Big Mom was deceptively fast for a woman of her size. Not as fast as Cherry, but fast enough to react to her now that she was focusing all her attention on the smaller woman.
Cherry would find an opening to slash at Big Mom's eye, only for her to tilt her head at the last split second and receive a nick across her nose instead.
Or Cherry would throw a bolt of lightning at her chest, then Big Mom would twist Napoleon just enough to receive it instead, channeling the electricity down the right side of her body instead of through her heart.
So when Cherry had finally finished priming a King Punch and jumped into Big Mom's guard to hit her with it, it wasn't much of a surprise when she managed to block it with Napoleon.
*CRACK!!!*
Fractures radiated across Napoleon's blade, but it didn't completely shatter him. Big Mom swung the homie sword and crushed Cherry between the flat side of the blade and a homie boulder, the latter screaming as it shattered into countless little pieces.
Cherry managed to extract her arm from the relatively small hole she had punched through Napoleon in time to avoid a grab from Big Mom's free hand, which instead got a fist full of gravel that still squirmed with remnants of pseudo-life.
Big Mom threw the gravel in Cherry's direction, pelting her with a hail of bullet speed stone shrapnel that would have torn a marine battleship's crew to shreds.
Hundreds of sharp pebbles pinged off Cherry's armor harmlessly, making her glad she had actually worn it for this fight. They may not have pierced her skin, but they still would have stung like a mother fucker.
"Mama, I'm not doing so…good," Napoleon huffed painfully. The only reason he was still in a single piece was his unique nature as one of Big Mom's special homies.
"Shut up, Napoleon. I can always replace you later," Big Mom spoke without a hint of concern for one of her oldest homies.
"Doesn't sound like she wants you around, huh? Care to switch sides?" Cherry offered.
"Mama isn't herself when she's hungry, and who do I have to blame for that?" Napoleon shot her down with a glare.
"On the contrary, I think Big Mom is MOST herself when she's hungry," Cherry disagreed.
Big Mom swung Napoleon with no mercy for Cherry or the sword, grabbing at Prometheus to send more fire Cherry's way at the same time.
Cherry was not afraid of fire though, even Prometheus' flame only left her feeling a bit too toasty. She used the fire to hide from Big Mom's view, then slicing up her left arm as she burst forth from the flames that would have made a lesser woman's skin extra crispy.
Prometheus tried to chomp down on Cherry, but his simple mind could not fool Cherry's observation haki, allowing her to see him coming seconds before he made the move. She twisted around and raked her ethereal hand across his face, sending him reeling back in primal fear of a natural predator that he didn't know could exist.
He watched in existential horror as a gentle white energy was ripped from his being and crushed in an uncaring metal grip before being scattered to the winds to vanish into nothing. His flames had lost some of their heat in that exact instant.
Big Mom and both of her special homies understood immediately how dangerous this fight really was in the moment that followed. The special homies were made from Big Mom's own life span; that was what gave them the synergy and power that they had. She couldn't just make more of them endlessly like normal homies.
Though Big Mom had been driven feral by her gluttony, she had not lost her mind entirely. This showed in how the next few exchanges played out.
"Hehehe, playing keep away with your homies now, are you?" Cherry chuckled as Big Mom had suddenly become hesitant to attack her directly with her homies. "They won't do you much good if you're too scared to hit me with them, will they?"
"Scared?" Big Mom seethed. "I'll show you who is scared!"
Big Mom did something then that Cherry hadn't expected. Using the Soul Soul fruit, Big Mom flooded her own lifespan into both Napoleon and Prometheus, quickly repairing and even further empowering their already potent strength. She wreathed Prometheus onto Napoleon so that they would enhance one another's destructive ability to a height greater than the sum of their parts on top of that!
She was considerably slimmer than she had been before she did that, and if Cherry had thought that she had grown weaker from the massive sacrifice then she would be dead wrong.
*SHING*
Cherry dodged Napoleon by a hair's breadth, Prometheus' heat actually burning her skin beneath her armor in much the same way her plasma breath had done to Big Mom not so long ago.
'She got a lot faster…' Cherry thought, flipping over another slash by the smallest of margins.
Worse than that, Cherry wasn't sure whether or not Napoleon could cut through her armor now that he's been improved. His face had twisted into that of a sadistic demon and his edge seemed sharper at a glance. Combined with Prometheus' heat, she was certain that in a haki-less clash, they truly would pierce her armor's defense.
Suddenly, haki had become the most important factor in this fight.
*THUMP thump*
All she had to do was last a bit longer, and the fight would end in her win no matter what Big Mom did.
Cherry drew her spear and thrust it forward as she narrowly escaped potential bisection for a third time. Big Mom met her spear with an open hand.
