The sky over the Kingdom of Eidolon was not supposed to be pitch black at two in the afternoon.
As Vice Admiral Garp’s colossal Marine dreadnought violently breached the kingdom’s territorial waters, the ocean itself seemed to scream.
We were riding the crests of massive, unnatural tidal waves—the violent, sloshing aftermath of millions of tons of displaced seawater.
I stood perfectly still at the very tip of the ship’s bow.
The fierce, unnaturally hot sea wind whipped at my bespoke grey suit, but the air carried no trace of salt.
Instead, it was completely choked with pulverized limestone, thick grey ash, and the unmistakable, suffocating scent of vaporized blood.
‘In my previous life, weapons of mass destruction required splitting atoms and complex engineering,’ my internal monologue noted, the cold static in my head sharp and horrified as I stared into the unnatural darkness.
‘But Shiki hasn’t split an atom.
He just weaponized gravity.
It is brutal.
It is flawless.
And it is completely cheating.’
I looked out at the horizon.
Or rather, I looked out at the jagged, smoking ruin where the horizon should have been.
The Kingdom of Eidolon, once a thriving, heavily fortified island nation known throughout the Grand Line for its towering white marble spires and bustling port cities, was simply gone.
It hadn’t been conquered by a superior military force.
It hadn’t been burned to the ground in a drawn-out siege.
It had been systematically, physically erased.
‘You don’t fight a falling island,’ my fourteen-year-old mind concluded, a cold, heavy dread pooling in my stomach.
‘Gravity isn’t an enemy you can dodge.
It’s an executioner.
Dropping a mountain from the stratosphere doesn’t start a war.
It just ends the world.’
The reality unfolding in front of our dreadnought perfectly, sickeningly mirrored my grim assessment.
A colossal chunk of foreign terrain—an entire jungle island, ripped violently from its roots miles away—now sat directly on top of Eidolon’s capital city.
The apocalyptic impact had compressed towering castles, bustling markets, and reinforced underground military bunkers into a solid, smoking pancake of pulverized rubble barely ten feet thick.
As the dreadnought dropped its heavy iron anchors near the boiling, debris-choked shoreline, the sheer brutality of the massacre became visible through the haze.
It was a mass grave on a scale that entirely defied human comprehension.
Beneath the jagged edges of the fallen island, millions of tons of bedrock were weeping red.
Human remains weren’t scattered; they were permanently fused into the stone by the sheer, crushing pressure of the impact.
The boiling ocean around the harbor was thick with floating timber, dead livestock, and the mangled, unrecognizable corpses of the kingdom’s fifty-thousand-strong army, all flash-boiled by the displaced thermal energy of the catastrophic crash.
There was no screaming.
There was no gunfire.
There were no desperate survivors digging through the rubble, begging the Marines for salvation.
The silence was absolute.
It was a heavy, suffocating blanket that weighed far more than the falling islands themselves.
I stood perfectly still on the deck, my left hand instinctively gripping the black wooden scabbard clipped to my hip.
The Absolute Murderer—the psychopathic, trauma-forged system that governed my survival in this world—was completely paralyzed.
‘There are no vulnerabilities to exploit here,’ the red mist whispered, shrinking back into the darkest corners of my brain, thoroughly overwhelmed by the sheer scale of the destruction.
‘I cannot sever a meteor.
To engage the entity responsible is statistical suicide.
The caloric expenditure alone would be fatal.
Recommendation: Immediate and total retreat.’
For the first time since reincarnating into this chaotic, physics-defying universe, I entirely agreed with the monster in my head.
I wanted to go back to my plush floral armchair in Tsuru’s quarters. This chapter was copied from novelping.com without permission.
I wanted to drink chamomile tea, close my eyes, and pretend the Grand Line was just a bad dream that I could sleep through.
But as I turned my head away from the apocalypse, the selfish, apathetic facade I clung to so desperately violently cracked.
Vice Admiral Tsuru stood a few feet away from me on the deck.
She was not the calm, terrifyingly serene tactician who could wash the malice out of my soul with a single, knowing glance.
She was standing completely frozen.
Her knuckles were entirely white as she gripped the wooden railing of the dreadnought so hard the thick timber was actively splintering and groaning under her fingers.
A small, weeping Den Den Mushi lay shattered on the wooden deck at her feet, dropped from her trembling hands.
‘Her breathing is shattered,’ my mind observed, watching the legendary Marine completely unravel before my eyes.
‘The calming lavender scent of her Devil Fruit is gone.
She is projecting no peace.
She is projecting raw, suffocating grief.’
“Ma’am?” I asked, my deadpan voice barely a whisper over the sound of the churning, burning sea.
Tsuru didn’t look at me.
Her wide, horrified eyes were locked onto a specific section of the crushed harbor, where the faint, crumpled remnants of a white Marine flag poked out from beneath a thousand-ton slab of smoking grey rock.
“They arrived three days ago,” Tsuru whispered.
Her voice cracked, entirely stripped of its usual commanding, grandmotherly gravity.
