One Piece: The Dragon All-Star - 192

Chapter 192: Final Battle with Kaido! Kai’s New Form!

Kaido’s form changed in a shocking way.

Flame-like auspicious cloud markings surfaced between his brows, and the hair all over his body curled and streamed like flowing clouds.

Bands of pitch-black flame-clouds formed from nothing, coiling around his massive frame.

Every muscle swelled and bulged, radiating an even more terrifying pressure.

Kai’s brows lifted.

So this was… Awakening?

“Gunyo-riki.”

Kaido’s low voice rolled out, his outline blurring as if it melted into the air. “Ryusei-gun.”

In the next instant, countless afterimages of his kanabo tore through space in Kai’s pupils, a storm of iron phantoms like a thousand dragons in wild flight, crashing in from every direction.

He had no room to react, nowhere to dodge.

Fast.

No, not just faster. Stronger across the board.

Kai’s pupils shrank. He forced his Haki to the limit, arms crossing in a rapid guard.

Bang. Bang. Bang. Bang.

The rain of blows almost fused into one continuous impact.

It felt like taking a Sea King head-on.

Kai was hurled away at once.

Crack.

His heels plowed two trenches dozens of meters long into the rock before he finally ground to a stop.

He raised his head, looking at Kaido’s transformed state.

There was no fear in his eyes.

Only hotter battle lust.

If you are transforming, then so is Kai.

He drew in a deep breath.

Dazzling green light burst out from within him.

His already huge, powerful dragon-man body grew again, lines of muscle smoothing into something even more explosive.

Most striking of all were the two pure golden streamers that extended from the horns at the back of his head, made entirely of shining light. They trailed behind him like a pair of dragon whiskers from myth, or holy halo-ribbons, gliding and curling with a strange, sacred grace.

“Wororororo!”

Kaido roared with laughter when he saw it. “So that is your Awakening form? Looks nothing like any other Mythical Zoan.”

“Let me see what it is worth.”

He wrapped both hands around his kanabo, body canting to the side in a batter’s stance, every ounce of strength pouring into his arms.

“Kongō: Kabura.”

He swung.

A colossal column of compressed force, wrapped in black-red lightning, blasted out.
It tore the island open as it screamed toward Kai.

“Dragon Pulse.”

Kai did not back down.

He opened his jaws and unleashed a brilliant, massive shockwave of his own.

Boom.

Blow and blast met midair.

The explosion was so loud it felt like it cracked eardrums.
The wild turbulence of clashing energy vaporized the rock around the impact in an instant.

Before the smoke could clear, Kaido lunged in.

The kanabo in his hands left a forest of afterimages, raining down like a typhoon.

Kai’s movements stayed relaxed, body flickering like a mirage.
His fists blurred into their own web of shadows, intercepting each crushing blow as it came in.

Boom. Thud. Crack. Bang.

Explosions and impacts rolled over the island without end.

Every exchange between them had enough force to bring a mountain down or send a river off its course.

After trading more than a hundred such head-on clashes in a matter of minutes, the two of them broke apart again, sliding back across the torn rock for dozens of meters.

They looked at each other once and burst out laughing in unison.

“Again!”

They both said it at the same time.

Their fighting spirits erupted like twin volcanoes as they crashed together once more.

The brutal battle raged on from high noon under a blazing sun all the way into a star-splashed night.

The constant shockwaves of their battle scoured the island like an enormous shovel, shaving the surface down by tens of centimeters.

After yet another earth-splitting exchange, they slipped past one another and came to a halt, facing off from a distance.

They both looked like hell.

Aside from the one scrap of cloth that refused to be destroyed, every trace of clothing had been blasted to tatters.

Their bodies were covered in cuts and bruises.
Some of the smaller wounds they could not be bothered to waste stamina healing; there were more important things to spend their strength on.

“Impressive,” Kai said.

He grabbed what was left of his upper garments and tore them away, revealing a lean, perfectly cut torso.

“An old-timer is still an old-timer. When it comes to battle experience, I am still behind.”

