Colosseum

The bronze-clad doors of the royal palace's main hall had been completely crushed.

As far as the eye could see, there were people. Siswal citizens poured in densely, like worker ants, packing the broad square and the courtyard before the hall until there was no room to move. They carried rusty pickaxes, firewood axes, and even stones picked up off the ground.

More chilling still, every one of the hundreds of thousands wore the exact same savage smile, like a mask.

There were no battle cries, no prewar roars. There were only the scalp-prickling, perfectly synchronized footsteps and the eerie laughter rising from deep in their throats. Like a wall of flesh that kept advancing, they pressed toward the lone Rain without fear.

Standing above, Odel panted heavily, yellow fluid seeping from the blisters on his neck. He stared fixedly at the black-clad youth below, his eyes filled with sickening madness.

"Do it!" Odel's voice echoed through the night sky, brimming with brazen confidence. "Wasn't your magma great at burning? Kill all three hundred thousand of them! Let's see whether Marine Headquarters puts an admiral-level kill order on your wanted poster tomorrow morning! Maybe Akainu will come after you personally. Then we can see whose magma is stronger—yours or his."

Rain stood where he was, his dark gray cloak snapping in the night wind.

He watched coldly as these civilians, forcibly stripped of pain and reason, approached. Odel's calculations were precise. On these seas, even the most vicious pirate would instinctively hesitate when faced with hundreds of thousands of unarmed civilians being used as human shields.

And once he was trapped in a sea of people like this, even a body forged of iron would be worn down to death. What was more, Rain's [Magma Form] was still in its adjustment period. Releasing such high temperatures at full power consumed an astronomical amount of stamina.

But Odel had misjudged one thing.

Rain's Devil Fruit power was not magma, a purely destructive ability, but rock, something far more versatile.

"Using living people as shields really is a good idea." Rain slowly exhaled a breath of stale air. The dark red flames on his right arm gradually receded, replaced by a deep, pitch-black layer. "But it only works on idiots who like to meet force with force."

Rain suddenly raised his right leg.

"Logia: Rock-Rock Fruit."

His right foot slammed heavily onto the palace's hard marble floor.

"Boom—!"

This was no ordinary physical destruction. The instant his sole touched the ground, a grayish-white ripple of energy spread wildly beneath the surface, centered on Rain like an inverted bowl and plunging deep underground. Rain sank his consciousness fully into the leyline, forcibly rewriting the molecular density of every rock layer within five hundred meters.

The earth trembled. Dust began to rain down from the palace dome.

Odel, standing above, suddenly narrowed his eyes.

A powerful sense of danger shot up his spine and into the back of his head. As a pirate who had once struggled through the New World, his Observation Haki might not have been top-tier, but its warnings at the brink of life and death were exceptionally sharp.

He "saw" the terrifying energy gathering madly underground, on the verge of erupting. His opponent was not trying to attack the civilians—he was trying to alter the terrain of the battlefield!

"Don't think you can lock me up!"

Odel let out an enraged roar, no longer caring about hiding behind the crowd. He knew that once a Logia user finished setting up the battlefield, he would be doomed beyond recovery.

In an instant, his arms became coated in a pitch-black sheen as hard as steel. Armament Haki hardening!

"Suggestion: Frenzied Dance!"

Odel's body turned into a dark purple blur. Stepping on the civilians' shoulders, he dove down from the stairs at an unimaginable speed. His fist scraped through the air with a piercing sonic boom, accompanied by the high-frequency sound waves of the [Suggestion-Suggestion Fruit], enough to shatter an ordinary person's eardrums and sanity, as it drove straight toward Rain's face.

He had to interrupt Rain's technique!

Facing this heavy punch infused with New World Haki, Rain showed not the slightest panic. He did not dodge, because if he moved, the leyline reconstruction would be ruined.

Rain abruptly raised his left arm. Grayish-white granite instantly covered the entire limb as he met Odel's fist head-on.

"Bang—crack!"

A dull crash of flesh against stone erupted. Odel's Armament Haki had, after all, been tempered in the bloody crucible of the New World. The Granite Armor on Rain's left arm was covered in spiderweb cracks the instant it made contact, then shattered with a boom.

The immense impact pierced through the rock and smashed viciously into Rain's left shoulder bone.

Rain let out a muffled grunt. A trace of blood spilled from the corner of his mouth, and he felt his left shoulder bone clearly shift out of place.

Yet his pure black eyes remained fixed on Odel, now within arm's reach, carrying the cold cruelty of a hunter drawing in the net.

"You took the bait."

Rain forcibly endured the punch as the energy from his right foot finally connected completely with the leyline.

"Leyline Reconstruction: Obsidian Colosseum!"

"Rumbleeeee—!"

With a deafening roar like the end of the world, the entire palace floor seemed to be cleaved apart by an invisible giant blade. Under Odel's horrified gaze, four towering black walls surged from the earth with a roar, like four mad dragons awakening from hell!

These walls were no longer ordinary grayish-white stone. Rain had compressed their molecular gaps to the limit, turning them into pitch-black High-Pressure Obsidian with hardness comparable to diamond.

The walls rose so quickly that there was no time to react. Hundred-meter-tall black stone walls, more than ten meters thick, slammed shut around Rain and Odel, joining together seamlessly.

The towering obsidian blocked out the sky overhead, leaving only a narrow square opening.

In an instant, the irritating zombie-like footsteps, eerie laughter, and howling wind from outside were all completely cut off by the heavy obsidian walls.

The hundreds of thousands of smiling citizens preparing to pounce were blocked outside by the massive walls that had appeared from nowhere. Tirelessly, they clawed at the smooth, hard obsidian with their bare hands, leaving countless bloody marks, yet unable to scrape off even a single chip of stone.

The center of the palace had been forcibly carved into an absolutely sealed space of barely five hundred square meters.

Inside this obsidian prison, there were no civilians, no escape routes—only endless silence, and two men who would not rest until one was dead.

The air began to grow scorching.

Rain shook his slightly dislocated left arm, producing several teeth-grating sounds of bone grinding. The dark red flames on his right arm ignited once more. Scalding magma dripped from his fingertips onto the floor, burning deep pits into the marble.

Within this sealed stone prison, the heat of the magma could not disperse. The temperature was rising in a terrifying straight climb.

Rain rolled his neck. The burns on his left shoulder quickly scabbed over in the heat. He looked at Odel, standing not far away with a face that had already turned livid, and a cruel curve tugged at his lips.

"Hundreds of thousands of human shields really are troublesome." Rain's voice echoed through the empty colosseum, carrying the oppressive force of an Earth Core Furnace. "But now, no one can disturb us, future 'Pirate King.'"