After that, all the wisps of glowing emerald light imploded and converged into a single point, directly atop the darkness within Ter's right eye.
His eye changed colours and turned hazel with a complex and beautiful pattern.
It was as if a miniature sun with a faint green hue replaced Ter's eyeball.
He lingered for a moment and cranked his neck to look up straight at the sky. As soon as his vision met the clouds, the emerald light encapsulated by his eye exploded and shot up like many strings of lasers.
The beams of light travelled high into the sky, passing clouds without disturbance.
After reaching a great altitude, the beams of light abruptly stopped and collapsed into themselves.
They converged and separated into blobs of light carrying a green hue. Their structure broke apart and rebuilt itself countless times in a single second.
Finally, the wisps of light carrying a faint emerald hue settled into the shape of a perfect sphere. The sphere itself was entirely white, but on its surface, a hazel circle was visible. And within that green circle was a dark, spiralling hole.
The glowing structure took complete form and looked like a giant hologram of a white eyeball with hazel iris and an absolutely dark pupil, suspended high in the air.
And around the eyeball were greenish wisps of smoke surrounding it.
For a moment, it just hung in the air unmoving.
Down below, on the burning ship, which looked like an extinguishing matchstick from this height, shuddered; some creatures from the sea seemed to have been attracted to it for an unknown reason and were attacking its remaining hull.
The passengers—pirates who stood upon the once-renowned and feared mother of blood continued to blindly fire artillery into the dark world. For a moment, they looked down at the approaching sea creatures and shot at them too.
Chaos was engulfing the world
And at the centre of it all was a single man, standing in the middle of the battlefield as if not worried about a thing in this wretched world.
His hands were crossed behind his back, while his dark brown fur coat fluttered in the wind. He didn't wear a shirt despite the cold and just stood still in his black trousers.
His emerald right eye had turned dark again, he looked up at the sky for a few moments, then suddenly closed his right eye, while the left was hidden behind his pirate eye patch.
In the moment that followed, the hologram-like eyeball that hovered in the air suddenly shuddered.
In an instant, it was as if the inanimate, illusory eye was suddenly gifted the treasure of life.
It started to move, swirling its gaze around as if testing its newfound vision, then in a moment, its pupils gained a new sense of focus.
The illusory eye turned to look down, and all it saw was a single ship illuminating a minuscule fragment of an endless dark ocean, like a dwindling matchstick thrown into a bottomless abyss.
And that's all Terror's illusory eye could see…
For now.
…
At a moderate distance away from the burning ship, another, much smaller ship continued to sail closer.
Its pitch black colour blended with the darkness of the night, making it invisible to any onlookers.
The passengers on it lay low; they were being quickly carried forward by the winds, but the two still decided to paddle along to increase speed.
"Goddamn, how far is this ship! I'm paddling so much, my arms are going to boil at this rate." Scarn grimaced while sweating an ocean of his own.
Behind him, Light—also covered in sweat and huffing his every word—said, "Just a bit longer, we will get there soon, I hope."
Scarn turned back with a furious expression and said as he continued to paddle, "What do you mean you hope? You better be sure about this or you're dead! And so am I!"
Light coughed, "Yes… You are right, I am sure, but that being said, what was that green beam of light launched off of Ter's Ship just now? I can't make out what happened to it when it reached beyond the clouds, it looked like it turned into a sphere of some kind."
Scarn lingered for a moment, hesitant in his answer, "It must be his unknown devil fruit ability, I'm sure of it. We still don't know what his ability exactly is, but whenever he uses it, a green hue appears out of nowhere."
'Devil Fruit ability…'
Light lingered for a moment. In his entire plan, the only thing he was sceptical of was the variable of Ter's Devil Fruit ability. Scarn described a lot of things regarding his devil fruit, even recapping the whole scene of the battle between the 12 navy ships and Ter's crew.
But no matter what, Light just could not figure out what exactly Ter's ability was.
The only thing that caught his attention was the fact that Ter's ship had an unnaturally high artillery power. So much so that it alone contended with 12 ships. Even if it was far bigger than an average marine ship, that amount of firepower was still ridiculous.
'Could his ability have anything to do with artillery? Or maybe he is somehow able to enhance his ship?' Light didn't know, but he had to do what had to be done.
If he succeeded in today's mission, he would have almost nothing to worry about, 'Well except that damn water snake I guess, will he really follow me till the day I die just because I looked into his eyes? What an insecure bastard.' he lampooned.
Regardless, Light had to persevere. If he defeated Ted, or even if he just damaged his ship enough for another navy platoon to catch its tail, he would be greatly rewarded, and for putting on a great show for the god of death inside his soul, he would get to use the Death Note too.
He shivered thinking about Ryuk's chilling voice when he talked about devouring his soul if Light failed to entertain him. No matter how much a human being lacked emotions, they could still fear, not the psychological fear, built with experience, knowledge and culture, but the primordial instinctual fear for one's own life, that's something one could never lose without going utterly insane.
Still, Light didn't panic.
"There is no need to worry, at least for now. The pirates can't use their strongest lights, so as long as we keep our distance, they can't see our pitch black ship in the dark." That is what Light thought.
But was that right?
Because Terror knew there was someone or something attacking them. He just couldn't see it right now due to the unyielding darkness of the night.
So all he had to do was make the night fall to its knees, and obey him.
And that's what he did.
High up in the sky, far away from the two ships.
The illusory eye abruptly stopped moving. Then the pupil suddenly dilated to the point of looking like a sinkhole in the hazel iris.
It stayed in that state for a few moments, but then moved.
No… it didn't just move, it spun. And as it continued to spin, the wisps of greenish hue around it got sucked into the eye through the spinning pupil.
It continued rotating within the iris. Slowly at first, but its rotations kept getting faster and faster, and the more it rotated, the smaller it got in size, while also absorbing more and more green wisps from outside.
But regardless of how violently it spun, the pupil never left the centre of the iris.
It was previously as dark as the abyss, but now it had lost some colour.
The now smaller pupil that was previously absolutely dark turned faintly grey with a hint of green and continued to absorb more and more of the greenish hue around it, while spinning faster and getting smaller at the same time.
It continued on for a few moments, but then it abruptly ended its spin after sparking for a moment and then completely collapsed onto itself as it got too small and closed up.
It had absorbed all of the wisps of green around it and got lost in the hazel iris after closing up on itself.
But then, the entire eyeball started vibrating. The microscopic pupil momentarily opened and immediately closed back up, just a little bit, while letting some wisps of emerald glimmer escape.
The vibrations continued to grow more and more fierce to the point that the entire gigantic eye hologram started to shake violently.
It was as if there was something trying to escape through the now closed pupil hole.
The eye continued to violently vibrate to the point of becoming a blur for a few moments, and then it stopped completely.
The pupil couldn't imprison the light much longer.
So it didn't.
The pupil instantaneously expanded to its normal size, and a brilliant beam of light shot out of it like a bullet careening out of the barrel of a gun.
Light did not expect this…
…