EPIC: Path of Demons and Dragons

"Ama no Murakumo..." droned Kizaru, producing a cross-hilted sword of light with his left hand, wielded in his right.

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Accompanied by a flash of golden light, Kizaru attempted to slice off the wings adorning the left side of Vahn's body, only for his sword to shatter like a physical construct as it made contact.

"Hmmm...?"

"Sorry, but that won't work anymore," remarked Vahn, extending his left hand to Kizaru, causing the Admiral to flicker away and stare at him with a moderately confused look. Alongside his appearance, Vahn's outfit had changed, leaving him shirtless with baggy black and gold harem pants, a teal sash, and various accessories that, unbeknownst to Kizaru, increased his Light Resistance to 100%.

Leaving Kizaru even more confused, golden light erupted from Vahn's body before he suddenly crashed into him at the speed of light, causing them both to scatter like golden fireworks.

"So that's how it is..." muttered Kizaru, his expression uncharacteristically serious as he reformed several tens of meters from Vahn's scattered form, Haki gathering in his arms and legs, causing them to tint black with a gold gleam as he asserted, "Your Devil Fruit power is mimicry..."

Reforming much slower than Kizaru, Vahn's response to the Admiral was to emit beams of light from the tips of his flight feathers, populating the sky with a complex latticework of highly penetrative lasers. Several struck Kizaru directly, but instead of piercing or damaging him, they sank into his body as he remarked, "My body is comprised of light. Using it against me is like trying to extinguish a fire with a flamethrower."

Raising and aiming his right left foot at Vahn, Kizaru accelerated forward, transforming all but his foot and lower leg into photons. As a result, his Haki-covered appendage impacted the former like a projectile fired from a sub-relativistic railgun, shattering against him but sending him flying back several kilometers per second with a visibly indented sternum, perforated organs, and virtually every bone in his torso fragmented.

Despite the distance he had traveled, Vahn barely had time to right himself in the air before Kizaru appeared above him, dropping another guillotine-like kick toward the top of his head. This time, however, Vahn drew himself back using his domain, causing the kick to pass right in front of his face, burning off the tip of his nose.

"Hmmm...?"

Not expecting Vahn to dodge his attack, Kizaru raised his left brow ever so slightly. In the very next moment, his foot changed trajectory, rising toward the hunched-over Vahn's diaphragm like a scythe.

'Dammit...!' Vahn exclaimed internally, forgoing defense in an effort to grasp Kizaru's leg. Unfortunately, he underestimated how much the muscles in his abdomen contributed to clenching strength, as he was unable to do more than close his arms after his body was separated into two parts by the force of Kizaru's kick.

"My, you're tenacious..." droned Kizaru, aiming his left index and middle fingers at Vahn's eyes as he muttered, "Amaterasu..." before blinding him with a flash of golden light.

Despite the loss of his vision, Vahn could sense Kizaru's movements as the man gathered Haki in his left hand and used it like a blade to separate the upper half of his face from the lower. Then, grabbing the separated section, he darted back several kilometers in an instant, ostensibly in an attempt to prevent his body from reforming.

'This is starting to become annoying...' thought Vahn, a cold sensation filling his mind even before the upper half of his face regenerated from golden flames. At the same time, the section held by Kizaru broke down and evaporated, leaving the Admiral with a curious and frustratingly calm expression.

As if in resopnse to Vahn's frustration, the weather became increasingly violent. Ordinarily, the skies above the Calm Belt were unnervingly calm, but conditions were becoming increasingly storm-like as Vahn's domain expanded to encompass an area of nearly ten kilometers.

'Hmmm...?'

Sensing a powerful presence that didn't belong to Kizaru, Vahn lowered his gaze to the sea just as a mouth nearly a hundred meters across, lined with razor-sharp teeth, erupted from below, rising hundreds of meters in a split second before snapping shut around him.

Though he was surprised and taken aback, Vahn didn't hesitate to form long, blade-like beams of light from his wings before performing a swift spin like the blade of a blender. Then, though there were thick curtains of blood in his way, he exited the colossal creature's mouth and throat using one of the incisions he had made. Looking back, he saw it was a giant eel, primarily yellow with paler yellow spots and a long brown ridge fin running from its head and throat, presumably along the entirety of its body.

Leaving Vahn at an even greater loss, an even larger Sea King, resembling an amethyst-purple gar, bit down on the throat of the giant eel, prompting several others to join in.

"How peculiar. This storm of yours must be riling them up..." remarked Kizaru, causing Vahn to startle as he appeared next to him. In the very next moment, he was sent flying as the ridge of Kizaru's foot connected with his face. It wasn't nearly lightspeed due to the spatial density within his domain, but the force behind it was still enough to cause his head to explode into liquid-like motes of golden light before Kizaru intercepted his trajectory several times over, giving him no time to recover and eventually sending him crashing toward the deck of his battleship.

'Ugh...what now...' groaned Vahn, opening his eyes to find he could only see from his left, looking up at the sky. More notably, his field of view was extremely confined, and while he could move his body, the orientation of his limbs was fixed in awkward positions with his left arm behind him, his right in front, and his legs fixed as if he were mimicking the silhouette of an exit sign.

