Whew. War of the Best. I still don't believe we're here. Get used to me saying this from now on to the end of the fic. I talked about the plan going forward a couple of chapters ago, but to get into some more detail: there's going to be an arc after Marineford, and then we're going to do a timeskip.

Now, I need to apologize in advance, because as of the moment I'm writing this note, there's a copy of Fire Emblem: Three Houses waiting for me two days from now and it's going to consume most of the waking hours work doesn't take up. I want to plan the next arc as well as I can, too, because something important has to happen and I don't want to screw it up. For about half a year I've managed to post a new chapter once a month, but I'm afraid the next one's going to take longer. Maybe I'll update the BNHA one to make up for the extra wait, I'm not sure, but just so you know.

I also want to thank everybody who commented on the last chapter because... wow. I was floored by the amount of reviews for that chapter, and I don't know if it was because I said I didn't get as many as before last time, or because summer break hit with full force, but I'm grateful from the bottom of my heart. I'm trying to reply to everybody. You're the best.

Fahdza: Thanks! I'm happy the last scene had such an effect!

Jag: Poor, poor Bepo. He got the short end of the stick and a chapter title dedicated to him.

Hyphen: Hey, glad to have you back! Robin was sent first to Tequila Wolf in East Blue, so she's not yet with the revolutionaries, but yep, she'll meet Tsubaki and Take when they rescue her! The kids are doing their thing for now, studying and training. But we'll eventually get back to them.

29. Legends never die
(Welcome to the new age)

Despite having arrived early, if someone had told Saki that the entire archipelago was already in the grove where the broadcast was set to take place, she would have believed it.

The overcrowding was to be expected, since in addition to the citizens of Sabaody and the travelers that were passing through, evacuated civilians from Marineford were packed in front of the screens in wait for the execution to begin. She saw other pirates, too, some of them familiar faces, but nobody was interested in causing a ruckus that day. The anxious anticipation among all, the awareness that the events of the day could have consequences for the world at large, guaranteed that the collective attention was somewhere else, because nobody in their right mind would want to miss an event with so much significance.

The Heart Pirates found a spot near a speaker towards the back of the crowd. They could have forced their way closer to the screens, but they were large enough that it wasn't necessary, and Saki was grateful for it, because large gatherings of people where she couldn't tell where the shots were coming from made her twitchy, and she didn't want to be caught in the middle of hundreds of people if for some reason they needed to make a run for it.

"How long until the hour?" Shachi asked, surveying the area. "I lost track of time during the… uh…"

"Kerfuffle," Penguin said quickly, before he could bring up the last shameful incident at the sub and trigger a chain reaction. "It starts in three—"

A deafening sound of static ran through the area and the screens came to life, displaying images of a plaza, and Fire Fist Ace being brought to a scaffold.

"They've advanced the execution?" Saki said as the camera panned the area before setting back on the men at the scaffold.

Hundreds of Marines, along with the Admirals and the five remaining Shichibukai filled the plaza, ready for battle. Seeing all that manpower meant solely to stop one pirate's crew really put in perspective for Saki the difference in orders of magnitude between a Yonkou and them, or the other Supernova crews.

"Either the government's scared of Whitebeard and want to hurry up, or they want to intimidate the world by showing the preparations," Law said, drawing the attention of his crewmates. "I wouldn't be surprised if they tried to get it over with before he arrives."

The unexpected schedule somehow managed to add to the gravity of the situation. Saki didn't think Law's first suggestion sounded right. Surely the Marines couldn't believe that they could avoid the battle if Fire Fist Ace was executed before Whitebeard's fleet reached Marineford. Did they want him dead so badly that they couldn't wait a few hours? She didn't think Marine HQ would have risked war if they weren't confident in their chances to win.

That only left the propagandistic option.

Fleet Admiral Sengoku walked up to the scaffold with a Den Den Mushi, began his speech, and things began to make a little more sense.

"Men, I have something crucial to tell you all," he started, supposedly talking to the soldiers gathered at Marineford, and cynical enough to be doing so while putting on a show in front of a camera. "Something about the true meaning of Portgas D. Ace meeting his end here today."

The crowd on Sabaody went silent, everybody was hanging onto the words of Sengoku.

"Ace," he said to the prisoner beside him, "tell me the name of your father!"

Ace mumbled something to himself, but what the Den Den Mushi picked up were his next words. "My father is Whitebeard!"

"He is not!" Sengoku retorted.

"Yes, he is! Whitebeard is my only father! I have no other!"

Sengoku sent a long look at Ace and afterwards continued as if that outburst hadn't happened, and he hadn't just sounded incredibly petulant. "Back then, we searched as though our lives depended on it… Searching for the possibility that there existed on that island a child of that man. Based on nothing but the tiniest of leads from Cipher Pol, we investigated all newborn children, all children who were yet to be born, and all of their mothers, but ultimately found nothing."

Saki had no idea where Sengoku was going with his story. He spoke about a mother and a trick that she played on the Marines.

"In the South Blue, there lies an island by the name of Baterilla. Your mother's name was…" He looked again at Ace. "Portgas D. Rouge!"

So Fire Fist Ace he hadn't taken his father's surname…?

"She performed a feat that we could never have hoped to imagine, and out of devotion to her child, bore him in her womb for a full twenty months!"

The crowd was beginning to whisper incredulously, and Saki snuck a glance at Law to see that his only reaction had been a slight lift of eyebrows.

"And when the birth finally came, her strength all but spent, she left this world as you entered it. One year and three months from the father's death, a child was born bearing the most accursed blood to be found in this world. That child is you." And he snapped at Ace. "Do not claim you are not aware… your father is no other than Pirate King, Gold Roger!"

The crowd stopped holding back and excited discussion broke out, the loudest being the reporters yelling through their own Den Den Mushi to get the news to their offices as soon as possible.

