The ruins of Golden Lion Shiki's palace on the primary landmass of Merveille had been completely repurposed, serving now as the staging ground for the Eclipse Pirates.
"Big Sister! Carina! Get over here and look at my latest work!"
Jeno's boisterous shout echoed across the stone courtyard. His midsection gave a deep, metallic thrum like an industrial forge before his jaw unhinged, smoothly ejecting two heavily customized weapons onto the assembly table.
"This is a high-density alloy I synthesized yesterday after consuming Shiki's twin blades, fused with the lunar ore remnants and localized minerals from the peaks! I've logged it as the Jeno Obsidian Alloy. Its structural strength and molecular density completely lap any standard steel found in these blue seas!"
With a heavy grunt, Jeno hoisted an enormous, unwieldy greatsword and slammed the point into the stone. The impact left a deep crater radiating cracks through the flagstones.
The weapon was monstrous. The blade was as black as grease, roughly thirty centimeters across, backed by an incredibly thick, reinforced spine that terminated in a wicked, curved spike at the tip.
"Big Sister Leona, your new greatsword! I've brought the edge to a mirror polish, but given its sheer, multi-ton mass, it doesn't just cut when it connects—it delivers the concussive force of a kinetic strike!"
Leona stepped forward, her hand closing around the grip.
Float-Float Fruit.
The heavy steel, which easily tipped the scales at several thousand pounds, instantly became as light as a reed in her fingers. She spun the massive blade through a series of blinding, fluid flourishes before nodding in quiet satisfaction. "The balance and response are seamless. From this hour, its name is Meteor."
Jeno patted his metal chest, his ocular lens whirling with pride. "Hehe, that's not all. I mapped the mechanics of the Sky Island reject dials into the core matrix. When you use the flat of the blade to parry, the sword absorbs the physical momentum of the strike, storing it to multiply the velocity of your next swing!"
In her right hand, she held the lightning-fast, silent edge of White Night; in her left, the destructive, weight-shifting mass of Meteor. The dual-wielding style of the feline swordmaster had been completely re-engineered.
Jeno then reached for a sleek, long-barreled rifle that shimmered with a low, blue-white light, passing it over to Carina. "Carina, this is the Eye of God, tailored specifically to your combat profile. It links your surveillance assets directly with advanced laser discharge."
Carina accepted the weapon, her fingers tracing the sleek composite stock with an irrepressible smile.
"The rifle features dual fire modes," Jeno explained. "The first is a long-range sniper configuration, discharging a hyper-concentrated laser beam that pierces armored plating beyond visual range. Linked with your fruit's tracking arrays, you can take a target's head off from miles away. The second is a heavy dispersion setting, causing the beam to detonate into a high-explosive reaction on impact—exactly like Kizaru's output!"
"Jeno, you're a genius! Let's see those black-market brokers try to corner me now!" Carina's eyes flashed with sudden malice. Clutching the rifle, she hurried toward the edge of the cliff to test her precision, utilizing her Communication Fruit as a full-map radar network.
With his synthesis factory producing stable results, Jeno planned to methodically upgrade the armaments of Sabo and the rest of the vanguard as new materials were harvested.
Watching the technical overhauls from his position atop the ruined palace terrace, Ace smiled with grim satisfaction. He stood up, clapping his hands together to draw the attention of the yard.
"Alright. The steel is forged. Now, let's talk about your discipline."
Ace's cold gaze swept over Sabo, Enel, and Shark—the three who had recently broken through the mental threshold to touch the disposition of a King. "Conqueror's Haki is the marking of a sovereign, a trait shared by one in a million. But if your only trick is releasing it in a raw, careless wave, you aren't fit to carry it into the New World."
Ace pointed a finger toward the valley, where hundreds of large, mutated beasts roamed the dense canopy.
"You've broken the seal; your task now is absolute, surgical precision. I want you to target a single entity within that pack. Exercise your kingly pressure to stun that specific target without letting the backflow touch the creatures standing directly beside it."
Ace didn't turn his head as his awareness flared.
Buzz!
An invisible, hyper-concentrated line of conceptual force cut through the air, spanning a hundred meters in a fraction of a second. The largest alpha tyrannosaurus in the center of the valley didn't even manage a growl before its legs buckled, its bulk hitting the dirt as foam bubbled from its jaws. The smaller beasts surrounding it merely shifted uncomfortably, feeling a passing chill, but remained fully conscious.
"That is precision," Ace said, drawing his awareness back inward. "It's about compressing your will into a hardened wire, not scattering it like loose sand. I'll map out the focal triggers, and then you're on your own."
With those instructions anchoring their routine, the floating island was transformed into a violent, unrelenting proving ground.
