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Their bodies moved even faster than their thoughts, their defenses already taking shape before the attack had fully descended.
Because "it"
had moved.
Those once hollow, frozen eyes abruptly opened.
Without warning, countless "threads," so fine they were nearly invisible,
erupted from her body, spreading wildly in every direction, piercing the air, the sea, and every inch of space within sight, until they vanished beyond the limits of perception.
Then those threads began to "turn."
Pfft, pfft, pfft, pfft, pfft-
That was not the sound of objects being cut. It was the wail of space itself being forcibly torn open and brutally twisted.
Driven by overwhelming Haki, those threads became the cruelest of laws, rejecting any form of "wholeness" wherever they passed.
The three closest to her took the impact first.
Their bodies flew backward as though struck by an invisible sledgehammer. Blood spurted from countless fine wounds that suddenly appeared, tracing gruesomely beautiful arcs through the air.
And that was after they had glimpsed a sliver of the future and concentrated all their defenses in front of them.
As for the others-
Brief screams rang out, then abruptly stopped.
Visually, the entire battlefield split into countless irregular fragments.
Then those fragments began to rotate, shift, and join together in defiance of all reason.
Above became left, front merged into back, and every sense of direction and spatial order collapsed, like a bloodstained, chaotic cube being toyed with by an invisible giant hand.
The sight vaguely recalled the domain created by a certain Devil Fruit user whose hallmark was a scalpel.
But it was entirely different.
That domain carried a certain restraint, a line against taking lives.
What descended now was pure, undisguised destruction.
Anything swept by those rotating threads-rocks, decks, human bodies-was neatly separated in an instant.
An