The darkness of the cell in Hachinosu was thick and suffocating, smelling of rust, seawater, and old despair. Chains, heavy with Sea-Prism Stone, bound Monkey D. Garp to the wall. He sat slumped, his breathing ragged, his legendary Marine jacket torn and stained. To any observer, he was a broken man, a relic defeated by the new era.
The cell door scraped open, spilling yellow torchlight into the gloom. Marshall D. Teach, Blackbeard himself, filled the doorway, his massive frame eclipsing the light. His grin was a jagged mess of missing teeth and overconfidence.
"Zehahahahahaha! Look at the mighty hero, Garp the Fist," Blackbeard boomed, his voice echoing in the small space. He sauntered in, followed by a wary Kuzan, who stood silently by the door. "Chained up in my dungeon. Fate is a funny thing, isn't it? The man who cornered the Pirate King, brought down by my little crew."
Garp coughed, a pained, wet sound. He slowly lifted his head, his eyes barely open. "Teach... You talk too much."
Blackbeard laughed even harder. " Zehahahaha! You would be the perfect hostage for me to get to your son, Dragon, and your grandson, Luffy. With you in a cage, I wonder who will come running to save you first? I'll get to crush two generations of your family with one move! It's the kind of epic fate I was born for!"
It was the moment Garp had planned for. The weakness vanished from his eyes, replaced by an inferno of pure, undiluted Conqueror's Haki. The air cracked. The torches flickered wildly. Blackbeard's smile froze, his eyes widening in shock as he felt the crushing pressure.
"It's you," Garp's voice was no longer a rasp, but a low, predatory growl, "who should be worried."
With a sound like a cannonball firing, Garp exploded into motion. The Sea-Prism Stone chains, weakened by a flaw he'd spent hours exploiting, shattered. In the space of a heartbeat, he was on his feet, his right fist, now coated in the glossy, obsidian sheen of advanced Armament Haki, aimed not at Blackbeard's head, but at his heart. This wasn't a punch to knock out. It was a fist to end a life.
But Blackbeard, for all his arrogance, was an Emperor. His instincts screamed. He didn't have time to dodge. He had time for only one thing.
"Black Hole!"
A vortex of pure, tangible darkness erupted from Teach's torso. It didn't block Garp's fist; it swallowed it. The unstoppable force of Garp's Haki met the inescapable pull of the Yami Yami no Mi. For a second, there was a stalemate. Then the darkness began to crawl up Garp's arm, unraveling it not into blood and bone, but into pure nothingness.
Garp knew he had failed. He had gambled and lost. But as the void consumed him, pulling the rest of his body into its silent, crushing embrace, he did not scream. He did not despair.
He laughed. A loud, booming, defiant laugh that echoed even as his form disappeared completely. The darkness imploded, leaving behind only the shattered chains, a stunned Kuzan, and a panting, terrified Blackbeard clutching his chest.
The deafening silence was not an end. It was a passage.
The air above Konoha was a canvas of chaos. Rain lashed down, mingling with the blood and ash of the dying. Below, the Nine-Tailed Fox, a beast of pure malice given form, roared its defiance, each sweep of its mighty tails leveling what was left of the village. At the center of the devastation, Minato Namikaze, the Fourth Hokage, stood resolute before a ceremonial altar, his infant son, Naruto, lying upon it. His wife, Kushina, her red hair plastered to her skin, held the beast at bay with the last of her strength and the golden chains of her clan.
Time was running out. As Minato prepared to summon the Shinigami, the very sky above them screamed.
With a sound like tearing fabric, a perfect circle of impossible darkness ripped open reality itself. It was not a cloud, but a void—a black hole suspended in the stormy heavens. The chaotic red chakra of the Kyuubi seemed to dim in comparison to the utter wrongness of the portal.
From within its swirling depths, a figure tumbled out.
It was the spectral echo of a man, translucent and ghostly, but built like a mountain, with broad shoulders and a white coat that billowed even in his uncontrolled descent. Monkey D. Garp, his spirit still reeling from the passage between worlds, fell from the sky.
He wasn't aimed. He wasn't guided. He simply fell. And his landing point was the very epicenter of the rage below.
With a dull thud of spiritual energy that rippled through the Kyuubi's malevolent aura, Garp's spirit landed squarely on the massive, fox-like head of the beast, right between its burning, hateful eyes.
The Kyuubi, in the midst of its world-ending rampage, flinched in utter shock. What was this new pest? This insignificant gnat that dared to literally stand upon its brow? It let out a roar of pure indignation, thrashing its head to shake him off.
But it was too late. On the altar below, Minato clapped his hands together.
"Reaper Death Seal!"
The spectral form of the Death God manifested, and from the ground, the Adamantine Sealing Chains erupted. They lashed out, wrapping not just around the Kyuubi's limbs and torso, but also around the unexpected intruder on its head.
Garp, still dazed, looked down to see the golden chains binding his ghostly form to the fox's fur. He felt an irresistible pull, dragging him towards the infant on the altar. "What in the blazes is going on now?!" he thought, his confusion overriding everything else.
He was pinned to the beast, an unwilling passenger on its journey into imprisonment. Together, the legendary Marine and the legendary Demon were dragged from the physical world, pulled into the swirling vortex of the seal, and plunged into the soul of the newborn baby.
When Garp's senses returned, he was in a vast, dark space that looked like a cavernous boiler room. Water covered the floor, and pipes snaked along the walls and ceiling. His own form was translucent, a ghostly echo of his former self. And before him, towering over everything, was a set of colossal golden gates.
Behind those gates, two massive, slitted red eyes, burning with a hatred now mixed with personal insult, snapped open and fixed on him.
"You..." the Kyuubi's voice was a low, guttural growl of pure fury. "The flea that dared to stand on my head! You will be the first I devour when I escape this cage!"
Garp, now a permanent resident in the mind of Naruto Uzumaki, simply cracked his spectral knuckles and shot the furious demon a defiant grin.
"Looks like we're going to be neighbors," he boomed. "And the first rule of living next to me is simple: learn to respect your elders, you overgrown fox!"