Chapter 341: The Death of Rhodes?
Aboard the Marine warship, Sengoku finally exhaled — a long, slow breath he hadn't realized he'd been holding. His broad shoulders dropped as the tension bled out of him.
His gaze remained fixed on the mushroom cloud still blooming in the distance.
A bullet through the heart first. Then a Dyna Stone at point-blank range — something comparable in destructive force to an Ancient Weapon.
Thorough. Absolutely thorough. No margin for error, no room to escape.
"No wonder the Elders put their faith in him," Sengoku murmured quietly. "No wonder they were so certain Rhodes would never leave Chesterton Island alive."
He shook his head slowly.
"Rhodes..."
Gion — Vice Admiral Momousagi — stood motionless at the railing, her eyes distant, locked on the column of smoke rising from where the island used to be. She didn't speak. She barely seemed to breathe.
It was unlike her. Gion was composed by nature, cold-headed in a crisis, rarely swayed by emotion. She was not the kind of woman who let herself be moved.
But Rhodes had been different.
She had seen something in him — something she recognized from a long time ago, from a version of herself that no longer existed. Back before the weight of the world had ground down her ideals into something quieter, something resigned.
When most young Marines first put on the uniform, they burned with it — justice, real justice, not the kind written in pamphlets. They wanted to change things. Gion had been that way once. So had Akainu, though his fire had curdled into something harder over the years.
But the older you got, the higher you climbed, the more clearly you saw the rot beneath the surface. And sooner or later, most of them made their peace with powerlessness.
Gion had made hers.
Except —
Rhodes hadn't even turned twenty, and he'd already done things she'd stopped believing were possible. He'd stood before Kaido of the Beasts and not flinched. He'd carved out a corner of the world and held it by sheer force of will and strength.
She had thought, watching him, maybe.
Maybe this one.
Maybe someone like him could actually steer things in the right direction. Maybe the world still had that kind of room in it.
That was why she had moved. Why she'd been willing to throw away her candidacy for Admiral, her entire career, everything — because she believed he was worth it.
"Accept it, Gion."
Tsuru's voice was gentle but firm, the way it always was when she was delivering something unkind.
"No human being survives that. Not even close. The only exception walking this earth is Kaido himself — and that's because he isn't entirely human anymore."
Gion lowered her head. Her expression was unreadable.
"...I know," she said quietly.
Tsuru sighed, looking out at the water.
"He shouldn't have died like this. He was too young, too brilliant." She paused. "But he made an enemy of the World Government too soon. That was always going to be his end."
It went unspoken between them — the distinction that everyone in the upper echelons of the Marines understood but rarely said aloud. The Marines are the Marines. The World Government is something else entirely. During Sengoku's era as Fleet Admiral, the gap between the two institutions had been maintained with great care. Which was precisely why the Five Elders had worked so hard to elevate Akainu — a man whose loyalty ran in a more convenient direction.
Sengoku said nothing for a long moment. When he finally spoke, his voice was even.
"Those who stand at the vanguard of a new age... they either ride the storm and become something legendary —" He exhaled. "— or they burn out before their time, and history forgets them."
A sharp sound cut through the air.
A tall figure in a white coat dropped onto the deck as if he'd stepped out of thin air — unhurried, silent, carrying an ornate pistol at his side. His face was blank, professionally so. The kind of blankness that took years to cultivate.
CP0 Captain Grald.
The user of the Zip-Zip Fruit. The man who had just carried out the assassination.
The moment he landed, he felt it — a killing intent drilling into the side of his skull. He glanced toward it without alarm.
Momousagi. Her eyes were cold enough to freeze the sea.
Grald looked away without interest. In terms of rank and raw power, she was beneath him. The hostility of an Admiral candidate wasn't something he needed to acknowledge.
"Confirmed kill?" Sengoku asked. His tone was controlled, but the weight behind it was unmistakable.
Grald considered for a moment before answering — not out of deference, but because Sengoku's reputation as a former Fleet Admiral and one of the most powerful men of his generation still commanded a certain wariness.
"The heart was destroyed on impact," Grald said. "And then the Dyna Stone detonated at near point-blank range." He let a beat pass. "There's likely nothing left to bury."
