Seeing the opening chaos, Ace wasted no more time. Flames erupted from his boots as he vaulted into the sky, charting a direct flight vector toward Onigashima. Below him, the displaced local citizens filled the ruined streets with cries of distress and mourning.
Luffy, breathing in heavy, ragged gasps, slowly forced his legs forward to close the distance toward the crater where Kaido had crashed.
Suddenly, a series of rapid, thunderous footsteps echoed from behind the smoke. A massive detachment of the Beast Pirates had breached the perimeter, led by one of the absolute pillars of the Governor-General's command structure—Jack the Drought, Lead Performer of the Three Disasters! Behind him, dozens of elite infantrymen glared murderously at Luffy's exhausted frame.
"Kaido-san!" Jack barked, his eyes widening as he processed the visual data of the collapsed dragon. Without a second of latency, his muscles tensed to launch a lethal offensive against Luffy.
"Hey, hey, hey... Disrupting the established parameters of a duel like that is a severe protocol violation," a calm voice drifted from the flank.
Drake stepped smoothly through the haze, cradling little Tama safely in one arm. Not a single pirate in the sector had registered how or when his spatial signature had mapped into the grid. Leveling a flat look at the vanguard, he noted, "The current board dictates a strict one-on-one scenario."
"Hmph! I couldn't care less about your ridiculous dueling rules! What absolute garbage," a loudmouthed subordinate from the rear sneered, bypassing Jack to bark at Drake. "You honestly calculate that a mere, unproven brat from the Worst Generation has the leverage to stand parallel to Kaido-san in a true duel?"
To the internal database of the Beast Pirates, their Governor-General was the undisputed strongest biological entity alive. The concept of a rookie pushing him to his limits was a severe error loop.
"Exactly! If our Lord hadn't been heavily intoxicated from high-grade sake, that little trash over there would have had his life signs permanently terminated within the first millisecond! Ahahaha!"
Clutching tightly against the fabric of Drake's formal collar, Tama's small hands trembled slightly as she whimpered, "Big brother..."
"Relax," Drake murmured softly, reaching up with a gentle hand to massage her head. "Their verbal output is about to drop to absolute zero."
Pivoting his gaze toward the roaring assembly, a sharp flash of brilliant crimson light erupted within his eyes.
Vrumm!
An immense, suffocating wave of pure spiritual pressure exploded from Drake's frame, instantly expanding to blanket the entire Beast Pirates detachment.
"Has no one ever downloaded the data into your processors that your volume metrics are incredibly irritating?" Drake's voice dropped to a freezing, detached pitch.
Conqueror's Haki!
Thud!Thud!Thunk-thud-thud...
Excluding Jack the Drought, who managed to anchor his stance, every single member of the Beast Pirates infantry collapsed like stringless puppets, their consciousness completely wiped from the grid.
"You!" Jack's pupils dilated to their limits as he violently thrust a finger toward Drake, his vocal cords gathering tension to unleash a roar.
"Shh..." Drake raised a single index finger to his lips, sharply cutting off his acoustic track. "Lower your volume. It would be highly unoptimized to trigger a panic response in the child."
Having delivered the restriction, Drake calmly raised his right hand and executed a sharp, downward pressing motion against the empty air.
BOOM!
Jack felt an anomalous, mountain-shattering weight suddenly manifest over his physical mass. His boots violently cracked the stone floor as his legs began sinking into the earth, thick webs of crimson blood vessels bursting across his eyes as his features contorted into a mangled mask of pure strain.
"Aaaaaagh...!" A primal, beast-like grunt tore from his throat as he fought the pressure.
CRACK...
Right at that microsecond, a sharp, fracturing resonance echoed from above Jack's spine. The transparent wall of compressed space he had deployed was beginning to form microscopic fissures under the Disaster's immense raw durability.
"Ahahaha! Your fancy trick lacks the necessary output parameters to contain me!" Sensing the baseline restriction beginning to yield, Jack let out a triumphant roar.
However...
Drake's right hand simply made a second, casual downward stroke. An unparalleled surge of crushing barometric force descended upon Jack's frame once more. A second spatial wall stacked perfectly atop the initial layer, doubling the mechanical compression metrics instantly.
BANG!
The acceleration was instantaneous. The exact millisecond the variables stacked, Jack's knees slammed violently into the dirt, his massive arms shaking as they scrambled to provide enough structural leverage to prevent a total collapse. A dark stream of blood leaked from the corners of his lips, verifying that his internal systems were rapidly approaching their critical limit.
"Just anchor your coordinates right there and watch the show," Drake said smoothly, walking over to settle himself calmly onto a nearby piece of debris with Tama. "My younger brother's duel permits zero interference from external assets."
He prepared to enjoy the unfolding spectacle while Jack remained locked in place, desperately burning through his stamina to survive the spatial weight.
"Drake-aniki... he looks..." Tama murmured, her eyes flicking toward Jack's agonizing posture with a hint of childhood sympathy.
