"Haha, why be so sentimental, Shanks?"
Rayleigh laughed, his laughter full of ease, "You're still too emotional. I'm someone who's already died once, anyway. Forget whether you can really kill me this time. Even if I really die, you don't have to be this sad. The one who truly killed me wasn't you, brat."
Srrk!
Rayleigh dragged the blade that had pierced through his chest, staggering as he turned around. He grinned as he looked at the man before him, who was about as tall as he was:
"You've become more manly than you were more than ten years ago."
He tremblingly reached out a hand and gently patted Shanks on the shoulder, "If you get the chance, try your best to live on. You shouldn't have to carry this much, Shanks..."
At the very moment he finished patting him, Rayleigh completely lost all signs of life.
That body slowly fell toward Shanks.
Even an S-class powerhouse could not escape death after having his heart pierced through.
It was only through his powerful vitality that he could say a few more final words before dying.
Moreover, after his heart was pierced, Conis stopped controlling him.
After all, being personally killed by Shanks was the final fate this body was destined for after being revived.
"Vice Captain..."
Shanks's eyes nearly split open, his eyes bloodshot as he gently caught that lifeless body and pulled him into his arms.
Once again.
Once again, he watched helplessly as a companion died before his eyes.
And this time, he had personally killed the vice captain he had once respected the most.
"AAAAAAAH!"
Shanks threw his head back and howled at the sky, dropping to his knees and letting out a cry of grief that was almost beastlike.
The Conqueror's Haki within him completely went out of control, pouring out in all directions like a violent storm and sending the surrounding cloud sand several meters into the air.
Robin and Crocodile in the distance both frowned when they saw this.
Robin acted decisively. Her ability surged, and dozens of arms appeared out of thin air, forcibly dragging Luffy, who was pinned to the ground and seriously injured, away from that area.
Crocodile also transformed into sand, sweeping Luffy up and carrying him to a safe place.
Otherwise, with that uncontrolled Conqueror's Haki alone, Luffy would have been injured even more and fallen into an even more dangerous situation.
But Shanks clearly had no attention to spare for any of that at this moment.
His fists repeatedly pounded the cloud sand on the ground, again and again, smashing out one deep pit after another.
His voice was hoarse, tears mixed with blood sliding down his cheeks and dripping onto Rayleigh's already cold face.
It was a man who, after experiencing too much loss, could finally no longer suppress it and completely broke down.
The sky, which had originally been clear and cloudless, suddenly began to drizzle.
Heavy dark clouds surged in from who knew where, slowly gathering and rolling as they shrouded the entire Upper Yard Island in a gloomy, oppressive gray darkness.
Cold threads of rain slanted down, wetting the cloud sand and also wetting the cold body lying quietly in Shanks's arms.
This suddenly overcast sky seemed to silently echo the shattered state of Shanks's heart at this moment, making his grief look even more overwhelming.
However, as bystanders, Robin and Crocodile felt somewhat complicated and somewhat speechless.
"Where did dark clouds come from at an altitude of ten thousand meters?"
Robin looked up at the dark clouds that should not have appeared here in the first place, her brows slightly furrowed:
"Is this also Conis's ability?"
She turned her head and looked toward Gan Fall, who was standing nearby.
When it came to understanding the World Government's inner workings, she did indeed know somewhat more than others.
But even so, there were limits.
She only knew that Conis's ability was extremely special, that she came from Sky Island, and that she possessed some kind of extraordinary power.
But beyond that, she knew nothing about the true secrets.
After all, back when she was with the World Government, most of her daily training had simply been sparring with Zephyr or Gion.
She had never been qualified to participate in the trials and clashes of the younger generation.
Those true secrets of the World Government were too far away from her.
Just like the World Government seemed to know that she would defect.
Hmm... perhaps they really did know.
But she still had a reason she had no choice but to do it.
"The Princess's ability goes far beyond this."
Gan Fall spoke calmly, not a trace of emotion in his old eyes, "If you want to see the Poneglyph, come with me. You can also collect your reward for clearing the trial while you're at it."
