What was strange about hindsight was how obvious it all felt once it had already stopped mattering.
Varin could still see it clearly now, scattered across everything that had already happened like broken glass catching light at the wrong angle. Luffy was standing at the execution platform, lightning crashing down around him, the kind of bolt that had scattered Buggy across the sky like confetti. And yet Luffy had stood in it like it was wind and noise. Varin remembered noticing it at the time, the way you notice something strange, while in a hurry, without stopping to understand what it means.
Something so seemingly simple it felt almost insulting in hindsight. Lightning didn't work on him. It never had. And somehow, Varin had never truly registered it until now, crawling out of the aftermath, the realization settling into place with the quiet finality of something that had always been obvious to everyone except him.
It made everything feel just slightly more ridiculous than it should have. Because power wasn't absolute, even when it looked like it was. It just took the right kind of absurdity to prove otherwise. And Luffy was exactly that kind of absurdity. The sort that didn't care about rules, didn't acknowledge hierarchy, didn't even seem aware when reality was supposed to bend in its presence.
Varin let out a rough breath as he moved. Enel had not been invincible. He had just been untested against the right kind of stupid.
Only Varin had learned that truth, or at least understood what it meant. The aftermath of Enel's earlier attack had left Zoro barely conscious, Gan Fall grinding through sheer endurance more than actual strength, and the warrior Gan Fall had named as Wyper held together by inherited rage and nothing else. None of them were in any condition to keep fighting in any meaningful way.
Robin had told him Enel's location, passing it along with the same calm precision she brought to everything, despite her hair still smoking from the shock she received. The god apparently hadn't been able to resist bragging about his ship, something massive and golden, built from the treasure that was supposed to still be buried in the ruins of Shandora, the name of the ancient city they were in. Robin had called it the Ark Maxim, repeating Enel's own words back with faint disdain.
So they, or rather he, had left the injured behind. Zoro himself had refused to stay down, of course, because admitting he couldn't move on his own would have required something that looked dangerously close to honesty. Gan Fall had remained with him, steady in that way old soldiers sometimes were, the kind of presence that made even collapse feel temporary. Wyper, the warrior whose shot had saved him earlier, had stayed too, his eyes still burning with the sort of anger that didn't cool just because the enemy had moved out of reach.
Varin didn't spend much time thinking about them after that. Not because he didn't care, but because the part of him that cared had already been pointed forward.
Luffy had appeared not long after, along with a young girl and Gan Fall's strange horse creature. He'd explained in his usual way that they'd been swallowed by the snake, but he was here now, and he wanted to kick Enel's ass. That was the short version. Varin couldn't remember much of the longer one. Two lightning strikes, probable nerve damage, and the rage sitting heavy in his chest over two of his crew being taken had done more to his thinking than he'd like to admit.
Luffy waited roughly five seconds before moving toward the ship after Varin told him the location, bouncing between logic and instinct like gravity had slightly different terms with him than with everyone else. Varin followed because there was nothing else to do except follow, and because something in him trusted that ridiculous momentum more than any plan that involved standing still.
The climb up the beanstalk was brutal in the way that exhausting things usually were, not dramatic so much as grinding. Wind that never let up, clouds that felt too solid to be clouds, and the constant impression that the world at this height hadn't been designed with people in mind. They found the ship relatively quickly despite all that, floating near the top of the stalk, built to be seen from anywhere and understood by no one.
He remembered the way Luffy had looked at it. Not impressed, exactly. Just deciding it was the next place they needed to be. That was always how it worked with him. No hesitation long enough to turn into doubt.
The moment they boarded, the air changed. Charged with something that wasn't quite lightning yet but was already becoming it. The interior was clean, oddly so, and completely empty. No crates, no crew, no sign the place had ever been used for anything practical. At the center of it all, Enel stood like he had been waiting the whole time.
He started speaking the moment they found him, voice carrying that same detached certainty, like the world existed purely to confirm what he already knew. The hole in his chest hadn't changed that, apparently.
He didn't finish, because Varin surged forward, claws tightening, body already past the point of restraint. But before he could close the full distance, something else moved alongside him. Luffy crossed the space between them like momentum had simply stopped applying to him. Enel reacted on instinct, arm rising with the absolute confidence of a man who had never once been properly answered. Lightning erupted from his palm, bright enough to bleach the sky white. It struck Luffy right in the chest….And nothing happened.
