“You were standing too tall.”
Hua Ye barely moved his eyelids.
The surrounding pirates had been thoroughly frightened by the ruthless speed of his attack.
One after another, they began trembling.
Nobody had expected Red-Eye—a veteran powerhouse who had spent nearly ten years on Hachinosu and possessed both a decent reputation and considerable strength—to die under Hua Ye’s sword just like that.
Well, technically speaking, Red-Eye had simply been too tall.
Hua Ye’s first slash took away his lower body.
Then, when Red-Eye collapsed, he conveniently lowered his neck into Hua Ye’s reach, so Hua Ye gave him one more slash and sent him on his way.
Hua Ye looked down at the corpse and examined his own completely tranquil emotions.
‘Killing really doesn’t feel like much of anything.’
The atmosphere abruptly froze.
A suffocating heaviness settled over the area, making the surviving pirates afraid to even breathe too loudly.
“A-Aaaagh!!”
Then screams erupted.
The pirates’ bodies suddenly burst apart without anything visibly touching them.
Limbs flew in every direction.
Blood and mangled flesh collapsed across the street.
In the blink of an eye, the entire group—from their boss to the last underling—had been wiped out, their corpses scattered across the area.
“My control still isn’t quite right,” Hua Ye muttered to himself.
“Directly using Reishi to crush humans is a little too effective.”
A bead of cold sweat rolled down Kaido’s forehead.
He stared at the man in front of him—shorter than he was and younger-looking as well—while enormous waves rose inside his heart.
He hadn’t seen anything happen.
His Observation Haki had only barely sensed it.
The instant he noticed something strange, the surrounding atmosphere itself seemed to become an invisible giant hand that crushed every one of those pirates to pieces.
Kaido couldn’t care less about their deaths.
Pirates on the sea were more numerous than stray dogs on the roadside.
What bothered him was the man standing in front of him.
He couldn’t figure out Hua Ye’s purpose.
Had this guy actually stepped in on his behalf?
For a moment, Kaido had no idea what expression he was supposed to make.
Hua Ye raised one arm.
Blue-green, branch-like patterns flowed across its surface.
He flexed his fingers once, then slowly clenched his fist.
Kaido’s pupils contracted sharply.
Hua Ye took one large step forward and drove his fist straight into Kaido’s chest.
BOOM!
Kaido had no time to react.
His entire body shot backward hundreds of meters, smashing through building after building until a huge section of the street collapsed into ruins.
For a brief moment, everything was silent.
Then a roar thundered out of the dust.
“WORORORORORO!!”
Kaido burst from the enormous cloud of debris.
He didn’t ask why Hua Ye had attacked him.
In the world of pirates, fights rarely needed a reason.
The moment someone chose to sail these seas, it meant they had tied their head to their belt.
One day, when the pants came off, the head might simply fall with them.
Kaido leapt high into the air.
For an instant, he became a tiny black speck against the sun before crashing down like a meteor.
Hua Ye didn’t move from where he stood.
He didn’t even raise his sword.
He merely lifted one hand.
BOOM!
Kaido brought his enormous kanabo down with thunderous force and smashed it directly against Hua Ye’s palm.
The instant they made contact, Kaido’s expression changed dramatically.
He couldn’t move him.
Not even slightly.
Hua Ye was simply standing there with one hand raised, yet he had caught Kaido’s fully charged strike as though it were nothing.
Kaido’s eyes widened in disbelief.
“How is that possible…?
How can the difference be this huge?!
Don’t screw with me!”
His anger immediately exploded.
Dense, dangerous Armament Haki wrapped around his kanabo as he unleashed several more savage blows in succession.
Every strike carried enough force to split a mountain and shatter steel.
At that moment, Kaido looked almost demonic.
Yet the raw ferocity of his attacks also gave him the appearance of a wrathful guardian deity.
Hua Ye loosely held his sword in one hand while blocking every strike with the palm of the other.
There was no sophisticated technique to it.
No delicate skill.
