Cross-Brain AN: For anyone who was honestly upset about the cliffhanger? Come now, we all knew that that battle would be a curb-stomp, and not in the Straw Hats' favor. This… is just the logical conclusion.
"Gum-Gum Homerun!"
"Typhoon Lash!"
"WATCH YOUR HEAD!"
"Jihahaha! Is that the best you—?!"
"LIGHTNING BOLT TEMPO!"
KEE-RACK!
"—GRAH!? Urgh… ack… alright… credit where it's due. That stung a bit. And more than that, it's pissed me off. So… congratulations, Straw Hats, you've made me decide to do the one thing I haven't had to do in twenty years."
"SHUT THE HELL UP, YOU SHITTY GOLDEN BASTARD! SKY WALK! MOUTON—! GAH!? WHAT THE— LET ME GO, YOU PIECE OF—!?"
CRUNCH!
"GAAAAGH!"
"I… am going to give you the courtesy… of actually putting some effort into crushing you all down into the size of a pebble. Honestly, you all should feel honored…"
A rumble, a heave, the earth itself crying out in tortured rage and agony.
"The last time I used this technique, it was to take care of a particularly stubborn member of Linlin's brood. Lion's Threat: Earth Bind."
"What the—ohfuckme EVERYONE MOVE, NOW!"
"No! Nonono! Guys! GUYS! GET OUT OF THERE!"
"DAMN IT, IT'S TOO THICK!"
"I CAN'T BREAK OUT!"
"OH, NOOOO!"
"SHIKIIII! GET BACK HERE!"
"How about… NOT ON YOUR LIFE, BRAT! NOW DO THE WORLD A FAVOR AND LET THE EARTH SWALLOW YOU AND YOUR DREAMS WITHOUT EVEN A TRACE! JIHAHAHA! JIIIIHAHAHA!"
"No… no… this… t-this can't…"
"Face reality, Miss Navigator. It has and it is. Now… I suggest you think real hard about my proposal… and about what you really want right now."'
"You… you…"
"Think. Hard."
"…whatever I want?"
"Apart from that little stunt you pulled back in my palace? Yes."
"…alright. You leave the East Blue alone… and let my friends go."
"That's two wishes, Miss Navigator."
"Yeah, well… I'm a greedy bitch. And if my skills weren't worth that much, I wouldn't still be standing here. So now, you choose. Take it. Or. Leave it."
"…You drive a hard bargain. But your skills are not impressive enough to make me abandon twenty years of preparation. I will give you my word that I will not attack your home island, and I will even be generous and extend that promise to the rest of your former crew. But the rest of the East Blue… it burned my dreams twenty years ago, and now it burns in turn. Not even you can stop that."
Grinding teeth, pure frustration and rage. "F-Fine. Fine. You have a deal. Now let's go, a-and you'll let my crew go, right?"
"Heh. Exactly right. Buuuut, I would not have my newest crewmate think me without mercy. Or at least, completely without mercy. Here. I trust you know what to do with this?"
"I… yeah. Yeah, I do. Alright, just-just give me a second."
CLI—
SLAP! "—AKE UP, CROSS!"
"GAH!"
I shot upright, rubbing my stinging cheeks. "Ugh… Vivi, I'm not Usopp, and I'm not dying of hypothermia, what the heaaaargh?" My grumpy demand trailed off into a pained groan as the rest of me lodged their complaints all at once.
"Oi, don't remind me of that, especially not now," a nasally voice—Usopp's I think, though the ringing and doppler effect in my ears made that hard to tell—grumbled from nearby.
"Under normal circumstances, I'd want to hear that story, but right now we have bigger questions to handle," came a cooler female voice from beside me.
I blinked and looked towards the voice, the blur that was its source slowly coming into focus. "Robin…?"
"The same," Robin answer, her slightly fuzzy arm pointing over my shoulder. "Can you tell us what we just pulled you out of?"
Still dizzy as all get-out, I turned my head to follow her finger, and was confronted with the awe-inspiring sight of a titanic spiral pillar… of…
I clenched my eyes shut and clapped a hand to my throbbing forehead as it all came rushing back to me at once. "Ohdamnitalltohell…" I hissed under my breath.
When I reopened my eyes, I was finally able to see the details that had escaped me just moments before.
I could see the annihilated and still-smoldering ruins that were all that was left of the village.
Of how deep of a crater we were in the bottom of.
Of the rest of my friends being slowly, painstakingly drawn out of the pillar we'd all been entombed in.
And I became painfully, agonizingly aware of who was missing.
The last of the cobwebs faded from my mind, the last pieces of the utter clownstomping we'd been handed slotted into places, and I looked at Robin in despair.
"Shiki?" I croaked. "Nami?"
"They were long gone long before we got here," Franky's voice said from a short distance away. "We found out about his plans to level the village a second after Vivi left, and by then we couldn't catch up in time to tell her. We took the time to put a plan together with Bartolomeo, but the second we saw Shiki about to face you guys, we were gone. We met Vivi halfway, and when we actually got here…"
"What the hell happened?!" Vivi cut in, gripping my shoulder and shaking me. Her expression cycled through emotion after emotion, and dizzy as I still was, I had no chance to process them. "I-I thought you said, I thought—!"
"We weren't ready."
It said a damn lot that it was Luffy who growled out what we were all thinking.
