The earth-shattering duel between the two Emperors reached a fever pitch. Gunnar, his body a whirlwind of Haki and raw power, traded blows with Blackbeard in a brawl that was leveling what little remained of the central courtyard.
"You're strong, boy!" Blackbeard roared, his laughter a grating sound even amidst the chaos. "But you're just like your old man! All power, no subtlety!"
He ducked under a quake-infused punch that shattered the air itself. In the same motion, his hand, swirling with the darkness of the Yami Yami no Mi, lashed out and grabbed Gunnar's face.
"Kurouzu!"
The familiar, sickening pull took hold. Gunnar felt the fire of the Gura Gura no Mi and the innate power of his Titan fruit being sucked away, nullified. For a fraction of a second, he was just a man, immensely strong, but just a man.
Blackbeard capitalized on that single moment. "ZEHAHAHAHAHA! GOT YOU!"
With a heave of his colossal strength, he lifted Gunnar off his feet and spun him around, using him like a human flail before hurling him with all his might. Gunnar shot through the air like a cannonball, utterly powerless, and crashed with a bone-jarring impact into the side of a massive, half-melted caramel spire hundreds of yards away.
The spire groaned and cracked, but held. Gunnar slumped down its sticky side, his vision swimming, the breath knocked from his lungs. The nullifying effect of the darkness faded, and power surged back into his limbs, but the damage was done.
He shook his head, clearing the haze, and realized he had landed in the middle of another battle.
Below him, Smoothie, in her enlarged form, was locked in combat. Her massive, Haki-infused blade clashed against the nine ethereal tails of Catarina Devon, the battlefield around them a maelstrom of pressurized water and blue fox-fire.
"Well, look what the sea dragged in," Smoothie said, not with alarm, but with a dry, amused smirk. She parried a claw strike from Devon without even taking her eyes off Gunnar. "Having trouble, my love?"
Gunnar slid down the rest of the way, landing on his feet with a heavy thud. He grinned, a trickle of blood running from the corner of his mouth. "Just getting warmed up. Thought I'd drop in and see how my favorite wife was doing."
"Your only wife," she corrected, effortlessly twisting and wringing the moisture out of a nearby panicked, living teapot to replenish her energy. "And I'm doing just fine. Though you're making a mess of my battlefield."
"It's a fixer-upper," Gunnar grunted, flexing his shoulders. He glanced at Catarina Devon, who was watching their exchange with a mixture of annoyance and predatory curiosity. His golden eyes narrowed. "He's getting on my nerves. You want me to take out your trash for you?" he asked, his voice a low, dangerous growl.
Devon bristled at the insult, her nine tails lashing aggressively.
From the distance, Blackbeard's triumphant, echoing laugh rolled across the island. "ZEHAHAHAHA! HAVING A LOVER'S SPAT? DON'T WORRY, I'LL KILL YOU BOTH TOGETHER!"
Smoothie shot a glare in the direction of the laughter before turning her cool, confident eyes back to Gunnar. "Tempting," she said, her lips curling into a smile that was both beautiful and deadly. "But you have bigger fish to fry. Go put that laughing sack of filth in the ground where he belongs."
She gave him a look, her eyes filled with an unshakeable confidence that was more intimate than any kiss. "I can handle this."
Gunnar's grin widened. "Alright. Don't have too much fun without me."
With another crack of his neck, he crouched and leaped, launching himself back towards the center of the island with the force of a missile, leaving a crater where he stood. The fight with Blackbeard was far from over.
Silence fell between the two women. Smoothie calmly took her stance, her massive blade held ready.
Catarina Devon let out a frustrated hiss, her fox-like features contorted in a snarl. "How disgustingly sweet. You pirates and your... attachments. It's a weakness!"
"Is it?" Smoothie asked, her voice dangerously calm as she began to absorb the liquid from her sword, causing it to glow with immense pressure. "I call it motivation."
Devon stared at her, at the queenly commander who faced a Mythical Zoan without a flicker of fear, who bantered with her husband in the middle of a war for their lives. She saw not weakness, but an unassailable foundation of strength. It was infuriating.
"I'm going to enjoy carving that smug look off your face," Devon spat, lunging forward in a blur of claws and blue fire.
"You are welcome to try," Smoothie replied, swinging her glowing blade to meet the charge.
The clash resumed with renewed ferocity. Catarina Devon, enraged by the casual display of confidence, became a whirlwind of Mythical Zoan fury. Her nine tails were a storm of ethereal blue fire and crushing physical blows, while her claws, coated in a thick layer of Armament Haki, tore through the candied landscape.
"I am the Crescent Moon Hunter!" she shrieked, her voice a manic cry. "I have collected the faces of kings and queens! Yours will be my masterpiece!"
