Chapter 442 - 93
"The Dragon King has finally made his move, but..." The Marine vice admiral watched the black sphere climb into the sky, his brow furrowed, unease written plainly across his face.
"Kah-keh-keh-keh! Useless." Indigo watched it go with a cold smile. "No matter who you are, you can't stop that many islands. Though you could at least struggle a little more convincingly. What is that supposed to accomplish? If you've already given up, Dragon King, then run now. That might actually be your best option at this point."
"Jii-jii-jii!" Scarlet's laughter echoed alongside his.
The black sphere was small. Apple-sized. The idea that something so modest could stop what was falling from the sky was difficult to take seriously.
"Has the Dragon King run out of ideas? What can something that small possibly do?" a civilian said, voice hollowed out with despair.
"It's over. It's all over. Even the Dragon King can't stop it. We're dead." Somewhere behind them, someone had simply sat down on the ground and stopped moving.
The despair was total. People had stopped watching for an escape and started waiting for the end.
"Something feels off," Oubaron said, frowning. "An attack like this is serious, yes, but the Dragon King's strength is well beyond what this situation should be able to corner. He should have options."
"Could that black sphere be carrying something inside it?" Kenny said. "Something powerful enough to take out every one of those islands at once?"
"It's looking like even the Dragon King is out of moves," Garde muttered with a grim half-smile.
"Don't worry," Lambo said, his voice settled and calm, though even he could feel something tightening in his chest. "I don't know what that sphere does, but I'm not feeling any danger from it. The Dragon King has this handled."
Most of the crowd didn't share that confidence. Outside the Oathblood Imperial Guard, faces had gone slack with hopelessness one after another.
But the Guard knew something the others didn't. They knew Rosinante's strength had long since surpassed Charlotte Linlin, had moved into territory that put even Whitebeard in question. The islands falling from the sky looked catastrophic, but they believed, without needing to discuss it, that he had an answer. So they didn't watch the sky. They kept moving, kept cutting down the exotic beasts still pouring into Nightless City. That was their task, and they returned to it.
Then the black sphere reached the first island.
The moment it made contact, it detonated outward. In an instant it had swelled to hundreds of times its original size, and with that expansion came gravity, vast and indiscriminate, warping the space around it as though the air itself had been seized and bent. The islands nearby lurched sideways, yanked from their trajectories, pulled helplessly toward the growing sphere.
The first island it had touched was simply swallowed.
At the center of the black sphere sat the silver-white block, and as that island was dragged inward and made contact with it, the island ceased to exist. No explosion, no debris, no sound. It was there, and then it wasn't, dissolved into nothing at the point of contact.
Every eye in the area went wide.
The gravity kept building. One by one, the falling islands were drawn off course, bent toward the sphere's center, pulled into it, and consumed by the white block at its heart. Each one was reduced to its most fundamental state, stripped down to bare atoms and erased, without ceremony and without noise.
In the space of a breath, the sky was clear.
Every island that had been falling toward Nightless City was gone.
"Am I dreaming? Pinch me, that hurt!" People grabbed their own faces to confirm what they were seeing was real, unable to simply accept it.
"Impossible. That's impossible. How does something like that happen?" Indigo's voice had gone ragged, his composure shredded completely. He sounded like a man watching the logic of the world itself come apart.
"Is that a Devil Fruit ability?" one of the Supernova pirates said quietly, still staring at the black sphere hanging in the sky, no longer expanding but not gone either. The unease in his voice was unmistakable.
If it could reduce islands to atoms, then a person would be nothing at all.
He found himself turning the question over involuntarily: what would he do if that thing were aimed at him? The more he thought through it, the more the answer refused to come. The gravity alone would make escape nearly impossible before the sphere even reached full size. And once it did, anything it touched simply stopped existing. The only real option he could identify was to already be far away before it activated, and even that felt less like a plan and more like hoping for luck.
"I'd heard the Dragon King's ability is the Silence Fruit," Oubaron said, the shock still audible beneath his measured tone. "A power that was considered practically useless, capable of nothing more than muting sound, and he's shaped it into something like this. It's been said he can silence gravity, resistance, even the force behind an attack itself. So the gravity I can account for. But that white block at the center... what is that? What kind of power does something like that carry?"
"Whatever it is, it's terrifying," one of the Blazing Lion Pirates' officers said, his face pale. "If he turned that on us, we wouldn't even have time to run."
"You're giving yourself too much credit," another officer from the same crew said flatly. "The Dragon King wouldn't waste an attack like that on you. He'd finish you off with something he throws together in three moves without thinking."
"Is this something new?" Kenny said, still staring upward. "A power the Dragon King only just developed?"
"Right then," Rosinante said, turning his attention back downward. His voice was unhurried, almost bored. "This little spectacle has gone on long enough."
His eyes settled on Scarlet.
The moment that gaze landed on him, every hair on Scarlet's body stood straight up.
And in the next instant, he dropped Indigo entirely and ran.
...