The Path of Training

After the street battle in Nanohana ended, Rain did not rush to leave the city.

Like an ordinary traveler, he used the Beli he had "borrowed" from Baroque Works agents to buy large quantities of fresh water, high-calorie dried meat, and a spacious dark gray cloak woven from fire-resistant asbestos and coarse hemp from black-market merchants.

He tightly wrapped his right arm, which faintly glowed with dark red firelight, beneath the cloak. Before he could fully control the violent core fire within it, he needed to use this method to shield the heat and avoid igniting his supplies anytime, anywhere.

When the blazing noon sun reached its peak, Rain shouldered his pack and once again stepped alone into the golden sea of sand that had buried countless skeletons.

His destination was the capital, Alubarna.

But he traveled slowly.

For Rain, traveling was secondary. "Taming" the magma in his right arm, which could go berserk at any moment, was the urgent priority.

"Boom!"

Deep in the desert, a giant desert venom scorpion over ten meters long, lurking beneath a dune, suddenly burst from the sand. Waving massive pincers capable of shearing through steel, it viciously snapped at Rain's waist.

Rain neither dodged nor formed Granite Armor over his body as he had before.

He merely slowly raised his bandage-wrapped right arm, spread his fingers toward the scorpion's giant pincer, and pressed his hand against it.

"Sizzle—!"

At the moment of contact, Rain deliberately released the molecular vibrations suppressed within his arm. The gray-white rocky outer layer instantly transformed into flowing, high-temperature lava!

The hardened scorpion pincer, which even rifle fire could not pierce, let out an unbearably shrill dissolving sound the instant it touched the liquid magma. Not only its shell, but the flesh and nerves within were completely carbonized and melted in less than a second!

"Hisss—!" The scorpion let out a miserable scream and desperately tried to retreat.

"Too crude. Too much heat is leaking out, and the drain on my stamina is enormous."

Rain watched the frantically struggling scorpion with a faint frown. His current state was like a leaking boiler. Though terrifyingly powerful, if he fought Crocodile in a battle of attrition while releasing power at full output like this, he would exhaust himself again in less than ten minutes.

"I have to compress the heat inside... like a magma chamber before a volcanic eruption. The surface may look like cold Obsidian, but the instant it hits the target, all the heat must explode within a range of one centimeter!"

Rain drew a deep breath and closed his eyes. He forcibly cut off the heat radiation from the surface of his right arm, madly compressing those active magma particles deep into his bones.

The dark red glow gradually faded, and a layer of cold, jet-black High-Pressure Obsidian once again covered the surface of his right arm.

"Again."

Rain abruptly opened his eyes, flashed forward, and instantly appeared above the scorpion's head. His Obsidian-covered right fist carried heavy physical momentum as it smashed viciously into the scorpion's hard skull.

"Bang!"

The hard shell was dented by the Obsidian, but it did not shatter immediately.

However, at the instant his fist stopped.

"Obsidian Meltdown: Implosion!"

The thousand-degree magma compressed within the Obsidian blasted completely into the scorpion's cranial cavity through the point of contact, without leaking a trace outward!

"Splat!"

The scorpion's massive body suddenly stiffened. Its shell remained intact, but scorching dark red flames and brain matter boiled beyond recognition instantly sprayed from its seven orifices.

The giant scorpion crashed to the ground, its insides already burned into nothing but an empty shell.

"This seems to work." Rain withdrew his fist and looked at his Obsidian right arm, which contained boundless compressed heat. A satisfied smile curled at his lips.

Next, he only needed to practice diligently and combine Obsidian with lava until he could control it freely. That would be his true trump card for returning to the battlefield and hunting the Shichibukai!

Two days later. Cato, an oasis town in central Alabasta.

This place had originally been an important supply station for caravans heading to the capital, but now the town square was filled with the cries of civilians and the sharp cracks of whips striking flesh.

"Why are you crying?! The King's Army will soon go to war with the rebels. To support the front lines, this year's Well Tax must be doubled!"

The town governor, a tall, thin man with a mustache and sinister eyes, sat in an ornate chair. While drinking chilled wine, he directed his security troops to brutally seize the civilians' remaining fresh water and belongings.

"But sir... you collected taxes only last week! If we pay again, everyone will die of thirst!" An old man knelt on the ground and begged bitterly.

"You old bastard, shut up!" The security captain kicked the old man to the ground. "You dare resist the tax? Believe it or not, I'll hang you from the city gate!"

"You bloodsuckers! Aren't you afraid Grayrock Rain will come settle accounts with you?!" A hot-blooded young civilian in the crowd roared with red-rimmed eyes.

The terrifying incident in which the governor of Golden Sands City had been publicly blasted into a mist of blood had once frightened these corrupt petty officials out of their wits, making them behave themselves for quite some time. That was also where these civilians found the courage to resist.

Yet upon hearing that name, the tall, thin governor was not afraid in the least. Instead, he burst into wild laughter.

