The Arabasta Kingdom, desert capital Alubarna.
The sun burned like a forge, turning the gold dunes into rolling waves of heat. In stark contrast, a cool underground casino throbbed beneath the city. Smoke curled under low lamps. Voices rose and crashed. The clink of coins beat time for a symphony of greed.
At the deepest end, a luxurious back room felt cold as ice.
A tall man stood with his back to the door, watching the betting floor through a wall of glass. He wore a lavish black fur coat that defied the desert heat without so much as a sheen of sweat. A gold cross hung from his left ear. A cigar smoldered at the corner of a young, severe mouth.
This was the new king of this underworld, Crocodile.
"Boss." A trusted underling eased the door open, voice shaking. "Th-that guy is here again."
Crocodile did not turn. He lowered the cigar, breathed a slow plume of smoke.
"Tell him to get out." The rasp in his voice carried a command that brooked no argument.
"We did, but he would not listen, and he put several of our brothers in the infirmary."
"Oh." Crocodile finally faced the door, an impatient, predatory light flickering in his hawkish eyes. "Useless trash."
He strode out. His shoes sank noiselessly into the carpet, yet the pressure that walked with him made his men choke on the silence.
The casino floor had gone mute. Patrons had fled in panic, leaving overturned tables and guards rolling on the ground.
A monster stood at the center.
He was built like a devil out of iron, muscles knotted and coiled, his very presence sour with violence.
Douglas Bullet.
"Crocodile." Bullet split his mouth in a bloodthirsty grin, voice like stone grinding stone. "Your men are too weak."
Crocodile stopped opposite him, gaze steady, measuring. "I will say this once more. I have no interest in brawling with a mad dog. Get off my turf."
"Mad dog." Bullet's grin grew uglier. "That is right. I am a mad dog, one that craves strong prey. And you, Crocodile, they say you are the strongest thing in this desert."
"So what."
"Prove it." Bullet roared. He stamped, cracking the stone floor, and launched like a cannonball, a black mass with a mountain's weight behind it.
"Fool," Crocodile said, moving forward rather than back.
He lifted his right hand, fingers spread, palm leveled at the onrushing brute.
The floor at his feet withered to sand in a breath. Dry grains rose like living things, piling into a towering wall.
"Sables."
The impact boomed like thunder.
Bullet's iron fist slammed the sand wall. It burst, blasting the hall into a choking khamsin. Sight dropped to nothing.
"That all you got," Bullet bellowed from the grit and howl.
A black shape tore the curtain of sand and hurtled for Crocodile's face. Haki wrapped Bullet's knuckles, a slick, ominous black sheen in the dark.
Crocodile's eyes narrowed. His body unwove into flowing grit, Logia lightness sliding him past the lethal strike.
"A Logia. Interesting." Bullet's miss only stoked his fire.
He whirled a sweeping kick through the storm.
Crocodile gathered himself midair. His left hand's gilded hook flashed and caught the strike with a ringing shock.
Clang.
Metal on flesh sang like steel on steel.
Force hammered through the hook and shoved Crocodile back across the floor, carving twin furrows in stone.
"Not a bad punch." He shook feeling back into his arm.
"Not a bad hook," Bullet shot back, battle fever blazing. "Come on. Stop dancing and show me all of it."
"As you wish." The last warmth drained from Crocodile's eyes.
He pressed his right palm to the ruined floor. "Desert Spada."
Sand gathered in a ravenous spiral, sheathing his arm in a blade several meters long. The edge spun, keening, the air around it peeling away in curling ribbons.
"Combine." Bullet bellowed.
Tables, shattered stone, iron trim and fixtures ripped free under a pull like gravity and raced to him, plating his body layer over layer into a brutal exosuit.
It was his Devil Fruit at work, the power to merge materials into himself.
A sand-borne butcher and a steel-clad giant crashed together again.
Boom. Boom. Boom.
The underground palace shuddered to collapse. Each meeting of sand blade and iron fist kicked off shockwaves that shredded anything left standing. Walls split. The ceiling shed stone in slabs. Luxury turned to rubble in an hour of ruin.
They fought from dusk into midnight, from midnight into dawn.
When the first pale line of morning found a hole in the wreckage, both men were heaving for breath, bodies mapped in cuts and bruises. Bullet's composite shell lay in slagged chunks at his feet, leaving muscle scored and bleeding beneath. Crocodile's fur coat hung in strips. Fresh slashes lined his cheek, one drop trailing along the edge of a still-clenched cigar. His glare had not dulled.
"Hah… hah…" Bullet's chest rose and fell like a bellows, but his grin had never looked more satisfied. "That was good. That was damn good. Crocodile, you are strong."
Crocodile said nothing. He only watched.
"Call it a draw," Bullet wiped the blood from his lip and let his stance melt. "When I am stronger, I am coming back. Next time, I will break you."
He turned, laughing, and trudged away across the wreckage.
Crocodile stood there until the man was gone, then the strength ran out of his legs. He dropped to one knee and coughed a bright mouthful onto the sand.
"Boss." The survivors converged, white with fear.
"Out of my way." He pushed them off and forced himself upright, eyes fixed on the path Bullet had taken, complicated light moving there.
He had felt it, that will that exists only to become strong.
Measured against that, his own pursuit of strength had a bitter admixture to it.
Unbidden, a vision flickered, the Oro Jackson carving the horizon, and a man's unchained laugh burning through the wind.
"Heh."
The chuckle rose and broke into a ragged, delighted cackle.
"Ha ha ha ha. Interesting."
He straightened, brushed dust from the ruined fur, and in the newborn light his scars looked fiercer than ever.
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