The wind carried the cries of mothers searching for children, of men carrying the still-warm bodies of their loved ones, and of children shaking parents who would never wake again. Every breath tasted of iron and salt. Every heartbeat felt like it reverberated inside an empty cavern. And through this world of grief, Hordy Jones' pain stood like a beacon.
Otohime, her body was weak, her breaths shallow, her blood still spilling from wounds she refused to acknowledge. But her Observation Haki—sharp, delicate, unfailingly gentle—swept across the suffering deck and stopped.
Stopped on the boy with trembling fists, his clothes soaked in his sister's blood, his eyes shattered beyond recognition. A child whose world had been taken from him in one merciless instant. Otohime didn't look away.
She couldn't. The ache in his heart was loud enough to drown out the screams of the dying. And so, despite her guards shouting, despite the Whitebeard pirates trying to hold her back, despite her three princes crying out in fear—
She walked. Step by step, barefoot across the bloodstained planks, past the men forming a protective circle, past the soldiers crying at the sight of their queen moving toward danger. The entire ship seemed to hold its breath. Her eyes softened when she looked at Hody. Not with pity.
But with recognition of her own failure.
This is what they all feel.
This is what they all carry.
Their grief… their anger… their justified fury… I cannot turn away from it.
She knelt slowly before him. His sister's body lay between them, her eyes closed as if peacefully sleeping. Otohime brushed the girl's cheek with trembling fingers, a silent prayer passing through her lips. Then she turned—to her sons.
Fukaboshi, Ryuboshi, Manboshi… Their eyes drowned in terror as if realizing something was dreadfully wrong. And in Fukaboshi's arm, a baby girl wrapped in coral silk sobbed, unaware of the world falling apart around her. Otohime memorized their faces and the memories. Every laugh. Every tear. Every line of their expressions. That single second would be the last time she saw them. When she turned back to Hody, her heart no longer trembled.
"I am sorry…" she whispered, her voice fragile but warm as sunrise. "Your pain is real." Despite his boiling hatred and rage, he flinched as if struck. Otohime reached out—slowly, gently—and wrapped her arms around him. A light, motherly embrace. An embrace meant to swallow agony.
To forgive it, to accept it.
It broke him. His breath hitched, trembling, teeth clenched until blood dripped from his gums. His hand shook violently as he grabbed the knife hidden within his sleeve.
"O-Otohime-sama… Don't… I—I—I don't—" The words dissolved into sobs. But Otohime didn't let go.
"It's alright," she whispered. "If your heart cries for release… then let me carry that burden with you."
Her tears fell onto his shoulder. And Hody's fell onto hers. For a moment, the world stopped.
No Elders. No sea kings. No war. Only grief meeting grief. Only a queen embracing the hatred her people were suffocating under.
Then—SHNK.
A blade slid through flesh. Gasps rippled across the deck. Hody froze, knife buried to its hilt in Otohime's chest. His hands were shaking. His breath shattered. The queen's body jerked—then softened. But her arms never loosened. She only tightened the embrace. Warm blood pooled between them, dripping down Hody's forearms, splattering softly onto his sister's body.
The deck fell silent. Not even the ocean dared breathe. Tears streamed down Otohime's face, but her smile… Her smile was gentle. Radiant. Forgiving.
"There is… no hatred… in my heart for you, all I want to ask for is your forgiveness."
Her voice grew faint. Feather-light. Already drifting away.
"Only sorrow… that the world made us suffer so deeply." Hody collapsed forward, catching her as she sagged. "O-Otohime-sama… I didn't… I didn't mean—I-I—"
She lifted a bloodstained hand and brushed his cheek with the tenderness of a mother touching her own child.
"My dream… was for children like you… to never know this pain…" Her eyes dimmed as she whispered, "I pray… one day… someone will save you… from the darkness I could not."
And with a final exhale—her hand fell. Her smile stilled. Her warmth faded against Hody's trembling body. Queen Otohime died in the arms of the boy who murdered her, accepting the hatred of her people with the tenderness of a mother.
Across the ship, screams broke out. Soldiers fell to their knees. The princess wailed in horror.
Shirahoshi cried so loudly the sea itself trembled. And Hody, drenched in her blood and his sister's, stared emptily into the void… as the last light of Fishman Island's greatest hope flickered out.
