43: Chapter 43 The Flesh and Blood of Ancient Beasts

The steel prow of ship slammed deep into the dark green mud at the edge of the island.

The hull sank, pushing a ring of white waves mixed with rotting leaves across the sea surface.

Sea Cow Mohmoo, pulling the ship, let out a muffled low growl and retreated its massive body back into the deep, stagnant water beneath the keel.

"Rice, the gravitational magnetic field on this island is a bit strange."

Nami walked quickly from the navigation cabin onto the deck.

She held a brass compass in her hand, drawing a heavy line across the parchment map, her fair knuckles turning pale from the force: "The steel needle of the Log Pose is stuck at the two o'clock position, completely locked."

"Before the magnetic force is fully recharged, we cannot sail out of this sea area, even if we lower all the sails."

"Then we stay."

Rice pulled his hands out of his jeans pockets.

He flexed his wrists, clenched his knuckles in the air, and a series of crisp bone-cracking sounds erupted.

He didn't look at the woman behind him; his bloodshot black eyes, gazing past the hundreds-of-meters-tall ancient giant trees, were locked onto the two mountain-like shadows in the center of the island: "Go and lock down all the rigging on the deck."

"Mikita, Paula, guard the rear cabin door. Without my order, no one is allowed to step into the forest ahead."

"Yes, Captain."

The crisp response came.

Mikita turned to the side, her soft yellow dress clinging to her body in the sea breeze, and she stomped her rounded calves hard on the deck, the power of the Paramecia-type Kilo-Kilo Fruit circulating beneath her skin again.

Her weight instantly stabilized at 500 kilograms, like a weight cast from pig iron, firmly pinning down the gangplank of ship.

Paula walked to the main cabin door without a word.

Her black hair, tied behind her head, swayed in the wind, and her hands hung at the edges of the pockets of her blue loungewear, her ten fingertips slightly curled in the air, faintly glowing with the cold light of sharp needles.

They were waiting.

Waiting for this man, who had dragged them out of the quagmire of Baroque Works with his iron fists, to crush this island known as the "Forbidden Zone."

...

Rumble.

The ground began to vibrate at a high frequency again.

A black giant python, over ten meters long, unable to withstand the terrifying battle intent pouring out from the depths of the jungle, frantically dashed out of the dense bushes.

The giant python's bowl-sized dark red scales rubbed violently against the moss-covered ground, kicking up large swathes of black humus soil.

However, before the giant python could dash into the sea.

A giant banana leaf, dozens of meters long, shattered with a boom.

Rice's figure appeared abruptly in front of the giant python.

He was barefoot, stepping on the cold, slippery ancient mud, his bronze upper body skin pulled into muscle lines as if carved by a knife under the blazing sun.

[Soru]

A pale white airflow crater was left in the air.

Rice's figure crossed the distance of over ten meters in an instant, appearing above the giant python's millstone-sized triangular head.

He steadily pulled his right arm back in mid-air.

With Armament Haki applied, relying on the pure physical strength honed to the human limit through years of being ravaged by Garp's iron fists in Foosha Village, he punched straight into the center of the giant python's hard skull.

[Tekkai: Hard Fist - Heavy Smash].

Bang—!!

A dull sound of flesh colliding exploded in the forest.

The giant python's mouth, filled with fangs, didn't even have time to open before its entire head, under the pressure of the immense force, was blown into a cloud of dark red blood mist.

The massive force traveled layer by layer along the giant python's dozens-of-meters-long spine, shattering each white vertebra along the way into fine bone powder.

The massive snake corpse lay limply in the mud, its tail still thrashing against the ground due to nerve spasms, breaking several black vines as thick as a thigh.

Rice landed steadily back on the ground.

He bent down, his right hand shaped like a claw, his five fingers tearing through the tough scales on the giant python's chest and abdomen like steel nails, and pulled hard.

A sea python gallbladder, glowing with a dark cyan color and as big as a fist, was torn out of the snake corpse along with a long string of warm, dark red blood vessels.

