The revelation settled in Ace's mind not as a solution, but as a source of profound frustration. He had the key, but the lock was invisible. He stared at his own flaming hands, trying to will his Conqueror's Haki into them, to feel that immense pressure Gunnar had described. But nothing happened. His fire remained just fire, albeit an apocalyptically powerful one.
"Something wrong?" Kuzan's voice cut through his thoughts, sharp and cold. "Having second thoughts?"
"Shut up!" Ace roared, his frustration boiling over. If he couldn't find the new path, he would brute-force the old one. "I'll just have to burn you to absolute ash!"
He became a whirlwind of solar fire. "Solar Vortex!" He spun, creating a cyclone of black-and-white flame that vacuumed up the surrounding debris, turning them into superheated projectiles. It was a blender of celestial fury, and it roared towards Kuzan.
"Crude," was Kuzan's only comment. He stomped his foot, and a massive, thirty-foot-thick wall of glossy black ice erupted from the ground. "Ice Wall: Tartarus."
The vortex slammed into the wall. The sound was a deafening shriek of grinding elements. The ice wall cracked and groaned, glowing a sinister orange as the heat tried to penetrate it. The superheated debris peppered its surface, creating a shower of sparks and steam. The wall held, but barely.
Ace broke off his attack, panting. That had taken a huge amount of energy, and all it did was scratch Kuzan's defense.
Kuzan retaliated instantly. He touched his ice wall, and from its surface, dozens of sleek, bird-like projectiles of black ice launched themselves at Ace. "Ice Block: Black Pheasant Swarm!"
They moved with unnatural speed, their Haki-infused forms cutting through the superheated air. Ace was forced onto the defensive, creating a flurry of fiery explosions to intercept them. "Enkai: Hibashira!" Pillars of fire erupted one after another, each one detonating a pheasant in a flash of steam, but the swarm was relentless, forcing him back, step by agonizing step.
They were perfectly, maddeningly matched.
Ace would create a river of magma; Kuzan would counter with a creeping glacier of black ice, creating a new, steaming wasteland where they met.
Kuzan would launch spears of absolute zero; Ace would meet them with lances of solar fire, their collisions creating waves of concussive force.
The landscape around them was a testament to their power, a chaotic realm of constant creation and destruction. Gingerbread houses were encased in black ice one moment, then melted into molten slag the next. The syrup-sea hissed and boiled where their stray attacks landed. They were two gods of opposing elements, and neither could gain a definitive advantage.
Ace's breathing grew ragged. His awakened form was a colossal drain on his stamina. He could feel his power beginning to wane, the brilliant white of his flames starting to flicker with hints of their original orange. He was running out of time.
Kuzan, too, was showing signs of wear. The black ice, a manifestation of his peak power, was forming more slowly. The wounds he'd sustained earlier still ached, a deep, burning cold that even his own power couldn't fully numb.
"This is pointless," Kuzan stated, his voice a low growl of exasperation. "We could do this all day, and the only result would be the destruction of this miserable island."
"I'm not stopping until you're a puddle on the ground!" Ace shot back, but his words lacked their earlier conviction. He knew Kuzan was right.
He needed one more attack. One final, decisive blow. He couldn't make it stronger through Haki, not yet. But he could make it more focused. He could pour every last drop of his remaining power, his will, his very life force, into a single, perfect point.
He extended his left hand, and his awakened flames began to coalesce, swirling and condensing. They formed into the shape of a long, elegant bow, shimmering with the light of a dying star. With his right hand, he reached back, pulling an arrow made of pure, solidified solar fire from the bow's string. The arrowhead glowed with an intensity that was painful to look at, a pinpoint of absolute destruction.
Across the ruined battlefield, Kuzan watched this with a grim expression. He recognized the play. A final, all-or-nothing gambit. He mirrored the action. The cold around him gathered, forming a massive, jagged longbow of black ice in his left hand. With his right, he drew back an arrow that was not solid, but a shimmering, translucent form of absolute zero, so cold it warped the air around it.
They stood, two archers of impossible power, aiming at each other across a wasteland of their own making. The world seemed to hold its breath.
"It's useless, Fire Fist," Kuzan said, his voice carrying easily across the distance. "Your arrow of fire, my arrow of ice. They will meet in the middle, and they will annihilate each other. It will be another stalemate. A waste of our last strength."
He was right. Ace knew he was right. It was a perfect equation of opposition. Fire versus Ice. Heat versus Cold. An unstoppable force meeting an immovable object. The result would be zero.
But as he stared down the length of his arrow, at the former Admiral who had broken his friends and stood as a wall before his family, he felt a flicker of something new. Not the overwhelming pressure of Conqueror's Haki, but a different kind of will. A focused, burning certainty.
Ace's lips curled into a strained, defiant grin. He looked at Kuzan, his own sun-bright eyes meeting the Admiral's cold, calculating gaze.
"Who said they were going to negate each other? Mine will swallow yours!"
From the jagged peak of a shattered caramel spire, Marco and Smoothie watched the battlefield below—a wasteland of fire and frost, where two titans waged war.
Smoke rose in spirals. The heat of Ace's flames met the bitter freeze of Kuzan's domain, creating a volatile no man's land between them.
"Three commanders down," Smoothie murmured, her voice laced with worry beneath her regal calm. Her eyes, usually sharp and cold, were heavy with dread. "If this keeps up... Ace is next. He's strong, but Kuzan's a former Admiral. That's a monster in human skin."
Marco didn't blink. His gaze was locked on Ace. He saw the exhaustion, the slow drag of breath, the heaviness in the fire. But there was something else—a shift in the air, in Ace's stance, in the way he held the bow.