Saki saw shock and horror in the faces of many people around her, aghast at the revelation, but as a pirate, she was feeling markedly different. Had the World Government really sought out a war, had it had to reveal a man's most personal secret in front of the world, at his weakest moment, just because of a father that was dead even before he was born? And a father he seemed to reject, at that.

She was disgusted. "They want to turn him into a symbol," she said, and the words had a bitter tang as she spoke them. "They want to end the era the way it started."

Sengoku went on about Ace's pirate career, but the rapt attention he'd had from the audience at Sabaody was gone and replaced with nonstop speculation as he continued. To Saki, nothing he could say mattered anymore. She had never held much respect for the Navy as an institution, but whatever shred of it had been left vanished then. It was their job to protect, and they had demonstrated they didn't mind hurting and causing pointless deaths just to make an example of a pirate.

As if that would stop anybody determined enough to follow in the footsteps of the great pirates of the previous generations. As if it wouldn't spur more people to take to the seas. If Saki had learned something since she joined the Heart Pirates, was that some people's rightful place was out in the sea, for better or worse, and no amount of threats could dissuade a determined soul from searching for a way to feel alive.

"It is absolutely imperative that we take your head here today," she heard Sengoku say, though she wasn't staring at the screen anymore. She was looking at her friends and the other people around, and for the briefest of moments, her eyes met Jean Bart's, who wore a grave expression and seemed to be enjoying the show as much as Saki. "Even if that means going to war with Whitebeard himself!"

And Saki had to return her attention immediately to what was going on in Marineford, because as soon as Sengoku stopped talking, something happened.

A fleet surrounded Marineford's plaza, and though she couldn't see Whitebeard anywhere, she recognized many of the Jolly Rogers on those sails from the endless news reports from the New World, many of which she had been seeing since she was a little kid reading everything that fell in her hands back in Asteria. Crews affiliated with Whitebeard that had come to help, and that meant that the man himself was on the way.

The pirates didn't attack immediately, and the first line of defense of Marineford, the Shichibukai, started to shuffle in their positions, expectant.

After a tense silence, the Moby Dick emerged from the bay, along with several ships from Whitebeard's fleet, leaving the rest of the crews as a support line in the back.

Whitebeard's thunderous voice resounded through the speakers set up in Sabaody, accompanied by a strange, rumbling laughter that felt like it made the ground itself tremble. "How many decades has it been, Sengoku?"

Once again, the journalists in Sabaody went crazy trying to report the new development to their main offices, and the rest of the audience seemed to have switched anticipation and uncertainty for plain worry. The war was certain now, and everybody in the archipelago had first-row seats to it, and not solely because they were getting a broadcast of the events. Marineford was a stone's throw away, and it was only a matter of time for the storm to reach them.

Whitebeard punched the air with both fists and it cracked.

The ensuing explosion had many of the people watching gasping and covering their faces, and Saki could have sworn she hadn't only heard the sound through the speakers.

Bepo had winced at the noise and was looking around, uneasy.

"What's wrong?" Saki asked him.

"The ground's shaking."

"I don't feel anything," Penguin said.

"It's the power of Whitebeard's fruit," Law told them. "He can create earthquakes."

"I can feel it," Bepo said. "I don't like it, Captain. We're too close to Marineford, there may…"

The sentence died in his mouth as the cameras in Marineford picked up two gargantuan waves about to crash on Marineford's plaza, and as soon as they appeared, Admiral Aokiji froze them in place, along with the bay where Whitebeard's fleet had appeared, trapping them there and also creating a larger battlefield.

If the situation had made Saki feel small before, it was time to take conscience of how microscopic she and the crew were in the grand scheme of things.

The pirates leaped to action immediately, and so did the Marines, with the Vice Admirals taking the lead.

Saki tried to keep straight what was going on, but it soon proved to be impossible between all the cannon fire, Mihawk's slashes and the Devil Fruit powers making an indiscernible mess on the screen, particularly Kizaru's, Akainu's and Marco's, that were so bright and eye-catching that they obscured everything else.

Before long, incandescent rocks were falling from the sky and ships were sinking, but the pirates didn't back down for a second and a creature much larger than a battleship stepped forward to join the fight. Kuma, the real one, Saki assumed, released something that stopped the giant in its tracks, like a shockwave, and then the giant, with a strained effort, tried to land a hit on Doflamingo.

Saki had honestly forgotten for a moment that he was there, because even someone of his infamy didn't look all that impressive surrounded by those people, but then she saw him cut one of the creature's legs like it was nothing as he laughed like a maniac, and it made her skin crawl. She tried not to think that that was what Law was dealing with, and that sooner or later he'd become the Heart Pirates' problem.

She had to look away for a moment when the ground shook again, and this time all of them felt it.

And when she looked up again, alerted by some cries in the audience, she saw a warship and… people falling from the sky into the plaza.

And one straw hat drawing the spotlight to its owner.

"Is that…?" Saki whispered without thinking.

Shachi was gaping. "Are those Crocodile and Jinbei?"

"They were in Impel Down," Law said with disbelief. "How…?"

They had broken out. They had broken out and somehow Straw Hat Luffy was with them, along with a lot of men dressed in prison uniforms.

As everybody was distracted by the entrance and Jinbei yelling at Sengoku that he resigned his position as a Shichibukai, Crocodile tried to stab Whitebeard in the back, only to be defended by Luffy.

Saki's grip on the situation was completely gone and, if what had happened at the human auction was a good indicator, she wasn't going grasp it soon. "I'm lost."

"Me too," Shachi said.

"Me three," added Penguin.

When Luffy yelled at Whitebeard that he was going to be Pirate King, Saki couldn't take it anymore, covered her face, and started cracking up. The images of what was going on mixed with those of the auction incident to create a glorious resume for Straw Hat. You had to love the guy.