"We underestimated him, we were all still tired, and we got our asses kicked because of it," Luffy bluntly summarized.
"It didn't help that he provoked us the way he did," Sanji literally fumed as he burned his way through his second cigarette since we'd woken up. "Objectifying Nami-swan and making himself out to be the victim… I want to explode just thinking about it. Grrrgh." Growling, he massaged his forehead. "Which, in retrospect, is exactly what he was going for."
"An-zzt-d it sure as he-kchk-ll didn't help that he went s-bzz-traight for Soundbite first," Su provided, her voice shaky and staticky. Soundbite was on her back, spiderweb cracks decorating his shell.
I did a bit of a double take at seeing Soundbite somewhere other than on my shoulder, but the fact that our non-human crew members were talking told me it wasn't serious and kept me calm.
"I'll patch him up as soon as my body lets me," Chopper sighed from nearby, no doubt having noticed all the looking about I'd done. "I knew I was pushing myself too hard… and if I try anything else now, I don't know if my body will be able to keep up as long as I need it to."
"If Soundbite isn't in any danger, then that's fine," Luffy said, his hat shadowing his eyes as he surveyed the mountain, the ruins, and the state of his crew. "But Shiki is going to pay for this. Guards."
"Sir!" the five Dugongs saluted immediately.
"Take Merry and go ahead of us to the Sunny. As soon as we're ready to fight, we're going to Coup de Burst straight up to Shiki's palace. Make sure he's ready."
"Aye-a-zzt!-ye!" four of them barked, Boss already moving to grab Merry. The elder Dugong paused, though, when Donny spoke up, his expression clearly hesitant.
"A-Actually… I, uh…" Donny slowly withdrew a seashell from behind his back, a gold and somewhat ornate one. "I-I was look-krcht!-ng around once I got out and found th-zzt!-is. I… think it's a Tone Dial, but… I don't remember us hav-eeng!-ing one like this. Do… Do you guys think…?"
The discomfort on his face slowly transmitted to the rest of us and we all stared at the shell with something approaching existential dread.
"Should… Should we listen to it?" Conis asked uncertainly.
"It could just be another attempt by Shiki to make us go out of our minds again," Vivi reasoned, slipping out one of her Cutters. "Maybe we should…?"
"Here, give it to me," Robin prompted, materializing an arm in front of Donny and gesturing invitingly. "I'll listen to it myself, and if it's not worth our time, I'll crush it immediately."
Donny glanced at Luffy. Our captain nodded, and the dugong handed off the Dial to her, new arms swiftly carrying it out of earshot.
Robin closed her eyes in concentration, and a second later, they snapped open, framed by a suddenly deathly pale face. "It's not Shiki."
"Are you—?"
"It's not Shiki," she repeated, purely desperate… I don't even know what emotion that was etched on her face. The Dial soared back out of the bushes, and she caught it and played it in one smooth motion.
"Please forgive me for not being able to say farewell to you all directly."
Our hearts all practically stopped at Nami's voice coming from the shell, sounding more defeated and downtrodden then I'd ever heard her before.
And that 'stop' went outright frozen for me as she continued to speak, her every word just making… everything so very, very much worse.
~o~
With a grimace, eyes closed, Nami allowed the Tone Dial to fall from her grasp and settle on the altered earth below.
"Very good," Shiki sneered. "Now, let us be going. The ceremony will begin soon."
Nami so wanted to pin the bastard to the nearest intact wall, be it with her glare or her Eisen Tempo or even a physical bolt of lightning, but at the moment, that wasn't an option. As such, she settled for dredging up her memories of Arlong and giving the lion-bastard the least-obviously stiff nod she could manage. "Fine, let's go."
And so Nami started to march off in the direction the Shiki indicated—
"Wait."
And then froze as a very familiar voice spoke up, and both she and Shiki both turned their heads to face the source: a grim and gaunt goth, with her head bowed low and her expression shadowed by the… well, shadow of her umbrella.
"Perona?!" Nami gasped even as Shiki tilted his head curiously.
"So, you managed to survive the onslaught, hm?" the Float-human questioned. "What, are you looking for a round two or something? Fair warning." Three stones lifted off the ground to orbit above his palm. "I won't be quite so merciful with you as I was with my navigator's old crew."
Nami was about to either protest the threat or ask Perona what the hell she was thinking, but before she could do either…
"Will you allow me to join your crew?"
The navigator's brain stalled as the incongruent words hit her ears. "…what?" she whispered numbly.
Shiki, meanwhile, took the question much better. "Join me?" He leaned back in thought, a cloud of smoke spilling out his mouth. "Hmm… well, your abilities are genuinely intriguing. But do you really expect me to believe that you too would so easily betray your crewmates? After you helped your friend… lose her way earlier at that?"
"N-No! No!" Nami hastily protested, shaking her head at her 'captain' before running to Perona's side, reaching out to her in desperation. "Perona, please, you don't have to—!"
SLAP!
Nami's words died in her throat, the cold and almost impersonal look that the Goth had showed her doing an even better job than the forceful strike that had knocked her hand away.
