"Emergency report! Priority dispatch! The black mist engulfing the East Blue has accelerated exponentially! At this current expansion rate, fully blanketing the entire East Blue will take... a mere three minutes!"
"What?!"
Hearing the frantic voice pouring from the Transponder Snail, the crew of the Dragon Flag Pirates was thrown into sheer panic.
They understood the catastrophic reality behind those words all too well.
The remaining lifespan of the entire East Blue was down to these final three minutes.
"How did this happen?!" Kenshin pressed urgently.
He knew better than anyone that the East Blue was the cherished homeland of their captain, Drake!
"Just moments ago, the spread of the mist surged into overdrive! If that black canopy begins weeping that lethal black rain again..."
"The entire East Blue will be wiped clean off the map, reduced to an uninhabited wasteland."
Listening to the receiver, the Dragon Flag Pirates lapsed into grim silence.
They knew the deadly nature of that black rain; they had witnessed its horror with their own eyes.
If it descended en masse, stating that the East Blue would cease to exist was not an exaggeration in the slightest.
At the very least, not a single living soul would survive.
"Three... minutes..." Drake murmured, a bitter smirk tugging at the corners of his lips.
The East Blue was colossal. Even with his spatial abilities, covering an entire sea simply exceeded his operational radius.
Unless he neutralized Im within these three minutes, saving the East Blue was an impossibility.
Yet reality was no staged play.
The dark mist had already smothered nearly five-sixths of the entire sea.
If he attempted to crush her with absolute force, and she cornered herself into mutually assured destruction, she could detonate the strike prematurely.
Even if that didn't wipe out the entire sea, the resulting carnage would be virtually indistinguishable from total annihilation.
Worse still, he lacked a definitive method to eradicate Im's core essence once and for all. The monster was possessing an innocent vessel, and after that initial failure, Ain's Soul-Sealing Art was unlikely to land a second time.
It was an impossible stalemate.
"Drake... what do we do?" Kenshin asked quietly, noticing Drake's uncharacteristic silence.
They all understood their predicament: without a way to destroy Im's true spirit, saving the East Blue was a hopeless dream.
Drake found himself entirely at a loss. This was precisely the absolute worst-case scenario he had envisioned.
He possessed no fail-safe countermeasure.
Without answering Kenshin, Drake sank his consciousness directly into his inner mindscape, demanding an answer from the System.
He needed a way to obliterate Im's soul in an instantaneous stroke.
Yet as Drake looked upon the System with desperate hope, the entity resorted to its oldest, most infuriating routine: playing dead!
No matter how Drake pressed, it remained completely motionless, refusing to make a sound, limp as a corpse that had been rotting for centuries.
Drake: "!!!"
In the end, Drake was forced to withdraw in sheer exasperation. The damn System had reverted to its usual useless nature.
Whatever. At this point, I have to rely on myself.
Shaking his head, Drake pulled his consciousness back to the physical world.
The moment his focus returned, he was met by the anxious, expectant gazes of the entire crew.
"Don't worry. Leave it to me," Drake offered them a confident grin.
At a juncture like this, a captain could never say he was out of options!
Guess I'll have to give that method a shot. Locking his gaze onto Im, Drake surged forward with lethal intent.
"Spatial Sealing Art!"
Across invisible dimensions unseen by the naked eye, layered spatial barriers manifested around Im, walling off her perimeter.
BOOM!
A colossal pillar of concentrated space plunged from the heavens, crushing down onto Im's frame and impaling her against the spatial barrier behind her.
For the first time, a flicker of genuine panic surfaced within Im's eyes.
She discovered to her horror that under the crushing weight of this spatial pillar, her physical strength was rendered completely impotent. The ambient spatial energy ground away at her flesh continuously, tearing through her cells faster than her regeneration could mend them.
That single restraint trapped her in a continuous state of profound weakness.
Immediately after, a second spatial pillar plunged down. In rapid succession, six colossal pillars descended, pinning Im firmly against the spatial wall.
She was immobilized down to the bone.
"Impossible!" Im cried out, completely caught off guard.
How could Drake possess such a terrifying binding technique?!
It actually worked! A flash of pleasant surprise lit up Drake's eyes. He had only deployed it on a whim.
The technique carried virtually zero lethal output, making it useless as a finishing blow against high-tier combatants.
At best, it served as a rudimentary crowd-control restraint, which was why he had never expected it to yield such an astonishing effect against Im.
With his superior Spatial Suppression and Spatial Binding already at his disposal, he had always looked down on this crude sealing art, leaving it mothballed until now.
"How about we strike a deal?" Drake approached Im with a warm, amiable smile.
"I'll spare your life once more today, and you disperse this black mist."
"In your dreams!" Im snapped her head away, refusing to acknowledge him.
Drake showed no annoyance, casually sitting down right beside her. "Tell me, why are you so obsessed with destroying the East Blue? Slaughtering this many innocent people yields zero strategic benefit to you anyway."
This was a genuine mystery to him.
Even if the collapse of the World Government filled her with bitter resentment, taking it out on the populace of the East Blue was excessive beyond reason.
"It's not easy being a woman, you know. Why make things so hard on yourself?"
"Listen to reason, girl. In this fleeting life, finding a little happiness is all that matters. Why take things to such grim extremes?"
"All this killing and dying—doesn't it ruin the scenery?"
"Look at this grand, magnificent ocean waiting for you out there..."
Drake prattled on, jumping from one absurd topic to the next in a desperate attempt to talk Im down through sheer verbal attrition.
Inside the Demon Warder, the crew's lips twitched violently. They had assumed Drake was executing some profound tactical masterstroke.
To think he was just rambling like a traveling jester!
If Im could be swayed by cheap sentimental babble, the world wouldn't be teetering on the brink of an apocalyptic massacre in the first place.
"So it really won't work, huh..." Drake suddenly exhaled a deep, defeated sigh.
"Of course it wouldn't work, you idiot!!" Kenshin and the others shouted at the top of their lungs, wondering what sort of madness had seized their captain's brain.
SPLAT! TEAR!
Fountains of crimson sprayed into the air. Drake's eyes snapped wide.
Before him, Im had severed her own trapped limbs and torn through her torso to violently wrench herself free from the spatial pillars!
Blood gushed profusely from her mangled arms and the gaping cavities gouged into her torso, yet Im showed not a shred of agony. She merely fixed an icy, venomous glare upon Drake.
"Since you are so desperate to save this worthless garbage, I will deny you that satisfaction!"
Raising both arms, Im drove them violently downward.
"Heaven-Burying Dark Tempest!!"
She shrieked the incantation at the very top of her lungs, turning a look of pure, mocking malice back toward Drake.
Her sneer delivered a silent, final verdict: You lose.
"Dammit!" Drake grabbed his head in sheer panic, completely out of moves. Plunging his consciousness into his mindscape, he screamed desperately, "System! System, get out here and help! Everything's completely gone to hell!"
Yet the mindscape remained dead silent, met by no response at all.
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