As Doflamingo became an unwilling pink satellite, the Witch, seemingly unharmed by her tumble, floated into the sky. She wasn't supported by strings or wings, but levitating, her tattered rags billowing around her like storm clouds. Her staff pulsed with a malevolent green light, and her milky eyes, no longer blazing with unfocused rage, were fixed with chilling intensity on Marco.
"Phoenix," her voice rasped, a chorus of decaying whispers and dry leaves carried on the wind. "You reek of defiance. Why do you defile my sacred Ikki? Why do you disturb the slumber of the Rot?"
Marco, circling cautiously, kept his phoenix flames burning bright. "My Pops, Whitebeard, needs something you're hiding here, old woman. A Devil Fruit. A mythical Zoan."
The Witch let out a sound like grinding tombstones, a mockery of a laugh. "Heal? There is no healing here, only decay and rebirth in my image. The Mythical Fruit… you speak of the Seed of Despair. He cannot have it. I will not give it."
"So you do have it," Marco said, a grim satisfaction in his tone. "That just makes my job easier, Whatever you consider seed of chaos or whatever!" Without further warning, he dived, talons of blue flame extended, aiming for the floating crone. "Phoenix Brand!"
The Witch didn't flinch. She raised her staff, and the very air around her seemed to curdle. "Foolish bird! You will burn in a pyre of your own making!" From the staff, a torrent of thorny, black vines, crackling with green energy, erupted to meet Marco's charge.
But before the two attacks could connect, the battlefield erupted anew.
"Sables: Pesado!"
A colossal wave of sand, dense as bedrock and shaped like a monstrous fist, surged upwards from the ground, intercepting Marco's dive and slamming into the Witch's vine shield. The impact threw both airborne combatants off balance. Sir Crocodile, riding atop a swirling pillar of sand that was constantly reforming, rose to their level.
"This is my quarry, Phoenix," Crocodile drawled, his golden hook glinting. "The fruit, and the Witch's head. Step aside, or be buried."
Before Marco could retort, another voice, cool and lazy, cut through the chaos from below. "Arara, now don't hog all the fun, Crocodile-ya. The Marines also have a vested interest in this... 'Seed of Despair'."
Admiral Kuzan, having dealt with the immediate threat of the tree-golems, was now striding towards the epicenter of the conflict. The ground around him frosted with every step. He looked up at the aerial melee and the two roaring, newly-reformed Ursas who were already turning their attention back to the sky.
The fight became a maelstrom.
Marco, recovering his balance, found himself fending off not just the Witch's energized vines, but also tendrils of sentient sand sent by Crocodile. "This is not your business, Crocodile! Stay out of it, yoi!" He unleashed a flurry of fiery kicks, forcing the sand to retreat momentarily.
The Witch cackled, her staff now weaving intricate patterns. "More flies to my web! More souls to feed the Rot!" The earth around the two Ursas began to tremble violently. Chunks of rock and soil, imbued with the same sickly green energy, tore themselves loose and orbited the giant bears like miniature moons, then launched themselves as projectiles towards Kuzan and any unfortunate Marine still too close.
Crocodile, ignoring Marco, focused his assault on the Witch. "Desert Spada!" He formed a blade of compressed sand, lashing out with surprising speed, aiming to cleave her in two. The Witch countered with a shield of writhing roots that erupted from the ground below, even reaching skyward.
Kuzan, meanwhile, faced the twin Ursas. The bears, seemingly even more savage after their regeneration, charged him. One swiped with claws that could tear through steel, the other tried to stomp him into a paste.
"Ice Block: Partisan!" Kuzan thrust his hands forward, launching a volley of sharply pointed ice spears. They thudded into the bears' thick hides, making them roar in pain but doing little to slow their momentum. The purple runes on their bodies glowed brighter, seemingly nullifying some of the ice's effect.
Marco, seeing an opening as Crocodile and the Witch were momentarily locked, swooped low. "Gotta stop those bears before they flatten everything, yoi!" He aimed a concussive blast of blue fire at the legs of one Ursa, trying to topple it.
The Witch shrieked, sensing Marco's intent. "Ursa! Crush the winged pest!" One of the bears, despite the fiery assault, turned its attention, unleashing a deafening roar that buffeted Marco with sheer sonic force, forcing him to veer off.
Crocodile used the distraction. "Desert Girasole!" The ground beneath one of the Ursas turned into a massive, sucking quicksand pit. The bear roared in surprise and began to sink, struggling against the consuming earth.