In raw stats, including Haki techniques, he had already surpassed Kaido.

The edge was small, but a lead was a lead.

Even so, throughout the last exchange Kaido had used battle-hardened instinct to claw things back at key moments, instead of being steamrolled outright.

That kind of depth, forged through a lifetime of wars and death matches, was something he still could not fully match.

“Heh. You think I cannot see you have been using me as a whetstone?” Kaido snorted.

“Ah, caught me?” Kai grinned, unbothered.

He did not sound the least bit ashamed.

He wanted to climb higher more than anything.

He raised his right hand, thumb and forefinger pinched almost together, eyes glittering with excitement.

“I’m right on the edge. I can feel it—that thin barrier to the next stage. I’m about to break straight through.”

“Hmph.”

Steam puffed from Kaido’s nose as he bared a savage, exultant smile.

“Then let your teacher give you one last lesson, brat.”

Before he finished speaking, his already massive body began to bulge and twist.

In a breath, a dragon hundreds of meters long coiled through the air above the island.

He looked down on Kai from on high.

“Take a good look at my real full power.”

Oh?

That one.

Light flared in Kai’s eyes.

Anticipation surged through him.

Then he had to answer with everything he had too.

His body changed with a roar.

Emerald light speared into the sky, his frame exploding upward within it.

It stretched and lengthened, shifting into a green dragon over a hundred meters long.

He still did not match Kaido’s sheer size, but the aura rolling off him did not lose in the slightest.
If anything, it pressed back against Kaido’s.

“One strike to settle it, Kai!” the azure dragon bellowed, voice shaking the heavens.

Flames hotter than molten metal erupted from his throat, gushing like a broken dam.

They flowed down his entire length in a thick, lava-like river, racing across his body.

In a blink, an armor of pure fire wrapped Kaido from snout to tail.

With that fanged shell in place, his bulk swelled several times over.

His full length now stretched for kilometers.

A true flame dragon straddled the sky.

The heat it put out matched its scale.

Wherever the tail brushed the island, stone softened and sloughed, spilling away as a river of magma.

Fire Dragon Torch.

The sight of it was so unreal it looked like myth intruding on reality.

Even pirates far out at sea could see it clearly.

“Gulp.”

Viola swallowed with effort.

Her eyes were wide, her voice shaking.

“T-that size… It is insane. Even giant Sea Kings are not that big.”

Could Kai really beat that?

Even Loki’s face had gone heavy.

“That is… a bit beyond the scale,” he said.

If that dragon ever appeared over Elbaf, it would not need to attack.

The heat alone would be enough to light the Treasure Tree Adam and turn the giants’ homeland into a blasted wasteland.

“Relax. Believe in Kai,” Yamato said.

She still looked perfectly cheerful, even reaching over to pat Hiyori’s tense shoulder.

“Hiyori, you see that? You are going to be that strong too one day. You ate the same Fruit as my old man.”

At that, a wry, bitter smile slipped onto Kozuki Hiyori’s flawless face.

Yamato was giving her way too much credit.

Even when two people ate the same Fruit, they could still be worlds apart.

How far you pushed the power always came down to the person, not the Fruit.

“Wororororo!”

Kaido’s laughter boomed from within the blazing dragon.

“Kai! Whatever you have, bring it on and show me.”

“Then I will give you everything I’ve got,” Kai said.

He bared his teeth in an answering grin.

His green dragon body coiled and launched, streaking upward like a shooting star.

Kaido spiraled in place, watching, ready to see the final answer his student would write.

Until—

At the peak of the sky, a point of green light snapped on.

That tiny star swelled impossibly fast, piercing the thick banks of cloud.

Kai came down wrapped in a cone of searing green radiance and compressed air tens of meters wide.

It was like watching a colossal emerald meteor fall from space.

Next to that descending brilliance, his dragon body looked small.
But the focused, piercing pressure that lanced out from it felt sharp enough to punch through stars.

A divine spear driven straight down from heaven.

“Wororororo! Finally,” Kaido roared.

Red light flashed in his eyes as he let out the most exhilarated shout of the fight.

