The burning earth sent black smoke boiling into the sky.
The flying fleet held formation across the horizon like a pack of rabid war beasts, venting North Blue fury on the ancient city below. Golden lances stitched the ground; heat and penetration vaporized buildings to dust and touched off chain detonations. Cruise missiles drew crimson tails as they knifed into armories, watchtowers, and depots, severing arteries of movement. Artillery rolled down in sheets, stray shells birthing fires that swallowed squads of the Holy Land Guard.
Night became day.
Infernos roared upward, a sea of flame devouring district after district. Roofs fell. Walls folded. Under the barked orders of North Blue unit commanders, the bombardment crept toward the Land of the Gods. Crimson blossoms of light punched open across the skyline, their thunder echoing off stone.
"Aaaaah—damn it!"
"Where did a flying fleet come from?!"
"Protect me, you dogs!"
"Use your bodies to block the blasts or I'll have you all killed!"
In the Land of the Gods, bubble-helmed nobles tottered in finery, faces bloodless, venom and bluster barely masking terror as they shrieked at their guards to throw themselves under the rain of fire. Jolted from warm beds and angry at the disturbance, they stumbled out—only to stare up, dumbstruck, at the warships that had materialized above their sanctuary.
"Attack! Now!"
"Shoot them down!"
"Excellency… they're too high!"
"They know our armaments. Our guns can't reach that altitude!"
"How is this possible…?"
The Guard and the CP agencies fired blindly, then faltered as their shots died in the air, despair spreading from firing line to firing line.
"Trash! Garbage! Useless trash!" a Celestial Dragon howled, snot streaming. He ripped a flintlock from a guard, leveled it skyward—
BOOM.
A vast golden beam fell and erased him. The explosion's breath scorched a ring of Guardsmen and CP operatives to ash. Farther back, nobles watched their "god" vaporize and shrieked, limbs shaking, warm wetness spreading down their legs.
Boom. Boom. Boom.
Guns shifted; the fleet's fire rolled fully into the Land of the Gods. Under the merciless drumming, nobles screamed and wailed, some collapsing to beg the sky for mercy.
High above, Momonga watched, knuckles whitening on his saber. The way his aura pulsed—expanding, compressing, knitting and spilling in erratic tides—would have made Darren's Perception sit bolt upright.
There was no easy way to describe the change. Yet if one insisted:
Conqueror's Haki 0.515!
Conqueror's Haki 0.461!
Conqueror's Haki 0.612!
His fresh-awakened kingly will was spiking wildly, strength surging at a pace to make the Grand Line gnash its teeth. It felt unreal. If not for the cacophony of blasts, the sobs and screams, the hard weight of the saber, he might have dismissed it as a fever dream.
I'm slaughtering Celestial Dragons.
I'm butchering the world's "gods."
And Darren's old joke—that killing Celestial Dragons triggers Conqueror's—was true.
He felt it when he gave the order: dozens of powerful auras burst awake across the fleet. Dozens of officers and sailors, from tens of thousands, had crossed that line with him. One in ten thousand, they said. Today, the North Blue had harvested dozens.
These would be the pillars of what came next.
"This is insane," he muttered, breath long and heavy. He'd always known Darren was mad. He hadn't known how deep the abyss ran.
His gaze swept the battlefield.
The Knights of God flickered through the Land of the Gods, intercepting lance and shell mid-flight, blades and wills slashing corridors through the barrage. Hasty, draining—and yet enough to blunt the worst of it.
"The Guard, the CP, the Knights—they're all up," Momonga murmured, eyes hardening. Darren's orders rang in his head. He drew a slow breath and let his stare settle on a single, distant point.
The heart of Mary Geoise. The ancient castle at the peak of the Stairway to Heaven: Pangaea Castle.
So. Let's see what you've hidden here for eight centuries.
Blue thunder gathered in his palm. He licked dry lips, and an insane thought crackled through him, sending a shiver along his spine.
If I level Pangaea Castle… how far will my Conqueror's soar?
Even he flinched at the audacity of it.
To be continued...