Heavenquake: Sky Rend

"Hey, hey..." At that thought, Logot's assault suddenly faltered, and mockery gleamed in his eyes.

"Kid... don't tell me you don't know any swordsmanship at all?"

"Heh." Gern offered no answer, merely taking a shallow breath.

Logot was right. Ever since acquiring the Tremor-Tremor Fruit, Gern had never undergone any proper training.

Before gaining his fruit ability, he had been nothing more than a logistics soldier with a little extra strength.

After acquiring the fruit, he had spent a year developing its powers, but he had still relied solely on his Devil Fruit to brute-force his way to greater combat strength.

Against a truly experienced fighter, however, that weakness was easy to spot.

That was why Gern carefully studied his opponents' intelligence before every fight.

After all, without a system, he only had one life!

"Ha! I knew it!" Logot laughed. "You've got a fine blade, but all you can do is flail around with it. What a waste!"

He flicked his spear upward, knocking Gern's blade aside, then thrust its tip straight at his throat. "Blood Beak: Throat Piercer!"

Gern hastily twisted aside. The spearhead grazed his neck, drawing a thin line of blood.

He took the opportunity to put some distance between them, his gaze grave and his face expressionless. His lack of combat experience was indeed a weakness.

But now, it seemed he had also uncovered the truth about the man before him.

Another pirate with no trump card. His Armament Haki is only at a basic level, too. I can handle him easily...

"What's wrong? Scared already?" Noticing Gern's pause, Logot flicked the blood off his spear and sneered.

"A guy who throws his weight around with a fruit and a Famous Sword has nothing left but despair once someone sees through him!"

After a brief silence, having seen his opponent for what he was, Gern slowly curled his lips into a dangerous smile.

"You're right..." He took a reverse grip on the Black Blade: Eight Desolations. In the sunlight, the dark red cracks along its blade erupted with a dazzling scarlet glow.

"I'm no master swordsman."

The blade hummed softly.

It was not the vibration of metal, but the wail of space itself.

"But..." Gern slowly ran his left hand along the spine of the blade. In an instant, hundreds of millions of vibration particles compressed, collapsed, and compressed again upon it!

The air around the edge twisted into spiraling bands of vacuum.

"Your Haki..." Gern suddenly raised his head. "Doesn't seem all that refined either!"

The blade fell.

In that instant, the world lost all sound.

With the Black Blade: Eight Desolations at its epicenter, the ground across the entire harbor rolled violently backward like a rug being lifted!

Hundreds of tons of rock shattered into dust the instant they rose into the air. Seawater was torn into crystalline cubes, and the air fractured like glass!

"Whitebeard..." Watching the scene unfold like a natural disaster, Logot's expression changed drastically, his pupils contracting.

The world-shattering sight finally awakened a long-buried memory. At last, he remembered whose power Gern's resembled.

"Bastard, what kind of fruit did you eat?!"

Armament Haki instantly covered Logot's hands. That was already the limit of what he could do.

"I don't know. But I do know that my fruit's ability, its destructive force, its power... are terrifyingly strong."

Gern bent his knees slightly. The vibration particles on the blade had reached the limit of compression, and the surrounding space began to warp.

"Strong enough to let me briefly ignore..." His lips curved into a wild grin. "Even crush..."

The ground beneath his feet collapsed with a thunderous crash. "This so-called gap between us!!!"

As the words left his mouth, Gern's figure blurred within the distorted space. Only the black blade, pulsing with waves of destruction, remained clearly visible.

"Heavenquake: Sky Rend!!" The instant the black blade slashed out, the entire expanse of space shattered like a mirror!

A vibrating slash spanning heaven and earth tore through the sky. Everywhere it passed, its vibrations reduced all things to their most basic fragments of dust!

A clean fissure stretching a hundred meters sliced through the sky above half the harbor and the coastline below, as though a god had scratched a fingernail across the canvas called the world.

Logot's vision suddenly warped. He instinctively raised both arms to block, only to feel an unprecedented impact strike him the very next moment.

The instant his Armament Haki touched the vibrating slash, it cracked and crumbled as brittlely as ice.

Crack... BOOM!! In a mere instant, an invisible force swept Logot away. The air exploded and the ground collapsed along his path.

The dust slowly cleared over the shattered harbor.

Gern slowly sheathed his blade. The scarlet cracks on the Black Blade: Eight Desolations gradually dimmed, but the space around him still warped faintly, as though the aftershocks had yet to fade.

The harbor's ground had been utterly destroyed, and seawater flooded into the enormous rift.

"Urgh... cough..." Logot opened his mouth wide, but could only force out broken sounds.

The shock waves had already pulverized his organs into bloody sludge, and a single slash had severed both his arms along with the Armament Haki he had taken such pride in.

Blood gushed from every opening in his face, pooling into a dark red swamp on the scorched ground.

"Your Haki is as thin as paper!" (Only exceptionally powerful Haki could withstand the power of a Devil Fruit.)

Gern lowered his head and gazed at Logot's dying body. After a moment of silence, he bent down and picked up the bloodstained spear, Blood Beak.

"'Blood Spear' Logot, with a bounty of sixty-nine million..."

With a backhand swing, he sent the spear piercing through the air. It punched precisely through Logot's skull, pinning the once-infamous pirate beneath his own flag.

The sea breeze moaned through the ruins, carrying away the last trace of blood in the air.

"Hah... hah..." Only after confirming that Logot had stopped breathing for good did Gern finally give out and collapse heavily to the ground.

His chest heaved, and sweat mixed with blood soaked his torn clothes.

That last strike had been the trump card he had developed by combining the Black Blade: Eight Desolations with the Tremor-Tremor Fruit.

By wrapping vibration particles compressed to their utmost limit around a Supreme Grade Blade, he unleashed not merely a cutting edge, but the tremors of space itself!

Its power was astonishing, and its cost was equally crushing.

Now, even lifting a finger took effort. Every muscle in his body felt as though millions of steel needles were piercing it again and again, and even breathing brought a searing pain.

"An opponent worth sixty-nine million... pushed me this far..."

Dazzling sunlight fell across his face. Gern narrowed his eyes and touched the thin trickle of blood seeping from the small wound on his neck.

"I'm... still too weak."

A long while later, having recovered a little, Gern sat on a broken rock, slowly winding the White Bandage he carried around the Black Blade: Eight Desolations...

In the distance, a warship approached slowly. The Marines stood on its deck, gazing in awe at the lone figure amid the harbor's ruins.

"Warrant Officer Gern won!" Cheers echoed across the sea, but there was not a trace of joy on Gern's face.

He looked up at the sky and murmured to himself, recalling Logot's words.

Haki-that was the true mark of the strong.