The flaming slab of bedrock falling directly toward us weighed approximately the same as a fully loaded Marine dreadnought.
‘If I were a normal fourteen-year-old boy,’ my exhausted brain reasoned as the suffocating shadow of the falling mountain swallowed the ruined courtyard, ‘I would simply accept my fate.
I would close my eyes, embrace the sweet, permanent release from Garp’s cardio regimens, and let the kinetic impact turn me into a permanent structural addition to the pavement.’
But a tiny, phenomenally clumsy eleven-year-old girl was currently cowering behind my knees.
And for reasons my psychopathic, trauma-forged assassin’s mind still hadn’t fully processed, the idea of her getting squashed was entirely unacceptable.
My thumb pushed firmly against the iron tsuba of my katana.
The blade slid exactly one inch out of the black wooden scabbard.
The air around me instantly dropped by twenty degrees.
The suffocating, blood-red mist erupted from my pores, compressing entirely into that single, terrifying inch of exposed steel.
I didn’t swing wildly.
I didn’t yell a flashy technique name like the meatheads at Headquarters.
I just looked up at the falling mountain, raised my sheathed sword, and drew a lazy, horizontal line in the air directly above my head.
*Absolute Penetration.*
The conceptual weight of a million deaths didn’t care about the mass of the rock.
It didn’t care about the roaring flames, the gravitational pull, or the terminal velocity.
It simply declared a mathematical absolute: whatever touched the invisible edge of the blade was cleanly, irreversibly divided into two separate pieces.
The massive slab of bedrock hit the invisible arc of my swing and silently, perfectly split straight down the middle.
The two halves of the flaming mountain parted around us like water flowing around a stone in a stream.
They crashed into the pulverized cathedral ruins on our left and right with deafening, world-shaking force.
The ground violently buckled, throwing up a massive, blinding curtain of grey dust and ash, but the tiny ten-foot circle of earth where Tsuru, Gion, and I stood remained completely untouched.
I let out a slow, ragged breath, my cracked ribs screaming in fierce protest as I lowered my arms.
‘Threat neutralized,’ I calculated, ready to click the sword shut and immediately pass out on the nearest soft piece of rubble.
‘I have successfully performed a miracle that violates at least three laws of thermodynamics.
I deeply deserve a nap.’
But the Grand Line was never that accommodating to my schedule.
Through the thick, choking cloud of ash thrown up by the bisected mountain, shadows began to move.
A loud, heavy thud echoed across the courtyard, followed by another.
A detached squad of Shiki’s pirates, blown off one of the lower floating islands during Garp’s rampage, had survived their fall into the ruins.
There were about a dozen of them.
They were covered in soot, bleeding from the impact, but heavily armed and desperate.
“Look!” one of the pirates coughed, pointing a jagged, bloodstained cutlass through the thinning smoke.
“It’s a Marine Vice Admiral! Tsuru the Great Staff Officer! And she’s got a couple of brats with her!”
The pirate captain, a massive, scarred brute with a mechanical eye and a heavy flintlock pistol gripped in his fist, grinned a desperate, feral smile.
“Grab the little girl! If we use the kid as a hostage, the Vice Admiral won’t attack! It’s our only ticket off this rock!”
Tsuru’s eyes narrowed dangerously.
She stepped forward, her hands raising as the conceptual, cleansing aura of her Wash-Wash Fruit began to gather around her fingers.
She was entirely capable of handling a dozen exhausted pirates without breaking a sweat.
But I didn’t give her the chance.
The pirate captain made a fatal, unforgivable mathematical error.
He raised his heavy flintlock pistol, pulled the hammer back with a loud click, and aimed the black iron barrel directly at Gion.
My brain completely stopped working.
The scabbard was the cage.
The one-inch rule was the absolute limit.
One inch was enough to compress the killing intent, to bypass biological durability, to survive the monsters of this world without losing my grip on humanity and slipping into mindless slaughter.
But looking at the black muzzle of that pistol aimed at the shivering girl wearing my oversized jacket… the rules didn’t just break.
They incinerated.
‘He pointed a gun at my sister.’
The thought wasn’t a cold, calculated matrix of vulnerabilities.
It wasn’t an assessment of kinetic output.
It was a raw, entirely unhinged roar of protective, deeply human rage.
I didn’t draw the sword one inch.
My left hand gripped the scabbard, my right hand gripped the hilt, and I pulled the blade exactly sixteen inches out of the wood.
More than half of the cursed steel was exposed to the open air.
The reaction was apocalyptic.
The red mist didn’t just leak out of me; it exploded like a ruptured dam.
A suffocating, crushing dome of pure, concentrated malice expanded outward, instantly turning the air in the courtyard into a viscous, blood-red fluid.
The sky above us literally seemed to bleed.
The temperature plummeted so fast that thick white frost instantly formed on the shattered stone beneath my polished shoes.
