Karoo, the giant spot-billed duck, sprinted frantically across the desert dunes. Riding on its back, Darian looked to one side and heard a massive, rhythmic rumbling sound echoing in the distance, making the whole earth seem to tremble beneath the sand. It was the unmistakable sound of a large army marching.
During the rapid ride, Darian suddenly shouted, "Halt!"
Upon hearing Darian's sharp command, the mounts all screeched to a stop, kicking up sand. Everyone's eyes turned to him.
"What's wrong?" Nami asked, puzzled by the sudden stop.
Darian didn't respond to Nami immediately. Instead, he turned and looked directly at Princess Vivi.
The commotion from the distant march was so great that Vivi and the others had naturally noticed it. Nami might not fully grasp the scale of what was happening, but as a princess raised in the capital, Vivi certainly knew that it was the noise caused by an army of hundreds of thousands of people mobilizing for war.
Despite the rebel army's massive operation happening right over the next dune, Darian had ordered them to stop. Vivi asked anxiously, "What happened, Mr. Darian? We have to keep going!"
"Vivi, it's time for you to face reality and make a choice," Darian said, his voice deadly serious.
"Even though Crocodile has been defeated and driven off, the rebel army and the millions of Baroque Works agents embedded within them are still active, and they're almost at the gates of Alubarna. Your peaceful plans have failed."
Despite the deafening commotion of the incoming war, Vivi still harbored the deeply naive idea of stopping the conflict without losing a single soldier. At this moment, Darian finally couldn't help but ruthlessly expose her ridiculous idealism.
Looking at Darian's somewhat indifferent, hardened face, Vivi bit her lip, tears welling in her eyes. "But we have to try to talk to them!"
Darian remained cold as he replied, "Alabasta's current situation is indeed due to Crocodile's use of the Sand-Sand Fruit to create artificial sandstorms, causing the entire kingdom's water supply to collapse. For years, not a drop of rain has fallen, and the people, unable to survive, naturally rebelled. That is the truth."
He leaned forward, locking eyes with her. "But this war is a *fact* now. They are angry, starving, and armed. You don't want people to die in this conflict, do you? Now you have to make a hard choice as a ruler. Do you want me to brutally suppress those civilians right now, or do you want to let them directly attack the royal palace and slaughter your father's guards?"
"Hey, Darian, think about Vivi's feelings!" Nami scolded, clenching her fist and sounding angry on the Princess's behalf.
This time, however, Darian didn't tolerate Nami's usual bossy behavior. He yelled back, his voice booming with authority. "Shut up, Nami! You don't understand how war works!"
Seeing that Darian was genuinely furious and deadly serious, Nami was stunned. She opened her mouth, but the intense aura he projected silenced her. She couldn't say a word.
Darian turned back to Vivi and spoke with brutal honesty. "Actually, I'm a bit of a scumbag, Princess. I only originally wanted to help you because you're pretty, and because Nami promised me money."
Darian was so engrossed in delivering his harsh reality check that he didn't notice Nami's absolutely murderous expression flaring up behind him.
"But after spending a few days with you," Darian continued, "I feel that you are treating national affairs and warfare like a child's game. You have no ability to make the hard decisions required of a monarch. Frankly, your idealism is getting a little boring."
Vivi gasped, her face pale.
"Now, I want to ask you one final question," Darian demanded. "Should I go over that dune and directly suppress those starving rioters with lethal force, or should I stand back and let you continue with your ridiculous idea of standing in front of them and 'persuading' them with love... and then wait for the rebel army to storm the capital and let your country be destroyed in the crossfire?"
He pointed a finger at her. "You must understand that once ordinary, starving people become an armed mob, you can't persuade them to drop their swords with just a few pretty words and tears."
Upon hearing Darian's harsh words, Vivi angrily shouted, "Shut up! You're not allowed to say that! Aren't we on our way to stop this tragedy?!"
But all she got in response was a mocking, disappointed smile from Darian.