Shirahoshi's cry did not belong to an infant. It was a calamity given sound—a raw, newborn grief so vast it seemed to tear at the very fabric of the world. The moment the blade struck Queen Otohime, the infant felt it and knew it, and the scream that burst from her tiny lungs was not the cry of life's beginning…it was the howl of a god awakening to loss.
The sound struck Fishman Island like a divine hammer. The great coral dome trembled. Glass sang. Steel warped. Every fishman and mermaid within the port dropped as though gravity had tripled—some unconscious instantly, others thrashing as their senses were drowned beneath a tidal wave of Haoshoku Haki so violent it seemed to shear thought itself in half.
Even the Whitebeard Pirates—monsters among men—fell like wheat before a storm. Vista, blade still half-drawn from his attempt to stop the attacker, screamed as blood streamed from his ears. Even the CP0 agents, experienced veterans, slammed to their knees, hands clawing at the ground as a pressure far beyond their comprehension raked across their inner worlds. It wasn't just Haki. It was the grief of Poseidon.
Outside the bubble, the sea convulsed. Whole currents reversed. Underwater mountains shifted. The very abyss screamed back, a keening resonance rising from the black depths as though the ocean itself mourned with the infant goddess.
Whitebeard, mid-swing against an Elder, staggered. His Observation Haki—honed through decades of war—simply collapsed, as if refusing to interpret the impossible surge that flooded the battlefield. Marco felt his flames sputter as a cold sweat drenched him, even from deep inside the crater he'd been smashed into. But it was the reaction of the Elders that truly marked the moment.
Saint Mars, eyes burning with mockery in his massive Itsumade form as he swung his massive talons toward Marco, suddenly froze. A shudder ran up his spine—not of fear, but of recognition. His head snapped toward the port, pupils contracting to pinpoints.
The Fengxi, none other than Elder Warcury—its hooves moments from crushing Jozu—halted with a strangled snort, divine instinct overriding command. Even the beast knew that presence. He whispered, breath trembling despite himself.
"That pressure… It can't be."
For a heartbeat, the Elders—who had not bowed to another soul in centuries—found their Yokai forms refusing to obey them. Their mouth parted. And for the first time in an age, a pure, undiluted emotion reached the surface behind his eyes.
Dread.
They knew this feeling. They had learned about it only once before, in the forbidden archives beneath Pangaea Castle—where the name Poseidon was carved into records older than the World Government itself.
"The Ancient Weapon…is born."
Shirahoshi's scream peaked. And the world bent. Every Sea King across thousands of miles—colossal titans whose bodies dwarfed islands—froze mid-stroke. Their minds, ancient and vast, turned in unison toward the newborn beneath the sea. A single, sorrow-soaked note rippled outward. The Sea Kings answered.
We hear you.
We obey you.
We come.
The deep began to stir. Across trenches the size of nations, shapes moved. Eyes opened. Voices rumbled in the drowned dark. Even the colossal Ancient Sea Kings already assaulting Fishman Island faltered.
These were not the ordinary titans of the deep—they were the select few whose wills had been strong enough to resist the last summoning. Too old, too proud, and too steeped in ancient memories to bend easily. They had shaken off the haze of the battlefield's earlier call…but the newborn's cry pierced them.
The raw, unfiltered emotion in Shirahoshi's wail—fear, grief, divine instinct—overpowered the command that had held them in chains. What had been a one-sided domination warped instantly into a struggle, a cosmic tug-of-war between two forces that should never have existed at the same time. The sea itself shuddered as two Poseidons reached for the same throne.
The newborn's haki-laced grief surged outward, instinctively commanding the ocean to stop, to kneel, to protect. And from far below, an older will—more jagged, twisted, and stained—pulled back with the fury of a dethroned god.
Far beneath Fishman Island—down where even iron would crumble under pressure and light had never existed—something stirred. A behemoth unlike any other, a sea dragon whose coils stretched for miles, whose head alone was as large as Fishman Island, slowly raised its crown of bone and coral. Its eyes glowed with an ancient intelligence. It felt the call of the newborn Poseidon and—for the first time in centuries—considered defiance.
The deep waters vibrated with the promise of rebellion. But a sound cut through the abyss.
Clack.
