The natural system started off strong, but the navy finally reached its peak!

"Supreme... Hadouken!!!"

"BOOM!!!" The moment the fist was unleashed, all the air on the entire island was sucked away.

A pale shockwave, tens of meters in diameter, swept across the battlefield, crushing everything in its path into dust!

After a long while, the smoke slowly dissipated, revealing Kuzan kneeling on one knee, blood trickling from the corner of his mouth, his ice crystal armor riddled with cracks, but his eyes were colder than the polar wind.

"Ha..." He slowly stood up, the freezing air condensing into new glaciers beneath his feet.

"That's what a 'monster' should look like."

Chapter 241 Airspace Collapse

After a moment of silence, a cold wind blew up. Without a word, the two of them simultaneously pushed off the ground!

The ice surface shattered with a deafening roar, and two figures, one in blue and one in white, transformed into streaks of light like cannonballs, embarking on a deadly collision along the central line of the broken ice field!

"Ice hockey!" Kuzan murmured, and hundreds of baseball-sized ice hockey pucks instantly condensed around him.

Then, his arms became blurry as he hurled the ice balls, which were filled with terrifying freezing energy, like a catapult!

"Whoosh whoosh whoosh!" The ice puck tore through the air, leaving countless pale, frosty trails in its wake.

Like a reverse blizzard, it crashed down on Gern!

"Just what I wanted!" Gern laughed wildly, his sprinting speed undiminished. Fist-sized, high-frequency vibrating pale particle spheres instantly materialized before him.

Then, with a flick of his left hand, these vibrating spheres shot towards the ice hockey storm like a barrage of bullets!

"Heavenly Tremor - Star Link!"

The next second, the center line of the battlefield turned into a symphony of destruction!

"Boom! Boom boom boom!" The ice hockey puck and the shockball collided at an astonishing frequency and annihilated each other!

Extreme cold and extreme tremors, two diametrically opposed natural forces, are locked in a fierce struggle within a confined space.

Each collision exploded into a blinding blue-white energy ball, accompanied by deafening explosions!

The repeated violent air bursts, failing to completely neutralize the freezing air and shockwaves, forcibly distorted and merged them.

The frozen air was shattered into billions of crystal dust particles, which were then instantly captured by new frozen air.

In an instant, huge, ferocious "ice flowers" formed from countless ice crystal fragments and pale shockwave arcs bloomed continuously in mid-air between the two!

These "ice flowers" are over ten meters in diameter, with intricately structured petals that are as sharp as ice blades.

They hovered briefly in the air, refracting distorted light, breathtakingly beautiful, yet terrifyingly dangerous.

Then, it shattered violently in the impact of the subsequent explosion, turning into a death rain mixed with ice blades and shockwaves, which enveloped the entire battlefield!

The two ran at full speed through the constantly emerging and destroying flowerbeds of death, throwing out more and more ice balls and shock balls, rapidly closing the distance between them!

Kuzan's eyes pierced through the flash of the explosion and locked onto Gern.

Every throw was calculated with lead time, and they even deliberately used the ice puck to hit the ground and create ice mist to obscure their vision.

Meanwhile, Gern activated his micro-vibration perception to its maximum, his pupils reflecting countless incoming trajectories.

He precisely intercepted every most threatening ice hockey puck, the shattering energy causing his black hair to dance wildly in the wind!

Fifty meters! Thirty meters! Ten meters!

The last puck and the last shock puck collided with a deafening roar at the center line!

An unprecedentedly huge "ice flower" suddenly bloomed, almost filling the entire space between the two people!

In that instant, the two figures did not pause for a moment, simultaneously enveloped by the lingering particles and cold mist around them.

They unleashed their decisive next strike towards that giant ice flower, and towards each other!

The center of the ice flower was completely detonated by two forces, and the huge impact instantly engulfed the two figures!

........

"It's not over yet, Kuzan!" Gren flew backward, bouncing wildly on the ground. He then braced himself with his hands to stabilize himself before slamming his fists together.

"Buzz—Crack!" The pale, vibrating sphere compressed and took shape between the fists, its surface covered with dense black lightning patterns.

The air was sucked out, and the ice layer collapsed in patches around him.

Kuzan's pupils contracted, his Observation Haki foreseeing the destruction that was about to occur.

Immediately afterwards, he plunged his arms into the ice and unleashed his Devil Fruit power at full force: "Glacier Wall!"

Thousands of icicles rise abruptly from the ground, layer upon layer, like relics of an ancient glacier.

In an instant, Gern's killing move arrived.

"Heavenly Tremor - Collapse of the Twin Stars!"

Two vibrating spheres spiraled out, shattering the space in their path as if it were glass.

The first ice wall shattered into countless ice crystals the moment it came into contact with the second and third ice walls, which collapsed one after another!

The shock wave spread in a ring, lifting the permafrost tens of meters high.

Kuzan leaped into the air under the cover of the ice wall, his right arm fully elementalized: "Two Spears!"

Countless ice spears rained down like a storm, each spearhead not falling in a straight line.

Instead, under Kuzan's control, it drew a tricky arc, blocking all of Gern's evasive angles.

Gern grinned, neither dodging nor avoiding.

"Too slow!" He stomped his right foot on the ice, and the shockwave expanded in a hemispherical shape.

The incoming ice spears were shattered into dust a hundred meters away, but Kuzan's true killing move was hidden in the ice mist.

Three transparent ice spikes suddenly pierced through the ice crystal mist!

Upon seeing this, Gern's pupils constricted sharply, and he turned his body at the last second.

