They made a pretty sight, Vinci would admit.
He'd not yet had the opportunity to dissect one of the Demon Tribe, or even to read of such a thing - not even in the Necromonger's books. They kept to themselves, forging their weapons. Nobody made war with them, except the truly idiotic - and the truly idiotic died in droves, their fleets broken, their armies destroyed, and the captives (according to rumor) either eaten or sacrificed to the volcano gods.
And what faced them was the instrument of that destruction.
Rank upon rank upon rank of the Demon Tribe faced them, wielding halberd and pike. Larger specimens, ten or fifteen feet tall, stood behind them, great crossbows in hand with quarrels that could core a frigate loaded. Armored soldiers with normal crossbows lined the rooftops on all sides. Good quality plate, better than anything a normal forge could turn out or most normal people could wear. Black as night, crude-looking, but it'd still turn aside bullets with an ease normal plate couldn't. All of them bore the black batlike wings of their kind to some degree.
Vinci looked at the army that had broken everything that faced it...and found himself disappointed.
Where were the cannons, the guns, the great machines?
Tartarus had forged iron for so long they'd become it, frozen like statue soldiers. Even as the Hunt made a formation to match theirs, they did not move.
An army fighting with ancient tactics from three centuries back, weapons from the same. Calcified, ancient, arrogant.
Vinci's lips peeled back from his teeth. "So, you lot going to fight?"
Fifteen hundred pikes lowered as one.
That answered that.
"Push through," Vinci ordered, and Helios threw a sun at them.
Okay, not an actual sun, that would have destroyed the planet (Vinci reminded himself to make absolutely certain Helios's Logia wasn't capable of that). But a sphere of light and heat, the size of a house, flew at Vinci's word. In an instant, a hole was smashed through the formation. Those on the edges of the attack fell, armor reduced to slagged metal, and buildings on both sides immediately burst into flame - and as for anything that the fireball hit, well, that simply ceased to exist. The sphere bored through the houses, continued forward - and then burst like a pricked bubble, a pillar of flame rocketing into the sky.
"Was it supposed to do that?" Vinci asked to a suddenly pale Helios.
Helios opened his mouth to answer, then started, staring at where the flames were guttering out. Vinci followed his gaze, and-
Mechanical left arm. Red hair. Goggles. Expression of dawning horror, even as he lowered his left arm, which was still crawling with the magnetic fields he'd no doubt used to deflect the blast.
Kid.
Vinci saw red.
Kid wasn't an idiot; he booked it the second the flare dissipated, running down the abandoned streets as all the captains started screaming for his blood.
How the hell had Grigori gotten all those crews together? He'd crippled them, beyond what even a master surgeon could fix in a month, and yet here they stood. An army, and unless Kid missed his guess every single one of that army was juiced to the eyeballs with whatever bullshit Grigori could pull together.
No matter. He'd thought Grigori, if he brought anyone, would revive one, maybe two of the crippled bastards at worst, probably copy that trick of his that had let him beat his Devil Fruit power...twenty and all their crews would be tricky, but he had backups. And the Demon Tribe, what was left of them in their armor, would hold off the crews, the captains coming right for him already. The battle was already starting, he knew.
He dodged to the left as a blast of steam ripped through the air, scattering cobblestones. He lashed out with his flesh hand, and a frission of magnetic fields tore the thing apart, scattering atoms. Another corner rounded - the biggest of his contingencies was just ahead. Might stop the bleeding hearts, might not, but it didn't matter. He'd packed loaded for bear, for this. He was stronger, but last time he underestimated Grigori in a fight he'd lost an arm.
Would it be enough to deal with all these captains? Maybe, maybe not.
A grin split Kid's face.
This would be close. One win, one loss...now it could go either way. Made his blood thrum.
Grigori would die last. As for his crew…
What the Demon Tribe's remnants couldn't put down...Killer had a solution for. Even the ghoul. And Kid would make sure Grigori understood just how badly he'd failed to kill his dream.
It was complete bloody chaos, and part of Lauren hated herself for revelling in it.
The rest of her?
