While everyone was frozen in sheer astonishment, Sanji had already sprinted his way to Germa's coordinates.
"Stop them, quick!"
The venue instantly erupted into a chaotic frenzy. Sanji fought with everything he had to break through to the Vinsmoke Family, who were mere feet away, but the elite forces of the Big Mom Pirates had already completely cordoned off the quadrant. He couldn't force an entry.
They needed time—a single microsecond of a blind spot where the enemy command structure was completely paralyzed.
"Luffy, execute your phase now!" Jinbe bellowed. Under these parameters, their isolated force wouldn't be able to hold the line for long.
Luffy forcibly suppressed his roaring urge to trade blows with Big Mom, shifting his trajectory to dart toward the banquet table.
"Not good. His target is..." Katakuri's pupils shrank slightly. Extending his arms into thick strands of mochi, he shot them forward to intercept Luffy's path.
"Dah!"
Luffy executed a tight mid-air flip, threading the needle through the incoming attack vector by a hair's breadth. He landed with a heavily strained expression, his eyes locking back onto Katakuri.
But before Katakuri could issue a counter-directive, a violent flash of sharp crimson light erupted within his eyes once more.
"Damn it! Too late..."
SMASH!
Following the crisp sound of shattering glass, the portrait of Mother Carmel—the single artifact their mother protected with her life—was reduced to jagged fragments across the table.
Bege, who had practically mathematically concluded that their operation was a bust, felt a sudden surge of pure ecstasy. However, the exact variable that manifested in the next microsecond was something entirely absent from his calculations.
"The wedding cake..." A low, guttural growl tore from Big Mom's jaws. Facing her directly, Jinbe's expression turned remarkably grave.
Suddenly, Big Mom threw her head back and shrieked at the heavens: "THE WEDDING CAKE!!"
The catastrophic shockwave of pure sound ripped across the entire venue. In an instant, the guests felt as though they had been dragged into a living hell; the sheer, tearing agony vibrating through their eardrums nearly claimed their lives on the spot.
"M-Mama..." "Not good! Her Craving Sickness has completely broken baseline thresholds! Scatter immediately!" "Agh! Why the hell did it have to trigger right now!?"
BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!
Completely blind to the concepts of ally and enemy, Big Mom embarked on a cycle of random, unadulterated destruction. Every single fist she drove forward and every titanic stomp she delivered carried a weight that no ordinary combatant could survive. Getting hit meant an instant casualty rating of one hundred percent.
"Whoa!" Luffy stared at the rampaging Big Mom, his eyes bulging in sheer shock. "What the hell is wrong with her...?"
Regardless of the variables, Luffy hurriedly retrieved the specialized "earplugs" Bege had engineered for the crew and stuffed them into his ears. The situation had completely devolved past the point of safety; Big Mom's cognitive reasoning was entirely gone. She hadn't even processed the data that Mother Carmel's portrait had been shattered.
"Damn it, it's the Craving Sickness! Why did it have to flare up at this exact microsecond...?" Bege's face turned dangerously dark.
Did this mean their assassination plot had collapsed into an absolute failure before they could even deploy the payload?
On the other side of the battlefield, Sanji had capitalized on the localized chaos to successfully extract the members of the Vinsmoke Family, returning their Raid Suit canisters to their hands.
"The rest of the survival parameters are on you guys now!" having delivered the line, Sanji whipped around, leading Chopper, Nami, and the others to forge an escape vector through the dragnet.
"Someone... intercept them...!" Smoothie managed to strain out the order through the dampening weight of the soundwaves.
Right at that moment, countless earplugs molded from pure mochi shot across the field. Katakuri, entirely unaffected by the acoustic trauma due to his specialized Haki manipulation, walked calmly through the debris, his sharp gaze locking onto Luffy.
"Luffy! We need to present the fragments to Big Mom again! Force her system to process the shattered portrait!" Brook shouted, materializing beside the captain.
"Got it!"
Luffy gritted his teeth, snatched a handful of the portrait fragments from the table, and charged straight toward Big Mom's coordinates.
BOOM!
With a blinding flash of speed, Katakuri intercepted his path, driving a heavy fist into Luffy's frame and blasting him backward.
"Gah!" "Luffy!"
The members of the Straw Hat crew paled in unison. The shattered pieces of the portrait had been cleanly secured by Katakuri's hand.
"Not a single one of you leaves this summit alive today!"
This time, Katakuri's fury was absolute.
BOOM!
Big Mom's indiscriminate assault vectors had rolled into the quadrant occupied by her own children. Her strikes held zero familial restraint. Every downswing carved a massive crater into the chateau's foundation.
"The wedding cake..." "Mama! Look at my face, I'm Perospero! We are your children!" Perospero screamed frantically, attempting to re-calibrate her senses.