A trident—massive as a skyscraper—tapped against the titan's skull. The sea dragon froze. Seated proudly upon its island-sized head was a massive mermaid. Or the twisted remnant of one. Once, she had been queen of the seas—majestic. Gentle. The Poseidon of an age long forgotten.
Now, corruption twisted her body. Fins hardened into obsidian spines. Her tail darkened into something serpentine and cruel. Her once luminous eyes flickered—just for a heartbeat—as that newborn scream reached even her.
For a moment, clarity returned. A flicker of sorrow. A whisper of recognition. A mother's instinct to answer a child who was not hers… but was family all the same. For that single breath, she wavered. She could feel the new Poseidon's pain.
And she almost… almost let go.
But then—the memory wasn't hers, the voice wasn't hers, but the command was.
A cold, absolute order echoed through her mind: "Erase Fishman Island. The next Poseidon must never rise."
Her pupils dissolved into blood-red rings. Her body contorted further, her silhouette warping until she resembled a demon wearing the skin of a mermaid queen. When she spoke, her voice carried two tones—her own and something older and crueler riding atop it.
"I serve only the will of the God of the World."
Her corrupted Haki surged. More tridents—formed of abyssal pressure—materialized around her like phantom spears. At her slightest command, the massive sea dragon began to swim. The water trembled. And alongside it, the abyss awakened.
A dozen more shapes emerged—continent-sized Sea Kings, titans that dwarfed even the ancient beasts currently attacking Fishman Island. One by one, they gathered around her like satellites orbiting a dying star. These were not rebels.
These were loyalists—her royal guard. Beings who had served her during the last great war, when the seas themselves had roared at her command. They felt her call. They recognized their queen. And they obeyed without hesitation. The ocean's floor cracked as they rose, shaking the entire region as they surged toward Fishman Island.
The battlefield outside Fishman Island ruptured with chaos. Moments ago, the Sea Kings had moved as one overwhelming tide—an unstoppable armada of living mountains tearing toward Whitebeard and the already fractured island.
But then Shirahoshi screamed. And deep below, the corrupted Poseidon retaliated. Two wills. Two queens. One ocean. The result was cataclysm.
A horned leviathan—its maw large enough to swallow the entire Whitebeard armada whole—lunged toward Whitebeard, only to freeze mid-charge. Its pupils widened, shimmering with confusion as Shirahoshi's newborn command grabbed hold of its instincts. It reared back, bellowing.
Another Sea King—scaled like volcanic stone, ridge-backed, and shaped like a living battleship—answered the other call. It slammed its body sideways, crashing into the first with the force of a meteor strike. The shockwave blasted water upward in a tidal column that scraped the underside of the Fishman Island bubble. Whitebeard, breathing heavily, steadied himself with his bisento.
The Sea Kings turned on each other with no hesitation, ancient bonds shattered by divine conflict and primal savagery. A whale-shaped behemoth the size of a country surged upward from beneath, jaws open wide. Its teeth were the size of ships, glinting like harpoons as it clamped down on the flank of another titan.
Flesh tore. Blood clouded the water in crimson eruptions. The ocean shook. Another, serpent-like, wrapped its coil around a crab-like titan nearly as large as Marineford itself. Its body constricted, cracking exoskeletal plates with booming snaps. The crab roared and retaliated, snapping a pincer straight through the serpent's midsection—sending tens of thousands of tons of flesh spiraling into the depths. The water became a graveyard of drifting megafauna.
It was clear to anyone with Observation Haki—even the most battle-hardened veterans—that the Sea Kings were split cleanly in two. Half obeyed the newborn Poseidon, their movements erratic and defensive, trying desperately to push their corrupted brethren away from Fishman Island.
The other half obeyed the fallen Poseidon, striking with terrifying precision, moving like soldiers following a general's command—cold, relentless, merciless.
A turtle-like titan, shell ringed with volcanic ridges, surged toward a serpentine Sea King that had hesitated in its attack on the island. Shirahoshi's influence had made it pause…and that hesitation cost it. The volcanic turtle slammed into it, spikes shattering scales, then blasted a superheated plume from its blowhole—cooking the upper half of the serpent alive. The serpent screamed as molten flesh peeled from bone.
The ocean itself mirrored the clash of wills. Shirahoshi's call was raw—chaotic, instinctive, and desperate. It pushed her chosen Sea Kings to defend, to shield, and to hold the line. But the corrupted Poseidon's command was refined—perfected through millennia—and backed by a god's terrible authority.
