Big Mom's voice hissed across the stretch of ocean between them in an unnatural screech. "HANSEL'S DOOM!"
She swung Napoleon in much the same way that she had when using her Ikoku Sovereignty technique, only that the horizontal column of slashing annihilation was now filled with Prometheus' hellfire.
"That ain't good. She's at least a few times faster than when I fought her too…" Cherry said.
Cherry wasted no time drawing her own sword up into the air, crackling with massive arcs of electricity as she drew upon the full extent of its lightning.
It was a good thing that she did, too, because by the time she swung it down the column of burning death had already crossed half the distance to their ship and they could already feel the temperature bump up a few degrees.
There was no swish as the sword cut through the air, but instead a thunderous crash like genuine lightning had struck at the same instant. The slash raced over the water faster than the eye could follow and split the column of flame in twane just in time for it to pass the Sunny by on either side of them.
"No time to waste, Jinbe! If you're coming, then get your big blue ass in gear!" Cherry shouted and exploded into motion, leaping so quickly through the air that each foot fall sounded like a gunshot.
Jinbe dove into the ocean not half a moment later, and at the same time Takako splashed into the juicy depths from the same confines of Cherry's vital energy sea.
Truthfully, Cherry was excited. Big Mom had been somewhat of a disappointment the first time they fought. She was strong, of course, but her judgment in battle had been impaired by her hunger pangs, her mind always drifting towards her desire for her craving and away from the fight at hand.
'Not to mention, she was probably having a battle of will with her heart demon the whole time,' Cherry surmised.
It was different now, though. The heart demon was in charge and Big Mom's true self was in a deep slumber, leaving nothing to distract it from the coming battle.
Cherry delighted in the opportunity. She had been growing worried that there would be no one left to challenge her in this world, and whilst that wasn't necessarily a bad thing, it did mean that she would have no choice but to raise her strength the slow and boring way rather than tempering herself on the grindstone of war.
"How are you going to fight her? You lost an arm last time and like you said, she's gotten faster now," Jinbe called out, diving in and out of the sea like a dolphin and just barely keeping pace with Cherry.
"I'll just have to go even faster. There's an idea I've had rolling around in my head for the last few days, but if I try now it's probably gonna hurt like a bitch," Cherry said, seeming calm on the surface, but he could hear the finely honed edge in her voice.
"Which means you're definitely going to use it," Jinbe replied, seeing through her intentions easily.
"Yep," Cherry snickered. "Hopefully I don't just explode~!"
They were about to make contact with Big Mom, so Jinbe hung back to get ready to do whatever he could to douse Prometheus with his fishman karate. He wondered if Takako could learn fishman karate.
Cherry footsteps, as loud as they were, were no longer the loudest sound that she was making. Her heart hammered away in her chest, picking up the pace with each passing second, but she wasn't preparing herself to use her totally completely original Divine Right punch.
Instead she was trying to keep all that kinetic energy contained inside her body, to push herself to the very limits of her capabilities and walk the knife's edge of self destruction.
She had always thought that the way Elizabello used this was incredibly wasteful. Even when she combined it with the advanced form of shigan to narrow the scope there was still a great deal of waste.
That's why she had the idea to simply not release it all at once, to keep her heart pumping the power out instead of stopping when she had enough for a single punch.
The trouble was, her body isn't designed to contain this kind of energy, not the same way that freak of nature Elizabello's is. Her cultivation made her sturdy enough to brute force it, but the technique was still damaging to her.
Cherry arrived before the wretched thing controlling Big Mom's body. She clad herself in her armor, hugging it tightly to her form like a second layer of metal skin.
Big Mom swung Napoleon at her in a wild and deadly arc.
Cherry allowed the vast store of kinetic energy to flood out of her core to every inch of her body. The energy banged up against the inside of her armor and reflected back inwards without allowing even the smallest amount to escape with her desire for it to do so.
Napoleon had been swung at a speed that would have made it difficult for Cherry to dodge, but now it seemed to slow to a relative crawl.
Cherry flowed around it, tracing along Napoleon's blade with Sakura Tengoku, making sparks fly in slow motion and intermingle with Prometheus' flame.
Her sword reached the guard of Big Mom's own and sliced through like a hot knife through butter. She continued up Big Mom's arm, cutting through her steel-like skin along the way.
When Cherry reached the massive woman's shoulder, she angled her sword to carve into her neck with the full intention of taking Big Mom's head clean off.
'Let's see you wake up from this!' Cherry thought viciously.
Sadly, her thoughts betrayed her. Such a straightforward intent, and one that was rather predictable at that, was easily seen through via observation haki.
Big Mom's white, pupil-less eyes seemed to watch Cherry with cold detachment, an ever present creepy smile adorning her lips. Armament haki, dark as the void, coagulated on her throat just in time for Cherry's blade to scrape across it like nails on a blackboard.
Cherry used her momentum to flip around and crack Big Mom on the jaw with a powerful kick, creating a small distance between them as fire raced up Big Mom's body to lick at the shoulder where Cherry had been.
With a blur of motion, Cherry bombarded Big Mom with hundreds of slashes and flying shigan in the span of only a few seconds, peppering every centimeter of the unconscious emperor's body with relatively weak but still dangerous attacks. That served as a decent distraction for Jinbe's first attack; an aerial stream of water splashing against Big Mom's lanky form and drenching her down to the bone, almost literally with how thin she was.
Cherry blinked the blood pooling in her eyes away and launched right back into the fray. The damage to her body was starting to add up, but this wasn't nearly as disastrous as the time she fused her body with her sword.
This was working out better than expected, if she said so herself. At this rate, Big Mom will be dead and Cherry will be home in time for supper.