A/N: My hands are melting from the amount I typed yesterday.
In case you were wondering, it's a few minutes past midnight.
Once the crew plus two had finally reassembled on the deck, and we'd been given the green light by the closest person we had to a shipwright, I began my brief presentation.
"Right, so as I was saying before being so rudely interrupted-"
The little spirit I was holding in my arms twisted around to blow a raspberry in my face. I responded by chucking her into the air, catching her under the shoulders, and turning her to face the crew.
"This," I shook her around a little bit to emphasise my point, smiling a little despite myself as she giggled and tried to squirm out of my grip, "this is a Klabautermann. I'm not sure of the specifics, but they're born either when a boat continuously feels intense love or when it feels intensely loved."
The childish spirit waved at the crew enthusiastically, happy to show off her new motor skills. She'd been steadily growing as more repairs had been finished and her incorporeal body had been more and more inundated with my Haki. I hadn't noticed it at first, but where there had once been something that resembled a newborn baby, now there was a little girl who likely still wouldn't reach my waist if we were to stand side by side, but she would be close.
The results of her appearance were honestly pretty typical. Nami had a small smile on her face and Usopp looked like he'd just been slapped across the face with a fish, and I stopped paying attention after that.
Just hand over some exposition until it got to the point where we could get the fuck out of here, get us the fuck out of here, and then figure out a way off the ship for good.
That was the plan. Simple, really.
"I'll admit, I wasn't expecting to see her so soon, but this sort of shit happens all the time on the Grand Line." I shrugged and tucked Merry securely under my elbow, so she was hanging from my hip on the opposite side of my one remaining arrow. Huh, that reminded me; where was my bow?
It hadn't been on the deck, and if it was somehow down below, nobody had thought to bring it with them. Did that mean it had fallen overboard? I honestly wouldn't be surprised if it had fallen overboard during our journey into the Calm Belt.
Damn. That bow and I had been through a lot together. Though I would rather lose that than something like Krieg's body. After all that I had gone through to get him... come to think of it, was he still on board?
...I would have to check that the second I got some free time.
"This," I shook off the melancholy ache of losing a treasured companion and held up my finger like I was about to give a lecture… wait. "This is something called Haki. By the time you get to the New World, it'll be everywhere." I opened and closed my hand, testing the way the muscles felt now that they were drenched in Haki. As per my demands, the spiritual energy had climbed all the way up to my elbow, though it had continued on and gotten halfway up my bicep before I noticed.
So the soul energy that had been grafted onto my borrowed body was rebelling against me, eh? Can't say I'm all that surprised.
"There are three types of Haki, that I know of, and everybody on board this ship is capable of at least two of them." I frowned down at my arm momentarily, before ordering the Haki to spread until it was halfway across my chest. Both because I had a plan, and because it seemed to bet getting faster while travelling to portions of my body that it had been to before and that could only be a good thing.
"I've seen you knock bullets out of the air with that." Glancing up at Zoro, I was greeted with a familiar frown and a pair of crossed, bandaged arms. "Can you teach us?"
"Nope." He blinked at me, and for one of the first times in recent memory, I chose to elaborate rather than attempt to piss someone off further. "I was born… yeah, born with it like this. I have no idea how to unlock it, and I don't know how to use anything other than Armament. Hell, I'm only just beginning to figure that shit out."
A tiny hammer hit me in the chin. I looked down at Merry, having genuinely forgotten for a second that she was even there, before rolling my eyes at her pout and setting her on the ground. Almost immediately, she was in among the Straw Hats, poking at their thighs and prodding whatever weapon she could reach.
I didn't even want to think about what that entailed.
"I'll help you however I can when we get some free time, but right now we need to get out of here." I gave the crew a wry grin and peeled my shirt off, mostly because I also didn't know where my jacket was and I didn't want to somehow lose that as well. "The Calm Belts are notorious for being where Sea Kings go to breed, after all. Kind of surprised we don't have company yet."
They all looked at me dumbly for a moment, except for Nami, who stared in horror like she had just remembered a thousand-word essay that was due in fifteen minutes. I looked back at the others just as dumbly; did they not know what Sea Kings were, or were they just not at all bothered by it?
"Sea Kings?" Usopp repeated slowly, Merry in his arms and poking at his nose. Ah, of course.
