-Broadcast-
Garp kept his Observation Haki spread wide as he raised his fists. Whatever he said with his mouth, his awareness was reading the corridor in all directions — the shadows behind him, the ceiling joints, every alcove and junction in range. If Black Sperm had allies planted in the dark, he would know before they moved.
But the creature in front of him was the immediate problem, and it was already changing.
The arm — if it could be called that, a limb no wider than a human thumb — began to grow. The process was not dramatic so much as deeply wrong, a cellular expansion that pushed outward in pulses, thickening, elongating, the black mass accumulating into something that had no business being attached to a body that small. Within seconds it had exceeded the width of an adult's arm. It kept going. The rest of the creature remained exactly as it was — that small pale face, that trembling antenna, the tiny central mass — while the fist at the end of the extended arm reached a size roughly equal to Garp's own height.
The arm swung.
The fist came down with the weight of something much larger than the thing driving it, a compressed shockwave preceding the impact.
Garp liked this. He couldn't help it. He had spent years inside Still Water Prison being useful in small ways, visiting Dragon, eating meals, watching the walls. A fight with something that actually required him to pay attention was not unwelcome.
He stepped into the punch rather than away from it and drove his right fist forward.
The two connected. One fist enormous, one fist belonging to a man in his seventies — and the result was neither side moving. The crack of impact reverberated down the corridor. The stone floor under Garp's feet networked with hairline fractures from the force he was absorbing through his boots, but the boots stayed planted, and his arm stayed where he put it, and the enormous black fist halted against his knuckles like it had run into a load-bearing wall.
Black Sperm stared at him from across the impasse.
"Old man." The voice was clipped. "You can block it. Fine."
The second arm began to grow.
"Then take both."
Garp rolled his neck. "That's more like it."
What followed was not a complex fight. It was a fist fight — a genuine, undecorated exchange, both parties swinging hard and fast, the only question being which body could sustain the math. Black Sperm's enormous fists were fast, driven by something other than muscle that Garp hadn't fully catalogued yet. Garp's fists were Garp's fists, which were a different category of problem from most things in the world.
They traded. The sounds were percussive and continuous, each impact landing with enough force to register in the structure of the building — dust from the ceiling, a pillar cracking somewhere further down the corridor. Where the black fists connected with Garp's body, Armament Haki had already hardened the relevant surface. Nothing broke. Some things would bruise. The old man absorbed it and kept throwing.
Where Garp's fists connected with the black fists, those fists deflated slightly each time — like something yielding at a cellular level, not breaking so much as compressing, the volume redistributing around the impact point before slowly reinflating.
Both of them were adjusting their readings of the other in real time.
Garp threw more punches. The speed climbed. The afterimages multiplied until an outside observer couldn't count the exchanges individually, only register the ongoing thunder of contact and the progressive accumulation of damage to the surrounding corridor.
Fast, Garp thought. Strange. And that arm isn't just large — the strength per unit isn't diminishing. Whatever makes up this creature, each part carries its own weight.
He filed that away for later.
"You're good at this," Garp said, not breaking rhythm. "But I've been bored for years, and I'd like to stop now."
He planted his feet.
His right fist pulled back — not wide, just back, the way a hammer draws back — and the Armament Haki that had been spread across his body for the duration of the fight gathered to a single point, concentrating at the knuckles and the bones behind them, compacting inward until the surface of his fist was dense with it. Everything he had. Not distributed, not managed. One point, one moment.
"Ginga Bunretsu — Galactic Split."
He threw it.
The shockwave preceded the fist itself — a ring of compressed air expanding outward from the swing at a speed that turned the air between him and Black Sperm into something briefly structural, then destroyed it. The fist followed through the channel the shockwave made, and when it connected with the nearest black arm, the arm didn't deflate. It came apart. The force transmitted into Black Sperm's central body and kept going, and the creature was simply dispersed — not thrown, not knocked across the room, but disassembled into fragments by an energy that treated matter as a mild suggestion.
The fragments were very small. Many of them were still moving.
Garp looked at them.
"If you hadn't killed that man," he said, "I might have settled for locking you up." He exhaled slowly through his nose. "That's not on the table anymore."
He tracked the nearest fragments with his Observation Haki. They were smaller than a fingernail, most of them. Still active — he could register movement in them, the signature of something alive rather than merely twitching. It was a strange way to die. Stranger than dismemberment. More complete.
He stood there for a moment, his mood doing what it did in the quiet after fighting — descending, settling back into the familiar weight of the years and the walls and the visits to Dragon's cell. The manic old man who laughed too loud in difficult situations and the one who sat too quietly in his room were the same person, and sometimes one arrived after the other.
Luffy, he thought, without particularly meaning to. Unfilial grandson. Not once. Not a single visit.
He was aware, in some distant way, that if Luffy ever actually walked into Still Water Prison, Garp would probably have to keep him there. Reunite the whole family in one convenient location. That would simplify matters considerably.
He was still considering the logistics of this when the fragments moved.
Not the random cellular activity of dying things. Directed movement — toward each other, a consolidation happening across the entire floor simultaneously. The scattered pieces found each other and joined, and from the joining emerged not one reconstituted Black Sperm but many. Dozens. Then hundreds. Then more than that — a tide of miniature figures flooding back into the corridor from every joint and crack and corner, each one no taller than the original, each one carrying the same pale face and trembling antenna, and each one, impossibly, radiating the same individual strength as the creature he had just destroyed.
The numbers climbed past counting.
"Don't look down on us."
The voices overlapped, perfectly synchronized, coming from thousands of mouths at once.
"Beat him down!"
"All of us at once!"
They came from every direction. Garp's Observation Haki registered them all — trajectories, speeds, intentions — and the registration was accurate. The problem was not information. The problem was that accurate information about ten thousand simultaneous attackers did not reduce the number of them.
He swung. He kept swinging. Every punch that connected cleared a small radius, the closest figures sent reeling, but the space they left was filled before the motion completed. They came in from above, from the sides, from the floor grating — a black ocean closing from all vectors at once, and no matter how hard or fast he threw, the calculation was not in his favor.
Two fists. Ten thousand enemies.
Garp fought with everything he had, and it was enough to be impressive, and it was not enough to matter. The black mass closed over him steadily, and the last thing visible above the tide was his fist still moving, still throwing, unwilling to acknowledge the geometry of the situation even as the black ocean swallowed him entirely and the corridor fell quiet except for the sound of thousands of small voices.
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