“Come to think of it, you’ve never seen me use a Law before, have you?”

The clothes snapping in the wind around Antikas suddenly fell still, as if the fierce gale high above didn’t exist.

Before Aya could figure out what her old man meant and answer, he spread his hands and shook his head again. “Well, you were so weak back then that I didn’t need to use a Law to teach you a lesson…”

“You bastard! Did you only say that to mock me?!”

Aya glared, ready to curse him out—but Antikas made his move just then.

The clouds, which had been blown away by the shock waves from their earlier clash, had somehow reappeared around them. Aya immediately got a bad feeling.

“Cloudflow: Coil.”

Antikas snapped his fingers. Distracted by his words, Aya hadn’t noticed the clouds spreading around her and closing in. At a mere thought from him, they surged over her like a tidal wave.

The moment the clouds touched her, Aya knew something was wrong. They should’ve felt like air, but instead they were sticky as mud—and freezing cold. As soon as they wrapped around her, they began rapidly devouring the heat radiating from her body. The chill seeped through her from head to toe.

“Get off me!”

Aya instantly unleashed her Chi. A golden aura kept the clouds at bay as she spun, shook off their grasp, and shot upward.

A Dragon flying at full speed was astonishingly fast. But without Magic, even one flying on its membrane wings was limited in how high it could go—and even so, the clouds couldn’t keep up.

Yet when she broke through ten thousand meters and reached the top of the troposphere, the clouds around her showed no sign of clearing. Everywhere she looked was still a sea of white, and the extreme cold was rapidly draining Aya’s Chi reserves.

“Lady Tiran, what exactly is happening to me right now?!”

“That’s an enormous mass of clouds… Is Uncle Antikas’s Law something like cloud control?”

Watching from afar, Tiran had Miss Luco carry her higher as the battle moved upward. She studied the massive column of clouds and tried to guess what was going on.

Normally, the temperature at this altitude would be extraordinarily low, and the atmosphere would contain so little water vapor it was almost nonexistent. Most of it would be in the form of tiny ice crystals, making it difficult for clouds to exist at all. Reversing the laws of nature on such a massive scale should only be possible with an ability on the level of a World Law.

“Clouds?” Aya paused. So her old man’s Law was easier to deal with than she’d expected? At least it wasn’t something like that muscle-bound woman’s deity and its 【Destruction】—the kind of thing she didn’t even want to face after hearing its name.

“Don’t let your guard down. I’m only guessing based on what the ability seems to do. Who knows what else it can do?”

“Got it, got it. But they’re clouds, right? No matter how cold they are, I can burn them away. I’ll just turn them all into steam!”

In an environment this cold, fire element would be so scarce she might not even manage to conjure a tiny first-level fireball. But Aya could still work around that.

She could instantly raise the temperature around her by making the molecules vibrate violently at high speed. No need to start a fire.

“Vaporize!”

She swept her right hand sharply to the side. Her Chi-coated fingertips left a scarlet-gold ring in the air, which quickly spread outward. The freezing clouds it touched melted away like snow.

The expanding ring was like a sharp blade. With a single stroke, it cut through the rising column of clouds, opening up a clear view beyond.

“Hah… Did we really fly this high?”

“Oh, is this your Law? Temperature control? No, it seems to go deeper than that… That’s a pretty interesting way to use it.”

Antikas couldn’t immediately figure out how Aya’s Law worked. But his many years at Holy Rank, and his familiarity with Laws, told him instinctively that there was more to this ability than what he’d just seen.

“Cut the chatter and just get ready to take a beating!”

Seeing that her old man had dared to come this close, Aya didn’t hold back. She completed the weave of her Spatial Law, made a short-range jump to close the distance, then raised her fists and rained blows down on him.

But Antikas neither dodged nor tried to block. He simply let Aya’s fists hit him.

“?!”

The instant she hit Antikas, Aya realized something was wrong. Her fist met no resistance at all. Even though she’d struck her old man, it felt no different from punching empty air.

Her fist even sank into his body, as if she’d punched into the surface of water. There was no spray of blood, no sign of a dent—only ripples passing across his outline.

“An afterimage?”

“Ha! If it were an afterimage, could it do this?”

The figure Aya had mistaken for an afterimage bared his teeth in a grin, then punched her right back. The blow landed squarely on her chest and nearly knocked the wind out of her. It felt as if all the air in her lungs had been squeezed out.

The force of the punch sent Aya flying more than ten meters before she managed to steady herself. She coughed again and again, wiping a trace of blood from the corner of her mouth as she stared at the hole in her old man’s chest, slowly “healing.”

Though “healing” wasn’t quite right. It looked more like when she’d punched a hole in the clouds earlier, and the surrounding clouds had slowly flowed in to fill it…?

“Your body can turn into clouds?!”

“You finally figured it out?” Antikas touched the spot that had just healed, seeming pleased with Aya’s reaction.

Tiran, watching from nearby, got excited too. “Aya, Aya! He’s definitely a Logia-type Devil Fruit user! He can turn his body into an element and everything!”

This world had Magic, but even the most accomplished mage couldn’t freely switch their body between an element and human form. Partial transformation was possible, but only black mages who’d gone off the deep end—or outright lunatics—would try to alter their bodies through elementalization. And the process was absolutely irreversible.

“So I’m telling you, he’s definitely a Devil Fruit user!”

“Enough already!”

Aya shouted back through their contract. “Instead of going on about irrelevant stuff, why don’t you help me figure out how to deal with him?!”

“Huh? What’s so hard about that?” Tiran sounded completely confident.

“…You have a plan?” Aya raised an eyebrow, her voice full of doubt. But Tiran’s confidence was a little contagious, and the idea seemed at least somewhat plausible. After all, this was the princess who was always coming up with bizarre ideas.

“Of course! If he’s elementalized, all you have to do is learn Haki. Then you can grab him every time!”

Tiran gave her a thumbs-up.

Without a word, Aya cut off the contract link.

You’re better off relying on yourself than on heaven or earth. Just get it done.

With that in mind, Aya brought out her classic skill once more: Branch of Calamity. She reinforced the ten-meter molten greatsword with the Law of Vibration. The flowing lava along the blade instantly became ionized flames, turning almost ethereal.

Even if he turned into clouds to dodge, getting hit by this sword should still burn him away completely, right?