Enel’s reaction to the experiment had come faster than Kael had anticipated.
He’d read it from Upper Yard in the process of studying the stone—a check on the chakra of a deity, a sensory probe, roughly once every twenty minutes, whose chakra had, in this case, changed radically over the course of the day because it was now apparent to the god, for the first time since Kael had started reading him, that the man calling himself a god had been lying to himself.
The god had begun the day seated upon his throne.
The god had spent the rest of the morning and early afternoon observing his country from the peak of its observatory.
And, by the time the sun had set, the god had made his choice.
If there was something in his sky he couldn’t understand, then there was nothing in his sky he owned, and if there was no sky left a god could claim, then it was time to leave it.
The decision was to leave.
Kael knew the Ark Maxim even before he saw it; it had been building for some time, but Kael hadn’t realized what he’d been seeing until it was nearly complete—another check on the chakra at the borders of Upper Yard, and the realization that there was something here he hadn’t seen yet—and tonight it was ready.
It was a craft.
A great craft, the size of a small island, powered by Dials of every imaginable variety, built with the specific purpose of getting the man and his entourage up to the moon country that he’d spent years inventing in story and legend.
There was another reason why he had to build this craft.
In the process of launching it, the Ark Maxim would burn Skypiea to the ground.
It was not deliberate—insofar as he knew, anyway—that was merely an extra layer of cruelty on top of the cruelty of a deity abandoning his country.
But in the process of launching it, all of the Dials that comprised its power source would have to be discharged in order to provide the lift necessary to get it into the upper levels of the country’s sky.
All of Skypiea’s Dials; all of the Dials in Skypiean residences.
Each of those Dials, in the process of being discharged at once, would unleash their respective phenomenon into the sky.
And all of that at once would amount to—quick calculations through his chakra in the field—to something like a dozen storms going off all at the same instant, in a relatively compact area.
Skypiea wouldn’t survive.
Kael was already on his feet before the calculation finished.
He sent a chakra pulse to Robin—an urgent message she understood, a simple location signal, and an implicit request she always read correctly—and felt her respond back from Angel Island.
He sent a similar pulse to Luffy, who was asleep, as was his custom, in some part of Upper Yard, and felt his brother’s chakra respond with alertness at the news that there was something urgent happening.
And then the Ark Maxim took off from Upper Yard.
And Kael began working to stop it.
The job would be simple.
Across all of the country’s airspace, in the brief time before the Ark Maxim finished taking in power from its surroundings, redirect all of the discharges from the Ark away from it and onto the cloud sea.
And at the same time create sufficient pressure in the surrounding sky as to reverse the vacuum caused by the Ark’s pull, keeping the craft from ascending any higher and giving Luffy time to catch up to it.
Kael stepped into Sage Mode for the first time in weeks.
The orbs around him brightened.
The marks above his eyes shifted to their fully formed position.
Natural energy, lighter and faster than anything he’d ever harnessed before, was drawn into his system, apparently sensing the need in the situation.
He drew a breath.
Then he started.
Step one of the process—the redirection—required that he extend his awareness over the entire country’s airspace and simultaneously make contact with each of the millions of Dials in it.
It would take concentration and a level of sensitivity he’d only briefly approached, before.
But it wasn’t beyond him, and the Dials, when he made contact, responded almost instinctively as he had suspected—they seemed to know who he was, as if they had been waiting for the chance.
Instead of discharging their powers upward, the Dials discharged sideways, and downward, into the soft belly of Skypiea’s atmosphere.
The sky lit up.
Wind moved against itself. This chapter is updated first at g.com.
Thunder boomed without origin.
Skypiean citizens in their homes heard the thunder and held each other, not understanding how they were being saved.
The next step—the pressure differential—was more difficult.
The engine of the Ark was sized for the craft; he would have to create a greater force within the sky to reverse the pull.
He did so by producing a wind.
Not just any wind—the orbs around him were charged with nine of the Truth-Seeking Orbs Kael carried, and the resulting wind had chakra to carry it as far as necessary, enough to match the pull of the Ark itself and reverse its effect.
The result was the Ark hanging suspended in the air above Upper Yard, neither rising nor falling.
The last step—holding it and giving Luffy a chance to board the ship—he was already executing.
Kael held the Ark in place.
He held it.
He held it.
Luffy got to the outer shell of the Ark.
Kael could sense his progress.
Luffy worked his way inside and along the ship, fending off any defense mechanisms Enel had left aboard the vessel with his unique approach.
Kael could feel Luffy reaching the interior of the Ark, feeling him work his way through the structure and disable the automated traps Enel had installed.
Finally, in the seventh minute, Kael sensed the reaction.
Luffy had reached the Ark, and whatever defenses had been present were now gone, and Enel had noticed, and Kael knew—he’d felt it that morning, in response to the demonstration—how the chakra of this man who thought he was a deity reacted to a challenge to his beliefs.
He’d seen the hinge, earlier.
Now, he’d feel the hinge turn the other way.
Enel committed.
The ensuing conflict was, in Kael’s sense, the battle he’d missed.
A duel between Luffy and Enel, the latter throwing the former into the air on the deck of the Ark Maxim a thousand feet above the surface of Upper Yard.
The lightning of the god, unleashed from his body at full capacity.
Luffy’s form, Luffy’s strange body, which Kael had recognized from the moment they had met to be made of material unaffected by electrical shocks, receiving the discharge and returning it to its sender.
It was clear from what Kael could sense that the battle was imbalanced in a way Enel would have no way of comprehending; Enel had been informed earlier in the day that his power was not the most formidable force in his country’s airspace.
Luffy had taken that knowledge and informed Enel again, in the language of violence, that he had been very, very wrong for a very long time.
Kael held the Ark.
He held it.
He held it.
Luffy struck Enel.
He could feel it.
The blow was a physical presence in the chakra field, and in its wake, Kael could detect that the chakra of Enel was that of a man who was unconscious.
Kael held the Ark for thirty more seconds.
Luffy had managed to drag Enel back to the outside of the ship and climb back down it.
Kael did so, and the Ark descended smoothly, slowly settling into the cloud sea of Skypiea below.
It landed.
Luffy and Enel landed.
And Kael stepped down from his hill above the white road.
He sat down on the ground, exhausted.
He still maintained his Sage Mode, but the effort involved in sustaining it at such a level threatened to exhaust him even further; as much as possible, he allowed it to ebb, letting it gradually fade away as the orbs slowed in rotation.
The marks above his eyes disappeared.
Robin arrived where she had sensed he would, sitting down beside him.
He accepted a flask of water.
He drank it.
She handed a piece of dried fruit to him, which he accepted.
“Did Luffy land okay?”
“He did.
He’s eating something.”
“That’s just like him.”
“The country is intact.”
“You held the sky.”
“I just held a ship in the sky for a little while.
I wouldn’t make it sound more impressive than it is.”
“You did it.”
She wasn’t demanding praise.
She gave him room.
He drank the last of the water.
The grass underneath him was cool.
The cloud sea was fading into evening colors.
He rested his head on a rock, finally relaxing after all the tension of the battle had worn off.
“There’s a Poneglyph.”
In Shandora, the deeper ruins.
Anytime you can.
“Tomorrow.”
She stayed until the stars emerged overhead.
They were different stars here, and he didn’t try to read them.
He let them be what they were.
If the wind takes ye, fifty chapters ahead wait in the captain’s hold for five gold a month, Same Username as here, fair winds.