"ZEHAHAHAHA—HIC—!"
A drunken, triumphant laugh cut through the stormy air near the Gates of Justice.
"Impel Down! Here I come!"
Marshall D. Teach, better known as Blackbeard, stood on the deck of his crude, massive raft, his mind racing with calculations, his grin growing more sinister by the second.
He had it.
He'd successfully manipulated Fleet Admiral Sengoku and secured temporary Warlord of the Sea privileges.
That status was his golden ticket, a key that would open the deepest, darkest locks of the world's greatest prison.
His target? Level 6. The "Infinite Hell."
A place where the world's most legendary, most monstrous criminals were left to be forgotten by time, their world-shaking power rotting in the dark.
"How can a man achieve his dreams without like-minded comrades?" he mused, his voice a low, gravelly rumble.
"Zehahaha! It's time to awaken those slumbering beasts!"
"When that time comes, the Warlord position will just be a stepping stone! This entire sea… it will eventually bow before me! A man's dream…"
"Captain," the smooth, reedy voice of Lafitte, his navigator, interrupted his monologue.
"There appears to be a Marine ship ahead."
Teach narrowed his eyes, his gaze following Lafitte's pointing cane.
Sure enough, emerging from the gloom near Impel Down, a massive Marine battleship was heading away from the prison.
The enormous, stark-black characters for "Justice" emblazoned on its hull seemed to glare at them, illuminated by the flashes of lightning.
"A Marine ship? Coming from Impel Down?" Teach's brow furrowed.
A thought, sharp and sudden as the lightning itself, flashed through his mind.
"Could it be… they're transporting Ace to Marineford for the execution?"
His face split into a wide, gap-toothed grin.
"Zehahaha! Perfect timing! I'm one of their own now! Move us closer!"
Under Teach's command, the massive, ramshackle raft slowly, clumsily, adjusted its course, angling to intercept the warship.
...
On the battleship's deck, Ace sat listlessly, the sea-prism stone chains heavy on his wrists, his spirit even heavier.
Suddenly, a familiar, detestable laugh scraped against his eardrums like a rusty saw on bone.
"That… voice…"
Ace's head snapped up. His entire body went rigid, tensing like a cat whose tail had just been stomped on.
His gaze, once dull with despair, now burned.
He stared at the approaching raft, his eyes twin infernos of pure, unadulterated hatred, flames that seemed capable of reducing the very ocean to ash.
"TEACH!!!"
"Yo~ Is that you, Commander Ace?" Blackbeard's voice boomed across the water, dripping with false concern and oily schadenfreude.
"How's the food in Impel Down? Being transported to headquarters for your big execution, are we?" He pretended to stroke his chin thoughtfully.
"Zehahahaha—hic—! This is just getting more and more interesting!"
He stood on his raft, hands on his hips, his massive, disproportionate body swaying with the waves, looking like an overbearing gorilla, drunk on his own success.
"Wait…"
Teach's taunting grin suddenly froze.
His peripheral vision had caught three other figures standing on the warship's deck, and his pupils contracted sharply, as if pricked by needles.
Akainu. Kizaru. Kuzan.
All three…
All three Admirals are here?!
This… this level of security was insane.
Why in the world would they need three Admirals just to transport a single, chained-up prisoner?
Were they that terrified of Whitebeard trying a rescue here? It didn't make sense.
A single elite Vice Admiral, maybe two, would have been more than enough.
Unless… unless something had happened.
Something major.
Something he didn't know about.
Teach's mind whirred, spinning through a thousand conjectures.
But his face quickly broke back into that wide, "friendly" grin as he bellowed across the water to the three men who represented the Marines' greatest military might.
"Admirals! Good to see you!"
"Yooo~"
Before Akainu or Kuzan could even react, Kizaru's lazy, drawn-out voice drifted over.
He slowly lowered his yellow-tinted sunglasses, squinting as he sized Teach up and down.
"A three-star bounty, isn't it? Teach?"
"?" Teach's smile froze again.
'Three-star? What the hell is he talking about? I'm a Warlord of the Sea! Temporary, yes, but still! Personally acknowledged by Sengoku! Is their internal intel really this bad?'
