"A tickle?"
The corners of Garp's eyes twitched wildly. His face, usually sporting a flippant grin, turned utterly grim.
"Good! Very good! Excellent!" Garp abruptly pulled back his fist, repeating his approval three times. A pressure ten times more terrifying than before erupted from his body. "You asked for this, brat! Don't die!"
Boom!
Armament Haki, black as ink and thick as oil, instantly surged from Garp's right fist, dyeing the entire fist pure black!
The Haki was so condensed and domineering that even the surrounding light seemed to be devoured, forming a small field of distortion!
"Brat! Try taking another punch from me!"
Garp let out an earthshaking roar. His iron fist, infused with top-tier Armament Haki, came crashing viciously toward Yas's chest again, following the simplest, most direct path without a single flourish!
"Love Fist!"
Garp had put at least seventy percent of his strength into this punch!
He had once used this punch to crush, in a single blow, the legendary pirate Chinjao's pointed head, which could split the Ice Continent!
He believed that even the monstrous bodies of the Four Emperors would suffer if they took this punch head-on!
Yet Yas's face still showed not a trace of fear. Instead, it brimmed with even more feverish excitement!
"Just what I wanted!"
Rather than retreating, Yas advanced, boldly meeting Garp's iron fist with a straight punch likewise coated in "Lightning Release Armament"!
He would pit the strongest against the strongest! Fist against fist!
He wanted to see which was stronger: his "Evolutionary Power," which combined Lightning Release and Haki, or this Navy hero's "strongest iron fist," honed over decades!
Boom-crack!
The two fists, both radiating an aura of destruction, collided thunderously in midair!
This time, there was no dull thud!
Instead, there was a true explosion of energy powerful enough to tear everyone's eardrums apart!
Blue-black lightning and pure-black Haki wildly intertwined, collided, and annihilated one another!
Centered on the two men, the terrifying energy storm formed an enormous spherical shock wave over a hundred meters in diameter, sweeping furiously in every direction!
The entire Rear Mountain shook violently and groaned beneath that power!
Countless bottomless fissures spread like a spiderweb from beneath their feet, racing through the foundations of all Marineford!
"Oh no!"
In the distance, Zephyr's expression changed drastically. Without hesitation, he pushed his Armament Haki to its limit, forming an indestructible Haki barrier before him that barely blocked the residual force of the devastating shock wave.
These two... lunatics! Are they trying to tear Marineford apart?! Zephyr roared inwardly, his face filled with horror and helplessness.
This battle had gone far beyond "sparring"!
These were clearly two evenly matched monsters fighting a duel to the death!
Amid the dust and smoke, the two figures separated immediately after contact.
Yas staggered back more than a dozen steps, each leaving a deep footprint in the hard alloy ground, before he barely managed to dissipate that overwhelming, terrifying force.
For the first time, fine cracks appeared in the layer of blue-black heavy armor over the right fist he had used to clash with Garp. A piercing, bone-deep pain shot through his knuckles.
But!
The cracks lasted only a second before the raging Lightning Release Chakra rapidly repaired and sealed them at a speed visible to the naked eye!
In the blink of an eye, it was as good as new!
The extraordinary physical vitality and recovery granted by the Third Raikage Template were fully revealed at that moment!
Opposite him, Garp took only half a step back before steadying himself.
Yet his face was filled with ten times the shock and disbelief he had shown when Yas took his first punch head-on!
He slowly raised his right fist. A small patch of the Armament Haki covering it, powerful enough to shatter islands, had actually been blasted apart! There was even a faint white fist mark on his knuckles!
Though the injury was negligible, what it represented made Garp's heart skip a beat!
In a contest of pure strength and Armament Haki, had he, a long-renowned Navy hero, gained only a negligible advantage over a recruit who had awakened his Haki less than an hour ago?
"Monster..." Garp squeezed the word through his teeth. Looking at Yas, who stood opposite him not only uninjured but even more eager to fight, he felt for the first time that this would be troublesome.
This brat's defense, recovery, and bizarre offensive power had completely defied all reason!
If they kept fighting like this, even if he won, he would probably pay dearly for it!
