The First Half of the Grand Line, The Florian Triangle.
Thick, unyielding white fog rolled across the surface of the sea, completely obscuring the sky and the sun. The moment the Eclipse cut through the perimeter of the Florian Triangle, the ambient temperature dropped significantly, casting a dark chill across the deck.
"Achoo!"
Buggy, wrapped tightly within a heavy wool blanket, huddled near the base of the superstructures. "No matter how many times our navigation path crosses this quadrant, these mists give my joints the creeps. Hey, Enel, can't your current discharge a flash to scatter this fog?"
"Fool, how can localized lightning displace an atmospheric formation of this magnitude?"
Enel sat cross-legged atop his structural taiko drums, tossing a fresh apple in his palm before taking a casual, crisp bite. "Besides, our prow has already reached the coordinate mark."
The words had barely cleared his teeth when a massive, island-like dark shadow broke through the dense gray wall ahead. With the heavy, metallic groan of industrial chains dragging through iron housings, the monolithic gateway of Thriller Bark slowly descended, allowing the Eclipse to slide smoothly into the interior bay along with the current.
"Hehehehe! Hehehehahaha!"
A signature, high-pitched laugh, laced with a razor-sharp mocking edge, echoed across the empty stone ruins of the harbor.
The officers gathered along the bow rails, tracking the vector of the sound. Standing on the dilapidated parapet of the ancient castle fortress was a tall, imposing figure carrying a heavy black blade across his shoulder.
"Hey... my dynamic vision isn't tracking an error, is it?"
Sabo pushed up the brim of his top hat, his azure eyes widening with genuine astonishment as he scanned the figure. "The giant onion head... has actually shed his mass?"
Standing atop the stone wall was indeed Gekko Moriah.
But his physical morphology had undergone a complete re-engineering compared to the bloated layout Enel had flattened two months prior. The massive, balloon-like belly that had signified his years of absolute stagnation had vanished entirely. In its place was a dense, heavily defined musculature that looked as solid as reinforced masonry. He stood shirtless in the cold wind, holding the Black Blade Shusui in a two-handed grip, his silhouette projecting the long-lost, predatory authority of a veteran powerhouse from the Grand Line.
"Lord Moriah has been executing his regime like an absolute madman lately," Perona murmured, her burgundy parasol resting against her shoulder as she floated down from the upper air to touch her boots to the deck of the Eclipse. She blinked curiously at Chopper and the matte-black mechanical spider before directing a dry complaint toward Ace. "He forces his shadow to drive his muscles through sword forms every single hour. Even when his consciousness drops into sleep, his arms are still hacking at timber stakes. Dr. Hogback noted that if he maintains this rate of structural weight loss, his system will collapse from sheer physical exhaustion sooner or later."
"Hehehehe! Muzzle your mouth, Perona!"
Moriah launched his mass off the high wall, his heavy boots hitting the stone pavement directly before the Eclipse's boarding ramp with a solid concussion. He completely ignored the startled expressions of Sabo and Buggy, his narrow, yellow slits tracking Ace as the captain stepped out from the main cabins.
"Captain Ace... did your department deliver the asset you guaranteed through the channel?" Moriah's deep voice carried an undisguised, ravenous longing.
"Your patience appears remarkably thin," Ace noted, stepping down the ramp while carrying a sleek, temperature-regulated cooling case, which he casually flipped across the gap into Moriah's palms.
"A single dose rests inside the foam. This is the compound engineered to break past your biological limits. But before your system ingests the fluid, purge every foreign shadow from your core. The evolutionary process requires the systematic fracturing and reconstruction of your entire muscle and bone matrix. If your spiritual pathways are still choked with foreign consciousness when the trauma hits, your mind will undergo an immediate, total breakdown."
"Hehehe! As long as the metrics yield raw power, I possess enough common sense to clear the board!"
Moriah didn't waste a heartbeat in debate. He unhinged his jaw, a thick plume of black smoke erupting from his throat as more than a dozen pirate shadows he had harvested the previous afternoon were forcibly expelled, condensing into a tight, screaming orb of dark energy against the stones.
"Dr. Hogback! Is the caloric fuel prepared?!" Moriah roared toward the ruins.