Where the newborn urged protection, the fallen queen commanded extermination. The result was pandemonium.
A colossal manta-like Sea King, its wingspan stretching miles, tried to shield Fishman Island by rising before the bubble. Three corrupted titans slammed into it from different angles, spearing their bodies through its wings like spears through silk.
The manta thrashed, its scream vibrating through the water like a subaqueous earthquake. Blood poured in dark clouds as one of the attackers—an armored ancient sea king shaped like a mountain—dragged the dying titan downward, ripping away a wing in its jaws.
High above, a shark-shaped monstrosity miles long rammed into a whale titan, the impact splitting the whale's skull like a cracked egg. The sound echoed like thunder rolling through the sea.
Elder Mars, recovering his balance midair, stared with wide eyes. "This is insanity… These things—they're not fighting for our side anymore… No, we need to get rid of whoever inherited Poseidon's power!"
No—they were fighting for dominion. Because two wills now demanded the ocean. Two Poseidons pulled at the strings of creation. One newborn and untrained. One ancient, corrupted, and fueled by the King of the World.
Elder Warcury reached the same dreadful conclusion Mars had—but faster. Being closer to the port, he felt the newborn's divine scream shake the marrow in his ancient bones. His monstrous form—massive, horned, and draped in celestial hide—turned slowly toward the source. His nostrils flared. His pupils narrowed.
The new Poseidon was there. On the ship docked at the port. Right now. And for Warcury, that was all that mattered. The Third Division Commander—battered, bloodied, bones creaking—lay sprawled beneath him. He'd been little more than a plaything to the Elder, something to occupy his time while the world government forces purged the island. Now? The ancient beast didn't even see Jozu anymore.
Warcury shifted his massive form, his Conqueror's Haki flexing with sickening cracks as he dug his hooves into the coral floor. His mountainous form crouched, preparing to launch himself toward the port with a speed no creature that size should possess. Jozu saw it instantly. The Elder was leaving. Heading toward the port. Toward Shirahoshi.
Jozu's battered lungs burned as he forced air through them. His body—shattered in places even his diamond form struggled to support—still responded. Barely. He roared, raw and wild:
"You shall NOT—!" He didn't even finish.
Warcury's yokai form—the colossal Fengxi, a mythical beast of fang and fire—reacted before the third division commander could resist. Its rear leg snapped backward with terrifying casualness. Not a strike. Not an attack. Just a reflexive dismissal. The hoof—each segment larger than Jozu's enlarged diamond form—blurred through the air like a meteor. It struck Jozu square in the chest.
The world detonated.
The impact made a sound like tectonic plates colliding—an impossible, crushing boom that hammered the battlefield. The island itself rippled into a spiraling shockwave, compressing around the point of impact and blasting outward in rings.
Jozu's diamond body—one of the hardest substances known to man—fractured instantly. Cracks spiderwebbed across his crystalline flesh like breaking glass; even the newly awakened powers didn't stand a chance against the elders' might. For a heartbeat, he hung suspended, shock frozen on his face. Then he disappeared.
His body tore through the water so fast he became a silver streak, smashing through coral pillars, shattering ancient reef structures, and finally embedding deep into the seabed—buried inside a crater that spread for hundreds of meters. Blood seeped through the cracks in his diamond skin.
The earth around him trembled. That was the difference in power. A Whitebeard commander, awakened, hardened into living diamond… kicked aside like an ant by a beast merely stretching its leg.
Warcury didn't spare Jozu a glance. His massive form lunged forward, hooves tearing gouges into the ground as he accelerated—the very seafloor parting violently around him. His eyes locked on the port, on the ship, on the newborn energy flaring like a beacon.
A hoarse, guttural growl escaped his throat, vibrating through the battlefield: "The heir dies before the sea can claim her."
With a thunderous movement, Elder Warcury surged straight toward the port—intent on killing the new Poseidon before her power could fully awaken and become a true threat to the World Government.
BOOM—!
The sea itself buckled. Elder Warcury—mid-charge, all of his monstrous limbs propelling him like a living apocalypse—felt the seabed give way beneath him. Not because of his weight. Not because of tectonic fault. But because a bisento, wreathed in crackling tremor-light and coated in brutal, terrifying Haki, speared downward from above like a divine punishment.
