"How did you figure it out?"
Feeling the pressure gathering behind him, Shamrock showed no sign of panic. Instead, he smiled faintly and looked calmly at Uta.
"By all rights, you shouldn't even know I exist. Shanks certainly wouldn't tell you something like that."
Uta waved one hand behind her, signaling for a certain someone who was already poised to attack to hold back for the moment. Then she turned back to Shamrock and patiently explained.
"Shanks didn't tell me."
"But your not-so-reliable teammates spilled practically everything they should and shouldn't have told me about a year and a half ago."
She paused, and her eyes drifted downward toward Shamrock's exposed legs.
"As for how I figured out you weren't him… honestly, your disguise was really good. Every flaw had a perfectly reasonable explanation."
"But Shanks has been deliberately refusing to regrow his leg hair because he wants to keep it as a perfectly valid excuse to beat Cain up someday."
Uta smiled.
"He told me that himself."
"That was what gave you away."
"And besides, if Shanks really had come back, there's no way he'd quietly stand around here all by himself. At least a few of his crew would've wandered over to join the fun."
"…I see."
Shamrock fell silent for a moment before understanding dawned on him.
So that explained why Killingham and Sommers had ended up in such a ridiculous state during their previous encounter.
He raised his eyes toward Uta.
"Then will you come with me to the Holy Land?"
"No."
Uta refused without the slightest hesitation.
"I still want to travel around the world and go on adventures at sea. I don't want to go with you."
"I see."
Shamrock shook his head, sounding more resigned than disappointed.
"You know, when I first learned you existed, I considered simply leaving you to live and die down here."
His voice remained calm.
"No matter how beautifully a flower blooms in a filthy world, it is still a flower growing in barren soil."
"But whenever I happened to hear your songs during my rare moments of leisure… they brought me a kind of peace I almost never experience."
Shamrock slowly raised his head toward the sky.
"And yet, when I remember that I possess a life without end while you do not, I can't help imagining the distant future, when I'll have to watch that flower wither before my eyes."
"When that day comes, perhaps there'll be nothing left for me but killing and numbness."
His gaze returned to Uta.
"So if I want to preserve that peace for as long as possible—if I don't want the flower to wither—then I have no choice but to transplant it somewhere else."
There was no overflowing affection in his words.
No desperate familial love.
It was simply Shamrock's sincere appreciation for Uta's existence itself.
And that was exactly why he remained so composed.
Without warning, countless arrow-shaped constructs erupted around Uta and wrapped tightly around her body.
At the same instant, Shamrock threw aside part of his cloak, revealing his left arm, spun around, and drew his sword in one fluid motion.
His blade met the staff already descending toward him.
BOOOOOOM!
The heavens and earth seemed to shudder.
The clouds twisted overhead as two immense torrents of Haki crashed together.
Shamrock locked weapons with Cain and sneered.
"You had an excellent opportunity to attack me earlier, yet you wasted it."
"What a shame!"
From the corner of his eye, he could already see Uta completely wrapped in Gunko's arrows.
His smile turned colder.
"I was stalling because I was waiting for someone."
His eyes fixed on Cain.
"So what were you waiting for, pink-haired brat?"
Everything Shamrock had said earlier had merely been buying time for Gunko to get into position and abduct Uta.
Yet the instant those words left his mouth—
a force far beyond anything he had anticipated exploded through Cain's weapon.
Shamrock's arms jolted violently.
His entire body was blasted backward beyond his control, smashing through layer after layer of forest before finally stopping several hundred meters away.
Cain rolled one shoulder, rested his weapon across it, and grinned.
"I was waiting for Bella."
"You seriously thought I was just standing around doing nothing?"
The Bella who had previously been sleeping in Uta's arms was now wrapped around Cain in ribbon form.
A hundredfold amplification combined with a full-power opening blow.
That had been the most effective first strike Cain could arrange.
Even though Uta had assured him while they were sharing information inside Uta World that she would be perfectly fine, Cain still wasn't entirely comfortable leaving things to chance.
He glanced toward her.
"Uta, you okay?"
Uta calmly stepped forward from inside the mass of arrows binding her.
The arrow constructs simply passed straight through her body without offering the slightest resistance.
"I'm fine."
She smiled as she came to stand beside Cain.
"I told you a long time ago."
"Something like that will never happen to me again."
Her control over the phasing ability she had developed through the Sing-Sing Fruit was already second nature.
Uta glanced toward the direction Gunko had approached from and nodded slightly.
"Looks like you were right. There really was someone else nearby."
"Yeah."
Cain's expression sharpened.
"Which means I don't need to hold back anymore."
He pulled Uta against him.
