Welcome to the first chapter of what I believe is the first One Piece/Soul Calibur crossover! A few things before we begin - first, this is a medium length fic - more than ten chapters, I think, but less than thirty. Second, no OCs. I have two canons to work with and don't need any. Third, this fic is based in the One Piece universe, with Soul series characters and a few settings integrated in. Last, I can't promise regular updates just yet. I've got a lot on my plate right now, but once I really get going on this fic, I hope to put out a chapter a week. Onto the show.
Disclaimer: Namco owns Soul Calibur, and Eiichiro Oda owns One Piece. I only own the contents of this story.
The Sword of Salvation
"Trancending history, and the world…
A tale of souls and swords, eternally retold…"
Chapter 1
A Real Ghost Ship! Exploring the Adrian
The Thousand Sunny, the magnificent sloop so recently acquired by the Straw Hat Pirates, cut through the water with speed and grace, its lion figurehead slick with sea spray. Soft waves lapped steadily against the ship's hull, and the sun shone gently down between benign white clouds. The day was almost too perfect to complain about, especially since such fantastic weather was fickle on the Grand Line. "This is boring," Luffy muttered. Almost too perfect.
Monkey D. Luffy had spent the day entertaining himself on the small playground that had been built into the Sunny's main deck, or scanning the horizon, or fishing, or stuffing his face. All of those activities had lost their luster for the moment (except stuffing his face, but Sanji had just informed him that dinner time was still two hours away), leaving the childish captain without anything to entertain himself. "Usopp, let's go do something."
"Ah, not now, Luffy," Usopp sighed. "I was just explaining how Dials work to Franky."
"Yeah, Long-nose here was just telling me about these freaky little superpowered seashells!" Franky added. Water 7 had been a trading town and Franky had actually gained a bit of experience with the Skypiean wonders before joining the crew, but Usopp had still managed to get his hands on about seven or eight varieties Franky had never seen before.
Other captains might have been pleased to hear that the new crew member was being brought up to speed on equipment, or that he was getting along with the more veteran pirates. Luffy merely tilted his head and petulantly asked, "How come Franky doesn't already know about Dials?"
Usopp looked at his captain blankly. He still sometimes wondered why Luffy was in charge. "Because Franky wasn't with us in Skypeia. Remember?"
Luffy grinned. "Oh, right!" He turned around and sauntered off, not a care in the world.
"Does he always just walk off like that?" Franky asked, lifting his sunglasses between two massive fingers.
"Only when he's decided to find somebody else to bother," Usopp said with a relieved smile. "Now, this one's an Impact Dial, and it's one of my favorites…"
---
"Hey, Sanji, if you aren't going to feed me, at least entertain me!"
"I'm busy, you shitty captain!" Sanji puffed deeply from his cigarette before returning to the list he was writing.
"What's that?" Luffy pointed to said list, leaning over Sanji's shoulder.
"Oi, gimme some space!" Sanji spun on the stool he sat on, pushing Luffy away with his foot while still writing. "It's a grocery list I'm starting for next time we make landfall. Chopper dipped into some of the herbs for experimental medicines, and now we're running low."
"Why do you have to do that now?!" the three-hundred-million-Beri man complained, still grabbing at the grocery list.
"So we don't forget when we get the chance to shop! If we don't keep stocked with the right ingredients, Chopper's shitty medicine and my food could both be without them for weeks."
"So…?"
Sanji sighed deeply, inhaling so far that half his cigarette turned to ash. He could be so clueless sometimes… "So my food won't be as tasty, and if Chopper doesn't have medicine, somebody could DIE."
Luffy finally gave Sanji some personal space. "Oh… yeah, I guess that's important. You keep doing that."
---
"Hey Robin, I'm bored!"
The brunette looked up. "You could read with me. In fact, I have this book I think you'd – " Luffy was already gone. Robin chuckled softly to herself and turned back to the philosophy text she'd been reading.
---
A straw hat, followed by messy black hair and a tanned head, poked into the crow's nest. "Zoro, I'm bored!"
Zoro was bench-pressing an obscenely large block of iron. It was a wonder the thing didn't fall through the floor to the main deck below. "So lift some weights or check out the view," Zoro replied passively. "I'm not in the mood to play or… whatever it is, I'm not really in the mood." Zoro was always in a funk to some extent, but especially now, with one of his swords destroyed back at Enies Lobby. He hadn't found a half-decent replacement, and he hadn't dared seriously look around Water 7's shops for fear of getting into debt with Nami again. Now he was questioning that decision.
Luffy ignored the weights – when he lifted them, he had to simultaneously concentrate on not letting them stretch his body out, so it wasn't a great way for him to train. Instead, he looked out the window, and it was only a few seconds before his eyes widened. "Woo-hoo! Zoro, check this out!"
