-Broadcast-
No common ground, no negotiation. Iron Island had nothing to offer either side in the way of diplomatic alternatives, so both sides stopped looking for them.
The matchups resolved naturally. Gajeel had met Smoker before and he carried enough s from that encounter to have opinions about how this one would go. Gin wanted the man with Doflamingo's face. Four fighters, two pairs, Iron Island as the stage.
"Mock Town — I've been wondering how much you've changed since then." Gajeel rolled his shoulders, drew a breath that seemed to pull the air of the entire space into himself, chest expanding with the accumulation of it. "Don't disappoint me."
He opened his mouth.
Roar of the Iron Dragon.
A silver whirlwind erupted from him with a sound that was less a roar and more a displacement — something that moved the air rather than occupying it, spinning with a force that carried iron filings throughout its volume. Gajeel had been eating iron ore for a long time and the filings in his body had been accumulating in proportion to his appetite. Combined with Armament Haki embedded throughout the attack, the result was a technique that hit a Logia user where a purely physical blow couldn't.
Smoker didn't take it directly. His body dissolved into smoke — not a retreat, a tactical repositioning — and spread outward.
He'd learned this lesson at Mock Town: iron filings suspended in a roar's wake latched onto the smoke and slowed it. He knew the trap now. He wouldn't walk into it twice.
What he replaced it with was invisible. Carbon dioxide, produced in volume the moment he stopped restraining his fruit — colorless, odorless, undetectable to Observation Haki, building concentration in the immediate atmosphere around the battlefield. Once it reached the right threshold, it would announce itself in the most productive way possible.
"Fight me properly," Gajeel said, tracking the dispersed smoke with his eyes. "You have Conqueror's Haki. Use it instead of hiding in the air."
His feet changed.
Black metal extruded from his lower legs and reshaped — not feet anymore but spear points, multiple and sharply defined, and he used them to launch himself upward at an angle that gave the attack maximum coverage. Iron Dragon Spear. The metal in flight split outward in four directions, spear tips multiplying and fanning into a net formation that descended from multiple angles simultaneously.
Smoker assessed this mid-smoke and started to relocate — too late. The net closed around him faster than a pure evasion could account for. He felt the edges of it and tried to push through a gap, converting to his most dispersed form—
And then the weakness hit.
Contact with the metal produced it: the helplessness of seastone, not the overwhelming version of full immersion but the creeping, power-draining quality of sustained exposure. He couldn't move through the net without touching it, and touching it drained him each time.
"You lunatic." He pulled back toward the net's center and stopped burning energy on escape attempts that weren't working. "You've got seastone in your body."
"In the iron filings," Gajeel confirmed. "Took me a long time to figure out how to process it without killing myself. Eating seastone doesn't agree with a Zoan the way eating regular ore does — the weakness hits you too, while you're digesting. You just have to commit to the process until the body adapts." He paused. "Or until it doesn't, and you find out the hard way. I got lucky."
He monitored the net without urgency.
Gin had already drawn his rain into position before the exchange began in earnest. The dark clouds covering Iron Island were his — not gathered from existing weather patterns but constructed, the Ame Ame no Mi imposing its own atmospheric logic on the island's air. The clouds completed their formation with the efficiency of someone who had done this before and knew exactly how long each stage took.
What fell from them was not ordinary rain.
Acid. Not concentrated to the point of instant dissolution, but sustained — the kind of rain that didn't kill quickly but killed thoroughly, working on everything it touched with patient corrosiveness. The soil changed color where it landed. The sparse vegetation that had survived the island's prior industrial exploitation didn't survive this. Whatever animals still occupied the stripped landscape found that their options had narrowed considerably. Birds lost the ability to stay airborne. Insects stopped moving. The sound of Iron Island became the sound of acid rain on barren rock and the silence of things that had stopped struggling.
Doflamingo stood in it and coated himself in Armament Haki with the practiced efficiency of someone who had survived worse. The coating held against the acid's immediate damage. Against sustained exposure over the duration of a Logia user's patience, it would eventually not.
He knew that. He addressed it directly.
The awakening of the Ito Ito no Mi reached outward. The ground around Doflamingo converted — soil, rock, the remnants of vegetation, all of it flowing into white threads that gathered toward him in accumulating density, responding to his will. The acid rain corroded the threads as they formed; he recycled them before they were fully compromised and replaced them continuously.
He couldn't fight a war of attrition with someone who could maintain the acid indefinitely. He didn't intend to.
Wild Waves of White Threads.
Tens of thousands of threads arranged simultaneously in horizontal formation — not a web but a wave, moving toward Gin with the mass and momentum of something natural. Each thread was fine enough to pass through most defenses that weren't ally designed to stop it; in aggregate, they were the opposite of delicate. The wave tightened as it moved, the threads compressing anything they touched toward structural failure. Most opponents caught in it spent their remaining time discovering that struggling accelerated the process.
"The volume and quality are both different from what I saw before," Gin said. He was watching the wave approach with the quality of attention that comes from knowing you need to have already decided what you're doing. "You're telling me that's not enough to prove you're a fake?"
The white threads hit something before they hit Gin.
Faint ripples had appeared in the air above him — barely visible, the kind of disturbance that water makes when it moves at depth and only the surface registers it. Whatever Gin had prepared was already in position and waiting for the wave.