My expression morphed into a smirk as I enjoyed the look of confusion on his face for a second longer, knowing just what it would turn into as soon as I opened my mouth, but something made me pause. Just for a moment, I could have sworn that I'd needed to readjust my footing to keep from stumbling.
It was instinct at this point, having been out on the ocean for so long and even worked in a busy restaurant atop the waves, but you only needed to do that when…
...Bugger.
I pushed at the bridge of my nose with a Haki-free finger with as much nonchalance as possible. My glasses burst into existence around my eyes, and with the feigned disinterest of staring at a boring cloud floating across the sky, I glanced over the edge of the boat.
Ripples. And not just any ripples, bigger ripples than before. And they were only growing in size.
Yeah, well, you know what, Murphy? You can take your fucking Law with you when you go choke on the fattest dick in the universe and die the death you deserve. Nobody likes you.
The first wave hit the boat. I looked back at the crew, and gave Nami the most defeated expression I could possibly muster. I'm not sure if the others noticed it or not, though I did see Merry fade from normal view and, presumably, return fully to the boat. Maybe, I don't really know how it all worked.
Sorry, I muttered in response to the silent question I could see written all over Nami's face, and that was when we were moving.
Oh, silly me, did I say moving? What I meant to say was AAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHH-
There was no other way to explain it. One moment we were sitting on a ocean that was losing a battle of movement against a toddler's bath water, and the next we were way too close to the clouds, staring down at a cylindric body that would have taken upwards of an hour to run along. Maybe less, I'm not sure.
It was difficult to see in its entirety, not dolphin monster big by any stretch of the imagination, but standing on our little East Blue boat it was enormous. For the second time in as many hours, I was left staring at something that made me feel like I wasn't anything at all, because how can something grow that big and manage to support its own weight!?
I caught motion at the very corner of my vision. Usopp had just taken a deep breath. The wild look in his eyes made it obvious what he was about to do, but our current position smack-dab in the middle of the leviathan's forehead had us sitting right in between its only source of sight.
Its dopey, useless gecko eye placement meant it wasn't able to see us.
"Usopp." It was remarkably silent, this high up in the sky. Come to think of it, shouldn't there have been more than one Sea King milling around us?
Oh well, maybe they were all too busy propagating the next generation. If they were fucking each other, they wouldn't fuck us.
"If you make a single. Fucking. Noise," I continued in a breathless tone, trying to convey the sheer magnitude of the emotions I was feeling while attempting to remain as quiet as possible. It wasn't easy, "or if you do anything at all that ends up making my Devil Fruit useless and thus defeats the entire point of me eating it, such as spooking the Sea King with a loud noise and dumping us all in the ocean, I swear to you-"
I paused for a quick breath, because I'd run out of air, and continued as though I hadn't interrupted myself.
"I swear to you that I will overcome the universal Devil Fruit weakness through the sheer power of my anger, search the ocean floor until I find your body, dig you a shallow tomb in the bedrock with my bare fucking hands, dump your disintegrating bones in after however many years it takes me, cover your bitch face up so nobody ever has a chance of finding you, and piss on your fucking grave."
Slowly, oh so slowly, I turned to look him dead in the eye, my neck muscles straining to accommodate the movement. If Usopp's face lost any more colour, it would become transparent.
Come on man, pull it together. This wasn't even the most fucked up shit we'd seen today.
Everyone else was looking at me once again. I pretended not to notice the approval in Zoro's expression because he was a fucking lunatic at the best of times, and dropped silently to the deck of the boat, pushing at my glasses with the hand that was coated in Haki.
"Anybody have any other ideas?" I whispered to the other outlines. The Sea King below us was just a massive blotch of somewhat light gray; if it had a soul, I wasn't in position to see it.
Getting a unanimous head shake in response, I crossed my legs, resting my elbows on my knees with a deep frown.
"Guess that's my cue. Try not to move, try not to talk, don't even fucking breathe too loud. It may have spotted us from underwater, but now it doesn't know where we are. Chances are it's so large that the ship's weight doesn't even register."
I tried looking at its head to get an idea of how large the brain was in comparison, but there were no obvious clues. The head we were atop was slowly swivelling from side to side, so it was either losing the fight against gravity, or it was clever enough to scan its surroundings for evidence of our existence.
