In Grove 1, the syndicate paraded the iron cages holding the Fish-man slaves down the main thoroughfare, making a public spectacle of the delivery.
"Boss Jinbei!" a young Fish-man growled from the crowd.
Dozens of Fish-men stood behind the Warlord, their eyes burning with helpless rage.
"This is only the vanguard. The majority of the captives remain in the holding cells," Jinbei rumbled, forcing his fists to unclench.
He knew his presence here constituted an act of treason.
He didn't care.
If he had to trade blows with Kizaru to shatter those cages, he would. The underworld had crossed a sacred line. Past kidnapping rings operated in the shadows, fearful of the Sun Pirates' retaliation.
This syndicate operated in broad daylight, turning the systematic enslavement of his people into a theatrical event.
Jinbei glared at the procession.
Then, his gaze tracked down the street, and his blood ran cold.
A man wearing a resin bubble over his head rode upon the back of a massive, crawling human.
The slave possessed the build of a gladiator, yet his scarred back bore the fresh, weeping lacerations of a riding crop.
"Celestial Dragon," Jinbei rasped, his expression hardening into stone.
The furious murmurs of the Fish-men died in their throats.
They possessed reckless courage, but they understood the hierarchy of the world.
Striking a Celestial Dragon meant invoking the wrath of an Admiral!
And the Celestial Dragon had not come alone.
A grotesque procession of Celestial Dragons, each riding a broken slave, marched down the avenue.
A wave of submission rippled through the crowd.
Auction guards, captured slaves, and hidden underworld brokers dropped to their knees, pressing their foreheads to the cobblestones.
"You worthless beast!" a shrill voice shattered the silence.
A bloated Celestial Dragon lost his balance and tumbled from his mount.
A black-suited Cipher Pol agent blurred, catching the noble before his velvet clothes touched the dirt.
"Why can't you crawl in a straight line?!" The indignity sent the Noble into a screeching frenzy, his face flushing crimson as his peers snickered at his clumsiness.
BANG!
The Celestial Dragon drew a flintlock and fired point-blank into the crawling slave's skull.
The slave's dense bone structure and sheer muscle mass caught the projectile.
The man possessed the durability of a New World veteran. Yet, despite surviving the execution attempt, the giant didn't rise.
He remained on his hands and knees, shivering, terrified to voice a single plea for mercy.
"Zaslor, you lack the strength to put down a dying dog. How embarrassing. Watch a master at work!" Another Celestial Dragon giggled from his perch, drawing his own gilded pistol.
BANG!
He fired straight down.
The bullet shattered his mount's spine.
The massive body slumped onto the pavement, dead.
Deprived of his mount, the second Celestial Dragon pitched forward, requiring another CP agent to catch him.
"Insolent trash! How dare you die and drop me!" The Celestial Dragon kicked the corpse of the man he just murdered, shrieking in outrage.
The surrounding Celestial Dragon erupted into vicious, mocking laughter.
....
From a high rooftop overlooking the plaza, two towering figures observed the drama.
Admiral Sakazuki chewed his cigar to shreds, his rugged face locked in a grim scowl.
Beside him, Admiral Kizaru maintained his lazy, half-lidded smirk, masking his thought.
"When is the Hunter making his move?" Sakazuki grunted, shifting his smoldering gaze to Kizaru.
"I have no idea, Sakazuki," Kizaru sighed, adjusting his tinted glasses. "I delivered the snail. I cannot track a man of that caliber."
Sakazuki's frown deepened. "If Headquarters knew this auction was a targeted trap, why did we allow the Celestial Dragon to leave Mary Geoise?"
"That falls outside our jurisdiction. The Five Elders sign their travel passes, not Sengoku." Kizaru returned his attention to the avenue.
Below, Saint Zaslor emptied his pistol into his kneeling slave.
The flintlock rounds tore through flesh but failed to pierce vital organs, lodging deep in the man's dense musculature.
"Execute this beast!" Zaslor screamed, his pride fracturing under the continued laughter of his peers.
A Cipher Pol agent stepped forward, his leg blurring.
"Rankyaku."
A compressed blade of wind severed the slave's head from his shoulders. Mollified by the blood, Zaslor snapped his fingers.
A handler dragged a fresh slave out of the lineup.
As Zaslor climbed onto the new mount's back, the captive stared at the headless corpse, a haunting spark of envy flashing in his hollow eyes.
"Our guest has arrived," Kizaru murmured.
Just as the procession neared the auction house doors, Kizaru dissolved into a beam of light, materializing in the center of the avenue.
His lazy demeanor vanished.
"Admiral Kizaru!" the Cipher Pol agents shouted, forming a defensive perimeter around the Celestial Dragons.
Before the agents could draw their weapons, a suffocating pressure descended upon Grove 1.
The oxygen grew heavy.
It felt like a primal apex predator had stepped into a den of rabbits.
The sheer weight of the aura crushed the plaza!
One by one, the Celestial Dragons went limp, tumbling from their mounts like discarded dolls.
The elite Cipher Pol strained to catch their charges, but the invisible gravity locked their joints and paralyzed their muscles.
Thud. Thud.
The Celestial Dragons struck the pavement in silence.
The Haki had stripped them of their consciousness before they even hit the ground.
A lone figure emerged from the shadows at the far end of the avenue, walking with measured, deliberate steps.
He carried a sheathed longsword in his right hand.
With every footfall, jagged arcs of black lightning violently ruptured the air around him.
Cyrus had arrived!
Kizaru braced his stance.
'The lunatic had actually shown up, and he opened his gambit by knocking the Celestial Dragons into the dirt with a supreme burst of Conqueror's Haki.'
Above the street, Sakazuki locked his furious gaze on the Pirate Hunter.
Thick black smoke hissed from the Admiral's coat as his arms began to drip with molten rock.
"What manner of Haki is this?" Jinbei gritted his teeth, his massive frame resisting the oppressive wave.
The Fish-men behind him collapsed to their knees, teetering on the edge of blackout.
'Who possessed such a monstrous haki? And who possessed the sheer madness to knock out the gods of this world?'