In the next instant, his body transformed into a colossal pink dragon stretching more than ten thousand meters through the sky.
Cain turned toward both Gunko and the forest where Shamrock had been thrown—
and unleashed a raging blast of fire.
BOOOOOOM!
The scorching breath crashed toward the island.
Snow and ice evaporated instantly, filling the entire Underworld with towering clouds of white steam.
In the span of a single moment, Cain had forcibly changed the local climate.
A blackened trench several thousand meters long had been carved straight through the ground.
Afterward, Cain stared down at the devastation and immediately started complaining.
"Who the hell was it that said getting bigger automatically makes you stronger?"
"With a body this huge, I'm basically a gigantic target."
"And trying to use Observation Haki to find someone when I'm this big is a pain in the ass."
He quickly returned to normal size with Uta in his arms and stood atop Bella as they followed the enormous trench left by his breath attack, searching for their enemies.
When the two finally reached the ruined forest, they found a familiar figure standing atop a faintly flickering teleportation circle.
The man wore a cloak.
A God's Knights insignia rested in one hand.
Red hair shifted gently in the wind.
Cain didn't hesitate for even half a second.
He brought his staff down directly toward the man's head.
The red-haired figure sensed the attack and instantly raised his sword to block.
BANG!
Cain's strike hadn't been amplified by Bella this time, but its power was still considerable.
The surrounding ground shattered, cracks spreading hundreds of meters in every direction.
The teleportation circle beneath the man's feet vanished completely.
Cain was about to continue attacking when the red-haired man looked at him in genuine surprise.
There was no carefree grin on his face.
Instead, his expression was serious.
"Cain? Uta?"
He frowned.
"What just happened?"
Cain stared at the man's defensive stance.
The wide movement of his block had pulled his cloak aside enough to reveal his entire body.
Smooth calves.
Not a single leg hair.
An empty left sleeve.
And that hoarse voice.
Cain's anger surged instantly.
"You're STILL pretending to be Shanks?!"
His grip tightened.
"You even shaved your legs and cut off your arm this time?!"
"DIE!"
BOOOOM!
Another violent explosion followed.
Then another.
And another.
After all, as far as Cain was concerned, this was the bastard who had just tried to take Uta away.
There was absolutely no reason for him to show mercy.
…
Several minutes earlier, deeper within the forest—
After witnessing Cain's enormous dragon form with his own eyes, Shamrock couldn't help smiling.
"It appears we've encountered someone far more troublesome than expected."
He looked toward the gigantic dragon shadow dominating the horizon.
"Compared with the legendary Nidhogg, he's certainly no less impressive."
After a moment, Shamrock added,
"It would be useful if we could bring him under our control."
"Then should we make our move, Commander?"
Gunko descended beside him.
"Our identities have already been exposed."
"I checked Loki earlier. He still hasn't awakened, so he probably doesn't know what's happening."
She paused.
"Although Uta breaking free from my restraints was unexpected."
"Would it be better to take both of them back to the Holy Land? If we could control them, they'd represent an enormous fighting force."
Before Shamrock could answer, Cain's surprise attack arrived.
Compared with an ordinary blast of dragon fire, this one had also been amplified by Bella.
Its violence was on an entirely different level.
Gunko attempted to redirect the attack with her arrows, only to discover that Cain's Haki was simply too powerful. Her ability couldn't shift its course at all.
She was preparing to rely on her immortality and endure the attack head-on when Shamrock suddenly grabbed her wrist.
He shook his head.
His Observation Haki had just detected something.
A ship had reached Elbaf's harbor.
And someone aboard it was rapidly approaching their location.
Shamrock's expression tightened.
"Of all times, he had to come back now."
"This isn't the right moment for us to meet."
Without wasting another second, Shamrock drew his blade and split Cain's dragon breath in two.
He then retreated with Gunko.
"Let's go."
"We already obtained Loki's blood sample. Forget the rest for now."
"As for our identities being exposed…"
Shamrock reached into his clothes and removed a God's Knights insignia.
"That's not a problem either."
Gunko used her ability to pin the emblem firmly to a nearby tree.
A teleportation circle immediately ignited beneath the two of them.
Then they vanished.
And almost at that exact moment—
a red-haired man came sprinting through the forest.
Shanks.
The Red Force hadn't even fully reached the harbor when his Observation Haki detected an unfamiliar disturbance somewhere on Elbaf.
He hadn't taken the time to alert the rest of his crew.
He had simply rushed ahead by himself.
But by the time he arrived, everything was already over.
All that remained was the fading teleportation circle—and a God's Knights insignia.
---------
Read 40 chapters ahead and support me on patreon.
patreon (.)com/Newbietranslator