Chapter 11: The Sky and The Horn

Everyone braced for impact as they expected Cancel to explode in anger. However, all he did was smile as he tapped the armrest of his chair.

Cancel's chair had gone through a number of modifications and improvements. From the back, it looked like a shiny sphere. From the front, it looked someone had carved a sofa into a huge ball of metal. It was over one and a half meters in radius.

Cancel had packed his chair full of gadgets and tech, as evidenced by the armrest that neatly folded into itself when he tapped it, revealing a storage space. Cancel fished out a helmet from the space and put it on his head. As he did, a blue tinted glass pane dropped down from the helmet and covered his face. Cancel tapped the other armrest of his chair, causing the glass visor to light up with weird text and symbols.

As his helmet finished booting up, Cancel heard a voice come from it.

"Yo, Cancel! What's up?"

A devious grin crept up Cancel's face as he watched the scene on his helmet screen. "They have taken the bait."

104th Marine Branch, South Blue

Captain Hebinu cackled like a madman as he played with the object on his hand. It looked like a cross between a treasure chest and a clam. It was bright red in color, with gray lines swirling around. On one side, some of these gray lines formed an image of a serpent, while on the opposite side they formed an image of a feather. Hebinu slammed it down, and continued cackling when he saw the floor crack.

"Kwakwakwakwakwa! Not even a scratch! It's definitely the real thing." His weird laughter echoed throughout the Marine base.

"Sir! The equipment is ready!" A soldier shouted from outside Hebinu's room. The captain hurriedly ran up to the mirror as he patted his clothes and adopted a more Captain-like demeanor.

"Tell them to bring the captive to the interrogation room." He told the soldier as he exited his room, the chest-clam in hand.

"Sir yes sir!" The soldier saluted, before leaving to do as he was told. "La ~ la ~ la ~ Kwakwakwa ~"A grin crept up Hebinu's face as he walked towards the interrogation chamber, humming a tune that was intermittently interrupted by bouts of manic laughter.

"I wonder what that idiot's face will look like when he finds out I took the treasure for myself. Gah! I can't wait! Kwakwakwakwa!" He muttered to himself as he entered the interrogation chamber.

When people hear the term "interrogation chamber", they will most likely picture a dark room with one table and two chairs. On any other day, they would have been correct in assuming that the 104th Marine Branch's room was no different. On this day, however, the interrogation chamber was unrecognizable.

A weird contraption was placed in the center of the room. A number of long metal sticks were attached to the sides of a large board. Each stick had two joints and a needle attached to the end. The board was seemingly made of wood with its brown color, while the metal sticks were painted in different colors. There were a number of different colored light bulbs hanging above the board. Whoever designed the thing had certainly put a lot of effort into making sure everyone would recognize it as a torture station.

A few people in lab coats were milling about the room. Most of them were at one corner, looking at a number of test tubes that had different colored fluids in them. Each test tube had a pipe attached to it, connecting it with the contraption in the center of the room. The rest were in the opposite corner, where there was a table with a bunch of papers on it. They were pointing at various papers and arguing about the things in them.

Silence fell upon the drab room as Hebinu entered. "Are we ready?" He asked the people that were standing around the table.

"Sir! Are you sure you want to do this? This is the first boxclam we have seen in decades. We do not have complete information on them. What if something goes wrong?" asked one of the scientists. He was the oldest of the bunch, and was presumably their leader.

Hebinu shook his head as he laughed. "Stop worrying Dr. Fuzz. It's just a clam. If only you did less worrying and more science-ing, Vegapunk wouldn't have kicked you out."

Dr. Fuzz winced at the mention of Vegapunk. That was a part of his life that he wished he could forget.

"Captain Hebinu, we know nothing of this type of boxclam. Some varieties of them are known to have violent reactions when opened forcefully. Wouldn't it be better if we handed it over to the HQ?" Fuzz asked. He honestly wanted no part in this endeavor, but he owed Hebinu's uncle too much to say no to the Marine Captain.

