Sweeping the Pirates

Deep beneath Kars Mine Island lay a living hell, as if abandoned by the gods.

The dim, cramped mine shafts were filled with suffocating dust and the pungent sour stench of sweat. Amid the piercing clang of pickaxes came suppressed coughing and low moans of agony.

Hundreds of ragged, emaciated civilians were chained together like livestock, digging into hard rock walls while standing knee-deep in stagnant water. Some were able-bodied adults from nearby villages; others were white-haired elders or children not yet grown. Heavy pickaxes had worn their hands down to bloody pulp, and their wounds festered and stank in the filthy water.

"Move it! Didn't you eat today? If you don't dig up two hundred catties of Black Gold Ore by today, nobody gets a bite to eat!"

A pirate lackey wielding a barbed whip stalked through the tunnels, cursing loudly.

Crack!

The whip lashed viciously across the back of an elderly man who had collapsed into a puddle from exhaustion. The barbs instantly tore through his thin, ragged clothes, spraying droplets of blood. The old man screamed and convulsed, but no longer had the strength to get back up.

"Grandpa!" A little girl with a face smeared in coal dust shrieked and threw herself over him, shielding him with her frail body as she looked at the pirate in terror. "Please, Grandpa has had a fever for two days already. If you hit him again, he'll die..."

"Die? Before Captain Baroque's grand ambition, the lives of trash like you aren't worth a stone!" Cruelty flashed through the lackey's eyes as he raised his whip high, ready to strike both the old man and the girl.

"Stop."

A deep voice, like muffled thunder, echoed from the depths of the mine.

Heavy footsteps followed, making the entire cavern floor tremble faintly. The working civilians shuddered as if they had seen a ghost, immediately dropping to their knees in the stagnant water, not daring to even raise their heads.

Stepping out of the shadows was a terrifying giant nearly four meters tall, built like an iron tower. His upper body was bare, his muscles knotted like rock. Most horrifying of all, a thick, sharp grayish-white rhinoceros horn protruded from his head, while his skin had the rough, hardened texture of a keratinous hide.

A 35 million Beli bounty, a Zoan-type Rhino-Rhino Fruit user—"Mad Rhino" Baroque.

Baroque walked over to the fallen old man and looked down at him. There was not the slightest trace of human pity in his eyes, only the disgust one might show toward garbage.

"My ship... was destroyed by those monsters on the Grand Line." Baroque's voice reverberated through the mine, thick with barely restrained frenzy. "I need the hardest Black Gold Ore down here to trade for cannons and the toughest keels on the black market! I'll build a new warship and fight my way back into the New World!"

He suddenly reached out with a thick, tree-trunk-like hand, seized the whip-wielding pirate lackey by the throat, and lifted him as easily as a chick.

"C-Captain?" The lackey struggled in terror.

"I told you to supervise them while they mined, not waste time here playing with trash!" Murderous fury burst from Baroque's eyes. "If he can't dig anymore, turn him into fertilizer to fill the pit! What are you wasting your strength on?"

Crack!

A spine-chilling snap of bone rang out. Baroque had crushed his own subordinate's neck and tossed him into an abandoned shaft beside them like discarded rubbish.

At the sight, the surrounding civilians were so frightened that they seemed to stop breathing. The little girl clamped both hands over her mouth as tears ran down her soot-stained face, terrified of making even the slightest sound.

Before absolute violence and despair, these civilians had been robbed of even the courage to kill themselves.

"Keep digging!" Baroque roared. "If you don't gather a ton of Black Gold Ore within three days, I'll kill every last one of you!"

Yet just as he turned to leave, the few dim oil lamps hanging from the mine ceiling suddenly went out at the same time without warning.

The entire mine instantly sank into pitch-black, deathly silence.

"What's going on? Who put out the lights?" Several pirates on guard drew their muskets and shouted nervously.

Drip... drip...

In the darkness, the sound of some strange liquid dripping suddenly reached everyone's ears with startling clarity.

One pirate clumsily struck a match. The instant its feeble flame lit up, he discovered in terror that half of a human body was protruding from the hard rock wall beside him—the body belonged to the companion who had been standing guard with him moments ago.

