbor slowly settled into an eerie quiet around them—just the sound of the water lapping against the hulls, the creak of damaged wood, and the first pale, grey light of dawn beginning to bleed over the eastern cliff.
When Gareth finally looked up, something fundamental had gone out of his face. The rage was still there, but it was suffocating under the weight of something much heavier.
"You killed him," Gareth whispered.
"Yes."
Gareth looked around the harbor. He looked at the ruined camp, the cratered dock road, the sixty-three ships sitting dead in the water, and the absolute sea of butchered bodies.
Four years of piracy. Light could see the eulogy in the way Gareth looked at the wreckage.
"We were going to the Grand Line," Gareth said, his voice hollow. "Next month. Everything was set."
Light tilted his head, his pleasant smile returning despite the blood dripping from his chin. "Insects like you don't last long past the entrance," he said smoothly. "You'd have been a statistic on a Marine bounty report within the year. I simply accelerated the timeline."
Something shifted violently in Gareth's expression. "Insects," he repeated slowly.
"You both had an extraordinary amount of Bad Karma," Light said, twirling the dagger effortlessly in his right hand. "I go where the Red Karma is. It's as simple as that."
"WHO DO YOU THINK YOU ARE?!"
It wasn't a question anymore. It was raw, flat sound—the voice of a man who had absolutely nothing left to calculate and nothing left to lose. Gareth stood up, and the grief burned off him like steam. Underneath it was a monstrous, suicidal rage.
"ONE MARINE! ONE FUCKING PERSON! YOU WALK IN HERE AND—"
"Yes," Light interrupted mildly.
The single word landed directly in the middle of Gareth's screaming sentence and stopped it dead. Gareth stared at him. He stared at the fractured arm held tightly against Light's ribs, at the small dagger in his right hand, and at the serene, arrogant smile that sat on Light's face in the middle of a slaughtered harbor at dawn, as if he entirely belonged there.
"I'm going to kill you," Gareth said. It was quiet. Serious.
"You have been trying," Light noted. "Come on."
Gareth crossed the harbor in five massive steps that shook the earth and swung.
The first punch missed Light's head by an inch and cratered the dock next to his foot—the sheer air displacement of the miss was hard enough to rip the cobblestones out of the dirt. The second punch caught Light's shoulder, spinning him fully around. Light dropped to one knee, used the momentum to spin back up, and unleashed three point-blank flying slashes across Gareth's chest from the dagger.
Gareth ignored the deep cuts and grabbed at Light through his own blood. Light drove the dagger directly into the bicep of the reaching arm and used Force Authority to violently repel himself outward, breaking the grip.
They separated. They moved back and forth across the ruined harbor ground. Gareth was slowing down by degrees; the accumulated blood loss from a hundred cuts was finally doing its quiet, lethal work, and his breathing was growing ragged and desperate. Light's fractured arm knocked against his side once when he pivoted wrong, the pain spiking so white he nearly blacked out, but he forced his expression to remain perfectly calm, adjusted his stance, and kept moving.
"You're... you're still smiling," Gareth panted, sounding genuinely offended.
"You are still breathing," Light replied. "I appreciate the exercise."
"SHUT THE FUCK UP!"
Gareth charged recklessly. Light stepped cleanly inside the wild, desperate swing, feeling the wind of the massive fist pass his ear, and drove the dagger upward, right under Gareth's ribs. He put the entire weight of his Level 5 Life Force behind the thrust, angling the blade directly into the heart.
Gareth froze. His massive hands came down heavily onto Light's shoulders—crushing, immensely powerful even now, even with a blade in his heart. The grip tightened painfully for one terrifying second.
And then, it didn't.
The giant man went down slowly. He fell the way anything that large falls—in stages. Knees first, then listing sideways, finally settling onto the harbor stones with a sound like a collapsing building. He ended up on his back, staring blankly up at the lightening sky.
Light stood over him, panting softly, and watched the glowing red numbers above his face. The 89,200 hovered there for a moment, and then slowly faded into nothing.
Light stepped back, wiped the dagger on his trousers, and looked at his panel properly for the first time since the duel began.
[ KARMA SYSTEM ] [ KP: 127,340 ]
[ LIFE FORCE Lv.5 — Next: 300,000 KP ] [ WEAPON ARTS Lv.4 — Next: 350,000 KP ]
[ OBSERVATION Lv.1 — Next: 600,000 KP ] [ ARMAMENT Lv.0 — Next: 500,000 KP ] [ CONQUEROR'S Lv.0 — Next: 1,000,000 KP ]
[ SORU Lv.2 — Next: 150,000 KP ] [ TEKKAI Lv.2 — Next: 150,000 KP ] [ GEPPO Lv.2 — Next: 150,000 KP ] [ KAMI-E Lv.2 — Next: 150,000 KP ] [ RANKYAKU Lv.2 — Next: 150,000 KP ] [ SHIGAN Lv.2 — Next: 150,000 KP ] [ LIFE RETURN Lv.2 — Next: 80,000 KP ]
[ FORCE AUTHORITY Max Output ]
127,340 KP. Armament Haki was at 500,000. He was less than four hundred thousand away.
The harbor was entirely quiet now. The few dozen pirates who had managed to survive the massacre had all rushed back onto the ships in a desperate attempt to flee. But they had quickly discovered that the rudders were jammed and the ships couldn't move. So, they were currently hiding below deck in the dark, praying to whatever gods they believed in that the smiling demon would leave with the morning sun, or—in a profound twist of irony—praying for normal Marines to arrive and arrest them.
The sky had transitioned from pitch black to a pale, bruised grey, and was slowly working its way toward something warmer.
Somewhere inland, behind closed shutters and heavily barricaded doors, eight hundred civilians were waiting in terrified silence to find out whether the morning would bring them a new pirate captain, or something far worse.
Light looked toward the silent town. It was closer than the ships.
Hm. I haven't scanned the civilians yet, Light thought, his dark eyes narrowing slightly.
The broken arm could wait.