Fuck me sideways, I didn't know which one was scarier. I mean, I wouldn't die, but I didn't want to sit on the bottom of the ocean for three years!
"Hopefully it'll go back into the water slowly and when we get down, we won't have to worry about anything but speed." I glanced down at my chest; the Haki was still spreading. I began to push it in every which direction as I spoke, actually seeing another layer begin to rise from my palm as I began to pool as much as I could in my grip. "When we hit water, I'll coat Merry with Haki. Anybody see which way we came in?"
A rustle of cloth that had my ass clenching later, and Sanji was pointing behind himself, slightly to the left. Port, starboard; don't know don't care. Left.
"Great." With a tired smile, I revealed my master plan. "Assuming the Haki doesn't outright sink her, which I don't think will happen but you never know, I'll punch us out of here."
"...Punch?" Luffy, Zoro, Johnny, and Yosaku all repeated, some of them louder than others. I think Usopp was still in shock, Nami was shaking her head, and Sanji had turned away entirely, a cigarette in his mouth and a million regrets likely on his mind.
"Punch." I nodded, brandishing a fist for emphasis. The Haki I'd gathered suffused back over my hand, and through my shades, I could make out the physical bump that denoted its existence.
In time, I'm sure I could come to hate this Fruit even more, because I couldn't stop myself from loving it. My life is pain, yadda yadda yadda.
"We've got however long it takes before this thing loses interest." Crawling wasn't the most dignified of exit strategies, but I'd made my bed when I chose to sit down, and now I was going to lie in it. "If anybody needs me, I'll be working towards actually making sure I don't accidentally murder you all horrifically."
Getting up the stairs without either getting to my hands and knees or giving us away was difficult, but I managed. With a final ninja roll, I disappeared through the still-empty doorway to the galley, only coming to a stop after making it underneath the table.
Class.
XxX
Alright, so the plan to distance myself from the Straw Hats and allow their adventures to continue uninhibited wasn't going all too great.
I entirely blamed the little spirit that would now not leave me be.
"I still don't understand how you came to be so quickly," I muttered to her as I lightly tapped my fingers against the palm she was holding up, siphoning out the Haki I'd gathered to do whatever it was that she was doing with it.
Originally, I'd been hiding out under the table and pulling at the Haki until it was standing half a foot off my hand, before mashing it all back down. With my vision, I could see that it actually wasn't being reabsorbed into my body, it was being compressed and layered down on top of the Haki already there. Some of it seeped in through the cracks left in and on my skin, and that was only to fill in the places that had been left open. They couldn't have been more than microscopic in size.
Whatever my supply was, it wasn't infinite.
But damn it all if I wasn't going to make it big enough to not matter. Why? Because I can, mainly; this was a freakin' superpower!
...At least, that had been the plan, until Merry trotted up to me silently and began to take away everything I'd managed to stockpile like a little shit. I couldn't yell at her, and I couldn't really smack her upside the head, so in the end I decided to just hand it over and try again later. I knew it was possible, I could still make progress once I got some time to myself.
I drew my fingers back, switched the arms that were keeping my top half off the ground, and waited for her to raise her other hand to repeat the gesture. Essentially, now that I'd gotten the Haki to spread all the way down to the tips of my previously untouched fingers, I was playing an even slower and more boring version of patty-cake.
Merry hesitated for a moment, her mouth tilting down. The Haki in my hand visibly coiled towards her, stretching even further from my skin in its effort to reach her. Interesting…
Slowly, Merry raised a hand to her mouth, and pantomimed taking a bite from something. I smiled at her, because she was utterly adorable, and raised my eyebrows as she pointed at me and nodded conclusively.
"Because I'm giving you something to eat?" My voice wobbled a little in the effort to keep the laughter out of it. What else would I expect from a ship being captained by Luffy?
Merry scowled at me, reaching out and flicking me on the forehead. She jabbed her finger right in my face once again, and I looked up into her coal-black eyes as they glinted down at me. Was her body getting bigger? I could swear her hood was being pulled back, and her horns were definitely more pronounced than they had been not even ten minutes ago.
"Because I ate something?" I tried again, more bemused and amused when she nodded, shot me a grin, and tapped my still-outstretched palm with her fingers. I was actually paying attention this time, so I could see her hood crawl a few millimetres back, as more of a curve made itself known on her horns.
