CHAPTER 579: PIRATES DON’T FIGHT FAIR

Ryokugyu grimaced and dragged himself to his feet. "Leave? You think that just because you got in a few good hits that you can win this fight?"

He took off his cracked sunglasses and crushed them in his hand. "I’ll tell you what. I’ll leave, but Cheapshot has to come with me. We’ll have ourselves a proper rematch, no running away."

He gave them a smile that was more of a sneer, as if he already knew what the answer would be.

"Is that all you wanted? Should have said so, dude," Cherry said, letting Momo down.

Apparently, that wasn’t the answer that Ryokugyu was expecting, because his sneering smile turned to genuine confusion.

"Let’s go," Cherry said, then looked at Momo and the Scabbards. "I’m heading out early. Tell the others that I’ll see them again soon."

Kin’emon nodded. "I will."

For some reason, Cherry’s easy acceptance of Ryokugyu’s demand didn’t seem as simple as they appeared. However, none of the Scabbards objected, nor did Momo. They’d proven what they had set out to prove; that they could defend Wano from even one of the world’s greatest warriors. There were very few countries that could boast as much.

Ryokugyu found Cherry’s words just as odd. "If you run away, I’m going to turn right back around, you know?"

"Sure, whatever. I’m not running," Cherry dismissed.

Ryokugyu didn’t know if he believed that, but what was there to lose?

Nothing, he decided. He’d get his fight, kill one of the World Government’s biggest pains in the ass, and be back at base before the week was out. Aokiji could hardly complain about those results, even if he wouldn’t be happy about how they were achieved.

Neither of them said another word to each other as they marched away, out of the city.

...

"This is far enough. This is where you die," Ryokugyu said, once they were in a suitably unpopulated location on the shores of Wano.

"Really? I thought you’d want to go somewhere else entirely. Some deserted island or something," Cherry said.

Ryokugyu snorted. "And you think I’d trust you to wait that long? I’m not giving you any opportunities to tuck your tail and run."

"I see," Cherry nodded. "I suppose that this will do, then."

*Whistle*

Cherry let out a high pitched whistle, loud enough that it made Ryokugyu flinch from fifty paces away.

"What are you-?" Ryokugyu asked, but his question answered itself as he detected approaching interlopers.

The entire Straw Hat crew soon emerged from the tree line, Luffy at the forefront with his signature grin on his face.

Ryokugyu looked between them and Cherry, somehow shocked at this development.

"What are you so confused about? I did send them a message that I’d see them soon. Right in front of you, no less," Cherry smirked. "Did you really think I was going to engage in some honorable duel with you?"

For the briefest moment, Ryokugyu considered maintaining his bravado, false or otherwise. He was well accustomed to bullying others with his strength and his rank.

Ultimately, he decided on a different tact. One he hadn’t resorted to since he was young and weak. "If you wanted to gang up on me, you shouldn’t have brought your whole crew, Straw Hat. You think you’ve got me cornered, and maybe you do, but I can guarantee that not all of you will walk away."

Ryokugyu didn’t wait for a response. He dug deep within himself, calling upon the power of his devil fruit and drawing up its greatest power.

The world exploded in tree growth and soon those trees covered every centimeter of the shore. Not a single grain of sand could be seen and the tree towered so high that the natural forest next to them looked like a field of grass in comparison.

Logia awakenings were the hardest to achieve. The difficulty of aligning your own mindset with a force of nature was understandably higher than doing so with some beast or another. Some might argue that paramecia types were the hardest due to their often unusual powers, but once you figured it out, it came easy.

Naturally, this meant that logia types had the most devastating awakenings. Punk Hazard was an extreme example; a once tropical island reduced to a volcanic hellscape and a frozen wasteland, nearly all life destroyed.

Ryokugyu’s devil fruit did not possess the raw destructive qualities that his idol, Akainu’s, did. It did have its own advantages, though.

The most obvious was that he could make himself one with the entire forest. He could sense all those within with perfect clarity, emerge from any tree therein, and even attack without emerging at all!

The reason for this was that the forest was not actually a forest at all! Every tree that he created was in fact a single organism! He was one with the forest and the forest was himself!

Ryokugyu watched as the Straw Hats hurriedly looked around in search of him. They would not find him, not until he was upon him; and then he would be gone again until he attacked once more.

Pirate Hunter Zoro immediately split off from the group. Perfect. It was always prudent to deal with the ones most likely to start cutting down his trees first.

The others didn’t even notice one of their own splitting off. How foolish! Once the swordsman was dead, the others would search for him and split up as well, and he’d pick them off one by one-!

"Hm?" Ryokugyu hummed in confusion.

He had only a fraction of a second to wonder what the odd feeling was before he felt as if he was yanked.

"AHHH?!" Ryokugyu shouted.

His body was pulled free from the trunk of a tree like a barbed splinter from flesh. His throat was caught in the vice grip of a demon straight from hell, smiling at the pain it inflicted upon him in tearing him from the safety of the forest.

"Found you~!" Cherry singsonged.

"H-how-?" Ryokugyu grit his teeth as he tried to pry the offending hand from his neck.

"You think you can diffuse your consciousness and I won’t be able to fuse it back together?" Cherry snickered. "You just made yourself into a bigger target, idiot."

Cherry hurled Ryokugyu into the air, letting him briefly catch his breath. He never imagined that his devil fruit would run into a hard counter like this.

Then he heard the drums. Drums that set his heart on edge and the hair on his neck standing at attention. His eyes were drawn to the source of the sound; Straw Hat Luffy with cloudy white hair, bouncing up and down on the thick net of roots like a trampoline. He was winding his arm around and around with increasing speed.

Ryokugyu panicked. He stretched his arm for a branch of the nearest tree, only for it to get sliced apart by Zoro halfway. Before he could even stretch in the other direction, he was struck by lightning from a cloud over his head that he failed to even notice.

*SProIORoIuNgG!!!* "HAhahAHahahAHhA~!!!"

A fist slammed into his solar plexus, but the impact did not come. He felt only a strange tension in his guts as he gazed into the mad joy that consumed Luffy’s face.

Then he flew faster than he ever had, and Wano disappeared before his very eyes, leaving nothing but open ocean for as far as he could see.