Not the way it was supposed to. It didn't scatter or pass through Luffy, nor did it dissolve into whatever harmless display a Logia's power usually performed when it met the wrong kind of resistance. It simply met him, hit with everything it had, and then…Stopped. Slid off the moment reality tried to enforce its own rules, like Luffy's body had quietly decided those rules weren't his problem.
Varin caught that detail at the same moment Luffy's fist connected, snapping Enel's head sideways, causing the god to stagger back. The composure that had defined him cracked visibly as his hand came up to his face. His nose was definitely broken, blood already marking the arrogance he had worn like a crown. The shock of it didn't register as pain first. It registered as disbelief, like his body was still trying to work out whether something had actually been allowed to happen to him. "That shouldn't be possible," he muttered, voice low and sharp in a way that hadn't caught up to fear yet.
Varin rolled his shoulders out slowly as he came to a stop nearby, the faint sting of earlier lightning still making itself known in small ways he refused to acknowledge. "Mate," he said, tone light, the sort of casual that never quite managed to be harmless, "is this really the time to be posturin'? You've been hit twice now, it's clearly possible."
Enel's gaze fell on him, dragging over Varin with disdain, before something weird happened. Enel's eyes dropped slightly, and his eyes flickered with something that was arrogance or hate; the god almost looked scared. His eyes flicked to the hole in his chest, still bleeding, but less; it looked like Enel had burned the wound, likely to stop bleeding as best he could, meaning the god wasn't entirely clueless.
Varin noticed the hesitation the moment it appeared. He always did. That was the problem with people who tried to intimidate him. They usually forgot he was watching in ways that didn't have much patience for theatre. He tilted his head, the grin creeping back into place with that familiar edge that had stopped being playful some time ago. "Oh, that's a new look," he said, voice dragging just enough to make it obvious he was enjoying himself at Enel's expense. "Don't tell me the big lad's startin' to realise things aren't linin' up quite the way he likes."
The air between them tightened. Not visibly, just the feeling of something waiting to see what came next. Varin stepped forward anyway. Slow and deliberate, closing distance not out of caution but out of a flat refusal to acknowledge it deserved any. "Feelin' scared there, lad?" he added, the grin sharpening just a fraction more. "Maybe the big bad god's just a man who's been shoutin' loud enough that nobody thought to check if there was anything behind it."
The fight that followed wasn't a fight in any clean sense of the word. It was a lesson. Delivered repeatedly, and without mercy. One that would make most people reconsider shit-talking a god.
Enel moved the moment Varin finished speaking, not toward him, which would have been the sensible response to someone that size closing distance, but sideways. His body dissolved into lightning between one breath and the next, reappearing a dozen feet away with the casual ease of a man stepping around a puddle. The air cracked where he had been standing. The smell of ozone hit Varin's nose a half-second too late to matter.
Luffy was already moving before the god fully reformed, arm stretching back in that elastic, boneless way that still looked slightly wrong no matter how many times Varin had seen it. The fist launched forward with enough force to tear a groove in the air behind it.
Enel dissolved again, and the punch hit nothing. Luffy skidded forward from the momentum, catching himself on the edge of one of the ship's railings while Enel reformed above them both, floating there with the calm of someone watching a performance he had already seen.
Varin surged toward him from the left, but Lightning answered before he got within ten feet. Not a full bolt, but smaller, closer to the one Wyper had intercepted earlier, a crack of electricity that shot outward in a flat arc across the deck. Varin threw himself sideways, and the bolt clipped the air where his shoulder had been a fraction of a second earlier. He felt the heat of it against his cheek. Felt the hair on his arms stand up from the charge left behind.
That was a bit too close. He landed hard and kept moving immediately, circling wide rather than pressing forward, because stopping meant giving Enel a stationary target, and a stationary target with that much lightning behind it was just a corpse with extra steps.
Luffy came at him again from the right. Another stretch, another punch, another clean miss as the god blinked sideways through the air. The rubber fist crashed into the deck instead, splintering the wood beneath it, and Luffy bounced upright immediately, completely unbothered, already looking for the next angle.
"He's not even reactin' to you," Varin called across the deck, keeping his eyes on the floating figure above them. "He knows you're comin'."