"'Have to'?" Perona repeated, her face and tone as expressionless as a statue. "Of course I do. I told you, remember? I am not, have never been, and never will be a part of your crew. The only reason I got on your ship was to find somewhere new I could live in luxury, and what do you know, I found it. Hell, I found my way on to the only hunk of rock that's not going to be burning in a week. Really, the only thing you should be asking is why I wouldn't want to join Shiki's crew, when the Straw Hats mean absolutely nothing to me."
"B-But…" Nami whispered numbly, her mind still playing catch-up. "Y-You're my friend…"
"Horo!" the ghost princess barked out a harsh laugh. "'Friend'?! Remind me, have I ever, even once, addressed you as my friend? Hm? Have I?"
The navigator tried to answer… but nothing came out.
"Thought not. And just to clarify things, let me tell you exactly why I hung out with you, even when I didn't think of you as a friend." Perona leaned in close, putting her scowl an inch from Nami's face. "You. Were. Convenient. A means to an end. And it would have been too much trouble to let you die while I was travelling with that crew. But now, I don't need them anymore, so now I don't need you. So, in short?"
Perona straightened up and adopted a most pleasant and innocent expression. "Thank you ever so much for helping me find a new home where I can live the rest of my days in peace and comfort." And then, just like that, all emotion fled. "Now please, leave me the hell alone."
Through it all, Shiki didn't move, not even when Perona looked him dead in the eye. He stared for several seconds, neither wavering, until finally, his face split into a grin.
"That was cold, girly," he remarked. "And I love it. Perona, was it? Welcome to my crew. You'll excuse me if I put your wish on hold until later. Now, if that's all, let's be going."
Perona nodded curtly and followed after him, making a point of bumping into Nami in the process. The navigator flinched and clutched at the struck shoulder as if it'd been hit much harder as she followed with a sad, sour expression on her face.
The action drew an inquisitive glance from Shiki, one that fell on the gauze wrapping the joint. "By the way, Miss Navigator, I noticed that you've been wearing that bandage all week. Did you contract that serious of an injury? I can have one of my doctors take a look at it."
Nami flinched again, her nails biting even harder into her shoulder. "No, it's not injured. It's just… not time yet."
Shiki cocked an eyebrow at the answer, but shrugged dismissively. "Whatever you say, Miss Navigator. Aaaanyways, you both go ahead, yeah? I'll be right behind you."
From their expressions, both women wanted to know why Shiki wanted to stay behind. But neither wanted to test their new captain's patience, and so trudged away.
Once they were past the intact section of the village and out of sight, Shiki's ever-present grin gained a particularly violent edge. "Should have thought things through a little bit longer, Miss Navigator," he whispered gleefully.
And so, with an almost dismissive flick of his hand, a veritable blast of earth erupted in front of the door to the bunker, which he'd torn open earlier.
Chuckling to himself, Shiki took to the air. "After all," he said. "Can't have a proper bloodbath without the slaughter."
A minute later, the Golden Lion landed next to his new crewmates. "Alright, all good. Let's go!"
So they went, Shiki hauling up a chunk of earth to transport them to their new home.
And as they rose to the air, Nami cast a final, mournful glance towards the monument her crew had been made into, and could only pray that everyone would understand the message she had left them.
~o~
A picture of grinding teeth, bleeding palms, and eyes reflecting every force of nature imaginable defined our crew as we listened to the tape.
Some of our reactions were more volatile than others: Chopper was twitching on his hooves, eyes flickering in and out of cyan madness; Conis had blood dripping from between her clenched fingers; and where Vivi's face was dead to the world, absent of all reaction, I could sense something swirling in the back of her mind, roiling off of her.
What that was, I didn't know. My mind was… busy.
"That's why…" Nami's voice choked out. "That's why I'm begging you to forgive me for—"
"WHAT THE HELL IS THIS!?"
Everyone else flinched at the sudden, livid bellow Luffy let out, drowning out whatever the hell else Nami had been about to say.
And I… I didn't begrudge him. Because I… I just… I just couldn't. I-I literally couldn't.
For a few seconds Luffy just stood there, snorting and growling as he glared bloody murder at the offending Dial. Until finally, something just snapped behind his eyes and he spun on his heels, marching off.
Franky cast a worried look after Luffy, but then he shook his head and pointed at Robin. "Hey, play that again."
And that was when I snapped. "Do it without me," I hissed, fighting to keep my tone under control.
Usopp looked at me in surprise. "But, Cross, she was saying something at the end—!"
"I've heard enough," I bit out, daring anyone to dispute me.
If anybody wanted to, I didn't give them a chance. I just snatched Soundbite off of Su's back, slapped him onto my shoulder and stalked off, my teeth grinding like a chainsaw.
I just… it just… I could barely even think I was so… so…
No words. None. None.
We'd lost. Lost again. Lost so. Fucking. Badly.
And he hadn't even been trying. He ripped us apart.
Humiliated us. Laughed at us, like we were trash.
And then Nami.
Not only had he taken her…
But her voice was there. Summarizing it, emphasizing it.
Hammering. It. In.
Hammering in the fact that I had…
That we had…
That we'd…
We—!
"FUCK!"
SMASH!
I huffed and snarled as I came down from the peak of my unholy rage. My chest heaved and my throat ached from the roar I'd let loose, but I barely noticed as I yanked my foot out from the chunk of wall I'd demolished.
Soundbite eyed me warily, if still a bit dizzily. "That help? At all?"
