Chapter 121: False Gods and True Monsters

[Victor POV]

The solid gold deck of the Ark Maxim hummed beneath my boots, vibrating with the sheer, ungodly electrical output of its captain.

Enel did not look like a man anymore. Enraged by the casual absorption of his ultimate attack, the self-proclaimed God of Skypiea had completely surrendered his physical form to his Devil Fruit. He expanded into a colossal, blinding avatar of pure, crackling blue electricity, the 200,000,000 Volt Amaru. He towered over the deck like a mythical Raijin, his eyes glowing with lethal, unrestrained fury.

“You dare stand on the threshold of God?” Enel’s voice boomed, no longer a spoken word but a deafening thunderclap that physically shook the air. “I am the sky! I am the divine retribution!”

I simply stood with my hands resting loosely at my sides, letting the supercharged energy I had absorbed from his previous attack roll off my shoulders in faint, green sparks.

“You’re a man with a powerful Devil Fruit and a severe superiority complex,” I replied calmly.

Enel roared, thrusting his colossal, lightning-wreathed fist downward to obliterate me. The heat radiating from the strike was enough to instantly melt the gold deck beneath my feet.

I raised my right hand, my palm open. I didn’t coat my skin in the visible, hardened black armor of standard Armament Haki. Instead, I channeled it outward, projecting an invisible, hyper-dense barrier of willpower millimeters above my skin.

Advanced Armament: Internal Destruction.

Enel’s massive fist crashed into my raised palm.

The collision sent a blinding flash of light across the heavens, followed by a shockwave that tore the golden railings completely off the Ark. But my arm didn’t buckle. The invisible Haki armor perfectly grounded the two hundred million volts, stopping the giant fist cold.

“What?” Enel gasped, his colossal form freezing.

“You rely too much on intangibility,” I stated. I curled my fingers, gripping the raw lightning. Through the advanced Haki, I grabbed Enel’s true, physical body hidden deep within the electricity.

I squeezed, violently injecting my own Haki directly into his internal structure.

Enel screamed, a very human, agonizing sound, as his ribs fractured under the invisible pressure. I casually swatted my arm to the side, throwing the giant avatar of lightning across his own deck. Enel crashed heavily into the main mast, denting the solid gold structure.

Infuriated and humiliated, Enel’s body dispersed into pure electricity. “You cannot catch lightning, Blue Sea trash!”

He attempted a light-speed flank, traveling through the conductive gold floor to materialize directly behind me, his golden staff raised to impale my heart.

He moved at the speed of lightning. But he was fighting someone who could see the future.

My Advanced Observation Haki flared, mapping his exact trajectory a full two seconds before he moved. As Enel materialized behind me, I tapped into the tether of my fifth clone, the Night-Terror Ferret.

Shadow-Skip.

I stepped backward, sinking instantly into my own shadow on the golden deck. Enel’s staff pierced nothing but empty air.

Before the God of Skypiea could even register the miss, I emerged silently from the elongated shadow cast by the Ark’s mast, directly behind his towering form.

“Mantra is just the basics of Observation,” I whispered, my voice echoing directly into his ear. “And yours is terribly unrefined.”

Enel spun around in sheer panic, but before he could launch an attack, I unleashed it.

Advanced Conqueror’s Haki.

I didn’t direct it outward as a blast, I dropped it straight down like a hammer strike. The sheer, suffocating weight of my absolute willpower slammed into Enel. The golden deck groaned, buckling under the sheer gravitational pressure of a King’s spirit. Enel’s colossal lightning avatar violently flickered, sputtering as the Warlord’s Haki forcefully suppressed the Logia’s power.

Enel was driven to his knees, his hands trembling as he fought to lift his head against the crushing weight of my aura. The illusion of his divinity was shattering piece by piece right in front of his eyes.

“Know your place,” he said, trying to resist my haki.

I reached to my waist and drew the Jade Wings. The twin daggers gleamed with a deadly, emerald light, connected by the long, black chain. I simply grabbed the chain, infusing the dark metal with dense Armament Haki.

With a flick of my wrist, the chain lashed out like a viper. It wrapped tightly around Enel’s massive, crackling throat.

Because the chain was infused with Haki, it didn’t pass through the lightning. It gripped his real windpipe. I yanked hard, violently choking the self-proclaimed God.

With a single, effortless pull, I ragdolled the two-hundred-million-volt giant, ripping him off his feet and slamming him face-first into the golden deck. The impact cratered the ship’s bow. I swung my arm in a wide arc, dragging Enel by the throat and smashing him into the port-side rotors, shattering the massive gears in a shower of sparks and pulverized gold.

[General POV]

Enel lay in the ruined wreckage of his own rotors, his physical body bruised, battered, and bleeding from the internal Haki strikes. The 200,000,000 Volt Amaru form had completely destabilized, returning him to his normal human size.

He gasped for air as Victor retracted the black chain.

For the first time in his life, Enel felt genuine, suffocating terror. His Mantra was useless. His lightning was useless. His speed was outmatched. This Blue Sea captain was less human and more like a natural disaster.

