Chapter 189: Chapter 24: Solo Kill
Iggy couldn’t make heads or tails of the situation, but whatever had happened seemed to be the power of that fruit the little girl had tricked him into eating.
The dark flame-clouds carried no heat. Nor were they some kind of weapon to be hurled. They were the hallmark of a Zoan Devil Fruit Awakening.
"You’ve got an ability that lets you teleport—that should be more than enough to run away with. I don’t know who you are, but that arrogance is exactly what’s going to kill you!"
Iggy launched himself skyward. The Fool’s sand coalesced into a beast the size of a small car and swatted at King Crimson with a paw that cracked the air with an audible snap.
"Remember this—the one who killed you is the noble Emperor of Stray Dogs!"
King Crimson had just used Time Erasure moments ago. Diavolo met the blow fist-first through his Stand.
His King Crimson’s destructive power was a lofty Rank A!
"Ha—idiot. Who’d trade punches with you?"
Iggy meowed out a taunt.
The Fool’s greatest strength lay in the simple fact that it was sand. Its shape was nothing more than a convenient mold for manipulation; if he wanted, he could even compress it into a miniature barrier so watertight not a drop could seep through.
And naturally, a mass of sand wasn’t going to relay damage back to its user the way a normal Stand would.
King Crimson’s fist punched clean through The Fool’s body. Immediately, the sand contracted and locked down around King Crimson’s arm joints, pinning it in place. This was a maneuver Iggy hadn’t known during the fight with Joseph—but he knew it now.
With the enemy Stand immobilized, Iggy leapt forward and raked his claws across King Crimson’s torso. One-centimeter claws sank into its throat like there was nothing there at all, tearing a gushing wound across Diavolo’s actual body.
"Filthy mutt—seeing that smug look on your face, like you just pissed your scent onto every corner of the neighborhood, makes me sick."
Barely two or three seconds later, Time Erasure activated again. King Crimson, freed from time’s constraints, wrenched itself loose from the sand.
"A lowly stray dog, daring to make that expression at me." King Crimson’s warped features mirrored Diavolo’s fury.
The throat wound would have been fatal for any normal person, but Diavolo—unknowingly benefiting from the Empress’s Stand trait of having no true vital points in the host body—barely qualified as injured. Or rather, all of it had fallen within Epitaph’s predictions.
Every soul-swapped individual’s psychic power had been amplified. That wasn’t limited to Iggy.
Iggy had been right about one thing: Diavolo’s ability was perfectly suited for escape. But that required him to actually control the body—and as a mere tumor, his authority over it was nil. Unlike the old days, where he’d shared a body with Doppio and could even cede control to his secondary personality at will, his only option now was the same thing the Empress had always done: quietly feed and grow until he was big enough to threaten the host.
Diavolo checked Polnareff’s direction. Those two had finally started moving this way, but a good ten meters of safe distance remained.
Within the erased time, the body controlled by the Empress couldn’t be excluded from the erasure the way Diavolo-the-tumor could. When she moved during the deletion window, Diavolo had to suffer the disorienting effects right along with her.
His pride would never allow him to retreat from a stray dog.
He released the erasure early. Iggy, caught mid-air with no way to adjust, took a direct hit from King Crimson and crashed to the ground with a yelp.
Diavolo then seized the fleeing Empress by the throat. "Don’t move, you imbecile. Do exactly as I say. Now—face that black Stand and use your Stand to strike the back of your own skull!"
From Iggy’s earlier attempt, he’d pieced it together: this Light Source wasn’t something easily destroyed. First, only a Stand could reach it—that much was certain. And a weak attack definitely couldn’t break it.
He was confident King Crimson could hit it. But he was a tumor. This woman’s Stand had better pack some real punch.
"Stand... aren’t you my Stand?" The Empress stared at him in terrified confusion.
"What?" Diavolo blanked, not processing her meaning. "Just DO it!"
"Do what?! You’re nothing but my Stand! Are you trying to help Polnareff kill me? We should be running!"
Her acting when she’d deceived Yimi had been flawless, but this woman’s intelligence clearly hadn’t caught up with the current situation.
"You moron—haven’t you noticed you’ve grown a sixth finger?! Running is useless! Do as I say and swap us back into our own bodies!"
Perhaps because Polnareff was closing in step by step, the mutations were accelerating—even as a tumor, Diavolo could feel the body warping at an alarming rate, faster than any human host.
Was there no choice but to wait for the flat-top idiot to get close and deal with him? But the memory of King Crimson’s sudden betrayal still made Diavolo flinch. He couldn’t be sure that attacking Polnareff again wouldn’t provoke something even worse.
Then came phantom pain shooting through what felt like a shin. That damned dog! Despite having its spine snapped by King Crimson, the mongrel was biting down on King Crimson’s calf as if nothing had happened—with a jaw force that might put a crocodile to shame.
"I don’t know what just happened, but that punch HURT!"
A Zoan Devil Fruit Awakening didn’t produce the kind of visually dramatic transformation a Paramecia type did. What it enhanced was every aspect of the user’s physical capabilities—life force above all else.
In plain terms: a sit-up more resilient than any bandage wrap. If a blunt-force injury didn’t look immediately lethal, odds were it wasn’t—maybe not even a serious wound.
"Let go of me, you mongrel!" King Crimson’s other leg hammered into Iggy’s body.
"Ow, dammit! But I’ve got you figured out now. Even if that teleporting bullshit can come off cooldown fast, you can’t control where your body moves, can you? That’s why you’re stalling here instead of running. At this range, your little parlor trick’s only good for sucker punches."
In the two-to-three-second cooldown between erasures, the sharp-witted Iggy made full use of the age-old manga convention that narration and inner monologue don’t count toward time.
"And just now, I came up with a real good idea. Let me wrap my Fool around your body like this—since you can’t move anyway, I’ll just bury you alive, body and weird tumor and all. Simple, right?"
Iggy tanked the kicks—blows that would’ve killed a heavyweight boxer—with his tiny frame, and bared a sinister grin:
"Don’t blame me for collateral damage. That woman who borrowed your body already blew her cover trying to escape from Polnareff. I didn’t want to get involved, but I’m already in it, aren’t I? And frankly—you piss me off."
"Don’t bother watching for flat-top over there. I’ll finish you before he gets here."
Sand—thicker and heavier than ever before, boosted by Requiem’s residual power—piled onto Diavolo’s host body and the Empress within, then rapidly compressed.
"You stray dog—"
He was the Emperor of dual faces, invincible from birth. He could not die to a stray dog. He could not.
"WHY?!" That was the Empress’s last word.
Not a bad technique. Sealing the enemy in compressing sand as a burial shroud.
He’d call it: "Dirt-Clod Coffin Lid."
Iggy used his newly supple body to lick the fur on his hind leg. "So cats really are this resilient, huh? I’ve been underestimating these creatures."
Comments