His companion's body appeared embedded in the stone, with only his twisted, despairing head exposed. His chest had been completely crushed by the closing rock, and dark red blood slowly trickled down the wall.

"Enemy attack!" A shrill scream tore through the mine's silence.

Rumble!

Before the cry had even faded, the seemingly indestructible rock walls on both sides of the mine suddenly came alive. Vast sections of stone churned and surged like waves.

More than a dozen pirates carrying muskets did not even have time to pull their triggers before the rock beneath their feet transformed into a massive quicksand vortex, swallowing them amid screams more than ten meters underground. The stone then closed and hardened again, burying them alive completely.

"Who's playing tricks? Get the hell out here!"

Baroque roared, driving forcefully off the ground with both legs. He shot toward the wall where the strange occurrence had just taken place like a cannonball leaving its barrel.

Boom!

His savage strength shattered the two-meter-thick rock wall instantly, sending countless chunks of stone spraying out like meteors.

Amid the billowing dust, a tall, slender figure in a black trench coat slowly "emerged" from the rock wall on the other side like a ghost. Most of his body was still fused with the stone. His deep, icy eyes swept over the civilians on the ground before finally locking onto Baroque in the distance.

"I was planning to quietly clean up trash like you," Rain said as he slowly stepped out of the rock, the stones beneath his feet automatically flattening into a path. "But you were getting on my nerves just now, rhino."

"A Navy dog? No... You're Grayrock Rain, the one who's been killing pirates all over the West Blue?" Baroque recognized Rain's attire at once, then burst into deafening laughter. "Hahahaha! A mere bounty hunter from the Four Blues actually dares come looking for trouble with me? You think killing a few pieces of trash with ten-million bounties means you can challenge pirates from the Grand Line?!"

"A beaten dog from the Grand Line shouldn't flatter himself." Rain raised his right hand, and the rocks throughout the mine began to tremble in resonance with his movement.

This was his home ground. Deep within this island made of tens of millions of tons of rock, he was the only god.

"Seeking death!"

Baroque's eyes instantly turned bloodshot. His body began to swell violently amid a bone-cracking series of pops, and his shirt burst apart. In only two seconds, he transformed from a giant man into a terrifying humanoid mad rhino over five meters tall, covered head to toe in heavy gray armor.

Heavy Armor: Charge!

Baroque kicked off hard with his hind legs, instantly blasting a massive crater into the ground. Lowering his head and aiming his spear-like rhinoceros horn at Rain, he surged forward as a gray blur with terrifying momentum that could crush anything in its path.

The power of that blow was enough to smash a warship in two!

Faced with that mountain-toppling charge, Rain did not retreat even half a step. His gaze remained cold as he sharply brought his hands together.

Boom! Boom! Boom!

Accompanied by violent tremors, three enormous stone walls, each five meters thick and formed from high-density basalt, rose from the ground before Rain in an instant!

"Break!"

Baroque roared as his rhinoceros horn slammed into the first stone wall.

The hard basalt shattered instantly before the Zoan's savage strength. Then came the second wall, and the third! Relying on his overwhelmingly brutal physical power, Baroque smashed through every defense, charging through the flying rubble until he reached Rain. His enormous hoof came crashing down at Rain's head.

Bang!

The moment Rain's body came into contact with the rhinoceros hoof, it exploded into countless tiny stone fragments that scattered across the ground.

"Physical attacks are useless against me. Does that brain stuffed full of muscle still not understand?"

Rain's cold voice came from every direction in the mine. The scattered fragments rapidly gathered above Baroque's head, reforming into Rain. Suspended upside down in the air, Rain's right leg had completely transformed into a black granite pillar covered in sharp barbs. With the force of ten thousand tons behind it, it cleaved toward the back of Baroque's neck like a battle-axe.

Boom—!

A thunderous impact, like a colossal bell being struck, exploded through the mine. Rain's blow, powerful enough to knock out a Sea King, landed squarely on the back of Baroque's neck.

The tremendous force drove Baroque's massive body downward. His knees slammed into the ground with a bang, blasting two deep pits. The mine floor cracked like a spiderweb, and the civilians around them were thrown off balance by the shock.

Against an ordinary pirate, that strike would have shattered his spine and killed him on the spot.

Yet something astonishing happened.

