Flames guttered out, leaving a chaos of ice and splintered hulls.
Wreckage littered the frozen sea. In barely a dozen seconds, nearly ten warships were reduced to scrap, and Marines lay dead or groaning across the ice.
Moonwalk.
Fleet Admiral Kong's figure blurred as he launched skyward.
On the flagship, Borsalino raised two fingers, index and middle pressed together, and aimed at Rakuya in the clouds.
"Laser."
A spear of gold leapt from his fingertip and detonated a meter from Rakuya's body, the blast shunted aside as if an unseen wall refused to let it touch him.
"Huh. Even light gets stopped?"
Borsalino's brows twitched. His body dissolved into photons and streaked into the sky.
At the same time, Kuzan kicked off with Moonwalk and followed. Sakazuki hurled a magma fist and rode the recoil upward like a volcano-born rocket.
Behind them, Garp sprang after. Two at Fleet Admiral level and three Logia users surged up together, while Sengoku and Zephyr watched from below, cold-eyed, ready to intervene the instant the tide turned.
"Kong," Rakuya called, voice calm above the roar of wind and surf, "this is your Marine 'justice'? Five against one?"
"You kidnapped my Admirals, butchered my men, and even killed a Celestial Dragon," Kong shot back, face a slab of shadow and muscle. "You think I should not take you down?"
"Marshal, spare the speeches," Sakazuki said icily, rushing in. "Let him sneer about numbers. Only the weak whine about fairness. Truth belongs to the strong."
"Five against one makes you 'strong'?" Rakuya laughed, then shot higher, a white figure against thickening cloud.
"Rakuya, you will not escape."
"Surrender while you can."
"Today you die."
Five Marine titans drove after him, killing intent like iron.
Rakuya closed his eyes and let the sea answer.
For Peach Rabbit's safety, he had already sent her into the system space to bicker with the Nine-Tails. Up here, it was just him and the sky.
He tilted his head back and opened his arms. Power rolled off him in slow, inexorable waves.
Clear blue dimmed to iron gray. Billows of white flipped to churning black as thunderheads stacked on thunderheads, building a ceiling of storm with no visible end.
The ocean bucked. Wind tore itself into screaming ropes. Waterspouts spun from the surface like drill-bits, snatching the sea into towering columns until extinction-scale waterspouts bridged sky and sea.
The water dragons roared, devouring the horizon.
Rakuya breathed, a single sound that felt like command.
Far below, something vast and ancient stirred. Sea Kings answered, surging from the abyss. Pillars of water heaved upward, smashed into hulls, and sheared decks into driftwood. Ice groaned as fractures spidered outward, as if something beneath hammered to break free.
"What is that ability?"
"He is calling the storm. Weather control. He must be a Logia."
"If he is Logia, why does Armament Haki not restrain him?"
Kong and the others traded clipped words even as their eyes tracked the growing catastrophe.
On the ice, Marines wavered. Against nature itself they had nothing but rifles and grit. Admirals could fight. Everyone else was tinder in a gale.
Wind howled. Swells hammered the frozen plain. Ice plates tipped, crashed, and split.
"Strike the sails."
Sengoku vaulted up with Moonwalk, voice cracking like a whip across the fleet.
"Drop sails now. Leave them up and the wind will flip you."
"Move. Listen to Admiral Sengoku."
Canvas thundered down ship after ship, the strain on masts easing. The staggering lessened. But the water dragons had already risen to their full, ruinous height.
Kong's face tightened as a column thick as a tower corkscrewed toward the formation.
"Sakazuki. Kuzan. Those waterspouts are yours."
"Yes, Fleet Admiral."
Both Admirals vanished in blurs.
"Ice Age."
Kuzan's cloak snapped in the gale. Frost detonated from his outstretched hands. The base of the nearest waterspout froze solid, cold hurled upward through the spinning column until the dragon became an ice pillar spearing the clouds.
"Great Eruption."
Sakazuki's right arm became a mountain of lava. Heat slammed outward. Spray flashed to steam. A magma fist hundreds of meters long punched through the base of another waterspout, cutting its feed like ripping the plug from a drain.
The dragon faltered, shifted, tried to reform.
"Humph."
Sakazuki kicked back, settled fifty meters off, and raised both arms.
"Meteor Volcano."
Boom. Boom. Boom. Boom.
A barrage of blazing magma fists ripped skyward, hammered into the writhing column. Steam billowed in sheets. Under the bombardment the water dragon shattered, collapsing in a deluge that hissed and spat against the falling meteors of stone and flame.
The sea sizzled. The storm raged on.
Above it all, Rakuya hung in the air, eyes still closed, the ocean answering his will.
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