Uchiha Puppet Master, Starting from One Piece.

He stood about several hundred meters to the right of Bai Yu, his arms crossed in front of his chest, his left hand resting on the scabbard of the Night Blade, and his right palm resting on the back of his left hand, in a casual posture.

But his eyes weren't random.

Those golden, sharp eyes, which seemed to see through everything, hadn't blinked even once since Loki transformed. The world in those eyes wasn't the world that ordinary people saw, but an incredibly complex model composed of multi-dimensional information such as lines, angles, trajectories, distances, speeds, power, and domineering aura.

He kept calculating.

In his 60-meter giant form before transforming, Loki was calculating the giant's center of gravity, point of force exertion, joint rotation radius, and every possible attack angle and corresponding countermeasures.

In Loki's transformed black dragon form, he was calculating something completely different.

He was calculating the pattern.

The patterns governing the existence of this black dragon. How it moves, how it senses, how it attacks, how it defends, and how it maintains a form that shouldn't exist in this physical world—there must be some patterns in these behaviors, some patterns that can be observed, understood, and utilized.

Mihawk seeks order amidst immense chaos.

There is a limit to the speed at which the black dragon's head can turn. That limit is extremely slow relative to the black dragon's body, which is 10,000 meters long. It's not because the black dragon's neck muscles are not strong enough, but because it is too big. It takes a lot of time for nerve signals to be transmitted from the head to the tail. Its body cannot achieve coordinated and rapid movement of the head and tail. This is a physical law—a physical law that even the black dragon, which has distorted the rules, must abide by.

Each scale of the black dragon breathes on its own.

Those scales are constantly absorbing energy from the surrounding space, and then converting the absorbed energy into energy to maintain their own shape.

This means that fighting alongside the Black Dragon will continuously deplete and weaken anyone's Haki. If the battle drags on for too long, their Haki will be completely drained by the Black Dragon, eventually turning them into someone without Haki.

We must act swiftly, or find another way to attack.

But that area is probably the location of the core organ where the black dragon transforms the Haki it absorbs into energy to maintain its own form, like a human heart or the core of a Devil Fruit.

Attacking there, perhaps, just perhaps, could inflict real damage on the Black Dragon.

Mihawk removed his hand from the hilt of the sword.

It's not about giving up, it's about preparing.

His right hand gripped the hilt of Night's sword, his left hand rested on the scabbard opening, his thumb braced against the guard, and his other four fingers securing the scabbard. The legendary king was about to make his move.

Chapter 235 Devastating Victory

The moment Mihawk drew his sword, the temperature of the entire battlefield changed.

Night's blade slid out of its sheath in a way that transcended the realm of speed. The movement didn't even seem very fast, but anyone present couldn't describe the specific process of that movement in retrospect, because what they saw wasn't the trajectory of the blade, but rather the result left behind after the blade had reached its destination.

The blade of the Black Blade Night is not wrapped with ordinary Armament Haki, but with a special Armament Haki that Mihawk has honed, compressed, and refined to its extreme over decades.

That domineering aura has no form, no perceptible external features, but when it cuts through the air, the air does not make a cutting sound, because the speed at which sound is generated cannot keep up with the speed at which it cuts through the air.

Sword energy.

A horizontal arc, over a hundred meters in diameter and composed entirely of slashing motions, was released from the tip of Night's blade at an almost stationary speed.

No, it wasn't still; it was moving so fast that it appeared still as it advanced toward the black dragon's neck.

Along the trajectory of that slash, space itself was torn open with a thin, dark crack, and tiny sparks of energy kept jumping around the edge of the crack.

Jabba launched an attack from the left at the same instant.

The Armament Haki on his two battle axes reformed. This time, he didn't add anything extra to the Haki, nor did he shape it. He simply compressed all the Conqueror's Haki he could muster into a layer one atom thick on the axe blade in the most primitive, pure, and savage way.