"Reward for clearing the trial..."
Shanks gritted his teeth and repeated those words one by one.
His voice contained anger powerful enough to burn everything to ashes.
The next moment, he suddenly stood up, holding the bloodstained Gryphon. Like a completely enraged lion, he charged madly toward Gan Fall.
He could not accept it.
He could not accept that these people would take everything he had gone through, the overwhelming grief of personally killing his closest friend, and casually treat it as nothing more than clearing a game.
"If you choose to make an enemy of the World Government and an enemy of our God, shouldn't you be prepared to make sacrifices?"
Facing the violently incoming blade, Gan Fall did not even show the slightest intention of dodging.
Yet Shanks's blade simply could not hit him at all.
Because, today, neither Gan Fall nor Shanks was destined to have the fate to strike him.
"Fuck your sacrifices!"
Shanks's eyes were blood-red. He swung the saber in his hand almost frantically, sending one surging slash after another tearing through the air and stirring the winds and clouds.
From Shanks's own perspective, every slash was aimed straight at Gan Fall's vital points, without the slightest deviation.
But in the eyes of Robin, Crocodile, and the other bystanders, what they saw was an entirely different and bizarre scene.
Every slash Shanks swung shifted by an incredibly tiny amount at the very instant it was about to touch Gan Fall, as if by some strange twist of fate.
Sometimes it missed by an inch, sometimes by half an inch.
Even though the residual force of those slashes extended hundreds of meters backward and stirred the vast White Sea beneath their feet into endless turbulence, they simply could not hurt a single hair on Gan Fall.
"Hey, hey, this ability is kind of disgusting..."
Crocodile narrowed his eyes slightly, staring fixedly at that bizarre scene.
Based on these details alone, he still could not accurately determine the principle behind Conis's unfathomably deep ability.
But regardless, Shanks could not possibly be swinging his sword around randomly.
For a powerhouse as battle-hardened as Shanks, every slash would inevitably be aimed at a killing blow.
The only possible reason every slash was being avoided was that Shanks himself was being affected by some kind of power.
But the problem was, Shanks's entire body was covered in Armament Haki.
That was precisely the power capable of restraining Devil Fruit abilities.
With that being the case, how could he still be affected?
This ability was simply too outrageous.
"No matter how much you vent your anger, you can't change anything," Gan Fall's voice remained as calm as water, "Wasn't 'necessary sacrifice' something you, Shanks, always had on your lips?"
He slowly turned around, actually showing his back to Shanks as he leisurely walked toward the center of Upper Yard.
That calm back seemed to show that he did not take the violent attacks behind him seriously at all.
His voice slowly drifted over, "What? It's fine when someone else is sacrificed, but when it comes to sacrificing someone close to you, it's not fine?"
"Talk about double standards."
"AAAAAAAH!"
Those words were like a steel needle, ruthlessly stabbing into the most painful place in Shanks's heart.
He completely went berserk.
Gryphon in hand suddenly gathered two kinds of Haki: black Armament Haki and crimson Conqueror's Haki. The two forces intertwined and wrapped around each other, forming a terrifying blade of light capable of tearing the heavens and earth apart.
He leaped high into the air and brought this slash, filled with destructive power, crashing down without holding anything back toward the entire sea of sand beneath his feet.
At this moment, there was only one thought left in his mind.
Kill Gan Fall!
BOOM!
The instant the slash struck the ground, the entire Upper Yard Island shook violently.
The earth continuously rocked and trembled, as if it might split apart at any moment.
Sand and earth flew into the sky, combined with the slash wave spreading out in all directions from Shanks, like a tsunami capable of destroying heaven and earth, sweeping overwhelmingly toward where Gan Fall stood.
"Can he dodge this?"
Seeing that Gan Fall's back had not turned around at all, with not the slightest intention of dodging, Crocodile could not help but narrow his eyes.
In his view, the range of this attack was so vast and its power so strong that it was no longer something that could be neutralized by simply dodging.
However, the next second, his expression suddenly froze.
