The air was different here. Not cold, not hot, but dead. Still. It smelled of old stone, stale blood, and something else—ozone, and the metallic tang of powerful haki long since faded.
The door's grinding shriek made the inhabitants stir.
"Ooh, newcomer."
A voice, raspy and mocking, echoed from a nearby cell.
"What crime have you committed, kid?"
"Forget to drink your mama's milk?"
Lakeman stepped out, his boots clicking on the stone.
The Eternal Hell was a circular chamber, cells carved directly into the rock wall around a central empty space. The lighting was a dim, sourceless glow.
He recognized many faces from his last visit. They recognized him, too.
The chatter from new, ignorant prisoners continued, but from the older cells, a dead silence fell.
Men who had witnessed his previous display pressed themselves against the back walls, eyes wide with remembered terror.
In one large cell, Douglas Bullet, a mountain of muscle crisscrossed with scars, stopped his relentless push-ups and stood, his chains clinking. His eyes, burning with a fanatic's intensity, fixed on Lakeman.
In another, the Golden Lion Shiki, his legs still intact but wrapped in chains, glared from under his wild mane. Seastone chains wrapped his torso, humming with suppression.
And in the darkest corner, Patrick Redfield, the "Red Count," simply watched.
Other monsters—Avalo Pizarro, Catarina Devon, Vasco Shot—stared with varying mixes of fear and morbid curiosity.
"Ooh, it's quite lively here," Lakeman said, his voice conversational, almost friendly.
He took a few steps into the center. "It seems you scum of the sea have forgotten the pain from last time."
His expression frosted over.
Then he unleashed it.
It wasn't a wave.
It was a detonation.
Golden lightning, visible and crackling, erupted from him in a silent, expanding sphere.
The very air solidified, pressed down with the weight of a mountain range.
This was Conqueror's Haki, but not as the world knew it. This was a demigod's will, refined and multiplied beyond mortal comprehension.
The mocking curses from the new prisoners cut off mid-syllable.
The weaker-willed among them—petty warlords, boastful pirates who had stumbled into Level 6—simply died.
Their eyes rolled back, blood burst from their noses and ears, and they slumped, lifeless husks.
Unseen by any, their life essence, their strength, their very potential, was siphoned away by Lakeman's Steal-Steal Fruit, forming tiny, glittering pellets in his private space.
Their bodies then crumbled to dust, lost in the overwhelming pressure.
The stronger ones gasped, twitched, and collapsed, unconscious but alive, their minds swatted into oblivion.
"Aahh"
Bullet roared, a sound of immense strain.
His own Conqueror's Haki flared around him—a proud, violent red aura that had once shaken the New World.
Against Lakeman's golden tide, it was like a candle guttering in a hurricane. It was crushed, extinguished in an instant.
He fell to his knees, veins bulging on his forehead, his bones creaking in protest.
Shiki snarled, his legendary will fighting a desperate, losing battle. His amber Haki shimmered and shattered. He collapsed forward, held up only by chains binding his body, his body paralyzed.
Only Redfield did not fall. He knelt, his head bowed, his own deep crimson Haki forming a fragile, faltering dome around his cell.
But it too cracked and splintered under the onslaught, as the world turned to golden fury around him.
Then, as suddenly as it began, it was gone.
Lakeman stood in the center, not even breathing heavily.
The silence that followed was deeper than before, broken only by the ragged, wet gasps of the survivors.
In the surveillance room far above, a guard stared at blank Den Den Mushi screens. All linked to Level 6, had fainted, their eyes spinning.
He ran to report to Deputy Warden Shiryu.
Shiryu listened, then waved a dismissive hand.
"Ignore it. Saint Lakeman is… inspecting the merchandise. Return to your post." He licked his lips, a bloodthirsty smile spreading.
'How many will he cull today?'
Below, the Golden Lion Shiki was the first to find his voice, though it trembled with a fear he'd never known. "What… what kind of power… is this?"
"Have you gone senile from old age, Shiki. not even recognizing Conqueror's Haki." Lakeman said in a playful tone.