There was no skill involved in this axe strike.

This axe blow is all about power.

Jabba launched himself up from the ground like a meteor, and the black, glassy ground beneath his feet shattered instantly. It wasn't shattered by his footing, but rather by the Conqueror's Haki he released just before he exerted his strength. When he stepped on it, the fragments didn't even have a chance to fly before being vaporized by the second layer of force.

He spun several times in the air, each spin accumulating more kinetic energy for the battle axe. Eventually, his body became so fast that it was no longer visible to the naked eye, leaving only a blurry, dark outline drawn by Armament Haki, tracing an almost perfect arc on the left side of the black dragon's neck.

The two battle axes simultaneously struck the same scale on the black dragon's neck.

Shanks is on the front.

Griffin moved 0.3 seconds before Mihawk's slash and Jabba's battle axe were about to hit. It wasn't that he attacked prematurely, but rather that he saw through his Observation Haki that if he didn't act within those 0.3 seconds, Mihawk and Jabba's attacks would interfere with each other—not because they were poorly coordinated, but because the black dragon was so large that their attacks would interact unexpectedly with each other before they hit each other due to the energy fields they carried.

"Gods avoid."

the second time.

On Griffin's blade, Conqueror's Haki and Armament Haki merged together in an unprecedented proportion. The boundary between the two types of Haki formed countless tiny, visible vortexes on the blade. Each vortex was spinning, annihilating, and regenerating at high speed. The energy released in this process was presented in the form of light, not reflected light, but light that was spontaneously radiated after the energy itself reached a certain threshold.

Three attacks, from three directions, struck the black dragon's neck almost simultaneously.

boom--

Not a sound.

There were three sounds, but the intervals between the three sounds were so short that they could not be distinguished by the human auditory system. In the end, they appeared on the eardrum as a long, suffocating sound, as if the whole world was screaming.

Mihawk's slash arrived first.

The horizontal arc, a hundred meters in diameter, struck the left side of the black dragon's neck. The moment the strike made contact with the scales, a strange visual effect was created—the strike did not cut into the scales as Mihawk had predicted. Instead, a refraction-like phenomenon occurred on the surface of the scales. The energy of the strike spread along the scales, like a column of water hitting a wall coated with grease. The water splashed in all directions along the wall, but the wall itself remained undamaged.

Mihawk's pupils contracted slightly.

His strike was deflected by some kind of force field on the surface of the scales.

That force field wasn't Armament Haki, Observation Haki, or even Conqueror's Haki. Rather, it was an inherent attribute of the Black Dragon itself, a powerful defense carried by Nighogd as the being that "devours the roots of the World Tree."

Any attack must break through this barrier before it can reach its body, and the essence of this barrier is decay.

It is the decay of the attack itself.

Mihawk's slash underwent accelerated aging in a temporal sense the moment it touched the scales. The slash should have been at its sharpest, most stable, and highest energy density peak within a fraction of a second after it was released, but the black dragon's scales caused it to complete the entire process from peak to decay to dissipation in less than a microsecond. By the time the slash actually touched the scales, it was already old.

So old that it's no longer lethal.

Jabba's attack followed immediately.

His two battle axes struck different parts of the same scale at different angles. The Armament Haki compressed to its limit on the axe blades met the same fate as Mihawk's slash in the first microsecond after contacting the scale's surface: it was decayed, aged more rapidly, and weakened to almost nothing.

However, Jabba's Armament Haki has a unique quality that Mihawk's slash lacks.

When the black dragon's power began to erode Jabba's Armament Haki, the extremely thin layer of Haki changed its nature in a very short time, becoming less easily eroded.

It wasn't because Jabba deliberately controlled it, but rather that his domineering nature learned to survive when pushed to its limit.

This is legendary, experienced advice.

Mihawk's strike was perfect, but perfection lacks the space for self-adjustment when faced with something beyond reason.

