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Imu could feel the keen edge gathered on that blade. Even frozen still, it made her skin tingle.
She raised her right hand, pressed her index and middle fingers together, and swept them forward.
A slender, constantly twisting black fissure remained wherever her fingertips passed.
It was not a slash, but a more fundamental kind of severance-in the face of absolute "force,"
the structure of matter lost its meaning.
The fissure swept silently across Mihawk's chest, slicing through clothing, skin, and muscle to expose a cut surface as smooth as a mirror.
There was no blood, because all flow had been locked in time.
He had not even managed to change the cold, stern expression on his face.
The third.
Imu's gaze shifted toward that seething darkness.
A substance as black as viscous liquid formed the shape of a colossal dragon, coiled over the cracks in the Red Line.
Yet deep within that darkness, a violent heartbeat pounded madly, almost breaking free of time's restraints.
Fear gripped Teach's throat.
Even hidden in the deepest recesses of his Devil Fruit power, he still felt as though he were standing stark naked on a snowy plain.
As he watched that figure approach, every step seemed to land on his heart.
Suffocating despair finally broke through the levees of reason-
"Stay away!!!"
The darkness exploded.
It did not spread outward, but contracted inward before erupting in a sudden expansion.
Viscous, pitch-black light surged in all directions like a tide, actually diluting the cold white moonlight covering the battlefield for an instant.
In that negligibly brief opening, Teach discovered he could move.
He did not even have time to think.
His survival instinct drove his body, and he hurled both fists forward, wrapped in deathly white light.
That was not light, but pale