"It will be alright. Didn't you say you built the containment device? Have some faith in yourself, old man."

Fuzz sighed. He could see that something was wrong. Hebinu had always evaded the topic when he talked about HQ. However, there was nothing he could do. It was his fault for agreeing. The lure of lost ancient knowledge was far too powerful for him to ignore. 'In for a penny, in for a pound', he thought to himself.

"Alright. Bring in the captive." Fuzz ordered the soldiers that were guarding the door.

…

Skyhorn Island is an island located at the border of the South Blue and the Calm Belt. It is a relatively large circular island, with a radius of around a hundred and fifteen kilometers. The reason it is named as such is because of the landmass that occupies the vast majority of the island's skies.

The island is home to a huge mountain that looks like a horn facing the sky. At its base, the mountain is barely a kilometer in diameter. At the top however, it has a diameter of nearly a hundred kilometers. It is a miracle that the mountain never thought about physics, and collapsed in on itself.

The top of the mountain is a flat plateau, with lush green vegetation. Skyhorn forest, as it is called today, didn't always use to be a forest though. Until a couple centuries ago, Skyhorn was home to a highly advanced human civilization. Archaeological evidence shows that the first human settlers arrived at the island roughly four hundred and fifty years in ago. They were refugees who had run away from their country located in what is now called the New World. Old journals that were dug up say that they made it to the mountaintop using the power of their leader, who could make objects float as she wished.

What little is known about the civilization that once called Skyhorn their home comes from rough translations of the inscriptions and books that were discovered by scavengers ten years ago. Evidence suggests that the Skyhorn people were very good at using devil fruits for their advantage, with pictures and carvings depicting people using a vast multitude of devil fruit powers in their day to day lives. One of the things the scavengers discovered back then was an unassuming little red box. Unable to pry it open, they had sold it to an antique dealer in South Blue.

In the ten years since the object was found, it changed hands multiple times, until finally coming into the possession of one Captain Buzzer. Buzzer told no one about it, slowly researching into the secrets of the curious object and the civilization it came from. One day, by pure happenstance, he was casually going through his pirate group's recent haul when he found a sea-animal encyclopedia among a bunch of documents. Despite being a pirate, Buzzer was an avid reader of … everything. His ship had a vast library in it, with all kinds of books that the eccentric captain read to pass time.

As he was reading, Buzzer stumbled upon an entry on a curious type of creature known as a Boxclam, which eerily resembled the object he had been researching for the past few months. The book said that boxclams were creatures native to the Calm Belt, and were used by Royal families of the old as treasure chests.

"… Boxclams can be trained to open and close with specific triggers. Once a trained clam is closed, it can only be safely opened with the set trigger. There are ways to forcibly open them, if you can call self-destruction that. However, there aren't many ways you can interact with them. Once sufficiently fed, they can remain closed and dormant for centuries… Their shells are said to be harder than diamond..." The book stated.

Unable to do anything, Buzzer had told his backer, Nostrade Bru about the boxclam. Curious, Bru used his connections as a noble to gather knowledge and materials from the Skyhorn civilization. Eventually, he discovered, through fragmented inscriptions, that rich families from the civilization used boxclams to store their family treasure. These treasures could be either from powerful devil fruits, equally powerful weapons or knowledge that could shake the world.

Bru had first thought of using his status as a noble to request Dr. Vegapunk to help him open the clam, but eventually thought otherwise. Vegapunk was a dog of the World Government. He was sure that if he let Vegapunk, and by consequence the World Government, know about the boxclam, they would kindly take the dangerous objects off his hands. So, to maintain secrecy, Bru had used his stupid son's connections with a stupider Marine Captain to have the author of the Encyclopedia of Sea Animals, Dr. Fuzz, try and open it.

That brings us to this day, with Dr. Fuzz and Captain Hebinu standing in front of the "torture station" inside the interrogation chamber of the 104th Marine Branch. Hebinu was almost jumping around in childish glee, having successfully one-upped Nostrade Gru. At least, that's what he thought.