Luffy watched Doflamingo in confusion. He had appeared from a different direction than he should have.
When the dust settled at ground zero of Luffy's assault, a lone figure could be seen. It looked like Doflamingo, but it had several gouges ripped out of it that shouldn't be survivable. Inside these devastating wounds, countless ripped strings could be seen.
After Doflamingo attempted to block Luffy's attack with Off White, he quickly made a body double and slipped away under the cover of his defense. Since Luffy lacked direct line of sight on him and was so focused, he unfortunately missed the switch.
The real Doflamingo flew at Luffy, arm pulled back like a claw intending to finish him off.
Just as he reached the exhausted upstart pirate captain and bore down on him with a lethal blow, Luffy vanished. In his place appeared Kyros who looked as healthy as he'd ever been. More importantly, Kyros was in the middle of swinging his sword.
*Slash!*
Doflamingo couldn't dodge it; he was too exhausted, too slow. He was cut from his shoulder to his hip across the chest and stumbled back in shock.
Kyros didn't allow him to put any distance between them. He pursued Doflamingo relentlessly, like a hound from hell bent on dragging him to the place he belonged.
Dolfamingo wasn't a shichibukai for nothing, though. Despite being on the back foot, Kyros couldn't land any more solid hits; only small cuts and grazes from time to time, nothing substantial like the first surprise attack.
In addition, he was able to use his strings to close the long gash across his torso and prevent himself from bleeding out.
"Fufufufu! Is this all you've got? The fate of Dressrosa rests upon your shoulders, and you can't do anything about it!" Doflamingo mocked.
"The birdcage isn't moving anymore." Kyros pointed out with a calm voice. "You're so exhausted that you can't even spare that much attention. There is no more time limit, and I can do this all day."
Doflamingo grit his teeth and his mind searched frantically for a solution. Kyros intended to wear him down and Doflamingo can't win a battle of attrition in his already exhausted state.
He reached his mind out for the parasitic strings he placed within the giant, Hajrudin, but he couldn't find them. He caught a glance of the towering figure watching the battle from a distance, so he was definitely still in range.
'They removed my string?! How?!' Doflamingo couldn't believe it. His parasitic strings wrapped around the victim's spinal cord, they couldn't just be casually removed!
His eyes caught onto a familiar figure at the edge of the battle, waiting in the winds so to speak. Fujitora was sat at a table, slurping noodles from a bowl as if this was just a regular day.
"Fujitora! Are you just going to sit there whilst a Shichibukai is under attack?!" Doflamingo shouted. It was a long shot, but he had to take every shot that he could.
"Hm? Are you under attack? I can't see anyone attacking you, though?" Fujitora drank the remaining broth and picked up a second bowl.
"What are you, blind-?! DAMN IT!" Doflamingo fell straight into that one.
Doflamingo tried to side step an overhead swing of Kyros' sword, but his foot didn't budge.
*Slash*
Once again Doflamingo took a slash across the chest, this time from the opposite shoulder to the other hip, creating a large X on his front torso. Four slender, but deceptively powerful arms that were gripping his leg disappeared in a puff of flower petals.
Now he had one more thing to be mindful of on top of a mountain of other factors that might lead to his death. He should have cut his losses from the start, but the arrogance he had built up over more than three decades wasn't an easy thing to discard.
The game of cat and mouse between him and Kyros lasted a few more minutes, with Doflamingo in the unenviable role of the mouse. Kyros never overextended in an attempt to end things more quickly, thus drawing out Doflamingo's inevitable end.
A simple mistake created an opening at his right side. Kyros took it with a hard kick with his freshly regrown left leg, the very same one he lost during his first confrontation with Doflamingo.
Doflamingo could take it, though, and he'd used the chance to counterattack. Or he would have, if Luffy hadn't come out of nowhere like a bat out of hell, slamming into the left side of Doflamingo's face with a devastating kick of his own.
After doing an involuntary cartwheel in the air, Doflamingo slumped to the ground completely drained of energy, unmoving.
For a few moments, it was deathly quiet. The whole of Dressrosa seemed to hold its breath.
When the birdcage unraveled, the silence turned into deafening cheers. Only a small portion of the kingdom's population directly bore witness to the Shichibukai's downfall; it was only then that they all knew that the devil was defeated.
In a hidden place, Law heaved a sigh. Though Doflamingo didn't fall by his own hand, he was not such a shallow person that his long awaited revenge must be completed by himself alone. It was enough that Doflamingo finally got his due.
"Oh, shit-!" Cherry left those short words hanging in the air as she charged directly through a brick wall. From the sounds of it, it wasn't the only one she did so with either.
Law wondered what her hurry was that she needed to do even more property damage. When he started to sweat and realized that it was several degrees hotter than a few minutes ago, his question answered itself.
…
The time had come and Akainu was ready to act.
Up until now, he had his men running around helping people evacuate inwards away from the birdcage, whilst those with decent armament haki helped to slow down the birdcage's shrinking.
He didn't care about it, but it was good for morale and their reputation to help people.
His reports told him a number of pirates were also holding off the birdcage, but that was easy to spin as self preservation.
The same was true for the battle against Doflamingo, the Straw Hats were only saving their own skins. In fact, the good people of Dressrosa never would have been in danger in the first place had the Straw Hats not picked a fight with him!
Meanwhile the Neo Marines had planned to draw Doflamingo away, to reduce collateral damage to a minimum. They even had a whole plan drafted out. Nevermind whether it would have worked; what mattered was directing the blame to where it belonged. On the pirates' heads.
Akainu lit a cigar on his tongue and took a few puffs off of it before cracking his neck. "Keep the small fries away from me."
"""Yes, sir!""" his Neo Marines chimed and saluted with determined faces.
Akainu started forward at a marching pace, his momentum that of an unstoppable tide of molten rock. His destination was the site of the battle against Doflamingo, and his objective to cut down the victor and the loser alike.
His body began to roil, bubble, and surge; the surrounding air slowly started heating up to an uncomfortable degree.
He saw them in the distance, Luffy standing over Doflamingo's unmoving form. There was another, but he was irrelevant so long as he didn't get in the way.
Akainu raised his arm in a fist and before he consciously understood why he did so, two feet slammed into it in a drop kick that threw him into the wall on the other side of him.
Akainu clambered out of the crumbling, and now melting, wall and glared at the interloper. Cherry had hit him so fast that only his fine tuned reflexes allowed him to respond to the warning his observation haki gave him in time to block it. Unfortunately for Cherry, he had sparred with Kizaru often enough to develop this sort of almost automatic defense mechanism.
"Hey, bud. Ready for round two?" Cherry snickered, a spear and sword appearing in either of her hands.