"Yeah!" Luffy agreed, somewhat annoyed. "Stand still so I can punch you," he called out to Enel. Varin couldn't help but stifle a laugh. Even now, his captain didn't understand the sheer threat of the man in front of them, even after Varin's explanation back on the ship, which he realised that Luffy either forgot or wasn't paying attention, so normal Luffy things.
Varin circled wider, not letting his thoughts distract him, keeping his weight low, trying to find any angle that didn't feel immediately obvious. The problem was that every angle felt obvious. Every time he shifted his weight, every time he coiled his legs to spring, Enel was already drifting sideways before Varin's body had fully committed to the movement. The god didn't even look alarmed about it. He just moved, unhurried and precise, like he was reading from a page Varin couldn't see.
Another bolt came without warning, aimed low this time, skimming across the deck in a wide flat sweep. Varin vaulted over it, claws scraping against the railing as he cleared the arc and landed in a crouch on the other side. His knees screamed from the impact. The nerves in his legs still hadn't fully forgiven the earlier strikes, and every landing reminded him of that clearly.
He rose slower than he wanted to. And Enel glanced at him then, the same half-look he had given him before, the one that sat somewhere between acknowledgment and dismissal. Like Varin was a problem he had already calculated the answer to, and was simply waiting on the world to catch up. That look made something hot move through Varin's chest that had nothing to do with the lightning damage.
Luffy launched himself upward, stretching his arm around one of the ship's masts to slingshot himself toward Enel at a completely different angle. For a moment, it almost looked like it would work. The trajectory was strange enough, fast enough, that even someone reading ahead might need a second to adjust.
Enel tilted slightly to the left. Luffy sailed past him close enough that the rubber fist grazed the air beside the god's ear, near enough that it should have connected, should have had the same result as the platform; instead, nothing. The momentum carried Luffy past, and he caught himself on the far railing, spinning around immediately with that same annoyed look.
Varin was already moving again before Luffy landed, cutting in from a sharp angle on the right, trying to use Luffy's pass as cover. Claws out, body low, aiming for Enel's side while the god was still tracking the rubber man. He got within four feet, just as a bolt hit him across the left arm. It wasn't a direct hit, thankfully, nothing more than a graze, barely, the edge of a strike aimed at the space he was occupying rather than him specifically. But even the edge of it was enough. The electricity tore through his arm, locking the muscles solid for a half second before he wrenched himself sideways and broke contact. His arm dropped uselessly at his side for several seconds afterward, fingers refusing to respond, the whole limb buzzing with a deep, structural wrongness.
Varin landed on one knee, breathing hard through his teeth, forcing the arm to move through sheer stubbornness while his nerves reconnected themselves in ways that hurt more than the strike itself. And that was only a graze. He didn't want to think too hard about what a direct hit would do right now. He had already answered that question twice, and both answers had involved craters.
Enel hadn't moved. The man stood in the air above the deck, watching Varin straighten up with the patient expression of someone waiting to see if the point had been understood yet.
Varin smiled at him anyway, flexing the damaged arm slowly until the fingers started answering again. "Nice shot," he said. His voice came out rougher than intended.
"You are persistent," Enel replied, his tone reverting back to calm arrogance, with more than a bit of smugness.
Luffy was already coming again from a completely different angle, having apparently decided somewhere in the last thirty seconds that variety was the answer. He bounced off the mast, off the railing, off what appeared to be absolutely nothing, using his own stretched limbs as a ricocheting system that didn't follow any obvious pattern. For a brief moment, even Enel seemed to track him harder than usual, the god's eyes moving with the strange, jerky momentum of someone trying to predict something that didn't bother with straight lines.
Varin didn't waste the distraction; he moved without thinking. Everything he had was thrown toward the distance between him and Enel while the god's attention was split. His boots hit the deck hard enough to leave impressions in the wood beneath him. Five feet. Three.
Enel's head turned as his arm came up. Varin twisted his body sideways mid-stride, throwing himself into a hard lean that took him off the direct line a half second before the lightning erupted from Enel's palm. The bolt tore past close enough that Varin felt it drag across his jaw, felt the heat of it sear past his ear, and then he was inside the distance, past the point where the strike could track, close enough that he was already driving his shoulder forward.
