The crushing weight of the Conqueror’s Haki vanished as instantly as it had appeared.
One second, the air was so dense it felt like we were buried under miles of ocean pressure; the next, the atmosphere snapped back to normal, leaving a ringing silence in its wake.
Out on the vast, crystal-blue lake, the colossal Rainbow Dragon smoothly coiled its serpentine, snow-white body back into its original floating posture, tucking its head as if it were simply going back to sleep.
But the message was undeniable.
Behind me, the Glacial-Inferno Sovereign and Zon were still trembling, slowly picking themselves up from the dirt.
The ferret pups were whimpering, burying their faces into Pon’s dark fur.
<Do not go,> the Sovereign conveyed, her mental voice, usually so full of majestic authority, now entirely stripped of its composure.
<If you approach the Grand Sky-Swimmer, you will be unmade.
It is suicide.>
Zon frantically nodded, his small paws gripping my pant leg.
<Flee, Victor.
Take the sky and leave.
Do not anger the god!>
I stared out at the shimmering halo of light refracting over the center of the lake.
I looked at Gammamon, who was rubbing his temples, his yellow eyes wide with lingering terror.
“I appreciate the concern,” I said, my voice tight but steady.
“But look at it logically.
If a being that powerful politely invites you over, and you decide to leave him on read and fly away…
he’s not just going to shrug it off.
If he gets annoyed that we ignored him, he could erase this entire side of the island.
We have to go.”
Gammamon swallowed hard, the little blue scarf around his neck fluttering in the breeze.
“I really hate it when your logic makes sense.”
“Stay here,” I told the animals, offering a reassuring, albeit forced, smile.
“If we aren’t back by sunset…
well, it was nice knowing you guys.”
I tapped the black disk at my hip.
The jade avatar of the Sky-Rift Roc materialized in a burst of green mist, scaled down to the size of a small transit bus.
Gammamon and I climbed onto its broad, metallic back, securing ourselves between its shoulders.
With a mental command, the Roc spread its bladed wings and launched us into the sky.
The flight over the petrified forest was terrifyingly quiet.
As we approached the center of the lake, I expected the atmosphere to warp, perhaps a shift in temperature or a suffocating pressure like the border of Zone 1.
But there was nothing.
The air was perfectly still.
“The Roc can’t land on the water without thrashing and causing a tidal wave,” I muttered to Gammamon as we hovered a hundred yards from the floating deity.
I tapped the disk again.
“Summon: Sovereign.”
The jade unicorn appeared in mid-air, plummeting toward the water.
“Ice platform.
Fifty feet wide,” I ordered.
Before the jade hooves could break the surface of the lake, a blast of Absolute Zero frost erupted from the Sovereign’s body.
The water instantly crystallized, forming a perfectly flat, thick disc of solid ice.
The Sovereign landed gracefully, and the Roc touched down right beside it, its metallic talons digging into the frost.
I dismissed the unicorn to conserve my Fa-Jin.
We stood on the ice, dwarfed by the sheer, incomprehensible scale of the Rainbow Dragon floating just a few dozen feet away.
Suddenly, the pressure spiked.
It didn’t feel like the Conqueror’s Haki from earlier, this was a purely physical density, as if gravity itself was bowing in reverence to the creature.
It pushed me to my knees, the breath entirely stolen from my lungs.
Gammamon let out a choked gasp, flattened against the ice.
The Dragon lowered its massive, crystalline-antlered head.
Those terrifying, glowing purple eyes with their perfect, black concentric rings the Rinnegan, locked onto me.
And then, just as abruptly as it began, the pressure vanished to absolute zero.
The perfect, terrifying control of a master.
I sucked in a desperate lungful of air, coughing violently as I pushed myself back up to my feet.
Gammamon scrambled up beside me, hiding slightly behind my leg.
“So,” I managed to rasp out, wiping my mouth.
“You called.
What does the Apex of the island want with two guys who are just trying to leave?”
The Dragon didn’t speak with a physical mouth.
The voice resonated within the very marrow of my bones, echoing like a grand cathedral.
“You carry a resonance,” the Dragon observed, the tone ancient and endlessly calm.
“A spark of Will that feels…
a little bit like Damine.”
The name hit me like a physical blow.
I froze, my eyes widening.
I hadn’t thought about that name since the chaotic, blurry memories of my arrival in this world.
“Damine?” I repeated, my voice barely above a whisper.