She waved her hand in front of my face, and I automatically reached up to touch her hand to mine. This time, however, she grabbed on before I could draw back, threading her fingers in between mine and closing her eyes.
The table, benches, and floor all flickered black. I stared at the ground between us dumbly for a second, before pushing at my glasses. The amount of Haki that Merry was taking from me had increased by a ridiculous amount, and I could see that as more flowed into her and shifted to that pure glow of her body, the intensity of willpower covering our surroundings continued to grow.
A moment later, I figured out why, and promptly wrapped both arms around Merry to make sure we wouldn't get separated. A moment after that, we were moving.
It was gradual at first, with the only indication we were moving being the way the edges of the tablecloth were lifting ever so slightly. And then, evidently, our temporary mount got bored, because things very suddenly sped up.
The crashing of the waves below us was providing enough noise for me to be confident in standing up and hopping through the empty doorway, out into the fresh air where there wasn't a plethora of sharp objects ready to tear through either me or Merry. My feet hit the deck at the exact moment the boat hit the water, initially sinking so low that water splashed onto me from over the railing.
At least one person on board shit themselves. I'm almost certain of it. Maybe it was just a little bit, but it happened.
I held my metaphorical breath as the last of the massive sea serpent disappeared beneath the now turbulent waters. By now, only the spires on its back were visible, rapidly retreating further into water that really shouldn't have been deep enough to house it. How big was this world in comparison to mine, I had to wonder?
Buoyancy and ship design won out after that. Merry managed to stay above water, as she had been built for, and for a terrifying silent minute, all was still. Not even the Sea King's flat head had provided as much stability as the ocean now did.
"...Can I scream now?" Usopp croaked out from where he was standing, hugging the repaired mast so close that looking back, I'm kind of surprised the Haki-infused wood managed to hold up. He looked like he was in the middle of a seizure - was he even breathing?
"Yes." Did he seriously need permission? I shook my head and made my way over where Luffy was face-down against the deck. Placing Merry down beside him and sighing in relief when the Haki didn't fade from the ship's body, I snatched up my shirt from the ground nearby, shoved it over my head, picked up one of Luffy's limp arms, and began to tie it around my waist. My eyes roved over my arms as I worked; both were completely saturated down to the bone and beyond in Haki, ready for the trial run I was about to put them through.
I heard Usopp take a deep breath, before letting out an ear-piercing scream. Not at all eager to see if his lungs could summon forth more creatures from the depths, I hauled Luffy's insensate (and wet - ah) body off the deck, shoved him into Zoro's arms, and leapt off the boat in the opposite direction that Sanji had pointed out earlier.
I got maybe halfway down to the water before Luffy's arm stopped stretching. That was a brief moment of luck, perhaps not as much as it was that Merry could hold up Armament on her own and freed me from having to worry about it, but I digress. Moving quick, I raised both hands and lay them against the hull, drawing them back as carefully as possible once I had them level with one another.
I'd told everyone that I was going to punch the ship. Technically, what I was going for was more of a push, but I literally did not care about the differences.
The Haki was there to make cutting through the waves not just easy, but possible without shattering Merry's underside to shit. The biggest problem was that I had no idea how much power I would need to actually get us back on track. Too little and we may not even get out of the Calm Belt, too much and who knows how long it'll take us to get back?
I needed a nice, even number…
"Nine hundred and thirty-seven percent."
Hah! Just kidding.
I looked down at my arms, watching as the Haki rushed over and through them. "One thousand percent," I said quietly, tensing my muscles harder than I ever had before.
The effect was almost instantaneous.
My bones, drenched in more Haki than anywhere else by virtue of being the lowest point it could gather, began to creak under the strain. I pushed my muscles together further, and to my disbelief, I actually saw cracks beginning to appear along the edges of my bones. The Haki was fracturing from the force I was putting it under.
So there was an upper limit to what I could do, at least until I figured out how to properly direct the spiritual energy to where I needed it to be. Good to know.
My arms were a blur even to my eyes as I pushed them forward, planting them against the edge of the ship. There was a solid whumph as I made contact, Haki against Haki, and for a comical moment, nothing happened.
