Tenfold, a hundredfold, a thousandfold!
It was as though an invisible island were slowly descending onto the sword, its terrifying weight passing through the hilt into his entire body.
Saint Dio's legs sank slightly, and the ground beneath his feet suddenly cracked. His bones creaked, his muscles trembled violently under the extreme load, and the veins on his forehead writhed like earthworms.
But he did not lower his sword.
His teeth ground together, and sweat dripped from his chin, yet his ice-blue eyes burned with unprecedented exhilaration.
"Hah-!"
He swung his sword with all his might!
An unimaginably enormous sword wave broke free of Jörmungandr's blade, roaring forth as though to cleave heaven and earth apart. Its sheer scale brought a flicker of surprise even to Rayleigh's eyes.
It no longer resembled a slash that human strength could produce. It was like a meteor streaking across the heavens, or a white ribbon stretching across the sky. Its sheer size gave the impression that, had its target been the moon above, it might well have split it in two.
Wherever the sword wave passed, it plowed a massive trench several meters wide through the ground. The blast hurled the ruined buildings along its path into the air, and even the air screamed as it was torn apart.
Even the distant onlookers who were not directly caught in the attack were forced flat against the ground by the biting sword wind, unable to lift their heads.
This was the technique Saint Dio had developed through Jörmungandr.
By changing the blade's weight, he could adjust the power of his slashes.
The heavier the sword, the stronger the slash.
But at the same time, its wielder had to endure a load equal to the sword's weight.
It was a double-edged sword. If he exceeded what he could withstand, that terrifying weight would crush him before his enemy fell.
But at that moment, Saint Dio had delivered that slash.
He had withstood it.
Chapter 11: Come forth! Jörmungandr!
Rayleigh's pupils contracted slightly as the enormous sword wave spanning the sky bore down on him with unstoppable force.
He was in midair, with nowhere to gain purchase beneath his feet. By all rights, he could only take the blow head-on.
Even with his strength, he could not possibly emerge unscathed from directly confronting a slash powerful enough to cleave an island apart.
Yet the Pirate King's right-hand man merely made one unhurried movement.
He took off his right flip-flop.
Then he thrust his bare foot hard against the flip-flop. As though he had stepped on something solid, he forcibly shifted several meters sideways in midair, slipping past the edge of that enormous sword wave at an unbelievable angle.
The sword wave roared past, severing a few drifting strands of his white hair. He floated down unharmed onto a nearby rooftop, one foot bare and the flip-flop still in his hand.
On the ground, Saint Dio froze, still holding the finishing posture of his swing.
He looked at the white-haired old man standing on the roof, leisurely putting his flip-flop back on, and the corner of his mouth twitched.
"...You can do that?"
He could not help blurting it out.
Even with his understanding of how this world worked, he had never heard of anyone changing their trajectory in midair by taking off a shoe and stepping on it.
Rayleigh rolled his slightly stiff shoulders and back, his joints cracking.
"Looks like I'll have to show the youngster what a real gap in strength looks like."
Before he had finished speaking, he vanished from where he stood.
Saint Dio's pupils abruptly contracted. So fast!
Observation Haki blared frantic warnings in his mind, and his body moved almost on instinct, bringing Jörmungandr across in front of him.
But he was still too slow.
Rayleigh appeared behind him as though he had teleported, his slender sword having already completed its slash at some unknown moment.
The next second, a wound deep enough to expose bone burst open across Saint Dio's chest, blood spraying out like a blooming crimson lotus.
"-!"
Saint Dio gritted his teeth and swept his sword backhanded across.
But Rayleigh moved as elusively as a ghost. Saint Dio's blade missed again and again, while several wounds of varying depths appeared on his arms, shoulders, and side in an instant. Blood dripped down his arms onto the ground, staining the rubble beneath his feet red.
Was this... the strength of a legendary pirate?
Saint Dio's breathing grew ragged, but his eyes shone ever more fiercely.
He had not failed to anticipate a gap between himself and Pluton, but when that gap was laid out before him so plainly, the pressure still left him feeling suffocated.
And Rayleigh clearly had no intention of stopping there.
Now that he had made his move, he would give it his all. That was the most basic courtesy owed to an opponent worthy of respect.
His figure flashed again, and his slender sword stabbed straight toward Saint Dio's left eye like a silver bolt of lightning.
The sword tip rapidly grew in Saint Dio's pupil, its icy edge almost touching his eyelashes.
At that critical instant...
Whoosh-!
Eerie green flames suddenly erupted from Jörmungandr's blade.
As though alive, the flames surged up, turning into several serpentine chains formed from fiery light that instantly coiled around Rayleigh's sword.
The fiery snakes tightened, locking the blade that was about to pierce Saint Dio's eye firmly in place and forcibly stopping it mere fractions of an inch from his eyeball.
A flicker of surprise crossed Rayleigh's eyes.
He looked down to see that the green flames had taken the forms of several lifelike little snakes. They slithered up his blade with their heads raised, hissing threateningly at him as though warning him to back away.
What drew his attention even more was that faint traces of rust had begun appearing on the surface of his sword wherever those green flames coiled around it.
The flames were corrosive.
Rayleigh acted at once. With a flick of his wrist, he pulled his sword free of the flames' restraints, then lightly pushed off the ground and drifted several meters backward, opening up the distance.
He lowered his head to inspect his cherished sword, raising an eyebrow slightly at the patches of corrosion on the blade.