Bullet pushed himself up, his face a mask of shattered belief. "Bullshit! I experienced Roger's Haki for half my life. There is no such thing. Roger's Haki isn't even a quarter's quarter's quarter of your power now. How could such monstrous Haki exist?"
It was a plea, a denial. His entire life's pursuit—to surpass Roger—had just been rendered a pathetic joke.
Lakeman looked at him, a flicker of genuine pity in his eyes. "Tsk."
"Impossible!" Shiki roared, desperation fueling hysteria.
"You brat wasn't even born when I roamed the whole sea! I witnessed and fought the peak powerhouses of this world, all that it has to offer. Roger, Newgate, Rocks, Garp, The Five Elders, the Knights of Gods. I've seen them fight. Don't try to fool me with your 'Conqueror's Haki' rhetoric."
He was raving, his mind unable to reconcile the evidence of his senses with a lifetime of understanding.
Only Redfield was silent.
He had heard Lakeman's words, accepted this was Conqueror's Haki, and that acceptance seemed to have triggered something.
He wasn't looking at Lakeman anymore.
His eyes were unfocused, staring into some internal abyss.
His body began to twitch, a fine tremor that ran through his limbs.
Then he went utterly still, as if paralyzed by a terror far greater than what Lakeman had just unleashed.
Lakeman's curiosity prickled.
'I didn't use full strength. I don't want to kill my experience-providing sheep yet. So why does he look like his mind is breaking?'
He focused his Observation Haki—not the basic kind, but the unique kind, demigod-level version of the ability he'd first gotten from Redfield himself, as feedback.
The ability to read minds, memories, emotions—to hear the "voice" of a person's very soul.
He sent a tendril of that consciousness into Redfield's mindspace.
It was like plunging into a septic ocean.
It was filled with Anger, thick and boiling.
Hatred, ancient and directionless.
A desire for violence so pure it was an aesthetic.
A need for destruction that wanted to unmake the world, brick by brick, life by life.
These were not Redfield's surface thoughts; these were something else hidden in his mindscape, something ancient.
And they sensed Lakeman's divine consciousness like a beacon.
The negative emotions coalesced, charged at him with the fury of a dam breaking. Lakeman's eyes widened. He tried to pull back, to sever the connection.
It was a fraction of a second too slow.
From the very depths of that psychic mess of negative emotions, something else stirred.
A spark. Tiny, insignificant.
It was Conqueror's Haki, but of a color he had never seen—absolute, lightless black.
It contained no desire to rule, to make others submit. It held only a single, crystalline imperative: Kill. Destroy. Annihilate Everything.
The spark, despite its size, radiated a pressure that felt… older. Denser. Rivaling, perhaps even surpassing, his own golden demigod Level Conquerors haki and will.
It shot up the connection he'd made, like a black dart aimed at the heart of his consciousness.
"What—?!"
The world stopped.
For Lakeman, time stretched.
The black spark pierced his mental defenses with an eerie, silent ease.
It didn't carry memories or thoughts—just pure, undiluted destructive intent. It began to unwind his mind, to fray his consciousness at the edges.
In the real world, his physical body reacted. He clutched his head.
"Aaahhh!"
The roar was torn from him, raw with shock and sudden, searing pain.
Blood—crimson and shocking—trickled from his eyes, his nose, his ears.
On the floor, Bullet and Shiki, still reeling, felt it.
A pressure different from Lakeman's, but just as vast, flashed into existence for a microsecond—a glimpse of absolute void, of ending.
An instinct older than humanity screamed in their DNA.
They convulsed, a terror so profound it bypassed thought, and their minds, already overloaded, shut down.
They collapsed, utterly unconscious.
Redfield, the source, simply folded forward like a marionette with cut strings, his mindscape now empty of the invader.
Inside Lakeman's head, a war was fought in silence and blinding speed.
His golden Haki, the will of a king who would dominate all, met the black spark, the will of an ending with no king, no subjects, only nothingness.
They clashed in the theater of his soul.
The struggle felt like years. It was minutes.
His will, tempered by the system, fed by a dozen geniuses, fueled by stolen lives and a destiny he seized for himself, held.
Slowly, inexorably, his golden light smothered the black spark. It didn't destroy it; it erased it, dissolving it into motes of nullity that faded away.