I guess after that, the universe caught up with where I'd gotten, because then we were moving.
"Hope for the best!" I screamed over the howling winds, and grinned at the resounding response from on board when they all figured out that that was exactly what I was doing. Giving a heads up was for people who wanted to remain on pirate ships, after all.
Ahh… getting a ship out of the Calm Belt? Devil Fruit. Pissing people off and/or scaring the ever-loving shit out of them, with little to no regard for how they will react? Priceless.
XxX
"I don't fucking believe it."
Clambering back on board the ship for me had been saved until I was able to fight against the momentum. That had left me dangling over the edge of the boat as the ocean rushed by, hanging on with nothing but whatever grip I could get on the Going Merry's hull , and Luffy's arm around my waist. Thankfully, they'd both held, and once we were slowing down I was able to pull myself back up and actually try to figure out where I'd gotten us.
And, suffice it to say, I didn't fucking believe it.
I stared, as advertised, in utter disbelief as the Going Merry shed the last of her momentum, coming to a complete stop between two walls that could have been made out of brick. Right in front of us was a massive metal gate, and behind that loomed the single most horrifying monument of Nami's torturous past.
From what I could tell, we were perfectly in the middle. There was the exact same amount of empty space between both sides of the ship and the walls. If I killed a dolphin on the way over, it would be Flipper all over again.
"Arlong Park…" Nami murmured from somewhere behind me, sounding just as surprised as I was. Everyone else had gathered up around the front of the ship, along the railing I was more or less hanging over, but I was too busy wondering about the odds of the shot that I had just made. Surely it hadn't been just me, there must have been some sort of divine intervention. Surely.
"You got us to the front door. Nice shot, Shitty-" I blinked and shook my head as Sanji started talking from beside me, hopping away from the figurehead and onto the rigging from where I was standing. One quick swing and I was landing atop the brick wall to our right, looking out upon a village that could only be Cocoyashi. "...Zombie?"
I stood up straight and turned around, sweeping my hand through my hair and feeling a distinct lack of glasses on my nose. I guess that would explain why everything wasn't in ultra-high definition. You'd think I would have noticed before now. Well, you would think wrong.
"I'll see you guys later, yeah?" I gave them a quick two-fingered salute, before turning around and taking off down the wall as quickly as I could. I'd stick close to the Park no matter what, but above all else, I wanted get some distance between the crew and I, and pretending to care about this place enough to want to take in the sights was as good an excuse as I was going to get.
...It didn't feel all that good, lying to them. But this was by no means my battle. Luffy would be the one to beat Arlong and earn Nami's trust, and the others would work on the crew that had turned a blind eye to her suffering all along. There was that one octopus looking guy who would hopefully make it out alright, but I had my own problems to worry about before I could worry about his.
If I didn't start pushing the crew away now, then I would be in too deep to get away. There wasn't many chances I could get while we were out at sea, and there certainly wasn't anything I could hope to do if they were actively looking for answers.
If I took part in this, the first major battle since setting sail on the Going Merry, then there would be no backing out. Wasn't that how shounen usually worked? You bleed together, you die together as legends a handful of decades down the road? After being paired with someone else from the main cast and producing an ugly litter of children?
Yeah, no. I didn't have a handful of decades, and I would rather shoot my own nuts off before having children of my own.
Picking up speed as I neared where the wall met the ground proper, and pointedly ignoring the calls of my name following after me, I hopped down from the brick wall, pushing Haki into my legs with a forceful thought and nudging at the bridge of my nose with my knuckle. The colours surrounding me sharpened, and even as I increased to a full run at a silent one hundred percent, I could take in everything perfectly.
Frustratingly alike to much in the past few hours, the village was… mostly silent. I wasn't really paying all that much attention, in all honesty, but where were all the people?
Going from what little I could hear, there was a small commotion somewhere closer to the centre of the village, and soon enough, I turned a corner and was able to make out a group of people in the distance.
Largest of them all was a blue man with a nose that protruded further from his face than Usopp's. I was still too far to hear what was being said, and as I began to pass the first house on this… street? Road? Whatever this was, I took to its rooftop, hopping along and doing my best to remain as inconspicuous as possible. Hell if I knew which species of fish had superior eyesight, and if any of Arlong's crew were cross-bred with one.
