Ch. 36 – Defying Fate?

Zoro wasn't one to dwell on regret. It was generally a waste of time to worry about what one should have, could have, or would have done. But at the moment Nemo forced him to draw Sandai Kitetsu, he couldn't help but regret not asking Athena more about the prophecy. After all, just as she had predicted, he'd allowed himself to grow feelings for Helena. Those feelings had led to a kiss, which had led to Nemo's attack, which had led them here.

Helena couldn't move. The darkness lay across her like cords made of dark steel, tying her to the altar as she struggled fruitlessly to break free. His own attempts at resistance proved equally useless, not to mention painful, tearing his tense and straining muscles as Nemo forced him to walk toward her.

Zoro didn't know why he'd thought the mushroom lights would be of any use– scattered as they were, they did practically nothing to dispel Nemo's power. Even when Zoro stepped within their soft glow, it was like his body and swords had been dipped in a non-liquid ink. The dim light could not penetrate the thin, dark shell covering him, nor the cords binding her.

Nemo had left Zoro's eyes clear; he obviously wanted Zoro to see the pain he was about to cause. He'd left his mouth free to move as well. Perhaps he expected Zoro to beg or plead. Zoro wouldn't give him the satisfaction.

Helena didn't have the same reservations. Normally she had more pride, so he was a little surprised. Maybe Nemo had broken her after all:

"Please, Quintilian. Don't do this. He doesn't deserve this…!"

Why was she pleading on his behalf? She was the one about to get cut.

"PLEASE!" she screamed, struggling with everything she had against the shadows. "Is there nothing I can say or do? Quin, just name your price. What do you want?"

Diplomacy, huh? Maybe that was her style after all. But Nemo didn't falter. Zoro raised the sword above his head with two hands like an executioner. What would happen to her when the blade fell? She couldn't die, right?

"Zoro, fight it, damn you!" she screamed at him when she realized Nemo wouldn't respond to her. "Don't let this happen. This is bigger than me. Your dream is on the line!"

What did she mean by that? Zoro froze. Not of his own accord, Nemo had stopped him:

"That you care about him enough to try and bargain with me, knowing what my price would be," – naturally Quintilian would want Helena to marry Troy. Her words potentially put her kingdom on the line. "—is enough to make me despise him and you Helena du Cygnus. Instead of pleading for him, you should have pled for yourself. Suffer."

Zoro finally understood what Nemo intended to do. In the dream Helena had been covered in fatal wounds. If that was any indication of what was really to come, Nemo intended to make him kill her multiple times without actually killing her. –make her suffer the pain of death without the relief dying.

But then, how did the prophecy make sense? Athena said the man who loved Helena most would kill her. –Or was it the man most in love with her? Or her true love? How did Zoro fit into any of those categories? He'd only just begun to care about her; Love was a pretty strong word. –Anyway, someone was supposed to actually kill her, but she couldn't actually die.

He had no more time to think. The blade had begun to fall.

As it neared her person, something happened that Zoro should have expected; after all, he had injected her with the Nemomora himself. Chopper had overestimated the speed of his injection though, or those were the slowest ten heartbeats in the history of heartbeats. Helena screamed a bit, and arched her back in pain. He would have been alarmed, but he was too relieved to see the veins glowing through her skin, glowing straight through her bonds!

But had it worked fast enough? As the veins glowed brighter and brighter, the blade got closer and closer. He shut his eyes so he wouldn't have to see it make contact. Then his blade was clunking hard against stone.

It didn't feel or sound like he'd torn flesh. When he opened his eyes again, Helena had disappeared from off of the altar.

"What's this?" Nemo asked. "Have you eaten some kind of Devil Fruit, Majesty? How is this possible?"

