The brawl between the two Emperors was no longer a fight; it was a natural disaster. The ground shuddered with every blow, a constant, rolling earthquake that tore the candied landscape asunder.
"ZEHAHAHA! IS THAT ALL YOU'VE GOT, 'CAPTAIN'?" Blackbeard's laugh was a grating roar. He saw an opening, a flicker of exhaustion in Gunnar's defense.
He moved with a speed that defied his massive frame. His fist, wreathed in the swirling void of the Yami Yami no Mi and crackling with the stolen pink energy of the Soru Soru no Mi, slammed into Gunnar's stomach. It wasn't just a punch; it was an anchor of darkness that pulled Gunnar in, nullified his Haki for a split second, and then detonated with raw, concussive force.
Gunnar's world became a concussive roar. He was blasted off his feet, a human cannonball on a violent, tumbling journey. He smashed backward through the remains of a gingerbread clock tower, the structure exploding into sugary shrapnel. His flight continued, tearing through the wall of a hardened caramel warehouse and finally bursting out the other side of a multi-story wedding cake that served as a barracks, before his momentum finally bled out. He lay in a heap of rubble and frosting, his ribs screaming, blood spraying from his mouth.
"ZEHAHAHAHAHA! GET UP! THE PARTY'S JUST GETTING STARTED!" Blackbeard bellowed from the distance.
In the wreckage, Gunnar coughed, blood staining the pristine white frosting beneath him. He pushed himself to his knees, his golden eyes burning with a furious, otherworldly light. He didn't get up. He went up.
With a primal roar that defied gravity, he launched himself into the sky. He wasn't flying; he was a meteor in reverse, ascending on a pillar of pure, unadulterated rage. The blood on his face, a testament to Blackbeard's brutal blow, hit the superheated air around him and instantly vaporized into steam.
High above the battlefield, silhouetted against the broken sky, he transformed.
The air itself seemed to curdle as his body exploded in size. Bones cracked and reformed at an impossible rate, flesh weaving itself into a new, terrifying tapestry. He grew past fifty feet, past a hundred, past two hundred, stopping at a colossal, mythic height of 219 feet. He was a true Ymir-class Titan, a walking apocalypse of jagged obsidian rock veined with rivers of magma, and crystalline blue ice that steamed with absolute cold.
His shadow swallowed the battlefield.
"INCREDIBLE!" Blackbeard screamed, his face a mask of ecstatic greed. "I MUST HAVE IT!"
Gunnar's voice boomed from the heavens, the sound of grinding continents. "HAVE THIS!"
He raised his colossal foot, a continent-sized appendage of ice and fire, and brought it down. It was an execution from the sky, a stomp meant to erase Blackbeard and a significant portion of the island from existence.
Blackbeard stared up at the descending apocalypse, his grin widening to an impossible degree. "ZEHAHAHA! BIG MOM'S POWER ISN'T JUST FOR MAKING SNACKS! ISLAND HOMIE: GAIA'S FIST!"
He slammed his massive hands on the ground, pouring a colossal amount of stolen soul-energy into the very earth. The island screamed. The ground beneath him—rock, candy, and steel—writhed and convulsed. A colossal fist of rock, hardened caramel, and shrieking, captive souls erupted from the earth, rising to meet Gunnar's descent. It was a grotesque mockery of Big Mom's power, a fist the size of a mountain.
Titan foot met Island fist.
The impact was a sound that was felt more than heard, a deep, resonant KRA-KOOM that convulsed the entire island. A shockwave of pulverized earth and shattered sugar erupted outwards for miles. For a single, earth-shattering moment, the two colossal forces were locked in a stalemate.
This was the moment Blackbeard had been waiting for. With Gunnar's power and attention fully committed, Blackbeard unleashed his true weapon. He raised a hand, and a vortex of absolute nothingness, the pure essence of the Yami Yami no Mi, shot upwards and latched onto Gunnar's titanic form.