"This had better be worth my time," Zoro muttered, carefully setting down the enormous metal block. He walked over to Luffy's side, and his breath caught briefly in his throat. "Whoa." Ahead and on the port side, another ship, longer than the Sunny but about the same height, approached. But the differences in the ships were countless; the Sunny was brightly colored, with bright, shining sails and a bright, shining Jolly Roger. This ship was old and drab, its green, gold-trimmed sides graying with age and decked in mildewed, tattered sails. The flag was once apparently a fine jolly roger, but the details were impossible to make out, as a large red eye had crudely been painted across the flag and sail. The Sunny's figurehead was a smiling lion with a flower-like mane; this ship's figurehead was… well, it was gone. The Sunny had a green lawn on its main deck and a giant '3' on its side, as part of the soldier dock system. This strange pirate ship was decorated with moss and barnacles, and shallow gashes from going without repair for many a Grand Line storm. The ship's name, The Adrian, was hardly visible anymore, for all the neglect.
"A real ghost ship…" Luffy muttered. The smell of adventure was so strong, he was practically drooling already. "How did you not notice that, Zoro?" he asked sharply.
"I don't know," Zoro admitted. Normally, he was the first person in the crew to know when they had an uninvited guest – maybe he had been unobservant while training, or maybe the ship just had no presence to speak of. Finally, he decided to pick up the microphone. "Hey, guys, we're approaching a strange ship." Zoro took one glance at Luffy, his eyes lighting up as they fixated on The Adrian, and added, "I think we're going to board it whether we want to or not."
---
"What do you guys think is on it?" Chopper asked, excited and a little nervous as they gathered to stare at the derelict.
"Probably just some rotting furniture," Nami sighed. "But if we're lucky…" her eyes got that unfocused, I'm-going-to-add-a-zero-to-my-bank-account look to them that they acquired every so often.
"I bet there are zombies, and spooky ghosts, and even a really tall talking skeleton with cool hair!" Luffy predicted. Chopper's eyes widened in fear, practically overtaking his entire face.
"Don't be ridiculous, Luffy," Nami snapped. "There's no such thing as zombies, ghosts, or talking skeletons with unique hair."
"Either way, my no-way-in-Hell-am-I-going-on-that-haunted-ship disease is plaguing me again," Usopp moaned, his knees knocking together.
"Fine, we'll need somebody to guard the ship. You two can stay," Sanji snapped.
"What, you're all going?!"
"It was my idea to go!" Luffy yelled. "Of course I'm going! There's plenty of time for a quick adventure before we eat!"
"I'm going because The Adrian sounds familiar," Robin explained. "I'm hoping to find something of historical value on board."
"I'm in it for the treasure, of course!" Nami said with a smile.
"I'm going because Nami-san and Robin-swan are going!" Sanji confessed, wringing his hands in delight.
"I'm going to inspect the ship," Franky said as he rubbed his jagged chin. "It looks like it's been abandoned a while, and only a really well-built ship could float alone through the Grand Line for a long time like this before getting wrecked. Or a really lucky one…"
"I'm not going," Zoro grumbled. "Who said I was going?"
"Come on, Zoro, it's not like you have anything better to do." More of Luffy's complaining.
"Training and sleeping are always worth the time," the green-haired swordsman argued, but there was something nagging at him, and Luffy hit on it.
"There might be a cool sword on the ship."
"The chances of that are really slim, and even if I find a sword, Nami or Robin would probably want it because it had cash value or historical value."
"Nah," Nami said with a dismissive wave of her hand. "Even if a sword is valuable, the only people who want it are swordsmen, and they're deadbeats to a man." Zoro felt a vein in his forehead tense, but he let the insult go. "The most I'd do is pry gems out of the scabbard."
"And if there was historical value to the blade, I'd be happy just to inspect it while you weren't using it," Robin assured him.
Zoro had no choice but to relent. "Alright, I'll come."
"Right then!" Usopp exclaimed, drumming up some fake confidence. "Chopper and I will keep the ship safe from harm!"
"Yeah!" Chopper chimed in.
"You sure you don't want to come?" Luffy asked.
"Are you kidding? Nothing out here could be as scary as that ship!" If Usopp had noticed that the albatross flying above the Thousand Sunny had a wingspan upwards of one hundred feet, he might have reconsidered his statement, but because it was flying so high, he couldn't tell.
Thanks to the comparable size of the ships, boarding The Adrian was as simple as extending a few gangplanks to walk across the gap. Luffy went first, feverishly looking this way and that, followed by Franky, whose eyes scanned the ship more deliberately and critically. Nami and Robin went next, chuckling at the raging argument behind them even as they looked around for anything interesting. Zoro brought up the rear guard, as he usually did, but because Sanji had wanted to be able to keep an eye on the girls, the two had wound up standing next to each other. One accidental bump evolved into an argument that had them at each other's throats. The playful mood, however, was stifled as soon as they came across the corpses in front of the cabin door.
