The battlefield was divided into two distinct halves along the ridge of the dune where Damian had stopped.
On this side of the dune, Fisher's mercenaries were throwing short spears and scimitars to the ground, the sound of metal striking gravel echoing everywhere. White flags of surrender were barely pried out from among a few tattered short spear flags, drooping helplessly in the morning breeze.
Dorovich's militia were even more straightforward; some knelt in a row on the sand, hands behind their heads, not even daring to look up at the navy.
But on the other side of the dunes, the regular troops that Charles had brought out did not move.
They maintained their breakout formation; the shield wall in the front row was still intact, and the gunners in the back row still gripped their guns, their blades stained with the blood left by the Guard Corps. They were breathing heavily, their eyes bloodshot, but not one of them laid down their weapons.
When the navy's surrender signals were raised from the sand dunes, their response was silence.
Damian's Den Den Den Mushi rang.
He picked up the Den Den Den Mushi button. Barlow's voice came through the receiver without any preamble.
"Charles' main force has been brainwashed by Prince; they won't surrender."
Damian paused for a moment, "All of them?"
"All those soldiers you see on the battlefield, standing in unbroken ranks, swords still drawn, eyes still burning—every single one of them."
Damian hung up the Den Den Mushi, fastened it back to his waist, and pinched the bridge of his nose.
He dismounted, his boots landing on the gravel, the hem of his white Justice Coat fluttering in the desert wind.
"Is that so?" he said softly, in a voice only he could hear.
His gaze swept over the faces that refused to surrender. A young officer stood behind the shield wall, his uniform torn in half by artillery fire, revealing a blood-soaked bandage wrapped around his exposed shoulder. His chin was held high, and his eyes were fixed on him.
An old soldier crouched behind a pile of rubble, holding a scimitar with several chips on the blade. His lips moved silently, probably reciting an ancient prayer from some desert oasis.
A young soldier huddled in the gap between the shields, his face so dirty that his age was impossible to discern.
"All naval personnel, maintain formation. No one is permitted to fire without my order."
The adjutant went to relay the order, Damian continued forward.
The rebels' iron hooves were hundreds of meters away when Charles's elite troops saw the figure in the white coat walking alone, and the shield wall instinctively moved forward a little.
The shield bearers in the front row gripped their shields and spears even tighter, while the musketeers' index fingers rested on the trigger guards.
No one fired, because the man's eyes were turning red.
Deep within Damian's pupils, three Tomoe slowly rotated before merging.
The Tomoe interlock, rotate, and stretch, eventually coalescing into four intersecting spiral patterns, like four solidified flames, or a Mangekyo Sharingan slowly rotating.
"Takemikazuchi."
An invisible slash appeared at the edge of Damian's vision.
The slash was originating from his right eye and was pushing straight forward.
The air was split open.
Where the slash passed, the air was compressed into two visible, translucent walls of air. The area between the walls was a pure vacuum, and light passing through it was strangely deflected, distorting the rebel army's figures into fragmented lines from an abstract painting.
The gravel was split open.
The chop left a straight crack in the gravel beach, not very deep, but incredibly smooth, as if someone had measured it with a ruler before making the cut.
The shield wall was cleaved open.
The heavy shield in front silently split in two the instant the slash touched it, the cut as smooth as a mirror. The shield-bearer's armor, scimitar, flesh, and bones were all severed at that moment.
There were no screams, no struggles; the people fell before they even realized they had been stabbed. Their bodies, from the chest upwards, were neatly sliced off along a plane perfectly parallel to the ground.
The upper half of the helmet, the raised arm, the stiff neck, and the collarbone that stretched across the entire throat were all severed at the same time.
Before the blood could even gush out, the person had already collapsed heavily like a severed puppet.
Second row.
Third row.
Fourth row.
Takemikazuchi's slashes did not decay or slow down.