Zoro caught sight of her as she straightened up on the other side of the altar. Chopper must have improved the recipe, because the glow was brighter than Zoro remembered. Helena shone an angelic, pure white, the light magnified by her thin, white dress. Her fiery crown created a halo effect around her. Its hundreds of gems quivered in the light like drops of liquid honey hanging onto a prism of colors set off by the porcelain frame. The foot rapiers he'd tossed to her earlier gleamed lustrously in her hands as she held them in an attack ready position.

For all she looked angelic in appearance, her expression was far from cherubic. He felt something akin to pride as he saw the confidence that had returned to her furrowed brow and practiced stance. She was no longer the tired, frightened little girl he'd found just moments ago. She was no longer a Queen open for negotiation, either. She was a swordswoman prepared to change her fate.

"Where are we going, exactly?"

Chopper looked up at Hector, who ran by his side through the dark maze. The General had not hesitated to follow Chopper's lead, but he did seem confused.

"My friend!" Chopper insisted. "Chiron!"

"He's the Lord of the Labyrinth," Robin expounded, "If we can find him, he can likely lead us to Her Majesty. He knows all of the Labyrinth's secrets, and he's no friend of Nemo's."

"Hold on!" Robertus called from behind them, "General, we've got more company!"

Chopper sniffed over his shoulder, sensing what Robertus' power had detected first. His pace slowed, and he skidded to halt. "Malabranches," the reindeer said, bristling. "—A whole lot of them, coming from behind."

"I'll take care of them," Achilles started, cocking his heel. "Just sit back and watch, General."

"No," Hector replied. "Time is of the essence. Her Majesty has been trapped down here for too long as it is. You go ahead with the others, Achilles. Make sure they are safe."

"Wait, you're trusting me with…?"

"Go!"

"But General, you'll get lost," Robin pointed out.

The Malabranches' growls were audible now, even to human ears. Chopper's animal instinct made him balk a bit. The beasts smelled liked death. And there were so many more than the last ambush!

"I'll follow your string!" Hector replied. "Find this Chiron person and find her Majesty. Let me worry about finding my way."

"Come on, men!" Achilles called, taking charge with gusto.

Chopper shot one last look at Hector, and nodded. The General was strong. He'd be fine. Anyway, Chiron was close. With a bounding leap Chopper took the lead, and the rest of his group was quick to follow.

Usopp shakily drew his slingshot, for all the good it would do against the army of malacoda mice things bearing down on them.

"Alright guys, you go on, I'll cover you," he said, stepping back with Raqueline, who had started trembling. He hoped she wasn't about to faint again. Who would catch him if she fainted first?

"Stupid Long-Nose! Get up here and be a man!" Sanji called back to him.

Before Usopp could retort, the mice leapt into action. They'd only picked one target though; Chef Feta, who in his nerves had already smothered himself by mistake with his power. A stream of French curses and stinky orange cheese later, it was all finished. The mice were all over him. It was awful. They were squeaking in delight! They were…

Licking him?

"Stop zat! Stop zat! It tickles!" Chef Feta cried as they licked the cheese off of him. "Ugh! I hate rats! Back off you pests! I'd neverrr allow you in my kitchen!"

He sprayed them with more cheese, pushing them away with the force of the blast. They didn't seem to mind though. Squeaking and hissing happily, the malacoda frolicked gleefully about in the pool of cheese now forming around them.

"Well, I suppose that takes care of that," Andromache said, sheathing her sword. "I never thought your power would come in handy in combat, Chef-San."

"What are you talking about? My powerrr is very handy in a fight!" Chef Feta insisted. "Anyway, what do we do now? Ze are still blocking ze way! Hey! Get out of ze way, you rats!"

The mice paused in their joyful romp to look at him, their large, whiskered noses quivering and dripping cheese. Then they backed away, forming a path between them as the snakes on their tails stiffened vertically in attention.

"They're listening to you?" Sanji asked in surprise.

"Well, clearly you are their new god or something," Usopp pointed out. "You just made it rain cheese."

"Maybe they can take us to the Queen," Andromache mused.