He saw the vast cloud sand surging toward them from all directions, as though its kinetic energy had been drained in an instant. It actually stopped bizarrely before it even reached Gan Fall.
Immediately afterward, that suspended cloud sand happened to collide head-on with the slash wave spreading out from Shanks. The two forces simply canceled each other out in midair, turning into harmless dust that drifted down from the sky.
"Impossible!"
Crocodile cried out.
'What the hell!'
'How could there be such a coincidence in this world!'
The vast cloud sand had happened to stop right before the attack.
The place where it stopped had happened to allow it to collide head-on with the slash wave.
And the force of the collision had happened to be enough to perfectly cancel the two out.
This could no longer be described with the word coincidence.
But if even this cloud sand, which had no discernible pattern whatsoever, could be precisely controlled to this extent...
Then how terrifyingly powerful did the person controlling it from behind the scenes have to be?
"Not SS-class."
Feeling Crocodile's gaze filled with doubt and surprise, Robin shook her head slightly and said calmly, "In this Nika incident, powerhouses above S-class will not personally participate. Even if they participate, they won't take action. Even if they do take action, it will have to wait until the moment of the final battle."
"Wait?"
Crocodile's eyes suddenly widened, his face full of disbelief:
"What do you mean by that? What do you mean SS-class powerhouses don't participate? Just how many powerhouses does the World Government have?!"
In the World Government's power ranking system, aside from Rosse himself, whose strength was unknown, SS-class was the highest level.
And among all the information the World Government had publicly released so far, only two powerhouses had been officially confirmed to be SS-class.
One was the current Fleet Admiral, 'Akainu' Sakazuki.
The other was that world's greatest swordsman, the woman who also held the position of the World Government's First Lady, Gion.
But from what Robin had said, there were actually far more than these two SS-class powerhouses?
Robin glanced at him, her tone casual, yet every word struck like thunder, "As far as I know, the World Government alone has at least fifteen SS-class powerhouses. And if we're only talking about S-class... there are already more than a hundred."
She paused, then added, "The one who captured you before should have been Shirahoshi Palace. Although her strength is rated only S-class, her actual combat power is in no way inferior to SS-class."
"You've got to be kidding me!"
Crocodile's pupils suddenly contracted, and he nearly cursed out loud, "How could the World Government possibly be this strong? Then... then how strong would Nika in his complete form have to be? Can he surpass SS-class?!"
With a gap in strength like this, what the hell was the point of playing!
His current strength, within the World Government's ranking system, was only A+, not even at the level of S-.
In other words, there were more than a hundred World Government powerhouses who could easily defeat him.
And someone like him was already considered a famous and feared great pirate across the vast sea.
With such a disparity in strength that it was enough to make one despair, he could not even begin to figure out how they were supposed to win.
"I don't know."
Robin shook her head, a complicated emotion passing through her eyes, "Maybe it's SS-class, or maybe it's a level even higher than SS-class. Who knows?"
"Without the World Government's help, my personal strength has already reached its limit. As for breaking through further and reaching SS-class... I have no idea how."
It was precisely because all of this was unknown that she was willing to make this gamble.
After all, it could not get any worse than this.
Could her life really get any worse?
Back when she was with the World Government, Rosse had already toyed with her completely.
And with Rosse's almost abnormal possessiveness, her circumstances could no longer get any worse.
Since that was the case, she might as well stake everything on one desperate gamble.
Moreover, there was one more thing she had kept in her heart and had not said aloud.
Aside from the World Government, based on everything she currently knew, there was no other method in this world that could break through the shackles of S-class.
Joy Boy had done it once.
But that had already been eight hundred years ago.
If someone wanted to break through S-class in this era, without relying on the World Government's power, then looking across the entire world, the only hope would be Luffy.
Only this reincarnation of Joy Boy, the inheritor of the Nika Fruit, had even the slightest hope of reaching that realm.
And the most despairing thing was, reaching SS-class was merely the minimum threshold for being able to contend with the World Government.
Just hearing that was enough to make one feel despair.