Chapter 28: The Fist of the Hero

(Victor’s POV)

The weather had shifted drastically.

The sunny, peaceful skies of the South Blue had given way to ominous, churning black clouds.

The wind howled with a feral intensity, whipping the ocean into a frenzy of violent, frothing waves.

Sitting in the comfortable, insulated cabin of the flying teardrop carriage, I looked through the reinforced glass window.

Rising up ahead of us like a wall that touched the heavens was the Red Line.

And carved into its impossibly sheer face was the raging, upward-flowing river of Reverse Mountain.

The gateway to the Grand Line.

“It’s loud out there,” Gammamon observed, munching on a piece of dried meat.

“It’s the entrance to the greatest sea in the world,” I replied, feeling a surge of anticipation.

But down below, amidst the churning, violent waves directly in front of the mountain’s current, a massive shadow blocked the path.

Anchored squarely in the treacherous waters, unfazed by the raging storm, was an enormous Marine Battleship.

The figurehead of the ship was shaped like a massive dog with a bone in its mouth.

Standing on the deck, letting the rain and sea spray wash over her pristine Marine coat, was Rear Admiral Hototogisu.

Beside her stood a massive, broad-shouldered man with a greying beard.

Vice Admiral Garp.

He didn’t issue a warning.

He didn’t use a megaphone to demand our surrender.

He simply looked up at the Sky-Rift Roc carrying our carriage through the clouds, grinned a terrifying, battle-hungry grin, and hoisted a solid iron cannonball the size of a three-story house over his shoulder.

He hurled it.

It screamed through the torrential rain like a meteor, moving so fast the friction ignited the air around it.

“Roc, drop us!” I yelled.

I unhooked my disk, swiping my thumb across it.

The Sky-Rift Roc instantly dissolved into emerald mist.

With our lift completely gone, the heavy oak carriage plummeted like a stone toward the raging ocean below.

The massive cannonball shot through the exact airspace we had occupied a fraction of a second prior.

But I wasn’t letting him take potshots at us without returning the favor.

As we fell, I tapped the disk again.

“Summon: Obsidian Gorilla!”

The massive, shadowy jade ape materialized in mid-air, falling alongside the carriage.

It didn’t punch the cannonball, it simply reached out with its gravitational pulse.

The Gorilla caught the sheer mass of the iron sphere in its telekinetic grip, halted its momentum completely, and violently reversed it.

With a deafening roar, the Gorilla hurled the house-sized cannonball straight back down at Garp’s battleship at double the speed.

Below us, Garp leaped into the air, his fist turning pitch-black with Haki.

He punched the returning cannonball, shattering the massive iron sphere into a million harmless pieces of shrapnel that rained down into the sea.

“I’m not fighting that monster in the sky,” I muttered to Gammamon, eyeing the rapidly approaching, violent waves.

We were seconds away from crashing into the sea.

“We need a stage.”

I swapped the Gorilla for the Glacial-Inferno Sovereign.

The majestic jade unicorn materialized beneath the falling carriage.

As its hooves made contact with the frothing, mountainous waves, a blinding wave of absolute zero erupted outward.

The raging ocean instantly flash-froze.

A perfectly flat, miles-wide continent of thick, unbreakable glacial ice formed in the blink of an eye.

The carriage slammed onto the ice, skidding for a hundred yards before grinding to a halt.

I kicked the carriage door open and stepped out into the freezing storm, Gammamon right beside me.

A second later, the ice a hundred yards away exploded upward.

Vice Admiral Garp landed on the frozen sea, his Marine coat billowing in the hurricane winds.

“Bwahahaha!” Garp’s booming laughter echoed over the storm.

“I throw a cannonball, and you throw a continent!

You’re an interesting brat, Victor D.

Costa!

But if you want to pass my gate, you’re going to have to do better than parlor tricks!”

“I don’t have time for a Marine evaluation,” I called back, my voice completely devoid of warmth.

I unhooked the black disk, holding it flat in my palm.

“You want to test me, old man?

Fine.

Let’s see if you survive the curriculum.”

I didn’t hold back.

I pushed my Fa-Jin to its absolute, agonizing maximum, flooding the Jade Wings with every ounce of kinetic energy I had stored.

Pulse.

Five distinct pillars of emerald light erupted across the ice.

The Glacial-Inferno Sovereign stomped its hooves, igniting a mane of blue fire.

