Chapter 118: The Weight of an Era

The chaotic shrieks of the Meeseeks faded into the periphery. The blue creatures violently dragged the remaining mutant beasts and pirate mercenaries into the outer corridors, leaving the shattered central courtyard completely isolated.

Only two men remained.

Golden Lion Shiki descended from the high balcony. He floated effortlessly through the air, the massive steering wheel lodged in his skull glinting in the artificial light. His golden mane billowed wildly around him.

He had no legs. From the knees down, his limbs had been brutally amputated and replaced by his legendary Meito swords, Oto and Kogarashi. The gleaming, razor-sharp blades served as his prosthetics, tapping lightly against the cracked stone plaza as he touched down.

The instant the blades made contact with the earth, the world tilted.

Using the power of the Float-Float Fruit, Shiki commanded the very bedrock of the island. The stone floor fractured, ripping upward to become a jagged, ninety-degree wall. Ace stumbled, his boots sliding across the shifting masonry as the plaza tore itself apart, throwing the young pirate into a chaotic free-fall toward the open sky.

Shiki lifted his right leg, pointing the tip of Oto forward like an executioner’s spear.

Ace didn’t wait to find his footing. He ignited his hands, pointing both index fingers like dual pistols as he plummeted.

“Higan!”

A rapid, blinding barrage of concentrated fire bullets tore across the courtyard, melting the air in their wake. Shiki simply floated forward in a smooth, frictionless glide, his body twisting in mid-air. He spun, his sword-legs becoming a deadly, blurring propeller. The legendary blades effortlessly swatted the superheated bullets out of the air, deflecting the fireballs into the surrounding architecture where they detonated like mortar shells.

Ace used the recoil of his own attacks to stabilize himself in the fractured airspace. He channeled flames into his boots, creating dual thrusters that launched him off a floating slab of bedrock. He rocketed forward in a zig-zag trajectory, leaving trails of black smoke to obscure his movements.

Crossing his fingers, Ace unleashed a glowing, cross-shaped beam of intensely concentrated fire.

“Jujika!”

The searing cross hurtled toward Shiki’s chest. The Golden Lion simply leaned back in the air, bringing his left knee up. He whipped his leg forward in a devastating, high-speed kick.

“Zanpa!”

A colossal, crescent-shaped shockwave of compressed air and Haki erupted from the blade of Kogarashi. The invisible slash tore through the center of the cross, cleanly cleaving the roaring plasma in half. The divided flames parted around the Golden Lion, incinerating the stone pillars behind him.

Through the parting flames, Ace materialized. He had used the Jujika as a smokescreen, closing the distance to point-blank range. His right arm was pulled back, his fist erupting into a roaring, compressed inferno that dwarfed his entire body.

“Hiken!”

The colossal fist of fire exploded forward. The sheer thermal expansion of the attack created a localized vacuum, sucking the oxygen out of the courtyard.

Shiki without flinching just inverted his body in mid-air, bringing both sword-legs up to cross them defensively. He laced the steel of his prosthetics with dense, pitch-black Armament Haki. The Hiken slammed into the crossed blades. The impact sent a devastating shockwave rippling outward, shattering the windows of the fortress and vaporizing the floating debris beneath them.

But the flames could not bypass Shiki’s guard. The veteran pirate pushed his legs outward, violently dispersing the Fire Fist into a harmless wave of embers.

Before Ace could recover his stance, Shiki went on the offensive.

Floating horizontally, Shiki spun like a top, unleashing a rapid flurry of flying sword slashes with his legs. Massive arcs of sharp, pressurized air bombarded Ace. The young Logia user desperately twisted his torso, transforming his upper body into intangible flames. The slashes passed harmlessly through his fiery abdomen and shoulders, but the sheer kinetic force of the air pressure continuously pushed him backward, preventing him from anchoring himself.