"I think she broke," Shachi commented.

"I don't blame her," Penguin replied.

And if Luffy was in one piece, it reassured Saki that Nico Robin would be, too, and she'd have another chance to find her in the future.

She looked up at the screen again as soon as she could stop, and the battle was raging once again, now with Kuma himself shooting light beams at the pirates, like the Pacifista they had encountered.

All the while, Sengoku kept speaking through the Den Den Mushi. "This man is another danger for the future. Not only was he raised together with Ace, but he is also the son of Revolutionary Dragon!"

It was Shachi's and Penguin's turn to snicker incredulously while Saki just stared, telling herself that at this point she was beyond surprise. It was okay. She could take everything thrown at her in stride. What was that tiny little detail on top of everything that was coming out in the open that afternoon?

The reporters in Sabaody just went crazy at the revelation, and she pitied the people at the home office who would be trying to put out an extra issue just to be bombarded with more outlandish discoveries.

The battle raged on, and Saki wasn't sure where to look at: the Shichibukai, the Impel Down prisoners, Whitebeard, the waves crashing against the plaza and the iceberg falling down on the battlefield… It was impossible to keep track of what was happening.

She didn't understand what was the point of broadcasting that. Just people killing each other over a man that, if the Marines were so bent on executing, they could have done it without publicizing it until the fact was done, instead of encouraging senseless carnage. It wasn't even as if they had provoked the war to trap the pirates and crush them. Both sides were equal in strength, and losses on the Marine's side had to be heavy too. It wasn't a good look.

It was then, for the first time, that Saki realized that there was a chance that Mack's sister was somewhere in that battle field, too. But when she looked at him, he was merely watching the screen intently with his usual laconic expression. Then again, he was as good at keeping his face blank as keeping kitchen invaders in check.

There was movement on the scaffold, and conversation was reignited again in the audience. More and more people in the grove became aware that something was going on, and comments that the Marines were going ahead of schedule began to circulate.

For one hour and a half, the pirates and Marines had been equally matched, but then, a ship full of Pacifistas arrived at the bay, flanking the pirates in the plaza from behind.

The people of Sabaody recognized them, too – as it appeared, many of them had been let loose the day of the auction house incident and the civilians had had to put up with the destruction left by their attacks.

All of a sudden, two of the screens died, and only the middle one remained, showing the image of a former member of Gold Roger's crew that Saki had never heard about, and that would have looked less out of place in a circus than in Marineford.

"That's not the Marines broadcasting…" Commented Jean Bart.

"That's it," Law said, eyes fixed on the last functioning screen, "the Marines cut the official transmission, but someone else must have gotten a hold of a Den Den Mushi."

"Cut the transmission?" Shachi repeated. "What for? They were the ones who set this up!"

The grove was filled with the indignant yells of people demanding to see the battlefield.

"There must be something they don't want to show to the audience," Saki suggested.

And then, the stolen camera captured something that would remain in the memory of the world for ages.

On of Whitebeard's men suddenly turned on him and stabbed him in the abdomen.

But contrary to expectations, Whitebeard didn't fight back. He just listened.

"Stop this stupidity, Whitebeard!" Said the man. "I have talked to the Marines! I know that they promised to spare the lives of you, your crew, and even Ace!"

The man rambled on about losing his former crew to Gold Roger and feeling betrayed that Whitebeard had taken his son under his wing, hiding it from his subordinates.

The words 'you sold us out', 'you made a deal with Sengoku' resounded in the archipelago among the stunned silence of the audience.

And with a blink, the last screen went black.

The audience was about to riot, and the handful of Marines that had been appointed as security were spouting excuses to stop the mob closing in on them.

"We're setting sail, Bepo!" Law said, already turning away from the screens.

"Aye, aye, Captain!" He replied immediately, and for good measure, he reasserted his dominance. "Follow me, Jean Bart!"

Jean Bart didn't seem to mind at all, and the rest of them followed suit behind him, thankful that he was opening the way so they didn't have to make their way through the crowd shoving people.

As soon as they were away from the thick of people, Penguin asked, "Where are we going?"

"Marineford," Law replied without stopping to look at him.

"W-what?"

Bepo was the only person in the group who didn't seem surprised by it, so they had probably talked about it beforehand.

"Why?" Shachi asked.

"And how are we even getting there?"

"Like Whitebeard did."

"The world's gone off the rails," Saki muttered under her breath, keeping the pace with the others. Screw it, if Law wanted to go to Marineford, she wasn't going to complain. Bad ideas had a tendency to turn out surprisingly well where he was concerned.

"Seriously, Captain, why?" Shachi insisted.

He glanced at Shachi and smirked. "Don't you want to see the end of the battle that will change the world?"

—

The entire battlefield seemed to hold its breath when Whitebeard leaped to action after having been stabbed, encouraging his men to fight with renewed energy.

Marina was holding up against those who came her way, but she was concerned about her men, so many of which had never met enemies of this caliber and had no means to defend against haki users, and she tried not to think that allowing them to follow her was the same as sending them to their death, because there was no time to think.

Dodging, running, parrying, throwing her chisels at the enemies hoping that, if they couldn't do the job, they would at least help another companion not get hurt.

The pirate she was fighting against at the moment coated his chest in armament haki, but her chisel sank in all the same, and she pulled it out as the man fell and hurried to one of her men, who was getting overpowered by several enemies.

She couldn't help but doubt the fairness of what her side was doing. Marina had never hesitated in pursuing pirates in order to protect the innocent, but this didn't feel right. Wouldn't she, too, have gone to help a friend in need?

She couldn't be sure, because Marina did not really have friends, only superiors and subordinates, but she wanted to think that she would have.

