"FUCK!" Sengoku roared, slamming his fist down on the command console, making the nearby officers flinch.
"These inexplicable actions… Shiki is practically daring us! He's challenging the Marine's bottom line!"
After taking a moment to slightly calm his boiling emotions, Sengoku immediately commanded loudly.
"Divert all available satellite Den Den Mushi! Connect to every regional base's data feed! Continue monitoring his trajectory! We absolutely cannot let that madman make any outrageous moves!"
The technical officer standing nearby already had fine beads of cold sweat covering his forehead. He fully understood the gravity of this incident.
This wasn't just a pirate sighting; it was the return of a legend, a force capable of untold destruction.
He didn't dare show the slightest negligence.
His hands danced rapidly across the control panel, fingers pressing buttons with fluid grace, while his eyes remained glued to the main tactical screen, not daring to miss any detail.
After a series of tense operations, the technical officer finally pulled up a spectral analysis diagram of the airspace over the Grand Line.
On this display, various complex lines and data points intertwined, creating a dazzling, confusing picture.
However, when everyone's gaze focused on the last known coordinates of Shiki's flagship, they all couldn't help but gasp sharply.
Where there should have been clear, trackable signals, there now appeared a massive signal blind spot, a void resembling a black hole on the map.
This blind spot seemed like a bottomless vortex, devouring all radar, radio, and even visual Den Den Mushi signals attempting to approach it, making it completely impossible to peer through.
The technical officer stared at this bizarre phenomenon, an ominous premonition rising in his heart.
Wiping the cold sweat from his forehead, he reported this astonishing discovery to the Fleet Admiral in a low, trembling voice.
"Fleet Admiral… the Visual Den Den Mushi feeds are being completely jammed. It's like… like they've vanished into another dimension…"
.....
On the golden warship's deck, high above the clouds…
The navigator was using an astrolabe, cross-referencing it with a strange, humming compass, to calibrate their course.
Meanwhile, Shiki stood at the corner of the warship, casually glancing down at the faintly visible outline of Enies Lobby far below the clouds.
The judicial island, a symbol of the World Government's power, looked no larger than an ant from this height.
He curled his lips into a disdainful smile.
He casually tossed his empty, oversized liquor bottle backward.
It tumbled end over end, tracing a long arc through the thin air before finally disappearing into the sea of clouds below, destined to fall for miles before splashing into the endless ocean.
"Hmph. i don't have time to waste playing games down there," Shiki muttered under his breath, a familiar, ambitious fire flashing in his eyes.
"Once the Eternal Kingdom is complete, the entire sea will be shocked by its magnificence! That kid Ron… he truly is a rare genius! His vision… it dwarfs even my own."
Just then, as the last of his twenty-nine floating islands slowly disappeared into the swirling mists of the Knock-Up Stream region, leaving only a lingering golden speck of light as proof of their passage…
.....
Down below in Water 7…
Deafening bell sounds suddenly rang out across the city.
Not alarm bells, but the joyous, chiming bells that signaled the end of danger, the return of normalcy.
These sudden chimes seemed to awaken the populace from their collective, terrified trance.
Instantly, the entire city began to boil with activity, with relieved chatter and nervous laughter.
Residents poked their heads out from their homes, looking up in surprise at the now-empty sky.
Cloudless, clear blue, with a long, beautiful rainbow arching overhead—a common sight after the passing of a sky island's localized weather system.
When they realized that the impossible apparition hadn't actually caused any damage, they began carefully checking their homes, their shops, their boats.
Surprisingly, miraculously, even the most sensitive areas—the fine layer of dust accumulated on windowsills—hadn't been disturbed in the slightest.
A young shipwright apprentice carefully picked up a ship nail that had fallen to the ground hours ago.
It was still slightly warm from the sun.
He looked up at the empty sky, and in a daze, it seemed as though the mysteriously vanished archipelago was nothing but a collective hallucination, a shared nightmare.
Then, a news coo swooped down, dropping the morning paper onto a nearby cafe table.
