If You Want to Take Me Down, This Move Is Better

Saiwu's body curved into an arc that barely maintained balance, his right hand gripping the hilt of his naginata for dear life as it propped up his frame, which looked as though it were about to fall apart.

Large drops of sweat seeped out of his forehead, making him look as if he had just been fished out of water. Frequently urging Haki to offset the bad luck consumed too much, and he could barely hold on any longer.

Soru

A red figure flashed behind him, fair fingers extending from a glove to gently touch his back. Bad luck crawled onto his body once again.

Saiwu clenched his teeth hard. Exhaustion surged out from the gaps in his bones like a tidal wave, and he forcefully endured the drowsiness that practically pressed him down into the ice sheet, urging the sliver of Armament Haki he had left to shatter the newly attached bad luck.

At the same time, he grabbed the naginata, Armament Haki pouring into the blade along his arm bones, and swept horizontally around.

The blade collided with that seemingly slender, Armament Haki-covered palm, and sparks exploded.

"With this power... why not fight fair and square!"

Saiwu's eyes split open in anger.

Baccarat sighed. "Is there any possibility that you're just too unlucky and can't ever get close to me?"

The moment her words fell, she used force in her wrist and casually shattered the blade. Amidst the splashing iron fragments, she raised her foot and swept horizontally, sending Saiwu's figure flying like a tattered sack.

Baccarat used Geppo with her left foot to ascend into mid-air, her heels kicking out a circle of white pressure waves in the middle of the air.

The muscles of her right leg snapped and contracted in an instant, rolling the surrounding airflow into a vacuum slash shaped like a spread-winged bat.

Rankyaku: Bloody Bat

The slash precisely cut open the neck of Saiwu, who was flying backward. A line of blood bloomed on his neck, and the afterwave of the impact passed through the ice mountain behind him, leaving a deep gully in the ice wall. Shivering ice fell, piling up into a miniature ice mound beside his headless body where he landed.

At the edge of the Jewel Ice Bed, Lafitte and Daz Bonez shuttled between hundreds of ordinary Happo Navy members.

On the sea level not far away, a fleet quietly moored.

On the deck, those Eternal Financial Group employees who had been transferred to transport treasure crowded behind the bulwark railings, looking at everything happening on the shore with chilling dread.

The notoriety of the Happo Navy was known to everyone in West Blue, and even the regular army of Flower Country did not dare to easily provoke this group of legitimate pirates. Yet in front of these two people, the speed at which hundreds of navy members fell was no different from chickens waiting to be slaughtered.

Daz Bonez walked in the vanguard, letting those fists and swords releasing Hasshoken shockwaves smash against his steel-like body, sparking a string of fire. Those fellows whose Hasshoken wasn't practiced enough could only stare blankly in the face of his hardness.

Lafitte squatted down, shrinking behind that two-meter-tall steel tower of a man while elegantly twirling his cane.

Circles of hypnotic ripples expanded outward with him at the center. The Happo Navy members who had not been chopped down by Daz gradually grew dazed in the rhythm of the cane, and then...

Before long, under the joint efforts of the two, the Happo Navy members all fell, and the sounds of shouting and killing subsided.

Lafitte walked to the shore to greet a few people coming ashore to clean up the battlefield. Leaning on his cane, he returned to the ship together with Daz Bonez, leaning against the bulwark railing and looking toward the direction deep in the glacier plain where explosions constantly echoed, quietly awaiting the result.

This wait lasted for a full day and night.

On the wide glacier plain, Chinjao's flat bald head simultaneously wrapped around Armament Haki and Hasshoken shockwaves. He strode those short legs disproportionate to his torso, kicked hard with his feet, and his entire body soared into the sky like a rocket launched into space, punching through layers of air and charging fiercely toward the figure flapping bloody bat wings in the sky.

Hasshoken: Mutou

Seeing Chinjao charging at him, Lucas, who had swallowed a Rumble Ball, saw his muscles transform into streamlined shapes. His figure abruptly shot upward, silver hair standing on end root by root.

He transformed into a hybrid form, blood-red Haki wrapping and covering his entire right arm. The air fled wildly before his fist front, and he blasted a punch toward Chinjao's flat head.

A loud explosion erupted between the two. The surrounding air was churned into paste, and shockwaves spread outward in circles, churning the high-altitude clouds into rolling turmoil.

Immediately afterward, Chinjao felt pain in his head and plummeted straight down toward the glacier below, slamming into the ice surface.

"Heh-ya-ho-ho! Brat, even someone like me who has already lost his tusks, you haven't been able to defeat in a short time. With this kind of strength, don't covet the treasure here!"

Chinjao stood up from the slightly cracked ice field, patting away the ice dregs clinging to his shoulders.

Lucas did not answer. He landed steadily on the ice surface, stood in place, closed his eyes in contemplation for a moment, and then attacked the air beside him with his fist.

On his fist front, a diffusive shockwave burst forth, vibrating that patch of air into a transparent ripple.