The Obsidian-Jade Gorilla pounded its chest, its gravity already warping the rain.

The Silken Widow-Maker hissed from the shadows of the carriage, and the Night-Terror Ferret melted directly into my shadow.

High above, the Sky-Rift Roc materialized with a metallic shriek, its razor-sharp wings slicing the storm clouds.

Beside it, the sixth clone appeared, HoHo, the majestic jade Phoenix-Peacock.

With blinding speed, HoHo swooped down, hooked its talons into the carriage’s roof rings, and hoisted our transport high into the stratosphere, keeping it completely safe from the impending apocalypse.

Beside me, Gammamon’s eyes glowed with pure, unrestrained digital fire.

A pillar of roaring red flames consumed him, melting the ice around his feet into steam.

When the fire cleared, BetelGammamon stood towering on the ice, his crimson armor radiating solar heat, his three horns sparking.

Garp stopped laughing.

He cracked his knuckles, a terrifying, silent intensity dropping over him.

I didn’t say a word.

I just drew my Jade Wing daggers and nodded.

The battle began in absolute, suffocating silence.

The Obsidian Gorilla moved first.

It slammed both fists into the ice, unleashing a localized pulse of twenty-times gravity directly over Garp.

The sheer pressure instantly crushed the ice beneath the Vice Admiral, cratering him ten feet deep into the glacier.

Garp didn’t even buckle.

He exploded out of the crater, aiming a devastating right hook at the Gorilla’s skull.

Before his fist could connect, BetelGammamon intercepted him.

The massive red triceratops caught Garp’s Haki-coated fist with his own.

The resulting shockwave instantly vaporized the rain in a hundred-yard radius and split the miles-wide ice continent entirely in half.

From above, the Sky-Rift Roc dive-bombed, sweeping its metallic wings in a lethal scissor-strike.

Garp leaned backward, the bladed feathers sparking against his Armament Haki.

As he leaned, the Night-Terror Ferret lunged from his shadow, forming pitch-black spikes that thrust upward.

Garp shifted his weight, dodging the shadow-spikes by a millimeter, but that was all the Silken Widow-Maker needed.

Invisible, Haki-infused spider silk snapped around his ankles.

I flooded my legs with Fa-Jin and broke the sound barrier.

I appeared directly in front of his face.

The true power of the Jade Wings wasn’t just generating daggers, it was fluid shapeshifting.

As I swung my right arm, the dagger instantly elongated, transmuting into a heavy, swept-bladed glaive.

Garp snapped the spider silk with pure muscle and brought his forearm up to block.

The heavy jade glaive slammed into his Haki-coated skin, ringing like a church bell.

I didn’t stop.

I fed kinetic energy into the weapon, fluidly shapeshifting it mid-recoil.

The heavy glaive shrank and split, becoming dual, razor-sharp curved scimitars.

I launched into a blistering flurry of strikes, engaging the Hero of the Marines in a blistering one-on-one melee.

The clones provided flawless, silent support.

Every time Garp tried to counterattack, the Gorilla would pulse a gravity well, throwing off his timing by a fraction of a second.

When he tried to step back, the Sovereign would flash-freeze the air behind him into solid walls of absolute-zero ice.

I ducked under a haymaker that sheared the top off a nearby ice mountain.

I shifted the scimitars into a long, flexible whip-sword, lashing it around Garp’s guard to strike his ribs.

He caught the blade barehanded, the jade cutting shallowly into his palm.

Garp’s eyes flared with red-black lightning.

Advanced Conqueror’s Haki.

He ripped the whip-sword forward, pulling me entirely off-balance.

He stepped into my guard, his right fist drawn back, warping the very air around it.

I desperately shifted the Jade Wings into a massive, thick tower shield, bracing it with both arms and flooding it with every drop of Armament Haki I possessed.

Garp punched the shield.

The kinetic force was incomprehensible.

It felt like being hit by a continent.

The jade shield shattered instantly.

The impact struck my crossed arms, violently launching me backward.

I didn’t just fly, I became a ballistic projectile.

I smashed through a towering glacier, skipped across the ice continent, and crashed straight through the miles-thick ice floor, plunging deep into the boiling, freezing abyss of the ocean below.

With me submerged, the battlefield above erupted into primal fury.

Through the telepathic link of the Digivice, I felt BetelGammamon go feral.

The massive red dinosaur unleashed a deafening roar, charging Garp head-on.

It was a clash of titans.