"Swoosh! Swoosh!" Two ice spears grazed past his ribs, leaving two deep frostbite wounds that exposed the bone.

He grabbed the third one with his bare hands, and the high-frequency vibration started instantly.

"Crack!" The ice spear shattered, but the extreme cold had already spread down his arm.

Gern's entire right arm was instantly covered with a thick layer of ice.

"Don't be too confident, Gern!!" Kuzan landed, clasped his hands together, and the ice crystals in the sky suddenly condensed into countless mirrors.

Each ice mirror reflected his image, completely disrupting Gern's perception.

Gern used Armament Haki to shatter the ice shell on his right arm, and the blood that had just seeped out froze into blood crystals.

At the same time, his breathing became heavy, and white mist condensed into frost-like beads on his eyelashes.

"A mirage, or something like the moon in the water...?"

Seeing this, Gern suddenly closed his eyes, as if the deafening explosions and biting cold around him had all vanished.

All aura and momentum were restrained to the extreme at this moment, like the still sea before a storm.

Then he slowly raised both palms, one above the other, and held them in the center of his chest.

"Buzz!" A heart-pounding buzzing sound was generated between his palms, not from sound, but from the tremor of space itself!

The atmosphere wailed, and the light twisted and collapsed in his palm.

A highly irregular, pale sphere suddenly appeared!

Unlike the previous vibrating sphere, it was not stable. Its surface was wildly bumpy, surging, and deforming, like a spatial heart that had been forcibly bound and was eager to break free.

The interior of the sphere was in utter chaos, with fine black spatial cracks flickering on its surface like blood vessels, emanating a terrifying threat that could freeze even Kuzan's marrow!

"This is...?!" Kuzan's Observation Haki sent a sense of unprecedented crisis through him.

This feeling was more intense than any of Gern's previous moves!

So he instinctively wanted to retreat in his elemental form to interrupt Gern's charge.

But it was too late.

Chapter 242 The Ultimate 'Movement', The Ultimate 'Stillness'

Gern suddenly opened his eyes, his pupils devoid of any emotion, filled only with an absolute will to destroy.

Since Tianzhen awakened, his ultimate control has allowed him to unleash the power of all his moves even more effectively than before!

Then, Gern suddenly clasped his hands together, which had been hovering above and below his chest.

"Earthquake - Airspace Collapse".

Instead of a deafening explosion, there was a deeper, soul-chilling sound of shattering!

"Click—Buzz!!!"

Centered on Gern's palms, an indescribable transparent shockwave expanded instantly in a spherical shape, sweeping across everything within a kilometer radius!

The space itself was detonated!

Vision has completely lost its meaning.

The ice field beneath their feet was no longer cracking, but rather breaking down directly into countless disconnected, massive, sharply edged fragments.

Like a shattered mirror, between the fragments are bottomless, pitch-black void cracks!

The air was no longer a gas; it first solidified, then shattered like glass.

Countless deadly air fragments, refracting and distorting light, are suspended in every corner!

Kuzan's elemental transformation was forcibly interrupted the moment he came into contact with the transparent shockwave!

He felt as if his body and consciousness were being dismantled into the most basic particles along with this space.

The ice crystals shattered inch by inch, not from being shaken apart, but from the collapse of the "structure" that makes them up.

He then let out a muffled groan, and the blood spurting from the corner of his mouth was instantly blasted into a blood mist by an invisible force.

The whole world seemed to have become a shattered kaleidoscope, with all matter, energy, and even light losing their original order and falling into complete chaos and collapse!

Gern stood at the center of this shattered realm, his black hair dancing wildly, his body wreathed in dark, domineering lightning, like a god who wielded the power of destruction.

In this realm where the spatial structure itself is groaning and crumbling, conventional dodging and defense have lost all meaning.

Kuzan's pupils reflected a horrifying image of the world shattered into billions of lenses.

Her body was being torn apart by an invisible force of disintegration, and her icy skin groaned in unbearable pain.

If it cannot be detached from its elemental form, then...

Absolute Zero - Seal!

Kuzan abandoned all thoughts of movement and attack, and unleashed the full power of the Ice-Ice Fruit with all his might!

So he suddenly crossed his arms in front of his body, no longer releasing the freezing air outwards, but compressing it inwards to his own limit!

In an instant, a layer of extremely deep, almost light-absorbing, ghostly blue ice crystals covered his entire body.

Taking the concept of "freezing" to its extreme

An absolute defensive barrier that attempts to completely "freeze" its own time, energy, and even existence!

The terrifying power of the Skyquake and the collapse of the airspace swept upwards, tearing and shaking the last vestiges of ice.

"Crack! Crack!" Countless cracks instantly appeared on the surface of the azure ice crystal.

The shards of ice peeled off his body like a snowstorm whipped up by a gale, only to be swallowed up by the spatial rift the instant they were separated.

Kuzan groaned, and blood seeped from his clenched teeth, instantly freezing into crimson icicles.

At the same time, the "ground" beneath his feet had already disappeared, and he was suspended in the shattered fragments of space, relying entirely on this layer of absolute ice to resist the collapse of the entire space.

Every second felt like an eternity, and his domineering aura and stamina were being consumed at an unprecedented rate.

However, the essence of "freezing" is precisely to stop the movement and let the energy stagnate!

The essence of Gern's "space collapse" technique is to trigger high-frequency, violent oscillations in the spatial structure, thereby causing it to collapse.

Kuzan's desperate, absolute defense is attempting to use extreme stillness to counter extreme movement!

Sure enough, the omnipresent, tearing shockwave struck the layer of dark blue ice.