Boom!
A fist wrapped in Conqueror's Haki slammed into the black blade, head-on.
No flashy beams. No theatrical explosions. Just the purest, most extreme collision of power.
Black-and-red lightning erupted outward from the two of them like a storm, tearing open the earth, pulverizing rock, even shaking Doflamingo's Birdcage until it swayed on the verge of collapse.
Mihawk's arm muscles bulged, veins standing out like cords. He poured every ounce of strength he had into forcing Yoru forward, even if only by an inch.
But Kael's fist was an unscalable mountain.
It didn't move.
"Good power, Mihawk," Kael's voice cut through the roar, perfectly clear. "But power alone isn't enough."
The moment the words fell, an even more terrifying force surged from his fist.
Crack!
Yoru let out a strained, tortured cry, as if the blade itself couldn't bear the pressure.
Mihawk took the impact like a cannonball to the chest. He flew backward, spraying a line of blood through the air, and smashed deep into the distant mountainside.
One punch.
Just one punch shattered the perfectly planned, five-man ultimate strike.
"How…?" Tesoro stared in a daze. The golden path he'd built for Mihawk suddenly looked like a joke.
"Monster… that guy's a monster!" Moria's teeth chattered.
"Fuffuffuffu… so this is… Kael-sama's real strength?" Doflamingo's laugh was bitter, yet trembling with excitement.
Crocodile kept his eyes locked on Kael, and the battle intent in them only grew hotter.
"Don't give up! He's not unscathed either!"
Everyone snapped their eyes to Kael.
Blood dripped from his fist, drop by drop.
It wasn't much, but it proved their attack had worked.
"Oh? You managed to cut my skin. That deserves praise." Kael glanced at his knuckles, then flicked his hand as if shaking off rain.
He looked at the five men who were standing again, battered but unbroken, and the smile on his face brightened into something almost radiant.
"Warm-up's over."
"Now I'm getting serious."
The five of them felt their hearts tighten.
The next second, Kael vanished again.
This time, he was several times faster than before.
"Above!" Crocodile's Observation Haki caught the faintest trace and he roared a warning.
They all looked up.
Kael was already a thousand meters in the air, both hands raised high. A black sphere of destruction was forming rapidly between his palms, compressed from ultra-dense soundwaves and shockwaves.
It pulsed with annihilation.
"Quakeburst, Black Hollow."
The sight alone made everyone shiver deep in their souls.
They had no doubt. If that thing dropped, the entire island would be erased in an instant.
"Move!" Tesoro's eyes went bloodshot as he forced every last ounce of power out of his body.
"Gran Tesoro, Divine Shelter!"
Gold erupted from the ground like geysers, shaping into an enormous golden dome that sealed the five of them inside.
"It won't work! It won't hold!" Doflamingo's face turned pale. More than anyone, he understood how terrifying Kael's move truly was.
"Shadow Warrior!" Moria snarled, forcing his shadow into the golden dome, trying to reinforce it with everything he had.
Then Kael tossed the Black Hollow down.
There was no screaming whistle of air.
The black sphere simply fell in silence, weightless, almost gentle.
Yet the space around it warped in eerie ripples wherever it passed.
The instant it touched the golden dome, time seemed to freeze for a single heartbeat.
And then, silent destruction arrived.
Hummm.
The golden dome didn't even last one second. Like a drawing erased by an invisible rubber, it began at the point of contact and vanished without sound, without resistance, wiped into nothingness.
Tesoro vomited blood. He felt his connection to the gold get deleted, utterly erased by a force he couldn't comprehend.
The black annihilation continued downward, ready to swallow them all.
At the final possible moment, a turquoise-green slash shot into the sky and struck the black sphere with perfect precision.
Mihawk.
At the most critical moment, he'd moved again.
The slash exploded into blinding light against the sphere, but only slowed its descent slightly.
"It's not enough! Scatter!" Crocodile roared.
But it was already too late.
Just as the five of them were about to be devoured, Kael's figure flashed in front of them.
He raised one hand, pressed lightly against the world-ending Black Hollow.
"Disperse."
One word.
The terrifying sphere dissolved on the spot, breaking into countless tiny motes of light that drifted away like fireflies.
The five of them stared, minds blank.
He created the technique.
Then he casually dispelled it himself.
Was he… playing with them?
"Too slow. Too slow," Kael shook his head, looking genuinely disappointed. "Your reactions are slow, your coordination is stiff, your power is weak."
"At this rate, we won't even make it to nightfall."