"It's over, kid. Stop resisting..." said Vice-Admiral Chaton, standing over Vahn and staring down at him as he lit a cigarette and explained, "I ate the Topo Topo no Mi, making me a Topology Human. I can control the dimensionality of objects to make them two or three-dimensional. You're currently two-dimensional, trapped on a special plate lined with seastone, so if you want to regain your third dimension, you'll behave."

'What an absurd power...' thought Vahn, his expression hardening as his Chainbreaker took effect. In response, Chaton placed a plate formed from seastone over him, causing his world to become pitch black and a feeling of weightlessness to overtake him. He also lost the ability to breathe, but that wasn't a particular concern as it had been a while since he needed to intake oxygen to remain conscious.

BOOM

Just as Chaton was considering placing a weight atop the plate, a sound akin to a thunderclap echoed through the surroundings as said plate was promptly shattered to countless pieces. At the same time, Vahn rose from the deck's surface as if pulling himself from a viscous liquid, starting with his left arm and gradually restoring his three-dimensionality.

"What the hell is this guy...!?" exclaimed Chaton, sporting a fierce grimace as a piece of seastone shrapnel had cut his face.

"He's an enemy and a criminal...!" exclaimed Momousagi, unleashing webs from the tips of her fingers, forming several layers of netting over Vahn as he struggled to free himself from the deck. Kizaru intervened with a metal stake infused with seastone, stabbing it into Vahn's left shoulder with the intention of disabling his Devil Fruit abilities once and for all, but the latter just glared up at him and smiled, causing a sense of foreboding to fill the Admiral's usually unwavering heart as he realized the former was resistant or completely impervious to the seastone's debilitating properties.

Reasoning that freeing the rest of his body would take too long, Vahn gathered Ki in his left hand and attempted to slam it against the ship's deck. Before he could, Vice Admiral Momousagi moved like a blur to slice off his hand at the wrist, followed by Kizaru kicking the Ki sphere into the air like a luminous baseball that exploded a few tens of meters above the ship's nearly hundred-meter-tall mast.

Undaunted, Vahn detonated a Ki sphere inside his body, making it appear that he had self-destructed. Kizaru stood his ground without moving, but Momousagi was forced to retreat as the explosion ripped across the deck, sending several Marines overboard.

'This man fights as if he isn't afraid of death or pain...' noted Kizaru, his expression a slight frown as he turned his head in slow motion, tracking Vahn as he used the explosion to conceal his retreat.

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Seeing Kizaru appear to block his path, Vahn's expression firmed as he abruptly swelled like a balloon, his insides glowing golden as he set off a second explosion in his chest. Before that, Kizaru sent him crashing into the sea with a kick, causing the explosion to expand underwater, causing the nearby battleship to list precariously as a column of water more than fifty meters in diameter and several hundred tall erupted from the sea at its port side.

'This guy is just too fast...' thought Vahn, reforming several tens of meters beneath the water's surface. To make matters worse, he noticed a large number of Sea Kings swimming around and battling one another, some of which were larger than the nearby Impel Down. One of the smaller ones, a roughly six-hundred-meter-long sailfish, swam toward him like a blade slicing through the sea, but before it could get close, an especially long and thick beam of golden light pierced the sea and sliced through it from snout to tail.

'Alright...I think it's about time we wrap things up before someone gets killed...' thought Vahn, allowing his transformation to dissipate as he sank deeper into the sea. The vast majority of Marines were good people who believed in justice and preserving the livelihoods of ordinary people, so if he and Kizaru kept fighting, there was a good chance the rampaging Sea King would be drawn to and sink the entire fleet, resulting in the deaths of hundreds, if not thousands, of innocents.

Fortunately for the Marines onboard the battleships and those forming the disabled fleet, it appeared that Kizaru, Momousagi, and Chaton had realized they wouldn't be able to arrest him as, rather than ordering their men to drop depth charges, they began sailing as a group toward Impel Down. At the same time, Kizaru sliced several other Sea Kings to pieces, causing a frenzy that distracted and deterred the colossal creatures from pursuing the bite-sized vessels...

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"Well, that was a disaster..." remarked Vahn, exhaling from his nose and then smiling as he reappeared in the theater and discovered Grayfia and Venelana waiting for him in a large porcelain hot tub with a wood exterior. In place of water, they had filled the tub with a fragrant and viscous pink liquid, presumably a type of oil as they wore white gloves and leggings to ensure they wouldn't slip.

"Considering you were up against someone with decades of experience battling at relativistic speeds, you endured well," stated Venelana, offering a faint smile as she hummed, "More to the point, the Straw Hats were also successfully able to escape thanks to your distraction. Take a look."

Half-turning to peer back over his left shoulder, Vahn took in the events happening on the various displays as Grayfia and Venelana emerged from the tub and approached him, jointly disrobing before snaking their hands around to his front, pressing their breasts against his back, and kissing his neck and shoulders. As Venelana had said, the Straw Hats, onboard the still-submerged Thousand Sunny, was already a fair distance from Impel Down, but their heading was strange.

(They're sailing toward Amazon Lily at Rayleigh's suggestion) revealed Sis, answering how Luffy and Hancock would have their fated encounter despite the former not being sent to her island and the latter refusing to participate in the canceled Paramount War. Whitebeard would have been informed of Ace's rescue via the System, so unless he wanted to prove a point, there was no need for the battle to occur. Likewise, Blackbeard had ostensibly given up on raiding Impel Down as his colossal raft was sailing in the opposite direction, his expression a deep, resentful scowl...

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