"…No," Marco said quietly. "Look at his eyes. He's done surviving. He's about to win."
Down below, Ace closed his eyes.
The world dulled—Kuzan's creeping chill, the roar of his own inferno, the chaos around him—all fell away.
He dug deeper.
Not into his fruit… but into himself.
Memories. Love. Failure. Pride. Rage. His brother's voice, telling him a king doesn't ask for permission—he commands.
Ace reached for that truth. His truth.
And his fire responded.
His flames twisted violently, pulling inwards, reshaping. The arrow that formed wasn't just heat—it was presence. It was will. A deep, crackling hum filled the air. Tendrils of black and red lightning licked up the shaft of flame. The arrowhead pulsed like a star about to collapse.
His eyes opened.
They burned.
Across the battlefield, Kuzan felt it.
Not fire. Not Haki.
Something worse.
Certainty.
He drew his ice arrow—razor-thin, pure black, colder than death—and raised his bow.
"Let's end this," Kuzan said.
Ace's voice cut across the field—calm, absolute.
"Agreed."
They fired.
The arrows streaked through the air—fire and ice, wrath and stillness.
But when they met, there was no clash. No explosion. No balance.
There was only dominance.
Ace's arrow, cloaked in Conqueror's Haki, didn't resist Kuzan's—it erased it. The glacial arrow didn't melt or shatter. It vanished. Like it had never existed.
And the solar arrow kept going.
Kuzan's breath caught.
He moved—too slow.
The arrow struck.
White.
A sun bloomed on the battlefield. The heavens lit up. The ground screamed. Steam erupted in a tower that pierced the clouds, and a soundless blast carved a new crater into Whole Cake Island.
When the light faded, silence fell.
Kuzan lay broken in the crater's heart.
His chest smoked. His shoulder—gouged through. His body wouldn't move. His mind couldn't comprehend.
That arrow hadn't just burned him.
It had judged him.
Ace stood at the edge, barely upright, his bow dissolving into flickering embers. His flames guttered, his breathing ragged.
"You…" Kuzan choked out, blinking through the haze. "You coated it… in your will… Conqueror's…"
Ace gave a shaky grin—exhausted, defiant, proud.
"You kept trying to smother my fire," he rasped. "But you never asked what kind of fire it was."
He stepped forward, one foot landing heavy in the dust.
"Turns out," he said, looking down at the fallen Admiral, "all I had to do… was eat up yours."
Kuzan coughed, steam rising off his body. His arms trembled as he forced himself to rise—slowly, shakily—against the weight of pain, pride, and disbelief.
"You think that was enough to take me down?" he growled, blood trickling from the corner of his mouth. "I'm not some washed-up old man… I was an Admiral. I don't fall to heat and arrogance."
He raised his hand, and the temperature dropped like a dying sun.
The sky dimmed. Clouds froze solid above them. From his outstretched palm, darkness bled—cold so complete it bent the light around it.
Ace's brow furrowed. "What… is that?"
Kuzan's voice boomed across the ruins, hoarse but mighty:
"Absolute Zero: Sea Burial."
The battlefield answered.
A tidal wave of black ice surged upward behind Kuzan—silent, terrifying, consuming everything in its path. Buildings, mountains, even the air seemed to freeze mid-motion. The wave reared back like a living thing, jagged with death, as if the sea itself had been flash-frozen by a god.
Marco's face went pale. "That's not just ice… that's entropy."
Smoothie stepped back, shocked. "If that hits—"
Ace didn't flinch.
He looked up at the coming oblivion—and smiled.
His flames flared wildly. He closed his eyes again. This time, he didn't reach into himself.
He reached beyond.
Beyond fear. Beyond pain. Beyond rage.
To legacy.
To purpose.
To every life his flame promised to protect.
And it answered.
A second pair of wings—ethereal, burning white and red—unfurled behind him.
His body glowed like a phoenix born of the sun.
He drew a new arrow—larger, thicker, forged of golden flame so hot it shimmered violet at the edges. Black lightning wrapped it like barbed wire, pulsing with his will.
"Solar Requiem."
The name left his lips like a prayer.
He pulled the string, every muscle in his body screaming as the world wavered around him.
"Let's end it properly," he said, eyes blazing.
Kuzan and Ace released their final attacks.
The wave of death met the lance of fire.
The collision shattered sound.
A blinding eruption devoured the landscape—blues, reds, whites, and blacks twisting into an unnatural cyclone of heat and cold. The explosion split the sea, cracked the heavens, and sent shockwaves racing across Whole Cake Island like cannon blasts from hell itself.
Marco grabbed Smoothie and shielded her with his wings.
A kilometer away, the force still knocked ships off the water and flattened entire forests.
When the storm died… silence reigned.
The battlefield was gone. In its place, a colossal crater smoldered, its center fused into obsidian and glass, radiating waves of steam.
At the very center…
Kuzan lay unconscious.
His body was cracked with frost and burn scars. One eye swollen shut, armor shattered, breath shallow.
He wasn't dead—but his spirit had been broken. His power spent. His mind no longer able to fight.
He was defeated.
Ace stood a few feet away, barely upright, both knees shaking. His bow had vanished. His flames sputtered. His Conqueror's Haki had faded.
But he stood.
Chest rising. Eyes focused. Victorious.
Marco landed beside him, stunned.
"You… you beat an Admiral."
Ace didn't respond. He just looked down at Kuzan, then up at the sky—now clearing, letting golden sunlight shine through the parted clouds.
"…Yeah," he whispered hoarsely. "I guess I did."
He collapsed a second later, unconscious—but smiling.