"You're really content to serve under Rocks? What charm does that man have that ensnares the likes of Whitebeard, the Golden Lion, Linlin, Wang Zhi… one after another?"
"Shouldn't you all be thanking us, the descendants of the Creator? Without our forebears, you wouldn't even be standing on these seas."
The bald swordsman, Saint Kristen, carried the unconscious Cloud in one hand and skimmed through the air on Geppo (Moonwalk), angling back toward the deck. His attention never left Tengetsu Ares; with an opponent who fought on the level of a Marine Admiral, a single lapse could end the way it had for CP0's director.
Riding a Flame Cloud, Ares drifted closer. "I don't know what makes Rocks so 'special.' I only care about getting stronger and realizing my own dream."
Truth be told, he cared more for Whitebeard, the Golden Lion, and Wang Zhi and of course, Kaido than for Rocks himself. Everyone else was background noise.
Kristen set the limp Cloud down. His eyes sharpened; his voice was glacial. "What a laughable 'dream.' Pirates hide their greed behind words like that. I've seen too many of your kind."
His right hand slid, quiet as a hunting cat, to the hilt of the long blade at his left hip. His aura sank, drawing tight, like a beast coiling to strike.
Ares tensed. When killers like this compressed their presence, their cuts came from nowhere.
"Iaijutsu, Oni Seal!"
Shff!
Steel flashed one shard of blinding light and then nothing. No glittering arc in the air, only a ghost-trace too thin for the eye. Ares' Kenbunshoku (Observation) Haki wasn't his strongest suit, but instinct jerked his head aside.
and a line opened on his cheek. A thin spray of red.
His counter came as fast as thought. The bones in his fingers clicked; force gathered through his frame; his arm lanced forward like a thrown spear, the crack of it like thunder, driving for Kristen along the path of the cut.
The saint couldn't bring his blade back to guard in time. He stamped, body jolting forward in a second-stage surge like a rocket booster, slipping past the punch by Ares' cheek.
Only for his pupils to cinch tight a heartbeat later.
From behind Ares whipped a tail blue diamond scales gleaming the long, draconic lash hissing through the air.
Clang!
Kristen got his sword up, the ring of metal sharp enough to sting teeth then a mountain hit him. The force blew him off his feet and hurled him through bulkhead and timber in a crash of splinters.
Ares didn't chase. He was looking up, his face suddenly grave. "He's a Devil Fruit user too…?"
Darkness swallowed the world. In an instant, clear sky blackened with roiling cloud. The sea groaned under the weight of it; thunder rolled, a god's fist on a bronze drum. Blue-veined lightning stitched the heavens, bleaching Ares' dark-golden skin to ghost-white flashes.
A white figure floated within the storm. CP0 Director Cloud clothes blood-smeared, face marked with fresh wounds still wore pride and certainty like a mask.
"Ji-hahaha… Ares, I admit I underestimated you," he called down. "But the power I wield as CP0's Director is no less than an Admiral's. I am one of the World Government's strongest assets!"
He crooked a finger. A single thunderhead drifted to his palm, black as ink, flickering with jagged white veins.
"You're lucky you get to witness my fruit. You know why my codename is Cloud? Because I am cloud."
"I ate the Logia-type Kumo Kumo no Mi the Cloud-Cloud Fruit. Any cloud under the sky is mine to command."
He preened, a noble displaying a private gallery to a commoner, waiting to catch envy, fear, longing in Ares' eyes.
But Ares' gaze didn't change.
It was like swallowing a mosquito. Cloud's smile twitched, then died. He crushed the thunderhead in his palm pfft, gone to vapor but above, the canopy of storm had already spread for dozens of nautical miles.
"Thundercloud, Heaven's Strike!"
Lightning fell in columns as thick as barrels, hammering down in a deafening barrage.
Ares danced among them on his Flame Clouds, slipping left, cutting right, moving as if he'd known where each bolt would fall. Dozens of strikes slammed into the sea around him, and not a single one so much as singed him. He wove through the storm like a lord at home, all ease and ferocity.
Silhouetted in the white-blue glare, his figure looked less like a man than a war-god.
Cloud's eyes shook. "His Kenbunshoku… can he see the future? How else does he evade lightning?!"
Speed like that, and the body still choosing the right answer in the sliver of time it had Cloud struggled to picture how sharp the boy's Observation Haki had to be. Future sight? Had someone this young really climbed that far?
He didn't know that Ares was reading the storm feeling its charge and rhythm the way a blacksmith reads heat dodging not with prophecy, but with hard-won intimacy with thunder itself.
To Cloud, it looked like a miracle.
"Stop!!" a voice bellowed.
"Take one more step, and I'll kill this Celestial Dragon!"
Cloud whipped his head toward the shout and his pupils shrank. Sweat pricked at his temples. His voice came tight, urgent, to the deck below:
"Wait, don't do anything reckless!"
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