*BZZZZZT*
The spearhead whirled to life, spinning ferociously and grinding into the palm of Big Mom's left hand. Sparks flew as haki clashed against haki. Big Mom grimaced in discomfort as the drill spear began to dig in and draw blood. Instead of pulling back, she closed her hand around the spear-
*SHANG*
-and would have directly decapitated Cherry if not for her proficiency with Kami-e, bending her body out of shape in a way that would make contortionists go green with envy; and in a suit of armor, no less!
The rhythmic thrum of her heart beat began to grow in both speed and volume. The frequent clashes between the two hid it for a time with their cacophonous racket, but eventually even Big Mom caught on to it.
"That punch barely worked for you the first time, do you really think it will work a second time?!" Big Mom laughed uproariously. Napoleon and Prometheus joined in with demonic cackles.
"Yeah, pretty much," Cherry said.
*BOOOOOOOM!!!*
…
Smoothie hadn't initially been willing to try to intervene in her Mother's fight, but as it continued well beyond the point that it had any right to, she started to get nervous.
What would happen if her mother actually died? Wouldn't she be royally fucked?
"We have to help Mama, now!" Smoothie finally worked up the nerve to do something about it, trying her best to ignore the smoldering devastation the seducing woods had been reduced to.
"Are you crazy?! We'll die in seconds if we jump in there!" Mont-d'Or argued reasonably. Most of their siblings seemed to agree with him.
"If Mama dies, then we're all dead! Think of how many enemies we made just collecting ingredients for that damned cake!" Smoothie countered.
They hadn't feared retaliation from anyone they had slighted over the years precisely because one of the world's strongest people was at their backs.
"F-fine! But we'll focus on defending Mama, nothing more! Nobody dies for her sake," Mont-d'Or said, internally hyping himself up for what would probably be the most dangerous battle he would ever be involved in.
*BOOOOOOOM!!!*
The ground quaked and the atmosphere shattered. A tremendous force whipped past them all at several times the speed of sound, miraculously not hitting any of them directly, but blasting them off their feet regardless.
A second, smaller boom resounded behind them. Those who hadn't been injured too much by the shockwave to move turned to look and saw that the Whole Cake Chateau had been blown completely apart, some pieces of it showing no sign of coming back down.
"What the hell was that?!" Mont-d'Or shouted, but his voice was only barely caught by Smoothie over the ringing sound hammering in her ears.
"Mama…" Smoothie spoke quietly, her face blank because she was too stunned by what just happened.
She was glad she didn't get involved in that, in the end.
…
Morgans cackled in delight. "What a scoop! What a scoop! I can't believe I got to see that with my own eyes, and even better…!"
He waved the den den mushi picture in the air, willing it to clear up more quickly and marveled at his expert camera work. A crystal clear photograph from his state-of-the-art long distance camera den den mushi (the same as a regular camera den den mushi, but with a telescope affixed to it), despicting the very instead that Cherry's armored fist connected with Big Mom's gut.
He snapped a few more of the wreckage that was the Whole Cake Chateau for good measure.
Stussy stood beside him, looking incredibly pale.
'Did that crazy bitch combine Elizabello's King Punch with Shigan?!' Stussy accurately surmised.
"I'm getting the hell out of here," Stussy spoke aloud, and did just that.
Cherry landed on the shore line where the Thousand Sunny had previously been anchored, but no longer was. She walked over to a sizable crater in the earth and jumped down into it.
"What am I going to do with you, Pedro?" Cherry asked.
Pedro did not answer.
"I was going to use this myself, but I guess you need it more than I do," Cherry set the object in her hand down onto Pedro's half liquified body.
She could help a mortal's healing process along, but regenerating anything bigger than a finger would require a lot more than the boost that injecting her Vital Energy would provide. As such, sacrifices need to be made.
Pedro was very close to death; close enough that any mortal doctor would have just said he was dead, period.
"This is going to suck for you, Pedro. The mortal form isn't designed to take this kind of energy influx," Cherry said, knowing that Pedro couldn't hear her.
The air thrummed as she began the process. She focused on keeping his brain alive until his body was sufficiently repaired, or rebuilt more like.
The heart and lungs were first, being the most vital organs for sustaining life functions. She jolted his mind awake when she finished with them.
*GASP!*
Pedro sucked in a breath and regretted it immediately. He let the air out of his lungs in a blood curdling scream.
"Keep breathing or you're dead," Cherry jolted his mind again, making him briefly focus on her words. "I know it hurts worse than any pain you could have ever imagined, but it will pass. Breathe."
Pedro, with the nerves of steel of a man who blew himself up to kill the enemy, did exactly as Cherry told him. He barely even registered that it was Cherry who had spoken to him, the pain was so great. Each breath brought with it a new layer of hell.