Smoothie met the storm with the calm, unyielding force of a cliff face against a raging sea. Her enlarged form gave her the raw strength to match Devon's hybrid state, and her mastery of Haki allowed her to parry the vicious claw strikes with the flat of her blade.
CLANG! FWOOSH!
Steel met claw, pressurized water met mythical fox-fire. The battlefield around them was a chaotic blend of scalding steam and flickering blue embers. Smoothie was a fortress of defense, her movements economical and powerful, weathering every blow Devon threw at her.
"Your attacks are frantic," Smoothie stated coolly, sidestepping a lunge and delivering a powerful kick that sent Devon skidding back. "You fight with rage. It makes you predictable."
"And you fight like a statue!" Devon spat back, launching herself into the air. Her nine tails converged, gathering a massive sphere of crackling blue fox-fire. "Let's see you stand still against this! Kitsune-bi: Hyakki Yagyō! (Fox-Fire: Night Parade of a Hundred Demons!)"
She unleashed the attack, not as a single ball, but as a hundred smaller, guided projectiles of blue flame that rained down from every angle, a beautiful and utterly lethal barrage designed to overwhelm any defense.
Smoothie looked up at the descending storm, her expression unchanging. "Predictable."
She sheathed her massive sword. Then, she opened her arms wide, as if to embrace the attack. She began to spin, slowly at first, then faster and faster, becoming a towering, graceful cyclone of motion.
"You can't dodge them all!" Devon cackled from above.
"I don't need to," Smoothie's voice replied, echoing from the heart of her vortex.
As she spun, a powerful suction force emanated from her body. The air itself, thick with the moisture from the steam and the latent liquid in the candy ground, was drawn towards her. This was the true, terrifying application of her Shibo Shibo no Mi. She wasn't just wringing objects; she was wringing the very atmosphere.
The descending fox-fireballs, composed of ethereal, quasi-liquid energy, were caught in her gravitational pull. Their trajectory wavered, then bent, drawn inexorably towards the spinning commander. They didn't hit her. They were absorbed into her vortex, their energy harmlessly assimilated into the swirling torrent of moisture she was gathering.
In seconds, the entire barrage was gone, vacuumed out of the air. Devon stared from above, her eyes wide with disbelief. Her ultimate attack had been... drunk.
Smoothie's spin slowed to a stop. She was now glowing, her body radiating an immense, pressurized aura. She had absorbed the energy of a hundred demons, on top of the moisture she had pulled from the air. She was a living bomb of hydraulic power.
"My turn," she said, her voice now a deep, resonant boom.
She placed her hands together, palms facing outward. All the liquid, all the energy she had absorbed, began to concentrate in her palms. A sphere of swirling, impossibly dense liquid formed, glowing with a faint blue light from Devon's own stolen fox-fire.
"You speak of collecting faces," Smoothie said, her eyes cold and final. "But you are nothing more than a wild beast. And beasts... need to be tamed."
She thrust her hands forward. "Giga Pressurizer: Ocean Obliteration!"
A colossal, perfectly cylindrical beam of hyper-compressed liquid shot from her hands. It was not like water; it moved like a solid laser of pure kinetic force, wider than a warship and traveling at blinding speed. It was an ocean, compressed into a battering ram.
Catarina Devon had no time to dodge. Her instincts screamed, and she crossed her nine tails in front of her, a desperate, last-ditch shield of Haki and mythical energy.
The beam struck.
There was no explosion. Just an absolute, overwhelming impact. Devon's shield held for a fraction of a second before it was utterly annihilated. The beam of pure force slammed into her, not just throwing her, but engulfing her.
She was carried backward, a helpless speck in a torrent of unimaginable power. The beam tore through the landscape, carving a perfectly straight, half-mile-long canyon through what was left of the island. It ripped through gingerbread castles, melted caramel mountains, and finally erupted out into the syrup-sea, creating a monstrous tidal wave.
When the torrent finally subsided, the battlefield was forever changed. A massive, clean-cut gorge now scarred the island.
And at the far end of it, half-submerged in the sea, lay the unconscious, battered form of Catarina Devon, her nine tails limp, her mythical power extinguished.
Smoothie stood, slowly shrinking back to her normal size, her body steaming from the release of so much energy. She calmly drew her sword again, her expression as serene as ever. The Crescent Moon Hunter had been cleansed.
Gunnar landed back in the heart of the maelstrom with the force of a meteor strike, kicking up a cloud of pulverized rock candy and debris. Blackbeard was waiting, his grin a nightmarish gash in his filthy beard.
"You took your time," Blackbeard rumbled, darkness coiling around one fist, pink soul-energy crackling around the other.
"Had to say hello to my wife," Gunnar shot back, his golden eyes burning with renewed intensity. "Now, where were we? Oh, right. I was burying you."