The negative emotions that came with it dissipated like smoke.
Thud.
Lakeman fell to his knees, then sat back hard on the cold stone floor.
Sweat drenched his clothes. Blood stained his collar. His breath came in ragged, heaving gasps.
"Huff… huff…"
The silence in Eternal Hell was absolute. The living were all unconscious.
"What… was that?" he whispered to the empty air, the taste of copper and cold fear on his tongue.
He sat there for half an hour, motionless, as his demigod physiology worked.
The bleeding stopped. The microscopic tears in his brain healed.
The sluggishness in his thoughts cleared. Yet, a phantom ache remained in his psyche—the memory of that chilling, nihilistic will.
He considered using his Time essence to reverse the damage, to be at his peak instantly.
A cold dread stayed his hand.
'What if reversing my time… reverses its erasure? What if it comes back?'
He wouldn't risk it.
Finally, he stood. His body was whole. His mind was wary.
He looked around the chamber.
Everyone was out cold.
Redfield lay in a heap, his vital signs faint, teetering on the edge of death from the psychic backlash. Bullet and Shiki weren't much better.
A grim smile touched his lips.
He couldn't kill them yet. They were still valuable sheep.
He reached into his private space, withdrew three small, glowing pellets of stored life essence—the barest minimum, scavenged from the pirates his women had killed during the voyage.
He flicked them, and they shot through the bars of the cells, merging with the three unconscious titans.
Their breathing eased. They would live, but they would be weak, broken. Perfect for his purposes later.
He turned and walked back to the elevator, his steps echoing in the dead silence. The door closed behind him, sealing the Eternal Hell once more.
Back in the villa's warmth, the women sensed the change immediately.
The aura of invincible, playful dominance was gone, replaced by a sharp, focused tension. Lakeman summoned Shakky, Mirana, Robin, and Lily to his private study.
"I will be resting in my chambers. I am not to be disturbed for any reason. By anyone. Understood?"
His tone brooked no argument. It wasn't the command of a man going to enjoy his harem; it was the order of a King securing a perimeter after a near-catastrophe.
"Master, are you—" Robin began, her archaeologist's mind sensing a historical tremor.
"No questions. The four of you will continue training with others. Magellan and Shiryu will assume I'm occupied with debauchery. See that they continue to assume that."
They bowed as one. "Yes, Master."
He sealed himself in his bedroom.
For three days and three nights, he slept the sleep of the deeply wounded, not physically, but in the realm where will and consciousness resided.
His mind, like a muscle strained beyond limit, knitted itself back together, stronger than before, but a heavy feeling still lingered.
In the villa, life went on. Training continued in a soundproofed basement gym. Meals were served.
The maids and CP agents performed their duties.
Shakky and the others maintained a façade of normalcy, their worry hidden behind perfectly composed masks.
On the fourth morning, the door to the master bedroom opened. Lakeman emerged, dressed in fresh, dark clothes.
He looked rested, his eyes clear. But those who knew him well—Robin, Shakky—saw a new hardness in their depths, a layer of ice over the familiar fire.
He joined them for breakfast, eating with his usual hearty appetite.
He asked about their training, made a crude remark about Koala's improving throat technique that made the maid blush, and generally behaved as if the last three days had been exactly what the prison staff imagined.
The bindings in the back of his mind continued their steady crawl.
[Binding Genius - Shiryu. Progress - 98%]
[Binding Genius - Magellan. Progress - 97.5%]
Nearly complete. New sheep for the pen.
And downstairs, in the silent dark, the old sheep—broken, healed just enough, and filled with a terror deeper than any torture Impel Down could devise—waited.
They had felt the brush of something even their entire being feared. The game had changed, and they didn't even know the rules.
Lakeman sipped his coffee, watching the snow fall past the villa's window. The memory of the black spark was a locked box in his mind.
A mystery. A threat.
But also, a tantalizing possibility.
'If such power existed, even as a fragment, in a prisoner… what did that mean for the world outside?' And more importantly, 'how could he, Saint Lakeman, make it his own?'
He finished his cup and set it down.
The rest was over. Time to clear the confusion.
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