At the same time, Doflamingo—fleeing at top speed through the sky using Sky Path—caught sight out of the corner of his eye of Crocodile being smashed into the ground like a dead dog by Gern's kick, his fate unknown.
Doflamingo's heart plunged straight into the abyss.
"Tch…" He couldn't help but curse under his breath, his voice trembling with fear and bitter frustration. "You couldn't even last a single minute?! Useless sand crocodile!"
He finally understood—relying on others to buy time had been nothing but a delusion. From this moment on, there was only himself!
Without the slightest hesitation, Doflamingo immediately pulled out the small, private Den Den Mushi hidden in his coat and barked into it with the fastest, most urgent tone he could muster:
"All units! Immediately—right now!Scatter and run for your lives! Don't look back! Don't regroup! Whoever can escape, escape! Rendezvous at Reverse Mountain!!"
Before he could even finish speaking, a bone-chilling sense of danger crashed down from above his head!
He snapped his head up—
And saw that Gern had appeared at some point like a ghost, hovering directly in front of him, so close their faces were almost touching!
That same spine-freezing, "gentle" smile still rested on Gern's face.
And Gern's right index finger—somehow already raised—was lightly, precisely touching the exact center of Doflamingo's forehead.
The two of them froze in midair in an eerily intimate, utterly unnatural posture.
"Finished your call?" Gern asked with a smile, his tone relaxed, as if greeting an old friend. "Then…"
"It's your turn."
The instant his words fell, the fingertip pressing against Doflamingo's forehead erupted with a blinding, pale-white radiance!
Highly compressed, densely condensed high-frequency vibration particles transformed in a split second into a straight, razor-thin beam of pale light—slender, yet packed with annihilating power!
"Pshhk!"
The beam pierced cleanly through Doflamingo's forehead without the slightest resistance!
"—Gh!" Doflamingo's body jolted violently, as if struck by a sniper round. His eyes flew wide open as the light in his pupils drained away at terrifying speed.
All strength left his body, and he toppled backward stiffly, falling from the sky.
However, just as his body dropped less than half a meter—
Something went wrong!
The "Doflamingo" whose forehead had been pierced suddenly collapsed like a marionette with its strings cut, instantly breaking apart!
His body disintegrated into countless densely packed white threads, writhing as if alive, scattering and drifting apart in midair!
Meanwhile, the true presence of Doflamingo had already appeared hundreds of meters below, in a completely different direction—fleeing at an even more frantic speed!
"Oh?" Gern looked at the thread-constructed decoy slowly dispersing in the air. For the first time, genuine surprise—and appreciation—surfaced on his face.
"A string clone? You can use it like this?"
He rubbed his chin, watching Doflamingo's panicked, fleeing back, and couldn't help but praise him.
"Your talent for Devil Fruit development really is impressive… A Paramecia like the String-String Fruit, and you've managed to pull off this many tricks."
Yet despite the words of admiration, the cat-and-mouse amusement in Gern's eyes only deepened.
His Observation Haki immediately locked onto the aura of the real Doflamingo, pinning him down with absolute certainty.
"No matter how many tricks you have," Gern said calmly, "the outcome doesn't change."
He brought his hands together before his chest, palms facing each other.
Amid a low, ominous hum, countless violently unstable, irregularly flickering pure-white high-frequency vibration particles were compressed and condensed at a mad rate, instantly forming a trembling sphere of white light that radiated utter destruction!
Then—Gern suddenly pulled his hands apart!
The compressed vibration sphere was stretched and reshaped, transforming in an instant into a pale javelin over two meters long—
A weapon formed entirely of extreme vibration energy, its shaft twisting the surrounding light as if reality itself were being warped!
Gern raised one hand, holding the ominously humming vibration javelin suspended above his head.
Then, he gently pointed toward the direction of Doflamingo's escape.
"Heavenquake · Divine Spear."
"Shh—!!"
The pale javelin vanished instantly!