Like the ship, the bodies had been left unattended for a while; they had decayed down to skeletons with only the occasional bit of rotten meat hanging off of them. Judging by their garb, they were definitely pirates; the clothing didn't suggest that they had died in a completely different era, either. Either way, they hadn't died of natural causes; the crew could tell without Chopper's help that slashes and bullet wounds had done in these two.
Zoro considered bowing his head in a moment of silence for the two. Then Luffy reached down and plucked the head off one of them, and the moment was lost. "Look! I'm Skull Hat Luffy!" he laughed, removing the lower jaw and putting the rest on top of his straw hat.
Nami punched him in the face, knocking him over. "You idiot! We've barely been on the ship for thirty seconds and you're already desecrating the dead!" That said, she barely even waited until she thought nobody was looking before searching the pockets of the two poor souls.
"Who are you to talk?" Zoro snapped, immediately calling her on it. Nami was briefly startled, like a child who hadn't gotten away with stealing from the cookie jar, but quickly calmed down with a grumble.
"Either way, we should move on," Robin said placatingly. Brushing past the corpses, she lead the way into the kitchen, finding it to be in even worse condition.
"Ugh… disgusting," Sanji sneered. He found another corpse slumped over a sink basin, and pried a rusted knife from its hand. "I can't salvage any of these shitty cooking utensils, let alone the ingredients."
"And I'm not sure how this ship's staying together," Franky grumbled. "It was made with skill and care, yeah, but the materials used are nothing special – it should be coming apart at the seams. Let's go below deck so I can check it out more."
And so they wandered. It quickly became dark in the ship's interior, so Franky found two torches and lit them with a bit of Fresh Fire, giving one to Luffy and the other to Nami. It seemed that there was a corpse in every room, but they got more numerous on the upper levels and farther aft of the ship. They all seemed to be more or less the same age – rotted beyond recognition, but not entirely skeletal yet. All had been killed with a gun or a sword – a West Blue-styled longsword or short sword, Zoro announced upon closer inspection of one body. Most had been slashed to death with a blade sharp enough to cut through bone; deep stab wounds and bullet holes were less common.
Nobody found what they were looking for, except Nami when she found a modest treasure chest in the brig – and although she had salvaged some gold and silver and a few gems, the paper money was too decomposed to be of any value. She practically wept when one wad of bills had disintegrated as she touched it. "Such a waste…" she sighed.
"I know the feeling, Nami-saaan!" Sanji cried as tenderly as he could muster (it still didn't come across as all that tender).
"Sanji, console me in this time of grief by carrying the chest for me, will you?" Nami asked sweetly.
"Anything, Nami-san!" Grinning like an idiot, Sanji happily picked the chest up under one arm. As he did, Nami noticed some writing on the back in a small font.
"Property of Vercci, the Merchant of Death," Nami read, squinting at it. "Hate to break it to you, Vercci, but it's mine now. Come on, guys."
"I don't think Vercci will mind, Navigator-san," Robin said with a thin smile as they continued toward the epicenter of the killings. "He's been dead for over ten years. He used to be quite well-known in the underground, though; in the years before and after Gold Roger's execution, he was a very powerful businessman who employed many pirates to search for legendary treasures he thought might be weapons of some sort. In the end, he got fed up and took to the seas himself, where he met his end on the Grand Line." Robin paused before continuing. "Crocodile based many of his plans on Vercci's, using the Merchant of Death's successes and failures as a supplement to his own experience."
"So do you think this ship may have been the one that took Vercci down?" Luffy asked excitedly.
"Considering that there's only one chest, more likely these pirates were one of the crews Vercci employed." Robin blinked. They had come to the end of a hallway that featured the thickest concentration of bodies – at least three on each side. The bodies were more savagely attacked here, as well: only one body was still in a single piece, and it had been slammed into the wall so hard it was embedded there. At the end of the hall was a finely made door with a porthole window, but the window was opaque with dust and cracks. The air was stifling down here, smelling of choking dust and salted decay. "This must be the captain's cabin," Robin guessed. "Shall we?"
"Me first!" Luffy ran across the hallway and practically knocked the door off its hinges. "Hey, horrible murderer ghosts! Ooga booga!" He stopped as soon as he got a good look at the room. "Huh? Nobody's in here…" The room seemed a typical captain's cabin – a large window that looked out the aft of the ship, a modest bed and bedside table, a simple bureau, a dining table – all fixed down, of course, so as not to slide during storms. There was a small cast-iron furnace with coals, capable of heating and modestly lighting the room on cold marine nights. A few lanterns hung from the ceiling. A large, mostly-complete map of the first half of the Grand Line was spread across the table, pinned down at the corners with knives, and surrounded by many chairs. The room seemed untouched by the massacre, or indeed, by the ravages of time that had affected the rest of the ship. "Hmm?" What drew Luffy's attention was the largest chair at the table, which had its back to the door. The end of a blade poked through the back of the chair.
