Looking Up from the Old Era

The view pulled back.

A gale swept up shards of ice.

The scene split in two.

On one side, Imu hovered in midair, dark red markings slithering across his body like snakes.

On the other lay the eastern side of the battlefield.

The fighting there was just as brutal.

A bitterly contested front stretched almost as far as the main battlefield.

Countless bottomless trenches had been torn through the ice.

Seawater poured in, then froze into black pillars.

Monster remains lay heaped among shattered ice, and the air reeked of blood and rotting demonic energy.

Blades clashed with claws, flinging the snow aside again and again.

Beneath it, the rock had been scorched black.

Whitebeard stood at the very center of the line.

His bare torso was covered in claw marks, some deep enough to expose bone.

Blood had crusted over his rough skin. Old wounds and new had become impossible to tell apart.

He gripped Murakumogiri. Foul slime from the monsters clung to its blade and dripped to the ground.

"Tremor—"

He growled and thrust the hilt forward.

The air warped.

A spatial shock wave erupted as he pushed the Tremor-Tremor Fruit to its limit.

The force spread out from him in a fan, blasting three charging Blackwater Monsters into scraps of flesh.

But it was no use.

There were too many Blackwater Monsters.

They swarmed like ants in a flood.

One after another, they came.

Shatter one, and two more took its place.

Even those cut in half kept crawling across the ground.

"Shhk—"

A severed arm swept past Whitebeard's left side.

Its claw split his skin and gouged a deep mark into his ribs.

Whitebeard grunted. Murakumogiri swept sideways, cleaving the arm's owner and the two monsters behind it.

But his movements had slowed.

Whitebeard's chest heaved.