"Fully aligned, Lord Moriah! Fos-fos-fos-fos!"
Within the open plaza, Dr. Hogback and a detail of chef zombies had already wheeled out a massive mountain of roasted Sea King steaks.
Moriah popped the seal of the glass tube, tilting his long neck back to drain the deep blue Limit Breaker serum in a single motion.
For the initial seconds, his internal systems remained perfectly flat.
Then, Moriah's pale, stitched features contorted into a graphic mask of agony. He dropped heavily onto both knees, his thick fingers clawing into the solid flagstones with such raw force that his nails left deep, bloody scores across the granite.
"Aaaaaaah!"
Even a veteran who had previously survived the unmitigated violence of Kaido's spikes couldn't contain a piercing, ragged shriek when subjected to the blinding, bone-shearing trauma of genetic re-alignment.
"Consume the tissue immediately, Lord Moriah! Do not let the cells stall!" Perona stamped her boots in a panic from the margin.
With bloodshot eyes, Moriah scrambled across the dirt toward the mountain of meat, his bare hands locking around the scalding hot roasts to stuff the fat past his teeth in massive, ravenous bites.
Chewing, swallowing, cellular repair, and structural reorganization. The sound of fracturing bone elements and rapid, predatory eating mingled across the courtyard for over two hours without intermission.
When the final massive bone was cast into the debris, Moriah lay flat amid the ruins, every pore of his pale skin discharging a dense plume of scorching white steam.
"How do the new metrics track, Onion Head?"
Enel, an apple balanced between his teeth, drifted off the rail of the Eclipse to hover directly over Moriah's crown.
"Phew..."
Moriah slowly let out a long, burning breath, his spine snapping straight as he stood up from the flagstones. He rolled his broad shoulders, a deep, muffled rumble vibrating from within his ribs. Looking down at his hands, his fingers closed into a tight, iron fist.
"Hehehehe! The throughput is absolute! It feels as if my biology has shifted back twenty winters!"
Moriah gripped the hilt of the Black Blade Shusui where it sat embedded in the dirt, his narrow eyes flaring with a violent, long-lost combat ambition. He lifted his chin to track the sovereign suspended in the air.
"Hey, you electric brat. The networks stated you sustained a decent flattening from Garp's knuckles back in the East Blue? My reserves are currently overflowing... come down to the stone and audit my transformation!"
"Huh?"
Enel lifted his brow ridge, casually spitting the apple core into the wind. "A common mortal who relies on shadow theater to mimic baseline speed believes that losing a few pounds of lard permits him to challenge the sky?"
"Let's see if your sovereign skin can bleed, boy!"
Whoosh!
Before the words could fully clear his throat, Moriah's reconfigured frame exploded forward, unleashing a velocity that was completely disproportionate to his towering size, instantly crossing the gap to enter Enel's immediate perimeter. Shusui cut a clean, blinding arc of black steel through the mist, tearing the vacuum as it slashed upward toward Enel's chest.
"The acceleration has decent weight. But..."
Enel didn't even bother to unseal the golden staff from his harness; he simply crossed his arms over his chest, his torso casually shifting a fraction of an inch to the left while suspended in mid-air.
Whir!
The midnight-black edge grazed past the absolute tip of Enel's nose. Having integrated the Limit Breaker serum and parsed the entries from Garp's combat gauntlet, Enel's Observation Haki had firmly touched the threshold of the future path; a linear, straightforward slash carried zero capacity to breach his guard.
"Don't get the impression that my movement terminates here!"
Moriah's opening stroke missed the mark, but he fluidly twisted his waist within the momentum, forcing the weight of Shusui to draw a tight circle in the empty air before converting the trajectory into a powerful, horizontal cleave.
Enel still refrained from dissolving his tissue into an elemental current. He kept his eyelids lowered, his spine moving with the weightless flexibility of a willow branch caught in a gale, executing an extreme backbend a millisecond before the iron could clear his coordinate.
"Yahahaha! Is your entire tactical playbook limited to dodging like a common monkey?!"
The exact frame Enel completed his evasion—his previous physical momentum exhausted and his secondary balance not yet locked—a cunning light flared within Moriah's narrow eyes.
"Doppelman: Shadow Thrust!"
