Escape

Rain's right foot stepped into empty air.

For a Rock-Rock Fruit user, this was practically an impossible phenomenon. No one in this world understood the structure of stone better than he did. Yet, at the very moment he was about to crush Mr. 1's heart beneath his foot, the granite slab underfoot—still hard after a thousand years of wind and sun—instantly lost all its moisture and cohesion.

"Crash—"

The hard stone turned into a lifeless pool of fine yellow sand, slipping through the gaps in Rain's boots.

Before Rain could steady himself again, a terrifying sandstorm that blotted out the sky erupted from the center of the ancient ruins.

The sandstorm slowly split down the middle. A man in a broad black fur coat, a cigar clenched between his teeth, rode surging waves of sand into Rain's sight.

The Pure Gold Poison Hook on his left hand reflected a deadly chill beneath the setting sun. The stitched scar running across his face twisted slightly with his mocking sneer.

One of the Shichibukai, Sand Crocodile, Crocodile.

"Boss..." Mr. 1, lying in a pool of blood, struggled to open his eyes. Seeing that figure like the grim reaper of the desert, a trace of shame flashed through his gaze.

"Shut up, Daz. I'll settle your score when we get back."

Crocodile exhaled a thick cloud of bluish smoke and looked down at Rain on the sand. His gaze swept over Rain's left shoulder, mangled from smashing apart the steel Twin Blades.

"You're ruthless enough with yourself, and your combat instincts are passable. In a playground like the Four Blues, you could count as somebody." Crocodile's tone carried undisguised contempt. "Unfortunately, you shouldn't have come to Alabasta. And you definitely shouldn't have played with that inferior stone in my desert."

"Crocodile..."

Rain endured the tearing agony in his left shoulder and rose to his feet. Facing this infamous pirate, the fledgling Observation Haki within him screamed warnings. It was the instinctive, extreme shudder of a living creature facing its natural predator.

"Did killing a few worthless nobodies in the West Blue give you the illusion that Logias are invincible, brat?"

Crocodile held his cigar between his fingers, his eyes instantly turning cold and cruel.

"Today, I'll give you a free lesson. I'll show you what the monsters of the Grand Line really look like."

Before he finished speaking, Crocodile did not even move his feet. The right half of his body instantly transformed into a savage blade of sand that shot straight for Rain's throat!

Too fast!

Rain had no time to think. His right hand instantly condensed his strongest defense, High-Pressure Obsidian Great Shield.

A half-meter-thick shield of dense, pitch-black stone instantly blocked his path. Even Mr. 1's slashes had been unable to pierce such hardness with ease.

Then, a scalp-numbing sight unfolded.

When Crocodile's sand blade struck the obsidian shield, there was no deafening metallic clash.

"Sandstorm: Desiccation."

Crocodile's voice was like a curse.

The instant the sand blade touched the obsidian, an incomparably terrifying force of "draining" erupted. The High-Pressure Obsidian that Rain had taken pride in, with a density comparable to Diamond's, lost its luster, cracked, and collapsed at a visible speed!

"Rumble..."

In less than a second, that seemingly indestructible great shield was "weathered" by Crocodile's sand, turning into gray-black dust that filled the sky before merging back into Crocodile's sandstorm!

"What?" Rain's pupils shrank to pinpoints.

He finally understood why his Observation Haki had been screaming warnings. This was the Devil Fruit's most lethal [higher-order counter].

Rock, in the end, was merely solidified minerals from the earth. Sand, meanwhile, was the final form of rock after enduring countless years of weathering and completely losing its moisture and cohesion! Before the Sand-Sand Fruit's absurdly powerful abilities of "desiccation" and "weathering," Rain's Rock-Rock Fruit was practically nourishment delivered right to Crocodile's door!

The stone he had been so proud of was not even qualified to touch his opponent!