High-intensity sparring matches tore through the clearings daily, most notably between Sabo and the lightning sovereign.
"Flame Burst: Fire Dragon King!"
The compressed fire at Sabo's heels erupted with a thunderous crack, breaking the sound barrier as his hands, curved into hardened dragon claws and reinforced with high-level Ryuo, lunged forward.
"200 Million Volts: Amaru's Hammer!"
Enel, wielding his golden staff now coated in a dense layer of black Armament Haki, met the trajectory head-on. Fire and lightning tore through the clearing in a violent display of static. Sabo utilized the friction to sharpen the margins of his Observation Haki, while Enel, pressed by his brother's physical density, hounded his own unrefined Armament output to match the pace.
In another sector of the plateau, a different discipline was underway.
"Iron Body: Great Buddha Image!"
Urouge expanded into a towering, five-meter wall of raw, hyper-dense muscle, standing unyielding as Shark and Buggy launched a continuous, two-sided assault against his frame.
"Five Thousand Tile... True Punch!"
Shark's eyes were entirely devoid of emotion as he drove his water-shrouded knuckles into the Monk's midsection with a rapid, concussive rhythm, forcing his newly awakened Armament Haki to fuse with his martial forms.
"Listen to me, you two! Armament Haki isn't a technique—it's an invisible suit of iron you wear over your soul!" Urouge laughed boisterously, his chest absorbing the full weight of Shark's punches as he swung his heavy iron bar around in a wide, sweeping arc toward Buggy's position. "Isolate the power within the pain! Don't look for an exit! Absorb the mass!"
"Aaaaah! Are you insane?!" Buggy shrieked, his limbs separating as he scrambled to slip through the trajectory of the bar. "The great Buggy is a Chop-Chop user! Why am I practicing head-on suicide drills?!" Despite his protests, the panic forced him to frantically mobilize the unrefined Haki within his core to cover his vitals before the metal could connect.
High above the tree line, a silent figure hovered.
Maintaining her weightless profile required very little biological energy from Leona, but it demanded an absolute, clinical focus to manipulate external masses with precision. Her long red hair whipped across her face in the high winds.
"Rise," she whispered.
At her command, hundreds of shattered blades, loose masonry, and even the water from the terrace pools rose into the air, caught within the authority of the Float-Float Fruit.
"Sword Control: Flying Blade Domain."
Whoosh! Whoosh! Whoosh!
The jagged steel, stone spikes, and columns of pressurized water came alive, weaving through the upper air in a complex, crisscrossing pattern to create a lethal, all-encompassing field of fire. The technique didn't just threaten a target's flesh; the erratic, multi-directional movement severely disrupted the predictive capacity of an enemy's Observation Haki.
Then, Leona adjusted her grip on her dual swords—one light, one heavy. White Night lay ready in her right hand; Meteor rested in her left.
"If the old lion could control the earth, so can I," she murmured, her lips thinning.
She raised her hands toward the clouds.
Rumble!
Massive sections of the outer cliff face ruptured and flew into the sky, knitting together in mid-air to form a colossal earth lion hundreds of meters tall. But the rocky mane of her creation was stained a dark, murderous red by the backflow of her own sword-qi.
"Dual Sword Style: Lion King's Roar!"
As her blades came down, the multi-ton earth construct descended upon a distant mountain range with the force of an environmental disaster. The exact microsecond the stone connected, Leona vanished from her position, her absolute weightlessness allowing her to reappear instantly in the structural blind spot of the ridge.
Within her special perception, she isolated the exact focal node of the rock wall as it buckled under the lion's impact. Her left hand moved, Meteor making contact with the stone in a fraction of a second.
"Gravity Return."
The greatsword's immense physical mass returned instantly, combined with a dense coat of ink-black Armament Haki.
Boom!
The entire mountain structure collapsed like soft clay under the weight of the physical pressure and the explosive backflow of her sword-qi, dissolving into a massive curtain of gray dust.
The velocity of a fast blade for crowd control, the crushing mass of a multi-ton greatsword for the finish, and the silent, dead-line slashes designed to dissect human anatomy—the dual-wielding style of the feline swordmaster had found its definitive form in the upper air.
At the apex of the ruins, sitting cross-legged on the stone remains of the throne, Ace remained in deep meditation.
His eyes were closed, his Voice of All Things covering every margin of the archipelago to monitor the baseline growth of his officers. Along the contours of his fists resting on his knees, a dark, violent arc of crimson-black lightning—a force that seemed to crack the very air around his fingers—was compressed and forced back into his marrow, time and time again.
Through this continuous, daily accumulation, the final barrier separating him from Conqueror's Haki Infusion was turning thin as paper. It needed only the friction of a true battle to shatter completely.
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