"Shh... maintain a low volume and keep your sensors locked onto the main duel. Since your goal is to graduate into a true pirate, you must integrate this data: high-intensity conflicts of this scale will become a standardized lifestyle parameter moving forward. Claiming a seat upon the sea isn't an objective achieved through casual simulations."
Processing Drake's cold logic, Tama nodded frantically, re-calibrating her mindset. "I understand!" From that microsecond onward, she completely filtered out Jack's presence.
RUMBLE...
The earth shuddered violently as the massive, scaled nostrils of the Azure Dragon released a colossal blast of pressurized thermal air, generating a localized gale. The sheer scale of the biological titan left Tama entirely dazed. Every entity surrounding her coordinates was an absolute freak of nature, capable of reshaping the geography with a casual movement.
"Drake-aniki... will my system ever scale up to achieve a power metric parallel to theirs?" Tama asked, her voice filled with childhood awe.
Drake blinked, slightly surprised by the query, before a soft smile spread across his face. "Whether your metrics reach that peak is a calculation that belongs to no external entity. The algorithm depends entirely on your own willpower. If your internal logic dictates that you can achieve it, then you can!"
Casting his eyes over to Luffy, who had fully re-stabilized his combat stance, Drake felt a deep wave of reflection pass through his mind. This world was never lacking in dreamers, but those possessing the unyielding fortitude to systematically translate those dreams into reality were the true architects of the new era. Predicting how far an individual's trajectory could scale was an impossible calculation.
"Mmm! I will absolutely forge myself into an apex powerhouse who can stand proudly beside Ace-aniki!" Tama declared, tightly clenching her tiny fist with absolute resolve.
"Hahaha, maintain that configuration! I hold zero doubts you'll achieve the benchmark," Drake laughed.
"WORORORORORORO... Straw Hat Luffy!"
Kaido's gargantuan dragon frame began to rapidly compress, his cellular structure re-stabilizing back into his towering human form. His signature spiked club, the Hassaikai, materialized smoothly in his iron grip as his murderous glare locked onto Luffy.
"Where the hell is your brother Ace hiding? Tell him to compress his coordinates and face me! Your baseline attributes are entirely insufficient to challenge my throne!"
"Huh?!" Luffy barked, offering zero verbal concessions as his fists ignited with dark arcs of Advanced Conqueror's Haki. "A data deficit like that is something we verify through raw violence!"
BOOM!!!
His fist slammed head-on against the massive iron mass of the Hassaikai. The impact cleared any lingering traces of alcohol from the Governor-General's system; his sobriety was now absolute!
"HRAAH!" Kaido violently wrenched his hips, utilizing the massive leverage of his club to deflect Luffy's torque and blast him backward through the air.
"To think that an asset of your youth has successfully integrated Advanced Conqueror's Infusion into his combat files! Fascinating! However, if that represents the absolute ceiling of your operational output, you lack the leverage to shatter my regime!" With a thunderous roar, Kaido stepped into a high-velocity dash, swinging the Hassaikai through a lethal vertical arc aimed to split Luffy down the middle.
"Dah!" Luffy executed a mid-air pivot, threading through the trajectory of the club by a microscopic margin before driving a heavy heel strike square into Kaido's jaw.
BOOM!
The strike was layered with a dense coating of Conqueror's Infusion. Through the preceding exchanges, Luffy's combat algorithms had accurately computed that relying on conventional Armament Haki was mathematically useless against Kaido's anomalous durability. Only by infusing the raw power of supreme dominance could he hope to damage his internal structure.
Sure enough, following the concussive feedback of the kick, a thin trail of blood leaked across Kaido's cheek. However, running a diagnostic on the damage verified it was nothing more than a superficial, minor laceration.
"Brat, your execution is highly commendable!" Kaido bellowed, blinding trails of purple lightning beginning to arc and crackle across the spikes of his club. "Thunder Bagua!!"
Staring from his vantage point, Drake's eyes narrowed. His database held a comprehensive record of this specific technique. Within the original timeline of the world, Luffy had sustained catastrophic structural damage from this exact strike on multiple occasions, his system being knocked offline instantaneously.
Can Luffy successfully balance the equation this time?
Drake began gathering spatial energy within his palm; if the data indicated a fatal outcome, he would deploy his displacement loops to override the duel.
Facing the incoming apocalyptic mass, Luffy launched a direct counter-charge, the framing of the scene mirroring the historical files perfectly. However, what separated this microsecond from the past was that Luffy wasn't relying on the sluggish mass of Fourth Gear—he was utilizing the high-speed velocity loops of Second Gear!
The Hassaikai tore through the air like a localized meteor, its trajectory locked onto Luffy's skull.
Just as Drake calculated that history was on the verge of repeating itself, Luffy initiated a sub-second adjustment. Stamping his heel violently against the earth, he executed a radical micro-tilt, forcing his body to slip past the primary concussive path of the club.
The friction left a minor graze across his shoulder padding, but his internal structural integrity remained entirely uncompromised. Seizing the massive opening, Luffy drew his arm back and drove a maximum-output fist straight into the center of Kaido's abdomen.
BOOM!!!
The monumental kinetic wave swept outward, completely purging every piece of loose debris and dust across a massive radius!