Summit War 25
Aokiji stepped onto the icy path and landed beside Akainu. The freezing air spread silently from beneath his feet, sealing all the pebbles and bloodstains along the way into ice.
"Hey, hey, hey, are you kidding me? -- If this lands, the entire Marine Headquarters will sink." His tone was still as lazy as ever, but his speed was much faster than usual.
"Ice Age!" A burst of freezing air erupted, and an ice wall rose from the ground, crashing head-on into the hundreds-of-meters-long water dragon.
On the other side, Garp's iron fist had just forced Whitebeard back half a step, and his feet were already poised to strike.
But before he could even take a single step, the white light from Murakumogiri, enveloped in the Tremor-Tremor Fruit, swept towards him.
"Gururu! Don't underestimate me! I'm Whitebeard!" Whitebeard took a heavy punch from Garp, not even bothering to wipe the blood seeping from his mouth, and unleashed a fierce slash with Murakumogiri, imbued with Conqueror's Haki and Armament Haki.
"That brat has helped me so much, how could I possibly let you, you bastard, bother him again!"
"Damn it! Newgate, you lunatic!" Garp's roar and the Conqueror's Haki purple-black Inazuma exploded simultaneously. The two attacks collided again, tearing apart the ground within a kilometer radius with the Tremor-Tremor Fruit, and the shockwave blasted everything around them into the sky.
High in the sky, Kizaru pushed the Glint-Glint Fruit to its limit, transforming himself into a second sun. The light bullets from the Yasakani no Magatama rained down on the core of the thunderstorm.
"Retreat! Retreat now! This place is about to collapse!"
Run!
"Defense! Gather! Defense!"
"Stop fighting! Retreat!" Both the navy and the pirates abandoned their battle and ran frantically away from the plaza.
Those Ninjutsu techniques, imbued with Senjutsu Chakra, enveloped most of the Marine Headquarters plaza. Even the supposedly Iron Wall Encircling Wall seemed like mud houses in a storm before this natural disaster, teetering on the verge of collapse.
Marco and Jozu rushed to the front of the pirate crew.
Marco unleashed his Phoenix Flames at full power, the blue flames forming an arc-shaped barrier above everyone's heads.
Jozu's right arm transformed into Diamond, veins bulging on his forehead. He smashed the ice beneath his feet with a punch, gripped the cracked edge of the Iceburg with both hands, and roared as he hurled the entire Iceburg forward.
The remnants of the Whitebeard Pirates scrambled to hide behind the two men, some clutching their severed arms, others dragging their injured legs, but all their eyes were fixed on the falling apocalypse, their pupils reflecting the apocalyptic light and shadow.
The Sage Art Ninjutsu and the full-force attack of the Navy's top combatants collided violently in mid-air.
In that instant, the entire Marineford fell into an eerie silence.
It wasn't that there was no sound, but rather that the sound surpassed the limits of human hearing—the explosions produced when the six elemental Sage Art Chakra, along with shockwaves, magma, freezing air, light bullets, and iron fists, exploded simultaneously far exceeded the concept of "sound" itself.
Everyone felt their eardrums suddenly swell, and then the world was sucked into a vacuum.
Immediately afterwards, an extremely dazzling white light exploded from the center of the collision.
The light was not the color of flames, nor the color of lightning, but a pure, all-consuming incandescent white.
The white light swept across the entire square with overwhelming force, silently shattering the stone slabs and instantly vaporizing the ice surface. The broken walls of the fortress vanished from the edges like pencil marks erased by an eraser.
Then came the shockwave—which was no longer a "wave," but a visible, ring-shaped wall of air tens of meters high, which rolled outwards from the center of the explosion in all directions.
The earth was torn apart. Not cracked, but a canyon.
A bottomless chasm stretches from the center of the square all the way to the head of the bay, cleaving Marineford's crescent-shaped bay in two.
The Encircling Wall, Iron Wall was said to be an impregnable fortress that could even withstand the shockwaves of Whitebeard, collapsed and disintegrated like a sandcastle the moment the shockwave swept over it. The huge iron plate was swept into the air by the shockwave, flying and spinning like a piece of paper, before crashing into the surging seawater in the distance, creating towering columns of water.
Thousands of soldiers and pirates who couldn't retreat in time were swallowed up like grains of sand scattered by a gale in the aftershocks, without even having time to scream.
Marco lay prone on the ice, the Phoenix's blue flames shrunken into a thin layer clinging to his body—a defense he had barely maintained by squeezing out his last bit of strength.
He was breathing heavily, beads of sweat mixed with gunpowder ash dripping from his forehead onto the broken ice beneath him.
He looked up at the explosion's epicenter, still shrouded in smoke and dust, his eyes filled with horror.
Dozens of meters away, Garp and Whitebeard were simultaneously thrown backward by the shockwave.
Garp's military boots plowed two deep furrows into the broken stone slabs, and Whitebeard's Murakumogiri driven deep into the ground to barely steady himself.
The two men, no longer able to continue their fight, turned to look at the epicenter of the explosion.
The Gunko, which was closest to the explosion's epicenter, was already doomed under the Susanoo attack of three Susanoo Wood Release Clone.
When the shockwave swept over her, she didn't even have time to use her elemental transformation before being engulfed by the white wall of light, along with her Susanoo.
Her body was turned into a puddle of flesh by an irresistible force, mingling with the shattered Susanoo. After a long time, the scattered flesh and blood seemed to be drawn together by an invisible hand, reassembling, piecing together, and healing.
When she finally reformed into human form, her usual composure and arrogance were gone, replaced by a pale, disbelieving look of someone who had survived a catastrophe.
As the smoke and dust slowly dissipated, the sky Marineford remained heavy and gloomy, weighed down by thick layers of ashes.
Steel Bone Kong clutched his chest, blood seeping from between his fingers. Sengoku's Buddha Form was shattered by the impact. Akainu and Kizaru's breathing was uneven. Aokiji knelt on the broken ice, one of his arms frozen into an ice sculpture.
The five men, panting heavily, all looked towards the epicenter of the explosion, at the deepest part of the ruins.
A figure was half-buried in the rubble and broken ice.
His greyish-white robe was now stained dark red with blood, and the crimson-gold Sage Mode markings on his profile flickered faintly a few times before fading completely.
Uchiha Natsu lay there, covered in blood. His Tang Saber was broken in two; one piece was in his hand, and the other was stuck in a crack in the stone slab a few meters away.
In the final stages of the explosion, Steel Bone Kong withstood a barrage of Sage Art Ninjutsu, charging towards Natsu at the cost of severe injuries, and landed a solid punch on him.
The sudden attack, combined with the terrifying aftershocks of the clash between Sage Art Ninjutsu and the Navy's top combatants, caused both forces to simultaneously crush the fourteen-year-old's body, severely injuring him.