Cain watched the battle below without feeling particularly anxious, yet for some reason, he couldn't fully settle down either.
Maybe it was because of his current body, or maybe simply because he and Uta had been separated for too long, but a persistent thought kept circling through his head—he almost wanted to go down there right now, find Uta, and bury himself against her until he'd had his fill.
While his attention remained fixed on the arena, a red gleam suddenly flashed through his eyes.
Without looking away, Cain reached for the banana sitting nearby, handed the fruit itself to Bella, then casually tossed the peel over the edge of the viewing platform.
Below, Uta's battle could only be described as a one-sided massacre.
At least, it would have remained that way if nobody had barged in.
Just as the last few contestants were about to fall, an enraged roar suddenly thundered in from outside the venue.
"HUH?! I busted my ass getting all the way here, and now you're telling me to go fight on some other island?!"
Before anyone could react, nearly every loose piece of metal in the surrounding area ripped free and flew toward the source of the voice.
A gigantic mechanical arm formed in midair and slammed onto the outer structure of the arena, gripping it like a hook.
A figure vaulted over the wall.
Eustass Kid landed directly inside the battlefield.
"There's a perfectly good arena right here, isn't there?! So why the hell should I go anywhere else?!"
He had barely finished shouting when his boot came down directly on the banana peel Cain had thrown moments earlier.
His foot shot forward.
Kid crashed face-first into the floor.
For half a second, the entire venue went quiet.
Then the audience exploded with laughter.
Kid's entrance, which had been overflowing with aggression and swagger only moments earlier, was completely ruined. Not that he felt embarrassed; if anything, the humiliation only drove his anger higher.
"Damn it! Which bastard threw garbage onto the arena?!"
He sprang back to his feet and glared up toward the viewing platform, his voice leaving no room for discussion.
"I'm fighting here. That's not a request!"
Kid had actually listened to his crew for once and gone through the trouble of registering properly, only to be told that his assigned battlefield was on another island.
That completely defeated the purpose of why he had come.
There was no chance he was accepting it.
To his credit, Kid wasn't entirely brainless.
He possessed a certain amount of cunning.
Not much, admittedly. Most of him was still pure recklessness.
But before forcing his way into the venue, he had watched the broadcast from the registration area and confirmed one crucial detail: Big Mom herself wasn't present.
Only several members of the Charlotte family were currently maintaining order.
That gave him enough confidence to gamble that they wouldn't want to turn the entire event into a bloodbath in front of a worldwide audience.
As long as he could force them to let him remain on Whole Cake Island, that was enough.
Unfortunately, his grand entrance had ended with him face-first on the ground while thousands of people laughed at him.
Everything he had just shouted now sounded like a punchline.
There was no way Kid was swallowing that humiliation.
His furious gaze swept across the contestants still standing in the arena, and he immediately decided that beating a few of them senseless would improve his mood.
He had barely taken his first step when several arrows came screaming toward him.
Kid quickly swung his mechanical arm up to block, only to realize the arrows weren't metal at all.
They were made of freshly formed candy syrup.
The sticky substance splashed across the mass of metal he had gathered, binding the pieces together almost instantly.
His enormous mechanical arm lost much of its mobility and became an awkward, half-frozen lump of scrap.
Perospero stood above with his candy bow still drawn.
He had only just received the report from his subordinates, and now he looked down at Kid without the slightest courtesy.
"This is Totto Land, brat. Not somewhere you can do whatever you please."
Kid's anger finally boiled over.
"And what if I do?"
He looked across the arena, then toward the viewing platform, and released his Conqueror's Haki without restraint, deliberately directing the pressure toward the people above.
Perospero's expression turned cold.
"Then you'll die here today."
Before the words had even fully left his mouth, Katakuri stepped out from behind the platform.
His own Conqueror's Haki erupted.
The two forces collided head-on.
For an instant, the air seemed to twist.
Then Katakuri's pressure began crushing Kid's almost immediately.
By the time Kid's crew finally managed to catch up and saw what was happening, cold sweat had already broken across all of their faces.
"Katakuri, that's enough."
Perospero quickly intervened.
"If you keep going, half the spectators are going to collapse."
Katakuri glanced toward the stands, then slowly withdrew his Haki.
Kid, however, clearly had no intention of letting the matter end there.