BetelGammamon’s fists ignited with concentrated solar fire, launching blistering Sol Blows that melted the ice continent into boiling steam.

Garp met him blow for blow.

The Vice Admiral battered aside the fireballs with his bare hands, trading brutal, bone-crushing haymakers with the armored triceratops.

Garp buried a Haki-infused knee into BetelGammamon’s stomach, lifting the ten-foot beast off the ground.

BetelGammamon retaliated by headbutting Garp with his burning horns, sending the Marine sliding backward across the boiling water.

Deep beneath the ocean, surrounded by the crushing dark, I felt the kinetic shock of Garp’s punch.

My Fa-Jin reserves hit their absolute limit.

My muscles screamed, but my mind was perfectly clear.

Above, Garp wound up his right arm, preparing to deliver a devastating finisher to the panting BetelGammamon.

The ocean surface exploded.

I shot out of the water like a torpedo directly behind Garp’s blind spot.

I didn’t make a sound.

I poured every ounce of my stored kinetic energy into my weapons.

The Jade Wings flowed, expanding massively until I was wielding a colossal, double-headed warhammer twice my size.

Garp sensed the shift in air pressure, but he was fully committed to his strike on BetelGammamon.

I swung the hammer with world-breaking force.

The massive jade head slammed squarely into Garp’s left shoulder and ribs.

The sickening crunch of impact echoed over the storm.

Garp was thrown violently off-balance, launched sideways across the shattered ice, blood flying from a deep gash on his shoulder.

It was a clean, brutal sneak attack.

Garp skidded to a halt, digging his boots into the ice.

He wiped the blood from his shoulder, his eyes wide.

Then, the murderous, battle-hungry grin returned, wider and more savage than before.

He drew his arm back, the air around his fist warping and distorting as he condensed an impossible amount of Haki into a single point.

I knew instantly that if that punch landed on any of us, we were dead.

The test was over.

This was the final exam.

I locked eyes with BetelGammamon.

He understood.

The red fire surrounding the dinosaur suddenly shifted, condensing into a blinding, emerald-green digital light.

His bipedal form warped, expanding outward.

Four heavy, metallic hooves slammed onto the ice.

Heavy artillery cannons materialized over his broad shoulders, and thick, green armor plated his centaur-like body.

WezenGammamon.

He dug his hooves into the glacier, lowering his massive twin cannons directly at Garp.

Behind him, the Glacial-Inferno Sovereign reared up on its hind legs.

Its horn began to glow with a terrifying, dual-colored light, absolute zero on the left, sun-fire on the right, merging into a beam of impossible, physics-breaking energy.

I stood between them.

I dismissed the Spider, the Gorilla, the Ferret, and the Roc, pulling their residual Fa-Jin back into my core.

I shifted the heavy warhammer back into the dual Jade Wing daggers.

I channeled every single ounce of kinetic energy I had absorbed during the fight with Garp, from the shattered ice, from the roaring storm, and funneled it entirely into the blades.

They glowed so brightly they became hard to look at, humming with a frequency that made the air bleed.

Garp stood his ground, planting his feet wide.

He brought both fists back to his waist, his muscles expanding immensely, coating his entire upper body in advanced Armament Haki.

Red and black lightning violently arced around him, tearing the ice at his feet to dust.

No words.

Just the final, absolute clash of Will.

WezenGammamon roared, firing Albion.

A massive, concentrated beam of heavy digital artillery ripped through the air.

The Sovereign fired, unleashing a spiraling beam of freezing fire that fused with the artillery strike.

I crossed my daggers and slashed outward, releasing a hyper-condensed wave of pure kinetic Fa-Jin that wrapped around the combined beams, turning the attack into a colossal, blinding pillar of world-ending energy.

Garp stepped forward.

He thrust both fists out.

Infinitum Explosion.

The Vice Admiral unleashed a shockwave of pure, unadulterated physical force and Conqueror’s Haki that defied the laws of nature.

The two attacks met in the exact center of the shattered ice continent.

For a fraction of a second, the world went completely, utterly silent.

The light inverted.

Colors bled out of reality, leaving only a stark, negative-space void.

And then, the explosion happened.

It was a detonation that rivaled the Tsar Bomba of my old world.

There was no fire, no heat, just pure, cataclysmic kinetic obliteration.

The miles-wide ice continent simply ceased to exist, atomized instantly.