"Kurouzu!"
The cancerous touch of darkness spread, not just nullifying, but unmaking. Gunnar roared in agony as he felt his very form being dissolved. The lava cooled to inert rock, the ice cracked and sublimated. The titan form, his ultimate weapon, began to flicker and dissolve like a bad dream, the darkness pulling him apart from the inside out.
He was shrinking, falling, his power being ripped away. Blackbeard laughed, triumphant, ready to watch him crash to the earth as a broken, powerless man.
But Gunnar wasn't powerless. He had one thing that could not be stolen.
As he fell, shrinking rapidly, his body a whirlwind of dissipating steam and dying embers, he channeled all his rage, all his fury, all his royal will into one single point: his right fist.
The air around his knuckles crackled and warped with the sheer pressure of his will. Tendrils of black-and-red lightning, the unmistakable sign of a king's ambition, coiled around his arm.
Blackbeard's laughter died in his throat as he saw the falling, shrinking man cock his fist back, his eyes burning with regal fury.
"You can steal a man's power, Teach," Gunnar's voice growled, a promise of retribution falling with him. "BUT YOU CAN'T STEAL HIS WILL!"
His Haki-clad fist connected squarely with Blackbeard's upturned, shocked face.
The sound was not a crack, but a wet, final CRUNCH.
There was no explosion. No grand shockwave. Just a focused, absolute transfer of kinetic force and pure, indomitable will. Blackbeard's head snapped back at an impossible angle. His eyes rolled back into his head. He was lifted off his feet and shot downwards like a human cannonball.
He slammed into the ground, but he didn't stop. The force of Gunnar's Conqueror-infused punch drilled him through the island's crust. He tore through layers of frosting, cake, rock, and earth, leaving a perfectly round, man-shaped tunnel in his wake.
Gunnar landed on one knee, panting, his body screaming in protest. A few hundred feet away, a new sound filled the air: the gushing roar of the sea.
Blackbeard's descent had been so violent it had punched a vertical tunnel straight through the island's crust and out the bottom. A massive geyser of the dark, syrupy sea now erupted from the new hole.
Gunnar gave Blackbeard no time to recover, no moment to laugh, no second to plot. The instant the geyser of seawater erupted, confirming his enemy was still alive, Gunnar was moving. He had learned the ultimate lesson at Marineford: a cornered Teach was at his most dangerous, and the only way to deal with a rat was to give it no corner to hide in.
"ZEHAHAHAHA! DID YOU MISS ME?" Blackbeard's voice roared, riding the column of water up from the depths, his darkness protecting him from the sea's debilitating effects. He was a triumphant, water-logged demon ascending from hell.
Gunnar didn't answer with words. He answered with the power that should have buried Teach years ago.
He slammed his fist into the air beside the geyser. "Shima Yurashi! (Island Shaker!)"
The air itself cracked. The shockwave didn't just part the water; it atomized it. The entire geyser exploded into a cloud of mist and steam, robbing Blackbeard of his platform. For a split second, the massive Emperor was suspended in mid-air, his triumphant laugh caught in his throat.
Gunnar was already there. He appeared before Teach, a blur of motion, his own fist glowing with the white, shattering aura of the Gura Gura no Mi. He drove it forward, a piston of pure destruction, not at Blackbeard's head, but deep into his gut.
The impact was a sickening, internal THUD. There was no grand explosion, just a focused, brutal transfer of force. Blackbeard's eyes bulged as he felt his internal organs being turned to pulp, the quake-vibrations rattling every bone in his body.
Before he could even fall, Gunnar's other fist came up in a devastating uppercut. His knuckles, coated in a shimmering layer of Conqueror's Haki, connected with Blackbeard's jaw with a sound like a thunderclap. The blow snapped Teach's head back, lifting his colossal frame off the ground and sending him sailing helplessly into the air.