But what his equations omitted was that this manifestation of Big Mom's Craving Sickness was an absolute explosion; she had already forced it down once within Drake's independent space. To reset her cognitive functions under these parameters, introducing the actual wedding cake to her system was the solitary mathematical solution!
BOOM!
Without a single shred of surprise, the only response Perospero received was a massive fist driving down onto his position.
"Agh...!" "Brother!" The surrounding Charlotte siblings stood frozen in pure horror. "Quick! Command all units to execute a tactical retreat!"
In stark contrast to the absolute chaos consuming the Big Mom Pirates, Bege and his executives appeared remarkably poised. However, internally, their strategic calculations were in a state of severe turbulence. It was blatantly obvious that forcing Big Mom to process the shattered portrait again was structurally impossible under these restrictions. Even if they managed to display it, it likely carried zero baseline utility.
Judging by her current biological outputs, Big Mom was completely deranged. There was zero guarantee the mechanism would function.
"To hell with it! Launch the payload!" Bege gritted his teeth, hoisting the specialized secret weapon onto his shoulder—the KX Launchers containing highly toxic chemical payloads!
Beside him, his core subordinates smoothly lifted their respective launchers, pulling the triggers without a single microsecond of hesitation straight toward Big Mom's coordinates.
POW... POW...
"Not good!" Katakuri, who had been poised to pursue Luffy, felt a sharp flash of crimson erupt within his eyes. He executed a sub-second pivot, abandoning his path to dash toward the incoming projectiles. He had clearly processed a catastrophic future.
"Ahahahahaha!" Bege, who had previously calculated a near-zero success rate, burst into a fit of triumphant laughter upon seeing Katakuri's panicked transition. "The baseline parameters have shifted in our favor!"
"Look at how frantic Katakuri is! He undeniably processed a grim future for his crew, hahaha...!"
"You traitorous bastard, Bege!!" the surrounding officers of the Big Mom Pirates glared murderously at the captain. But Bege remained entirely unfazed, the smug, unreadable grin on his face expanding without an ounce of restraint.
Right at that exact microsecond, an authoritative voice boomed across the summit: "Candy Wall!"
A colossal barrier of solid candy shot into the sky from the earth, positioning itself with mathematical precision directly along the trajectory of Bege's chemical weapons.
BOOM!
Following a localized detonation against the solid candy infrastructure, the triumphant grins on Bege and his men completely froze, thick streams of comedic snot involuntarily leaking from their noses.
The elite members of the Charlotte family let out a collective sigh of relief upon seeing the anomalous, terrifying weapons successfully neutralized by the barrier. But the moment their cognitive functions re-calibrated and pure, incandescent fury consumed their minds, they snapped their gazes back to Bege's coordinates—only to find his silhouette had completely evaporated from the quadrant.
From a significant distance away, Bege's voice drifted back through the communication lines: "Mission parameters compromised! All units of the joint alliance, execute an immediate tactical retreat!"
Luffy and his companions immediately turned on their heels to bolt, but an entity in the sector was moving at a drastically superior velocity!
Katakuri, his expression a mask of cold steel, materialized directly in front of Luffy's path. He drove his massive trident, the Mogura, forward with lethal intent, aiming straight for Luffy's chest.
"Whoa... woah, woah, woah!" Luffy executed a series of micro-maneuvers, dodging the razor-sharp tip by a microscopic margin.
Simultaneously, Caesar Clown came hurtling into the plaza from the outer perimeter, clutching a massive, ornate mirror in his arms, with Brûlée secured tightly to his back. This was the exact blueprint of their pre-engineered extraction protocol: have Caesar utilize Brûlée's coordinates to secure an immediate dimensional retreat.
The strategy was elegant in theory, but reality held different parameters.
BANG!
The exact microsecond the Big Mom Pirates processed what the extraction unit was attempting to achieve, a high-velocity sniper round tore through the air, completely shattering the mirror into a million useless pieces.
"Eh... ah..." Caesar's brain stalled entirely, his body going completely rigid.
The Straw Hat Pirates and the Fire Tank Pirates felt their hearts drop into a bottomless pit: "!!!"
"The extraction vector is completely obliterated! How the hell do we exit the grid!?"
The summit was a scene of absolute, chaotic friction. Standing directly in front of Luffy, Katakuri positioned his towering frame like an unyielding monolith, completely locking down his movement vectors.
Sanji and his companions found themselves entirely encircled by the high-tier executives of the Big Mom Pirates.
Jinbe, Pedro, and Bege's core units were forced to compress their coordinates, drawing closer together to form a tight defensive cluster.
The circle of enemies was steadily closing in, fresh units continually reinforcing the perimeter. The data was glaringly clear... they were completely trapped inside the enemy grid!