Ace condensed his flames, solidifying in mid-air. He spun, hurling a flurry of glowing green phosphorescent lights that rapidly surrounded Shiki.

“Hotarubi!”

The fireflies swarmed the Golden Lion. Ace clenched his fist.

“Hidaruma!”

The lights detonated simultaneously, creating a chained, spherical explosion that completely engulfed Shiki in a dome of volatile fire.

For a split second, the sky was filled with nothing but roaring flames. Then, a massive shockwave of Conqueror’s Haki pulsed outward from the center of the blast. The sheer pressure of Shiki’s will instantly snuffed out the explosion, scattering the fire like dead leaves in a hurricane.

Shiki shot out of the smoke, crossing the distance in a fraction of a second.

Ace brought both flaming arms up in a cross-guard, reinforcing his forearms with his own burgeoning Armament Haki.

Shiki swung his right leg. The flat side of Oto, coated entirely in black Haki, crashed into Ace’s forearms. The physical force behind the blow was monstrous. Ace’s Haki buckled under the weight of a man who used to clash with Roger and Whitebeard. The impact sent Ace rocketing backward, his boots carving deep, molten trenches into a floating slab of bedrock until he slammed back-first into a heavy iron gate.

“You rely too much on your fruit, boy!” Shiki barked, his voice echoing with absolute authority.

Shiki didn’t let up. He soared forward, flipping in the air to deliver a devastating downward axe-kick.

Ace pushed off the dented iron gate, narrowly avoiding the strike. Kogarashi sliced through the iron and the bedrock beneath it as if they were made of paper, splitting a fifty-ton chunk of the island perfectly in two.

Ace summoned two long, crackling lances of white-hot, highly pressurized fire into his hands.

“Shinka: Shiranui!”

He hurled the lances at the Golden Lion’s back. Shiki didn’t even turn around. He merely tapped the floating chunks of severed bedrock with his blades. Under his command, the massive stones shifted instantly, intercepting the fire lances. The resulting explosion of kinetic force and thermal energy showered the plaza in molten rock.

Ace didn’t wait for the smoke to clear. He leaped from floating boulder to floating boulder, using precise bursts of fire from his heels to navigate the chaotic, fractured airspace. He closed in on Shiki from above, his hands coated in swirling, blue-white plasma, the absolute hottest extreme of his Devil Fruit.

Shiki looked up, his eyes narrowing. He flicked his leg, and a ten-ton chunk of marble flooring shot upward, intercepting Ace’s path.

Ace spun in mid-air, becoming a wheel of fire that cut cleanly through the marble, splitting it into molten halves. He broke through the debris, delivering a devastating, flaming axe-kick of his own, aimed directly at Shiki’s skull.

Shiki raised Kogarashi to block, but the extreme, localized heat of the blue plasma began to singe the golden fabric of his coat. It was a minor scratch, a superficial burn, but it was a blatant mark of disrespect from a rookie.

Shiki’s expression turned ugly.

As Ace’s leg bounced off the Haki-coated blade, leaving him suspended in the air for a microsecond, Shiki pivoted. He channeled a sickening amount of Armament Haki into the flat, blunt side of his left sword-leg. With a terrifying burst of speed, Shiki delivered a spinning roundhouse kick directly into Ace’s ribs.

The strike bypassed the Logia intangibility completely. The blunt-force impact of the Haki-laced steel acted like a colossal iron bat. The sickening, hollow crack of multiple ribs shattering echoed sharply over the roar of the fire.

Ace’s eyes rolled back. The breath was violently forced from his lungs in a spray of blood. He was launched horizontally like a cannonball, crashing violently through three thick stone archways, tearing through an armory, and finally burying himself deep into the rubble of a collapsed guard tower.

Shiki slowly drifted down, floating inches above the ground, his face an emotionless mask.

He raised both of his sword-legs high, performing a sweeping, upward kick toward the heavens. The Float-Float fruit’s power screamed as it was pushed to its absolute breaking point.

