In the waters 355 kilometers southwest of the Rum Kingdom.
An armed merchant ship flying the flag of the Rum Trading Company was sailing swiftly toward the Oykot Kingdom.
Suddenly, a pillar of fire shot into the sky from a barren black island not far away.
Boom!
Anthony, stationed in the armed merchant ship's lookout, saw it and his expression turned grim at once. He immediately sounded the alarm.
Vic and Ray, who had been resting in the cabin, rushed onto the deck. They saw the panicked crew and the terrifying pillar of fire in the distance.
"An underwater volcano erupted?!"
"What do we do?"
Anthony jumped down from the lookout and immediately gave his orders. "Ray, open a wormhole in the wheelhouse right now and teleport everyone back to the secret harbor in Mackerel Town."
"Vic, gather the entire crew in the wheelhouse immediately."
Ray ran to the wheelhouse and brought his hands together. "Wormhole, open."
Before long, Vic led more than a dozen crew members into the wheelhouse, and they filed into the wormhole.
A dozen seconds after everyone had left the merchant ship.
A vast shower of scorching lava meteors rained down from the sky.
But that was only the appetizer. Soon, a tsunami over a hundred meters high swept in, spreading rapidly in every direction.
As soon as Anthony and the others returned to Mackerel Town, they reported the incident to Noah.
Upon hearing the news, Noah immediately summoned every member in the Rum Kingdom, while Ray and Lilith set out at once as a monitoring team to track the approaching tsunami.
A distance of 355 kilometers meant that the tsunami was estimated to retain well over half its power by the time it reached the waters near the Rum Kingdom.
The southwestern part of Rum Island was hilly terrain only about twenty to eighty meters above sea level. Its coastal areas could not withstand a tsunami over fifty meters high.
Noah immediately sent Barton and a group of people to evacuate the residents of the southwestern coast.
At the same time, Lilith reported to him by Den Den Mushi that the tsunami was moving extremely fast. It was now less than two hundred kilometers from Rum Island and was estimated to reach it in a little over an hour or less.
He did not sit and wait for disaster.
He immediately took Jay and Lilian, along with Ray, who had returned, and used Wormhole Teleportation to reach a small island a little over eighty kilometers from Rum Island.
The island was tiny, with an area of less than a few tens of thousands of square meters.
They had come to this island because it lay directly between the tsunami and Rum Island. Noah planned to weaken the tsunami as much as possible here.
"Jay, use graphite to build a V-shaped breakwater."
"Yes, Noah."
Jay plunged both hands into the soil beneath his feet. Soon, a massive V-shaped graphite breakwater rose from the ground, its point facing the oncoming tsunami.
Graphite creations like this were temporary. Once the ability user could no longer sustain them with his stamina or fell unconscious, the creations would revert to their original materials.
The graphite that remained permanently had not, in essence, been created by Jay's fruit ability. Instead, he had used the ability to draw free carbon from the surrounding environment and synthesize it.
If the Graphite-Graphite Fruit could create graphite out of nothing or turn other, non-carbon elements into graphite, its power would certainly be no less than that of a planet-destroying existence.
Even when a Devil Fruit entered an awakened state, it could not permanently create elements out of nothing or transform their forms.
Take Doflamingo's String-String Fruit, for example. After he entered the state of Devil Fruit Awakening, the surrounding matter would turn into strings, but the change was temporary. Once Doflamingo stopped using his stamina to maintain it or fell unconscious, the surrounding string-like matter would quickly return to its original state.
The V-shaped breakwater on the island was now expanding and growing taller at a furious pace.
Meanwhile.
Lilian's entire body turned into flames.
But unlike the orange-red flames of previous Flame-Flame Fruit users, Lilian's flames were blue-white.
"Cruel Sun."
A blue-white fireball swelled violently around Lilian, its radius expanding by over a hundred meters in an instant.
Then the blue-white fireball crashed down from the air toward the sea.
Hiss...
The instant the edge of the fireball touched the surface, the seawater began to boil. The extreme temperature reached 2,830 degrees Celsius. This was the power of mimicking hydrogen-oxygen combustion.
In the central area where the fireball struck the sea, the boiling seawater did more than turn to steam. Some of it even broke down into hydrogen and oxygen, further intensifying the flames.
In less than ten minutes, a hollow more than a kilometer across had appeared in the sea in front of the island.
Lilian stood on the dry, vitrified seabed, gasping for breath. Clearly, the technique was an enormous burden on someone as young as her.
But Lilian's task was now complete.
The enormous hollow before her was already enough to cause a small tsunami.
Lilian turned into a figure of flame once more, left the dry seabed, and appeared behind the island's breakwater.
Compared with Lilian's brute-force approach, Noah's method required more technique.
He cast dozens of blank cards into the sea in a particular arrangement, then instantly sealed the surrounding seawater inside them.
In an instant, a series of hollows appeared in the sea.
The seawater would quickly fill these hollows, but their sudden appearance would cause the surrounding sea level to fall, creating tsunamis caused by the sinking sea.
These tsunamis spread in every direction. Although they were not very powerful, raising waves only a few meters high at most, there were a great many of them.
Wave after wave of small tsunamis spread in every direction.
They soon met the tsunami caused by the volcanic eruption.
Although the underwater volcano's tsunami swept the smaller ones aside, its power was still weakened bit by bit.
When the tsunami reached the vicinity of the island.
Noah stood atop the breakwater, which was over fifty meters high, and gauged it by eye for a moment. This section of the tsunami was now only a little over fifty meters high.
He immediately hurled the cards containing the seawater he had sealed earlier into the air.
"Release! Torrent!"
Tens of millions of cubic meters of seawater fell from the sky, crashing onto the crest of the tsunami.
Lilian, who had rested for a while, immediately became a mobile artillery battery.
"Fire Dragon's Roar!"
Dragon after dragon of flame charged toward the tsunami ahead.
After being weakened again and again, the tsunami had dropped to less than twenty meters high by the time it struck the breakwater, which cut a wide gap through it.
After completing the operation to block the tsunami, Noah gazed at the turbulent sea before him. His Conqueror's Haki seemed to have undergone a transformation, and his bearing became more imposing and substantial.
By the time the tsunami reached Rum Island, its power was no longer a cause for concern. Although the waves were still more than ten meters high, the residents of the southwestern coast had already evacuated, so there were naturally no large-scale casualties.
As for the other places affected by the tsunami, they could only hope for the best.
After all, Noah's current strength was not enough to completely dispel a tsunami of such magnitude.
To ordinary people, the immense natural power of this blue planet was indeed a horror that was difficult to resist.