Chapter 50: The Vanguard's Roar

The moment Victor and Aokiji launched themselves off the splintering flagship and plummeted toward the freezing sea, the collective atmosphere on the Marine deck shifted.

The veteran Vice Admirals and the hundreds of enlisted men stationed across the Buster Call fleet assumed the same thing: with the Beastmaster occupied by their highest military power, his crew was left completely exposed.

They thought it was time to slaughter the stragglers.

They couldn’t have been more wrong.

High above the chaotic bay, safely aboard the hovering, heavily armored Titan’s Glory, Perona sat cross-legged on the railing.

Her physical body was perfectly safe, completely out of range of the Marine artillery.

Her glowing, translucent astral projection, however, was floating right in the middle of the Marine flagship.

“They think they have us surrounded,” Perona giggled, twirling her spectral parasol.

Her eyes widened into a manic, wicked stare.

“How adorable!

Get them, my darlings!”

A massive, wailing tide of Negative Hollows erupted from her astral form, sweeping across the fleet like a localized plague.

Hundreds of low-level Marines charging with rifles raised were instantly phased through.

Their weapons clattered to the wooden decks as the soldiers dropped to their knees, their will to live entirely eradicated.

“I’m less than sea scum…” one Marine sobbed, face-planting into a barrel.

“I wish a seagull would use me as a toilet.”

“Toku Hollows!

Detonate!” Perona commanded.

Scores of miniature ghosts latched onto the heavy cannons and powder kegs of the adjacent ships.

The resulting concussive explosions shattered the artillery lines, blowing massive holes into the hulls and sending Marine gunners flying into the freezing water.

While Perona broke their morale, Victor’s Jade Clones broke their ships.

The massive, obsidian-jade gorilla, leaped off the flagship’s riggings with a deafening roar.

It landed dead center on the deck of a neighboring heavy-class battleship.

Several Marines rushed it with pikes, but the beast simply slammed its hardened fists into the wood.

Its Gravity Well activated at ten times the normal planetary pressure.

The sheer gravitational force instantly crushed the Marines to the floor, buckling the reinforced hull of the battleship until the timber snapped like dry twigs, dragging the vessel down into the sea.

Above the screaming, The Silken Widow-Maker, scuttled through the high riggings of the flagship.

Utilizing its Advanced Observation Haki, it saw the trajectories of incoming cannonballs seconds before they fired.

It spun invisible, Haki-coated razor-wire between the masts.

As the fleet tried to fire upon their own flagship to purge the pirates, the cannonballs hit the invisible web and were instantly, silently diced into harmless metal cubes.

On the quarterdeck, Vice Admiral Dalmatian moved like a blur.

Utilizing his canine Zoan devil fruit and the Rokushiki technique Soru, he bypassed the chaos of the ghosts and the beasts entirely, charging straight for Nico Robin.

Dalmatian was a seasoned veteran.

He knew the intelligence files on the Demon Child.

She was an assassin who used her Hana Hana no Mi to clutch and snap necks from a distance.

Her physical body was the weak point.

If he closed the gap, she would be defenseless.

“Justice catches up to everyone, Nico Robin!” Dalmatian barked, thrusting a lethal, Haki-hardened Shigan (Finger Pistol) directly at her chest.

Robin didn’t flinch.

She didn’t retreat.

She didn’t even bother crossing her arms to sprout limbs on his body.

Inside her chest, her two synchronized hearts pumped a massive, hyper-accelerated surge of adrenaline through her biologically upgraded chimera system.

Her eyes narrowed into a predatory slit.

With a smooth, terrifying snikt, five razor-sharp, obsidian-black panther claws extended from her nailbeds.

She swatted Dalmatian’s Shigan aside with her bare hand.

The Vice Admiral’s eyes bugged out of his skull as his Haki-coated finger met an immovable, terrifying physical resistance.

Before he could even process that the Archaeologist possessed superhuman strength, Robin stepped smoothly into his guard.

“I am done running,” Robin whispered, her voice laced with absolute, chilling calm.

She sprouted two extra arms directly onto Dalmatian’s broad shoulders, gripping his collar tightly to lock his incredibly fast body in place.

With her primary right hand, she drove her panther claws deep into the meat of his shoulder.

A highly potent, modified neurotoxin—generated directly from her newly engineered biology—pumped from the keratin grooves of her claws straight into his bloodstream.

Dalmatian let out a strangled gasp.

The paralyzing venom acted in a fraction of a second.

His canine transformation retracted involuntarily.

His eyes rolled back into his head, and the veteran Vice Admiral collapsed at her boots, foaming at the mouth and completely immobilized.

Robin stood over him, the blood dripping from her claws, looking every bit the apex predator she had become.

On the main deck, the air was thick with gunpowder and frost.

A squad of five elite Marine Headquarters Rear Admirals had managed to corner the towering skeleton.