Still, orders were orders. Even if what had prompted the war in the first place was a situation she didn't want to think about, someone who understood better than her had decided that it would be the best for the world in the long run. It had to be. She had trust in their judgement, or the life she had worked so hard for since she'd turned the minimum required age to enlist would lose all meaning.

She fought for what felt like an eternity, not paying any mind to the wounds she was receiving, trying not to get disoriented in the melee, and doing her best to overcome the terror that assaulted her each time Akainu lauched his lava, or Whitebeard created an earthquake and the ground and the sea and land tilted.

A blast that swept over the plaza made everybody stop for a moment, and Marina saw several Marines and pirates alike drop to the ground, its source being Straw Hat Luffy, who at the last moment had knocked out the men at the scaffold.

It seemed to revitalize the pirates, and the battle resumed with more force than ever.

Marina was barely aware of Vice Admiral Garp getting knocked out, or Fire Fist Ace being freed, or the state Whitebeard was in, because the only thing in her mind was her survival and that of her subordinates.

What she heard, however, loud and clear, was Whitebeard's last order to his men. He wanted them to go, and he planned to die there fighting.

"I'm a remnant of my era… There ain't no ship that's going to carry me out to the new one…!"

The island shook uncontrollably and buildings started to break down and fall as the attack on Whitebeard intensified. And in the middle of that confusion, one of Akainu's punches landed on Fire Fist Ace and killed him.

Whitebeard's retaliation was immediate, and their headquarters broke in two from the force of the impact, but that wasn't the only thing that happened.

The island split in two, and Marina realized with horror that the only reason they were all still alive was because Whitebeard had been holding back that whole time. He could have sunk them from the beginning. He could have sunk them at that moment, too, but he wasn't doing it, even though most of his men were safe on the other side of the breach, and she didn't understand why he wasn't going to those lengths, when it was crystal clear that they would have been used against him, if it had been in the government's hands.

In the midst of that chaos, the Blackbeard pirates appeared, accompanied by more Impel Down escapees. Before anybody could realize what was happening, they landed the killing blown on Whitebeard, who parted from this world with one last resounding declaration.

The One Piece exists.

And then…

…Then the earth shook again.

It couldn't be.

Blackbeard was going on a rampage, using Whitebeard's power, and the confusion at what he had just done didn't stop the battle for a second, even though the pirates had lost everything, even though Marineford was about to be wiped out from the face of the planet. It was senseless, and nothing could stop it now.

Those were Marina's thoughts when something happened in the bay.

A yellow submarine she knew very well surfaced between the stationed ships, and she watched with disbelief the people filing out of it to stand on the deck.

The strength of her arms drained with one since glance at them. "Mack…?"

—

Marineford was less than an hour away from the archipelago, and the Heart Pirates got there even faster thanks to the engine of the submarine. Nobody was questioning the decision to go there, but the tension in the air was, nonetheless, palpable. Depending on how the battle had gone while they weren't watching, their escape could be very difficult.

Was Law driven only by curiosity about what might happen? Saki doubted that it was the whole reason for diving headfirst into danger when he was usually the cautious one of the bunch, but she didn't have any better ideas of what he might have been after.

He wasn't the only one, though. On the way there, they passed by what Saki could only imagine were onlooker ships, all of them anchored at a safe distance from the island, watching the war unfold.

Too fast for Shachi's and Penguin's liking, they got to their destination, and she felt sort of scared, too. Mack hadn't said anything yet, and Saki wanted to ask if he was okay, but he didn't look in the mood to talk, and she couldn't blame him.

The sub emerged as Buggy the Clown flew over the bay with Jinbei and Luffy on tow. The Polar Tang was surrounded by the pirate fleet and Marine warships, and up ahead the battlefield was pure chaos, the island was split in two, with most pirates on the beach section, and standing and unmoving on the other side was Whitebeard.

"Is he dead?" Shachi said near Saki, echoing her thoughts. "And where's Fire Fist?"

"It looks like the pirates are retreating. Did they…?"

"They lost?!"

Meanwhile, Law had stepped ahead and was yelling at Buggy. "Bring Straw Hat-ya over here!"

Several pairs of eyes landed on Law, but nobody spoke up as they waited for Buggy's reaction.

"Huh?! Who the hell are you, kid?"

While Law tried to convince him to drop Luffy on the sub, Saki watched the people Buggy was carrying. Luffy was clearly unconscious and he seemed to be on the verge of death, but Jinbei, who was holding him, didn't look much better, and she wondered which one of the beasts present had been able to take down a Shichibukai so thoroughly, because from what she had seen so far, they deserved their fame as frightening warriors.

"It'll be a shame if he ends up dying here!" Law insisted at Buggy. "I'm going to make sure he escapes! Entrust him to me for the time being! I'm a doctor!"

"Like I said, who the hell are you?!"

Honestly, if that man kept hesitating, he'd have two corpses in his hands and possibly an entire submarine weighing on his conscience, the existence of which, granted, was up in the air. None of the ships were attacking them, but it was a matter of time – a very short span of time – that someone on the shore tried to go after them.

Law was well aware of the double urgency. "Hurry! Get those two on board!"

"Captain!" Sturgeon yelled. "A Marine ship is cutting around from the coast!"

Right then, the world below them shifted. It was the closest sensation to waking up in your bed with the worst of hangovers as you realized that the world was still spinning from the night before and there was nothing you could do to stop it except wait it out and try not to fall, only it was actually happening outside of Saki's head. With the center located in the plaza, the ocean split into concentric rings of water that swiveled left and right, threatening to capsize the submarine and toss them overboard.

Jean Bart stopped Sturgeon and Shachi from falling against the railings, and Bepo caught Law by the arm before he could get too close to them. For once, Saki kept her balance, and it was a shame, because the situation was too dire to rub it in their faces.