The rest of her was doing the revelling.
The Wraiths had taken to the rooftops in moments, scattering the crossbowmen with grenades and quick slashes to throat and hamstring and anything else that wasn't fully covered by plate. Mail was at those places, but the blades of the Wraiths were sharp and their limbs stronger than anything normal, and so armored soldiers fell, bleeding black.
There was the minor issue of the fact that they got back up, but Lauren was still having her fun. She leaned back from a clumsy swing of an iron cleaver, laughed, and pulled the trigger. Casull barked, and the upper third of the soldier's body ceased to exist, the shrapnel fragments ripping into the two men behind her target as a bonus. The smoking torso and legs remained upright for a moment before clattering to the rooftop, and Lauren moved on to the wounded in moments. They fell just as quickly as the first, buying her a moment of breathing room and some space at the edge of her rooftop. She turned to the wider battle going on below. "WIGHT RULES, CUT OFF THEIR LIMBS!" she shouted.
"WE FUCKING KNOW!" came the answer from the Nightmares.
They were having fun, too. Pikes and armor really didn't cut it against explosive-tipped bullets big around as a man's fist, nor against the sheer angry murder-machine-ness that the Huscarls were capable of unleashing under Herman's direction. The sheer pain-in-the-ass-ness of their opponents was pretty much the only reason this fight wasn't over.
She ducked just in time for a kick to pass through the space where her head had been, and glared at the offender.
Which was the torso and legs she'd just put out of commission. It raised one limb in some ornate martial arts pose.
"Oh, for fuck's sake," she breathed, kneecapping the thing and removing its legs in the process. At least the two wounded she'd left didn't have any limbs…
She stepped to the side, neatly avoiding a crossbow bolt.
Oh. Right. Ongoing battle.
She grinned, and her guns thundered.
Herman was, to put it bluntly, rather pissed off.
But hey, he'd found someone actually using a weapon worth the iron that went into it.
Amakatta slammed into the ornate cleaver his opponent wielded, and the shockwave knocked men off their feet on both sides. Strength on his part, sheer stubbornness on his opponent's. Dead bastard hadn't even noticed the loss of an arm, after all.
Herman's lips peeled back from his teeth as the blade-lock broke, him taking a step back and the dead bastard unmoving. Amakatta growled along with him.
On all sides, the Huscarls, his Huscarls, were fighting, the shield-bearing Wolves holding the line. Pikes shattered on their shields, their guns broke men with ease, their swords and axes rent iron plate apart, but against the dead they were only just holding the line.
The dead bastard was hard, right enough - lamellar armor covered him from head to toe, and the cleaver in his hands sang with bloodlust. Not a Name, not yet, but the forging and the deeds would make it so in time. Another Graded sword, to add to the many. Another life frozen in steel and scabbard.
He needed to reassess. It was time for a new trick, one the old man and his odd son had taught him through the making of sword and axe and armor.
Herman took another step back, then another, and behind him the Huscarls parted, men moving out of the way as he held Amakatta horizontally behind him. The dead bastard raised its cleaver in defence, fearing a charge, and Herman's smile became an ugly thing.
"Forged armor, forged blades, forged life, all made by hammer and will, let it be unmade by same," he said calmly, centering his footing and breathing deep, using the cadence as focus. Muscle tensed. "Shatter."
He swung, and metal broke with a scream of abortion.
Vespucci ran.
Was he the only sane person left? All the other captains had run off screaming after Kid, which was... incredibly stupid, to put it bluntly. Just asking to get trapped.
Him?
He hung back until everyone present had finished ripping, stomping, shooting, and otherwise obliterating the remaining Demon Tribe...zombies? Something like that. Then he'd signalled the closest people present - the Nightmare officer with the tonfa, the two Zoan users who followed that golden-robed captain, Keita, around like bodyguards, and a detachment of the odd clockwork people - to follow him, and booked it for the ships. He could say they were reinforcing the ship's guards, wary of another trap or ambush. It'd make him look slightly paranoid, but not cowardly, and that was important.
