Time rolls back a little.
When Sakazuki's thunderous roar shook the plaza, the Golden Lion's manic laughter cut off like a blade.
"Zehahahaha… a pack of gnats yapping at the jaws of death."
His mouth mocked, yet the pressure of Garp and Sengoku fighting in tandem was already forcing his breath short. Worse, the Marines' rekindled morale needled him with a nameless irritation.
"Save the cheap talk, Shiki."
Garp's fist was sheathed in pitch-black Armament, and every swing made the air itself cry out.
"Take a look at yourself. You know exactly where this is going."
"Garp is right." Sengoku, a golden Buddha, pressed forward with wave after heavier wave of shock power.
"The moment we joined forces, your era ended."
"Ended?" Bloodshot eyes flared with madness.
"Don't flatter yourselves. My dominion is only beginning."
He abandoned defense entirely. Sakura Ten and Oto turned into two skiesplitting slashes and howled for their throats.
A flaw.
To Garp's eyes that all-in frenzy was the largest opening of all.
"Too naive, Shiki."
Garp vanished. When he reappeared he was above the Golden Lion, right fist raised high. Haki and brute might collapsed into a single point. At that knuckle it felt as if a starfield was compressing upon itself.
"Fist Bone, Falling Star."
Shiki's pupils pinpricked. He had no time to move. That fist, heavy as a small planet, struck him square in the chest.
Boom.
The delayed annihilation bloomed.
Like a true meteor, the Golden Lion plummeted and slammed into the plaza. Stone shattered. A crater opened so deep the eye could not find bottom, and cracks webbed across half the square.
"Gah!"
At the pit's nadir Shiki vomited blood. Countless bones had snapped. He could not even rise.
The assault did not end. Sengoku knew how to finish a kill.
"Buddha Shockwave."
A vast golden palm fell from heaven and slapped the pit's heart. The shock compressed into matter, pinning the Golden Lion to the bottom as if a deity had set a seal. There would be no last counter.
"Ouoooooh!"
"Golden Lion, defeated!"
The surviving officers roared in release. They rushed forward with the seastone chains long prepared, swarmed him, and bound the sky-born admiral like a festival rice dumpling.
"Bastards… Garp… Sengoku…" Shiki's curses rattled weakly. His head lolled and darkness took him.
With their gravest threat neutralized, Garp and Sengoku finally looked toward the other battlefield.
One glance and what lightness they had died.
They saw a plain of rubble.
They saw Kuzan and Borsalino, broken and battered.
They saw Sakazuki, struggling to rise only to collapse again.
And at their center, Kael still stood.
The legends traded a look and needed no words. Both charged.
Kael's gaze slid past them to the Golden Lion trussed in seastone far away.
"Ugly, Shiki," he murmured, too low for any ears but his own.
Wind howled. Garp and Sengoku landed left and right and faced him, forming a new triad.
No shouting. No accusations.
Three men who stood on the summit of the sea simply stared. Their clashing auras thickened the air until breathing was work.
At last Kael broke the silence.
He lowered the black-gold naginata and wrapped both hands around the haft, settling into a grounded guard.
"Embarrassing to say," his voice was even, yet it carried to them as if spoken at their shoulders, "this blade has followed me for decades and the world still does not know its name."
He sank a fraction. The brilliant gold in his eyes dimmed and pooled into bottomless night.
"Let it end this farce today."
On that word, black-gold Conqueror's Haki erupted from him like a volcano.
Clouds above went wild, corkscrewing into a vast vortex. Lightning spidered across the sky.
"This blade is called Nidhogg.
This technique is…"
Kael raised the naginata from low to high and cut.
"…Dragon Deposed."
A roar answered that seemed to come out of the world's first days.
A black slash leapt from the blade.
It was not mere sword aura. It was a dragon, a monster wrought from pure will to destroy and the king's Haki.
Black-gold lightning coiled its scales. Its eyes were hateful and regal. Its momentum promised swallowed heavens and toppled thrones as it screamed for Garp and Sengoku.
Where it passed, earth split. Sky sheared. All matter in its path was ground down and undone.
Facing a strike that could have cleaved Marineford in two, Garp and Sengoku both blanched.
"Damn it."
Garp roared, stepped in, and drove his Armament to the absolute limit. His right fist was a black sun as he met the dragon's skull head on.
"Hah!"
Sengoku struck in the same beat. The Buddha's palm bloomed again, and in its center a sphere of shock power swelled to a never-before degree and hammered the dragon's body.
The Marines' twin pinnacles threw everything in to hold.
The sound that followed cannot be measured. For a heartbeat the world lost voice and color.
Blinding light devoured sight. A storm of force rippled out from the collision and raced like a ring across all directions.
The bastions of Marine Headquarters' outer wall crumbled like crackers. Buildings tore up by the roots, flung skyward, and were shredded to dust before they could fall.
Smoke and steam blanketed the heavens and would not clear.
No one knows how long it was before the rage subsided and the ruin stilled.
Blood beaded along the creases of Garp's knuckles. A line of red traced Sengoku's lip.
They had stopped it.
Across from them there was no one.
Kael was gone, vanished as if he had never stood there.
Only a scar, gouged from end to end through Marineford, and the cold rain still whispering down, proved that any of it had happened.
[The One Piece narrator voice]
From this day forth,
the Dragon and Lion Uprising that shattered most of Marineford passed into legend.
The Soaring Admiral, Golden Lion Shiki, was defeated and chained.
The Wave Lord, Kael Grylls, slipped away.
The Marines paid dearly.
To be continued.
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