Chapter 543: Collapse
Brett had never anticipated this.
Whatever else he had prepared for, whatever scenarios he had run through in his mind, Imu willingly sacrificing Mariejois had never been among them. Mariejois was the World Government's nerve center. The home of the Celestial Dragons. The seat of eight centuries of power. No matter how hard Brett tried, he could not have arrived at the conclusion that Imu would one day throw it away without hesitation just to get at Fish-Man Island.
And therein lay the problem.
Fish-Man Island sat ten thousand meters below the ocean's surface. Even the Lunarian weapon's catastrophic firepower would struggle to reach it directly - thousands of meters of deep water absorbed and diffused the energy of anything striking from above. Add to that the protective cavity in the Red Line that the island sat inside, and direct bombardment was nearly impossible.
But once Imu was willing to give up Mariejois, the equation changed entirely.
The plan was brutally simple: destroy enough of the Red Line above to bring the whole structure crashing down, and bury Fish-Man Island under the rubble. Entomb it. And even if the island somehow survived that, with the Red Line gone and nothing shielding it from above, continuous bombardment of the sea surface would generate currents and pressure waves capable of turning the deep into an uninhabitable hellscape.
This was the worst possible situation.
Fish-Man Island was facing the most direct threat it had ever known.
Brett's mind moved fast. The answer came quickly.
The single most urgent priority was making sure Fish-Man Island was not crushed in the collapse. There was exactly one person on the island capable of making that happen.
Brett became lightning in the deep water, streaking toward his destination.
Ryugu Palace.
Neptune and his wife met him at the entrance, both of them clearly frantic.
"Brett, what is happening? Is this an earthquake?"
Neptune's crown had slid sideways. "If it is, it's unlike anything I've felt before - the rock walls of the cavity above are cracking. A section of one of the palace wings just collapsed."
"It's Imu."
Brett kept it short. There was no time for anything more.
"I need to find Shirahoshi. She's the only one who can help right now."
He didn't wait for Neptune to answer. He already knew where she was.
Through the palace corridors like a bolt of light, and then he was at her door.
"Brett!"
Shirahoshi turned to him the moment he entered, her expression already strained with worry.
"The Sea Kings are sending me warnings. Something terrible is happening above us."
"It is. And this is the moment, Shirahoshi." Brett was direct and immediate. "I need you to use your power. Right now."
No room for hesitation. The bombardment was ongoing. The rock above was already giving way - massive chunks breaking free and beginning their fall.
"I understand." Shirahoshi pressed both small fists against her chest, her expression resolute. "What do I need to do?"
"Command the Sea Kings to catch the falling rocks. Stop them from reaching the island."
"I will."
She closed her eyes.
Brett heard it happen - her will extending outward from her like a radio wave propagating in every direction at once. The absolute command of a sovereign, delivered directly into the minds of every Sea King in range.
They were already moving. Converging on the space above Fish-Man Island.
"You've done more than enough, Shirahoshi."
Brett was already moving again. He punched through the palace ceiling without slowing down and drove upward into the open water.
The Sea Kings needed time to arrive. Until they did, someone had to hold the line.
That someone was him.
Brett broke into his awakened state. In the deep water, he shifted into his full dragon form - and in awakened state, his body expanded far beyond its normal size, becoming something genuinely enormous even by the standards of the deep sea. A true leviathan.
He looked up.
He couldn't see much. The water was deep and the light was gone. But he could hear everything with perfect clarity.
The sound of rock shattering. Cracks racing outward through the Red Line's structure, spreading farther with each new bombardment.
Under Imu's relentless fire from above, the section of Red Line directly overhead had been blasted open from top to bottom. And in this moment, an incomprehensible mass of stone was beginning to fall.
Brett drew a slow breath.
The flame clouds erupted from him in every direction, spreading outward in a wave with him at the center. He had never pushed his awakening this hard before. The clouds spread and thickened until they formed something like a ceiling above the island - a vast canopy of swirling flame cloud that blotted out whatever remained of the deep water's ambient light.
A few loops of flame cloud could carry an island through the sky. What Brett had just produced was an ocean of it.
He didn't know what the upper limit of that looked like. He only knew that without his awakening, this would have been impossible.
The first rock arrived.
A single fragment more than a kilometer in diameter, falling with the gathering speed of something that had been falling for a long time. Even in deep water, it was moving fast.
It landed on the cloud canopy.
The clouds trembled, shuddered, and held.
But it was only the first. More came. Many more. The rain of debris thickened rapidly into something that was no longer a rain but a deluge.
Brett strained to maintain the canopy, catching each impact in turn. At first it was manageable - even kilometer-scale rocks were something he could handle. But as the volume climbed, the canopy began to shake in a way that was harder to suppress.
How much of the Red Line was coming down? There was no way to calculate it. The Red Line extended far above the depth of Fish-Man Island, and even a small fraction of that mass, broken loose and falling, represented a quantity no ordinary island could have absorbed.
And then came the secondary disaster - the collapse of the surrounding rock walls, sending a lateral surge of stone and debris rolling outward through the deep water in every direction. Like an avalanche. Like a tsunami made of rock.
Brett split his cloud canopy, sending portions of it in every direction to meet the incoming surge from the sides.
His breathing was becoming labored.
Even for him, this was reaching the edge of what he could sustain.
He could hear Fish-Man Island below him. The sounds of alarm, the voices of his people realizing that something was terribly wrong.
And then, from the darkness of the surrounding deep water, help arrived.