"Find something, straw hat?" Franky asked.
"You bet!" With a grin, Luffy grabbed the large chair and turned it around. "Guys, check this out!" Robin stopped and blinked. Nami flinched. Sanji and Zoro looked up, suddenly interested.
"Eh?" Franky asked. "It's just another body."
"No it's not," Robin immediately noticed. "It is another corpse, but this one's different." And it was – this man was dressed more grandly than the others; he was clearly the captain. Not only that, but unlike the other rotting bodies they had found, he was in near-perfect condition. His skin had flushed to an odd shade of lilac, and his eyes, long hair, and short beard were milk-white, but there wasn't a spot of visible bone or rotting exposed flesh on him. He was an average-sized man, but he looked imposing in his throne-like chair and his captain's clothes. He wore a green and white shirt with similar pants, thigh-high boots with golden armor plates running down the front from his knees down, golden armlets, an elaborate belt, and mismatched gloves – one green and one white. He had a black three-point hat with a feather in it, and completed the ensemble with a fur-lined slate grey coat, which was belted over one shoulder and under the other rather than actually worn. His head leaned back and his right arm draped across his lap while his left arm rested on the arm of the chair. A sword had fallen from his right arm into the gap between his leg and the side of the chair – a strangely shaped short sword with a roaring lion's face carved above the hilt. There was also a longsword, a thick black-bladed affair that looked to have some sort of dark growth on it – or was that part of the sword? This sword had pierced through the pirate and the chair behind him. "Clearly, he's the captain."
"Look at this guy's hat and coat!" Luffy laughed. "Do you think it would look good on me?"
Nami sighed. "Luffy… look, far be it from me to act like Usopp, but this place is giving me the creeps. I mean, seriously, some guy came in and slaughtered the whole crew! I got what I came for, already, so we should scram."
Luffy tried on the dead captain's hat, pushing back his own signature straw hat. "Aww, it's too big for me," he complained, the brim coming down over his eyes.
"He hasn't heard a word I said," Nami realized, her eye twitching.
"Hey, I found the ship's schematics!" Franky cried triumphantly, pulling them from one of the drawers in the captain's chest. Excitedly, he began flipping through them, stopping on this page or that.
"And I found a captain's log." Robin had, in fact, found the log just in front of the captain. She flipped open to the inside cover. "The nautical journal of Captain Cervantes de Leon. It seems that's our man here." She squinted at the first page. "The writing is too hard to make out in this light," she sighed, slipping the small, leather-bound diary into her pocket."
"Hey, Zoro, how about helping me pull this guy out of the chair so I can try his coat on?" Luffy laughed. "Zoro?" The swordsman was just staring at Cervantes's chest – more precisely, the sword stuck into it. "Oi!"
Zoro snapped out of it, shaking his head. "Sorry." He stared at the blade in Cervantes's chest. "That's some sword."
"Any sword could punch through a guy and a chair if a strong enough shitty swordsman is using it," Sanji derided, puffing on his cancer stick.
"Yeah, but this sword has a weird feel to it. It's the same lack of presence I've been feeling from the ship." Sanji raised a curly eyebrow. Zoro hadn't responded to his barb – maybe he needed something less subtle. "This should be my new sword," Zoro suddenly said decisively.
"Eh?" Nami said. "Zoro, I'm all for looting nice things from derelict ships, but that's not even the right kind of sword for you."
"I just have a feeling about this blade." Zoro stepped forward and gripped the hilt; it was surprisingly warm in his hand.
"Alright!" Luffy laughed. "I told you there'd be a new sword here! Now just pull it out, and I'll lift the dead guy up and take his coat off."
Zoro began to pull the blade, meeting a surprising amount of resistance and a nasty wet scraping sound, until a hand on his right wrist stopped him. "Nami, I'm taking the blade, and that's final!" he snapped, until he noticed the hand was masculine and covered in a green glove. He grunted. "There's something you don't see every day."
Cervantes had lifted his head to an alert position, looking around with his blank white eyes. They fixed on each of the pirates in turn before focusing on Zoro and briefly flashing red. Then his bearded face broke into a malicious, toothy smile. "Darkness is coming," he spoke.
End of Chapter
Next chapter: Zoro wants to claim a new sword... but Cervantes, its deceased owner, isn't willing to give it up just yet! Zoro vs. Cervantes: Battle for the Mystical Blade!