No! I can't keep meeting him head-on!
I have to suppress him with speed and technique!
Garp's gaze abruptly changed, and his entire fighting style suddenly shifted!
He stopped seeking heavy blows that would finish the fight in one hit, instead perfectly combining the Six Powers with his masterful Taijutsu and Haki!
"Shave!"
Garp vanished instantly, becoming an afterimage nearly impossible to follow with the naked eye as he unleashed a storm of attacks around Yas!
For a time, flickering figures and howling fists filled the battlefield!
Garp's fists, feet, fingers, and palms became the deadliest weapons, striking at Yas from every direction and every unimaginable angle!
Every strike carried terrifying power capable of punching through steel plates!
Yet faced with this dazzling barrage of blindingly fast attacks, Yas slowly closed his eyes.
He pushed his "Mantra Haki" to its limit!
Within Yas's perception, Garp was no longer a series of blurred afterimages, but a clear trajectory composed of countless "images of the future"!
He could "see" the angle of Garp's punch a second later!
He could "hear" where Garp's foot would land a second later!
He could "feel" the movement of every muscle in Garp's body, predicting every action he would take next!
Guided by this ultimate perception, Yas's body became the perfect fighting machine!
He no longer simply endured the blows, instead beginning to dodge, block, and counter in inconceivable postures that defied human biomechanics!
Sliding steps, sidesteps, shoulder checks, elbow strikes!
Every movement was supremely simple and efficient!
He was like a Taijutsu grandmaster who had sparred with Garp for decades, perfectly predicting and neutralizing every attack!
Their figures crossed and collided furiously amid the ruins, raising wave after wave of air!
From a distance, they looked like two prehistoric beasts engaged in the most primal, bloodiest struggle!
"Bam! Bam! Bam! Bam!"
The furious exchange lasted a full ten minutes!
Under their relentless battering, the training ground that had already been razed flat was blasted into an enormous crater dozens of meters deep!
"Huff... huff..."
Garp abruptly leaped out of the fight, his chest heaving violently and fine beads of sweat already seeping from his forehead.
He stared in disbelief at Yas opposite him, who was also panting slightly, yet whose blue-black heavy armor remained completely intact. His eyes filled with frustration and madness.
"Just what kind of monster... are you?!" Garp roared.
Ten minutes! Ten full minutes of attacking at full strength!
He felt as though all the punches he had thrown throughout his life combined amounted to fewer than he had thrown today!
And the result?
Not only had his opponent failed to fall, but he had grown fiercer as the battle went on. Under Garp's relentless assault, his opponent's use of Haki and mastery of combat techniques were improving wildly at a rate visible to the naked eye!
This guy... was actually using me as a sparring partner?
Using me, Garp the "Navy hero," as a whetstone?
An utter humiliation!
"Hahahaha! If that's how it is, don't blame me for showing no mercy!"
Garp threw his head back and laughed wildly, his laughter filled with the frenzy of someone thoroughly enraged!
He stamped his foot, making the entire Rear Mountain tremble! An unprecedented surge of terrifying Haki, so dense it seemed tangible, shot skyward from his body, even blasting a huge hole through the clouds on the horizon!
"It's been a long time since anyone pushed me this far! Brat, dying to this move is an honor!"
Garp raised both arms overhead, gathering every bit of his strength and Haki into his fists!
That power was so immense that the very space around him began to distort and fracture!
In the distance, Zephyr turned pale as paper at the sight. "Garp! Stop! That move will kill him!"
But Garp could no longer hear a word.
His eyes bloodshot, he locked his gaze on Yas and, in a voice that seemed to come from the depths of hell, roared out, word by word, the name of the move that had once struck terror into countless legendary pirates!
"Feel despair, brat!"
"Galaxy... Meteor!"
The instant the words fell, Garp's fists, bearing the full power of his lifetime, came crashing down upon Yas's head like two world-ending stars falling from beyond the heavens, carrying the might to destroy everything!
Looking at those terrifying fists filling his entire field of vision, seemingly capable of devouring even light and time, Zephyr closed his eyes in despair.
"Was it going to end?"
Before you continue