The words hit like a clean slap across every face.
"Bastard… don't look down on us!" Moria snapped first.
He roared and melted straight into the ground.
"Shadow Gathering Ground, Demon Descent!"
The shadows across the entire island answered his call, surging toward him like a flood.
A colossal demon god formed from pure shadow rose from beneath the earth, towering over a hundred meters tall.
This was Moria's trump card. Absorb massive shadows, seize massive power.
"Kishishishi! Die, Kael!"
The shadow demon swung a fist the size of a building, smashing down with force that looked like it could punch a hole in the sky.
"Interesting."
Kael didn't retreat.
He stepped forward and threw a punch right back.
Boom!
A giant fist and a human fist collided.
And yet, it was the enormous shadow fist that shattered inch by inch.
Kael broke through like a spear, charging straight into the shadow demon's body.
"Lightwave, Supernova!"
The next instant, blinding white light erupted from inside the demon.
"Aaaaaaah!"
Moria screamed, a sound so sharp it scraped the soul. The shadow demon burned like black paper touched by flame, turning to ash in an instant.
From that moment, the battle fully entered a fever pitch.
Or more accurately, it became a one-sided massacre.
After that, Kael turned into a patient teacher, using the most brutal methods to "correct" their flaws over and over again.
Doflamingo's strings got snapped apart by vibrations.
Crocodile's sand got vitrified into glass by extreme heat.
Tesoro's gold got toyed with by soundwaves of shifting frequencies.
Moria's shadows were completely suppressed by Kael's lightwaves.
Even Mihawk's slashes got twisted and redirected by spatial distortion, thrown into absurd, meaningless directions.
The five of them fell again and again.
And they got back up again and again.
Pressure.
Pure, suffocating pressure.
Under Kael's hell-level pressure, their coordination sharpened at a terrifying speed.
They no longer needed Crocodile barking orders. A glance, a movement, a breath was enough to understand intent.
Doflamingo's strings stopped being mere control tools and became nerves, transmitting information, linking the five into a single organism.
Crocodile's sand stopped being a blunt weapon and became fluid. Quicksand, walls, clones, offense and defense in perfect sync with the team.
Tesoro's gold stopped being dead matter. He could even replicate his teammates' weapons in gold, making their combat patterns far more unpredictable.
Moria's shadows stopped being limited to ambush. He could fuse his shadow with a teammate's shadow, creating shadow retainers with multiple abilities.
And Mihawk became the team's sharpest blade, every swing landing in exactly the right place, always where Kael least expected it.
The fight continued from the first day into the second.
Then the third.
The entire island turned into a living hell.
Mountains were flattened. Forests became scorched earth. The ground split into crisscrossing trenches and bottomless pits.
Six monsters danced on the ruins in a savage feast that seemed like it would never end.
They forgot time.
Forgot fatigue.
Forgot pain.
In their eyes there was only battle, and the man before them, powerful enough to crush hope, yet somehow forcing them to break through their limits again and again.
Day ten.
When the sun rose once more, only a single enormous crater remained at the island's center.
Six figures lay sprawled at the bottom, twisted in exhaustion. Every one of them was battered beyond recognition, not even able to lift a finger.
Kael lay in the middle.
Even he had wounds now. They were healing quickly, but the disheveled sight of him was something none of them had seen in a long, long time.
He stared at the gray sky.
Then, quietly, he laughed.
"Heh…"
The laughter grew, swelling into something wild.
"Hahahahahaha!"
The sound carried a strange kind of contagion.
Mihawk, lying beside him, let the corner of his mouth lift, releasing a faint chuckle.
Then Crocodile.
Then Moria.
Then Tesoro.
Then Doflamingo.
"Kishishishishi!"
"Fuffuffuffu!"
"Hehehe…"
Five different laughs blended together, until they were swallowed by Kael's unrestrained roar of joy.
They'd lost.
Lost horribly.
But in those ten days and ten nights, every one of them had felt growth like never before, and something else too.
Something called trust.
They looked at each other's wrecked, ridiculous states.
There was no longer wariness. No longer suspicion.
Only the kind of wordless understanding that exists between men who've crawled through life and death together.
Just then, the rumble of a ship's engines came from the shore.
On the railing stood a man in a black suit, his jaw replaced with a steel prosthetic.
Caron stared at the island, which looked like it had been struck by a meteor, and at the six figures in the crater below, all of them soaked in blood.
His mind went completely blank.
This… was what Kael-sama called a "relaxing, enjoyable" team-building event?