"Mm... you guys in the Happo Navy call this Hasshoken, right."

"It's quite difficult, actually. It took me a whole day and night to learn it."

This understatement fell into Chinjao's ears, no different from a thunderclap exploding in his brain. Those turbid eyes suddenly widened, the eyeballs almost bulging out of their sockets.

Hasshoken was called a fist technique, but it was actually a martial arts system. Except for the first-generation pillar who created it, successive pillars of the Happo Navy wanted to master it with the shortest times counted in years.

The second-generation pillar who learned the fastest spent a full year just to barely get started under the hand-in-hand guidance of the first-generation pillar.

Chinjao's own talent was already considered top-tier, and he had spent a full two years. Yet how long did this brat before him take?

Chinjao couldn't care about the underlying implication of hidden strength in Lucas's words. He strode his short legs, making the ice layer tremble with vibrations, and charged over angrily.

Under the traction of his emotions, a mighty Conqueror's Haki erupted from his body.

The Conqueror's Haki within Lucas rushed out of his body as well, as if provoked. The two Conqueror's Hakis collided in mid-air, stirring up streaks of black and red lightning in the space between them.

On Chinjao's right hand, Armament Haki and Hasshoken shockwaves wrapped simultaneously. He smashed a punch toward Lucas; wherever his fist point went, the air was compressed into a white wall of air.

Lucas clenched his right fist, blood-red Haki and Hasshoken shockwaves looping around simultaneously as he met it head-on.

With a loud explosion, Chinjao let out a muffled groan. That vibration he was all too familiar with exploded inside his chest cavity, and his body bounced high, flying backward for over ten meters before heavily slamming into the glacier.

He crawled up, supporting the ground with both hands, his expression as gloomy as water.

The brat before him was not bragging. He really had learned Hasshoken from him simply through battle.

"Alright, I've already learned Hasshoken. You have no utility value left either, this battle should end here."

Lucas squeezed his fists, his knuckles making cracking sounds as he stepped closer to Chinjao's location.

"Heh-ya-ho-ho! So what if your talent is peerless, wanting this old man's life is not that simple!"

Chinjao stood upside down on the ice field with his head down and feet up. That flat head pressed against the ice surface, and his entire body used it as a pivot to begin spinning at high speed like a top. His plump body turned into a blurred shadow amidst the spin, fiercely slamming toward Lucas.

Hasshoken: Mutou Kaisen

Soru

Lucas advanced instead of retreating, flashing before Chinjao. His blood-red fist was wrapped with wisps of homologous electric arcs, smashing into Chinjao's spinning body.

The electric arcs licked across every inch of the contact surface like snake tongues, disintegrating the kinetic energy of the spin layer by layer.

Chinjao's spinning body was struck airborne by this punch, flipping over acrobatically in mid-air.

With his back facing down and face facing up, he saw a bloody shadow dive down from above.

A bloody fist, simultaneously wrapped with electric arcs and Hasshoken shockwaves, smashed toward his face.

"If I'm going to finish you off, it's better to use this move."

Chinjao's complexion instantly flushed red, and a sense of humiliation far stronger than when his pointed head was flattened by Garp 10 years ago surged into his heart.

As a pirate, he could accept death, he could accept defeat, but no matter what, he could not accept perishing by the Hasshoken he was so proud of.

He let out an angry roar, kicking his feet in mid-air and actually causing the air beneath his soles to detonate. His body counter-charged at Lucas like a cannonball, Armament Haki and Hasshoken shockwaves wrapping onto his flat head at the same time.

Hasshoken Secret Technique: Muzuiryu: Muzuirikugi

Chinjao dragged out a string of afterimages in the sky, connecting into a straight line. The surrounding air boiled like boiling water.

"Arrogant brat! Let this old man use the highest secret technique of this Hasshoken to smash all the bones in your body to pieces!"

Lucas transformed into a blood-red flash of lightning, actively closing the distance between them. On his sandbag-sized blood-red fist, dazzling electric arcs burst forth, and the air within a radius of hundreds of meters fled wildly beneath his fist, temporarily squeezed into a vacuum zone.

The drill head had no protrusion.

Amidst cloud-splitting and rock-shattering explosion sounds, a large amount of blood spurted wildly from Chinjao's seven orifices. After that blood left his body, it did not fall toward the ground, but instead suspended in mid-air, being pulled by some invisible force to converge into a patch of dark red blood mist.

Higanbana

Spikes of blood pierced through Chinjao's skin, spreading outward with his heart at the center. This time, he no longer had any spare energy to urge Armament Haki to offset it.

He watched helplessly as the blood containing life energy uncontrollably rushed out of his body, turning into blood mist and merging into the blood-red vortex behind the silver-haired young man.

His vision began to blur, his thinking began to fracture, and the anger and unwillingness on that old face gradually froze, finally turning into a withered corpse that fell straight down from mid-air toward the ice field.

TO BE CONTINUED