"Oh... now this really is..."
He did not finish his sentence. Across from him, Saint Dio took off his white outer robe, already soaked through with blood, and casually tossed it to the ground.
He stood bare-chested, revealing a powerful physique honed through countless trials.
Blood still seeped from the wound on his chest, flowing slowly down the grooves of his abdominal muscles. But as though he could feel no pain, he merely turned Jörmungandr point-down and drove it hard into the ground.
"Come forth-Jörmungandr!"
At Saint Dio's shout, the earth suddenly began shaking violently.
This was no ordinary earthquake. Something enormous was churning and roaming deep underground, crashing against the rock strata. The buildings on either side of the street groaned under the strain, their walls cracking and roof tiles tumbling down.
The ground heaved like waves, cracks spreading madly in every direction from the sword Saint Dio had plunged into it.
Rayleigh keenly sensed the disturbance beneath his feet. His Observation Haki picked up the life signs of something unimaginably enormous moving at high speed underground, directly beneath him.
Without hesitation, he pushed off with his toes and leaped backward.
Almost at the same instant, the ground where he had just stood exploded.
Countless stones and clods of earth shot skyward as a giant serpent covered in dark green scales roared up from underground, its gaping maw large enough to swallow an entire house.
Its slit pupils locked onto Rayleigh in midair, and it snapped at him with a swiftness utterly at odds with its enormous body.
Rayleigh twisted in the air, coating his sword in Armament Haki and bringing it down hard on the giant serpent's head.
Clang-!
A tremendous metallic crash rang out, sending sparks flying.
Rayleigh used the recoil to drift backward, landing steadily on a nearby patch of ground that remained intact. But his brows furrowed slightly.
He glanced down at his blade. It was undamaged. Nothing was wrong with it.
But when he looked up at the giant serpent, he found that the spot struck by his full-powered slash bore only a faint white mark. He had not broken even a single scale.
"...What a tough creature."
Rayleigh murmured under his breath, his tone carrying a hint of genuine gravity for the first time.
That slash of his could have split a massive steel ship in two, yet it had left only an insignificant scratch on the scales of the giant serpent before him.
After being driven back by Rayleigh's slash, the giant serpent did not pursue him. Instead, it plunged underground like a fish diving into water. The ground heaved violently again as the serpent raced beneath it, throwing the entire island's underground structure into utter upheaval.
Rumble-!
The island shook more and more violently. Streets crumbled and collapsed like crackers, and enormous fissures spread across the ground, swallowing buildings, roads, and plazas alike.
Seawater flooded in from the harbor, and the moored ships rocked violently on the surging waves.
Countless passersby screamed and fled in every direction. Their cries mingled with the thunder of collapsing buildings, and all of Area 26 seemed to be undergoing an apocalyptic catastrophe.
"The... the island's breaking apart!"
"Run-!!"
"Help-!"
Rayleigh darted and leaped between patches of constantly collapsing ground, moving like a fluttering fallen leaf. Each landing was precisely placed on the next patch of ground about to shatter.
His gaze pierced the dust-filled air and flying rubble, locking firmly onto the person at the center of the entire disaster-
Saint Dio.
The white-haired youth stood bare-chested atop a stretch of collapsing rubble.
His right hand held the longsword plunged into the ground, green flames leaping and churning along its blade like living things.
The wound on his chest still bled, but his eyes were astonishingly bright, and an exhilarated smile hung at the corners of his mouth.
Rayleigh looked at him, then glanced at the enormous serpent churning underground, throwing the entire island into chaos.
That sword... what on earth was it?
Chapter 12: Garp's arrival
Saint Dio owed his possession of an incredible weapon like Jörmungandr entirely to the special gift he had been born with: the ability to extract Devil Fruit powers from all things in the world and attach them to objects.
Whether rocks, seawater, plants, birds, or beasts, he could refine them into a complete Devil Fruit, then use himself as a medium to seal it inside a weapon.
That was how Jörmungandr had been born.
At that moment, the enormous serpent wreathed in green firelight was churning wildly between the island's depths and its surface.
Every passage made the earth groan in agony, enormous cracks spreading in all directions like a spiderweb.
Buildings collapsed in swathes, trees were uprooted, and the ground seemed to be repeatedly kneaded by a pair of invisible giant hands. All of Area 26 was already on the verge of complete disintegration.
Jörmungandr shot up from underground, its enormous body tracing an arc through the air before crashing heavily into another stretch of ground in the distance, sending rubble and dust flying everywhere.
It repeated that movement over and over.
Burrowing underground, breaking through the surface, burrowing again, emerging again. With every rise and fall, it came a little closer to Rayleigh's position.
There was less and less ground left to stand on.
Standing atop one of the few remaining, precariously swaying remnants of a wall, Rayleigh watched the hill-sized serpent's head draw ever closer. At last, a wry smile appeared on his weathered face.
"How terrifying... Has this thing gotten even bigger since a moment ago?"
He was not mistaken.
Compared to when it first appeared, the serpent's head had clearly swollen considerably in size.
It seemed that as it devoured more and more of the ground, its body continued to grow as well.
If left unchecked, it might well swallow the entire Sabaody Archipelago in one bite.
Rayleigh drew a deep breath and tightened his grip on his sword.
He had nowhere left to retreat.
Then his only choice was to go forward.
Before you continue