Whitebeard's beard bristled, his eyes blazing as he gripped the bisento with both hands. With the great blade whirling like a storm, not a single drop of light could pierce through. Alone, he held back nearly half of the skeleton squad's fan-shaped barrage—an onslaught spanning one hundred and eighty degrees.
At his side, Shanks too wielded his sword with both hands, eyes shut as he slashed wildly.
Yes—after being baptized in the Star Spirit's planetary-origin energy, the arm once bitten away by a Sea King had been restored to him.
At first it felt unfamiliar, but soon, he wielded his sword with both arms as though it were second nature.
His speed soared. The Haki wrapping his blade shone like crackling lightning, dazzling in its brilliance.
Each cut struck true—meeting an energy bolt dead-on. The blade would release a fleeting wave of sword aura, dispersing the bolt with perfect precision, not a shred too much nor too little.
Having honed only his sword all his life—never relying on a Devil Fruit—Shanks' ascension was clearly a step ahead of Whitebeard's.
The Haki sheathing his blade grew ever subtler, gradually fading from sight.
Until finally, it returned to simplicity. His treasured sword Gryphon lost its radiant gleam, becoming once more an ordinary longsword.
And yet—with each swing thereafter, his movements grew lighter, freer, filled with effortless grace.
Then—amidst the growing hail of green bolts—he loosed two more slashes into empty air.
They seemed to cut nothing at all, yet along the frozen line of their arcs, faint, unadorned ripples of light pulsed.
And just like that, a third of the green projectiles hurtling from that direction vanished.
The others turned in astonishment—only to see one of the skeletons left with half a torso floating in the sky.
Its arms, reshaped into kinetic rifles, and its legs, fashioned into thrusters, had been severed mid-air by Shanks' two ghostly cuts!
The squad's hive-mind intelligence had indeed observed the rippling waves from those slashes.
But their judgment was flawed—they had deemed the ripples harmless, not worth evading.
And so, one unlucky green-flame skeleton was undone by its own faulty analysis—crippled, limbless.
Those phantom-like strikes heralded the end of their one-sided suppression.
The counterattack had begun.
Not just Shanks' counterattack—but that of every warrior worthy to stand on this battlefield!
As Whitebeard bore half the skeleton squad's storm with sheer strength alone, the others did not sit idle.
Each took their turn, intercepting and erasing the barrages, honing their techniques, refining their weapon mastery.
Even if they failed to block and were grievously wounded—it mattered little. They had the Star Spirit, the greatest healer of the planet, as their bulwark!
Even if their bodies were blown apart, so long as they did not die outright, torrents of the Star Spirit's violent life force would flood their wounds—within minutes, they would rise anew, blades in hand!
In this relentless crucible of battle, these top-tier powerhouses were reforged as though in the furnace once again.
The impurities within them were hammered away—leaving only the purest essence behind.
With no limit in sight, their very being surged upward, climbing in quality without pause.
Each, in accordance with their own strengths and instincts, reshaped themselves freely.
Their various forms of Haki fused with seamless perfection, blending with their heightened control over their life force, becoming new, devastating tools of offense and defense.
Their power was not merely advancing by leaps and bounds—it was soaring, like a storm breaking through the heavens.
Even the ordinary pirates and revolutionaries, seeing this, began to mimic the process—taking the mutating aberrations as their practice dummies.
The suffocating pressure of must grow stronger had long since become their greatest driving force.
Even Charlotte Linlin herself had been "trained thin"—no longer a bloated matron, but transformed into a robust, athletic battle-mother.
She swung her massive nameless blade in a wide arc, unleashing a crescent-shaped wave of terrifying force.
The sheer power of that strike surpassed by far even the mighty Hakai she had once unleashed alongside Kaido on Onigashima.
The air boiled under the strike.
The sea churned with extremes—sublimation and crystallization occurring at once—creating a strange, misty aura around the wave.
One unlucky green-flame skeleton was caught in its path.
Its body convulsed like a mouse wired to electrodes, twitching erratically. And then, without any visible wound, the green particle-flames in its eye sockets abruptly snuffed out!
The previously dismembered skeleton, its four limbs severed by Shanks, flickered with unstable particles in its eyes. Green jets burst from its back, propelling it toward the now-vacant husk—seeking to use its comrade's body to repair itself.
That was the hidden trick of the skeleton cannon-fodder units: by consuming their comrades' remains, they could maintain their numbers, fighting until not a single one remained!
But Charlotte Linlin's lips curled in merciless mockery.
She may not have known this quirk of theirs—but it hardly mattered.
Which old pirate doesn't know to lace an enemy's corpse with traps?
Everyone who's tried it swears by it.
From within the vacant skeleton's body, a strange energy fluctuation detonated!
Like an EMP blast, it engulfed the crippled skeleton in its entirety.
Its green particle-flames sputtered and died—leaving nothing but two lifeless husks, falling silently into the endless sea.
Several Pacifistas, already maneuvering beneath the waves, surged up to retrieve the remains.
These were precious bio-metal, after all—not to be wasted.
By Vegapunk's calculations, each skeleton frame could yield at least two full suits of armor!
The squad's long-range bombardment formation was shattered. The battle's outcome was no longer in doubt.
Charlotte Linlin's one strike for two kills was proof—the warriors had uncovered the skeleton squad's fatal weakness, and could exploit it with precision.
Their so-called versatile tactics, their so-called immortal forms—were all nothing but lies.
These "low-level intelligences"—even in groups of ten—lacked the quality to transcend their nature.
By contrast, the warriors, having undergone even this brief crucible of hellish training, had already grasped advanced applications: converting pure consciousness into energy itself.
For such entities—mindless constructs incapable of producing consciousness-energy—annihilation was as simple as breathing.
In other words—the bio-metal skeleton soldiers might boast sky-high resistance to physical attacks… but their resistance to "magic" was virtually zero.
Cannon fodder—will forever remain cannon fodder.
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