"As a man who has conquered his own enemies, I have to say that you and your father are truly incompetent rulers," Darian scoffed. "It's true that a king should be lenient and loving with the common people in peacetime. But what time is it now, Vivi? Can't you wake up? How can you possibly rule this country if you refuse to violently suppress a rebellion that threatens to burn it down? The foundation for a royal family to rule a country is a strong, uncompromising army, not so-called 'love and benevolence.' Even I, a wanted pirate, know this basic fact of power!"
As he spoke, Darian pointed sharply at Robin, Mikita, and Paula.
"Ask her, her, and her!" Darian ordered. "These three women were the top officers involved in organizing this rebellion. Ask them how naive your thinking is. They started this rebellion to seize your country's resources; they don't care how many thousands of commoners die in the process!"
Darian's brutal scolding angered Vivi, and her eyes spilled over with tears of absolute powerlessness and frustration.
Pointed at by Darian and seeing Vivi's angry, betrayed gaze, Robin, Paula, and Mikita felt incredibly awkward, looking away. But they knew Darian was absolutely right. The syndicate had played the Royal Family for fools.
Looking at Robin and the other two agents, tears streamed down Vivi's face. She felt completely helpless. Deep down, she knew that Darian was right, but her heart simply couldn't accept the idea of her people being slaughtered.
"That's enough! Look, you've made Vivi cry," Nami finally spoke up, delivering a sharp punch to the back of Darian's head.
It was unclear whether she hit him because he had made Vivi cry with his harsh truths, or because she was violently retaliating against Darian for openly admitting earlier that he was lusting after the Princess.
Finally, a bloody compromise was chosen.
At the massive southern city gates of Alubarna, Darian and his small crew lined up, awaiting the onslaught of the rebel army, which surged over the horizon like a massive, unstoppable tidal wave of dust and steel.
"You women should step back now, otherwise you might get trampled when they hit our line," Darian said over his shoulder, cracking his knuckles.
Looking at Darian, who was preparing to hold off an army of hundreds of thousands by himself, Vivi offered a tearful plea. "Please, try not to kill them all."
"It's alright, Princess. You can't solve it your way anyway, so I'll have to do it mine," Darian replied coldly. "Besides, this war is directly related to the Baroque Works agents standing behind me, so it's fine even if they get crushed in the crossfire."
Vivi had nothing to say to Darian's blunt answer. Robin, Paula, Mikita, and Marianne—the very planners of the incident—looked deeply uncomfortable and helpless.
Seeing the endless, roaring army charging toward them, Nami and Carmen, who were essentially ordinary civilians in terms of mass combat, were trembling slightly. They clung tightly behind Darian's back, intending to use his massive frame as a shield if they really couldn't stop the charge.
As the massive army drew near, shaking the ground, Vivi felt entirely insignificant in the face of such raw, historical power. But she still stepped forward, spreading her arms wide, and roared with all her might.
"Stop! Please! Rebels, listen to me! This war has been orchestrated by Crocodile!"
However, the noise of hundreds of thousands of marching boots and screaming men was simply too loud. Furthermore, the Royal Army stationed on the city walls above them, completely unaware of the truth, opened fire directly into the rebel ranks. Vivi's desperate attempts to dissuade them were instantly drowned out by the thunderous sound of horses' hooves and heavy cannon fire.
BOOM! BOOM!
The sudden explosions obscured everything with thick black smoke and dust, and the enraged rebels continued charging blindly through the barrage toward the gates.
"How... how could this happen?"
Seeing this horrific scene of mutual slaughter unfolding before her, Vivi fell to her knees, utterly desperate. Only then did she truly understand the harsh reality of what Darian had told her in the desert.
"Mr. Darian... please," Vivi sobbed, looking up at him with tears streaming down her face. "Please help me!"
Seeing Vivi's broken state, Nami, who had been hiding behind Darian in fear, ran over and hugged the Princess tightly. She looked up at Darian with fierce, desperate eyes. "What's the solution? Hurry up and do something, you idiot!"
"I told you both how this works, but you just wouldn't listen," Darian said helplessly, pulling his white mask down over his face.
"Gear Second: Tenfold Magnification!"
Activating a new, experimental application of his Devil Fruit, Darian amplified his physical size. He increased his body mass and volume tenfold, instantly transforming from a tall man into a towering, terrifying giant over sixty feet tall.