...Was that racist? Oh, I don't care enough to worry about it. At least they weren't as fugly as some of the bogans back home.
Now those… those were some half-humans.
I came to a stop atop one of the houses bordering the village… square, almost falling short of my final jump in a bid to stay as low as possible. Being up this high brought a bit of a thrill to my chest, but I ignored the sensation as I crawled as close to the edge as I comfortably could, taking in the scene down below.
Nobody had yet noticed me, not even the people facing my direction. There was a group of half-humans who could only have been the Fishmen, and the blue one I'd spotted at a distance was holding a man up by the neck, his webbed fingers easily circling the man's neck and his single arm sufficiently strong to keep him aloft the ground.
...Now, there was such a thing as Uncanny Valley, I knew that, but not even that could explain the clear look at Arlong's face I was getting right now. The best I could equate it to was… cultural differences.
I mean, it was all there. The eyes, nose and mouth, no matter how disturbing one was in comparison to the others. But they had all been thrown onto a canvas that I could only describe as 'nope'.
He wasn't even ugly, all things considered. He was just… a fish. A walking, talking, homicidal fish.
And around here, that was entirely normal. They were all so close to human that I honestly did believe that if I had grown up knowing they existed as something more than moving pictures, I would have been entirely alright with that. Hence, the cultural differences.
...Or was that the definition of Uncanny Valley? I didn't really know, and it wasn't like it was within my power right now to fact-check that one.
"YOUR TRIBUTE WILL SOON BECOME THE CORNERSTONE OF MY ARLONG EMPIRE, THAT WILL RULE ALL OF EAST BLUE!"
Even though I was looking at the guy that said it, the sheer volume of Arlong's voice startled me for a moment. Refocusing on him, I could see the muscles in his arm flex, and over the gasps and cries of the crowd, I could hear the gurgle coming from the man's throat. There was a vaguely familiar woman with blue hair off to the side moving forward, but it was very obvious that Arlong wasn't stopping.
Holy shit, I'd gotten here right for the best part. I think I was about to witness a murder.
The other Fishmen were moving to intercept the villagers as they all suddenly surged forward as if on some silent signal. Nobody was holding any form of weapon, and not even the quiet pleas of the dying man could get them to stop.
Step by step, they got closer-
Fists were drawn back-
Everyone was shouting over one another, I would have to be loud-
"Zheekeehihihihi!"
Everybody froze, their heads whipping up to the rooftop I was laying on. The man stopped thrashing in Arlong's grasp as the Fishman relaxed his grip enough to let him breathe, and as I quickly checked while climbing to my feet, breathing he still was.
So, I kept laughing. I laughed long as people turned to one another and asked who I was. I laughed hard as the tension slowly began to drain from the situation, likely against all their wills.
Most importantly of all, I laughed obnoxiously as Arlong turned slowly to face me, his expression stuck in a terrifying grin that would have made any other lesser man shit themselves and run.
For the record, I do consider myself the lesser man, but I was also effectively immortal so it didn't matter all that much.
All their attention was now firmly on me, human and Fishman alike. I shifted around so that my feet were dangling from the rooftop, peals of slightly hysterical laughter still bursting from me. In all honesty, nothing about this current situation was all that funny, but once I got started it could be difficult to stop.
And stupidity was always something that could set me off. Stupidity born from hubris was that much sweeter.
The grin on Arlong's face hadn't faltered in the least. If anything, it looked even wider than before, every bit the shark that was in his DNA.
"I don't recall seeing you around here before." And I have my doubts that statement was only a statement.
I took in his face for a moment, with his too-sharp teeth and his pride-and-joy nose that looked horrifically ineffective for anything not combat related, and moved on to examine the group of Fishmen that was accompanying him. What did lieutenants look like again…?
Argh, no use, I couldn't remember anything about them, beyond something to do with lips and something to do with karate. There were no unusual lips in the crowd below, just as there were no… what were those martial arts uniforms called? Something like gi? Whatever it was, there was no stereotypical uniform in the crowd. Unless that was a human invention and the Fishman in question had burned them upon discovering an intense hatred for humans.
Either way, the small sample in front of me wasn't all that worrisome, apart from the big Fishman himself. And it had just occurred to me that I'd left the Straw Hats at Arlong Park.