"It's Kizaru!" Law suddenly yelled at Buggy.

Sure enough, behind him the Admiral had showed up and was heading straight to them. If Buggy stalled any longer and Law kept being stubborn, they were all going down.

"Alright!" Buggy said at last, throwing both pirates at the deck. "He's all yours, 'people I don't know!' Give it your best shot!"

Jean Bart was ready to catch them before Bepo could tell him to do so, and when they were secured in his arms he got a thumbs up from the mink.

Thankfully, Law didn't waste a second after that, motioning everybody to the door. "We're diving!"

With Luffy in Bepo's hands and Jinbei in Jean Bart's, Saki waited until the four of them were inside, along with most of her crewmates, trying to keep her eyes on the figure approaching them.

Kizaru was gone in less than the blink of an eye, and she couldn't tell where he had gone. Shit.

Bepo let a horrified cry out as he passed her. "These wounds are horrible! Is he still alive!? Gotta hurr—"

She found him again when there was a flash of light above the Polar Tang, coming from the mast of a nearby ship.

The Polar Tang was done for, too big of a target to get out of the way in time.

Saki believed a little bit in miracles when a pained cry coming from the island stopped everybody on the battlefield in their tracks, and the beam of light that had to sink them never came as Kizaru turned around to the source of the disturbance.

Someone was yelling at them to stop the fight. It was a young voice, and it took Saki a few seconds to make out a man in a Marine uniform, who stood in front of Akainu to obstruct his path.

"Let's stop this already! No more fighting! Let's end this! This is a waste of lives!"

The anguish of his voice rang in Saki's ears and made her shudder, and it dawned on her that the bravery of that boy had saved the lives of everybody in the submarine, and that he was going to die because of that, and she foolishly wished she was closer to help him get away, because nobody capable of doing that deserved to die in a war.

But she didn't have time to dwell on that, because a newly arrived ship sailed past them and the men inside promptly disembarked on the island, before any of the people in the plaza could realize what was happening.

Saki herself could scarcely believe what was happening when she saw the billowing Jolly Roger with three scars and a pair of cutlasses instead of bones.

"Holy shit," she muttered.

A man whose bounty she had seen countless times since she was a kid stepped between the young boy and the Admiral, and stopped the latter's punch just with a sword.

"Hurry!" Penguin yelled.

She wanted to. She knew she had to. But she was rooted to the spot with the unmistakable sensation that they were bearing witness to something that would go down in history.

Shachi was by the door, ready to shut it. "Hurry inside!"

At last, Saki headed inside, but stood on one of the first steps as she realized that what had been keeping Kizaru from sinking their ship had been none but Red Hair Shanks' first mate. He was threatening the Admiral with a pistol, and said man wasn't moving an inch.

He was threatening with a gun a man who moved at the speed of light, and it worked.

The submarine began to dive, and Saki stood by the door until the last moment, fully expecting to be scolded for that, but Law happened to be of the same mind, and gestured at Shachi, who was looking ready to punch Law and drag him in if he didn't close the door already, to go in.

And then, at the last second, Buggy tossed something their way.

"Captain!" Bepo said, panicked and not caring to hide it. "I know it's one of the Yonkou, but hurry up and close the door!"

"Yeah…" Law acknowledged him. "Hold on, something's flying towards us."

He caught it mid-air.

"Straw Hat's…?" Saki said, perplexed, and looked again at the battlefield. "Who—"

Law shut the door.

"We need to go," he said, and pushed the hat against Saki as he ran towards the operating room.

She let out a huff and felt some of the tension of the day leave her shoulders as she stared at the way Law had left with Bepo. She glanced at the Straw Hat she had against her chest and held it in one hand. It was beat up, frayed and repaired over and over. She had assumed before that Luffy wore a random hat, but it was clear that what she had in her hands was an old, cherished item. Important enough that somebody on the island made sure to get it back to him.

It was a mystery to be solved at another time.

Saki ran to the bridge, where she figured she could be more useful than in the middle of an operating theatre already occupied by several conscious people. Jean Bart was at the helm, and Sturgeon was yelling instructions at the top of his lungs.

Loud cracking sounds began to fill the sub and Jean Bart seemed to have difficulty steering the ship. For a moment, Saki thought they might have been hit and the structure was breaking down, but she couldn't see any damage, so she ran to one of the portholes and saw the ocean freezing behind them, ice surges covering the surface of the ocean and spiking towards them in pursue.

"It's Aokiji! He's freezing the sea!"

Between sudden the temperature changes and the earthquakes, the currents were completely out of whack.

"It'll take more than that to get us!" Jean Bart replied.

"Should I go get Bepo?"

"Don't worry, I can deal with this!"

Sturgeon kept yelling through a tube instructions at the guys downstairs. "Full speed! I don't care if the engine dies after this, but we need to go faster!"

As soon as he said that, a downpour of rays of light pierced the ice and rained all around them, and Saki had to hope for a second miracle, because no matter how good Jean Bart was, they didn't have the speed to dodge.

"It's gonna hit! Full speed ahead, to the sea floor!"

Maybe it counted as a wish upon a million shooting stars, because it worked, and they were able to leave Marineford unscathed and with two unforeseen passengers on board.

She placed the straw hat on Bepo's desk, only vaguely aware that she had been clasping it all along, and thinking with amusement that maybe it was the source of Luffy's unbelievable luck and it had seen fit to spread some of it to the Polar Tang in order to get its owner to safety.

There was only so much luck could do, though. What happened from then on was solely in Law's hands.

—

Marina couldn't believe her eyes.

Not because a young officer had tried to stand up to Akainu.

Not because Red Hair Shanks had stopped him with just one arm and no apparent effort.

It was because Akainu had been ready to execute one of his own subordinates. A boy who had had the courage to say what so many of them were thinking.

