-Real World-
The darkness swallowed the fire completely.
Ace stared at the space where his Hiken had been and felt the weight of what the Sky Screen had already told him settle across his shoulders. The Dark-Dark Fruit — the Yami Yami no Mi — did exactly what it had always done in the broadcast. No attribute damage reached Teach. No Logia could touch him. The fire that would have burned through anything else on this battlefield ceased to exist the moment it made contact with those black spirals in Teach's palms.
"The Yami Yami no Mi should have been Thatch's." Ace's voice was tight. He clenched his fists until the knuckles whitened. "You stole it from your own family, Teach. From our father and everyone who trusted you."
Teach said nothing to that. He had nothing to say that wasn't already visible on his face.
Around them, the battlefield outside the royal capital had become Ace's domain. The infected rebels and the ordinary soldiers who hadn't fled were trapped in a geography that was rapidly running out of unburned space. The Mera Mera no Mi (Flame-Flame Fruit) had no ceiling here — no walls, no civilians to protect, nothing to limit how much fire Ace chose to release. Pillars of flame shot upward across the desert floor, merging at their bases into a continuous sea of orange and white. Anyone still on the field who came into contact with it did not survive the contact.
Poisoned or not, soldier or rebel — fire resolved the distinction cleanly.
The temperature outside Alubarna's walls climbed sharply. Tens of thousands of rebels had already broken and run. The ones with enough sense to calculate what fleeing empty-handed meant for their tribes back in the desert made the calculation anyway and ran. Returning without spoils meant weakness, and weakness in the desert invited predation from neighboring tribes — annexation, enslavement, the slow digestion of the small by the hungry. They had understood that before they marched. They ran regardless, because the alternative was burning.
"Ace." Teach's voice carried easily over the fire, unhurried. "You're not much kinder than me. That fire of yours has already killed tens of thousands. Do you know how many families you're ending out there?"
Ace let the words reach him and considered them honestly for a moment. He was not naive enough to pretend the fire was surgical. He knew what it was doing.
He also knew what these rebels had done to Koza. What they would have done to Vivi. What they would keep doing to the Kingdom of Arabasta long after the assault was over, if any of them were allowed to return to their oases with working hands and loaded guns. Koza had been their nominated face, the man they had chosen for legitimacy — and they had beheaded him in the sand outside the gates. These were not men who could be negotiated with after today.
Ace did not respond to Teach. He let the fire speak for him.
"Teach." Vista had already closed half the distance between them, both swords moving in loose arcs at his sides. "How long do you last without your cannon fodder? A few minutes?"
Teach felt it the moment Vista entered his threat radius. The first principle of the Yami Yami no Mi in close combat: he could not transform to avoid damage. The second: every blow he took he felt at double the ordinary intensity. Vista's paired blades, coated in Armament Haki, moving at the speed of a Fifth Division Commander — the calculation of that was not comfortable.
"Burgess." Teach stepped back. "Get in front of him."
Jesus Burgess came forward without hesitation. He was the largest man in the Blackbeard Pirates and the strongest by raw physical output, and he knew his role. He had spent years compensating for what he recognized as a limited talent ceiling by working harder than anyone around him, and this was the job — put his body between the captain and whatever the captain could not afford to be hit by.
"Your opponent is me," Burgess said, and swung.
It was not a question of courage or stupidity. Burgess had fought credibly in the first half of the Grand Line. He simply had not yet fought a Fifth Division Commander of the Whitebeard Pirates, and there was no preparation for that gap except experiencing it.
Vista's first sword took both of Burgess's arms at the shoulder in a single motion. The second put a blade through his throat before the scream could form. Burgess stood for a moment with his eyes very wide and his hands somewhere on the ground behind Vista, then he fell, and the blood reached the sand faster than the sound of it.
Van Augur watched his crewmate die and did not waste time on grief. He was a sniper; he picked a target he could reach; he raised his rifle and fired upward.
The shots were supersonic — clean, precise, the kind that punched through armor rather than around it. They hit Marco twice through the eyes.
Marco shook his head slightly, the blue-gold phoenix flames already reknitting the damage before it could register as injury. He was looking down at Van Augur from directly above, his hybrid form giving him the altitude he needed. He folded his wings and dove.
One kick.
Van Augur's body came apart at the middle. He had not yet learned to coat himself in Armament Haki — a limitation that was forgivable in the first half of the Grand Line and fatal in the second. Against a veteran like Marco, it was simply the wrong shape of armor for the fight.
Vista was already moving toward Doc Q.
The ship doctor had been pulling a second canister from his medical bag when he registered that Burgess was dead and Van Augur was dead and the swordsman was coming directly at him. Stronger, his white horse, had not stopped trembling since the fire began. Doc Q had not yet raised the canister when Vista's blades crossed.
One sword for the canister — bisected before it could open. The other for Doc Q himself — the head parted from the shoulders before he could say anything, before the Shiku Shiku no Mi could produce even a single spore, before he had time to regret anything at all.
He died in front of his captain.
Teach looked at what remained of his three crewmates in the sand and said nothing.
The Whitebeard Pirates had not hurried. They had taken their time with it.