The fight from canon, as I had seen redone in many a fanfiction, hadn't gone all that well at first. There had been a lot of heartbreak and Luffy had fucked himself right off the bat, which had only made everything harder… maybe?
But if the main forces were separated, and I had the Captain with me right here…
I could almost hear a warbling, falsetto copy of my own voice in my head. 'Don't get involved in the fight, establish some distance, nmm nmm nmm. Nice follow-through, dickhead. You're soooo good at this.'
God damn it, I thought the voices had stopped.
"You actually believe that, don't you?" I said in response, pointedly ignoring the 'subtle' demand that had been thrown my way. I looked down at Arlong, in both meanings of the phrase, and scoffed at him. "You actually believe you have what it takes to rule the East Blue. That's a fucking laugh, mate."
The light reflecting off of Arlong's teeth and into my eyes got a little bit brighter. I almost moved to shield my eyes, but instead I grabbed my glasses and tossed them to the side. They disintegrated into tiny, glowing shards, drawing everyone's eye for a moment and removing the glare from my own. I would have to remember that one.
"Let me give you two names." I cut Arlong off before he could say anything, because in all honesty, I wasn't particularly interested in what he had to say. "Let me give you two names- no, actually, three names, all of people who will both take issue with you trying anything with the East Blue, and who can annihilate you with a thought."
If Arlong was busy with me, he couldn't be busy with the others. And if I could, say, get him pissed off over a long period of time to the point of exhausting himself, well… There came a time when a pleasure became a duty.
I took out my one remaining arrow, the only little rock on a stick that had survived with me to this point, and began to check over it idly. The Haki covering my hand jumped at the opportunity, and I came very close to rolling my eyes as I let it flow out to slowly cover the arrow.
"Third on the list would be Yasopp." I don't really know why Arlong was letting me keep going on without any context. Maybe what I had to say was very interesting. "You may not have heard of him, but he's got a son and a home island here in the East Blue, and there's also the small fact that he's the sniper on Red Haired Shanks' crew."
I smirked at the gasps that followed that name, because how could I not? Of course, to be fair, I didn't know all that much about Shanks, but I knew he was friends with that barmaid from Luffy's childhood, and I also knew that he would bring his whole crew down on Arlong's head if that's what Yasopp desired.
How could I make such a bold claim? Well, because Shanks was a shounen character on the side of good!
"Of course, Numero Uno would be Garp the Fist-" My lips twitched into an enormous grin at the reaction those words had. When at first, it had been the people and some of the Fishmen gasping, now it was every Fishman within my vision blanching and losing colour. Even Arlong paled a bit. "Nah, wait. Everyone knows that Fishmen are, like, ten times stronger than humans by nature, so it shouldn't be too difficult to deal with The Hero of the Marines after threatening his grandson, I mean, right?"
Of course, that wasn't mentioning Ace, or Smoker, or whoever else I didn't know about from my limited exposure to the world of One Piece… speaking of Smoker, how did Arlong even get this fa-
Riiight, he'd bribed a Marine or something, hadn't he?
Arlong's eyes were being shadowed by his hat. I'm not exactly sure how, given how close his hat was to his head, but I would need to get a hat so I could replicate that effect. Damn did it work to convey how pissed off he was getting. The other Fishmen around him were actually beginning to back off, and the more intelligent of the civilians had already fled the scene. The man Arlong had been strangling and the blue-haired woman, I noted, were not among those who had left.
I turned the arrow in my hand, letting my Haki out to cover that side as well, and let out a dejected sigh that didn't work at all coming through the infuriating expression I was wearing.
"Maybe if you actually got off your ass and trained instead of relying on your heritage, you would be genuinely scary." I shrugged mournfully, because I actually did mean that. Sure, right now Arlong was scary enough, but that was to civilians in the East Blue and to someone who'd never seen the likes of him before, and that was temporary at best. I was already getting over the effect he held the more I examined his actions.
His bounty may not have been indicative of his threat at all, but I'm pretty sure Luffy hadn't even had a bounty when he tore Arlong Park apart, and I knew he didn't have one now. And if Luffy could take on someone who had supposedly been to the Grand Line and was a Fishman, then they must have been neglecting themselves even more than that clown dipshit had been. Boggy? Bi-oh, Buggy.