The ink-black shadow stretching beneath Moriah's boots suddenly erupted like boiling asphalt, detaching itself from the stone to reconfigure into a semi-physical, pitch-black copy of the Warlord. The clone's hands instantly reconfigured into more than a dozen razor-sharp shadow spears, piercing through Enel's absolute blind spot from the rear at an exceptionally tricky, lethal angle.
"Oh? A synchronized deployment from the chassis and the shadow?"
Enel unsealed his eyes, a cold, arrogant smile touching his lips. Without turning his head, violent blue arcs of high-frequency static crackled across his right forearm.
Sizzle!
A fluid layer of ink-black Armament Haki encased his skin like an indestructible gauntlet of polished iron.
"Sovereign Judgment: Thunder Bone Strike!"
Enel whipped his shoulder around, driving his fist directly into the incoming shadow spears.
But the microsecond his knuckles were about to shatter the clone's mass:
"Shadow Warrior!" Moriah let out a wild, manic roar of laughter.
Whoosh!
The shadow entity standing before Enel's fist vanished instantly, replaced in the same frame by Moriah's physical body wielding the Great Grade Black Blade, Shusui.
Utilizing the absolute swap mechanics of the Shadow-Shadow Fruit, Moriah had executed an instantaneous, split-second transposition between his clone and his physical chassis. Enel's defensive counter-punch, calculated to obliterate a shadow, was now meeting Moriah's full-power, two-handed descent.
"Break down before my edge!!!"
Moriah locked his fingers around the leather wrap, the dormant, high-tier potential that had been neglected for thirteen winters finally surging back into alignment under the stimulation of the serum.
Buzz!
A faint, unyielding, yet exceptionally solid and pure midnight luster slowly slid over his large hands, coating the hilt of the legendary blade.
Advanced Armament Hardening!
Clang!!!
A deafening, metallic concussion resonated across the atrium ruins, accompanied by a violent, circular shockwave that sheared the stone slabs from the dirt. Enel's Haki-coated fist smashed directly into the flat of Shusui's edge, which was bound tightly within Moriah's newly restored armor.
The two outlaws locked their weight in a perilous, high-pressure stalemate in mid-air.
"Hehehehe! I can track the density! My Haki has finally returned to the bone!" Moriah ground his teeth, his narrow eyes alight with pure, unmitigated fanaticism.
"Hmph... an unrefined baseline at best," Enel snorted coldly, his arm muscles flexing as he prepared to spike his kinetic output to hurl the giant back onto the flagstones.
But at that exact millisecond, an exceptionally subtle, freezing vibration rose from beneath Enel's boots.
The shadow that had been left on the ground following the transposition had glided silently across the marble, shifting beneath Enel's position to instantly manifest as a massive, clawed shadow hand that clamped tightly around the sovereign's ankles.
"I've anchored your alignment, you arrogant child!"
Moriah grinned maliciously, the shadow hand flexing its mass to violently drag Enel out of the air, intending to slam his chassis directly into the granite floor.
Faced with this seamless, highly coordinated trap that blurred the boundary between reality and illusion, Enel finally abandoned his conversational posture.
"Thunder Sea!"
Boom!
A violent, blinding column of blue electricity erupted from his core. A microsecond before the shadow's inertia could disrupt his balance, Enel decisively dissolved his entire biology into pure current, the thermal discharge shattering the shadow hand into loose vapor as his form retreated dozens of meters into the upper air to restore his physical baseline.
"Hehehehe... well, look at that. Do the metrics warrant a secondary round?"
Moriah lowered Shusui, using the tip of the legendary blade to support his weight against the stones. Though he had failed to draw blood from the vanguard officer, forcing an outlaw who commanded top-tier Observation Haki and a supreme Logia to resort to an elemental retreat was absolute empirical verification of the hellish training he had endured within the mists.
High above the plaza, Enel re-knitted his physical form from the static, his lips turning down into an unhappy pucker as he adjusted his sashes.
"Your manipulation of that theater is slightly more clean than our previous meeting," Enel grunted, looking down. "Of course, had I deployed a wide-area lightning sweep to purge this entire stone floor, your large frame would have been reduced to charred meat an hour ago."
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