A dome of displaced air expanded outward at supersonic speeds, peeling the ocean back to the bare sea floor for a terrifying instant before the water violently rushed back in.

The shockwave hit the sky.

High above the clouds, HoHo let out a piercing shriek as the sheer force of the blast sent the jade Phoenix-Peacock and the heavy oak carriage tumbling uncontrollably higher into the stratosphere, desperately flapping its wings to regain stability.

Down on the surface, the blast hit the Marine battleship.

The massive, iron-clad vessel was violently lifted entirely out of the water, launched hundreds of feet into the air like a child’s toy.

On the deck, Rear Admiral Hototogisu screamed orders, using every ounce of her own Rokushiki training and the crew’s combined weight to shift the sails and anchor, miraculously stabilizing the colossal ship so it landed upright back into the boiling, chaotic ocean with a tidal wave of a splash.

As the blinding light faded and the apocalyptic roar died down to the sound of churning water, I found myself kneeling on a single, isolated pillar of ice that the Sovereign had desperately managed to construct beneath us before fading into mist.

I was gasping for air, my muscles screaming in agony, completely drained of Fa-Jin.

Beside me, WezenGammamon collapsed, reverting back to his small, chubby white form, snoring instantly.

A hundred yards away, standing on a floating piece of wreckage from a destroyed Marine dinghy, was Garp.

His shirt was completely gone.

His chest was covered in bruises and the bleeding gash from my sneak attack, and his breath was slightly ragged.

But he was still standing, his arms crossed over his massive chest.

He stared at me across the boiling water.

The terrifying, murderous aura had completely vanished, replaced by a wide, toothy grin.

“The Thunder Maiden,” Garp suddenly called out, his voice carrying easily over the waves.

“I noticed that silly wing tattoo on your arm while you were swinging those daggers.

Jasmine D.

Costa has the exact same one.

You’re her brother.”

I slowly pushed myself up to my feet, slipping the dulled Jade daggers back into their holsters.

I picked up the sleeping Gammamon, tucking him securely under my arm.

“She’s my little sister,” I called back, my voice hoarse but steady.

“But before you put a bounty on my head, get this straight.

I’m not a Revolutionary.

And I don’t work for your son.

I’m just a guy trying to keep his family safe.”

Garp stared at me for a long, calculating moment.

He looked at the utter devastation around us, the boiling sea, the parted clouds, the sheer scale of the power I wielded.

“If you really want to make a change in this world, brat,” Garp yelled back, his tone turning surprisingly serious, “you need to learn to use your Conqueror’s Haki better!

Raw power won’t save you against the monsters in the New World.”

Then, he threw his head back and laughed.

It was a massive, belly-deep laugh that echoed off the cliffs of Reverse Mountain.

“Bwahahaha!

A bounty hunter who can level an ocean and doesn’t care about politics!” Garp wiped a tear from his eye.

“You Costa kids are an absolute headache!

Get out of here!

Scram before I remember I’m a Marine and decide to drag you to Impel Down!”

I didn’t need to be told twice.

I gave the Hero of the Marines a single, respectful nod.

I tapped my disk, expending the last dregs of my energy.

HoHo plummeted from the clouds, the carriage swaying wildly beneath its talons.

It swooped low over the water.

I jumped, catching the edge of the carriage door and hauling myself and Gammamon inside.

HoHo banked hard, catching the violent updraft of Reverse Mountain.

We rocketed upward, leaving the storm and the shattered sea behind us.

Down below, the Marine battleship slowly maneuvered through the wreckage, pulling up alongside Garp’s floating debris.

Rear Admiral Hototogisu leaped down, landing beside the Vice Admiral.

She looked at the boiling ocean, her face pale, her uniform drenched.

“Vice Admiral Garp,” Hototogisu breathed, utterly terrified by the scale of the destruction.

“Did…

did you defeat him?”

“Defeat him?” Garp chuckled, brushing soot off his shoulder, staring up at the peak of the Red Line.

“Hototogisu, I didn’t want to press that fight.

Individually, those beasts and that kid are monsters.

They’d tear through the average Vice Admiral without breaking a sweat.

But together?

Their synergy?”

Garp’s grin slowly faded into a grim, hard line.

“If they fight together like that…

they could give the three Admirals a run for their money,” Garp stated flatly.

“Send a message to Sengoku.

Tell him the South Blue Anomaly has officially entered the Grand Line.

And tell him to start stocking up on aspirin.”

Word Count: 3025

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