Pirate: Invincible from the Start

"An illusion. It had to be an illusion."

Bearded Man still had his wits about him. He forced down his panic, spun toward the other Marines, and roared, "Stop standing around! Get up and warn the villagers! Save as many as you can!"

He was the first to run toward the houses on either side.

There was no time to waste. The meteor would hit any moment.

They couldn't stop it. All they could do was warn everyone and save whoever they could.

Kuta's face darkened.

He had realized it wasn't a meteor at all. It was an island.

He could even make out ruined houses and a few trees on it.

"Someone did this! There's no way the Knock Up Stream struck twice in a row!"

Only a few days ago, he'd been calling Corgi Island unlucky.

He hadn't expected the same fate to catch up with them so soon.

He could guarantee that all five of them would survive when the island fell.

But...

He looked back at the Marines, then at the villagers pouring from their homes and running around like headless chickens.

Farther away, he heard children crying, adults shouting in anger, and people colliding in the chaos.

How could he let the island fall on them?

"Kuta."

At Kuina's call, Kuta turned and met her anxious gaze.

She wasn't worried about herself. She was worried about the Town.

If the island fell, at least nine out of ten residents would die.

"Can you do anything?"

She had always believed Kuta could do anything.

She believed he could do it this time, too.

Kuta reached out and rubbed her head. Then he looked up at the approaching fireball and said firmly,

"I'll do everything I can to keep the island from hitting the Town."

His expression turned grave. "I can't let it get any closer. Even if I cut it apart, the debris would kill countless villagers."

He vanished on the spot, leaving a large basket of fruit to drop to the ground.

But no one cared about the fruit. They were all staring anxiously at the sky.

Kuta teleported beside the island and stared at the enormous mass, a thousand thoughts flashing through his mind.

Stopping it once would be easy. Stopping all of it wouldn't.

This was a sizable island, not some little meteor. His Space Domain could only control an area twenty meters around him.

If he had mastered the highest level of Haki technique, shattering it would be simple.

He had plenty of Haki, but its quality and his technique still fell short of that level.

At the highest level, Haki could strike and destroy an enemy from within.

In Wano Country, the technique of making Haki flow like air until it could damage an enemy internally was called "Ryuo."

Unfortunately, mastering that ultimate Haki technique took extensive real combat.

He had spent all his time holed up in the dojo. How could he have mastered it?

In fact, Koshiro had given him the method for training Ryuo long ago.

But that hadn't done him a damn bit of good.

Without extensive real combat, even King Luffy couldn't master Ryuo.

That left only one option: use brute force to cut the island apart.

He could teleport around it hundreds, even thousands of times in an instant.

He could unleash White Slash and Thousand Slashes to carve it to pieces.

But one thing made him hesitate.

That move would drain an enormous amount of his strength.

The moment he teleported into the sky, he had spotted many more islands among the clouds above.

And on the island at their center, he sensed a figure whose lion-like presence radiated the bearing of a ruler.

The instant he felt that aura, he knew who it was.

A lion-like presence in the East Blue. Floating islands.

If he still couldn't work out who it was, all those years of reading Pirate King would have been for nothing.

That old bastard had picked the worst possible time to show up.

For all Kuta knew, he had come looking for him.

"Just my damn luck."

Anger flashed across Kuta's darkened face.

If Golden Lion wanted a fight, he could come at him openly. What was he doing dropping an island before they'd even met?

And of all places, he'd dropped it on a populated island.

Kuta watched the island plunge past him and pushed his resentment toward Golden Lion aside.

There was no time for that now.

He would deal with the old bastard later. Even after burning through much of his strength, he was sure he could beat him.

Kuta fixed his eyes on the rapidly falling island. His pupils contracted, nebulae swirling in his eyes.

His right hand closed around Zankū's hilt as he silently began to teleport.

For an instant, time seemed to stand still. Countless Kutas appeared around the island.

They drew their swords together and sent countless enormous silver-gray slashes into it.

Then every afterimage merged back into one. Kuta stood where he had started, as if he had never moved.

Only his slightly ragged breathing betrayed him.

Clink!

The sword slid into its sheath.

"Swift Thousand Slashes!"

His voice broke the stillness.

The falling island suddenly stopped in midair. Countless dazzling rays burst outward from its center.

Then, with a tremendous boom, it exploded into countless small stones that streaked away in every direction, trailing fiery red tails.

Kuta stood still and steadied his breathing, preparing to face Golden Lion as he flew toward him.

The blast wave parted around Kuta as soon as it reached him, like water flowing past a blade.

On the island below, the fleeing villagers and Marines heard the earthshaking explosion. They stopped as one and looked up.

They saw a sight they would never forget.

The falling meteor had exploded. Dust swept across the entire sky in an instant, plunging the world into darkness.

Then countless small stones shot out of the dust.

Trailing long, fiery-red tails, they flew in every direction like meteors.

It looked like an enormous firework, dazzlingly beautiful.

And where the meteor had been, a figure flickered in and out of view amid the dust.

"Wow! Is that a Heavenly God?"

"It has to be! Who else could do something like that?"

The villagers who had escaped death reacted in every way: some clutched their heads and wept, some laughed aloud, and others collapsed to the ground, gasping for breath.

Bearded Man stared blankly at the sky. Then his strength seemed to leave him, and he sank to the ground.

The feeling of surviving certain death brought back memories of twenty years ago.

As he sat there in a daze, a thought struck him. He looked toward Kuta's group, found Kuta missing, and froze again.

Then he raised his eyes to the figure in the sky and murmured,

"How terrifying... Silver Hair Kuta."

Nami's Simplified Version

A-Luo dry-heaved for a while.

Then the nausea vanished, and a power he had never felt before surged through his body.

It made him itch all over as his body rapidly transformed.

When A-Luo stopped retching, everyone watched him curiously.

He dropped to the ground and trembled. His body rapidly swelled, and soon he had become a huge black ant.

Ahua and A-Tao stared at A-Luo, stunned.

Neither had ever seen anything like it.

A living person had gained a devil's power and actually turned into an insect.

Kuta and Kuina took it a little better. They were curious too, but not shocked.

Indigo gave a soft, wheezing chuckle off to the side.

He had seen this sort of thing plenty of times. There was nothing novel about it anymore.

The moment A-Luo became an ant, he understood what the Ant Devil Fruit could really do.

Thrilled, he reared up on his hind legs. His head transformed first, then his body, until he had become an Ant-Man with four pairs of arms and two antennae on his head.

"Wow! That's amazing."

Ahua lunged at A-Luo, reaching for the antennae on his head.

But A-Luo seemed to know it was coming. He stepped aside first, easily avoiding Ahua's hand.

"Hm?"

A glint flashed in Kuta's eyes as he watched A-Luo move.

He suddenly shot a hand toward A-Luo's head.

Again, A-Luo seemed to foresee the attack and dodged before Kuta's hand reached him.

A-Tao's hand, cigarette between her fingers, froze in midair. Behind A-Luo, Ahua stared at him in shock.

He didn't know what to call the ability to anticipate an attack's path.

But he had often seen Kuta and Kuina do it, so he figured it was an ability reserved for the strong.

Ahua didn't know what it was, but Indigo did.

He studied A-Luo curiously, shock showing on his face too.

"Observation Haki?"

"Not Observation Haki. It's probably Enhanced Perception from the fruit itself." Kuta looked at A-Luo with a hint of a smile. "But with senses that sharp, he should awaken true Observation Haki quickly if he trains."

"Oh..."

Even if it wasn't true Observation Haki, Indigo was still stunned.