"It's worth a shot," Feta said with a shrug. "Alright, filthy, disgusting rats: where is her Majesty?"

The malacoda squeaked as one, and turned to race down the tunnel ahead. The travelers hesitated, exchanging shocked glances. Usopp had thought that of all the members in their current group, Chef Feta would prove the most useless. By the looks on everyone else's faces, he wasn't the only one.

Chef Feta remained happily oblivious to their astonishment. "Well, what are we waiting for?" he cried, taking the lead, "Follow zem!"

With newfound energy and confidence, Helena faced the shadowed figure that she knew to be Zoro. Her entire body tingled as though on the edge of fever, and she knew she would be violently ill when this was all over, just as Zoro had been. It was worth it. If Nemo couldn't pin her down, he couldn't guarantee Zoro would land any sort of hit. Perhaps she could prevent this whole catastrophe after all.

To her surprise, Shadow-Zoro didn't attack her directly. He disappeared quickly into the darkness. She glanced around attentively, trying to sense where the next attack would come from. Fortunately her attacker, though a puppet, was on her side.

"Behind you!" Zoro cried, and Helena turned in time to parry him.

"Shut up, pirate!" Nemo retorted angrily.

Zoro smirked. Helena was surprised that she could see the expression on his darkened face, then realized that her light was chipping away at the black shell covering him. –it wasn't by much. It was like she could see him through a black mesh fabric. Nemo yanked him back into the darkness before his proximity to her could clear him up further, but the discovery gave her hope.

"Let's keep that mouth of yours firmly clamped on a sword, shall we, eh Mr. Three-Sword Style?" Nemo rumbled in bad humor.

"Heh. Idiot," Zoro retorted. Helena could hear the strain in his voice as he struggled against Nemo's control. "You can give me all three swords, but…"

His voice cut off. True to his word, Nemo must have not only gotten Zoro to clamp down on a sword, but he was keeping his mouth tightly closed to keep him from speaking further.

"You can give him three swords, but that doesn't mean you can make him use the three-sword style," Helena finished for him.

Shadow-Zoro leapt out of the darkness at her, three blades at the ready.

"After all," she continued breezily. She blocked all three of Zoro's swords with one of her own blades, using the other to catch the sheath of Peleus still attached across Zoro's chest. Cutting the flimsy leather free, she caught hold of the handle as Zoro was pulled back into the darkness. "A swordsman puppet is only as good as his puppet master, Quintilian du Aeschylus."

She stood on her hands to transfer the other rapiers to her feet, taking Peleus in hand and flicking it free of its sheath before spinning gracefully upright again. The Queen's Blade was still covered in darkness, but this close to her light she could already see it fading like mesh, just as she had seen happen with Zoro before. It also looked like the shadow covering it was cracked, maybe brittle.

"You're far from a swordsman, Quin," Helena went on. She knocked Peleus on the stone around her to see if she could shake the blackness off of it, and was surprised to see sparks. It was just like the caves she and Zoro had been in before! The stone must have some kind of a flint in it to spark so easily.

"And even if you were…" She struck the altar, hard, and a line of sparks flashed up the blade, breaking it free of Nemo's power and bringing it under her own luminescent control. Turning to fend off another Shadow-Zoro attack, she smirked and easily knocked a katana from its clumsy position in Zoro's mouth. "…You'd be lightyears away from three-sword style."

"Couldn't have said it better," Zoro said with another barely visible grin.

The katana landed within Helena's little island of light. She quickly retrieved it and knocked it free of darkness before Nemo could take it back.

"Heh. Oh, but as we all know, three-sword style is just a few parsecs behind four-sword style," Helena teased him, holding his katana at the ready.

"Excuse me?" Zoro asked. "I seem to recall beating your four-sword style on more than one occasion recently."

"Didn't I tell you to shut up?!" Nemo growled, pulling Zoro back again.

