Only five Holy Knights remained standing at Gridos' side, and his face was so dark it looked as though it could drip water. His eyes were wide with disbelief as he stared at the battlefield before him. Rage, shame, and regret churned violently in his chest. What should have been a flawless operation had collapsed into a complete disaster. Nothing had gone the way he had envisioned.
Beside him, Sigurd shifted uneasily, worry written across his face. "Big brother… what should we do now? Do we keep going?" His voice trembled with hesitation and doubt.
Gridos took a long breath, forcing himself to calm down. After a deep moment of thought, he shook his head. "This operation has failed. Continuing will only waste our strength. For now, we wait. Those three who stand by Whitebeard are all legends, each with power close to that of a King. Even with Eli Winters' strange spatial power, he may not be able to match them if they fight seriously. We wait for the moment they wear each other down. That will be our chance to strike."
While the Holy Knights withdrew, Hawkeye Mihawk, Dorry, and Brogy also stopped their assaults almost in sync, as if sharing the same intuition. They watched the fading silhouettes of their retreating enemies, eyes sharp with caution and contemplation.
Their hearts were still pounding. None of them had expected this outcome.
Who would have thought that reckless, impulsive Eli Winters had been hiding such a terrifying contingency, capable of protecting his entire group even without being on the battlefield himself.
When Gridos and the others had suddenly appeared, they had sensed danger. They had imagined countless scenarios, but nothing close to what actually happened.
Elsewhere, Eli finally sensed the decisive outcome of the battle raging over Little Garden. The tension that had been coiled tight inside him finally loosened.
He had placed spatial markers on Big Pan and the others beforehand, but he still hadn't witnessed their effectiveness in a real battle. Fighting Whitebeard and the other two Emperors while keeping one thought fixed on his companions had been draining and dangerous.
If any unexpected threat had emerged, he would have intervened in an instant.
Now that Big Pan and the others were safely inside his Kamui space, he no longer had anything holding him back. He could finally unleash everything he had against the three titans standing before him.
After clashing head-on with Whitebeard and pushing him back a step, Eli grinned wildly.
"Now I can stop holding back!"
Whitebeard, Kaido, and Charlotte Linlin stiffened. They had already fought to this extreme point and yet this brat still hadn't been serious?
But Eli gave them no time to process it.
A violent surge of power erupted from him. His aura exploded outward like a volcanic eruption. His Conqueror's Haki snarled through the air, crackling like tearing lightning.
Before the three Emperors could react, Eli's figure vanished as if erased from existence.
Charlotte Linlin's Observation Haki was the keenest among them. Her face turned pale. "Kaido! Be careful!"
Her warning came too late.
A sharp blade of black light screamed toward Kaido.
Kaido lifted his spiked kanabo on instinct, but Eli Winters was no longer the man he had fought in the past. The sword in Eli's hand, the obsidian-black blade called Oblivion, gleamed with armament hardening and a faint streak of azure light that danced along its edge like living lightning.
"Void Sever."
The strike slipped past Kaido's desperate defense and carved across his massive body, leaving a deep, bone-revealing wound. Even Kaido, with his monstrous endurance, couldn't swallow the agony. His roar echoed through the sky as he plummeted toward the ocean.
Only the Beast Pirates' All-Star, Queen, managed to catch him mid-fall and rush him back to their ship for emergency treatment. Even with no real doctor on hand, Queen's scientific knowledge kept Kaido alive.
Seeing Kaido defeated in a single exchange, the battlefield fell silent. Even Whitebeard and Charlotte Linlin felt their breath freeze in their lungs.
One glance at each other was enough for both of them to understand. If they didn't fight with everything they had, they would die here.
Charlotte Linlin's pirate hat dissolved into a gleaming longsword, her homies flaring with violent power. "Let's finish this, Newgate!"
The two Emperors charged Eli together.
Yet Eli only smiled faintly.
His movements became fluid and ephemeral, slipping between their combined assaults like a shadow carried by the wind.
The shockwaves of their attacks alone tore the battlefield, splitting stone and air alike.
Eli raised a hand, drawing the spatial pressure into his palm. "Spatial Lock."
The air warped around Whitebeard and Linlin, tightening like invisible chains.
Both reacted instantly. Whitebeard swung his massive glaive, attempting to break through the distortion, while Linlin sent a devastating slash screaming forward.
But space itself resisted them.
Then Whitebeard's fist lit with shattering white light. His Gura Gura no Mi roared through his arm.
The world cracked.
Like a brittle mirror struck by a hammer, Eli's Spatial Lock shattered into glimmering fragments.
Eli's eyes narrowed. Whitebeard's Devil Fruit wasn't merely awakened. It was fully mastered.
He vanished again, reappearing behind Charlotte Linlin, blade raised.
Whitebeard made a suicidal move. He ignored his own defense and charged straight at Eli, planning to take the hit in exchange for forcing an opening.
For a brief moment, Eli felt genuine danger.
He activated Kamui Phasing.
His body blurred into semi-transparency.
But Whitebeard unleashed everything at once. His glaive burst with power, an all-out quake slash that struck the very boundary between real and intangible space.
A sharp crack rang out.
Eli's Kamui wall shuddered and broke.
His intangibility failed for an instant.
The shock didn't injure him, but it forced him fully solid.
Linlin saw her chance.
"Homing Cannon!"
A blazing beam of compressed energy tore toward him.
Eli teleported, but not fast enough. The blast grazed his thigh, leaving a bleeding crater of torn flesh.
He swallowed a healing pill and exhaled slowly as the bleeding stopped.
Looking at Whitebeard, he smirked. "You're the first to ever break my phasing. But you won't do it again."
Whitebeard spat to the side. "If I broke it once, I can break it again. Today, you die, brat. For my sons."
Eli laughed. "Then try."
What followed was a brutal half-hour battle in which even Whitebeard, with everything he had, failed to break Eli's phasing a second time. Eli's mastery over space deepened with every exchange, the barrier between reality and void reinforced far beyond its earlier weakness.
When the dust finally settled, Charlotte Linlin collapsed unconscious, and Whitebeard was barely standing, his massive chest heaving with exhaustion and defeat.
Eli floated above them like a silent god of judgment.
For a moment, he considered ending their crews entirely. They weren't good people, and the world would be safer without them. But the truth of this world was cruel. Their existence kept a fragile balance. Removing them would only plunge the world into greater chaos.
He chose restraint.
Just as Eli was about to speak, a deep, steady voice echoed from afar.
"Lord Eli Winters… may I ask that you give me this one favor and end the matter here?"