"You... you bastard..."
Buggy pointed at Luffy with a trembling hand, as though he had seen a ghost. "Aren't you a rubber man?! How could rubber possibly block a sword slash?!"
Luffy rolled his neck, producing a series of cracking sounds. Amid a flurry of wood chips, he easily broke free from the wooden stocks that his monstrous strength had already split apart.
Luffy stood up and flexed his wrists, his face filled with the pride of successful training.
"Idiot! Of course rubber is afraid of blades!"
"But I'm a rubber man with Bronze Skin Iron Bones!!"
"Bronze Skin Iron Bones? What kind of joke is that?!"
Buggy flew into a rage. He could not accept that the brat he had once toyed with had become so powerful.
He tossed aside his broken sword, separated both hands, and gripped a dagger in each. Using the power of the Split-Split Fruit, he shot toward Luffy!
"Die!!"
Luffy did not even try to dodge Buggy's attack.
"Armament Haki--"
Luffy's right fist instantly hardened like iron. Though it had not completely turned black, the sheer weight of power it carried was already suffocating.
"--Pistol!!!"
"Bang!!!"
A simple, brutal, utterly unreasonable punch.
Luffy's fist ignored Buggy's flashy daggers and slammed directly into Buggy's prized red nose.
"Uwaaaaah--!!"
Buggy let out a miserable scream.
This time, he did not even have time to split his body apart to disperse the force.
The "power" and "Haki" contained within that punch instantly pierced through his defenses.
Buggy flew backward like a baseball blasted by a home run, tracing a miserable arc through the air from the towering Execution Platform.
"Boom!"
Buggy crashed heavily beside the fountain at the center of the square. The hard stone pavement was smashed into a crater several meters wide, with broken stones