The juice dripped down through his fingers, scorching a faint wisp of white smoke onto the black ancient mud.

Rice didn't even frown; he exerted force with his right hand, shoved the entire gallbladder into his mouth, and swallowed it cleanly.

The scalding, pungent gallbladder juice surged down his throat into his abdomen, like a raging fire burning wildly through his internal organs.

Rice squeezed all the essence of the ancient beast's flesh and blood contained in the gallbladder into the texture of his bones and muscles.

His bronze skin surface faintly took on a dark red color due to the flushing of the high-heat blood flow.

"The strength is decent enough."

"Why does this snake gallbladder have such a weird taste? It's different from the ones in Foosha Village."

Rice casually wiped a streak of cyan bile sticking to the corner of his mouth.

He lifted his black eyes, looked through the heavy tree shadows, and locked onto the two giant figures, dozens of meters tall, a hundred meters ahead.

...

That was a circular clearing hacked out by the two of them with axes and greatswords.

The ancient giant trees within a kilometer had long ago turned into wood chips covering the ground, and under years of trampling, the soil had been rammed until it was as hard as pig iron.

"Gwahahahaha! Brogy! Today is the final battle of these one hundred years! Your shield already has seventeen notches chipped into it by my stone axe!"

The giant, over thirty meters tall with a long black beard—Blue Oni Dorry.

He stomped his thigh, as thick as a century-old tree, hard on the ground, causing the surface to collapse into a giant footprint several meters deep.

He gripped the twenty-meter-long ancient stone axe with both hands, his muscles engorged with blood, pulling open cyan-black veins several inches long, and swung it down at his opponent.

"Gababababa! Dorry! Your stone axe has also cracked! The strongest warrior of Elbaf can only be me!"

Opposite him, the giant with a red beard and a horned helmet—Red Oni Brogy.

He also let out a violent roar that shattered eardrums. His two massive, black-haired hands gripped the notched, dark red broadsword tightly, neither dodging nor avoiding, and swung from bottom to top, creating a pale white air wave to meet the attack head-on.

Rumble—!!

The axe blade and the sword edge collided in mid-air for the three hundred thousandth time.

A visible, pale yellow air shockwave, centered on the point of collision, spread violently in all directions.

Dozens of ancient redwood trees as thick as a person's embrace at the edge of the clearing couldn't even hold on for half a second upon touching this airflow; they were all snapped in half at the waist with a piercing sound of shattering.

The gale howled, and the sky full of dust mixed with gravel rained down like a storm onto the berth where the white dove was docked.

On the deck.

Princess Vivi grabbed her arms tightly.

In the face of this terrifying power that surpassed mortal imagination, her body began to tremble violently and uncontrollably, and she almost collapsed onto the deck: "Is that... a god? Such power... Crocodile would be crushed underfoot in front of them..."

Alvida drew her wooden sword, the tip of the wooden blade pressing hard against the steel deck.

Her porcelain-like pretty face had lost all color, but her beautiful eyes stared unblinkingly into the depths of the jungle, her long eyelashes vibrating at a high frequency in the gale: "Pure flesh, giant monsters who have hammered their strength out ten thousand, one hundred thousand times."

"Rice... is he going to fight things like that?"

Nami's watery eyes were filled with worry.

...

In the center of the clearing.

The two giants held their vibrating weapons, and due to the massive recoil, they each took two steps back.

Their breathing, as heavy as bellows, stirred up circles of white heat in the forest.

However.

Just at the moment these two Elbaf warriors, who had been dueling for a hundred years, were preparing to raise their weapons again.

A black-haired youth, who looked as small as a flea in their eyes, strode with long legs, barefoot, and walked step by step to the center of the cracked clearing.

"Hey, you two old geezers."

Rice stood directly beneath the two massive shadows.

He slowly pulled his two hands, covered in thick calluses, out of his trouser pockets, his five fingers moving gently in the air.