"Face it, Quintidiot," Zoro called. He sounded like he was actually enjoying this. Well, she kind of was too. She especially liked the creative insult. "You've lost this fight."

Zoro launched at her again, this time with only two swords. By the time Nemo pulled him away again he was down to one, courtesy of a particularly good lunge on her part.

"So, are you going to put that in your mouth?" Zoro chuckled as she bashed the second disarmed blade free of dark flakes. "Five-sword style?"

"And chip my beautiful, royal teeth? No thank you," Helena replied light-heartedly. She left his two blades on the altar beside her, where they could easily catch her light and stay out of Nemo's control. She wanted to keep one hand free to try and catch the third blade.

"You both think this is a game, do you?" Nemo growled. "I'll teach you to laugh at me. Go ahead, Roronoa. Warn her if you can."

"What the…?" Zoro's voice sounded like he were suddenly being yanked around in a cyclone.

"Hmm, round and round the swordsman goes, where he stops, nobody knows!" Nemo taunted, yanking Zoro through the darkness.

"Hah. Like this is going to work," Zoro said. Yup, he was definitely being yanked all over the room. Not in a predictable cyclone though. Nemo was pulling him in and out of shadow, making it hard for Helena to pinpoint the sound of his voice. "Helena's got pretty good reflexes, in case you hadn't noticed."

"Hmm…then let's up the ante, shall we?" Nemo chuckled.

"How? Woah!" Zoro's voice suddenly came from everywhere at once, resonating like Nemo's. It was as if the room had become an echo chamber. "Careful Helena."

"Oh, by all means, keep talking. Let's confuse her more," Nemo goaded.

Helena tried to concentrate by closing her eyes , but it was useless. It was too disconcerting with her eyelids aglow; she'd have to tune her senses some other way. Staring into the darkness, she tried to detect Zoro's presence. What she sensed was something else – something dark and foreboding. – something that wanted her dead. Was it Nemo or something else?

What sword did he have left? She glanced at the altar. Oh dear.

He had Sandai Kitetsu. She hadn't felt unsafe around the blade since their duel in the caves, but that was because its master handled it with such control. Now its master had none, which meant…

Suddenly Zoro appeared before her, his body already partway through a powerful thrust. He'd appeared so quickly and with such precision that he found the smallest hole in her defense. His sword slipped past hers with a ringing sound, the metals singing on each other like water on the rim of a wine glass.

A non-swordsman like Quintilian never could have managed that. Not without the sword's help.

Before she realized what was happening, he had her pinioned against the side of the altar. Nemo released him just enough from the darkness so that though his body remained trapped in the thin, black shell, she could clearly see the look of horror on his face.

"No…" Zoro uttered with wide and disbelieving eyes. They were grey like a storm, or like steel maybe. Why had she never noticed before? –Such a weird thing to think about in a moment like this. Whatever the color, there was definitely a storm brewing there. She had never seen him so angry. She tried to smile at him reassuringly, but hadn't recovered from the shock of the blow. The sword stuck all the way into the altar behind her.

Nemo laughed triumphantly through the gloom.

"And this is just the start, Pirate Hunter. Or should I call you Princess Hunter?" Nemo laughed harder, as though he'd said something clever. "Now, destroy her again and again! Destroy the woman you love with the swords you love more!"

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Note from the Author: Creative Insult Contest!

so, I'm not really satisfied with Zoro's "creative insult" in here. Can you guys help me come up with something better than "Shadow-lurking, smooth-talking moron"? I'm trying to avoid obscenities and cusses (yes, I do drop a few hells and damns now and again, but I try to treat it like cilantro. A little goes a long way, and most dishes are better without it)

UPDATE 2/16/2016 - we have a winner! The Gord came up with "Quintidiot" in a past comment. Sometimes simplicity is best. After all, Zoro's no Shakespeare. Thanks for playing, all! - if you feel like insulting Nemo in future comments/reviews, by all means go ahead! I hate him too...