Still, Gunnar did not stop. He leaped above the ascending Emperor, his two hands clasped together into a single, massive hammer fist. He brought it down on Blackbeard's chest with all his might.
"FALL!" Gunnar roared.
Blackbeard was slammed down like a meteor, crashing into the tortured ground with a force that created a new, spiderwebbed crater.
But even that was not enough. Gunnar landed, planting his feet wide, and slammed both his open palms onto the ruined earth. A low, terrifying groan emanated from the very core of the island.
"You wanted this kingdom?" Gunnar's voice was a low, guttural growl, vibrating with the power he was unleashing. "THEN YOU CAN CHOKE ON IT!"
He unleashed the full, terrifying potential of his stolen fruit. "Gura Gura: Tectonic Waltz!"
It was not a single quake. It was a continuous, controlled cataclysm. Massive, spiraling fault lines erupted from Gunnar's palms, spreading across the entire island. The landmass itself began to move. The central plate of the island, where they stood, began to rotate, grinding against the outer edges with a sound of screaming rock and tearing steel.
Candy-themed castles, already in ruins, were ground into fine, sugary dust. Caramel rivers were whipped into violent tidal waves. The syrup-sea crashed against the newly formed, shearing cliffs, a chorus to the island's death throes.
Blackbeard, lying broken in his crater, was tossed about like a ragdoll, his body slammed against the shifting, grinding earth. He was at the epicenter of a world being torn apart, disoriented, battered, and for the first time, utterly powerless to stop it.
Gunnar's eyes burned with cold fire. He saw his moment. With the island still groaning and twisting beneath him, he focused all the rotational energy, all the quake-force, into one final, decisive blow.
He didn't leap. He didn't charge. He punched the very ground beneath Teach's feet.
"Kaishin! (Sea Quake!)"
The attack was not a tremor; it was an upward-firing earthquake. A geyser of pure kinetic force erupted from the ground, using the entire rotating island as a trebuchet. It struck Blackbeard's prone body, a final, definitive punctuation mark to the brawl.
With a silent, final roar of displaced air, Marshall D. Teach was launched into the sky. He ascended higher and higher, a helpless, tumbling black speck against the bruised and broken sky, a failed star cast out of his stolen heaven.
Gunnar stood, his body screaming in protest, his fists smoking with aftershocks. He watched the speck disappear into the clouds, his chest heaving.
"Stay up there," he rasped to the wind, a final, exhausted command.
The momentary peace of Blackbeard's ascent was a lie. A speck in the clouds became a falling meteor, wreathed in a swirling vortex of darkness. Teach had recovered, his inhuman endurance fueled by pure, malicious spite.
"ZEHAHAHAHAHA! YOU CAN'T GET RID OF ME THAT EASILY!" his voice boomed from the heavens.
Gunnar didn't wait for him to land. With a roar that was pure defiance, he launched himself into the air to meet the descent, a crimson-and-white comet of Haki and fury. They met mid-air in a clash that tore the very clouds asunder, a cataclysmic explosion of black and white.
This was no longer a fight. It was a maelstrom of claws and fists. In the heart of the aerial chaos, Blackbeard saw an opening. His hand, no longer a fist, became a claw, each finger coated in a thick, power-nullifying layer of the Yami Yami no Mi's darkness.
He swiped.
Gunnar tried to twist away, but it was too late. The claws raked across his chest. The darkness didn't just cut; it unmade. Flesh, muscle, and fabric were torn away, leaving four deep, black, cauterized gouges across Gunnar's torso. The wounds were so deep they exposed the stark white of his ribcage beneath.
The pain was absolute, a void that threatened to swallow him whole. But the shock of the blow gave Blackbeard the instant he needed. He drove his hand deeper into the wound, his fingers closing around the frantic, beating muscle of Gunnar's heart.
"IT'S MINE!" Blackbeard screamed, his eyes wide with manic triumph. He was going to physically rip Gunnar's heart from his chest.
