Boom. Boom. Boom.
The Drums of Liberation still beat as the three stood apart amid the shattered ruins of Pangaea Castle.
Black aura churned around Imu, making the air tremble under its pressure.
White-haired Luffy bounced up and down on the rubberized ground, without a trace of seriousness.
Rock stood on the other side, his gaze fixed solely on that white figure. He fell silent for a few seconds.
"Your Awakening came too soon..."
The last time Luffy had awakened, his fruit had forcibly dragged him back from the brink of death. That had been an eruption born of a life-or-death crisis.
But this time was different. He had still been lying at Headquarters recovering when that thing woke up on its own.
The kid still couldn't suppress the presence inside his body.
"Ahahahaha!"
The white figure paid no attention to what Rock was thinking. He sprang off the ground and shot toward Imu again.
His right arm swelled in the wind, covering a good portion of the sky in an instant.
The ground rubberized at the same time, and the wreckage of Pangaea Castle rose and fell like ocean waves.
Imu had already recovered completely from the initial shock.
Honebami Tōshirō lay across Imu's front, and those ringed crimson eyes stared at the descending giant fist, growing colder by the moment.
The aura was similar, the drumbeat was the same, and even that feeling Imu had loathed for eight hundred years was almost identical.
But the strength was nowhere close!
Boom!
The giant fist slammed down.
Imu swung the blade. Black-and-red Conqueror's Haki erupted head-on, and the white fist twisted out of shape to one side under the slash.
"You have that fruit, but not even one percent of the power its wielder had back then."
Luffy was blasted