“Then let this be the perfect curtain call for our duel.”

“Rising Dragon—”

The flame dragon’s huge head vanished behind a storm of black-red Conqueror’s Haki, the aura so thick it looked solid, arcs of Haki lightning snapping and howling around his horns.

At the same time, the fire dragon that blanketed the sky surged up, bringing world-burning heat with it, charging straight at the falling spear of green.

“Flaming Bagua!”

“Dragon Ascent!”

The two dragons slammed together.

Boom.

No words could capture the noise.

It smashed past the limit of hearing and straight into the bones, as if the whole world shivered in fear.

Spear met shield.

Meteor struck Earth.

At the point of impact, the light went mad.

For an instant it washed out every colour, leaving only white.

The island below screamed and shook apart.

Kai’s green meteor and Kaido’s flaming armor chewed through one another, each trying to erase the other.

His power tore at the fire, and Kaido’s Haki and Fruit forced the flames to regrow and refill the gaps.

For a while, they were deadlocked.

Inside the heart of the green radiance, Kai did not feel any panic.

His dragon eyes only burned brighter.

He could feel it.

The new power pushing up out of his core.

“Here it comes,” he shouted, thrilled.

In the next breath—

Blinding, pure white light burst from his scales, swallowing him from head to tail.

Something shifted inside that glow.

Countless crystalline plates grew over his emerald hide, like perfectly cut diamonds laid edge to edge.
Each one caught the light and split it, making it painful to look at.

Above his head, a crown-like jewel condensed into being, radiating solemn, sacred authority.

Terastallized Mega Rayquaza had arrived.

The instant this new form emerged, the stubborn, ever-regenerating flames that made up Kaido’s armor met the crystal facets on Kai’s body and simply… vanished.

Touched them, and melted away like snow kissing the sun.

With the barrier gone, the green spear tore through the fire dragon unhindered.

It did not slow before it slammed into Kaido’s true body.

What—

Kaido’s wild grin froze.

He could not comprehend how his full-power Fire Dragon Torch, a fusion of every scrap of strength, Haki, and Fruit he had, had been dismantled so simply.

He had no time to dwell on it.

The force hammering into his azure dragon flesh was overwhelming.

The blue dragon had nothing left to resist with.

He fell.

Hard.

His body smashed into the earth, cratering it.

Boom.

The world lurched.

Dust towered into the sky, blooming into a mushroom cloud.

At the same time, the ruptured fire dragon’s remnants blew apart.

The unleashed blaze surged outward like a supernova.

Sea water boiled around the island’s corpse.
Sails on the nearby ships caught fire one after another.
Wood creaked as it charred, smoke whispering off the hulls.

The sky itself seemed to catch, blazing like an ocean of flame.

Light and heat scoured the night away, turning midnight back into day.

“Hot! It is so hot! We are going to be roasted,” Chopper and Bepo wailed.

The two furballs panted, tongues lolling.

Their pelts felt moments away from bursting into flame, brains starting to swim in the heat.

“Take your clothes off!” Zoro shouted through the wave of hot air.

“Right!”

They answered on reflex, paws going for their own fur.

Then they both froze, realization hitting, and exploded.

“Idiot! We cannot take this off!”

Fortunately, the misery did not last long.

“Ice Fang.”

A cold blue ray lanced upward, cutting into the raging flames overhead.

Hiss.

Frost smashed into fire.

The collision boomed.

At the same time, the suffocating heat rolling over the fleet began to ebb.

“We are saved,” Chopper and Bepo sobbed, clutching each other in relief.

The moment lasted all of two seconds.

“Too hot,” they yelped together, shoving away from each other at once.

Two fur coats pressed together in this weather was a death sentence.

When the aurora-bright glare of the explosion finally faded and the roiling energy and dust started to settle, everyone could at last steady their feet.

They turned as one toward the battlefield.

They all froze.

Mouths hung open.

Pupils pinholed.

It was as if they were looking at the most impossible sight in the world.

“The island… the island is gone!” someone screamed.