Rayleigh looked at Doflamingo, whom he had cut in half, with an amused half-smile. "Perona, take a good look," he said lightly.
"At what? You already killed him." No sooner had Perona spoken than something struck her. "Huh? You cut him in half, so why hasn't he spilled a single drop of blood? What's going on?"
"Because this isn't him at all."
As soon as Rayleigh finished speaking, the two halves of Doflamingo hit the ground and turned into two bundles of string.
Perona's eyes nearly popped out of their sockets.
Rayleigh continued, "Doflamingo is a String-String Fruit user. He can use his powers to create String Clones of himself. Shakky did a little digging for me beforehand. His clones don't just look exactly like him—he can even make them talk like normal people and use his own abilities. But the strength of those abilities depends heavily on the distance between him and the clone. The farther away his real body is, the weaker the clone becomes."
"So..." Perona asked, her expression darkening, "the guy you cut in half was just Doflamingo's puppet clone?"
Rayleigh nodded. "That's right. This is his String Clone."
"Damn it!" Perona gritted her teeth. "No wonder my Negative Hollows didn't work on him... Then where is he?"
"Judging by this clone's strength, he's probably already far away."
"Ah, no! We can't let him get away! Uncle Rayleigh, let's go after him!"
"All right. Keep up."
With that, Rayleigh used his Observation Haki and immediately sprinted toward Spiral Island's shore.
Meanwhile.
Doflamingo was already carrying the still-unconscious Dellinger in one hand. With the other, he used Sky Walk, one of his abilities, to travel through the air at high speed on strings too thin to see with the naked eye.
Beside him was Buffalo, a Spin-Spin