I snorted derisively, my fingers twitching and jerking in my gauntlets. "No. And you know damn well the only thing that'll—!"
"GRAGH!"
S-SMASH!
I was cut off by a second roar of fury, one that was accompanied by two simultaneous crashes.
One source was obvious, Luffy withdrawing his arm from the rubble he'd just created, but the other was something of a surprise.
I looked at Zoro, standing in front of a mutilated track of land with all three of his swords drawn. His fists were strangling Shusui and Kitetsu, his teeth grinding into Wado, his body trembling with energy and emotions just waiting to be unleashed. Our eyes met…
And I realized that no, this wasn't a surprise. Rather, it was the only possible outcome.
And as the energy slowly drained from my body, and some of the edge on my emotions dulled, I knew there was only one way this could be done.
I huffed, taking my hat off to wipe the sweat from my brow. "…Captain."
Luffy snapped an immolating glare at me out the corner of his eye. A glare I met without flinching.
"…I'm the tactician," I stated. "My job is to make the plans. And I can do that. I can give you a hundred and one different plans, right here, right now, but only you can tell us what direction we're headed. Only you can tell us our destination. So," I spread my arms out wide, indicating… everything around us. Everything that had happened. "What's the play?"
Luffy continued to stare at me, and without looking away, he slowly raised his hand and pointed at the island looming so high above us. "…I want," he whispered, honest to God murder in his voice. "To make him pay."
"Alright, then that's what we'll do…" I nodded slowly, the motion gaining momentum as I jammed my hat back into place, right way forward. "We'll make him pay."
Zoro snorted in agreement, finishing the knot of his bandana with an almost whip-like crack!. "Then let's get it done."
We made to go back to the crew—
FWOOM!
And we all came to a dead halt at the sudden, and utterly incongruous, blast of air that hit us. A surprise, yes, but when nothing else happened we all brushed it off and continued on our way.
Nobody looked at us as we returned, because they were more concerned with the epicenter of the wave of air pressure.
With Princess Nefertari Vivi.
I gave her a once-over: hunched forward, hand clamped against her mouth, eyes screwed shut. Then suddenly they flew open, and I met the merciless steel in her gaze.
"…So," I asked as she straightened up and examined her hands in a whole new light. "How did it taste?"
Vivi clenched and unclenched her hands, as if to see if they still functioned properly. Satisfied, she snapped them into fists, giving me a determined nod.
"Delicious," she proudly declared.
Luffy's only response to that was a grave nod, following which he slowly panned his gaze over his crew, meeting their eyes one by one. He found exactly what he wanted and expected to see, and turned to face the continent that reigned over them all.
"No speeches," he stated in a matter-of-fact tone. "No waiting. No mercy. Let's go."
"Right," was our unanimous reply.
And that was all there was to be said on the matter.
-o-
Shiki the Golden Lion was on cloud nine in all but puffy white water. He had utterly devastated the crew of rookies that somehow thought that they stood a chance against him, conveniently ignoring the injuries that were loudly voicing their displeasure at existence. He had his armies together, his macabre masterpiece was complete, and in only a matter of hours, his revenge, twenty years in the works, would begin. No force in Paradise could stop him now.
His eyes scanned over the crews as they shuffled in and kneeled, grinning as he took in each of the faces. All of them were veteran Paradise pirates save for one rookie crew. That they were formidable fighters was a given, but even a New World veteran like him couldn't help but be impressed at the act of getting away with attacking a Celestial Dragon. Nobody had ever done that publicly before, and when he thought back to his equally unprecedented feat of escaping from Impel Down… well, an exception had to be made.
As the crews continued to file in, he gave a cursory scan of his monitors. His newest recruit, Perona, was lying in a four-poster bed that matched the decorations of her luxurious pink and black room, her face pulled wide in a grin as she rolled around, trying to get comfortable. The village was completely in ruins; only the visual snail watching had survived the carnage. The beasts were as savage as ever, and the ceremonial hall was filling up. Perfect.
Shiki observed as the last of the crews, the Barto Club Pirates, passed him with respectful nods that the captain somehow managed to make look crass. But he brushed it off; for allies as valuable as him, he was willing to overlook some eccentricities.
More importantly, now… now was the start of the age of his glorious—!
Shiki's grin dropped into an irritated glower as something caught his eye on another of the monitors: an incongruous lump of red on one of the Daft Green trees. The pieces put themselves together in his mind as fast as blinking.
"Damn it all," he growled to himself, striding down from his throne in an irritated huff, the underlings in the immediate area quailing away.
SQUEEK, SQUONK SQUEEK SQU-WONK!
Even the heavily bandaged Doctor Indigo stopped short, after running all the way to see him. The imposing clown shifted uncomfortably on his rubbery shoes, his eyes darting back and forth in the gap in the gauze that was all but his second face. Finally, he lifted his finger up, took a deep breath—
"Don't bother, I'm already aware," Shiki said before Indigo could get the words out, gliding past him.
The chemist blinked, eyes tracking his commander as he stalked off. Once Shiki was out of sight, and with no retaliation coming, the doctor mentally shrugged and squeaked off to finish his preparations for the main event.
Unseen to anyone, on her screen, Perona's rolling had escalated into tossing and turning, and then into an outright fit. The ghost-ruler was shaking her head and rapping her knuckles against her skull, eyes scrunched shut and teeth grinding, rocking back and forth on crossed legs. She even appeared to be speaking, snarling at first, then screaming, but the lack of audio made it impossible to tell what. Comfort, at this point, was out of the question.