Marina was embarrassed to her core on behalf of the entire Navy, and the cracks that doubt had created the last time she had spoken to her brother only grew larger.

She could feel Phillip's eyes on her as she said, "What are we doing…?"

The arm grasping her chisels dropped to her side, and she saw the entire plaza, pirates and Marines alike, watching Shanks' next move.

"I've come to end this war!" Shanks declared, and he picked up Straw Hat Luffy's discarded hat and tossed it at Buggy the Clown.

Something caught in Marina's throat when she saw the ocean turn to ice and the shower of light beams piercing its surface where the Heart Pirates' submarine had been just a moment ago.

"Captain?" Phillip asked timidly, and her face returned to an impassible mask as she steeled herself to look ahead, at the Yonkou in the middle of the plaza and not at the place where her brother could have just died.

Nothing felt real anymore. Red Hair's intervention, one Shichibukai after another stepping away from the fight, and the Yonkou's challenge to fight him and his men at anybody who wished to continue fighting.

If pirates were truly a blight upon civilization, if the Marines and their justice was the last line of defense against the great evil that roamed the seas, the moment Marina saw Sengoku bend to Shanks' demands and let the pirate fleet retreat with their injured and fallen comrades, she knew the battle had been won, but the war had been lost.

It had taken the whole force of the World Government to stop one Yonkou and the losses had been so great that it would take them years to rebuild. Fighting another one would have meant their annihilation, and there were two more of them.

The world was theirs, and for the first time in her life, she couldn't bring herself to see it as a bad thing.

She noticed pirates and Marines crying alike. She saw Howe, a few steps ahead of her, trying to keep a straight face and failing, pressing his eyes and mouth tightly shut so the tears wouldn't slip through, and Phillip walking next to him to pat his back.

Marina thought that a handful of tears were the least disgraceful thing they had done that day.

She lifted a hand to her chest and grasped her shirt at the empty spot, unable to feel anything beneath, but taking comfort in the knowledge that it was sailing away safely, somewhere, with her brother. Perhaps in more ways than one.

As long as her heart kept beating, she knew he'd be fine.

—

When Bepo joined them on the bridge very soon after their escape, he stood in front of the sonar and stared at the sonar as if he could force the display to change by force of will.

"Are they still behind us?" Jean Bart asked. He was still steering the ship, heading to nowhere in particular. They only had the Log Pose pointing to Fishman Island and the Eternal Pose to Niva in their possession, so following either of them was out of the question.

"Yeah," Bepo said. "I don't know what to do or how they're keeping track of us. They're on the surface!"

"Let's shoot the torpedoes at them," Sturgeon suggested, looking at the sonar next to Bepo.

"Not without Captain's authorization."

"Man, he's busy and you're second in command."

"You don't know how Shachi and Penguin get when they have to build new ones and reload them."

"I can vouch for that." Saki piped up, keeping an eye on the porthole at the back in case it was the pursuers who shot at them. "Last time we…" She trailed off as she noticed something undulating close by. "What the hell?"

"What's going on?" Sturgeon asked, running next to Saki. He smelled like tobacco and too much body spray, and she inched away from him in reflex.

"That's what I want to know. Is that a snake?"

He squinted. "I think so."

"Is it smiling?"

"Yeah?"

"And wearing a skull and pointing up with its tail?"

"You think it's telling us to emerge?"

"I think I'm gonna ask Mack what he put in the brownies."

"Let me see!" Bepo said, barging in between the two. "She wants us to surface."

"She," Sturgeon repeated.

"Of course," Bepo replied, perplexed. "Can't you see it?"

Saki patted Bepo on the arm, hoping to avoid a silly argument. "Should we?"

Bepo turned towards the porthole again, and whatever transpired between he and the snake must have reassured him. "We're emerging!"

Saki and Sturgeon just sort of shrugged at each other behind his back.

It took only a moment to warn everybody, and Saki was ready to barge onto the deck with Penguin, Shachi and Bepo to toss overboard anybody who dared attack them as soon as they were out on the surface of the sea.

They opened the door to a Marine warship towering over the submarine, but contrary to what they had been expecting, there weren't any signs of an incoming attack. Also, the snake was on the deck, having surfaced along with the ship, smiling and hanging out at a safe distance from them.

Before they could decide what to do next with the reptilian stowaway, someone jumped out of the Marine ship and onto the main deck.

Saki knew they had lost half their manpower willing to toss the invader to the water the moment Shichibukai Boa Hancock landed in front of them. Admittedly, even she would have had second thoughts about it, but the heart eyes Penguin and Shachi were making at her were a bit too much.

"What is Luffy's condition?!" She asked.

Bepo was the one who answered. "Man, good job figuring out that we were emerging here… I thought the Marines were still tracking us or something. Is this some kind of sick joke?"

"I had Salome trace you on the ocean floor," she replied as the snake slithered up her way next to her. "And how dare you try and change the subject like that, you mere beast?"

All right, that put Hancock at the top of Saki's shit list at the moment. How dare she?

"Sorry…"

"Bepo?!"

"So weak willed!"

They couldn't harp on Bepo's defeatism for long, because the door opened again, and out came Law, still wiping the blood from his hands with a towel. Saki was fairly sure he had done it for effect, because he was very strict about cleanliness in the operating room and sickbay. She wouldn't put it past him to have used food coloring.

"I did all that I could," he told Boa. "He's still alive after the operation, but he's sustained an unbelievable amount of damage. There's no guarantee that he'll regain consciousness."

Ah, that was the captain they all knew and loved, handing out bad news with the utmost tact at a woman who could probably sink them in a matter of seconds if she felt like it.

