On the rooftop, Crocodile staggered to his feet, the taste of blood was strong in his mouth, but there was also the shame of being humiliated like this.
He wiped the back of his hand across his lips, smearing the shocking red of his own blood. The initial shock was giving way to a cold fury.
A Water Logia was a nightmare, but it wasn't an automatic death sentence. He still had speed, he still had decades of combat experience. He just had to avoid direct contact with this brat.
"Desert Spada!" he roared, slamming his golden hook into the rooftop. A blade of compressed, super-hardened sand shot through the tiles, racing towards Ragnar with the speed of a striking serpent, aiming to slice him in two from the ground up.
Ragnar looked at the desert spade, but didn't move to block it. He simply vanished from Crocodile's sight.
It wasn't Soru, not exactly. It was a fluid, instantaneous displacement, as if he'd become one with the very moisture in the air and reformed elsewhere.
He reappeared three feet to Crocodile's right, his form solidifying from a shimmering mist. There was no wasted motion, no dramatic wind-up.
His right fist, now coated in a faint, black metallic sheen that seemed to drink the surrounding light, was already in motion.
CRUNCH.
The sound was sickeningly wet and solid. The Armament Haki-clad fist connected squarely with the side of Crocodile's jaw.
The Warlord's head snapped around with whiplash force, a spray of saliva and blood erupting from his mouth. He was lifted off his feet and sent hurtling sideways like a discarded ragdoll.
He crashed through a decorative stone parapet, tumbled across a lower balcony, and finally skidded to a stop in a heap of shattered pottery and torn canvas awnings.
Crocodile pushed himself up on trembling arms, spitting out a broken tooth. His vision swam, his entire skull ringing like a cathedral bell.
He stared at Ragnar, who stood calmly where he had been, flexing the fingers of his Haki-coated hand.
"H-Haki…" Crocodile stammered, the word tasting like ash. "How… how could a damn rookie like you use Haki?!"
Ragnar tilted his head, a look of genuine curiosity on his face. "Heh. Why are you surprised, Crocodile?" He began to walk forward, his steps slow, each one a hammer blow to the Warlord's crumbling pride.
"A talented person like me should naturally be able to do this. It's as simple as breathing. Or," he added, his voice dropping to a pitying, almost gentle tone, "I suppose it should be."
He stopped a few paces away, looking down at the disheveled Warlord as if examining a particularly pathetic insect.
"But I suppose a loser like you, who lost all his will and courage against Whitebeard all those years ago… you wouldn't be able to use Haki anymore, would you? It must have just… withered away inside you. Like a plant in your own desert."
The words were like a scalpel, expertly probing the deepest, most festering wounds in Crocodile's soul.
The memory of that humiliating, one-sided defeat at the hands of the world's strongest man, the shattering of his ambitions, the retreat into the shadows of the desert to scheme and manipulate because he no longer had the heart and courage to stand and fight on the world's stage, it all came rushing back.
The pity in Ragnar's eyes was a poison far more potent than any blade.
A guttural, inhuman roar of pure rage came from Crocodile's throat. "YOU DARE!!" The air around him exploded into a maelstrom of sand.
"DESERT LA SPADA!" Multiple blades of sand erupted from the rooftop, crisscrossing in a deadly net meant to shred Ragnar to pieces.
Ragnar didn't dodge. He raised his left hand, and a wall of water surged from the atmosphere, meeting the sand blades head-on.
The sand instantly turned to heavy, useless mud, splattering harmlessly to the ground. With his other hand, he made a casual flicking motion. A whip of water, thin as a razor and harder than steel, snapped out and wrapped around Crocodile's ankle.
With a contemptuous yank, he was pulled off his feet and slammed face-first into the rooftop tiles with a brutal "SMACK".
Before Crocodile could even process the impact, Ragnar was on him. He didn't use his water powers. He used his fists and feet, each strike coated in that devastating black Haki. It was a systematic, humiliating dismantling.
A kick to the ribs sent Crocodile rolling. "This is for hiding in the desert," Ragnar stated calmly, as if Crocodile hiding in the desert wasn't a good thing.
He then grabbed the Warlord by the collar of his coat as he tried to rise, kneeing him hard in the gut. "This is for using a kingdom as your personal playground."