He cleared his throat, about to explain, to emphasize his "temporary" status, when Kizaru suddenly let out a slow, appreciative
"Heh~."
"Confirmed," Kizaru's voice suddenly rose, no longer lazy, but tinged with a strange, almost giddy excitement.
"A three-star bounty, which means…"
WHOOSH—!
A flash of pure, golden light streaked across the water, too fast for the human eye to follow.
Teach didn't even have time to blink before Kizaru had rematerialized, no longer on the warship, but in the air, directly in front of his face.
Kizaru's foot was raised high, the sole of his shoe gleaming with the blinding, condensed light of a miniature sun.
"This 3 Billion Belly head is all mine now!"
"???"
Teach had no time to process.
No time to ask what 3 Billion Belly?!.
No time to activate the all-consuming darkness of his Devil Fruit.
His entire world became a flash of gold, and then an irresistible, cataclysmic force slammed into his face—or, more accurately, into his front teeth.
"CRACK—!"
It was a sickening, wet sound, like a bag of seashells being smashed with a sledgehammer.
"BOOM—!"
Teach's massive, 11-foot-tall body was sent flying backward like a cannonball.
He shot through the air, crashing violently onto the deck of his own raft.
The crude, heavy logs let out a teeth-gritting groan as splinters the size of javelins flew everywhere.
His body didn't stop.
It punched a jagged, human-shaped hole straight through the raft's deck, and he was kicked clean into the churning, stormy sea below.
"GACK—!"
He instantly gulped down several mouthfuls of salty, unforgiving seawater.
The side effect of the Dark-Dark Fruit—double the pain—hit him like a physical blow.
His vision went black as excruciating, white-hot agony exploded from his shattered face and spread through his entire body.
He vomited a cloud of bloody foam, seawater, and a half-dozen broken teeth.
'Damn it…' he cursed wildly, his mind reeling in confusion as the saltwater choked his nostrils.
'Why?! Why did Kizaru attack me?! And what the HELL is this 3 BILLION BELLY nonsense?!'
Even with his monstrous physique, being a Devil Fruit user in the sea was a death sentence.
His limbs felt heavy as lead as his body began to sink, his consciousness wavering.
"..."
The members of the Blackbeard Pirates, stunned into silence for a beat, finally erupted into a panic, jumping into the water one after another like lemmings, scrambling to fish their sinking captain out of the ocean.
"Still alive?" Kizaru had somehow rematerialized on the wreckage of the raft, looking down with casual amusement at the battered, sputtering form of Teach as his crew hauled him back aboard.
"Cough… cough… gurgle…" Teach lay sprawled on the broken logs like a dead dog, his face a swollen, bloody, unrecognizable mess.
His toothless mouth opened and closed pathetically.
Trembling, he reached a desperate hand out toward the Admiral.
"Wait… Admiral Kizaru… I don't… understand…"
Before he could finish his plea, a new, terrifying voice cut him off, a voice like a rumbling volcano.
"BORSALINO! MOVE ASIDE!"
"His bounty is all yours, I don't care!" Akainu's voice roared from the warship, carrying an unquestionable authority and… a hint of barely concealed, gleeful excitement.
"But his execution is mine! GREAT ERUPTION!"
Kizaru, grinning, flashed away, reappearing in midair in an instant.
If Sakazuki was promising him the full bounty, he had no complaints!
The sky above the raft turned a burning, hellish red.
Countless, massive magma fists, a meteor shower of pure fire and destruction, descended upon the wreckage with earth-shattering force.
"Boom! Boom! Boom! Boom!"
The raft didn't just break; it vaporized.
Splinters and debris were blasted in all directions, and the Blackbeard Pirates, who had just climbed back on, wailed in agony as they were instantly incinerated or blasted back into the sea like dumplings in a boiling pot.
"Whoosh—"
As the smoke and steam cleared, a third figure leaped down from the warship, his form silhouetted against the dark, stormy sky.
Kuzan landed lightly on a patch of debris, his breath a cloud of icy mist as he delivered the final, merciless strike, his hand touching the churning, magma-heated water.
"ICE AGE!"