“Where…
how do you know that name?”
The massive Dragon shifted, its iridescent scales catching the sunlight and casting rainbows across the ice.
“He is the reason we breathe,” the Dragon explained.
“Two centuries ago, in a world far removed from this ocean, the age of magic was dying.
Humanity had grown fearful.
They were hunting every magical species to extinction.
Damine was a wanderer of worlds, a traveler who happened upon our dying lands.
He could not save the world, but he offered to save us.”
I stared up at the godlike creature, completely enthralled.
“We struck a pact,” the Dragon continued.
“Using a power beyond my comprehension, Damine carved out our sanctuary, this very island, and transported it across the void, anchoring it in this world where we could be safe.
We have lived here, undisturbed, for two hundred years.”
“He moved an entire island across dimensions?” Gammamon whispered, peeking out from behind my leg.
“Just to save magical animals?”
“He asked for only one thing in return,” the purple Rinnegan eyes pulsed slightly.
“He foresaw a great war approaching this world.
He asked that when the time comes, I must aid the legacy holder of Joy Boy in the final battle.
To ensure I would be strong enough to fulfill that promise against the rulers of this world, he granted me a parting gift.”
The Dragon blinked, the concentric black rings shifting.
“These eyes.”
My jaw was practically unhinged.
The revelation cascaded through my mind, shattering my entire understanding of the lore.
Damine hadn’t just played savior to a bunch of endangered magical beasts.
He had seen the endgame of the One Piece world, realized the World Government was going to be a problem, and casually decided to upgrade a motherfucking dragon by gifting it the Rinnegan.
He left behind a living, god-tier superweapon just to honor a promise to Joy Boy’s descendants.
Damine sure knew how to commit to a cause.
“Okay,” I said, rubbing my temples as I tried to process the sheer scale of the cosmic chess game I had stumbled into.
“That is…
a lot to take in.
It’s good to know the history.
But why call us here?
And wait, if you guys are from a world of magic, how come the Sovereign and the Gorilla use Haki?”
“The laws of physics demand compliance,” the Dragon answered simply.
“When Damine anchored us here, the latent magical energy within my subjects was forcibly converted by the world’s natural order into Haki, allowing them to exist without unspooling reality.”
“He brought an island full of superpowered, magic-turned-Haki monsters into a world where the most dangerous common animal is just a really big fish,” Gammamon interjected, finding his courage.
“You’re lucky nobody found this place, or the world would be a totally different place by now.”
A deep, rumbling sound vibrated through the air.
It took me a second to realize the Dragon was chuckling.
“We have been found,” the Dragon corrected mildly.
“Three times.
The first was a crew of pirates.
They did not survive the outer shores.
The second and third were fleets of the World Government’s ‘Marines’.”
“Wait, Marines have been here?” I asked, my pulse quickening.
“The first fleet met the same fate as the pirates.
The second fleet, however, required my personal intervention.
It was over a century ago.
They brought a man they called an ‘Admiral’.
He wished to conquer this sanctuary for his rulers.”
“You fought a Marine Admiral?” Gammamon gasped.
“I had some trouble,” the Dragon admitted, sounding almost bored.
“I was still adjusting to the visual depth of these new eyes.
But I defeated him easily enough.
If they were to send their Admirals today…
I would win without exerting any effort at all.”
A dry, slightly hysterical chuckle escaped my throat.
I looked down at the ice, then up at the towering beast.
Here I was, standing in front of a creature so incomprehensibly powerful that it could probably eat Akainu for breakfast and go toe-to-toe with Imu on the Empty Throne.
And just forty-eight hours ago, I had been seriously debating if I could beat it within an inch of its life to steal its blood for a Jade Clone.
If I had actually tried to forge a connection with this thing, the Symbiotic Forge wouldn’t have mattered.
The sheer volume of energy required to contain its essence would have drained my Fa-Jin in a microsecond, turning me into a pile of ash before the blade even glowed.
“So,” I sighed, running a hand through my hair.
“If you aren’t going to kill us, and you don’t need our help…
Why call us?
Why traumatize half the island with that Haki burst?”
“A courtesy between world-travelers,” the Dragon replied.
“I sensed the awakening of your Conqueror’s Haki some time ago.
But you do not know how to wield it.
You leak it like a cracked vessel.
Because you share a resonance with my savior, I decided I will grant you the knowledge of how to train it, so you are not utterly defenseless in the seas ahead.”