The pretense of a duel was gone. This was a war of annihilation. Blackbeard slammed his hands on the ground, and the very rubble of the battlefield came alive. "Rubble Homies!" he roared, infusing the shattered landscape with stolen souls. Chunks of gingerbread, broken steel, and jagged rock candy molded themselves into grotesque, shambling soldiers, an army of pure scrap and malice.
They swarmed Gunnar. He didn't even acknowledge them. He stomped his foot, hard. KRAK-BOOM! A localized earthquake erupted from him, a shockwave of pure Gura Gura power that traveled through the ground and instantly disintegrated the Rubble Homies into a cloud of inert dust.
"Cheap tricks," Gunnar snarled.
"Zehahahaha! All power is good power!" Blackbeard bellowed, charging forward.
Gunnar met his charge. It was a clash of titans. Gunnar's fist, wreathed in the white, shattering aura of a quake, met Blackbeard's, which was coated in a thick, power-nullifying layer of darkness.
The impact didn't create a simple shockwave. It created a vortex. The two opposing Devil Fruits warred for dominance, tearing a hole in reality itself. The sky above them seemed to split, black-and-red lightning crackling across the rift in a scene reminiscent of the clashes between the old Emperors. The ground beneath them was scooped out, vaporized by the sheer, impossible forces at play.
They were locked in a stalemate of pure will, a symphony of annihilation.
High above the battlefield, a blue phoenix circled. Marco, clutching the stolen nodachi of Shiryu, watched the apocalyptic duel below. He saw the sky split, felt the island itself groan under the strain of the two men's power. He was a doctor, and he could see that both combatants were wounded, running on reserves of stamina that defied belief. But Blackbeard was a creature of pure attrition.
He'll try to outlast him, Marco thought, his eyes narrowing. He'll use some dirty trick at the last second. Gunnar is stronger, but Teach is a cockroach.
He couldn't let that happen. His duty as a commander, as a brother, was to protect his captain.
With a sharp cry, he folded his wings and dove. He was a comet of blue regenerative flame, aiming for Blackbeard's exposed back while the Emperor was locked in a power struggle with Gunnar.
Blackbeard's head snapped around, his grin widening impossibly. He had been waiting for this. It was exactly what a loyal commander would do.
"ZEHAHAHAHA! PREDICTABLE!"
He broke the clash with Gunnar, letting the quake-force send him skidding back, and turned his full attention to the diving phoenix. He didn't even use a named attack. He simply raised his hand, the darkness of the Yami Yami no Mi swirling in his palm. A powerful gravitational vortex erupted, not just pulling Marco in, but dragging him down from the sky.
Marco felt his flames flicker, his Devil Fruit powers being suppressed by the vortex. His dive became an uncontrolled fall.
Blackbeard caught him. Not with a hand, but with a blast. He unleashed a cannonball of pure darkness from his other fist that slammed into Marco mid-air.
"Liberation!"
The impact was absolute. Marco was blasted out of the sky with contemptuous ease, crashing to the ground with enough force to shatter a ten-foot-thick slab of hardened caramel. He lay in the crater, groaning, his body smoking, not from his flames, but from the raw, dark power of the impact.
He pushed himself up, his blue flames already knitting his broken bones back together, but the message had been received.
"Damn..." Marco coughed, spitting dust. "That's a different league entirely, yoi." He looked up at the renewed clash of the Emperors. "Trying to help would just make me a hostage... a liability." He closed his eyes for a moment, the decision settling in his gut like a stone. "That... is definitely above my paygrade." He would trust in his captain.
A moment later, a tall, regal figure landed gracefully beside his crater. It was Smoothie, her battle with Devon concluded. She looked from the downed Marco to the apocalyptic light show in the sky where her husband fought.
"He swatted you down like a fly," she observed, her tone matter-of-fact.
"He's an Emperor," Marco grunted, getting to his feet and dusting himself off. "It's what they do."
They stood side-by-side, two of the crew's most powerful commanders, now spectators. The sky pulsed with black, white, and crimson light. The island shook with every blow.
"Shouldn't we help him?" Smoothie asked, her voice tight with a rare flicker of concern. Her hand rested on the hilt of her sword.
Marco shook his head, his gaze fixed on the duel. "Look at them, Smoothie-san. That's not a battle we can join. We can't just add our power to his. We'd disrupt his rhythm... give that monster another target to use against him. We'd just get in the way."
He watched as Gunnar and Blackbeard broke apart, only to crash into each other again, their Haki a visible, tangible force that warped the air.
"Right now," Marco said, his voice quiet but firm with the wisdom of a man who had seen an era end, "the best thing we can do for our captain... is trust him. And watc