Roar—!

Baroque merely shook his enormous head and let out an enraged roar. His rhinoceros hide, as hard as steel, bore only a faint white mark. The terrifying endurance and vitality granted by his Zoan Fruit were displayed in full at that moment.

"Is that all you've got, bounty hunter? Before my armored hide, those rocks you're so proud of are as soft and weak as mud!"

Baroque abruptly rose to his feet and swung his thick arm backward, stirring up a gale as he smashed it toward Rain in midair.

Rain elementalized once more, turning into a shower of tiny pebbles that drifted gently to the ground, opening the distance between them.

His brows furrowed slightly.

This was the terrifying aspect of Zoans. They might lack the devastating area attacks and physical immunity of Logias, but when it came to sustained one-on-one combat and room for error, Zoans were monsters.

What was more, the man before him had fought his way out of the Grand Line. His body had long been tempered through countless battles, and his vitality was as tenacious as that of a humanoid tyrannosaur.

Rain stood undefeated. In this mine, even if Baroque threw ten thousand punches at him, he only needed to elementalize to evade them perfectly. But if he wanted to kill Baroque, ordinary blunt strikes and cuts of rock could not penetrate that thick keratinous armor.

"What's wrong? All you can do is run and hide?" Baroque wildly swung his fists, smashing the surrounding rock walls to pieces. Fragments flew everywhere like cannonballs. "Come out! Fight me head-on, coward!"

Rain watched the frenzied Baroque, then glanced at the civilians trembling in the corner. If this continued without restraint, the mine could collapse at any moment, and not a single civilian would survive.

He had to end this quickly.

Since ordinary rock could not break through Baroque's defenses, he would use the weight of an entire mountain to crush him.

"Since you like this mining island so much, I'll bury you here forever."

Rain took a deep breath and slammed both hands against the ground. He closed his eyes as Rock Vein Sense activated instantly, linking his consciousness to the structure of the entire mine.

Devil Fruit power, maximum output.

Crack, crack, crack...

From deep within the mine island came a series of teeth-grating fractures as the rock strata broke apart.

"Y-You... what did you do?!" Baroque suddenly felt the ground beneath his feet tilting violently as the surrounding rock walls began pressing inward on him like living creatures.

Rain did not answer. He directly manipulated the stone beneath Baroque's feet into a massive funnel, sending Baroque's huge body sliding uncontrollably toward a natural dead end in the deepest part of the mine.

Baroque tried to smash through the rock walls with brute force and escape, but every time he broke one layer, ten more layers of thicker, denser granite surged in to wrap around him.

Rain appeared at the entrance to the dead end as if teleporting. His fingers were locked tightly together, veins bulging across his forehead.

Rain drew upon countless rocks from the surrounding area, compressing them to the limit from above, below, left, and right at the same time toward a central point! It was like an enormous hydraulic press, with Baroque as the slab of meat caught in its middle.

"Roaaargh—!"

Baroque's shrill, despairing screams came from within the dead end.

"My armored hide... impossible... I'm a man who's going back to the New World..."

Crack! Bang!

Before absolute physical mass, even a Zoan's vitality had its limits. First, the hard rhinoceros horn snapped under the pressure. Then came the sound of bones breaking and internal organs bursting from compression.

Under Rain's control, countless rocks compressed together seamlessly, crushing the five-meter-tall beast-man into a slurry of broken bones and flesh, sealing him completely within the depths of the rock strata.

Deathly silence returned to the mine. Only Rain's heavy breathing echoed through it.

That move consumed an enormous amount of stamina, but its results were equally remarkable.

Rain stood up and dusted the ash from his trench coat. He turned to look at the civilians in the corner, who had been left utterly dumbstruck.

He did not wait to enjoy any cheers of gratitude. He merely pointed toward the flat stone steps behind him, which he had forcibly carved out with his power and which led directly to the surface.

"The pirates are all dead." Rain's voice remained cold. "Follow this path. The Navy is waiting for you outside. If you don't want to starve to death, get moving."

With that, Rain ignored the civilians as they kowtowed in tearful gratitude. He turned and walked toward the depths of the mine where Baroque had previously lived.

The 35 million bounty target was dealt with. Now it was time to count the spoils.