Inwardly, a rare flicker of satisfaction moved through him.
The Dragon Slayer. The name that had dominated every conversation, every newspaper, every betting pool in the New World for weeks. The young swordsman who had climbed over the body of a Yonko to claim a title no one his age had any business holding.
And yet here they were.
All that brilliance, all that impossible momentum — ended by a single bullet and a well-placed explosive. He probably hadn't even understood what hit him.
That's the difference, Grald thought. Between strength and inevitability.
It was, without question, the crowning achievement of his career.
"I see."
Sengoku nodded once, his expression neutral. Part of him had wanted a body — confirmation he could see with his own eyes. But the Dyna Stone's yield was not something he'd properly accounted for. Apparently it was sufficient to leave nothing behind.
Then — simultaneously — Sengoku and Grald both went rigid.
It hit like a physical force, a crushing, primal pressure bearing down from one specific direction. The instinct didn't lie: something is looking at you, and it wants to kill you.
They looked.
Kaido of the Beasts stood atop a jagged pile of ruins, his reduced frame somehow no less imposing for it. His face was a storm held barely in check. The muscles of his jaw were twitching.
Rhodes had been his. His fight, his rival, his to finish — or be finished by. The man had earned that much. And now some faceless rat hiding in the shadows had robbed him of that conclusion.
It was an insult. Not to Rhodes. To Kaido.
Sengoku held the gaze without stepping back, but he also didn't push. Kaido was spent — running on fumes and fury at this point. The threat was real but limited. And the Red Hair Pirates were still within range.
There was no strategic reason to escalate.
"Full power. We're pulling out — now."
Aboard the Red Force.
"That shooter..." Yasopp said slowly, lowering his scope. His voice had the careful quality of a professional respecting another professional's work. "World-class. I couldn't have made that shot cleaner myself. One bullet, directly through the heart." He paused. "And then whatever that explosion was — even if the first shot didn't finish it, nothing human walks out of that."
Beckman was quiet for a moment, the remains of a broken cigarette still between his fingers.
"The Dragon Slayer is dead," he said. "Which means the New World is about to get messy. Dressrosa, Fishman Island, the underground networks he was holding together — it's all going to fracture." He exhaled slowly. "Maybe that's not the worst thing for us. For Luffy, specifically. With Rhodes in the picture, the next generation barely had room to breathe."
The words were blunt. He didn't apologize for them.
Shanks hadn't moved from the bow.
His expression was unreadable — not the careful blankness of someone hiding their feelings, but the distant, slightly unfocused look of someone genuinely uncertain what they were feeling.
"Is he actually dead?"
The question came out quietly. Not theatrical. Just honest.
Yasopp glanced at him. "That's my read. I don't see how—"
"I know what you're saying." Shanks didn't turn around. "And you're probably right."
He stared at the column of smoke still rising in the distance, slowly dissipating into the sky.
But.
He couldn't shake it. The feeling that a swordsman who had fought like that — who had moved like that — didn't just quietly go out at the hands of an ambush. It felt wrong. Like the story wasn't finished.
Shanks said nothing more.
Rhodes had no idea any of this was happening.
He didn't have the luxury of thinking about it.
The instant the Dyna Stone exploded, the shockwave had chased him straight into the dimensional passage created by his Devil Fruit — the Door-Door Fruit — and the destructive force had shattered it from the inside. The carefully maintained tunnel had collapsed, and suddenly the space around him was cracking open like broken glass, jagged tears of pure black splitting through the air on all sides.
Rhodes had been cut nearly in two by spatial rifts twice before he made it through.
He was not Kaido. Being bisected was not something he recovered from.
This fruit, he thought, his teeth grinding together, is not to be trifled with.
He had to give the CP0 captain credit, reluctantly. The follow-up attack had been perfectly calculated. A heart shot alone might have failed against someone with his endurance. The Dyna Stone had been the insurance policy. Together, they formed a combination that would have killed almost anyone.
Almost.
The exit door blew open and Rhodes tumbled out onto solid ground, landing hard.
He rolled, caught himself, and immediately felt the threat emanating from the doorway behind him — a low, resonant wrongness that raised every hair on his body.
He didn't hesitate. He pushed off the earth hard enough to crack it and threw himself backward, covering a hundred meters in a single bound.