Enel’s terror quickly twisted into absolute, unhinged madness. If he could not kill the insect in front of him, he would kill the entire world the insect stood on.

“You think you have won?!” Enel screamed, blood dripping from his chin. He raised his golden staff toward the heavens, channeling every last, desperate drop of his electrical power into the Ark Maxim. “I will erase you! I will erase this entire wretched island!”

Above the ship, the pitch-black, swirling thundercloud that had been passively gathering suddenly convulsed.

Enel didn’t have the time to let the Raigo fully charge to its maximum. He forced the massive cloud to prematurely detach from the Ark’s atmospheric generators.

An incomplete Raigo formed, a colossal, spherical mass of highly condensed, pitch-black clouds violently churning with localized lightning storms. Even incomplete, it was the size of a small mountain, radiating enough raw destructive energy to completely wipe out the center of Upper Yard.

“Perish with the dirt!” Enel shrieked, swinging his staff downward.

The colossal sphere of destruction began to drop, aiming directly for the Giant Jack where the refugees, Law, Koala, and the rookies were making their final stand.

Victor’s eyes narrowed, glowing with bright, terrifying green energy.

He raised his hands, bringing the twin daggers of the Jade Wings together. Utilizing the weapon’s shapeshifting properties, the jade blades rapidly melted and fused, reforming into a massive, heavy, dual-pronged energy cannon resting over Victor’s right shoulder.

Victor tapped into his core, forcefully drawing upon the vast reserves of Fa-Jin kinetic energy he had been silently storing for months.

“You’re a terrible shot,” Victor said, his voice echoing with dual, overlapping tones of arcane power.

He didn’t aim the cannon at the falling Raigo. He aimed it directly point-blank at Enel’s chest.

Victor pulled the metaphorical trigger.

Kinetic Discharge: Fa-Jin Burst.

A colossal, compressed beam of blinding green kinetic light erupted from the jade cannon. The sheer recoil cracked the golden deck beneath Victor’s boots.

The beam struck Enel perfectly in the center of his chest just as he was guiding the Raigo downward. The devastating kinetic impact shattered the God’s ribs, completely bypassing his intangibility, and launched Enel violently backward off the Ark Maxim into the open sky.

The sudden, catastrophic blow to Enel’s concentration violently threw his aim off-balance.

The incomplete Raigo stopped its downward descent. Its trajectory warped drastically. Instead of dropping onto the Giant Jack, the colossal sphere of apocalyptic lightning shot horizontally across the sky, arcing wildly toward the western horizon.

Miles away, on the western front, Golden Lion Shiki was preparing to launch a second wave of terrestrial lions at BetelGammamon and Ace.

The legendary pirate paused, his advanced Observation Haki screaming a warning a fraction of a second before the sky turned pitch black.

The incomplete Raigo crashed directly into the exact center of the main island. The sheer kinetic momentum punched the colossal sphere of condensed lightning straight through the stone plaza, driving it deep into the subterranean levels of the fortress.

It detonated directly inside Dr. Indigo’s sealed, primary laboratory chambers.

The exact chambers holding the massive, primary vats of the unrefined IQ pathogen.

The resulting explosion shook all of Skypiea.

Millions of volts of divine electricity, the world-shattering force of the Raigo, and tens of thousands of gallons of pure, airborne biological mutagen aggressively mixed and superheated in a single millisecond.

The floating island violently shattered from the inside out.

A blinding dome of neon-green and bright blue light expanded outward, instantly vaporizing the stone castles and the remaining artillery bays. Massive chunks of bedrock, the size of battleships, were blown outward, falling like meteorites toward the distant cloud sea below.

Ace and BetelGammamon were caught in the shockwave, shielding their eyes as they were thrown backward onto a surviving, severed chunk of the outer courtyard. Even Shiki was forced to violently manipulate gravity to throw up a massive earthen shield to avoid being incinerated by the blast.

Then, a dead silence fell over the entire sky as the lightning faded.

The floating fortress was gone. In its place was a massive, swirling cloud of thick, glowing green fog suspended in the zero-gravity sphere Shiki had previously established.

For a terrifying ten seconds, nothing moved.

And then, it began.

Three distinct, world-shattering roars echoed across the heavens. They were not the cries of mutated mercenaries or jungle beasts. They were the roars of something entirely new, something ancient and deeply wrong.

The chaotic mixture of divine lightning and thousands of gallons of pure, superheated biology had acted as a catastrophic catalyst. It had bypassed the normal mutation process, violently accelerating the pathogen into its ultimate, apocalyptic form.

The thick smoke slowly parted, revealing the horrific aftermath.

Rising from the burning, free-floating wreckage of Shiki’s island were three gargantuan, apocalyptic Kaijus. They were easily the size of Marine battleships. One resembled a multi-headed serpentine hydra with scales made of fused bedrock and crackling electricity. The second was a massive, winged chimera with blades of bone protruding from its forearms. The third was a hulking, armored behemoth leaking corrosive, neon-green acid from its massive maw.

Their eyes glowed with blinding, neon-green rage.

New monsters were born today, and they looked down upon the sky islands with a singular, mindless urge to enforce absolute destruction upon the world.