After the way she had snapped at Bepo, Saki had expected a much different reaction than her silence and a worried expression. She felt bad for her, though not enough to let the insult towards Bepo slide. She also wondered how the coconuts had Luffy managed to befriend the captain of the Kuja Pirates.

Saki noticed that she had become gradually desensitized to meeting extraordinary people, starting from the moment they had started running into big names in Sabaody. After sailing into Marineford and back, seeing two Yonkou in the flesh and having a Shichibukai standing on their deck and another unconscious in the sickbay, being surprised by the humungous head of revolutionary Emporio Ivankov popping out of the warship didn't faze her half as much as it should have.

Shachi, however, yelled out at the top of his lungs, "What in the blazes of hell is that!?"

Ivankov, likely used to prompting that sort of reaction, ignored him completely. "Straw Hat gave it his best! Thanks to him, we managed to escape!"

The escaped prisoners from Impel Down were celebrating their freedom around Ivankov.

"They snuck onto the Marine's ship!" Hancock explained. "It seems like they are on Luffy's side."

"And what happened to the original crew?" Saki asked her.

"I took care of them."

Saki nodded slowly as Ivankov jumped onto the Polar Tang too, and her eyes went wide when she realized he was a big as Jean Bart. From what miraculous Grand Line place did these people sprout from?

Ivankov gave them the rundown of what had happened to Luffy and Ace while the prisoners cheered him on and Hancock was on the verge of tears.

"By the way, are you a friend of Strawboy's or something, sweetie?"

There was a small pause before Law spoke. He was either processing the 'sweetie' or waiting for a smart comment, and he was lucky that Shachi and Penguin were too busy staring at Hancock and that Saki had more interest in where the conversation was going than interrupting it.

"…No. I had no reason to save him either, but if kindness makes you uncomfortable, should I make up one?"

"No, thank you!" He said, gesturing wildly. "There are times when instinct moves our bodies, after all!"

Saki wasn't convinced, but she kept quiet. She wasn't so sure about Law claiming to have no particular reason to help Luffy. He wasn't the kind of person to put the crew in danger for a whim.

The door opened once again and Jinbei appeared. "Trafalgar Law from North Blue… I thank you!" He said solemnly. "You saved my life!"

Law was not having it. "Sleep. You'll die."

A hilariously cranky Law meant that he was probably very tired, and he wasn't taking kindly to the possibility of Jinbei undoing his work because he couldn't stay still. Saki was about to get annoyed at him and then it dawned on her that she was the type to do exactly the same, so she became discreetly embarrassed instead as Jinbei lamented his perceived failures.

"Beast!" Hancock suddenly called out, and Saki had to make an effort not to snap when she noticed she was speaking to Bepo. "Do you have a Den Den Mushi or something?"

"Yeah. Ah… Yes, we do, ma'am! Sorry!"

"Aw, that's not fair…" Penguin said quietly. "You're like the empress' slave or something!"

"Penguin," Saki said, staring at him with a concerned expression, "you need to get your head checked or a girlfriend."

"Why not both?"

"Talk to a doctor."

"If we call the Kuja fleet, this submarine will be able to cross the Calm Belt," she explained as if she hadn't taken to routinely insulting the second most important person in the submarine and there weren't two horny idiots a swift kick away from her. "If Luffy's survival is made known to the government, they'll surely send pursuers. We must hide in Amazon Lily. As long as I am still a Shichibukai, we will be able to treat him in safety."

Bepo, thoroughly whipped, ran into the sub to get the Den Den Mushi.

"Jinbei, you really should go rest," Saki told him. He looked like he was making an effort to stand, and he had just gone through surgery. "If you want to thank our captain for his help, you shouldn't let his effort go to waste."

Jinbei looked at her a little surprised. "You're right. I don't want to become a burden for you."

"She's absolutely right," Ivankov said, waving him away. "You need to be a good boy and lay down." And then he looked at the escaped prisoners in the Marine ship, and said, "Well then, my mission to protect Strawboy ends here! I'm going to leave everything to ya'll here, is that alright, Jinbei?"

"Yes. I still can't swim freely, either. I'll ascertain Luffy's recovery with my own eyes… I don't know what I'll be able to do, though."

Saki was convinced that the answer to that question was nothing, and that if there had been something Law himself couldn't do, Jinbei would certainly not be the one to come up with anything better. She got that he was affected by what had happened, but she it was grating on her that every new party at the scene wasn't showing the respect they ought to the people who had saved Luffy's ass.

Jinbei started to make his way to the door and Saki held it open for him. She was curious about Luffy's state, but nevertheless she decided to stay outside with the group, with the small confirmation that he was still holding on through the beeping of the machines he was connected to.

—

The Kuja were…

Well.

They were a special kind of people. Saki wouldn't say anything else because they were going out of their way to accommodate them and she acknowledged their helpful disposition, and even though she hadn't gotten the best first impression from their ruler, she didn't have anything against the other women she had met so far.

She hadn't expected it after seeing Hancock and her crew on the way to Amazon Lily, but the women that hadn't been out there in the world had very strange views on men.

And apparently they considered Saki an oddity, since she was travelling in a ship full of men out of her own free will.

She had never wished harder that they had kidnapped Felicia from the coconut underworld and brought her along, if only to divert their attention and not be the only exception.

Some of the blame fell on her, though. She had thought it would be interesting to talk to the women who came to bring them food to the beach, and though they had been skittish at first, as days went by and they seemed to trust Saki more, the conversations became progressively longer, and Saki's perplexity grew.

She didn't understand how their society survived, either. Did they leave the island to procreate? Did they need to become pirates to get permission to travel? How conducive was joining a pirate crew and then getting pregnant? In case that wasn't one of their goals, how did they maintain a stable population? There were a lot of them. What did they do with babies assigned male at birth? Was there an island of men somewhere out there that nobody had ever heard about, because of course most sailors weren't interested and it made for a worse legend?