So, naturally, when they'd headed back down the street the sounds of battle around the ships had reached their ears, and everything had gone to shit.
He threw himself forwards, barely dodging a swinging cleaver, and stabbed a knife into the back of a zombie's knee as he rolled back onto his feet. The zombie ignored it, but Vespucci was free of the melee and then -
BRRRRRRRRTTTT.
The undead half of the melee dissolved into shattered pieces of armor, zombie bits, and a lot of half-coagulated blood, a great deal of which splattered on Vespucci, because of course.
"Do you possess a deathwish?" the machine-person responsible chirped, the barrels of the huge rotary gun welded onto its shoulder smoking gently. The metallic limbs extending from its back retracted from where they'd braced the cyborg against the ground.
"Oh, fuck off," Vespucci said tiredly. "If I wanted to die, would I be here?"
"Given the properties of most of the crews in this alliance, 89.4% probability that you would."
Vespucci paused, then shrugged. "It's not like my pistol's accomplishing much. Sword's the way to go," he said, keeping his voice even.
"You require a larger weapon. Perhaps you should replace an arm with a lightning gun."
CRACKA-THOOM!
Vespucci very determinedly did not flinch as, out of the corner of his eye, he saw several dozen zombies become little more than ash under the lashing coils of electricity launched from another one of the machine-men.
"I'll pass," he said, trying very hard not to think of losing a limb to the Cog's...attentions.
"Hey, you understand what the hell they're saying?" someone else asked. Vespucci turned, and prevented himself from startling at the appearance of one of Keita's bodyguards. The hyena Zoan loomed in half-beast form, the outsized scimitar-like sword in his hand dripping with half-coagulated blood.
Vespucci blinked. "You don't?"
"No, of course I...eh, fuck it. You sure your Devil Fruit doesn't give you weird knowledge?"
"It lets me navigate. Nothing more."
"Yeah, sure, you knew that these undead fucks were sending reinforcements to fuck us up, and you can talk with these clockwork fucks, and all it does is give you navigational tips." The hyena-man grinned. "Sure, I get it, lips sealed. Just keep giving us fights like this, mate."
Vespucci kept his spine straight under the predator's gaze. "I am fairly sure," he said flatly, "that that's your captain's job."
The hyena's lips peeled back from his teeth, before the Zoan threw his head back and laughed. "Fair enough, little guy, fair enough. Eh, we finished off this lot, let's go find some more."
Of course the damn warmongers wanted to go fight some more. Vespucci raged inwardly as he smiled widely. "Let's. If we can sweep the shoreline-"
He stepped back as a piece of armor flew through the air.
Followed by more.
Followed by all of them, floating over the rooftops and congregating…
Near where Kid and the other murderous nutjobs had all run off to. Of course.
"On second thought, we should probably deal with that," he said mildly. With any luck, the fight would be over by the time they got there.
Euclid Siegfried knew, the moment that Kid stopped running, that they'd just walked into a trap. And so the ex-Krieger halted, assessing the square they'd found themselves in. It was an unremarkable plaza, a dead end with the only other exit beyond the street they'd just entered through being what looked like the entrance to a large warehouse, a large door of corrugated steel blocking it. No other doors, no alleyways - the buildings packed close here. And the cobblestones were loose - poor footing. Not a good place to make a stand.
Siegfried's mind spun into overdrive as Kid skidded to a halt, spinning around to face his pursuers and nonchalantly deflecting a bullet with his cybernetic hand in the process. "Ah, ah, ah...not one more step. I mean, you guys actually bother giving a shit about these little bastards, don't you?"
The warehouse door fell off its hinges with a earth-shaking bang, and Euclid found himself...disappointed.
Oh, the terrified children being held in place over an array of metal spikes by metal restraints clearly only being held up by Kid's Devil Fruit abilities was probably intended to be shocking, but if Kid really thought some snivelling brats would restrain this group from taking their revenge, he had another thing coming.
"See, this is how it goes. My control's the only thing keeping this bunch alive and unimpaled. Hit me, and who knows, it might slip. Wouldn't that be a -"
The tall preacher, Jeremiah, threw something at Kid, who caught it. A burnished circle of steel mounted on a short wooden handle shone in the sun.