“Shi Shishi Odoshi.”

The remaining bedrock of the plaza, the heavy iron cannons, the shattered castle walls, and the massive volume of water from the island’s severed aqueducts all violently ripped themselves free from the earth. Under Shiki’s absolute command, the thousands of tons of raw terrestrial matter twisted and churned high in the sky.

The debris molded itself into three colossal, roaring lion heads, each the size of a galleon, made of dense earth and swirling water.

Deep in the rubble of the guard tower, Ace staggered to his feet. He clutched his bleeding, caved-in side, coughing up a mouthful of blood. He looked up through the collapsed roof just as the sky went entirely dark.

The massive terrestrial lions plummeted.

Ace gritted his teeth, forcing his broken body to move. He threw his arms outward in a wide circle.

“Enjomo!”

A massive ring of fire expanded outward to act as a barrier, followed immediately by a colossal upward pillar of roaring flames to incinerate the falling attack.

But Shiki was a master tactician. The immense volume of water mixed into the stone lions instantly reacted to the extreme heat. A massive, suffocating cloud of thick steam exploded outward, instantly smothering Ace’s flames and completely cutting off the oxygen necessary for combustion.

The sheer, multiplied mass of the Golden Lion’s attack hit Ace.

The three massive heads crashed down simultaneously. The impact was apocalyptic. The entire floating fortress violently shuddered, dropping a dozen feet in altitude just from the sheer kinetic transfer. The guard tower was utterly obliterated, burying the young pirate under a literal mountain of crushed stone, mud, warped iron, and boiling water.

Complete silence fell over the ruined western wing of the fortress.

The steam slowly cleared, rolling over the edge of the floating island into the open sky. What remained was a colossal, tightly compacted mound of debris. Shiki floated above it for a moment, his Observation Haki scanning the rubble.

Nothing. Not a flicker of movement. Not a heartbeat.

Shiki snorted, a plume of cigar smoke escaping his lips. He turned his back on the rubble, preparing to float toward the inner laboratories to check on Dr. Indigo’s progress.

A deep, low rumble vibrated through the earth beneath him.

Shiki paused, glancing back over his shoulder.

Deep within the center of the mountain of debris, a faint, unnatural red glow appeared. It was small at first, like a dying ember. But within seconds, the mud atop the pile began to boil away. The crushed stone and iron began to bubble, turning into glowing orange slag, and then rapidly smoothing out into liquid glass.

The heat radiating from the center of the pile was astronomical. It was pure, unadulterated thermal rage.

With a concussive, deafening boom, a burst of pure, white-hot plasma shattered the mountain from the inside out. Thousands of tons of debris were violently blown away, raining down across the courtyard as molten shards of glass and twisted, glowing metal.

Heavy, ragged footsteps crunched against the scorched earth.

Ace stepped out of the smoldering crater.

His orange hat was gone, incinerated in the blast. His shirt had been completely burned away, revealing a torso painted in soot, sweat, and blood. Deep, bleeding lacerations crisscrossed his arms from Shiki’s Haki-laced shockwaves, and a massive, dark purple contusion covered the entire left side of his ribcage where the bones had shattered. He was panting heavily, his chest heaving as his body struggled to process the oxygen it had been denied.

He was pushed to his absolute physical limits against a monster of the old era. He was outmatched in technique, eclipsed in battle experience, and overpowered in Haki.

But as Ace slowly looked up at the Golden Lion, wiping a thick smear of blood from his chin, his eyes weren’t dull. They were burning with an intensity that rivaled the plasma coating his skin.

A fierce, borderline insane grin slowly spread across Ace’s bruised face. He planted his boots into the molten glass, ignoring the searing heat that melted his rubber soles.

His fists ignited. The flames did not roar, they hummed with a quiet heat, blindingly white heat. He locked eyes with the legend of the old era, his posture screaming a stubborn, unbreakable refusal to stay down.