Jörmungandr!
11: Emerge!
Jörmungandr!
Chapter 11: Emerge!
Jörmungandr!
Rayleigh’s pupils constricted as the colossal sword aura, slicing across the sky, bore down on him with unstoppable force.
He was suspended in midair with no ground to push off from.
By all rights, he should have been able to do nothing but take the hit head-on.
Even with his strength, facing a slash capable of cleaving an island in two would leave him far from unscathed.
Yet, the Pirate King’s Right Hand simply performed a single, unhurried motion.
He slipped off his right flip-flop.
Then, his bare foot kicked the shoe violently.
As if he had stepped on a solid object, his body jolted several meters sideways in midair.
At an impossible angle, he narrowly evaded the massive sword aura, grazing its very edge.
The aura roared past, severing a few strands of his white hair.
Rayleigh himself landed unharmed on a nearby rooftop, one foot bare and the flip-flop still dangling from his hand.
On the ground, Saint Dio remained frozen in his sword-swinging posture.
He stared at the white-haired old man on the roof, who was now slowly slipping his flip-flop back on.
The corner of Dio’s mouth twitched.
“…Is that even possible?” Saint Dio couldn’t help but mutter, his voice tinged with disbelief.
Even with his extensive knowledge of this world’s powers, he had never heard of anyone changing their aerial trajectory by kicking off their own shoe.
Rayleigh rolled his slightly stiff shoulders, the joints popping with a series of distinct cracks.
“It seems I’ll have to show this young man the true meaning of the gap in our power.” Before his words even finished, his figure vanished.
Saint Dio’s pupils contracted violently.
So fast!
His Observation Haki screamed a frantic warning in his mind.
Driven by pure instinct, he swung Jormungandr across his chest to block.
But he was still too slow.
Rayleigh materialized behind him as if teleporting.
His slender sword had already completed its strike.
The next instant, a bone-deep wound tore open across Saint Dio’s chest, and blood erupted from it like a blooming red lotus.
“—!” Saint Dio gritted his teeth and swung his sword in a vicious backhand sweep.
But Rayleigh’s figure flickered like a ghost.
Saint Dio’s blade repeatedly sliced through empty air.
In an instant, his own arms, shoulders, and waist were marred by several shallow and deep gashes.
Blood dripped down his limbs, staining the broken stones at his feet.
Is this…
the legendary strength of a great pirate?
Saint Dio’s breathing grew heavy, yet his eyes burned with a more intense light.
He had expected a gap in power between himself and the Dark King, but seeing that gap displayed so viscerally left him breathless with oppression.
Rayleigh, however, clearly had no intention of stopping.
Since he had drawn his sword, he would give it his all.
This was the basic courtesy one showed a respectable opponent.
His figure blurred again.
The slender blade, a streak of silver lightning, thrust straight for Saint Dio’s left eye.
The sword’s tip enlarged rapidly in his pupil, its icy edge nearly touching his eyelashes.
At the critical moment…
Whoosh—!
Jormungandr’s blade suddenly erupted in eerie green flames.
The flames seemed to possess a life of their own, erupting upward and coalescing into several snake-like chains of fire that instantly coiled around Rayleigh’s sword.
The serpentine bodies tightened, locking the blade in place just millimeters from Saint Dio’s eye.
A flicker of surprise crossed Rayleigh’s face.
He looked down to see the green flames had taken the form of several lifelike little snakes, slithering up his blade.
Their heads were raised, hissing at him in a warning to back off.
What caught his attention even more was that the sections of his sword wrapped in the green flames were beginning to show faint traces of corrosion.
The fire was corrosive.
Rayleigh acted instantly.
With a flick of his wrist, he yanked his sword from the flames’ grasp and leaped back several meters, creating distance.
He lowered his gaze to inspect his beloved blade.
Seeing the corroded marks on the steel, his brow twitched slightly.
“Well, well…
this is truly…” He left the words unfinished.
On the other side, Saint Dio stripped off his blood-soaked white outer robe and tossed it carelessly to the ground.
His bare torso revealed a powerful physique forged through a thousand battles.
Blood still seeped from the wound on his chest, trickling slowly down the grooves of his abdominal muscles.
Yet he seemed completely oblivious to the pain.
He simply inverted Jormungandr, point down, and plunged it violently into the earth.
“Come forth—Jormungandr!” At Saint Dio’s command, the ground erupted in a violent tremor.
This was no ordinary earthquake.
Something colossal was churning, slithering, and smashing against the rock layers deep beneath the surface.
The buildings lining the street groaned under the strain, their walls cracking and tiles rattling loose.
The ground undulated like a rough sea, and fissures spiderwebbed outward in all directions from the sword Saint Dio had driven into the earth.
Rayleigh sensed the disturbance beneath his feet instantly.
His Observation Haki detected a life force of unbelievable magnitude moving at high speed through the subterranean depths—right beneath him.
Without a moment’s hesitation, Rayleigh tapped his toes and leaped backward.
Almost at the exact same instant, the ground where he had just been standing erupted.
Debris and soil blasted into the sky as a colossal serpent, covered in dark green scales, roared out from the depths.
Its gaping maw was large enough to swallow an entire building.
The serpent’s slitted pupils locked onto Rayleigh in mid-air.
With a speed that defied its massive size, it lunged, snapping its jaws shut.
Rayleigh twisted his body in the air, his sword coated in Armament Haki, and brought it down in a fierce strike upon the serpent’s head.
CLANG—!
The impact exploded with the sound of metal clashing on metal, sending sparks flying in every direction.
Rayleigh used the recoil to drift backward, landing steadily on a nearby patch of ground that remained intact.
Yet, his brow furrowed slightly.
He glanced down at his blade.
It was undamaged—no problems there.
But when he looked back up at the giant serpent, he saw that the spot where his full-force strike had landed bore only a shallow white scratch.
Not a single scale had been shattered.
“…What a tough bastard.” Rayleigh muttered, his voice tinged with genuine gravity for the first time.
That single strike of his could have cleaved a steel warship in two, yet it had only left a negligible scratch on the serpent’s scales.
After being repelled by Rayleigh’s attack, the giant serpent didn’t pursue him.
Instead, it dove back into the earth like a fish into water.
The ground surged violently again as the serpent tore through the island’s subterranean structure at high speed, churning the foundations into chaos.
RUMBLE—!
The island’s tremors intensified.
Streets shattered and collapsed like crackers, and massive fissures spiderwebbed across the ground, swallowing buildings, roads, and plazas whole.
Seawater from the harbor flooded inland, and anchored ships tossed violently in the churning waves.
Countless pedestrians screamed and fled in all directions.
Their cries mingled with the thunderous roar of collapsing buildings.
All of Grove 26 seemed to be undergoing an apocalyptic cataclysm.
“The…
The island’s breaking apart!” “Run!
Everyone run—!!” “Help—!” Rayleigh darted and leaped across the continuously collapsing ground, his figure fluttering like a falling leaf.
Every time he touched down, he landed with pinpoint accuracy on the next section of ground just before it shattered.
Through the billowing dust and flying debris, his gaze remained fixed on the man at the very center of the disaster— Saint Dio.
The white-haired youth stood shirtless atop a pile of ruins.
His right hand gripped the longsword plunged into the earth, its blade wreathed in green flames that leaped and churned like a living thing.
The wound on his chest was still bleeding, but his eyes shone with a startling brightness, and an exhilarated smile tugged at the corners of his lips.
Rayleigh stared at him, then glanced at the colossal serpent churning beneath the island’s surface, tearing the entire place to pieces.
What is that sword…
what kind of thing is it?