Up on the viewing platform, Cain watched the entire scene with interest before casually raising one hand.
"Oh? Looks like our late arrival didn't hear what I said earlier."
A faint smile touched his lips.
"Then I suppose he deserves a small warning."
Bella instantly appeared in front of him.
A thick cloud of icy mist spilled from her body and swallowed Cain completely, blocking him from everyone's view.
The next instant—
Conqueror's Haki exploded outward.
But unlike the broad waves of pressure everyone had felt earlier, Cain's Haki didn't spread.
It compressed.
More and more tightly.
Until that invisible will became something like an enormous blade aimed directly at the arena.
The stone beneath Kid shattered with a deafening crack.
No one else was harmed.
The entire attack had been focused solely on him.
Kid's own Conqueror's Haki collapsed against it almost instantly, as flimsy as paper before a storm.
He couldn't actually see anything.
But he could feel it.
A black-and-red dragon ten thousand meters long was charging straight toward him.
It wasn't an illusion in the conventional sense.
It was raw willpower crushing directly against his mind.
Cold sweat burst from Kid's forehead and poured down his back.
Then—
his own mechanical fist smashed into him.
Kid went flying.
The audience fell silent.
What stunned them wasn't simply that Kid had been launched across the arena.
It was how it had happened.
Nobody else had struck him.
Kid had punched himself.
And then, before anyone could process that, his mechanical arm moved again.
BAM!
The metal fist slammed into his own body.
Again.
BAM!
Again.
BAM!
Every strike landed with full force, metal crashing against flesh as though Kid had suddenly gone insane and decided to beat himself to death.
He didn't stop.
More importantly, he seemed completely unable to stop.
The dull impacts echoed through the silent arena one after another, each blow making the spectators' skin crawl.
What kind of ability was this?
Even Doflamingo, sitting among the audience, finally lost some of his usual amusement.
"Fuffuffuffuffu…"
His grin remained, but his expression had grown noticeably more serious.
"This tournament keeps getting more interesting."
He leaned back in his seat.
"I should hold something like this in Dressrosa someday. After all, the colosseum there is much better suited for it than this place."
The strange silence continued until a sharp voice suddenly cut through it.
"Enough!"
Uta.
Perospero immediately looked toward her with interest.
"Oh? Does contestant Ado have something to say?"
"I came here to marry Miss En-chan."
Uta lowered her sword and turned toward the viewing platform. By then Bella's icy mist had started to disperse, revealing Cain behind it.
"If I only win because somebody else cripples my opponents for me…"
Uta's voice carried clearly across the arena.
"…then what right would I have to ask Miss En-chan to choose me?"
Cain visibly froze.
Warmth surged through his chest, followed almost immediately by embarrassment.
Not because of Uta's declaration.
Well, not entirely.
The real problem was that when Cain had released his Haki just now, the strain had accidentally caused the hormone transformation to lapse for a moment and return him to his male body.
Fortunately, Bella had the hormone medicine on hand and immediately helped transform him back.
Unfortunately, the sudden change in body size had torn several sections of his dress.
So for the moment, Cain had no choice but to keep Bella directly in front of him and use her as cover.
Even so, Uta's words genuinely moved him.
Cain nodded toward her.
"Then I'll be watching."
He smiled brightly.
"I'm looking forward to seeing what contestant Ado can do next."
Then, perhaps getting a little too carried away, Cain actually winked at her.
"I've got high expectations for you."
The moment he did it, even he felt vaguely disgusted with himself.
Then he remembered the person he was flirting with was Uta.
That made it significantly easier to tolerate.
The audience, however, reacted very differently.
A thunderous uproar exploded through the venue.
Countless eyes darted wildly between Cain and Uta, disbelief spreading through the crowd as people shouted over one another.
"QUIET!"
Perospero immediately raised his voice and forced the chaos back under control.
Then he looked down toward Kid.
"Fine. You'll get your chance, brat."
"You should be grateful for En-chan's mercy."
"Damn you…"
Kid had finally realized that the unnatural urge forcing him to attack himself had disappeared.
He pushed himself up with difficulty, his body aching from his own blows, and glared toward the arena.
By now, only Uta remained standing there.
"I don't need your damn pity."
His eyes hardened.
"And I promise I'm going to make you die ugly."
Uta gave a cold laugh and brought her golden sword across her body.
"The only one losing here is you."
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