Darian's Human Path ability could comprehensively amplify his strength, speed, abilities, or physique, but there was a strict limitation: there was no cumulative, stacking effect across all paths simultaneously. He could only amplify one base stat tenfold at a time.
In other words, by increasing his physical size tenfold, his overall mass and sweeping strength also increased to match the new scale, but he could not simultaneously use "Gear Second" to multiply that new giant's strength by *another* factor of ten.
His strength was naturally increased tenfold due to his massive size under normal physics, which was equivalent to wielding the raw, crushing power of an Elbaf Giant.
When they saw Darian suddenly transform into a colossal giant towering over ten meters tall, Nami, Robin, and the others gasped in absolute shock, stumbling backward.
"Get down!"
Before launching his attack, the Giant Darian's booming voice echoed like thunder, giving Nami and the others a final warning.
Although they didn't fully understand the scale of what he was about to do, the women obediently threw themselves flat onto the sand.
With such a massive, imposing size blocking the city gates, the front lines of the rebel army couldn't ignore him even if they wanted to. The sudden appearance of a towering giant holding the line startled the rebels, causing the vanguard to falter. But something even more terrifying was yet to come.
The Giant clenched his massive fist. A translucent, vibrating sphere of white light condensed over his knuckles. The sphere contained terrifying, contained power, and jagged cracks began to appear in the surrounding air itself.
"Asura Path: Giant Quake Fist!"
Feeling the immense, god-like power in his fist and the sheer scale of his body that looked down upon the battlefield, Darian threw a devastating punch at the empty air directly in front of the endless rebel army.
CRACK!
As his massive fist slammed into the atmosphere, huge, glowing white cracks rapidly spread outward from the center of the impact, tearing across the sky.
As the cracks spread, a terrifying, omnidirectional shockwave erupted.
BOOM!
The Tremor Fist of Darian in his Giant form was not necessarily more powerful in terms of pure, concentrated kinetic energy than his normal-sized punch, but the massive scale and area-of-effect visual impact were utterly shocking.
The colossal shockwave swept outward across the desert plains. Wherever the force passed, the earth itself cracked open, churning and rolling forward like massive ocean waves made of sand and bedrock.
The earth split open in thick, deep fissures, moving like giant earth dragons beneath the surface. The surging terrain devoured everything in its path, completely destroying the battlefield's footing.
The rebels, who had wanted to overthrow an evil king to survive, and the undercover Baroque Works members, who had incited the plot for money and power, were all caught in the devastation.
Faced with this terrifying attack, which looked exactly like an apocalyptic natural disaster, the vanguard was either blasted high into the sky by the shockwaves or swallowed up by the churning earth and the massive fissures moving like dragons.
The initial shockwave and the churning of the earth only blasted away and disabled the first few thousand rebels at the very front. The most terrifying aspect was the massive chain reaction caused by the violent tremors.
Under Darian's sustained power output and control of the vibrations, the sky and earth seemed about to collapse entirely.
The sky was shaking, the earth was trembling violently, and Nami and the others, who were lying flat on the ground with their hands covering their heads, felt as if the whole world was being roughly kneaded and shaken by an invisible god.
When the dust finally settled and everything calmed down, the chaotic charge of the rebel army had been completely broken. There was no organized army left—only thousands of civilians who had fallen to the ground in terror, been thrown from their horses, or lay in the sand, their faces filled with absolute fear and helplessness.
Looking up at the terrifying Giant blocking their path to the capital, his overwhelming power—like a walking natural disaster—completely extinguished any lingering thought of resistance in their hearts. The war was over before it began.
Tick-tock. Tick-tock.
"It's... raining!" Vivi gasped, looking up.
Feeling the cool moisture dripping onto her face, Vivi looked up at the sky with wide, tearful eyes.
Indeed, Darian's massive, atmospheric punch had created a terrifying negative pressure system over the desert, violently affecting the rising airflow and atmospheric pressure. The originally sunny, arid sky had darkened, and it began to drizzle softly over the parched land.
Perhaps it was also because Crocodile, the man holding back the rain, had been defeated yesterday, meaning there was no massive sandstorm network left to absorb the abundant moisture rolling in from the sea.
The drought was finally broken.
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