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The instant Luffy's words—"Domain Expansion"—left his lips, Doflamingo's world inverted.
One moment, he stood upon Eren's Founding Titan, the battlefield stretched below him. The next, reality folded like paper, and he found himself suspended in an alien space bathed in crimson light. The Straw Hat boy floated opposite him, and together they were dragged forward by Eren's momentum, though the massive skeleton itself had become invisible, existing beyond the Domain's walls.
Outside, observers could see nothing of the Domain's interior—the blood-red sphere was opaque, impenetrable to sight or sense. But Admiral Gin had more pressing concerns than what transpired within Luffy's technique.
He'd exceeded his time limit.
Maintaining Logia awakening for even brief periods drained stamina exponentially. He'd pushed far beyond safe parameters, sustained only by desperation and willpower. Now his body was screaming the price.
The three-headed water dragon began evaporating. Water molecules dispersed at visible speed, the construct losing cohesion and mass. The serpentine necks thinned, then dissolved entirely. The crystalline horns melted into mist. Within seconds, the massive elemental form collapsed inward, condensing rapidly back toward human proportions.
Gin rematerialized in his original body exhausted beyond measure.
He stood for a moment, swaying slightly. Then took a single step forward.
His legs buckled.
The Admiral of the Marines—one of the twelve most powerful marine in the organization—collapsed to his knees, then pitched forward onto the skeletal surface. His muscles had turned to water, his reserves completely depleted. Only sheer stubbornness had kept him conscious this long.
"Turns out... I haven't had this fruit long enough," he murmured, voice barely audible. His gaze lifted toward the crimson sphere containing Luffy and Doflamingo. "The rest is up to you, Luffy."
Five years. That's all the time Gin had spent with the Ame Ame no Mi. The story of its acquisition played through his fading consciousness like a fever dream.
After parting ways with the Straw Hat Pirates, he'd led the remnants of his former pirate crew into the Grand Line. Food had run low quickly. Desperation had driven him to fish with crude equipment, hoping for anything edible.
He'd caught a shark.
A massive bull shark, wounded badly, bleeding into the water. Gin had drawn his knife, prepared to butcher it immediately. But then the creature had looked at him—truly looked, with an intelligence that transcended animal instinct—and tears had leaked from its eyes.
Something in Gin's chest had cracked. He'd released it.
The shark had circled once, twice, then dove. Gin assumed that was the end of it—a moment of foolish sentimentality that would cost him and his crew dearly.
But an hour later, the shark returned. It surfaced alongside his small ship and... gestured. An unmistakable invitation.
What followed seemed impossible in retrospect. The bull shark led them to an underwater cave system, a natural refrigeration chamber where it had hoarded food stolen from passing ships. Enough provisions to feed Gin's crew for months.
And in that chamber, preserved in ice, sat a Devil Fruit.
Spiral patterns of deep blue and silver. The Ame Ame no Mi—one of the rarest Logia types in existence.
Sometimes fate played absurd games. You extended mercy to a wounded animal, and the universe rewarded you with godlike power.
Gin's consciousness began slipping. He'd done his part. Now it was Luffy's turn.
Inside the Domain, a very different scene was unfolding.
While Admiral Gin collapsed in peaceful exhaustion outside, within the blood-red sphere, a battle of absolute stakes was about to commence. Doflamingo was finally, irrevocably, paying the price for his arrogance.
Time reset to the moment of entry. Doflamingo had blinked—just once—and the entire world changed.
The Founding Titan vanished from his senses completely. Instead of standing on ancient bone, his feet touched solid ground. Red ground. The texture resembled the Red Line's distinctive crimson stone, but wrong somehow—too smooth, too uniform, as if reality itself had been painted over with a single color.
Everything was red. The ground, the distant horizon, even the air carried a pink tinge like looking through tinted glass. Above him, where the sun should have hung, a blood-red moon dominated the sky, full and bloated and utterly impossible.
Every instinct screamed danger.
Doflamingo's head swiveled, scanning for threats. His Observation Haki expanded outward—and hit a wall. The Domain's boundaries were impermeable to sensing, leaving him effectively blind beyond visual range.
"An illusion?" he muttered, fingers twitching as invisible threads spread from his body. "Did the Straw Hat somehow hypnotize me?"
But that made no sense. Monkey D. Luffy had eaten the Gomu Gomu no Mi, a Paramecia-type that granted rubber properties. Nothing in that fruit's power set suggested spatial manipulation or illusions. If Luffy possessed such abilities, why hadn't he used them five years ago? He could have simply teleported Ace away from Akainu's fist, avoided the entire tragedy at Marineford.
The logical conclusion: this was a trick, a scientific device, something external to Devil Fruit powers.
Doflamingo remained ignorant of the truth. Eren Yeager had taught both Gladius and Machvise about Domain Expansion, but the information hadn't reached the Heavenly Yaksha himself. An unfortunate gap in intelligence that was about to prove fatal.
He also didn't know his officers were dead. That Gladius, Machvise, Trebol, Diamante—the entire Donquixote Family—had met terrible ends. That even his daughter Elsa had rejected him, refusing to acknowledge their blood relation.