Enel stepped backward through the air like the ground had simply moved beneath him, drifting out of Varin's reach with a calm that made the whole lunge feel stupid in hindsight.
Varin's momentum carried him through empty space. He caught the railing with both hands to stop himself from going over the edge entirely, and for one very undignified second, he was hanging half off the ship, staring down at open sky below him, before hauling himself back upright.
He stood there for a moment, breathing through his nose, staring at Enel. Every damn time, every single time he committed to a direction, Enel was already adjusting before the movement was finished. Like the god wasn't watching what Varin was doing. Like he was watching what Varin was about to do. The realization settled into place with a cold clarity that cut through the pain and frustration currently competing for space in his skull.
It took Varin a moment to remember it, the other form of Haki, oberation? No, obver–observation, Observation Haki, the other form, the twin to his Armament. On top of an invincible fruit, this bastard could essentially read Varin's mind.
Varin's eyes moved to Enel's face, watching it differently now. The god wasn't tracking movement. He wasn't watching footwork or shoulder position or any of the usual signals. His expression was too removed for that, too far above the immediate moment. Like he was reading something that existed slightly ahead of what was actually happening.
Varin had known the man could hear conversations across an island. Had factored that in, had refused to name his abilities out loud specifically because of it. But he hadn't fully considered what else that level of perception covered. If Enel could hear heartbeats from miles away, could process everything happening across an entire sky island simultaneously, then the physical tells that preceded movement, the subtle shifts in muscle and weight that happened before a body actually committed to anything, those wouldn't even be a challenge. His damn fruit gave him a boost for the haki itself, just to add on to the other bullshit it could do.
Varin exhaled slowly. Rolled the damaged arm again, satisfied when it responded fully this time. He needed to be faster than thought. Fast enough that the gap between intention and action became too small to read. And in this body, carrying this much accumulated damage, with nerves still misfiring from two direct hits and a graze, fast wasn't something he had a lot of left. But, if he removed thought from the process, could he be read? Could he be predicted if he himself didn't know what he was going to do next?
It was a lot harder than it sounded, maybe even impossible, but he wasn't going to outspeed lightning, so his eyes dropped to his own hands. The decision made itself.
Bone cracked, and muscle surged as the wolf erupted upward beneath his skin, fur rolling across his frame in a wave while his silhouette expanded outward into something that had no business being on a ship this size. The deck groaned beneath him as he landed on four legs, the massive wolf filling the space between two of the ship's masts with barely room to spare on either side.
Luffy stopped mid-bounce somewhere to his left and stared. "Oh, cool! You changed!" Varin ignored him. His eyes were already on Enel, and they didn't look like the eyes of something that had ever learned patience.
He moved differently now. Faster, lower, a wolf's body was built for bursts that the human form simply couldn't match, legs coiling and releasing with a spring that didn't telegraph the same way, didn't carry the same readable weight shift in the shoulders, didn't give the god the same clean line of intent to read ahead of. He cut left hard, scrambled sideways across the deck in a way that had no logical momentum to it, then drove off the railing to his right and launched himself at Enel from above.
A bolt cracked upward and caught him across the flank. He twisted in the air, and the hit glanced instead of landing square, the electricity tearing across fur and muscle without the full contact it needed to lock him down. He hit the deck on the other side, skidded hard, gouging lines through the golden wood with his claws before stopping himself.
Still too close. Still too slow by a fraction, but it was a smaller fraction than before. Enel regarded him with something that might have been faint interest. "Faster," he observed. "It won't matter." Varin's lip pulled back from rows of teeth in a grin that had nothing friendly in it anymore.
Luffy launched himself again across the deck toward Enel, the trajectory looping wide in that elastic way of his. Enel raised one hand, and lightning gathered instantly around his palm, crackling in that focused, aimed way that meant something specific was coming. But when it struck Luffy, it did what it always did. Nothing. The electricity poured across him and simply stopped existing as a threat.
Varin saw something shift in Enel's expression. A very controlled version of irritation if he had to guess. The god's free hand moved, and the golden staff at his side rippled. The metal flowed outward like liquid under his direction, extending and reshaping itself with the smooth certainty of someone who had done this before. The staff lengthened, split at the top, the two outer extensions curving forward and sharpening until what had been a weapon for lightning was now three-pointed and built for something entirely more direct.