Gunnar's survival instincts screamed louder than the pain. There was no time to form a punch, no space to move. He did the only thing he could.
He opened his mouth and roared. Not a sound, but a blast. A point-blank, desperate eruption of his hybrid nature: a torrent of molten lava and freezing ice, a Lava-Ice Breath that slammed squarely into Blackbeard's face.
The thermal shock was catastrophic. The searing magma melted flesh while the absolute cold of the ice flash-froze it, creating a sickening sizzle and crackle. Blackbeard roared in agony, his face a ruin of burns and frostbite, his grip on Gunnar's heart faltering for a precious second.
Gunnar used that second. He kicked with all his might, dislodging the Emperor, and they both began their uncontrolled descent back to the tortured earth.
They crashed into the ground, miles apart, in separate, body-shattering impacts.
Gunnar pushed himself up, his hand clamped over the horrifying wound in his chest, blood pouring between his fingers. He could feel the cold air on his own ribs. He was grievously wounded, his vision swimming.
But Blackbeard was faster. He had gone insane. The pain had burned away the last vestiges of his cunning, leaving only a ravenous, beast-like hunger. Pink, sickly energy erupted around him as he fully tapped into the stolen power of the Soru Soru no Mi.
He didn't run. He appeared. One moment he was a mile away, a rising monster. The next, he was directly in front of Gunnar, his face a twisted mask of rage and raw flesh, his eyes burning with a mad light.
"SOUL...FRUIT...TITAN...MINE!" he shrieked, his voice a garbled mess of his own and a faint, ghostly echo of Big Mom's.
He wasn't just using her power; he was being consumed by it. He grabbed Gunnar by the neck, his grip like a vise, and slammed him back down onto the ground, the impact cracking the earth for a hundred feet. He pinned him there, a mountain of flesh and fury, and his other hand, the one that had so recently held Gunnar's heart, plunged back towards the gaping wound.
Gunnar's mind was a haze of pain and encroaching darkness. He was pinned, wounded, his strength failing. He couldn't move his arms, couldn't summon a quake. He could feel Blackbeard's fingers brushing against his ribs again, inches from his heart.
This was it. This was the end.
No.
The thought was a silent, final roar of defiance. It was the will of a king refusing to be extinguished.
He didn't have the strength to fight, but he had his will. He released it. Not as an attack, not as a coating. He released it as a pure, untamed wave of raw, psychic pressure.
A tsunami of Conqueror's Haki erupted from his body.
It wasn't a flicker. It was an explosion. The air itself buckled. Blackbeard, who had been bracing for physical resistance, was utterly unprepared for an attack on his very consciousness. The wave of pure will slammed into him, a hammer blow to his soul.
His eyes, which had been burning with madness, went wide with shock, then blank. The Soru Soru no Mi's pink aura sputtered and died. His grip on Gunnar's neck went limp. He was thrown backward as if by an invisible cannonball, tumbling end over end before crashing heavily to the ground, his mind reeling from the psychic assault.
Gunnar lay in his crater, the pressure gone. He gasped for air, his vision swimming with black spots. The world tilted on its axis. He had won the exchange, driven the beast back. But the cost had been immense. He could feel the edges of his consciousness beginning to fray, the abyss of unconsciousness beckoning him with a siren's call. He was dizzy, bleeding out, and his enemy was still breathing.
The ringing in Gunnar's ears slowly subsided, replaced by the crunch of approaching footsteps. He forced his eyes open, his vision blurry. A towering, regal silhouette stood over him, blocking out the bruised sky.
"Gunnar."
Smoothie's voice was a low, tight coil of fury and concern. Her eyes, usually so calm and confident, were wide as she took in the horrifying wound in his chest—the exposed bone, the torn flesh, the sheer, brutal violation of it.
"You're..." she started, her voice faltering for the first time.
