The morale around them lifted a little. The Marines behind Leo straightened up, eyes fixed on his back with something like hope.
Vice Admiral Leo was Marineford's best — a Haki master with years of experience hunting Devil Fruit users. Surely he could at least hold his ground against Anus?
Leo himself wasn't nearly that optimistic.
If there was one officer from the Rocks Pirates he'd least want to face, it was standing right in front of him. Marine Headquarters kept files on every member of the crew — detailed records, battle histories, known capabilities. In those files, only two names had never taken a loss.
Not even when an Admiral had personally stepped in.
One was Rocks.
The other was Anus.
Leo was no pushover. He'd put away more hundred-million-bounty pirates than he could count. But the moment his superiors had told him it was a Rocks Pirates ship he was meant to stop, he'd understood what he was walking into.
"Come on then, Anus!" Leo raised his Haki-wrapped blade, gripping it with both hands, and poured everything he had into a single swing. "Even if it kills me — you're not leaving this island without a fight!"
The slash tore through the air, split the deck clean, and drove straight for Anus.
"Brave." Anus raised one finger toward the sky.
Then he brought it down.
"HERE IT COMES!" the pirates hollered. "His signature move!"
As Anus's finger fell —
A pillar of lightning dropped from the heavens.
"Divine... Judgment."
The light swallowed everything.
The outcome was never really in doubt. The Rocks Pirates walked away clean.
Even a blockade anchored by multiple Marine Vice Admirals was just a minor delay for them — nothing more. Short of the Navy's absolute strongest moving together, almost nothing could stop the Rocks Pirates when they decided to move.
When they were gone, what remained were a few shipwrecks and a harbor full of smoke.
"Gee-hahaha! Anus, that power of yours is genuinely terrifying," Shiki said from the bow, watching him with something he was working hard not to show.
They were both Devil Fruit users. But the gap between them was hard to look at directly.
The Rumble-Rumble Fruit was natural disaster-level destruction — outclassed Shiki's Float-Float Fruit by a wide margin. If anything in the crew could even compare, it was probably Newgate's ability. Earthquakes and lightning were in their own tier.
"Save it, Shiki. No amount of flattery makes me forget what you and Wang Zhi just pulled." Anus's expression didn't warm.
"Harsh!" Shiki laughed awkwardly.
Not that he had much room to argue. If he was being honest, the last thing Shiki wanted was Anus as an enemy. Every officer in the Rocks Pirates had crossed swords with the others at some point — they all knew what each of them was capable of.
"Gurararara! Enough talking, come drink with us!"
"Shiki — use your ability and get us back to Beehive before sunset."
"Stop bossing me around, you're so aggressive—"
Beehive Island was a fair distance from the Riskec Bank's home port. But under Shiki's Float-Float Fruit, the officers were back before the sun had finished setting.
To the rest of the world, Beehive was synonymous with the underworld — and for good reason. In its earlier years, it had served as a dumping ground for criminals too dangerous for conventional prisons: an isolated rock with no food, surrounded by treacherous waters that made it nearly impossible to approach or escape.
Then someone found gold. Massive veins of it, running deep through the island's core. When word got out, certain shadowy organizations extended their assistance, and the inmates suddenly found themselves sitting on a fortune.
The World Government couldn't allow that. They couldn't stomach that kind of wealth falling into the wrong hands — not on an island they were using as a prison in the first place.
That was when the Rocks Pirates moved in.
Rocks had played both sides. He'd gone to the World Government and promised to seize Beehive and hand it back — for the right price. They paid. Then Rocks took the money, took the island, and kept it. He'd used the bounty to turn Beehive into the crew's permanent base of operations.
That had all happened six years ago.
"Lord Anus! You're back!"
The moment the ship docked, a woman was already waiting on the pier.
She was watching Anus the way people watch things they can't stop thinking about.
Like him, she had white wings folded at her back — a Skypeian. She wore a long, flowing dress, gold hair catching the light, with the kind of presence that made the air around her feel different.
