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.