Donquixote Doflamingo stood alone in this crimson hell, the last survivor of an empire that had already fallen.
Movement in his peripheral vision.
A figure emerged from the red shadows—not walking, but manifesting, as if the Domain itself had birthed him.
Luffy.
But transformed beyond recognition.
His skin had shifted from its normal tan to a deep, warm crimson—the color of arterial blood. His eyes had lost their whites entirely, replaced by solid red that glowed with inner light. Most striking was his hair: no longer black, it had become living flame-red, each strand floating independently as if suspended in water, reaching skyward in defiance of gravity.
And his size had changed. Luffy now stood at exactly Doflamingo's height—ten feet tall—a red giant whose presence pressed against the air itself.
"Doflamingo." Luffy's voice carried an unfamiliar edge, something cold creeping around the edges of his usual warmth. "Domain is the third stage of Devil Fruit mastery. Did you really not know?"
The words hit Doflamingo like physical blows.
"The first stage: Awakening," Luffy continued, raising one finger. "Impose your fruit's properties on the environment."
A second finger. "The second stage: Liberation. Transcend your fruit's limitations, touch the boundaries of conceptual power."
A third finger. "The third stage: Domain. Create a world where your rules are absolute law."
"NONSENSE!" Doflamingo's shout echoed across the red expanse, his composure finally cracking. "Devil Fruits only have two stages of power! Everything you're saying is—it's impossible! This is all fake! FAKE!"
But even as denial poured from his mouth, doubt poisoned his heart.
Donquixote Doflamingo considered himself a genius among geniuses. He'd taken the worthless Ito Ito no Mi (String-String Fruit)—a Paramecia that should have been utterly mediocre—and developed it into a weapon of mass destruction. He'd achieved Liberation through his own brilliance, his resurrection mechanism a testament to creative application of Devil Fruit principles.
The resurrection thread buried in his body was his masterpiece. As long as the Ito Ito no Mi remained connected to his flesh, death was merely an inconvenience. He'd exploited the fundamental rule that Devil Fruits dissipate upon their user's death by creating a fail-safe that triggered resurrection before complete separation occurred.
Countless experiments. Hundreds of failures. But he'd succeeded where everyone else would have given up.
That achievement had fed his ego to unsustainable proportions. He'd believed himself unique—the only person in the world to unlock Liberation's power. Lesser beings couldn't possibly match his genius.
Now this boy—this rubber-brained fool—was claiming an entire additional stage existed beyond his accomplishments?
Unacceptable. Impossible.
"You're trying to confuse me," Doflamingo snarled, threads erupting from his hands. "Some kind of drug, or hypnotic technique. The World Government has plenty of those. Did the Marines loan you their psychological warfare division? Did—"
The blood-red moon above began moving.
Not orbiting—pulsing. Expanding and contracting like a beating heart. Red mist rolled across the ground in waves, and the moment it touched Doflamingo's legs, everything changed.
Weakness flooded his limbs. His muscles felt hollow, depleted. His Haki reserves—normally an ocean of power—had been reduced to a shallow puddle. Even his mind felt sluggish, thoughts forming slower than normal.
He staggered, barely maintaining balance. His head snapped toward Luffy.
The Straw Hat boy was growing stronger. The aura radiating from him intensified with every passing second, multiplying, feeding on something invisible.
"WHAT DID YOU DO?!" Doflamingo's roar carried genuine fear for the first time in decades. "ANSWER ME!"
An evil smile spread across Monkey D. Luffy's face—an expression that looked wrong on his features, too knowing, too cruel. The smile's shape and cadence matched Doflamingo's own signature grin with disturbing precision, as if the boy was mocking him through imitation.
"The moment you entered my Domain," Luffy explained, his voice carrying the patience of a teacher addressing a slow student, "one-third of your core attributes transferred to me. Haki, physical strength, mental fortitude, life force—everything that makes you you. And the longer you remain here, the more I absorb."
He took a step forward. The red ground rippled beneath his foot like water.
"This is Gomu Gomu no Shūen Dansei (Rubber-Rubber: Elasticity at the End of All Things). If you don't defeat me here, the cycle never ends. You'll be drained completely, reduced to an empty shell, and I'll claim everything you were."
Doflamingo's mind reeled. The Domain operated as an alien space where time itself bent—they could fight here for a year while mere hours passed outside. The Founding Titan would continue its march. Eren would complete the Rumbling. And he would be trapped here, slowly dying by degrees.
Most Devil Fruits, subjected to absorbing one-third of a Yonko-level fighter's attributes, would have caused their user to explode from power overload. But the Gomu Gomu no Mi possessed extraordinary tolerance—its rubber properties extended conceptually to its capacity for growth. Luffy had accepted Doflamingo's stolen strength without even flinching.
And the most terrifying detail, the one Doflamingo hadn't learned yet: even after the Domain broke, even after returning to reality, Luffy would permanently retain one-tenth of everything he'd absorbed. The technique didn't just borrow power—it stole it.
Fortunately for the world's balance, Monkey D. Luffy required that injection to activate Domain Expansion. Without it, his snowball potential would be unlimited. He could challenge every powerful fighter in the world sequentially, growing stronger with each victory, until he became utterly invincible.
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