Finally, Perona's body snapped ramrod straight, muscles trembling as she loosed what could only be a blood-curdling shriek. White swirled into the video, and a second later, it snapped to static.
-o-
While Nami wasn't sure she'd ever truly forgive Kalifa for what she'd done to her crew, she had to admit that she owed the assassin at least one. If it weren't for the soap-based change in demeanor the assassin had inadvertently inflicted, it would be close to impossible for her to use her iron clouds to strap bundles of dynamite to the odious Daft Green trees surrounding the palace without slowing her Waver. Such was her pace that she had less than a minute's work left before she'd be able to take out Shiki's sole defense against his own creations with just one zap of lightning.
The only impediment to her work was the rancid smell of the trees. She had brought along a makeshift gas mask in the form of a wet cloth tied around the bottom of her face, but it had long since proven utterly inadequate for the task. But she'd be done soon, and then—
CRASH!
"Aaaaghh…"
A tortured groan crawled out of Nami's throat, her mind struggling to process what the hell had just happened to her. One second she'd been speeding along on her Waver, preparing the last touches to bring Shiki's world crashing down around his head, and the next—now—she was lying face-down in the snow, her entire body screaming in pain. Obviously, something had happened in between, but damn if she knew what.
Moving slowly in an attempt to avoid aggravating her injuries any further, Nami pushed herself to her hands and knees and tried to find her Waver so that she could get back to work—!
"…ah," Nami squeaked out, her brain stalling at the utterly impossible sight before her eyes.
Her Waver, Nami's Waver, her means of transportation, of tearing free across the waves without pause or hesitation, had just been destroyed.
Well, that was probably something of an exaggeration; the body was mostly intact, but the whole front wheel and the steering mechanism were straight-up gone. Ripped out of their frame, and a good chunk of the prow of her Waver with it. It wasn't irreparable damage, but that didn't help her when she needed it right this minute.
"Wh-What the hell…?" Nami breathed, weakly reaching out to her devastated possession. "How did this—?"
"You have been insulting me without pause for seven days now, Miss Navigator."
Nami's blood, and all the rest of her, froze. It was with an almost corpse-like stiffness that she craned her head upward and stared evil in the eye.
"And the most infuriating part is these little stunts," Shiki continued, his deceptively calm tone betrayed a twitching, too-tight smile. "This is pushing my tolerance to the breaking point. I am a very patient man, Miss Navigator. And trust me…"
Trailing off, Shiki raised his hand and snapped his fingers.
SMASH!
A jaw rose from the earth and crunched down on the Waver's hull. Nami's heart twisted as the fangs did their work, grinding the craft into an unrecognizable mass of splinters. At least the glimpses she kept seeing of the bulb holding the Jet Dial gave her hope that her precious possession was salvageable.
But with Shiki still looming over her and a few twitches away from snapping and gutting Nami like a trout, that hope was small and not terribly comforting.
"Trust me, Miss Navigator," Shiki grimly repeated. "You do not want to see a very patient man lose that patience. So." The lion-man cracked his knuckles, one by one, his glare never leaving the younger woman. "Why don't you go ahead and tell me… just what the hell you think you were doing. And then, maybe, I won't break your legs, hm?"
Nami remained on her knees a little longer, letting the promise of pain and most likely death Shiki had delivered sink in. She considered what would happen to her if she did what she really, really wanted to do.
And then, she got to her feet, Clima-Tact still in hand and forming a crackling boa around her neck, and did exactly what she really, really wanted to do.
"What I was doing," Nami croaked, eyes drawn in grim determination. "And what I'm still planning on doing… is sending your twisted dreams crashing and burning to the bottom of the sea, where they belong, and then I'm going back to my crew." The final word was emphasized by a stray bolt of lightning from her Eisen Tempo charring a chunk out of a nearby Daft Green.
Shiki huffed irritably at the decidedly un-satisfactory answer and raised his hand. But before he could gesture and mutilate his 'wayward' crewmate, he noticed something. Due to the intensification of Nami's lightning, she was better illuminated in the evening gloom, and Shiki's eyes were able to discern something new about her: her shoulder was no longer bandaged. And even with anger clouding his vision, Shiki found himself curious about the newly exposed flesh. Or rather, what that flesh bore.
Shiki vaguely knew of the tattoo on her shoulder. It was prominently displayed on her wanted poster, and he thought he may have caught her mentioning the motivation behind it on the SBS once or twice. But now, the once-simple pinwheel-and-tangerine combination had been dramatically changed. While the original tattoo was still in place, the ink that formed one of the larger arms of the pinwheel now coursed down her arm, covering a mess of deep, deep scars that he only saw so quickly thanks to his experience on the seas.
And the picture that the ink formed was one of a writhing, swirling storm. Tongues of lightning, wind, and clouds swirled among a multitude of dark-blue to grey-black spiral maelstroms, tinged and outlined in electric-yellow, coursing all the way down to her elbow.
The Golden Lion slowly turned his gaze back to her eyes. Eyes filled with something he dreaded recognizing. "You seem to have fully embraced your epithet, Weather Witch," he observed.