I blinked, thoroughly stunned.
“You’re…
giving us a training manual for Conqueror’s Haki?
For free?”
“Consider it an investment in Damine’s legacy.”
Gammamon stepped completely out from behind my leg, crossing his arms and looking up at the Rinnegan-wielding deity with pure, unfiltered skepticism.
“Hold on,” the little dinosaur said bluntly.
“If you’re actually super nice and just want to help people, why are all the animals so terrified of you?
Why do you act so scary all the time?”
The Dragon fell completely silent.
The majestic, godlike aura seemed to hitch for a second.
The massive head shifted slightly, looking away toward the petrified forest.
“They are…
fragile,” the Dragon muttered, the booming voice dropping in volume.
“If I breathe too deeply, the wind could crush the smaller ones.
If I stretch, the ambient Haki knocks them unconscious.
It is safer if they fear me and stay away.
Furthermore…”
The Dragon let out a long, heavy sigh that created a localized gale, nearly blowing us off the ice pad.
“They are entirely too loud.
The squeaking.
The howling.
It disturbs my rest.”
I stared at the Grand Sky-Swimmer, the apex predator of the island, the god capable of slaughtering Admirals.
“You’re an introvert,” I realized, a grin spreading across my face.
“You act like a terrifying, unapproachable monster just so the kids won’t play on your lawn.”
“I am the guardian of this sanctuary,” the Dragon retorted defensively, its tone taking on a distinctly grumpy edge.
“Now, brace yourselves.
The transfer of knowledge is…
unrefined.”
Before I could ask what that meant, the Rinnegan eyes flared with a blinding purple light.
It felt like someone had driven a white-hot spike directly through the center of my forehead.
A massive, incomprehensible surge of information, images, sensations, the very feeling of commanding one’s Will to manipulate the physical world, was violently downloaded directly into my cerebral cortex.
I screamed, collapsing onto the ice, clutching my head.
Beside me, Gammamon was thrashing, holding his horns in agony.
I instinctively tried to push Fa-Jin into my brain to heal the damage, but it did absolutely nothing.
This wasn’t physical trauma or torn tissue.
It was spiritual and neurological data compression.
My brain was simply overheating from the sheer file size of a god’s knowledge.
“You will experience discomfort,” the Dragon’s voice echoed, already sounding distant.
“Rest.
Train.
Survive, Victor.
Perhaps we shall meet again when the dawn breaks.”
Through my tearing eyes, I saw the blinding halo of colors fade.
The Dragon had coiled back up, tucking its head beneath its massive tail, instantly going back to sleep.
“You…
oversized…
jerk,” I groaned into the ice.
It took us ten minutes just to find the strength to stand.
I summoned the Roc, my vision swimming with purple spots, and we ungracefully hauled ourselves onto its back.
The flight back to the ferret burrow was a blur of throbbing agony.
When we landed in the clearing, Zon, Pon, the Sovereign, and the pups rushed out to meet us, expecting to find us half-dead from a battle.
Instead, they found two groaning travelers clutching their heads like they had the worst hangovers in human history.
<You survive!> Zon chittered in absolute shock, the Phase-Wolf having been quickly summoned to translate.
<Did you appease the god’s wrath?!>
“He doesn’t have wrath,” I grumbled, sliding off the Roc and immediately lying face-down in the soft moss.
“He’s just a grumpy, overpowered introvert who wants you guys to keep the noise down.”
The animals exchanged utterly bewildered looks.
“My brain feels like it’s made of angry bees,” Gammamon whined, curling up into a little white ball next to me.
We didn’t leave for South Blue the next morning.
The migraine was so intense that looking at sunlight made me want to throw up.
We ended up staying with the ferret family for another four days, doing absolutely nothing but sleeping in the cool, dark burrow, letting our minds slowly unpack the sheer volume of Haki training data the Dragon had shoved into our heads.
By the evening of the fourth day, the throbbing had finally faded to a dull ache.
We sat around the fire with the ferrets and the Sovereign, the mood peaceful and quiet.
I looked up at the stars peeking through the canopy of Zone 1.
We had the Elite Deck.
We had knowledge regarding Conqueror’s Haki.
We had survived the island.
“Tomorrow,” I whispered to Gammamon, who was already half-asleep against my side.
“Tomorrow, we really leave.”
Word Count: 2407
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