But the other Ursa was still very much active. It slammed a paw down where Kuzan had been standing moments before, the Admiral having sidestepped with deceptive agility.
"Persistent, aren't they?" Kuzan murmured, his breath misting in the super-chilled air around him. He touched the ground. The frost spread outwards with incredible speed, racing up the legs of the still-standing Ursa, and even creeping into the quicksand pit to encase the struggling limbs of the other.
The Witch screamed in fury. "No! You will not bind them!" She tried to channel more power into her champions, but Crocodile pressed his attack, a sandstorm forming around her, obscuring her vision and lashing at her with stinging grit.
Marco, seeing Kuzan's maneuver, flew higher, observing. "He's going for a full freeze, yoi. Smart."
"Ice Time!" Kuzan declared, his voice resonating with chilling authority. The temperature plummeted drastically. The very air seemed to crackle with frost.
The two colossal Ursas, one half-sunk in quicksand, the other mid-stride, began to slow. Their roars became gurgles. The malevolent purple light in their eyes flickered. Thick, opaque ice, harder than steel, climbed their massive bodies, layer by layer, until, with a final, shuddering groan that was cut short, both giant bears were completely encased in two immense, glistening statues of frozen fury.
The battlefield fell into a momentary, stunned silence, broken only by the Witch's enraged shrieks from within Crocodile's sandstorm and the distant, muffled sounds of Doflamingo presumably making an unscheduled reentry into Ikki's atmosphere.
The momentary stillness shattered as the Witch, her voice a venomous hiss, erupted from Crocodile's swirling sandstorm. "Insolent insects! You think freezing my champions will save you? Ikki itself is my weapon!" Her staff blazed with an almost blinding green light. The ground beneath them, not just the soil but the very bedrock, began to groan and shift. Jagged spikes of obsidian-like rock, infused with the same sickly green energy as her vines, thrust upwards violently, aiming to impale Marco, Crocodile, and even Kuzan who was momentarily observing his handiwork.
"Tch, relentless hag!" Crocodile snarled, reforming his sand pillar to weave through the erupting spikes. "Barján!" He launched a crescent wave of cutting sand, not at the Witch directly, but at the base of the rock spikes, trying to sever them before they reached their targets.
Marco, agile in his phoenix form, twisted and weaved through the deadly earthen barrage. "She's drawing power from the island itself, yoi! We need to take her down, fast!" He swooped, blue flames intensifying, aiming a powerful fiery kick towards the Witch's exposed flank as she focused on her earth-bending assault.
The Witch, however, seemed to have eyes everywhere. A shield of interwoven, thorny vines, thicker and more menacing than before, sprang into existence, absorbing Marco's attack with a sizzling sound. "The Rot consumes all, little bird! Even your rebirth!"
Suddenly, a cackling laugh echoed from above. "Fufufufu! Did you miss me? The party can't truly start without the main attraction!" Doflamingo, looking slightly dishevelled but grinning wider than ever, descended like a vengeful pink angel, his strings already lashing out. "Athlete!" He aimed a volley of hardened string bullets not at the Witch, but cunningly at the ground beneath Crocodile's sand pillar, attempting to destabilize the Suna Suna no Mi user.
"Doflamingo, you damn nuisance!" Crocodile roared, his sand shifting rapidly to avoid the attack, but it threw off his own assault on the Witch.
This created the opening the Witch needed. With a triumphant shriek, she slammed her staff onto the ground. "Wrath of the Withered Earth!" The very air crackled. The frozen Ursas, despite their icy prison, began to vibrate ominously. Not thawing, but something far more insidious. The purple runes on their frozen hides pulsed, and from within the ice, tendrils of dark, corrupted energy began to snake outwards, lashing like whips towards anyone nearby.
"She's animating them even while they're frozen, yoi!" Marco exclaimed, dodging a shadowy tendril that hissed past his head. This Witch was proving far more versatile and dangerous than anticipated.
Kuzan, seeing his icy prison being subverted, clicked his tongue. "Arara, she's a persistent one." He moved with surprising speed, ice spreading from his feet, intending to reach the Witch and neutralize her directly. "Ice Ball!" He hurled a sphere of condensed, super-chilled ice at the Witch, aiming to encase her.
The Witch, now juggling attacks from Marco, Crocodile, and Doflamingo (who was now gleefully trying to tangle all three of them in his strings simultaneously, "Fufufu! Let's dance, puppets!"), couldn't evade Kuzan's attack fully. The Ice Ball slammed into her outstretched staff-hand. Instantly, the ice spread, encasing her gnarled fingers, her wrist, creeping up her arm, freezing the staff solid within her grip.