These were the exact kind of questions she really wanted to ask and could not bring herself to because she possessed a quality called tact, the existence of which some of the guys clearly ignored and in her case denied, because they kept nagging her to find out, please, she was their only hope, and rightfully so, because Saki wouldn't wish any of those louts on an unsuspecting lady. The women barely looked in their general direction when the men were aware of their presence. As far as she was concerned, the only people in the crew who had proved to have an ounce of decency were the giant guy, the bear, the captain and the gay man, and she thanked her lucky stars for their presence every day they had to spend on that beach.

After several days like that, she couldn't wait for Luffy to wake up so they could leave, and the guys stopped being weird about the locals. She was also getting a little claustrophobic on that beach. It was a small strip of land with nothing but rocks, and the women had cordoned off the area with curtains so the guys couldn't look into the island. She supposed she would be allowed to go farther inland if she asked nicely, and though she honestly thought it would be amazing to see a town and get an idea of how they lived, she didn't want to be trapped in a social situation with a bunch of oddly socialized strangers for hours in the case they said yes, so she let that once in a lifetime opportunity escape without regrets.

Law, on the other hand, had been very quiet for a few days, as if trying to balance out the rest of the crew. Not in one of his moods, not really, just most distant and pensive than usual. Every now and then, he sat on the beach with the straw hat in his hand, staring thoughtfully at it. Luffy's condition had stabilized, but he wasn't waking up. Jinbei, on the other hand, was moving around from the moment they arrived to the island. She still didn't understand what had made Law want to rescue them.

"Do you think he's okay?" She asked Bepo one day, sitting with her knees to her chest on a mossy rock that overlooked the Polar Tang while he fished. He already had a few catches in a bucket.

Law was talking to Jinbei at that moment. Saki had grown past her initial annoyance at him as soon as he'd agreed to keep still, but he was still a stranger, and given their odd circumstances, she'd rather keep to herself and her friends.

"He hasn't told me anything," he replied, "but I don't think he's in a bad mood. I think he's sorting out his thoughts."

"Nobody has this many thoughts to sort through," she rebutted childishly, leaning her head on her knees. "Do you have any clue why he saved them?"

The sea looked so inviting that she was tempted to jump down swim to the nearest island just to have something to do.

"A doctor is a doctor." Bepo looked at her with amusement. "But why don't you ask him?"

"Because if it's important, he's not going to tell."

Bepo smiled a little and returned his attention to the line. "You may distract him."

"I'll pass."

"You wouldn't bother him, you know."

"I didn't say that," she replied, feeling attacked because he had read her mind.

"Uh-huh," he replied nonchalantly. "I'm watching."

"What?"

"I'm always watching."

Resisting the urge to grab a fish from the bucket and slap him on the head with it, she started to say, flustered, "What are you imp—"

But then the door of the submarine literally burst open, Saki jumped on the spot, Bepo dropped the fishing rod, and Luffy launched himself onto the beach and into the island, disappearing behind the separation marked with the Kuja Pirates' flag, and Jinbei took off after him.

The crew gathered in the middle of the beach, looking in the direction where Luffy had gone off, and fretting about what to do, but mostly about what were the chances of having their nether regions chopped off if one of the Kujas caught them trespassing.

"Screw it," she said, frustrated, and pulled one of the curtains apart to see what was going on on the other side. At least be able to warn the others if Law's unexpected surge of goodwill had gone to waste.

It was all tropical forest as far as the eye could see, but Luffy had left a straight path of destruction in his wake that Jinbei, she assume, had followed. She could hear the ruckus from far ahead, so she decided to stay put on that side of the curtain, waiting to see what would happen.

The warnings from her friends that she was going to get herself killed if she didn't go back were kind of grating, but their concern was touching, even if they had apparently forgotten that she happened to be a woman and she technically wasn't doing anything wrong.

When it became clear that Luffy wasn't dying and that the entire island was probably hearing his anguished screams anyway, she crossed the curtain again and was immediately ambushed.

"How was it?"

"Are there any girls?"

"Did you see any female bears?"

"For fuck's— What's your problem?!" She snapped. "It's just a forest, there isn't anybody else there!"

She huffed, walked a bit to the side of the group and stood there waiting for developments, like she'd basically been doing all those days, when a huge splash coming from the ocean made her turn around and Penguin pulled out a pair of binoculars to see.

"Take a look at that, it's a gigantic sea king!"

"What's going on?" Shachi asked. "Is it fighting with something?"

"It's dead!" He exclaimed. "Something just killed that thing!"

They guys huddled closer to Penguin to comment on what was going on and try to get the binoculars from him, and Saki kept staring in the direction of the splash. What she figured was the sea king floated in the water, but something else was moving in their direction at high speed, and she hoped whatever it was would stay away from the sub. Law was still sitting on his spot from before, but watching intently.

Soon enough, they saw who was the culprit of the sea king's demise when Dark King Rayleigh climbed onto the rocks while holding his shirt and coat under one arm.

For some reason, Saki got more fixated on that little, absurd detail than the whole story of him punching the daylights out of a sea king, or his boat sinking outside the Calm Belt and him thinking it was a perfectly acceptable alternative to swim all the way to Amazon Lily anyway. She also noticed that Law was silent and sweating bullets, and she would have paid good money to know what was going through his head at the moment.

They eventually pointed him to the way Luffy had gone and, to the indignation of many, he crossed the designated perimeter and went to find him.

In the end, she sat down more or less near Law while she watched the proceedings, and he tossed at her the straw hat he had been spinning on one finger.

She caught it, and glanced at him. "You're a weirdo."

He looked at her in confusion, but she didn't elaborate, and it didn't matter, because at the end of the day he was their weirdo, and she had yet to meet a Heart Pirate who wasn't okay with it.