Whitebeard's gaze settled on Bondrewd.
His hand gripped Murakumogiri's hilt, his fingers tightening so hard that his knuckles faintly cracked.
He raised the blade, then slammed the butt of its shaft into the ground with a thud.
The ground shook as though struck by a mild earthquake. Shock waves spread outward, sending rubble, ice chips, and debris flying.
"Soul Ritual."
Whitebeard uttered those words in a low voice. He wasn't loud, but there was a terrifying pressure behind them.
The words seemed squeezed from deep within his chest, laden with suppressed fury.
"What filthy scheme are you really plotting, Bondrewd?"
Bondrewd, the subject of his questioning, was rather busy at the moment.
He had just knocked back a fired-up Kuzan with his dragon tail, only to face Akainu's cold, ruthless expression.
"Oh my, are you two sure you didn't eat the wrong fruits?"
Facing the "magma dog head" Akainu hurled at him, Bondrewd raised his right hand.
-High-Temperature Phase Change.
A translucent microwave barrier unfolded before Bondrewd. The barrier itself emitted no light, but the air above it visibly warped.
The instant the magma dog head struck the barrier, its temperature rose rapidly, stripping away its molten viscosity.
Upon contact with the barrier, the magma dog head broke down from a "viscous fluid" into scattered liquid.
"-Hmm?"
Akainu was puzzled. Although the structure of his Hell Hound had been destroyed, turning from semisolid molten rock into liquid magma, it was still fundamentally within his control.
Vaporization would have been another matter. But what he was seeing merely changed the attack from a "strike" to a "splash."
"-You miscalculated, Bondrewd!"
Akainu simply continued controlling the magma, bombarding Bondrewd with Lava Rain.
Then-
"What!?"
Akainu watched the magma rain "flow" over Bondrewd and scatter.
At sufficiently high temperatures, ion mobility on the