"Well, we're screwed now! Anyone without wings isn't getting home!"
Queen yelled up at King in the sky, asking if the island had somehow come alive.
King coldly explained that this was the enemy's ability—the legendary Sky Admiral.
At this moment, Onigashima was still locked in fierce battle.
Tenma swung his blade to fend off Kaido's relentless assault, casually mocking the fact that Kaido's wounds hadn't fully healed yet.
Kaido was a ruthless beast. He didn't care in the slightest about his wounds tearing open and bleeding again—if anything, the fight only made him more excited. He sneered that Tenma's stamina was starting to lag.
That was true enough. Trading attrition with a Mythical Zoan monster like Kaido was definitely a losing proposition for Tenma.
Yet Tenma's eyes burned with nothing but fanatic fervor.
This kind of life-and-death battle was the perfect whetstone to break through his bottleneck.
Tenma took a deep breath. His Conqueror's Haki erupted without restraint, blood-red flowing Haki wrapping around his blade like molten magma.
Kaido froze for a split second—then burst into wild laughter.
So this brat was using him as a sparring partner to grind experience!
If you want to learn, then pay some tuition!
With a furious roar of "Three Worlds Ragnarok!", Kaido descended like a demonic god, his kanabo dragging a long trail of black flames as it smashed down.
Tenma didn't retreat. The Moa Moa no Mi activated, and the famed blade Shidarezura instantly expanded to over a hundred times its size.
Breaking the sound barrier, he unleashed a heaven-defying slash.
Blade and club collided—
The world fell silent.
Then came a deafening explosion that tore at the eardrums. The entire Onigashima nearly split in half on the spot.
The thick storm clouds overhead seemed to be ripped apart by an invisible giant hand, revealing a bottomlesscrack in the sky itself.
This was proof of standing at the pinnacle of the sea—
Heaven-Splitting.
Below, Queen stared at the apocalyptic scene, completely dumbfounded.
What kind of monstrous rookie had crawled out of nowhere?!
After that single strike, the violently shaking Onigashima finally began to calm, slowly descending back toward the sea.
King knew the battle was over. He grabbed the absurdly heavy Queen and flew back toward the utterly devastated stronghold.
What greeted them was a supermassive crater over a kilometer wide, as if a meteor had just slammed into the island.
At the bottom of the crater, Tenma leaned on his sword, gasping for breath, his body covered in fresh wounds.
Opposite him, Kaido sat on the ground, chugging alcohol with wild abandon. A new sword scar cut across his body, yet he seemed completely unconcerned.
King and Queen landed at once, positioning themselves protectively beside Kaido, eyes locked warily on Tenma.
Kaido waved them away impatiently.
"The fight's over. Why are you still putting on a show? Makes it look like I lost."
Despite how brutal it looked, both men still had reserves left. If they truly fought to the death, it would take days and nights.
But Kaido was also a businessman.
Keep fighting, and his home would be completely gone. With the Float-Float Fruit's shameless mobility in play, dragging this out would only mean losses.
Kaido stood up. His terrifying recovery ability was already stopping the bleeding.
He fixed Tenma with a sharp stare and pointed out that the gigantic slash earlier was absolutely not something the Float-Float Fruit could accomplish.
Tenma smiled, sheathing his blade. He knew there was no hiding it from an old monster of this caliber—and he had no intention of denying it anyway.
Since he had openly revealed the Moa Moa no Mi, it meant he never planned to keep it hidden.
This was his carefully considered decision—to slam his core trump card squarely onto the table, right here and now.
After all, one had to be self-aware.
His starting point had been nothing more than a fairly average Impel Down jailer.
Even with so-called talent templates, even after four and a half years clawing his way through darkness—through hell itself—his strength had indeed grown by leaps and bounds.
But if he truly squared up and tried to fight this man—hailed as the "strongest creature in sea, land, and air," a monster who had carved his way through mountains of corpses on the Grand Line—to the death…
That would be like an old man eating arsenic: courting death.
There was simply no way to truly defeat this humanoid tyrannosaurus.
Which was precisely why Tenma dared to storm the Beasts Pirates' headquarters alone and seek out Kaido.
He hadn't come to fight.
He'd come to do business.
To negotiate on equal footing with a monster of this level—and make him nod and agree—if you didn't have a few hard, undeniable bargaining chips in hand, your words would be worth less than a fart.
Sure enough, everything unfolded exactly as Tenma expected.
Kaido's bull-like eyes locked onto him. After a few seconds of silence, Kaido suddenly threw his head back and roared with laughter, the sound making the very air vibrate.
"Wororororo! Interesting, Tenma, you brat. What was it you said you wanted to talk to me about again?"
Don't let Kaido's crude appearance fool you—this old monster was sharp as hell.
That future habit of trying to kill himself for fun wasn't stupidity; it was boredom born of invincibility.
Just look at the weapon in Tenma's hands—growing and shrinking at will, unpredictable beyond reason.
Then consider that explosive, nearly imperceptible speed.
Add to that the intelligence reports of his ruthless decisiveness in Impel Down—two top-tier powerhouses dead by his hand.
As for the Moa Moa no Mi, back when Kaido ran with the Rocks Pirates, he hadn't personally witnessed it in battle, but he'd heard about it so often his ears had nearly grown calluses.
That was Douglas Bullet's signature ability.
One person eating two Devil Fruits and still walking around fine was certainly bizarre.
But on this strange, chaotic sea, bizarre things were everywhere.
Kaido merely widened his eyes briefly before regaining his composure.
What truly made him wary—and forced him to take Tenma seriously—was the combination of both the Float-Float Fruit and the Moa Moa no Mi.
Golden Lion's Float-Float Fruit alone didn't scare Kaido—but its strategic value was terrifying.
Floating islands, choosing when to fight and when to run—it was the ultimate headache, an unkillable fly.
Now add a fruit that could multiply size and speed at will.
This wasn't just a matter of doubling the threat.
It meant that even if Kaido wanted to capture Tenma, his success rate would drop from near certainty to maybe thirty percent.
When Kaido saw Tenma using advanced Conqueror's Haki, he'd already considered stopping to hear what this brat wanted to say.
After seeing this dual–Devil Fruit configuration, that consideration skyrocketed in priority.
With this freakish ability setup—and monstrous growth in just a few short years—Tenma had earned the right to be treated as a peer-level ally or enemy.
Tenma didn't waste time. He went straight to the point.
"I came to Wano to do one thing."
"Kill Kurozumi Orochi, kick him off the shogun's throne—and I'll take his place."
"After that, I want the Beasts Pirates to fully cooperate. Withdraw every single claw you've sunk into Wano. Get the hell out of this country, completely."
"From then on, as long as your people set foot in Wano, they'll follow the rules I set—or they don't come in at all."
The moment those words fell—
the air froze solid.