"Grayrock Rain? Hahahaha! You lowlife pigs are seriously out of touch!"

The governor rose to his feet and viciously slapped an underground tabloid secretly distributed by Baroque Works into the young man's face.

"Open your damn eyes and look! That terrorist who didn't know his place was personally executed by Lord Crocodile, one of the Shichibukai, deep in the desert a few days ago! He's already become a dried corpse, and even his ashes were scattered by the sandstorm!"

The governor stepped on the newspaper, his eyes filled with greed and madness that had finally been unleashed after being suppressed for so long.

"The killing god hanging over my head is dead. In this country, no one can control us anymore! Take everything! Don't leave them a single drop of water!"

Despair spread through the square like a plague. The last glimmer of light in the civilians' eyes went out.

"Is that so? It seems my 'death' gave you a rather pleasant weekend."

Suddenly, a calm voice carrying endless coldness and deathly stillness rang out from the edge of the square without warning.

The voice was not loud, yet it seemed to possess some strange magic, plunging the once-noisy square into dead silence.

The governor's wild grin suddenly froze, and he stiffly turned his head.

Amid the windblown sand at the entrance to the square, a tall, upright man draped in a dark gray cloak was walking over one steady step at a time.

As he approached, the temperature of the surrounding air began to rise rapidly in an exceedingly strange manner.

When a dry gust lifted the man's hood and revealed those pure black eyes, the governor and security troops' pupils instantly shrank to pinpoints.

"Gray... Gray... Grayrock!"

The governor's legs gave out in terror, and he fell straight from his chair onto the ground. The wineglass in his hand shattered to pieces.

"N-No way! The intelligence clearly said Sand Crocodile had drained you dry... How could you still be alive?!"

"I did indeed take a trip to hell."

Rain walked to the center of the square. The security troops scrambled and crawled away to either side in terror, not daring to stop him. Rain looked down at the governor sprawled on the ground and slowly raised his right arm, tearing away the coarse hemp cloak wrapped around it.

"Sizzle—"

That jet-black, profound High-Pressure Obsidian right arm, like a work of art, was exposed to the air. At a thought from Rain, blinding dark red firelight instantly lit up from the cracks in the Obsidian's texture!

The utterly terrifying heat instantly warped the air, and the governor could even smell his own hair scorching.

"But the fires of hell were too fierce, so I brought a little back with me."

Without another word, Rain's lava-burning right arm coldly pierced through the governor's chest!

"Splat—Boom!"

No blood splattered.

At the moment of contact, the terrifying heat instantly melted and carbonized the governor's chest cavity, internal organs, and even his spine!

"Aaaaahhh—!"

After a brief, miserable scream, the governor's body became like a lit wax figure, rapidly turning into a foul-smelling heap of charred remains and scalding dark red liquid before everyone's horrified eyes.

Rain slowly withdrew his right arm. The ground beneath his feet, once paved with bluestone slabs, had now been completely melted by the lava's heat, becoming black, glasslike scorch marks.

He did not look at the security troops, who were so frightened they had lost control of their bowels. Instead, he turned toward the young man who had shouted earlier.

"Spread the word. Whether it's the Navy, the King's Army, or those clowns hiding in the dark."

A chilling sneer appeared on Rain's face, illuminated by the firelight and resembling a demon from hell.

"Grayrock isn't dead. And this desert is about to see a change in the weather."

Half a day later, deep underground beneath Rain Dinners Casino in Rainbase.

"Bang!"

An exquisite wineglass was viciously hurled against the wall and shattered into pieces. Dark red wine trickled down the wall like glaring blood.

"Say that again, Nico Robin."

Crocodile sat in a broad executive chair, the scar running across his face faintly twisting with anger. His left hand gripped the Pure Gold Poison Hook tightly, veins bulging across the back of his hand.

Robin, the vice president dressed in dark purple leather, also wore an unusually grave look in her eyes. She pushed several on-site photographs that had just been delivered by Super Spot-Billed Duck toward Crocodile.

"Three hours ago, the governor of Cato Oasis was publicly executed. But this time, he wasn't crushed to death by rock."

Robin pointed at the charred corpse in the photo, its chest pierced through, the edges completely carbonized, while the surrounding ground had melted into vast patches of black glass crystals.

"It was an instantaneous eruption of extreme heat. The temperature even melted the desert sand, causing vitrification."

Robin looked at Crocodile's gradually darkening, fearsome expression and calmly stated the unbelievable truth in a tone that struck at every word.

"Boss, Grayrock Rain not only isn't dead. He also seems to have crawled out of the underground river carrying a terrifying power capable of burning straight through sand."

"Stone... melted into magma?"

Crocodile stared fixedly at the glass crystals in the photograph. Then the corners of his mouth suddenly split into a low, hoarse sneer filled with endless killing intent.

"Good... very good!"

"That brat from West Blue actually used me to develop his Devil Fruit at the brink of death... Since he's so eager to die, I'll prepare the biggest sand coffin for him in the royal palace of Alubarna!"