"As it is, you've angered a force far greater than yourself." I spun the arrow around in my fingers, before using it to point at Arlong. "And I will enjoy watching you realise that."
Where before there was a hushed sort of anticipation, now there was no noise in the air at all. I chanced a glance at a few of the people down below, Fish and man. Were they… were they not breathing?
"...I suppose that force would be you, is that right?"
In that moment, I felt a twinge of… something.
It started as somewhere between a tickle and a poke, spreading across my whole body before tunneling in on my chest. Icy tendrils of cold followed along in its path before they turned to liquid fire, warmer than comfortable but not quite painful. It was like an angry chihuahua was sitting on my t-shirt, barking down orders at me to bend and kiss the ground at its feet.
I frowned at the sensation and moved to push at my nose with a finger coated in Haki, but just as soon as the feeling was making itself known, it had vanished, leaving in its place nothing but the livid stare of a Fishman Captain.
Intriguing.
"...No." I answered at length, mind occupied elsewhere. "That would be Nami's true Captain. Speaking of Nami, however, nice job announcing that you were going to betray her deal with you from the very beginning."
Because it would be difficult to rule East Blue without being in charge of all, wouldn't it?
"So she betrayed me, did she? Joined another crew and sent some bounty hunter after my head?" From the sash around his waist, Arlong pulled his gun, levelling it at my head. My hand twitched on its own accord, my mind flashing back to the last time I'd had a gun pointed at me.
You know, that time that had made me almost twelve million richer.
"Not a bounty hunter." Though that could be an idea…
Arlong's eyes hardened, the glint of anger and pupil both abandoning them and leaving behind a pure, expressionless black. "I don't care," he growled, and pulled the trigger.
Haki was already moving before I had time to think about it, more on instinct than anything else, since it didn't really matter in the end. The bullet bounced off my cheek, hitting me harder than anything had before (probably a memento from the Grand Line), snapping my neck to the side.
And I do mean snapping.
That had fucking hurt, asshole.
My frown tipped even further downward, into a definite scowl. With one hand, I reached up to snap my own neck back into position, eliciting yet more gasps from the idiots who still had not yet gotten it through their heads to run away.
"Two hundred percent."
With the other hand, I lined up my Haki coated arrow, and flicked it.
Coated in Haki, leaving my hand at two hundred percent, and being fired off Haki made it the fastest arrow I'd ever shot to date. The friction of my borrowed spirit grinding against itself set it ablaze before it had even left my hand, and I watched dispassionately as it tore down towards Arlong's still raised gun.
With a guttural growl, Arlong lowered his gun and moved to knock the arrow off course. My eyes widened and my hand came up a second too late, the word on my lips before I could either make a difference or question why I was saying it in the first place.
"Stop!"
It all happened so fast.
A cord of Haki, jet black and coiled around itself like a rope, shot out of my hand towards the flying arrow, but it was moving way too slow to intercept properly. Arlong's namesake, his most precious feature, the base of his unprotected nose, right below the final 'tooth' before his face, connected with the flaming arrow with a thunderous crash.
It took a moment for my cord of Haki to attach itself to the arrow, and pull it back. Less than a second, but even that was too late. The arrow was still moving as I tugged it back towards me, but now it was almost three times as heavy, and however many times more gruesome.
I was almost too shocked to look down at my lap, where the arrow had landed. I had punched a dude's head off not too long ago, accidentally, and yet I was too surprised by the turn of events to look into my lap. And maybe, just a little bit, fucking terrified.
Arlong was staring up at me. He was surprised too, that much I could tell, but it wouldn't last. Already, his facial muscles were twitching something fierce, and were it any other person I didn't like that he was looking at, I would have laughed at their misfortune, albeit it a little guiltily.
As it was, I could only slowly look down, at the spare weight in my lap.
My arrow was there, much like I was expecting it to be.
Impaled more than halfway down was the namesake of Nami's torturer and archenemy. Said torturer and archenemy was staring up at me now, a hand slowly probing his face and tiny white pinpricks of light in his eyes.
He looked at me, actually looked right at me, and I felt that chihuahua again, except now it felt like a Rottweiler tearing into my flesh with reckless abandon, for fun and vengeance and a tasty treat at the end.
...Fuuuuuuuck.