"Good, keep going just like that. If you lose focus, then your lungs will stop and that's more work for me to do while I'm saving your ass," Cherry encouraged him.
Minutes passed by like millenia in Pedro's perspective. He only wondered briefly if death would be better once, and only for a split second at that. His will was strong, he wouldn't give up so easily.
Breathing stopped being an exercise in self torture when the bone, flesh, and skin of his chest had finally enclosed his chest cavity. It still hurt to breathe, but now the pain of his missing extremities had taken the majority of his focus.
"Ch-Cherry…" Pedro growled out, his vocal cords felt like they were being massaged with a cheese grater as he spoke. "W-what happened…?"
"You tell me, buddy. Looks like you got blown up," Cherry said, mildly surprised he could even speak.
"R-right… I blew up Perospero…" Pedro remembered. The event oddly felt like it happened a long time ago.
"And yourself along with him? You're crazy, you know that?" Cherry chuckled.
"I d-don't have much time left, anyways…" Pedro mumbled. His eyes wandered lazily, then widened. "Y-ou… Your-"
"Don't worry about it," Cherry said, knowing what he was talking about. "I'll be fine, in time."
Ten minutes later, Cherry released a breath and stood up. "You're good to go. Don't say I never did anything for you."
"I don't believe I ever said such a thing before, and I'm not going to start now that I'm even further in your debt," Pedro said, trying to stand up, but finding it quite impossible with the way his body felt like it was a thousand times heavier.
"There are no debts between friends. Even stupid friends who go and blow themselves up," Cherry said, picking Pedro up in a familiar fashion.
She proceeded to skip through the air over the ocean, presumably in the direction of the Thousand Sunny.
The ship was fast, especially with Nami's navigation and Jinbe at the helm, but the two of them did eventually catch up to the others. Nami seemed to be making good use of Zeus, having him create a strong wind to carry them onwards.
When she landed on the deck with a loud *THUD* several people nearly jumped out of their skin in fright.
"We're under attack!" Chopper squealed prematurely.
"I sure hope we aren't, cause I'm beat, let me tell you!" Cherry sighed, dropping the exhausted form of Pedro onto the lawn deck, startling him awake from the nap he had started taking.
"PEDRO?!" Carrot was in tears as she piled atop him on the ground, squeezing him in a hug so tight you might believe he'd float away if she let go.
"You're back, Cherry," Nami sighed in relief as she came down from the quarterdeck, then she paused and pointed at her. "WHERE IS YOUR ARM?!"
"Big Mom seems to think that offense is the best defense. She was wrong, but she did get me pretty good at the end there," Cherry said nonchalantly, waving the short stub that remained of her left arm about. "I got her better than she got me, of course."
Chopper was looking over Pedro is disbelief when he heard Nami say that, and seeing that Pedro was no worse for wear than extreme exhaustion, he rushed to Cherry's side to look over her.
"Stop fussing, will you?" Cherry said, playing keep away with her stump. "It'll grow back once I get some energy back."
Carrot barreled into Cherry's chest. "Do you mean it? You saved Pedro, you can't die…"
Cherry patted her back with her good arm comfortingly. "Yes, I mean it."
"What happened with Pedro? We all saw him explode with that dynamite strapped to his chest. I'm not sure that even I would have survived that with my devil fruit back in the day," Brook asked.
"Well, he was more puddle than Pedro when I found him, so you're right about that. If he hadn't used armament haki, then there wouldn't have been anything left to save judging by the size of that crater he made. I would have reattached my severed arm if I didn't need to burn it up to regrow his body," Cherry explained. "Can't regrow clothes, though."
"Yes, that would explain why he's mostly naked," Brook said. "I'll go get him some of Zoro's clothes."
"You can do that…?" Chopper looked like he was considering the medical implications of a woman who could sacrifice bits of her body, which she could regrow at her own leisure, in order to restore another person's body from well beyond the point of no return.
"Where are Luffy, Sanji, and Reiju?" Cherry asked curiously, noting that they weren't here.
"Luffy dragged that scarf guy into the Mirro-World and broke the mirror behind him," Nami recounted. "Sanji and Reiju went with Pudding to make a new wedding cake, so that Big Mom wouldn't tear her entire territory apart in her hungry rage. Maybe that isn't an issue anymore, though?"
That last question was filled with hope. Cherry expertly dashed it like a ship upon the rocks in a storm. "No clue. Big Mom is one tough old monster, so she may die or she may not. My money is on 'not', despite my efforts to the contrary. I'm doubtful that she'll be in fighting shape before we can escape, though."
"Well, that's something at least," Nami sighed, rubbing her brow. "All we have to do now is collect everyone and get as far away from this place as possible."
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