On the outskirts of the Land of the Gods, the once luxurious, immaculate residential district of the Celestial Dragons had become a bloody inferno.
Gern slowly drew the Black Blade: Eight Desolations from the neck of an elite CP0 guard, bringing a spray of warm blood with it.
He surveyed his surroundings: agents, guards, even some lavishly dressed private soldiers of the Celestial Dragons...
Corpses lay piled like mountains, severed limbs scattered everywhere. Almost none of the bodies remained intact.
Thick blood pooled into streams, soaking the expensive marble floor. The stench was so overpowering it turned the stomach.
A mountain of corpses and a sea of blood could hardly have looked worse.
Gern casually flicked the blood from his blade, watching those in the distance who trembled all over with terror
yet still poured toward him without end under orders. An icy sneer curled his lips. "Heh... looks like Sengoku's negotiations are going 'well.'"
He knew perfectly well that, aside from those first two unlucky fools, none of the Holy Knights had shown themselves again. Even Saint Garling, whom he had gravely wounded, had not returned for revenge.
The World Government had clearly made some sort of "concession," trying to buy time with the lives of these grunts. Or perhaps... they were satisfying some of his appetite for slaughter as a show of "sincerity"?
After all, the World Government had as many of these "things" as it could ever want.
Just as Gern was about to ignore the grunts and press farther toward the heart of the Land of the Gods,
his Observation Haki suddenly picked up an entirely different presence of Haki ahead!
"Hmm?" Gern stopped in his tracks.
He turned his head slightly, his gaze piercing the drifting smoke toward the source of that Haki.
A figure