The trident gleamed in the pale sky light as Enel leveled it toward Luffy with the calm of someone who had simply decided to solve the problem a different way.
"If the storm won't reach you," Enel said, voice as even as ever, "then let's try something more traditional."
He was in front of Luffy before the sentence finished. The trident drove forward in a single clean thrust, and the only reason it wasn't through Luffy's chest was that Luffy twisted at the last second, body bending sideways in that boneless way of his that had no business working as a defensive technique. The tines punched through his side instead, in and out in the same motion, and Luffy looked down at the wound with the expression of someone who had just noticed a mildly interesting thing had happened to them.
Then he grinned. "Gotcha." His neck stretched backward, pulling his head back and back and further back still, the rubber of it coiling with tension that built visibly, jaw set, eyes locked onto Enel's face from an impossible angle.
The headbutt connected with the full force of everything that pullback had loaded into it, a sound like a cannonball hitting a wall ringing out across the deck. Enel's head snapped backward, the god stumbling through the air, and for the third time since this had all started, the composure cracked open enough to show shock, and now humiliation.
His eyes came back to Luffy with a stillness that was worse than rage. The lightning came, but this time it wasn't aimed at Luffy or at Varin. Enel's arm swept sideways toward the rear of the ship, and the bolt that left his palm hit the section of the deck where Nami and Vivi had been watching. The explosion of light and force blew the railing apart instantly. Wood and gold and smoke erupted outward in a wave, and both of them were gone, thrown clear of the ship's edge and into open sky below, their voices swallowed almost immediately by wind and distance.
Luffy spun toward the sound before it had finished happening, arm already stretching, reaching downward over the ruined railing with everything his devil fruit gave him. His fingers found Nami. She grabbed on with both hands, and he hauled her upward in one motion, pulling her back over the edge and onto what remained of the deck behind him. She hit the wood hard and immediately pushed herself upright, hair wild, eyes already searching for Vivi.
Luffy's arm was already stretching again, angling downward toward where she had fallen, fingers spread, reaching for the second shape dropping through open air below the ship.
Enel moved to stop him, but Varin was already moving before he fully committed to it. Varin couldn't have explained the certainty afterward in any clean way. It wasn't a prediction in any technical sense. It was the reading of a man, the recognition of a particular kind of coldness, the understanding that someone who had just been made to look small in front of witnesses would reach for control immediately, and the most efficient control available was the one that cost Luffy something. He had seen Enel's eyes in the half-second before the arm stretched. Had watched the god's attention move from Luffy to the falling shape below, had felt the decision in it before the body carried it out.
The massive wolf hit Enel from the side before the god could fully extend his arm. The collision drove them both sideways off the ship's edge, Varin's weight and momentum carrying them clear of the deck and into open sky without anything solid beneath either of them. Enel dissolved instantly into lightning, the familiar escape, the reflex of a man who had never needed to stay still when things went wrong.
Varin had expected that too. His claws found the current as the electricity tried to move around him, Haki bleeding black across his paws and forelegs as he pushed into the discharge rather than away from it. The lightning couldn't fully take him while the Haki held, couldn't move through him the way it moved through open air, and Enel couldn't fully disappear while part of him was held together through force.
They fell together. Enel tried to dissolve again, but Varin's grip tightened, Haki pressing into the contact point, refusing to let the current slip cleanly away. He felt the electricity trying to find a path through him, felt it scraping against the armored surface of his fur and finding no purchase, the pain of it still reaching him in dull waves through the resistance, but nothing close to what a clean hit would have done.
He was aware of the air rushing past him. Aware of the ship shrinking above them. Aware that there was nothing beneath his paws except sky, and beneath the sky, clouds, and somewhere below the clouds, whatever waited under Skypiea's floor.
Varin looked down. Far below, a shape was still falling through the open air. Small, and getting smaller. He angled his body downward, using his weight and Enel's struggling form as a direction rather than fighting the fall. The wind screamed past his ears as they dropped, Enel sparking and crackling against his grip, the electricity building again toward another attempt.
Varin tucked his head and rode him down through the open sky toward where Vivi was still falling below, using the god as something between a shield and a vessel, his claws locked in and his Haki holding while the clouds rushed up to meet them both.