"It'll be fine," Gunnar rasped, gritting his teeth. He focused, channeling the last dregs of his elemental power. A thin, crystalline layer of his own ice began to form over the wound, not just as a bandage, but as a living suture. The jagged edges of the gash were slowly pulled together by the creeping frost, the intense cold sealing the blood vessels and stopping the bleeding. It was a crude, agonizingly painful form of self-surgery, but it would keep him in the fight.
He pushed himself to a sitting position, then, with a grunt of immense effort, to his feet. He swayed, his body a ruin, but he stood.
Across the field, another monster was rising. Blackbeard pushed himself up, his face a grotesque canvas of melted flesh and blackened frostbite from Gunnar's last-ditch breath attack. But he was smiling, a broken, bloody grin of pure, animalistic hatred. He began to walk towards them, a slow, ponderous, inevitable gait.
Gunnar looked at Smoothie, his golden eyes hardening with a command that was absolute. "Go. Now."
"I am not leaving you," she stated, her hand gripping the hilt of her sword so tightly her knuckles were white.
"This isn't a debate, Smoothie!" Gunnar's voice was a low, dangerous growl. "Look at him. He's not sane anymore. He's just a beast. This is going to be ugly." He glanced at the wider battlefield, at the distant signs of the other commanders' struggles. "Go help the others. Protect our family. It's not safe here."
"And you?" she demanded, her eyes pleading.
Gunnar turned his gaze back to the approaching Blackbeard. He raised his right fist, and the air around it began to crackle and bend. Raw, untamed tendrils of black-and-red Conqueror's Haki, the will of a king pushed to its absolute limit, coiled around his knuckles like a living storm.
"I have to put the beast down," he said, his voice quiet but filled with a terrifying finality.
Smoothie saw the look in his eyes. It was the same look he'd had before he first charged the island. There was no room for argument, no space for anything but his absolute will. With a final, anguished look at the ice-stitched wound on his chest, she gave a curt nod. She trusted him. She had to.
She turned and vanished in a blur of motion, a queen leaving the fate of her king in his own blood-soaked hands.
Now, only two remained.
The two emperors stood thirty feet apart, the world silent around them. They were a mirror of mutual destruction. Gunnar, held together by ice and will, his fist a storm of royal ambition. Blackbeard, a burned and broken monster, his own fist engulfed in a swirling vortex of absolute darkness, a promise of nothingness.
"I will finish it now," Blackbeard rasped, his voice a gargled ruin.
"Finally," Gunnar agreed, "something we can agree on."
There was no charge. No roar. They took a single, simultaneous step forward. They cocked their fists back. They summoned the last, final spark of their power, their will, their very existence.
They threw the final punch.
Gunnar's Haki-clad fist, a physical manifestation of a king's will.
Blackbeard's darkness-shrouded fist, a swirling vortex of the void.
They didn't aim for the chest or the gut. They aimed for the head. A final, definitive statement.
Their fists connected.
Gunnar's knuckles slammed into the ruin of Blackbeard's face. Blackbeard's knuckles crashed against Gunnar's temple.
For a single, silent, breathtaking moment, two opposing absolutes met. Will versus Nothingness. Creation versus Oblivion.
The world didn't explode. It imploded.
A sphere of silent, negative energy erupted from the point of impact, not of light, but of its absolute absence. It didn't expand; it contracted, pulling the air, the light, the very sound from the world into its core before collapsing in on itself.
The backlash was absolute.
Both men were thrown backward as if struck by the hand of God himself. They flew in opposite directions, tumbling through the air like broken dolls, their bodies limp and unresponsive. They crashed to the earth, kicking up twin plumes of dust, and lay still.
Silence reigned for a full minute, a stillness broken only by the whistling wind through the ruined landscape. Then, a groan. A scrape of rock.