The headline screamed in bold, dramatic letters:
"BREAKING NEWS! IMPOSSIBLE SIGHTING! THE LEGENDARY FLYING FLEET OF 'GOLDEN LION' SHIKI HAS REAPPEARED AFTER 22 YEARS!"
As the vast fleet of sky islands, now hidden from the Blue Sea by the dense clouds surrounding the Knock-Up Stream, passed over the airspace of Long Ring Long Land, the bizarre magnetic fields of the island chain began to affect them.
The once calm and undisturbed formation, held together by Shiki's power and the massive bronze chains, seemed to be violently stirred.
The twenty-nine islands, strung together like a pearl necklace, began to slowly separate, drifting apart slightly with the changing lunar tides and chaotic magnetic pulses.
They rearranged themselves into a more scattered, yet still orderly, pattern across the sky, like giant chess pieces casually cast aside by a deity.
"Shiki-sama! Magnetic field readings are going haywire!"
In the main ship's control room, a sharp alarm shattered the tense atmosphere.
Warning lights flashed a glaring red, casting half of Shiki's face in a fiery crimson glow.
A flicker of wild, almost insane excitement and fervor gleamed in his eyes.
He wasn't alarmed; he was thrilled. This chaotic energy was exactly what he needed.
He abruptly thrust a large, crudely carved piece of cherry wood—a temporary replacement for the ship's helm that had been lodged in his skull—into a slot on the control panel with thunderous force.
In an instant, crushed Seastone fragments packed around the wood rapidly vaporized under an intense electrical current channeled from Dr. Indigo's bizarre machinery.
A hazy blue mist permeated the air, neutralizing the Float-Float Fruit's effect within the control room, allowing Shiki fine-tuned control over the external manipulation.
His rough and boisterous laughter echoed through the control room.
"JIHAHAHAHA! Perfect! An amusement park with no Marines guarding it! Let the harvest begin!"
....
At the fishing village dock on the westernmost end of Long Ring Long Land…
Sunlight shimmered on the sparkling sea surface.
Everything appeared tranquil and serene.
A lone fisherman was intently mending his fishing net, beads of sweat forming on his weathered forehead.
However, at that very moment, he suddenly felt the ground beneath his feet tremble slightly. An inexplicable unease welled up inside him.
Instinctively, he raised his head and gazed toward the distant horizon.
He saw the sea level slowly, impossibly rising, as if enchanted by magic.
Then, his pupils contracted in terror as he saw why.
Obscuring the sky, descending from the heavens like a nightmare made real, was the fleet of floating islands.
The massive cluster seemed to exude an overwhelming sense of pressure, a silent, world-ending threat.
The steel cables mooring the fishing boats snapped taut under an immense, unseen strain, breaking with sharp, piercing cracks.
The salty sea wind, suddenly carrying fragments of coral and seabed debris, swept across his face, stinging with pain.
The entire beach seemed to be violently lifted by an invisible pair of hands, sand particles suspended in the air like a golden blizzard.
"Harvest begins!" Shiki's single eye, visible through a telescope on his flagship, suddenly blazed with golden light.
Thirty massive alloy chains, tipped with razor-sharp thermal blades, shot down from the underside of his main ship like meteors, plunging relentlessly toward the seabed far below.
They sparked brilliantly upon piercing the rock layers.
The long-settled volcanic rock hissed and melted under the intense heat, scorching magma flowing upward along the chains like roaring, fiery dragons being reeled in from the depths.
Deep within a nearby coconut grove, a group of islanders were immersed in the lazy tranquility of the afternoon.
Suddenly, their bodies lost all weight.
They gasped, flailing uselessly as they began to float uncontrollably upwards.
Their eyes widened in pure terror as they watched everything around them—their homes, their ancestral graves, the very ground itself—slowly, inexorably ascend toward the clouds, pulled up by an invisible, irresistible force.
"What's happening?! What's going on?! The island… the island is flying!"
"An earthquake in the sky?!"
"We're doomed! We're all going to be swept away!"