"Bold of them to bow out that quickly."
With a single smooth cut, Rayleigh dropped a freshly landed marine and smiled, watching the retreating captains without lifting a finger to stop them. Their real target was never that scattered lot. It was the man who wanted the world to kneel, Rocks D. Xebec.
"Yeah, but what is Ozz thinking?" Gaban hustled up beside him, sweat beading as he eyed Ozz standing alone in the middle of the final ring of monsters. "Looks like he wants to fight everyone by himself."
The two of them could tell Roger and Ozz were dead serious. So they asked no more questions. Instead they turned their blades toward the marines who still dared advance and the God Knights struggling back to their feet.
"Hey. That field over there is not for you."
Conqueror's Haki crackled along their edges as Rayleigh and Gaban stood shoulder to shoulder like a wall of iron. No one was getting past.
Faces tightened among the marines. A caped officer at their fore stared at the pair he knew too well, fat drops of sweat glistening at his nose.
"Roger's right and left hands."
"Dark King Silvers Rayleigh."
"Mountain Eater Scopper Gaban."
Against monsters like these he knew they were hopeless. Orders were orders, though. He raised his saber and drew breath to command the charge when a voice slid between the lines of marines and the blades of Rayleigh and Gaban.
"That is far enough."
A low thrumming rose.
On the fractured earth, a strange sigil unfurled, woven of an unfamiliar fire and lightning. The air turned different. Even on the main field, where a colossal clash was about to break loose, heads turned as one.
Black clouds smothered the sky. Two beams, like searchlights, bored through the smoke as a pillar roared upward. A pentagram blossomed at the center of the array, the number 5 etched upon it.
Black red lightning tore the ground like Judgment Day. Sailors scattered shrieking.
Ozz glanced down his barrel at the circle and did not look surprised, only faintly amused that the crowd for his show was growing.
Rocks, Roger, and the others, all bloodied and ringed by Ozz's killing zone, stared hard at this new intrusion.
"So you are finally coming down from your perch to join us."
"The Five Elders… Saint Saturn."
He finished speaking and pulled the trigger. If Ozz said he would give no face, he would give none. Not even to Im.
Conqueror's lightning fused to the round. It tore forward with brutal momentum, its wake raking Ozz's hair back to reveal a profile too calm and too cold, war lust simmering bright.
He looked as if the title Five Elder meant nothing at all.
The rest heard the name and went pale or grim. The world's highest authority, the Five Elders. Even Rocks had measured fear for them. And Ozz greeted them with a shot to the face.
What was he playing at?
Even Roger wondered if Ozz had gone past reckless into madness, swinging at anything that moved.
They did not know his timer was ticking down.
Before it ran out, Ozz meant to stake his spirit as high as it would rise and show a strength that admitted no equals. If the whole world could not see his bottom, none of the true powers would dare touch Gick's world after he left. And maybe the pressure would drag his own limits farther.
The shot connected with Saturn's staff.
Haki braided thick around the blow. As a fighter at the summit of the admiral emperor tier, Saturn could block a powerful but not full force bullet. The air between staff and slug crackled into a spiderweb of Conqueror's, knocking marines limp in rows, and finally ground the round to a stop.
Smoke thinned. Saturn stood revealed in his hulking ox demon form, both hands on his staff, not unscathed.
Ancient eyes fixed on Ozz. Centuries of calculation kept his voice calm.
"No need to bristle, Ozz. I have no intention of making you my enemy."
"On the contrary, I wish to see just how far a future king can go."
Expectation flickered there, and scheming, and a touch of resignation. He knew as well as anyone that a talent like this, with a power that wrong-footed even the Five, would not be killed here. Unless you erased him in an instant, Ozz would not die.
Better, then, to signal intent. However unruly, Ozz was, in Saturn's eyes, a Celestial Dragon.
"Only do not go too far. That would put me in an awkward position."
"Saint Ozz."
The meaning was clear. If God Valley became Ozz's personal stage, Saturn would not complain, so long as it did not make trouble for Lord Im. If Ozz crushed pirates, the headlines could read that Marines and Celestial Dragons had triumphed together. No need to give every laurel to a single vice admiral named Garp.
"Nani."
"Saint… Ozz?"
Rocks and Roger both stared like they had been lied to. Ozz only shrugged.
The air bristled. Ozz chose to fight four at once, adding the top of the Celestial Dragon lance, Figarland Garling, to the trio already waiting.
He split himself into four and squared up to Rocks, Roger, Garp, and Garling.
On paper it was absurd. He should have been carved apart in a heartbeat. But until his stamina burned out and the clones dissolved, there would be no quick ending.
Saturn let the matter drop. He had never meant to wade in. His gaze moved to the God Knights.
"Your fighting means nothing now. Come away with me."
A lone officer, one of the rare marines still conscious, saw the Celestial Dragons preparing to leave and the ground turning into a playground for monsters and faltered.
"Please wait. What are we supposed to…"
He barely blocked their path.
Bang.
Saturn only looked at him and the man's head burst like an overripe fruit.
"Ozz is one thing. But a mere marine thinks he can instruct a Celestial Dragon."
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