Slowly, painfully, Gunnar pushed himself up. His head swam, a cacophony of ringing bells. The world was a blurry mess, but he forced it into focus. His body was a symphony of agony, the ice on his chest wound cracked and bleeding again. He got one foot under him. Then the other. He stood, a titan of will refusing to fall.
Across the crater, another monster stirred. Blackbeard, his face an unrecognizable mask of blood and burned flesh, pushed himself to his feet with a roar of pure, animalistic rage. He was no longer a man with a plan. He was a force of nature, a hurricane of malice that had forgotten everything but the need to destroy the thing in front of him.
"I... AM... EMPEROR!" he bellowed, his voice a shredded ruin.
"You're just a noisy corpse," Gunnar shot back, his own voice a low, gravelly rasp.
Blackbeard didn't bother with Devil Fruits. He didn't bother with strategy. He lunged. He closed the thirty feet between them in a single, desperate bound, a mountain of flesh and fury seeking to end it all with tooth and nail.
His hand, no longer a fist, was a monstrous claw, each finger a thick, Haki-blackened talon aimed directly at Gunnar's eyes.
Gunnar's reactions were a fraction too slow, his battered body unable to keep pace with his warrior's mind. He couldn't dodge. He couldn't counter. He could only block.
He threw his left forearm up in a desperate, last-ditch defense.
The sound was a sickening SCHLACK as Blackbeard's claws tore through flesh and muscle. Gunnar roared in agony as the talons dug deep, shredding his arm down to the bone. The immense force of the attack drove him back a step, his boots carving trenches in the ground.
The tips of the blackened claws, slick with Gunnar's own blood, stopped a hair's breadth from his eye. He could feel the cold, murderous pressure of them against his skin. They stood locked in that brutal, intimate tableau: the beast trying to claw out his rival's sight, the king refusing to yield that final, bloody inch.
"I'LL TEAR YOUR FACE OFF!" Blackbeard shrieked, spittle and blood flying from his ruined mouth.
Gunnar looked into the mad, bloodshot eyes of the monster in front of him and grinned, a bloody, terrifying sight.
"My turn."
His right arm, which had been hanging uselessly at his side, snapped up. His fist, already coiled in the crackling black-red lightning of his Conqueror's Haki, began to glow with the white, shattering aura of the Gura Gura no Mi.
He didn't aim for the head or the chest. He drove his fist forward with every last ounce of his strength, every fiber of his being, deep into Blackbeard's exposed, fleshy stomach.
He unleashed the quake.
The air itself cracked like a pane of glass, the fault lines radiating from Gunnar's knuckles. The impact was not a punch; it was a detonation. A focused, internal earthquake erupted inside Blackbeard's very core.
Blackbeard's shriek of rage was cut short, replaced by a choked, wet gasp. His eyes bulged in disbelief as he felt his entire body being vibrated apart from the inside. The claws retracted from Gunnar's arm as his body went limp.
Gunnar pulled his fist back.
The release of pressure was like a volcanic eruption. The quake-force, having nowhere else to go, blasted out of Blackbeard's back. A visible shockwave of force ripped through the air behind him, and he was launched into the sky.
He didn't just fly; he was a ragdoll caught in a hurricane, tumbling end over end, his massive body spinning helplessly as he ascended. He became a black speck against the sky once more, a monument to his own greed, cast out by the very power he had once coveted.
Gunnar stood, his chest heaving, his left arm a shredded ruin, blood pouring onto the ground. He watched the speck disappear. This time, he was sure. It was over.
The speck in the sky did not stay a speck. It stopped its ascent, stabilized, and a sound drifted down from the heavens, a sound that defied all logic and reason.
Laughter.
A wheezing, broken, but unmistakably triumphant "ZEHAHAHAHAHA!" echoed across the ruined island.
Gunnar stared up, his mind refusing to process what his ears were hearing. The man should be a broken mess, a lifeless husk. But he was alive. He was laughing.
