The Navy Admiral Came, and He Still Got Cut Down

Amid the tsunami, dozens of warships flying seagull flags forcibly cleaved through the raging waves.

On the flagship's deck, the Navy Admiral drew the sword at his waist. The blade scraped against its brass scabbard, letting out a harsh grating sound.

He stared at the pink-haired child hovering in midair.

"All ships, listen up. Fire indiscriminately! Blast that brat down!" The Admiral's voice drowned out the roar of the waves.

Hundreds of heavy cannons spewed half-meter-long tongues of flame at once.

The dark mass of solid iron cannonballs tore through the air, carrying the acrid smell of gunpowder as they descended toward Rektol like a giant net.

Rektol hovered in midair.

The muscles in his right leg were still twitching, and acid kept rising in his stomach. The burden of wielding two Devil Fruits was too much for his three-year-old body.

But he bared his teeth, and a dry, hoarse laugh spilled from his throat.

"Trying to take advantage of me?"

Rektol raised his right hand and suddenly clawed all five fingers upward.

The enormous waves rolling across the sea abruptly froze. Tens of millions of tons of icy seawater defied gravity and surged upward from the ocean like an inverted waterfall.

At the same time, the heart in his left chest contracted violently.

Blue-white lightning followed his arm and frenziedly poured into the floating wall of water.

Water conducted electricity. The entire wall of seawater instantly became a blinding high-voltage electrical net.

"Rumble!"

Hundreds of solid cannonballs slammed into the watery curtain.

They did not explode. The high-temperature lightning instantly roasted their surfaces red-hot, while the seawater and repulsive force forcibly dispersed the tremendous impact.

The iron balls were like stones dropped into a swamp. They lost all momentum and plopped back into the sea one after another.

The seawater evaporated, and thick white mist laced with the smell of ozone instantly swallowed the entire Navy fleet.

Chaos erupted across the warship decks. The sailors covered their eyes and coughed loudly.

Rektol gave them no chance to catch their breath.

He withdrew the water wall, transformed into a streak of lightning, and plunged straight into the white mist.

"Bang!"

Rektol landed on the flagship's deck.

The deck was covered in seawater that had splashed down moments ago. His foot slipped, his body lurched sideways, and he nearly fell flat on his face.

Taking advantage of the momentum, he rolled across the deck once and grabbed a standard Navy saber lying beside a wooden barrel.

He got to his feet and spat out a splinter of wood.

The hilt was too large, so he could only grip it tightly with both hands. Two hundred million volts of electricity instantly coiled around the blade, stripping away the rust.

"Arrogant pirate!"

A savage gust of wind cleaved the white mist apart.

The Navy Admiral charged forward in great strides. Black Armament Haki coiled around his sword as its tip thrust straight toward Rektol's face.

He did not hold back merely because his opponent was a three-year-old child. The ability to control water and draw down lightning that Rektol had displayed was enough to make him fight for his life.

Facing the thrusting sword, Rektol swung the saber up with both hands.

The first move.

The lightning-wreathed saber and the pitch-black sword crashed into each other with tremendous force.

"Clang!"

A harsh metallic cracking sound rang out. The ordinary Navy saber in Rektol's hands split open, leaving a large notch.

The massive rebound shook blood from Rektol's palm. It flowed down along the hilt.

But the high-voltage current followed the crossing blades and shot straight up the Admiral's arm.

The Admiral clenched his teeth as the right half of his body suddenly went numb. The sleeve of his uniform was scorched by sparks, giving off a burnt smell. The fingers gripping his sword stiffened for half a second.

"Too slow."

Rektol lowered his center of gravity. The second heart in his chest suddenly began to beat.

The second move.

A terrifying gravitational field centered on Rektol crashed down onto the deck.

The Admiral had just tried to pull his sword back to defend when his legs felt as if they had been filled with lead. His knees bent downward uncontrollably.

The thick oak deck beneath his feet cracked apart, and splinters stabbed into his military boots.

The Admiral grunted as a trickle of blood escaped the corner of his mouth. Gravity crushed his internal organs, even making his breathing halt.