"Have you realized it?" Crocodile sneered as he strolled through the dust from Rain's crumbling defense and instantly appeared before him. "Stone will eventually become sand. Your power is merely a part of my desert."

Rain gritted his teeth. His left hand transformed into a sharp stone spike, which he drove desperately toward Crocodile's chest.

"Pfft!"

The spike pierced straight through Crocodile's body without resistance. But there was no flesh or blood—only hollow flowing sand.

"Too slow. And utterly meaningless."

Crocodile could not even be bothered to turn intangible to evade it. His right hand shot out and tightly seized Rain's swinging right arm.

"Feel true despair."

"Cracking Dryness!"

With Crocodile's low shout.

"Arghhhhh—!"

A miserable, beastlike scream burst from Rain's throat.

Crocodile's right hand was like a terrifying black hole. The instant it made contact, it crazily drained the moisture from Rain's right arm. Flesh, blood vessels, even the stone Rain tried to use for defense—all of it rapidly withered beneath that absolute power of desiccation!

Visible to the naked eye, Rain's originally long and powerful right arm instantly lost all color. Its skin shriveled and cracked like old bark, while the muscles atrophied into corpse-dry fibers!

If this continued for another two seconds, that desiccating power would spread up his arm to Rain's heart and turn him completely into a dried mummy!

I'm going to die here.

The thought flashed through Rain's mind, already overwhelmed by agonizing pain, like lightning.

He could not die! He absolutely could not die in a place like this!

Under the ultimate pressure of death, a heart-palpitating madness and resolve erupted in Rain's eyes.

Water! He needed water! Water was sand's only nemesis!

He had seen Alabasta's geological atlas in Golden Sands City. Deep beneath this desert lay an enormous, ancient network of underground rivers. And beneath these ruins, there was one!

"You want to drain me dry... dream on!"

Rain gave up resisting with his right arm and poured the last trace of Devil Fruit power in his body through both legs and deep into the earth beneath his feet.

"Earth Vein Collapse: Great Subsidence!"

"Rumble—!"

With Rain's roar nearly tearing apart his vocal cords, the underground bedrock beneath the ancient ruins had its structure destroyed from within.

This was not an attack. This was suicidal mutual destruction!

The ground for hundreds of meters around, before Crocodile's astonished eyes, collapsed in an instant like a brittle cracker that had lost its support.

A massive sinkhole over a hundred meters in diameter and bottomless in depth formed with a thunderous crash.

"Madman!" Crocodile cursed under his breath. Even he had no choice but to avoid the edge in the face of such a natural-disaster-like scene.

Crocodile immediately released Rain's half-ruined right arm. His lower body transformed into a powerful tornado, sweeping up the heavily wounded Mr. 1 beside him as he rushed toward the safe ground at the edge of the collapse.

Meanwhile, Rain, having lost all support, fell into that endless abyss with his battered body, drained of strength and gravely wounded, along with countless falling boulders and yellow sand.

"Splash!"

Several seconds later, a dull sound of water came from deep within the sinkhole.

Crocodile stood at the edge of the sinkhole and looked down into the bottomless darkness. Far underground, he could vaguely hear the roar of a rushing subterranean river.

Falling into a place like that while severely injured, with his right arm dried up, that arrogant brat's chances of survival were surely exceedingly slim.

"Boring farce."

Crocodile snorted coldly and flicked the burnt-out cigar from his mouth into the abyss.

"Daz, return to Rainbase and recover." He turned and left, his black fur coat billowing in the wind and sand. "And notify the Marines. Tell them that wanted criminal has already been swallowed by the desert."

Alabasta, within an icy, bone-piercing underground river.

Rain's body rolled helplessly through the rushing current. The river water poured into his mouth and nose, stealing away his last breaths.

His left shoulder was so deeply wounded that bone was visible, his right arm was shriveled like dead wood, and his strength had been completely depleted.

His consciousness was rapidly scattering, and the shadow of death had completely engulfed him.