The sight, the sound, the sheer, stubborn audacity of the monster who refused to die finally broke something in Gunnar. The strategic mind, the king's composure, the captain's responsibility—it all shattered, burned away by a wave of pure, incandescent rage.
His own laughter started, a low, rumbling chuckle that grew into a full-throated, manic roar. It wasn't a laugh of joy or victory. It was the laugh of a man who had been pushed past the brink of sanity, a man who had decided that if the world was insane, he would be its king.
"HAHAHAHAHA! FINE! IF YOU WON'T DIE, I'LL EAT YOU!"
The air ripped apart as he transformed one last time. Flesh and bone exploded outwards, a cataclysmic growth that didn't stop until he was once again the 219-foot Ymir-class Titan, a walking god of lava and ice. His eyes were no longer golden, but burning, manic spheres of white-hot fury.
He didn't leap. He bent the laws of physics to his will, launching his colossal form into the sky, a mountain ascending to meet a falling star.
Blackbeard, still laughing, saw the titan god coming for him and spread his arms wide. "COME ON! LET'S END THIS!"
Gunnar answered. He opened his colossal maw, a cavernous gateway of jagged, rock-like teeth and swirling magma, and met the falling Blackbeard head-on.
There was no clash. No explosion. Blackbeard flew directly into the titan's mouth. Gunnar's jaws snapped shut with the force of a tectonic collision, a sound that echoed for miles.
For a moment, there was silence. Gunnar floated in the air, a monstrous god who had seemingly swallowed his rival whole.
Then, his jaws began to strain. The muscles in his titan face bulged. A muffled, furious roaring came from within. Blackbeard was not dead.
With a final, desperate heave of his ludicrous strength, Blackbeard forced Gunnar's jaws open a few inches. His hands, coated in the swirling darkness of the Yami Yami no Mi, grabbed the upper jaw. His feet, braced against the lower, began to push. He was trying to rip the titan's head apart from the inside.
"I... WON'T... BE... EATEN!" Blackbeard's voice roared from between the titan's teeth. The cancerous touch of the darkness began to spread, the Yami Yami no Mi attempting to nullify Gunnar's titan form from within. The rock of Gunnar's teeth began to crumble, the lava to cool.
Gunnar roared in agony and fury, pouring every last ounce of his titan strength into his jaws, trying to grind the monster between his teeth. It was a stalemate of impossible forces, a god trying to chew a demon who was tearing him apart from the inside.
"Let go of my husband, you filth."
The voice was calm, cold, and right beside Gunnar's colossal ear.
A figure appeared in the air, a blur of motion. It was Smoothie. She had seen the final, insane confrontation and had come not to help, but to finish.
She moved with a grace that was utterly alien at this scale. She ran along the side of Gunnar's massive face as if it were solid ground. She leaped from his cheek, her massive sword, now glowing with a terrifying, pressurized energy, held high.
Blackbeard, his attention and power completely focused on prying the titan's jaws apart, saw her at the last second. His eyes widened in shock.
Smoothie's blade came down. It was not a clumsy hack, but a surgically precise, Haki-infused slash. It passed cleanly through both of Blackbeard's outstretched arms at the elbows.
There was a wet, final SHLICK.
Blackbeard's scream was no longer triumphant or furious. It was a high-pitched, piercing shriek of pure, unadulterated agony and disbelief as his severed forearms, still clinging to Gunnar's upper jaw, were left behind.
The resistance vanished.
With no arms to hold them apart, Gunnar's jaws, powered by the full, vengeful fury of a titan, slammed shut.
CRUNCH.
The sound was absolute. Final. The monster was bitten clean in two at the waist.
For a moment, Blackbeard's screaming, severed upper torso hung in the air, his eyes wide with the final, shocking realization of his own mortality.
Then, a torrent of blood, a gruesome waterfall of crimson, erupted from the titan's mouth, raining down upon the ruined island below.
The age of Marshall D. Teach had ended not with a bang, but with a bite.