"Tch, so they teamed up after all?"
Crocodile rose from the rubble and looked up. The possibility had crossed his mind the moment he saw Jack, but the idea that Kaido's "Drought" Jack would agree to work with someone else had seemed ridiculous.
Ridiculous or not, the two had joined forces. Now Crocodile just had to figure out how to beat them.
One thing puzzled him: how had Doflamingo shaken off the swarm? Crocodile could sense that his Plague Swarm had not been destroyed, yet somehow he had lost contact with it and could no longer control it.
Scanning the area, Crocodile spotted a white cocoon hanging from the top of a building. The swarm's last signal had come from there.
Looking closer, he was startled to find that the cocoon was woven from countless fine threads. Stranger still, at the ends attached to the building, he could make out stone still transforming into thread.
The hard stone was turning into thread before his eyes, wrapping itself around the cocoon!
"The String-String Fruit's Awakening?"
Now Crocodile understood how Doflamingo had escaped the swarm. He sighed. "I really was nowhere near good enough back then. The Sand-Sand Fruit was wasted on me!"
Whoosh!
A fine thread pierced the dust and shot straight at his head.
Squelch!
Crocodile let the Armament Haki-coated thread pass through his skull, crushed its tip with a sweep of his hand, then calmly pulled it out of his head inch by inch.
"The dead don't have a fatal weak point, Flamingo."
Before him, Doflamingo and Jack, now transformed into a mammoth, stood ready. Armament Haki covered them both, shielding them from the plague Crocodile constantly gave off.
An enemy this powerful was also impossible to kill!
It was a glimpse of the forces "Ice Dragon" Loa now