A flicker of eyes followed his stare, and then it was back to glaring at him. "My new tattoo, you mean?"
"Yesss," he drew out. "I can understand covering up such nasty scarring as that with something more… personal, I suppose… but I can't help but feel this goes beyond that. Or am I wrong?"
Nami's head bowed slightly, her bangs casting a shadow over her eyes. "…My mother. She… She was a Marine. Wonderful, kind, loving… and the strongest, bravest woman I've ever known. And I owe everything of who I am… to her. But recently… I decided… I'm going to take a little bit more… like the greedy pirate I am."
Nami's eyes snapped up, and Shiki could no longer downplay or deny the unmitigated fury crackling in her gaze. "I'm not just satisfied with her will to live anymore…" she breathed. "I'm taking up her will to fight. This tattoo represents my decision: From here on out, I am going to live the way she lived… and die the way she died. Never back down, and never surrender…"
The Weather Witch lashed her Clima-Tact out, and a barrage of lightning charred a line of blackened earth between herself and the Golden Lion.
"Not when everything you hold dear is on the line," she whispered, as much to herself as her enemy. "And especially not to someone like you."
For a solid minute, Shiki blankly stared at Nami before his face hardened into a mask of fury, his teeth bared in a snarl. "I severely underestimated you," he growled. "I crush the rest of your crew, I hold the lives of everyone dear to you in my hands, I overpower you in every conceivable way. And yet. You still fight. You never stopped fighting. It's clear that I've wasted my time trying to sway one with such a will. One such as you will never break, will never bow. Admirable, in a way. Truly strong female pirates are a rare thing nowadays. But still, a pity… If only you were the slightest bit weaker."
The Golden Lion's arm snapped skyward, and Nami could only watch in horror as a small mountain of dirt and rock ripped itself from the firmament and gathered into a hovering ball, grinding against itself until it was shaped into a single massive cone of stone, the point aimed directly at Nami.
"If only you'd broken like a good little girl," he rumbled, regret mixing with fury. "You might have lived a little longer."
Faced with her own impending doom, Nami's breath hitched, and for the briefest of moments, her mind reverted to her old mindset: a voice in the back of her skull screaming bloody murder at her to run, keep running and never stop, never look back, preserve her life.
And the moment Nami located where that voice was, she wrung its neck without a second thought.
The Weather Witch bared her teeth and spread her stance, spinning her Clima-Tact into a blur at her side. Her Eisen Tempo, all of it, began to glow.
"Never. Again," she swore, as much to herself as Shiki. "Now fry, you son of a—WHU-OAH!"
A sudden rush of… of something barreled through Nami's torso, comparable to what she assumed Luffy felt when someone punched him in the gut. Something you felt, but that didn't hurt. The force broke Nami's stance and concentration, loosening her grip on the Clima-Tact. It was a lapse of mere seconds.
"You're mine."
But unfortunately, as the pirate looming over her showed, those few seconds were the difference between life and death.
"Imperial Lion Talon," Shiki declared, and a sound of rushing earth reached her ears. She brought up her arms and staff to guard, praying she'd survive to counterattack, but though she heard a massive impact, she felt no pain.
"Hooooorooooo… miiiissed meeee…"
Oh, and her own voice was drifting through the air, something that made her blink in shock. And that was before she saw what looked for all the world like a floating bedsheet with concentric gray circles for eyes hovering right where Shiki's attack had ripped into the earth.
"Toooo sloooow, toooo sloooow," the bedsheet-thing taunted before drifting away.
"What the—YOU LITTLE BITCH!" Shiki roared, shooting into the air with an orbital belt of stone spikes. "YOU THINK YOU CAN JUST RUN AWAY FROM ME!? YOU GO WHERE I SAY YOU GO! GET BACK HERE!"
And before Nami could fully shake off her shock, Shiki the Golden Lion was out of sight, gallivanting off after the entity that despite looking nothing like her—!
The pieces clicked together, and Nami sucked in a ragged gasp. 'Stole the attention on me, looked like a ghost—!'
"Perona?"
An all-too-physical force slammed into her from behind, knocking her down to the ground hard enough to stun.
In those moments of stunned confusion, Nami found herself manhandled onto her back, staring up at a visage she barely recognized. Long, unstyled pink hair hung all around a face caked with running makeup, a ragged cloak draped around her as a makeshift defense against the Daft Green. Her eyes were wide, vessels peeking in at the corners, and her lips were spread to show teeth audibly grinding together. Perhaps most worryingly, the cloak and the flesh alike were rippling with half-formed Hollow bodies, roiling and twisting over each other.
"P-Perona?" the navigator repeated, confusion warring with concern.
"Why?" the Hollow-girl gasped in a—ironically—hollow tone .
When after a few seconds the non-sequitur failed to get a follow-up, Nami swallowed uncomfortably. "Wh-What are you—?"
Suddenly and without warning, something snapped behind Perona's eyes, and Nami came to the sobering conclusion that she may have fucked up.
"WHY!?" Perona outright shrieked at banshee-levels of volume, raising her fist and trying to slam it down on Nami's head. Of course, coming from an unathletic teenager half Nami's size, it was comically easy to block, but the next blows compensated by volume. "WHY, WHY, WHY!?" she screeched, over and over again, each word punctuated by another attack.