Then he stopped and turned around.
The doorway was gone. In its place was something that didn't have a good name.
A darkness that ate sound. Rocks and soil near the threshold crumbled inward without warning, silently disappearing. A tree at the edge of it tore apart at the roots and was pulled in. Further away, loose debris began drifting toward it as if gravity had decided to change its mind.
Rhodes watched, his expression tight.
After several long minutes, it shrank. Contracted. And then vanished.
Where it had been, there was a crater roughly thirty meters across — clean-edged, as though carved by something surgical. Like a bite taken out of the earth.
Rhodes stared at it for a long moment.
...Huh.
He filed that away.
If the spatial rift could do that to dirt and rock, it would do considerably worse to a human body. Even a body like Kaido's, built like a mountain and fueled by a Mythical Zoan — if something like that got hold of him, there would be no regenerating. You couldn't put yourself back together from nothing.
I wonder if he'd consider that an acceptable way to go, Rhodes thought. Probably not. He'd call it undignified.
The thought almost made him smile. Then the exhaustion hit him like a wall, and the smile didn't quite make it.
The damage to his heart was making itself known in full now. His body felt heavy in the specific, dangerous way that meant vital systems are failing, address this immediately.
He had conserved just enough of his special energy to stabilize himself. Not enough to be comfortable about it, but enough.
He looked around at the unfamiliar treeline, the unfamiliar sky.
No idea where he was. The exit point of a collapsed dimensional tunnel was essentially random — he'd ended up somewhere in the New World, an island with dense forest and large wildlife, currently stampeding away from the crater in noisy panic.
"Good enough," Rhodes muttered.
He found a hollow at the base of a large tree, settled into it, crossed his legs, and began the slow, careful work of channeling his remaining energy toward his shattered heart.
Across the Grand Line, the news broke like a wave.
The Dragon Slayer is dead.
Newspapers. Den Den Mushi calls. Word of mouth carrying it from port to port, island to island, until it reached every corner of the world.
The reaction was the same almost everywhere: disbelief, then reluctant acceptance. A Marine Admiral had been present. Shanks himself had witnessed it. If those two sources confirmed it, there wasn't much room for argument.
People grieved in their own ways.
On some unnamed island, in a clearing full of broken stone and restless animals, Roronoa Zoro paused with a sword in his hand.
He had heard. Word traveled even to wherever Hawkeye had dragged him for training.
"...Tch." He clicked his tongue, something complicated moving through his expression. "I wanted to fight him myself."
Then he turned back to the boulder he'd been splitting and got back to work. His journey wasn't over.
Dracule Mihawk rarely let anything show on his face.
He let something show now.
It was brief — a slight shift around the eyes, a stillness that hadn't been there before. He looked at the newspaper for a longer moment than he usually did.
He had been looking forward to it. Not to winning or losing — that was beside the point. He had wanted to know what it felt like to trade blows with a swordsman at that level, someone genuinely chasing the same peak from the other direction.
Those opportunities didn't come along often.
"He was that impressive?" Perona asked from somewhere nearby, newspapers scattered around her.
"Yes," Mihawk said simply. Then, after a pause: "It's a loss."
He meant it in multiple senses. He glanced across the clearing at Zoro, still going, still relentless, and shook his head once.
The boy had potential. Real potential. But there was a vast distance yet between what he was now and what the Dragon Slayer had already been.
And now that measuring stick is gone.
In the New World, the fallout was immediate and ugly.
Rhodes had built his power the hard way — by force, by reputation, by being the kind of person who could actually back up his words with his fists. The territories he held, the people he commanded, the networks he controlled, all of it had been organized around a single gravitational center:
Rhodes himself.
Without that center, the structure came apart fast.
The freshly subjugated crews and organizations — the ones who had surrendered because they had no better option — were already moving. Defections, reshufflings, opportunistic land grabs. The underground circuits he'd integrated began fracturing along old fault lines.
A smaller number held. These were the cautious ones, the ones who hadn't made up their minds yet. They had their eyes on Dressrosa, on Jinbe, on Enel.
Because those were the people Rhodes had trusted most.
And until someone knew for certain how they were going to respond —
— it was wiser to wait.
(End of Chapter)
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