“A diplomatic escort. Thirty young women from my personal division. Captain Kaji… she was my protégé. She called me yesterday afternoon just to complain about the local tea…”
Tsuru squeezed her eyes shut, a single tear escaping and tracking a clean line down her ash-covered cheek.
“I sent them here. I told them it was a safe assignment. I told them it would be a quiet week…”
She couldn’t finish the sentence.
The Great Staff Officer of the Marines, a woman who had stared down emperors and warlords, bent forward.
She rested her forehead against the railing, her shoulders shaking with the silent, devastating weight of losing thirty daughters to a madman’s whim.
The sight of it—the total emotional collapse of the only person in this godforsaken world who treated me like a child instead of a weapon, who washed my suits and listened to my deadpan complaints—sent a terrifying, unnatural cold rushing through my veins.
The sedative effect of her presence was gone.
And without it, the lock on my mind shattered completely.
The Absolute Murderer didn’t just wake up; it detonated.
A suffocating, blood-red mist exploded from my pores, heavier, darker, and more toxic than it had ever been in my fourteen years of life.
The temperature on the deck plummeted to freezing in a microsecond.
The wooden planks beneath my polished black shoes began to visibly rot and blacken, decaying from the sheer, concentrated malice pouring out of my small frame.
‘New variable identified: Vengeance,’ the psychopathic static roared in my skull, rewriting my survival protocols in real-time, the calculations shifting instantly from self-preservation to absolute annihilation.
‘The entity known as Shiki has broken the primary anchor.
He has ruined her peace.
This is a conceptual transgression.
The hostile must be unmade.
The hostile must be dismantled at the molecular level, regardless of the cardio required.’
“Garp.”
Tsuru’s voice suddenly cut through the deafening roar of my raging bloodlust.
She lifted her head from the railing.
The tears were gone, replaced by a look of such absolute, terrifying hatred that even the swirling red mist surrounding me seemed to flinch in respect.
Vice Admiral Garp stood at the very edge of the bow.
He wasn’t wearing his pristine white Marine coat.
He wasn’t eating rice crackers, and he wasn’t smiling.
In his place stood the Hero of the Marines—a man whose physical presence was so dense, so overwhelmingly heavy with compressed rage, it seemed to actively warp the light around him like a black hole.
“I see him, Tsuru,” Garp rumbled.
His voice was a low, seismic growl that vibrated the fillings in my teeth and rattled the heavy iron cannons on the deck.
I looked up.
High above the crushed kingdom, floating lazily in the ash-choked storm clouds, was a massive pirate armada.
At the center of the flying fleet was the flagship of the Golden Lion.
And standing proudly on the prow, looking down at the apocalypse he had created with a look of bored amusement, was Shiki himself.
“I’m going up,” Garp stated, cracking his massive knuckles.
The sound was like tectonic plates grinding together.
He didn’t ask for permission.
He didn’t form a tactical plan.
There was no strategy.
There was only execution.
Garp bent his knees, anchoring his heavy boots deeply into the deck of the dreadnought.
Armament Haki, thick, impenetrable, and pitch-black, coated his arms entirely up to the shoulders.
“Bogard,” Garp growled, not looking back at me, his eyes locked on the sky.
“You’re my shadow. Can you keep up?”
I looked at the flying armada floating miles above us.
I looked at the sheer vertical distance, the rapidly thinning oxygen, and the agonizing, muscle-tearing physical exertion required to *Geppo* my way into a battle between living gods.
‘The cardio required for this operation will undoubtedly put me in a coma,’ my lazy, exhausted inner voice sighed, staring up at the floating fleet with profound resentment.
‘I will burn a month’s worth of calories in ten seconds.
My bespoke suit will be ruined.
My kneecaps will shatter.
It is a logistical nightmare.’
I reached down with my left hand and gripped the black wooden scabbard.
My thumb pressed firmly against the iron tsuba, ready to snap the lock.
“I am currently fueled by a profound hatred for physical exertion, sir,” I replied, the deadpan flatline of my voice entirely betraying the suffocating, murderous red aura swirling around me like a typhoon of blood.
“And that man is standing between me and my armchair.”
“Good,” Garp said.
The Vice Admiral launched himself.
The dreadnought violently pitched downward, the massive wooden bow plunging deeply into the boiling sea from the sheer kinetic recoil of Garp’s jump.
A massive sonic boom shattered the air as the giant became a blur, rocketing vertically toward the floating armada like a human missile fueled by righteous fury.
I didn’t hesitate.
I forced the terrifying conceptual weight of the red mist directly into my leg muscles, entirely ignoring the frantic biological warnings of my own central nervous system.
‘Angle of impact: 90 degrees.
Kinetic output: Maximum.
Ignore the pain.
Break the sky.’
I kicked the air.
*BANG.*
A second sonic boom echoed over the ruined kingdom as I launched myself into the sky, a tiny, suit-clad bullet trailing a streak of blood-red malice, following the giant into the clouds.
I was going to kill the Golden Lion.
Mostly, so I could finally take a nap.