He watched helplessly as the notched saber, carrying dazzling lightning, swept upward from below.

The third move.

Rektol summoned every ounce of strength in his body, twisted at the waist, and unleashed a berserk slash on the level of a Great Swordsman.

"Thunderclap: Severing Current."

The blue, crescent-shaped sword energy sliced through the deck and the white mist before crashing directly into the Armament Haki defense the Admiral had hastily gathered.

There was no deadlock.

"Splurt!"

The sound of a blade cleaving through flesh and bone exploded across the deck.

The Admiral's right arm, the one holding his sword, spun through the air along with half of the severed blade.

Hot blood sprayed like a fountain, splattering across the flagship's mainmast's white sail and staining a large area red.

"Ahhh—!"

The Admiral clutched the spurting stump and staggered backward with a scream. He knocked over two wooden barrels filled with gunpowder before falling onto his butt in the pooled seawater.

The muscles of his face twisted completely from the agony, and cold sweat mixed with seawater as it ran down.

The saber in Rektol's hand finally failed to withstand the power of two Devil Fruits and shattered into a heap of iron fragments across the deck.

He threw away the remaining hilt.

He gasped heavily, his chest heaving violently. His calves throbbed with soreness.

But he did not retreat. He only stared coldly at the Admiral on the deck.

"With skills like that, you still dared to try taking advantage of me?"

The Admiral's lips had gone white from the pain as he glared at the pink-haired demon.

The gravitational pressure in that instant, combined with the unavoidable lightning sword energy, had completely shattered his psychological defenses.

"Retreat... hard to starboard!"

The Admiral shouted the order to the entire ship in a hoarse voice.

If they continued fighting, he would lose his life beside this deserted island today.

The flagship's helmsman frantically spun the wheel.

The warship turned clumsily across the sea.

Rektol did not pursue them. He used the power of the Float-Float Fruit to slowly rise into the air and return to the edge of the deserted island's ruins.

With the gravitational control gone, the other warships caught up in the tsunami and the lightning's aftershocks began sinking one after another.

The whirlpool tore three escort ships apart, leaving planks drifting everywhere across the sea.

The Navy fleet had lost more than half its ships. The few remaining damaged warships fled toward the horizon with torn sails, rolling and crawling away.

Several days later.

The first half of the Grand Line, Marineford.

The fortress of Marine Headquarters looked solemn and imposing beneath the sunlight. Seagulls circled above the white towers.

The atmosphere in the Marshal's office was somewhat stifling.

Two cups of hot tea sat on the redwood desk, but their fragrance could not conceal the room's heavy smell of medicine and blood.

The one-armed Navy Admiral knelt on the carpet.

The sleeve on his right side hung empty, wrapped in thick white gauze. Dark red blood seeped from the edge of the bandages.

His face was deathly pale, his hair disheveled, and all his former dignity had vanished.

With his only remaining left hand, the Admiral pulled a crumpled photograph from his pocket.

The edge of the photographic paper was still stained with dried blood.

It showed a moment captured at great risk by the warship's embedded journalist when the white mist dispersed.

The Admiral raised the photograph above his head and held it out toward the shadows behind the desk.

"Marshal... I have failed you. The fleet suffered seventy percent losses, and even I..."

He clenched his teeth and did not continue.

Standing beside the desk was a man wearing frog glasses with a braided beard on his chin.

The serving Navy Admiral in charge of intelligence and strategy, the wise strategist Buddha Sengoku.

Sengoku stepped forward and took the photograph.

The picture was extremely blurry.

In the background was the scorched deck of the Navy flagship, burned by lightning and fire.

At the very center was the side profile of a child who looked about three years old.

Pink hair. Bare feet. In his hand was a standard saber covered in notches.

Most terrifying of all, blue-white, raging lightning and an invisible gravitational field that distorted the air simultaneously surrounded the child.

Sengoku stared at the photograph.

The fingers holding the photographic paper suddenly tightened, and his knuckles turned white.

He saw the comrade lying in a pool of blood and screaming in the shadows behind the child.

Sengoku drew in a sharp breath. The water in the teacup rippled faintly.