Jesus Burgess slipped away from the back of the crowd of former toys. Under normal circumstances he was a very confident individual, but he was possessed of enough wisdom to realize he was a bit out of his depth at the moment.
He had been very close to the S.M.I.L.E. factory at the time that Cherry had destroyed it. He wasn't afraid of Elizabello because his King Punch took such a long time to charge up, and at the worst you'd just have to dodge it once. Cherry's replication though? That didn't seem to take anywhere near as long as a whole hour like Elizabello's version.
Fortunately he hadn't antagonized her too much during the tournament, and even the amount he had could be chalked up to normal fight banter he reckoned. How did he realize that Nightmare was Cherry in disguise? He just made the assumption automatically to justify his loss against her and Zoro.
"You were one of those guys with Blackbeard, right? At Marineford?" a voice that sent a chill down his spine spoke right into his ear.
Shifting his head slightly, he saw the woman in question standing on shoulder. He cursed his herculean strength in this moment, as he couldn't even feel her weight even now that he knew she was there.
"Where were you slinking off to like a coward? Your life is on the line as well, you know?" Cherry asked.
"The Champion isn't a coward." Burgess momentarily forgot who he was speaking to in the face of that provocation.
"Last I checked, you lost in the very first round of the tournament." Cherry chuckled. "Perhaps you'd like a rematch, though? I have the prize right here…"
Cherry pulled the oversized, drill-shaped strawberry out of her clothes. Burgess' eyes locked onto it instantly, filling with a dangerous glint of greed.
With that fruit, he was sure that he could defeat this monstrous woman. The question was whether he could take it from her.
The answer was no, but Burgess was an arrogant man so he thought there was a chance at least.
"You're on!" Burgess shouted and reached for her.
*pop*
Cherry vanished from his shoulder, shooting down the street with speed his eyes could barely follow. The force of her leaping off of him almost dislocated the shoulder, but he muscled through the pain and charged down the street after her like an enraged bull.
The fact that Cherry stopped to taunt him each time she was turning a corner prevented him from stopping to think about the futility of his actions.
The two racers tore through the streets and alleys of Dressrosa, miraculously avoiding any groups of people fleeing from the encroaching cage. Cherry even leapt through a window of a house, parkoured through it, then out the other side through another window. Burgess plowed straight through the walls.
Soon the slow moving strings of death were clearly visible on a straight away down a street. The hardier buildings were pushed along either side of the street, forming two tall walls of rubble with no openings.
"WIIIHAHAHA! Looks like a dead end for you!" Burgess said.
Cherry stopped before the string and turned around to face him. "You think so? Maybe I'll go through you?"
Burgess steeled himself, holding his arms wide to increase his options as he pushed towards her.
At this moment, all the jostling around seemed to have woken up Sugar, who was tied upside to Cherry's back. As her bleary vision started to clear, the fog of unconsciousness lifting from her brain she saw the birdcage only a few meters in front of her and getting closer by the second.
Sugar tried to struggle out of her bindings, but it was useless. "Let me go! We're going to die! We'll be shredded!"
Cherry ignored her and turned back to face the birdcage, showing Sugar that being sliced like deli meat wasn't the only threat as Burgess beared down on her. "AHHHHHHH!"
Cherry did the unexpected and leapt towards the birdcage. Sugar's screamed became even more desperate as her inevitable death was coming even quicker than she first imagined.
Cherry grasped two of the strings with haki coated hands, sparks flying off of them from the scraping. She wrenched them wider and propelled through the birdcage unharmed. The two string returned to position with a pair of loudly reverberating *SPRONGS*.
Sugar was in disbelief that she was not only alive, but that Cherry had actually pulled apart the birdcage's strings, which were under extreme tensile forces to prevent exactly that from happening.
Burgess wasn't far behind. He reached out to grab the string and…
"ARRRGHHH?!" Burgess reeled back. His meaty fingers bearing deep cuts down to the bone.
Cherry stood on the other side with a smirk. "I guess you lose."
She materialized her spear and pulled out the drill fruit. Pressing them together, the devil fruit melted into the spear and it transformed before their eyes; the spear head twisted around like a drill head whilst retaining its sharp edge.
Sensing the way to use the spear's devil fruit ability instinctively, Cherry let out an impressed whistle. "I think you guys were underestimating this thing. Let's see…"
Cherry reared back, the spear started to spin with exponentially increasing speed, then she thrust it forward. It was then she realized that she might have poured a little too much juice into it only just after obtaining the fruit. "Uh oh-"
The spear wrenched itself out of Cherry's vise-like grip and shot like a missile through the birdcage, nearly taking Burgess' head off in the process and taking just an ear instead. It continued onwards at blistering speed, sailing through the air unhindered.
…
Luffy and Cabernet had run out of ideas to mock Pika anymore and had grown quite bored with the stone man crushing them into the ground.
Pika reared up to slam into them again, but this time Luffy was going to meet the attack with his own. He figured he just had to be careful not to destroy the whole body and just the arm.
Luffy blew his arm up into a giant, haki coated fist. The two slammed together and naturally the one with haki won in the end. Pika's stone arm cracked and crumbled from the impact, but quickly started to reform itself causing Luffy to frown in annoyance.
"It's useless, Straw Hat! I can do this all day!" Pika shrieked.
Pika winded up another punch. Luffy was ready to meet this one as well.
"Huh-?" Pika paused.
A flash of starlight from outside the birdcage turned into a streak of color that crossed the distance in a split second. It penetrated Pika's stone exterior and with a few more flashes of starlight Pika's stone chest exploded out of his back, leaving a several meter wide hole through the construct.
Pika would have been shocked, if the drill spear hadn't pierced clean through his actual chest as well, killing him instantaneously.
Fortunately, Pika's untimely demise didn't compromise the structural integrity of his stone body. It still stood right where it had been before, only now it was completely inert.
""..."" Cabernet and Luffy didn't really know what to make of it.
So they stopped thinking about it. Cabernet flew Luffy up to the palace to have a confrontation with Doflamingo, now that they didn't have to worry about collateral damage so much.