He was simply using brute force to cancel out brute force.
Kaido lost track of how many times he swung.
The surrounding area became unrecognizable.
The earth cracked apart and the streets were reduced to ruins.
Throughout the exchange, Kaido continuously searched for a weakness.
Eventually, he noticed something.
A layer of blue-green, branch-like patterns remained visible across Hua Ye’s body.
Every time Kaido’s attack landed, those strange markings lit up.
“What the hell is that?!” Kaido shouted.
“Haki?
I’ve never seen Haki like that!
Armament is supposed to be invisible armor!”
“Blut,” Hua Ye answered calmly.
Kaido visibly froze.
Of course he didn’t understand the term.
It belonged to an entirely new and unknown system of power, completely separate from Haki.
Hua Ye suddenly moved.
In a blur of shifting steps, he slipped away from the descending kanabo.
He raised his fist.
Light gathered around it.
The next instant, Kaido took the blow head-on.
His heavily muscled abdomen caved inward.
Kaido’s head snapped back and a huge mouthful of blood erupted into the air, scattering downward like rain.
The blood fell toward Hua Ye.
But it never actually touched him.
There was an almost imperceptible gap between the blood and his clothes, yet that tiny distance might as well have been endless.
It was as though Hua Ye wore a completely transparent waterproof layer.
The blood slid down through the air along the outline of his clothes without wetting them in the slightest.
Then, for the first time in his fight with Kaido, Hua Ye used his sword.
The radiant sacred blade swept upward from below.
It was like a master painter dragging the tip of a brush across Kaido’s body, leaving behind a broad stroke of indigo light.
SHNK—
For an instant, time seemed to stop.
Kaido’s mouth hung open.
A thin line appeared at his side and extended diagonally all the way to his left shoulder.
Then the wound suddenly split wide.
Blood erupted from the horrific gash like a fountain.
It surged outward as though all the blood inside Kaido’s body had found a single opening and was fighting to escape through it.
That one slash had nearly cut Kaido’s body apart on a diagonal.
Even his massive iron kanabo had been severed along with him.
“Kaido…”
Hua Ye’s lips moved as he began to say something.
But a much louder voice drowned him out.
“KAIDO!!!!”
An enraged roar shook the entire area.
And beneath the anger, if one listened carefully, there was even a trace of concern.
The next instant, fire rained down from the sky.
BOOM!
Flames and explosions swallowed Hua Ye whole.
The blaze roared like thunder as wave after wave of fire surged across the battlefield without pause.
“Kaido!
You little brat, are you still alive?!”
Charlotte Linlin swept Kaido into her arms.
The bleeding from his wound had slowed considerably.
Then again, perhaps that was simply because he’d already lost so much blood.
Kaido lay in Linlin’s embrace, sucking air through his teeth as he struggled to breathe.
Linlin looked at the horrific wound running across the front of his body and ground her teeth in fury.
She had called Kaido over earlier because she needed him for something, but the bastard had taken forever to show up.
Annoyed, she’d come searching for him herself.
Instead, she’d arrived just in time to see Hua Ye nearly cut him in half with one sword strike.
She turned toward the raging sea of flames.
With her Observation Haki, she could clearly sense a dark silhouette standing deep inside the inferno, swaying lightly like grass in the wind.
Before long, the flames burned out.
The earth beneath them had been scorched black by the intense heat.
At the center of that blackened ground stood a figure dressed in white.
Still spotless.
Still standing proudly upright.
A radiant sword rested in his hand.
“No need to get so angry, Linlin.”
Hua Ye remained completely calm beneath Charlotte Linlin’s furious glare.
“I was only playing around with Kaido.”
“Hua Ye…
you bastard!”
Charlotte Linlin ground out every word through clenched teeth.
“Just you wait!
One day, I’m going to kill you!”
With that, she carried Kaido away at high speed.
Hua Ye watched their retreating figures.
A faint ripple passed through his otherwise calm eyes.
Then he dismissed his sword and began walking back the way he’d come.