Recognizing Brook’s stance and the cane-sword in his hand, they drew their own blades, surrounding him in a coordinated, lethal ring.

“Take his head!

Turn him to dust!” the lead Rear Admiral shouted.

Brook didn’t raise his guard.

He stood perfectly still, the sea breeze ruffling his afro.

“For fifty years,” Brook spoke, his hollow voice carrying a profound, quiet weight.

“I sailed the pitch-black fog of the Florian Triangle completely alone.

I had no crew.

I had no music.

All I had was the memory of my failures, and my sword.

I spent half a century shadow-boxing the ghosts of my past.”

He slowly lowered his posture, gripping the hilt of his cane-sword.

“Now, I fight for a Captain who marched into hell to keep a promise to me.

My blade has never been sharper.”

The Rear Admirals lunged simultaneously.

Brook moved so fast he seemed to simply cease existing in his current physical space.

He didn’t just step; he glided, weightless, a phantom passing through solid matter.

“Hanauta Sancho: Yahazu Giri,” Brook hummed softly.

He reappeared ten paces behind the squad, gently crouching.

He didn’t just cut their physical bodies; he channeled the terrifying, absolute freezing chills of the Underworld directly through his soul and into his steel.

Brook slowly pushed his blade back into his cane-sheath.

Click.

The five Rear Admirals froze mid-stride.

Their swords shattered into dozens of brittle pieces.

A thick layer of spectral, underworld frost erupted across their chests, and they collapsed to the deck in perfect unison, completely incapacitated.

“Yohohoho,” Brook laughed quietly, tipping his top hat to the fallen men.

The heaviest resistance, however, was anchored dead center on the flagship.

Gammamon was holding the line.

The little white Digimon was surrounded by shattered wood and craters, fiercely brawling against two of the most lethal combatants on the ship: Vice Admiral Momonga and the multi-armed Vice Admiral Onigumo.

“Die, you stupid pet!” Onigumo snarled.

His hair had morphed into massive spider-appendages, gripping six additional sabers.

He unleashed a furious flurry of eight flying slashes.

Gammamon ducked, weaving through the lethal net of blades.

A stray slash grazed his cheek, leaving a thin line of data-like soot, but the Vanguard didn’t wince.

Instead, a ferocious, utterly feral grin spread across his face.

I need more power, Gammamon thought, his fighting spirit igniting like a roaring furnace in his chest.

Far below them, standing on the frozen surface of the ocean in the middle of a deathmatch with Admiral Aokiji, the Digivice strapped like a watch to Victor’s wrist suddenly flared with a blinding, high-pitched frequency.

The digital connection between Tamer and Digimon bridged the distance instantly.

On the flagship’s deck, a colossal pillar of crimson digital light erupted from the sky, completely engulfing the little white triceratops.

The sheer thermal heat radiating from the beam began to scorch the surrounding wood.

Momonga shielded his eyes.

“What is that?!”

The light shattered like glass.

Standing in Gammamon’s place was BetelGammamon.

He was no longer a small, white mascot.

He was a towering, heavily muscled brawler with crimson skin, radiating a terrifying, suffocating heat.

His base stats had just multiplied by ten.

“Who are you calling a pet?” BetelGammamon growled, his voice deep and vibrating with power.

Momonga and Onigumo attacked simultaneously, launching themselves forward with Soru, their blades coated in dense Armament Haki.

BetelGammamon didn’t dodge.

He coated his massive red fists in his own Advanced Armament Haki (Emission), the black coating instantly igniting with explosive digital fire.

“Sol Blow!”

He threw a devastating straight punch directly into the intersecting blades.

The resulting shockwave of fire and kinetic Haki was catastrophic.

Onigumo’s eight swords instantly shattered into thousands of glowing fragments.

Momonga was blasted backward, his boots carving deep trenches into the deck as he struggled to remain standing.

Before Onigumo could recover from the destruction of his weapons, BetelGammamon lunged.

The crimson brawler grabbed the massive, multi-armed Vice Admiral by the thick collar of his Marine coat.

BetelGammamon spun once, utilizing his immense physical strength, and casually hurled Onigumo off the side of the flagship like a shotput.

The Vice Admiral flew over the railing, screaming as he plummeted toward the frozen ocean below.

BetelGammamon marched to the railing, leaning over to watch the Vice Admiral fall.

Down below, on the ice, he saw the battle between his Captain and the Admiral had reached a terrifying climax.

Victor was standing over a kneeling Aokiji, his eyes dead and unfeeling, thrusting a jade dagger down to execute the highest military power of the Marines.

At that exact second, Onigumo’s unconscious body violently crashed onto the ice directly between Victor’s blade and Aokiji’s face.

Seeing his Captain lost in a lethal battle trance, BetelGammamon waved his flaming fists and roared at the top of his digital lungs, his voice echoing over the frozen expanse.

“Victor!

No killing Admirals today!”

Word Count: 1621

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