Behind me, I heard Tsuru gasp, actively forcing her own formidable Haki outward just to shield Gion from the sheer, crushing psychological weight of my aura.
The charging pirates froze in their tracks.
The feral grin on the captain’s face melted into an expression of absolute, primal horror.
His mechanical eye whirred frantically, trying to process the data, but his biological eye was wide with the sudden, crushing realization that he had just aimed a gun at the physical manifestation of death itself.
“W-what is that…” one of the pirates whimpered, his cutlass slipping from his trembling fingers and clattering to the stone.
‘I am going to unmake them,’ my mind whispered.
Not the cold, administrative system.
Me.
‘I am going to erase them so thoroughly that their ancestors will feel it.
I am going to delete their geometry.’
I didn’t use *Soru*.
I didn’t need to close the distance.
I simply walked forward, my footsteps completely silent.
With more than half the blade exposed, the conceptual law of *Absolute Penetration* didn’t even require physical contact anymore.
It extended outward from the steel, a jagged, invisible distortion in the very fabric of the air.
I swung the half-drawn sword in a lazy, horizontal arc from thirty feet away.
I didn’t aim for their necks.
I didn’t aim for their hearts or their major arteries.
I just aimed at their general existence.
The dozen pirates simply ceased to be intact.
Their weapons, their armor, their bodies, and the solid bedrock they were standing on were cleanly, silently bisected.
The top halves of their bodies slid off their waists with a sickening, wet chorus of thuds.
The heavy flintlock pistol that had been pointed at Gion fell into two perfect, symmetrical pieces, the gunpowder spilling harmlessly onto the frost-covered ground.
I stood in the center of the massacre, the sixteen inches of exposed steel humming with a dark, satisfied resonance.
I stared at the bisected pirate captain.
‘He is dead,’ I calculated, the blinding rage slowly beginning to simmer down into cold logic. Read this novel at g.com for the best experience.
‘But his severed hand is still twitching near the trigger mechanism.
That is unacceptable.’
I raised the blade again, entirely prepared to dice the corpses into microscopic, harmless cubes, when a hand gently rested on my shoulder.
“Bogard. That is enough.”
Tsuru’s voice was perfectly calm, radiating that heavy, grandmotherly gravity.
The cleansing aura of her Devil Fruit washed over me, gently scrubbing the absolute malice from the air and pulling me back from the brink of psychotic frenzy.
I blinked.
The blinding, unhinged rage faded, instantly replaced by the crushing, agonizing reality of my cracked ribs and entirely depleted stamina.
The adrenaline crash hit me like a physical blow.
I forcefully clicked the sword shut.
*Clack.*
The red mist violently imploded, vanishing back into the scabbard.
The courtyard returned to its normal, ash-choked gloom, though the frost remained on the ground.
High above us, the sky gave one final, deafening shudder.
The clash of top-tiers abruptly ended.
Shiki the Golden Lion, apparently realizing that dropping islands on Garp only made the Marine punch harder, had decided to cut his losses.
A massive, golden burst of energy pushed Garp back, and the remaining ships of the pirate armada abruptly turned, fleeing into the storm clouds at top speed.
The battle of Eidolon was over.
I let out a long, pathetic wheeze, my knees finally buckling under the weight of my injuries.
I caught myself on the scabbard, using it as a makeshift cane to keep from collapsing entirely.
I slowly turned around to face Tsuru and Gion.
Gion was staring at me, her dark eyes as wide as dinner plates.
She was still clutching my oversized suit jacket tightly around her shoulders, entirely unhurt, though she looked like she had just witnessed a ghost commit a war crime.
Which, technically, she had.
“Are you unharmed?” I asked her, my voice returning to its normal, deadpan flatline.
Gion swallowed hard, looking at the bisected pirates, and then nodded slowly.
“Excellent,” I sighed, the last remaining trace of energy completely leaving my body.
I looked up at Vice Admiral Tsuru, who was watching me with a mixture of profound concern and deep tactical evaluation.
I had exposed entirely too much of the blade, and she knew exactly how dangerous that was.
“Vice Admiral,” I stated lazily, swaying slightly on my feet.
“I have successfully defended the asset. The asset is entirely safe. I am now going to pass out. If I wake up in the medical bay and my tailor has not been fully compensated for the destruction of this suit, I will be very upset.”
Before Tsuru could reply, my vision violently swam.
The exhaustion finally collected its toll.
I pitched forward, collapsing face-first into the ash and rubble, entirely asleep before I even hit the ground.
**Author’s Note** *Rubs eyes and finally finds the keyboard…* **Typing_In_My_Sleep** here!
Good news: I am officially awake (mostly), which means updates for this novel are officially back!
Also, while I was MIA, my sleep-deprived brain somehow cooked up a brand new story.
It is called **So I lost on the way to the grandline, so what?** (Yes, this is the Zoro System one I mentioned earlier).
Alright, my quota for being productive today is met.
Retreating back to my blankets for a nap.
Catch you in the chapters!