The world returned to Leo not as a gentle fade-in, but as a violent, crushing tidal wave of sensory horror.
He was drowning in sound. It was an apocalyptic symphony of swords ringing, and the distant, agonizing screams of thousands. Above it all was the ROAR of something impossibly large and guttural, like the sky itself was being ripped apart.
He coughed, the movement wrenching an unbearable pain through his chest and ribs. He couldn't open his eyes—they felt sealed shut by grit and a searing heat. He smelled sulfur, gunpowder, and fresh blood; it was the smell of war, but magnified a thousand times beyond anything he had ever experienced in a military exercise or real combat zone. This wasn't the metallic tang of an urban skirmish; this was elemental carnage.
"Am I… dead?" he thought, his internal voice weak and hollow. "Is this the final dungeon? Is this hell?"
He finally forced his eyes open. The first thing he saw was not the ceiling of a hospital or the stone of a grave, but an impossible amount of smoke and fire. Ash rained down like black snow. He was lying on a patch of uneven, reddish earth and pulverized stone. He was still wearing the remnants of his scorched uniform, now nothing more than rags clinging to his burned, aching skin.
He managed to roll onto his stomach, pushing himself up on his elbow, shaking uncontrollably. He tried to think, tried to process the last memory—Kat, Jax, Rook… the white flash. The memory was too sharp, too immediate. The guilt was a physical weight.
Focus, Leo. Where are you?
He looked up and froze.
Directly in front of him, towering over the battlefield like a god of destruction, was a man. He was impossibly huge, clad in a tattered white coat, his bare, muscled chest crisscrossed with scars, and a crescent-shaped white mustache that defied reality.
Leo's breath seized in his throat. His entire lifetime of media consumption, the mental catalogue of every game and anime he had ever loved, locked onto the image. It was instant, undeniable recognition.
"No… No way," he whispered, a sound lost immediately in the din.
The figure turned his head slightly, and Leo saw the sheer, terrifying power in those tired eyes. The man was holding a polearm that seemed wider than Leo's entire body. Then the man raised his massive, fist-clenched hand and punched the air.
The air itself CRACKED. The noise was not a sound but a physical shockwave, a vibrating force that hammered Leo's eardrums and made the earth beneath him split open.
The world's strongest man. Edward Newgate. Whitebeard.
Leo scrambled backward on the rubble, ignoring the pain. He was hallucinating. The brain damage must be immense. But if he was hallucinating, why did the ground keep trembling?
He forced himself to look past Whitebeard, past the chaos of the massive pirate fleet, and across the bay. His eyes landed on a colossal steel wall, riddled with holes, and behind it, a fortress with the distinct, unmistakable architecture of a naval base. Banners flew from every turret, displaying the familiar, stylized Marine symbol.
Wait. The crescent bay. The vast navy lined up on the docks. The sheer scale of the battle. The three gargantuan figures sitting on thrones high above the fray—the Admirals.
A hysterical, high-pitched laugh bubbled in Leo's throat.
"Holy… shit," he choked out, the word reverent and terrified. "This isn't a dream. This isn't hell. This is Marineford."
He had survived the classified power device explosion only to be dumped directly into the epicenter of the greatest fictional war ever conceived. The absurdity was so total, so complete, that it circled back around to pure, rational panic.
Why is my luck this bad? Killed in one battlefield, and now I'm a spectator in another that is 10,000 times worse?
He tried to run a diagnostic on his mental state, falling back on the only coping mechanism that had ever worked.
Interface. Status Screen. System Check. Activate!
He mentally screamed the commands. He squeezed his eyes shut, anticipating the cool, blue glow of the UI to pop into existence.
Nothing.
He opened his eyes. No floating bars. No XP gauge. No Mana counter. No warning sign, no quest log, nothing but the smoke-filled, blood-soaked reality of the war raging around him. He was a small, tattered man surrounded by monsters who could shatter continents.
"Don't tell me," he pleaded internally, his voice trembling. "Don't tell me I'm just an NPC. A background casualty. My role is just to die here in the crossfire?"
From the bay, a massive shape—a man whose body shimmered like polished diamond, Diamond Jozu—roared and hurled a gigantic shard of ice, ripped from the solidified ocean, toward the Marine headquarters. The ice mass was the size of a little mountain, spinning toward the plaza.
"That's Diamond Jozu!" Leo gasped, recognizing the Whitebeard commander.
Then, from the Marine side, a monstrous figure in a red uniform stepped forward. His body was literally molten rock, radiating an infernal heat that made the cold air sizzle. Admiral Akainu.
"Pathetic," Akainu's voice was a low rumble, instantly audible even over the war. He didn't bother dodging. He raised a massive, magma-covered fist, summoning the full, terrifying might of his Magu Magu no Mi. "Great Eruption!"
FWOOOOSH! A column of incandescent lava exploded from Akainu's arm, hitting Jozu's ice projectile mid-air. The impact was cataclysmic. CRRRRACKLE-HISS! The ice instantly vaporized in a massive plume of scalding steam and molten rock, sending chunks of superheated stone flying everywhere.
The molten fist didn't stop. It continued its trajectory, aimed not at Jozu, but across the bay, directly at the massive figure of Whitebeard.
Oh no," Leo whispered, I have to move. I have to get off the ice. I need to find the edge of the bay. Find a boat. ESCAPE!
He forced himself to stand. His legs were shaky, but they held. He took a single, desperate step toward the chaos.
Suddenly, a small, dark object landed ten feet from him. It looked like a cannonball, but it was traveling too fast and spinning too strangely. Before he could process the threat, a pirate near him screamed and dove away.
The object detonated.
KABOOM! The impact threw Leo hard against a pile of broken ice, knocking the breath clean out of his lungs. He slid down the frozen surface, finally coming to rest in a shallow pool of icy salt water.
As the ringing in his ears began to subside, a final, despairing thought echoed: The device worked. It just didn't bring the system with it.
Just as he surrendered to the cold water and the immense reality of his situation, something shifted. It wasn't visual; it was a deep, resonating hum, right at the back of his mind.
Then, faint, almost subliminal, a single phrase flashed in the corner of his blurred vision.
SYSTEM INITIALIZING... 1%
The text was pale blue, ghostly, and gone in an instant. It was enough. He wasn't an NPC. His system was coming online. He just needed to survive long enough for the patch to download.
Leo closed his eyes, gripping his Kukri knife, the sounds of the war deafening him once more. He had to level up from zero, in the middle of a war zone, with Whitebeard and the Marines as his first enemies.
New Quest: SURVIVAL. Objective: Escape Marineford. Rewards: EXP, System Online.