"I'm back, Lilith." Anus gave her a small nod and a smile.
Her face went red immediately, like she'd had too much to drink.
"Welcome home, Lord Anus!"
Lilith wasn't the "Evil" clone of Vegapunk from the original story. She was a fellow Skypeian — a powerful warrior in her own right, and one of the first people who had ever followed Anus.
Twenty-four years had passed since Anus arrived in this world. It had crept up on him.
He'd been born on Birka — the same sky island that had once produced Enel. When he'd figured out where — and when — he'd landed, he'd started planning immediately. Survival in this world required strength, and he'd understood that early.
So as soon as he was old enough to act on it, he'd thrown himself into learning to fight and hunting down the Rumble-Rumble Fruit, which he knew existed somewhere on Birka. It wasn't clean or easy. But at fourteen, he found it.
Before the Ancient Zoans entered the picture, the Rumble-Rumble Fruit was the undisputed top pick for anyone with foreknowledge. Its raw destructive power was beyond question. And at fourteen, Anus became the strongest person in the sky islands — built a faction, earned followers. Lilith was one of the first.
But Birka was a backwater. Anus knew that. The sky islands were a footnote in a world that played out on the open sea, and no matter how dominant a Logia was, it had its ceiling. True invincibility meant Haki — Conqueror's Haki, above all else.
So at seventeen, Anus stepped off the edge of the sky islands and dropped into the Blue Sea below, his strongest subordinates at his side.
He built a crew quickly. Made a name just as fast. Not long after, he crossed paths with Rocks — and lost to him in a Davy Back Fight. That was how he ended up in the Rocks Pirates.
He'd climbed from there to where he stood now. Officially a member of the crew, though in practice he'd kept his own inner circle. That was normal for the Rocks Pirates. Nobody there answered to anyone they didn't choose to.
"Anything happen while I was gone?" Anus asked.
On an island run entirely by pirates, that was never really a rhetorical question. Disputes, brawls, the occasional killing — it was all routine on Beehive.
"Apparently some hothead decided to challenge Uncle Yrle," Lilith said, thinking it over. "Crowd's already gathered to watch. Do you want to head over?"
Anus nodded.
Shiki, who'd been half-listening, immediately perked up. "Gee-hahaha! There's a show? Anus, don't leave without me!"
Anus glanced at him flatly. "Not your business."
"Don't be like that!"
"Fine, tag along if you want. Doesn't change the fact that I still have a score to settle with you and Wang Zhi. Neither of you is off the hook."
"You hold a grudge," Shiki muttered, his smile going stiff.
Nearby, Wang Zhi — who had been quietly edging away — picked up his pace and didn't look back.
It was a well-known fact among the officers: Anus was young, but he was one of the hardest people in the crew to deal with. The part where he never forgot anything was a significant reason why.
Whitebeard had also considered coming along, but Buckin had spotted him first and was already charging in his direction, and he immediately reconsidered.
"Gee-hahaha! Newgate, just give in already! Buckin's not going to stop—"
"Say that again and I'll put you at the bottom of the ocean."
"What, are you still carrying a torch for Shakky? That's low, Newgate—"
The air shifted slightly at the name.
Shakky — called the "Crown Jewel of Beehive," supposedly the most beautiful woman in the world — had been missing for nearly a year. No one had found a trace of her. The death of her boss, Maron, hadn't been fully explained either.
The group moved deeper into Beehive Island. Along the way, the pirates they passed shot looks at Anus and Shiki — some guarded, some outright admiring. Two of the Rocks Pirates' top officers walking openly through the island drew eyes no matter what.
Lilith, walking beside them, drew a different kind of attention entirely.
Before long, they came to the island's center.
A white clock tower rose over a hundred meters above the surrounding buildings — massive, almost elegant in a place where nothing else was. This was Anus's territory on Beehive Island. He'd named it the Tower of Babel. A few minutes from Rocks's Skull Building, sitting right at the heart of the island's power structure.
Pirates generally gave it a wide berth on most days.
Today, there was a crowd in front of it.