"Wha—Perona!" Nami yelped, squirming uncomfortably under the feeble punches. "What the hell are you—!?"
"WHY!?" Another ear-rending wail, only this time Perona raised her arms into the air, a roiling, screaming ball of malformed ectoplasm materializing between her clawed fingers.
The Straw Hat's eyes shot wide open in panic, and it was only years of cat-thievery that granted Nami the dexterity she needed to squirm out from under her aggressor and slip away. And none too soon, as the Hollow-whatever literally splashed against where she'd been barely a second later.
"What the hell, Perona!?" Nami demanded, opening her mouth to lambast the ghost girl for the blatant attempt on her life. The tirade promptly died in her throat when Perona conjured three more of the Hollow-things.
"WHYYYY!?"
Nami dove for the nearest Daft Green, biting back a curse. The ecto-manace's grasping, wailing embrace fell on bare ground, while meanwhile the sheer stench of the tree, combined with her terror and confusion, shaved away the last of Nami's patience.
"Why what!?" she demanded, her voice dripping with frustration.
"WHY DOES IT HURT SO BAD?" Perona shrieked back, and with that admission everything seemed to freeze.
Slowly, fearful of another attack, Nami stepped out from behind her cover and beheld Perona standing still, eyes wide and staring at nothing and a hand clutching her collar in a white-knuckled grip.
"Why does it hurt?" Perona repeated, her voice raspy from her earlier shrieking. It was unclear if she was talking to or talking at Nami. "Why do I feel so bad? Why does it feel like I just got stabbed, like I want to throw up, like I want to scream and scream and scream and never stop?"
"Perona…"
Nami took a hesitant step towards the Hollow-girl, but Perona snapped her gaze up, locking the navigator in place. Only this time, it wasn't fear of the rage in her eyes.
This time, it was because she recognized the abject terror tearing at the Ghost Princess's soul.
"Oh, Perona…" Nami breathed, sympathy flooding her voice.
"Why, why… WHY!?" And then, out of nowhere, Perona let out an agonized shriek and collapsed to her knees, clutching her head. "WHY DID IT HURT WHEN I TOLD YOU TO GO AWAY?! WHY DOES IT HURT WHENEVER I THINK ABOUT HOW YOU LOOKED AT ME?! WHY DID IT HURT WHEN I REALIZED THAT SHIKI ONLY FOUND US BECAUSE ONE OF HIS SNAILS SAW MY HOLLOW PLAYING WITH XIAO!"
More Hollows bubbled out from Perona's body—and yes, 'bubbled' was indeed the right word. Some were happy and giggling, others sad, or angry, or wearing expressions that couldn't even be identified. And Nami knew how to read expressions.
"WHY DID I GO OUT OF MY WAY TO TELL THE VILLAGERS TO GET OUT OF THE BUNKER BEFORE SHIKI COULD KILL THEM ALL!?" the girl sobbed, terror wracking her slim frame. "WHY DID I LEAVE THE LAP OF LUXURY AND SECURITY, LEAVE EVERYTHING I'VE EVER WANTED, TO STEAL SHIKI'S ATTENTION AWAY FROM YOU?!"
The Hollows bubbling from Perona suddenly swelled and Nami had a mere second in which to yelped and dive back behind the Daft Greens before the Hollows exploded off of Perona. By some miracle, none of them passed through Nami's hiding spot.
"WHY DID IT HURT WHEN I THOUGHT ABOUT HOW YOU WERE GOING TO DIE?" Perona wailed. "WHY DID I RISK MY LIFE TO COME OUT HERE AND SAVE YOU?"
Risking a peek around the vines, Nami gaped. The Hollows were now flowing out of Perona in outright streams, forming currents of ghosts that giggled and sobbed and made all sorts of other noises as they circled around her.
"WHY DO I CARE ABOUT YOU GETTING KILLED?"
It was like a bomb went off in Nami's mind. She wasn't getting Hollowed because Perona wasn't letting that happen. Even in the throes of a panic-fueled meltdown, she didn't want to hurt Nami.
Then, all of a sudden, the Hollows dispersed, Perona going from shouting down to a broken croak, her head cradled in her hands.
"Why… Why does it hurt… like when they took away Bearsy… and he stopped playing with me…?" she wept weakly. "Why do I care… about something that… that isn't me?"
This was the opportunity she'd been waiting for. Nami exited her shelter and walked up to Perona, her mind's eye reflecting a dusty road on her home island and a phantom pain in the long-healed scar on her shoulder. She didn't have her captain's hat, but she knew what to do.
"Because."
Nami sank to her knees in front of Perona and gently drew the girl into a hug, pressing the Hollow-teen's face into her shoulder.
"We're friends."
And with that, the last vestiges of Perona's composure imploded, and she wept into Nami's shoulder with abandon, clinging to her like she was her last lifeline left in the world. A comparison that was a bit too close to reality for comfort, but there it was.
After several minutes, Perona's coughing sobs subsided into wet sniffling.
"I know exactly how you feel, Perona," Nami whispered comfortingly. "I know what you're going through. I know how scary it is. And I promise, I'll help you understand it all. But… we'll do it later. For right now…" The navigator leaned back and gave Perona a conspiratorial smirk. "Think you're feeling good enough to help me blast these Daft Greens to kingdom come, and Shiki's reign of terror along with them?"