"Is this a fucking pizza cutter?" Kid asked.
"It is appropriate, as you appear to be all edge and no point," the preacher replied in an entirely dignified tone. Siegfried suppressed a smile.
Kid went a truly interesting shade of red. "You little-"
"C. Usurp," Grigori ordered, and the masked ghoul at his side nodded silently. Whatever he did, it made veins stand out on Kid's neck.
"I'M GONNA-"
"Second Gear."
Grigori vanished from his previous position. Kid turned to the left, reacting to something Siegfried couldn't see.
"Full-body Electrical Trauma."
Thunder sounded out of a clear sky, and Kid went flying, slamming into the side of one of the buildings and leaving a crater. Grigori stood where Kid had been, in some odd martial arts pose, before slowly returning to a normal standing position.
"Is that it?" Diceros Keita asked, the dark-skinned Zoan folding his arms over his golden robes.
Kid's fingers twitched. The pirate smiled. "Mistake."
Siegfried felt every instinct scream a warning, his second heart thundering alongside the original.
As he stepped out of reality, the jaws of the trap sprang closed, and the earth exploded.
They were, Pravilno decided, doing pretty well for two people and three weird animals.
Well enough, at least, that the Kid Pirates had run out of zombie-things.
Pravilno swayed around a swung sledgehammer, fired twice to drop the attacker with a brain splattered across the cobblestones, and then sent three tendrils of cloth lancing out. Each grabbed a Kid Pirate by the neck, and tightened quickly. Cracks sounded, and Pravilno let the corpses drop.
A large boom marked the end of Ostavila's opponents - her weapons, charged with her Devil Fruit ability, were terrifying - at about the same time a burst of screaming cut short signalled the end of whichever poor bastards had to deal with the mutts. That left all of them a bit of quiet, and a lot of actually-dead corpses. In fact…
"Hey," he called over to Ostavila. "I think this is pretty much Kid's entire crew." He recalled the strips of cloth, winding them back around his body. "Where the heck's Killer?"
One of the hounds, further down the street, shrieked in pain before collapsing in a spray of blood.
"Well fuck."
"I actually tolerated these people," a voice declared.
Pravilno whirled, searching for the source of the voice before finding Killer, standing on a rooftop. Blood dripped from the blades of the scythes in his hands.
"And of course, you killed them," Kid's second said, in an utterly flat voice. "Pity. I was expecting Kaneki, but...you'll do."
A knife thudded into the tiles at Killer's feet, and the thin man looked down. "Was that supposed to-"
The knife exploded, and acting on instinct, Pravilno lanced out with as many strips of cloth as he could in every direction. He hit something, but it was gone before he retracted the cloth.
"Interesting."
Ground level, farther down the street. Only a small rip in Killer's clothes betrayed the fact that Pravilno had hit him, damn it.
"Those are just cloth, but I can't seem to cut them."
"Devil Fruit," Pravilno answered.
Killer shrugged. "Understandable. But it relies on you being able to attack me with what you have on your body, doesn't it?"
Pravilno grinned under his bandages, and let a few more strips of cloth wave behind him menacingly as he heard Ostavila take out her kusari-gama. "Still fast enough to catch -"
Without finishing, he snagged control of the clothing of the two corpses nearest Killer, fashioning makeshift rope in an instant that grabbed the man by the wrists. Killer struggled against the bonds for a moment, failing to budge the fabric that was, temporarily, stronger than steel, then cocked his head as a deep thrumming sound began to fill the air.
The blunt weight of Osta's kusari-gama, already glowing, slammed into the man's head, and a massive explosion filled the air, shredding the bonds - and presumably Killer.
Pravilno relaxed an inch, lowering the pistol in his hands - and then raising it again as the dust settled and Killer walked forwards. His mask was cracked wide open, and under it -
"Oh, hell no," Pravilno said, as both of the hounds began to growl.
"Yes," Killer said simply, as his scythes began to spin.