Jabba's domineering nature is imperfect—rough, primitive, and savage—but it is precisely this imperfection that gives him adaptability and the possibility of surviving in dire situations.

The blades of the two battle axes eventually cut into the scales.

not much.

But that's enough.

The moment the axe blade pierced through, Jabba sensed a crucial piece of information: he felt the interface between the scales and the tissue beneath—a completely different material structure, softer, more fragile, and closer to the fleshy tissue he had seen on the creatures of this world.

It can be cut in.

Jabba's lips curled into a smile for a fleeting moment.

He can make a cut in the black dragon's body.

Then Shanks's "divine evasion" arrived.

Griffin's blade made contact with the black dragon's neck in a way completely different from the other two attacks.

Unlike Jabba, who tried to cut into the scales with his axe blade, or Mihawk, who tried to cover a wide area with a wide-ranging slash, Shanks compressed all his power into a pinpoint on the tip of his Griffin blade and then hammered that point into the scales like a nail.

This is another way of using the concept of divine avoidance.

The essence of Conqueror's Haki is the power of will.

Shanks' will is unmatched by few in this world.

The tiny point pierced the barrier the moment it touched the scales, not because Shanks' Haki was stronger than Mihawk's, but because he concentrated all his power on an area much, much smaller than Mihawk's slashing blade.

The tip of the knife pierced the scales.

It pierced the scales.

It pierced the softer, more fragile flesh beneath the scales.

Shanks' Observation Haki caught a chilling signal in that instant: the black dragon's muscle tissue reacted the moment Griffin pierced it.

Bai Yu stood still.

His Rinnegan captured all the information the moment Mihawk, Jabba, and Shanks made their move: the trajectory of every attack, the flow of every bit of energy, and the minute details of every contact with the black dragon's scales.

He understood what had happened earlier and more accurately than anyone else.

Of the three attacks, two were defended, and one caused damage.

The depth of that attack that caused the damage, relative to the black dragon's ten-thousand-meter-long body, was roughly equivalent to a human being pierced through the outermost layer of their skin by a single hair.

He's injured.

But the extent of the injury was negligible.

The black dragon moved.

Its neck reacted after Shanks' knife pierced its flesh, not by dodging or retaliating, but by a movement that seemed unbelievable to humans—its neck muscles contracted in that specific area.

It was just a muscle fiber the size of a fingernail that contracted.

The force generated by the muscle contraction was transmitted through the scales to Griffin's blade. Shanks sensed a terrifying power that was completely outside the human world. This power was not applied to Griffin from the outside, but rather expanded outward from the inside of Griffin's blade, as if the blade itself had suddenly turned into a bomb, and the direction of the explosion was from the inside out.

Shanks' fingers made the judgment in a fraction of a second: it wasn't that he couldn't hold onto Griffin anymore, but rather that if he didn't let go, his hand would be shattered by that force. Not a fracture of bones, but a complete disintegration at the molecular level.

He released his right hand.

Griffin tumbled through the air and flew away. The domineering aura on the blade vanished instantly under the impact of that force, like a candle being blown out by the wind. The blade itself drew an irregular arc in the air and finally stuck into the black, glassy ground hundreds of meters away, the blade sinking into the ground all the way to the guard.

This was the first time Shanks, the Red-Haired, had his weapon knocked away during a battle.

Jabba sensed something was wrong a split second before the black dragon's neck muscles contracted.

His Observation Haki doesn't have the ability to foresee the future like Shanks', but after living and fighting for so long, every cell in his body has developed a purely instinctive sense of danger that doesn't belong to any kind of Haki.

That ability sent a signal just before the black dragon's muscles contracted, and the signal was so strong that Jabba felt as if a bucket of ice water had been poured over his back, giving him a sudden jolt.

He let go.

The instant Jabba's body left the surface of the black dragon, the two battle axes were flung off the scales by contracting muscles, not pushed away, but blasted apart by a force that erupted from within.