"Got her!" Kuzan said, a hint of satisfaction in his voice, already moving to secure his prisoner.
The Witch let out a pained, furious screech, the green light in her staff sputtering, but her other hand was already beginning to weave a new, desperate incantation.
BANG!
A single, perfectly aimed rifle shot rang out from the edge of the clearing. The bullet, crackling with an immense concentration of Haki, didn't target her flesh, nor the staff. It slammed into the thick ice encasing the Witch's shoulder, just above the frozen arm. The impact wasn't enough to free her, but it sent a jarring shockwave through her body, cracking the icy shell on her upper arm and making her flinch violently. Her nascent spell dissolved, her concentration shattered for a critical micro-second.
Everyone momentarily froze, their eyes darting to the treeline where Benn Beckman stood, rifle still aimed, smoke curling from its barrel, his expression dead calm.
That micro-second was all Shanks needed.
He moved like a phantom, a crimson streak that defied perception. He wasn't aiming to disarm or merely incapacitate. Gryphon, his legendary cutlass, was a blur, imbued with a terrifying surge of Conqueror's Haki that seemed to warp the very air around it. He didn't sever a limb. Instead, he cut through the Witch's desperate, last-second defenses of thorny vines and shadowy energy, his blade arcing in a swift, decisive slash that connected solidly with her chest.
There was no gruesome spray of blood, but the impact was immense, like a thunderclap contained within her frail form. The Witch's milky eyes widened in utter shock, the green light within them flickering violently, then extinguishing like a snuffed candle. A choked gasp escaped her lips as the air was driven from her lungs. Her levitation failed instantly.
She was thrown backwards with tremendous force, not just by the blow, but as if the island's malevolent energy sustaining her had been violently short-circuited. Her trajectory carried her straight towards one of the massive, frozen Ursa statues.
CRACK-THOOOOM!
The Witch's frail body slammed into the ice-encased Ursa with devastating force. The Admiral's ice, already stressed by the Witch's earlier attempts to reanimate the beast, couldn't withstand the sudden, focused impact combined with the lingering chaotic energies. It shattered. Not just cracked, but exploded outwards in a colossal shower of razor-sharp ice shards and frozen bear chunks.
The Witch, her body broken, disappeared amidst the icy cataclysm.
And there, nestled within the very core of the shattered Ursa, where its heart might have been, now glinting innocently amidst the debris of ice and frozen monster, was a simple, unadorned wooden treasure box. The same one Ursa had swallowed. The Seed of Despair. Rocks' Devil Fruit.
The sudden silence that fell was absolute, profound. All eyes, pirate and Marine alike, were fixed on the small chest. Then, slowly, they turned towards the figure responsible for this sudden, dramatic conclusion.
Shanks stood calmly, Gryphon now resting on his shoulder, the faint hum of its power subsiding. He looked not at the chest, but at his crew, a silent acknowledgment passing between him and Beckman.
Marco, hovering in the air, was stunned into momentary speechlessness. The sheer, decisive power, the way Shanks had ended a chaotic, multi-front battle with a single, perfectly timed sequence of actions… it was breathtaking. "He… he just… yoi…"
Crocodile, his sand pillar slowly receding, stared at Shanks with a mixture of grudging respect and intense calculation. The Red-Haired Emperor had just demonstrated exactly why he was the most wanted among the rookies.
Doflamingo, who had just picked himself up from yet another crash landing some distance away, wiping dust from his pink coat, had witnessed the final act. His perpetual grin faltered for a fraction of a second, replaced by a look of raw, almost fearful, awe before it snapped back into place, perhaps a little wider, a little more manic. "Fufufufu… FUFUFUFUFU! Now that is how you make an entrance and an exit! Red-Hair, you magnificent bastard!"
Kuzan, who had been about to apprehend the Witch, stood frozen himself, not by ice, but by the sheer audacity and efficiency of Shanks' intervention. His eyes, usually lazy, were narrowed into slits, fixed on the Red-Haired captain. The implications of Shanks' actions – effectively taking out a key target and revealing the prize right under the Marines' noses – were not lost on him.
"Red-Hair..." Kuzan's voice was a low, dangerous rumble, the temperature around him dropping several degrees. "You have an impeccable sense of timing. And an utter disregard for protocol."