It wasn't accelerated through conventional physical means—instead, it shot forward along a perfectly straight trajectory in a way that nearly distorted space itself!
Where it passed, the air seemed to turn into fragile cloth, torn apart with ease, forming horrifying, visible folds—like a rag being twisted dry—before being shredded into nothingness by the high-frequency vibrations, leaving behind a briefly lingering, warped vacuum trail!
Almost at the exact moment Gern's finger pointed—
The annihilating javelin appeared out of thin air directly above Doflamingo's head!
Impossible to dodge!Impossible to block!
Doflamingo only had time to feel a deathly aura descend from the heavens—cold enough to freeze his very soul!
He looked up in despair, and what he saw was nothing short of apocalyptic.
The space above him—dozens of meters across—looked like brittle glass, covered in dense, rapidly spreading cracks!
The ground beneath his feet collapsed and decomposed soundlessly, forming an eerily perfect, bottomless semicircular crater!
Doflamingo himself was crushed in place by the invisible pressure of the vibrations, pinned so completely he couldn't move a single finger.
All he could do was watch death descend as his body began to blur and double, unable to withstand the extreme vibration frequency!
At the critical instant—when Doflamingo was about to be completely shattered into his most fundamental particles by the Divine Spear—
A cold, steady whisper, as if capable of isolating all sound, suddenly rang out from the edge of the battlefield.
"Silence."
An invisible yet overwhelmingly powerful force descended instantly!
A completely transparent, hemispherical domain expanded outward at astonishing speed, wrapping Doflamingo and the tiny space around him with flawless precision!
The moment this domain formed, everything inside it seemed to be muted—sound, energy fluctuations, even rules themselves were forcibly "silenced."
When the Divine Spear's violent high-frequency vibrations struck the boundary of the silent domain, the terrifying energy contained within it—
Melted, calmed, and disintegrated like ice beneath a blazing sun!
Before the spear could fully penetrate the domain, it vanished completely, leaving not even the faintest ripple behind!
Pressed deep within the crater, Doflamingo suddenly felt the crushing pressure disappear!
His body went weightless, freedom returning in an instant. Without time to think, pure survival instinct took over—he sprang up and shot backward at full speed, retreating desperately, his face filled with shock, disbelief, and the terror of narrowly escaping death!
Gern hovered in midair, gazing at the silent domain that had appeared so abruptly—and vanished just as quickly—
As well as the figure standing beyond it: a man who had appeared at some unknown moment, wearing a black feathered coat, clown-like makeup painted on his face, one finger resting lightly against his lips.
Corazon.
"Well then… looks like the Calm-Calm Fruit really can neutralize my vibrations," Gern said, stroking his chin.
"Whatever. My objective's been achieved anyway."
...
[Salted Fish's Note:]From a scientific perspective, sound is produced by vibrations that generate sound waves.If the Calm-Calm Fruit can isolate sound, then its essence may lie in interfering with the transmission of vibrations—or forcing vibrations to cease altogether.The core ability of the Heavenquake Fruit is precisely the generation and control of powerful vibrations.Therefore, in principle, the Calm-Calm Fruit could directly suppress or eliminate the vibrations produced by Gern, rendering them ineffective.
However, the soundproof barrier of the Calm-Calm Fruit must have an upper limit—just like how Law's Room was shattered by Blackbeard.In other words, if Gern's "Divine Spear" had been directly embedded into Doflamingo's body instead of detonating in midair, the Calm-Calm Fruit would have been completely incapable of nullifying that force.
Put another way: the Calm-Calm Fruit does indeed possess a fundamental advantage in suppressing the generation of vibrations (as shown above in protecting Doflamingo from their effects),but it cannot fully erase destruction that has already occurred.
Of course, if developed to its absolute extreme, even that might be possible—after all, One Piece is a world governed by willpower.That said, the Calm-Calm Fruit is clearly an absolute nemesis to any ability that relies on sound.