He drove an elbow into Crocodile's back, sending him crashing back to the ground. "And this," Ragnar said, planting a foot on the back of his head and pressing his face into the grimy tiles, "is for thinking you were ever in my league."
Crocodile tried to dissolve, to become sand and escape, but the Haki-infused pressure kept him solid, kept him painfully, shamefully tangible. He was being beaten like a common street thug, his Logia invincibility rendered meaningless, his every attack neutralized before it even began.
Each blow was not just physical, it was a direct assault on his ego, his legacy, his very will to fight. The fire of ambition that had once burned within him was being systematically stomped out under Ragnar's heel.
….
Meanwhile high above, hovering silently in the darkening sky, the massive airship of the World Economic Journal had arrived.
On a specially reinforced observation platform, Morgans stood with a team of his best photographers, their telescopic lenses and Den Den Mushi cameras trained on the rooftop battle below.
The mammoth news-coo was practically vibrating with excitement, his feathers ruffled, his beak hanging open.
"INCREDIBLE! ABSOLUTELY INCREDIBLE!" he bellowed, scribbling furiously on a notepad held in his massive talons. "He's not just fighting him… he's deconstructing him! Look at it! The sheer psychological warfare!"
He watched as Ragnar avoided another wild "Sables" sandstorm with a lazy sidestep, then conjured a sphere of water that enveloped Crocodile's head, holding him in a terrifying, drowning chokehold for a few seconds before releasing him, gasping and sputtering.
"KAHAHAHA! He's waterboarding a Warlord! The audacity! The spectacle!" Morgan's crowd, his pen flew across the page.
' The Sea Scourge does not merely seek victory; he demands abject surrender. He peels back the layers of a man's pride with the precision of a surgeon and the cruelty of a hurricane.'
'Crocodile, the untouchable master of sand, is being rendered utterly, pathetically touchable. His Sand Logia body, a source of fear for many, has become his prison, forcing him to feel every ounce of the humiliation being inflicted upon him.'
He watched Ragnar use a whip of water to snatch Crocodile's iconic golden hook, examine it for a moment with disinterest, and then casually toss it over the edge of the building, a symbolic castration played out for an audience of one.
"YES! The symbolism! The narrative!" Morgans was in ecstasy. "This isn't a pirate. This is a force of nature delivering karmic justice! A D. washing away the filth of a corrupt system! This will shake the World Government to its very foundations!"
His report was no longer just about a battle; it was about the birth of a new archetype. Ragnar wasn't painted as a mindless brute or a chaotic villain.
Morgans' words sketched the portrait of a terrifyingly intelligent, supremely confident sovereign who viewed the established powers of the world as inconveniences to be brushed aside.
He was the storm that had been foretold, the embodiment of the sea's wrath given human form.
Back on the rooftop, the fight, if it could even be called that, was reaching its conclusion. Crocodile was on his knees, his fine coat in tatters, his face a bloody, bruised mess.
The arrogant gleam in his eyes was gone, replaced by a hollow, broken stare. He had thrown everything he had at Ragnar, and the pirate had countered it all with an effortless, almost bored finality. His will was shattered.
Ragnar stood before him, not even breathing heavily. He looked down at the broken Warlord, his expression one of mild distaste.
"You see, Crocodile?" Ragnar said, his voice quiet but carrying perfectly in the sudden stillness. "This is what happens when you stop challenging the horizon and start digging holes in the sand. You forget how to swim. And when the tide finally comes in… you drown."
He raised a hand, and a colossal sphere of water, large enough to engulf the entire rooftop, began to coalesce above them, humming with contained power. It was the coup de grâce.
Morgans leaned so far over the railing of his ship that he nearly fell out, his camera Den Den Mushi clicking frantically. "END IT! FINISH THE STORY! LET THE WORLD SEE!"
Below, Ragnar brought his hand down. The sphere descended, not with a crash, but with a deep, swallowing "WHOOSH", enveloping Crocodile completely.
When it receded, the Warlord of the Sea was left unconscious, floating face-down in a puddle, utterly and irrevocably defeated.
Morgans straightened up, a triumphant, manic grin splitting his beak. He looked at the notes in his hand, the images being developed by his staff.
This wasn't just a report. This was the first chapter of a new era. And he, Morgans, had just written the headline.
….
[What do y'all think about this chapter?]