He lifted his young face, which was full of coldness and violence, and there wasn't even a trace of fear of the giants in his eyes, only a kind of invincible arrogance stemming from being Garp's disciple:

The white dove is fully loaded with the growth and ambition of all its crew.

"It's been a hundred years. Haven't you played enough with this children's game strength?"

The air fell completely silent in that instant.

The wind blew through the shattered banana leaves, making a rustling sound.

Dorry and Brogy stopped their movements simultaneously.

Those two turbid giant eyes, as big as water vats, slowly moved down and finally locked firmly onto Rice's naked, bronze-colored torso, which was faintly flowing with dark red, high-heat blood.

"Gwahahahaha! Dorry, did I hear that right? A little person who isn't even enough to get between my teeth is actually mocking the warriors of Elbaf?"

Brogy slammed the broadsword heavily into the ground.

Bang. The earth cracked.

"Gababababa! Little guy, your bones look pretty hard. But on this island, the price for provoking a giant is being smashed into the mud as fertilizer!"

Dorry's black-bearded mouth split open, revealing a row of white, menacing giant teeth.

There was no unnecessary testing.

As veterans who had been fighting on the battlefield for a hundred years, they sensed a pure, rule-defying martial battle intent from the surging violent hormones emanating from Rice.

Boom.

Blue Oni Dorry's left foot, as big as a millstone, shoveled hard into the surface without warning.

A giant black granite boulder weighing several tons and several stories high was instantly gouged out of the mud by his toes, and with a piercing shriek through the air, it smashed down head-on toward Rice's body like a collapsing mountain, blotting out the sky.

The shadow of the boulder completely enveloped Rice.

The soil underneath began to shatter in large patches due to the intense air pressure.

On the white dove.

Princess Vivi couldn't help but let out a scream of fear in that instant, closing her eyes tightly.

However, Rice, standing in place.

Stepped his left foot back half a step, bent his knees slightly, and his entire torso, in that instant, was as steady as a heavy pig-iron anchor driven deep into the lowest level of the Red Line.

Ink-like Armament Haki, without reservation, poured crazily along his right shoulder and into his entire right arm.

The skin and flesh on it turned an absolute jet-black color in an instant, and black lightning, inches long and crackling like needle pricks, even pulled out from the surface of his knuckles.

He didn't even need to look up; relying solely on his Observation Haki covering the entire island, he clearly captured Dorry's giant stone axe, which was slowly gathering power behind the boulder.

"Well done!"

The brutal curve of Rice's mouth stretched to the limit in an instant.

He didn't use [Soru] to dodge.

In front of two pure physical-combat giants, any dodging footwork was a desecration of the body.

He twisted his right fist in mid-air, and with the terrifying force of his entire skeleton being squeezed to the limit, he punched head-on at the hundred-foot heavy rock falling down.

[Tekkai: Hard Fist - Tyranny].

Boom—!!

The moment the boulder collided with the black iron fist.

The outermost beach of the entire Small Garden island began to collapse into the seabed in a large area in that instant.

And just at the moment when that giant granite boulder was smashed into a sky full of gravel by this punch.

Behind the gravel dust.

A twenty-meter-long giant ancient stone axe, wrapped in the center of a crimson bloody airflow, with a terrifying physical destructive power capable of tearing open the earth's crust, had silently arrived less than three meters above Rice's head.

And in the depths of the ancient stagnant swamp at the very back of the island, where no one had ever set foot.

A mysterious, dilapidated wooden ship, cast entirely from white bones, with a weathered, giant Sea King skull stuck to its bow.

At this moment, taking advantage of the backflow of ocean currents caused by the collision of these two terrifying forces, and pulled by countless black vines, it slowly, bit by bit, exposed its pitch-black sails that exuded a rotting aura.

On the main mast, a bronze ancient lamp that had burned out a hundred years ago.

In this instant, it eerily lit up with a strange, pale green flame.