It swept across the rebel ranks from left to right along the arc of Damian's gaze, and wherever it passed, people fell silently, row after row, like wheat being harvested by the same invisible scythe. Shields, scimitars, muskets, banners, helmets, headscarves, hair, flesh, bones—everything higher than the chest was uniformly flattened under the same invisible blade.
The young officer, his shoulder bandaged, still had his chin raised in an upward curve; his body suddenly disappeared from his collarbone upwards.
The old soldier crouching behind the pile of rubble had his curved knife chipped in by the aftershock of the attack, the blade snapping cleanly at the chip, half of the blade embedded in the sand.
The young soldier huddled between shields, the upper half of which was sheared off, exposing him entirely to the aftershocks of Takemikazuchi's attack. His helmet flew off, revealing it to be empty.
All the rebels within Damian's line of sight who were still in formation, still holding their weapons, and still standing there refusing to surrender were pierced through by the same slash in the same second.
The battlefield, involving tens of thousands of people, was suddenly Shizune.
The sand and gravel kicked up by Takemikazuchi's attack were still floating in the air, and tiny pebbles were falling from the edges of the cleaved shield.
Wolof stood on the north wall of Alubarna, his hands gripping the sandstone edge of the crenellations tightly, his fingertips digging into the cracks in the stone, his knuckles turning white.
He knew the Uchiha were strong; he'd known it yesterday in the sea of fire outside the three city walls.
But when he saw tens of thousands of people wiped out in a single blow through his binoculars, he couldn't help but loosen his grip on the ramparts and take a small step back.
Charles stood on the command platform, his binoculars slipping from his hands and dangling around his neck, swinging twice, the lenses reflecting the silhouettes of the fallen bodies on the battlefield.
Damian threw the tactics, formations, and commands he had learned during his years of military service on the ground and stomped them to pieces.
His lips moved as if he wanted to say something, but in the end, nothing came out. He found that even his trembling had stopped.
Fisher knelt beside his short spear, his bald head reflecting the blinding sunlight.
He had been kneeling since he surrendered, and now his knees were silently slipping on the gravel, causing him to lurch forward before regaining his balance.
He'd been navigating the Grand Line for twenty years; what monster hadn't he seen?
But with a single strike, all living people within sight were simultaneously killed, regardless of whether they were shield bearers, gunners, officers, or cooks. There were no aftershocks, no friendly fire, and the accuracy was such that even the direction in which they fell was the same.
This has exceeded his understanding of the word "power".
Dorovich slumped in the carriage, his gold fingernails filed off at his feet, his fat face trembling violently, but his eyes were not on Damian, but fixed on the red-and-white Fan Flag on the mast of the Marine warship.
He now truly realized what kind of people the chamber of commerce, which he had thought were just "competitors," really were.
The battlefield remained quiet for a long time.
The dust kicked up by Takemikazuchi slowly settled, forming a thin layer of ash among the shattered shields and fallen corpses.
The fissures in the ground, cleaved open by the blow, were particularly glaring in the sunlight, like a scar etched onto the skin of the desert.
The adjutant strode out from the naval formation, carrying a megaphone.
He ran to Damian's side and handed him the megaphone with both hands.
Damian took the megaphone and turned the volume up to the maximum. The static from the current echoed sharply across the empty battlefield for a moment before settling down.
The mercenaries, militiamen, and support personnel kneeling on the ground all focused their attention on him at the same moment.
"Is anyone still going to put up a last-ditch resistance?"
His voice was neither loud nor heavy, and there was no deliberate attempt to intimidate; in fact, his tone was no different from when he routinely called roll on the warship.
The loudspeaker amplified the words clearly to every corner of the battlefield, pressing down on every rebel flag still fluttering, and on every pair of eyes filled with fear, awe, or gratitude.
No one answered.
The last few soldiers remaining in Charles's elite unit laid down their weapons.
Their knives fell onto the gravel, and then their knees followed.
Fisher raised his short spear above his head with both hands, his forehead almost touching the ground.
Dorovich threw the Sand Ant Gang token he had been clutching out of the carriage window.