It hit the ocean floor with such force that the entire seabed folded inward, rippling like paper struck by a hammer. Coral ridges snapped. Earth warped. The shockwave hurled sand, stone, and water upward in a spiraling storm. The Fengxi—Warcury's gargantuan form—lost its footing entirely. The myth-beast shrieked as the violent tilt of the world sent its mountainous body lurching skyward, lifted by raw, impossible force.
Only as he flailed in mid-air did Warcury see the truth: the bisento had nailed a massive bird—an Itsumade, a fellow elder—straight into the center of a newly formed crater. Pinned. Impaled. Immobilized like an insect under a giant's thumb. And slammed down with so much power it had dragged the entire seabed with it.
Warcury didn't need an explanation. He recognized the wounded, bloody shape pinned beneath the bisento.
Elder Mars.
He had been shot straight out of the sky—punched downward with such obscene power that the impact alone had created a crater wide enough to swallow a country. Mars twitched, wings bent at unnatural angles. He was trying—failing—to rise.
Warcury's brain barely processed it before a voice—cold enough to freeze magma—drifted into the tremoring water. A whisper. A death sentence.
"Did you have fun… beating up my sons…?"
The world stilled. Mars, pinned to the earth, turned his head to look up. Even Warcury in his Fengxi form, airborne and spinning, turned his monstrous gaze to the silver radiance forming beside them.
"Nearly killing my friend…?"
The light intensified, sharpening into the outline of a man. A giant of a man. A titan with a flowing white mustache and the bearing of a god. A father whose fury could eclipse the sun.
"And massacring a species I protect under my banner…?"
Whitebeard stood there—no longer suppressed, no longer split between defending Fishman Island and holding the ancient sea kings at bay. The raging clash of Sea Kings had freed him at last. Now he was fully present. Fully focused. Fully furious. His fist glowed. Not like fire. Not like lightning.
But it was like something the world itself was trying—and failing—to contain. The tremor power vibrated the water into mist around him. Space around his knuckles bent and cracked like glass under pressure. He looked like a god sculpted from anger and sorrow.
Mars tried to move. Tried to defend. He didn't even register the punch. The silver star that was Whitebeard's fist slammed into the side of the Fengxi in mid-air. Reality broke. The shockwave didn't ripple—it fractured, splitting the world like a shattered mirror. The Fengxi's mythical hide warped, bones buckling, its scream lost inside the avalanche of sound.
Elder Warcury—immortal, inhuman, a monster wrapped in a man's shape—felt something he hadn't felt in centuries: terror.
The impact blasted through his mythical beast form, ripping through divine musculature, snapping enchanted bones, and cracking the shell of his celestial physiology. His monstrous form broke. Matter folded. Spirit screamed. And under Whitebeard's wrathful blow, his titanic, bestial body collapsed inward, shrinking and twisting until Warcury was forcibly reverted into his frail, ancient human form—a naked weakness he hadn't shown in decades.
He spat blood, ribs shattered. His limbs trembled. His immortality stuttered under the crushing force of Whitebeard's will. Whitebeard didn't stop. He didn't slow. He didn't breathe. Using the momentum of the punch, he flipped his bisento from the crater's center back into his grasp like it weighed nothing.
And then—he dropped. A meteor in human shape. His entire body lit with the white cracks of the Gura Gura no Mi. Tremor halos exploded outward with every heartbeat. The world bent around him as he fell. Straight toward the downed Itsumade. Straight toward Mars. Straight toward anyone foolish enough to stand beneath him. The seabed screamed as he landed.
And then—KRA-KA-BOOOOOOOOOOM!!!!
The world detonated. The crater deepened by hundreds of meters instantly. Thousands of tons of stone collapsed. The very ocean vaporized from the shock, turning the battlefield into a fog of tremor and death. Whitebeard rose from the center of the destruction—steam rising from his shoulders, veins pulsing with fury, eyes burning with murderous resolve.
He wasn't defending anymore; he wasn't holding the line. He was done losing merfolk lives.
Done watching his family bleed. Done burying friends.
Now… Whitebeard was on the warpath. And the Elders were about to learn what it meant to fight a man the world called the Strongest, the man closest to the throne of the Pirate King.