"I'm thinking…" interrupted a most unwelcome voice, accompanied by the most unwelcome occurrence of a steel collar flying out of nowhere and clamping shut on Perona's neck. She immediately collapsed with barely a panicked wheeze, once more leaving Nami standing alone against the monster.
"Not," Shiki finished, his wide grin twitching some. "Perona, baby, you lied to my face. You told me that you had no attachment to the Straw Hat Pirates."
The Hollow-girl didn't respond, too busy trembling on the ground in a fetal position.
Satisfied, Shiki turned back to Nami, savoring the trembling the navigator was unable to… suppress… wait a minute. That wasn't fear.
Shiki's sadistic, furious grin grew even more as he put the pieces together.
"You know something, girls?" he remarked, one hand already gesturing and forming constructs out of the snow. "The logical side of my mind is practically screaming that I should just kill you now myself. It would be so easy, just a quick couple of slashes and it would be done. But no… as much as I should do that, that's too fast and too merciful when you've forced me to expend this much of my energy! After all, there's quite a bit of tradition in piracy! Every crime has its punishment! And the crime here, whose punishment is very well-known…"
Cackling madly, Shiki shot his hands forward.
"IS MUTINY!"
Before either woman could react, the snow rose up, wrapped around them, and formed icy shackles around their wrists—
SNAP!
"ARGH!"/ "YEARGH!"
And then the women screamed in agony when the chains wrenched their arms out—nearly to the point of dislocating their shoulders—and bound them spread-eagled against opposite sides of the nearest Daft Green trunk.
"You two will remain in these bindings for what little remains of your lives. I'm going to leave you here and soon some of my men will be here to keep an eye on you while you succumb to the cold." Shiki removed a gasmask from his jacket and slipped it over his face. He then rammed the nearest Daft Green with his fist, causing the off-color vegetation to let loose a wispy cloud of green spores.
Spores that Nami and Perona couldn't help but inhale, that caused their hacking and wheezing to intensify as green bruises started to spread on their skin.
"And the Daft Green, whose potency you really shouldn't have underestimated." Shiki's sneer was obvious, even beneath his mask. "You will die slowly and painfully. And when the life leaves your eyes, I am going to broadcast your lifeless visages to the entire world. Your loved ones will sob… and the Navy will realize how much of a favor I am doing for them. They'll realize how much better things will be when the world is under my control."
"G-g-grghk…" Nami choked out around her panicking respiratory system, shooting a bloodthirsty and bloodshot glare at the Golden Lion. "You… won't… win."
"Ahhh, but don't you see?" Shiki the Golden Lion spread his arms, indicating the white-washed hell around them. "I already have…"
He then floated in close and shoved his gasmask right up to her face.
"Baby. Girl."
Snarling, Nami attempted to lunge at Shiki, which in practice meant she tried to bite his nose off, but Shiki merely floated away and then back to his palace, cackling all the way.
Her vision increasingly blurry, the navigator stared after him, until finally she no longer had the energy to hold up her head. "…he's dead once Luffy gets his hands on him…" she whispered to herself.
"But… what about… us?" Perona asked weakly.
To that… Nami had no response. She could only let her eyes slide shut in defeat, hoping beyond all hope that they'd come for her soon.
…no. No, not hoping, not hope.
They would come. She knew they would.
They'd come, because… because they had to.
They had to…
-o-
Near the highest point of Marineford, the Fleet Admiral sat sequestered in his office. He had sent out all of the necessary orders, and mobilization was going as fast as it could be managed. That left him only one thing to do.
"Shouldn't this be the part where you give a grand speech to inspire the Navy to defend the East Blue with their lives?" Tsuru asked quietly, sitting across from the Fleet Admiral alongside Garp.
"If I could do so without sounding hollow, I would," Sengoku replied, equal parts tired and bitter as he poured cups of sake for the three of them. "But Onigumo's words are still fresh in the world's memory. This may be the most righteous cause that the Marines have taken up in years, but there is no good way left to say 'serve Justice' or 'fulfill your duty' without sounding callous."
Tsuru's expression softened the slightest amount.
"What about, eh…" Garp swirled his cup, frowning in thought. "I 'unno, talk about how we already beat him twenty years ago—!"
"And then, less than two years into his sentence in the until-then inescapable gaol, he broke out, picked right back up where he left off and put us in the position we're in today," Sengoku smoothly finished.
Garp briefly mulled that over before wincing sympathetically. "Eesh, when you put it that way, hand me the—"
Wordlessly, Sengoku handed the Vice Admiral the bottle, which Garp began chugging.
While Garp conducted that assault on his liver, Tsuru leaned back and reflected on the orders that the Navy had executed over the past week. Briefly, briefly, she toyed with throwing it back in Sengoku's face, but just as quickly dismissed the notion. Both because she recognized how callous it would be, given the situation, and because as much as she hated to admit it, she knew that the Fleet Admiral's orders were the right ones.
The entire week after the Straw Hats had been defeated for the first time, there was little that the Navy could do. The location of Shiki's base was unknown but for the fact that it was hidden somewhere in the sky, out of the Navy's reach. And with everything that had happened to the Navy during and since the disaster at Enies Lobby, they simply didn't have the resources to spare to seek out such a place, let alone destroy it.
And since they only put the pieces of the enemy's plan together earlier that day, that meant their only option was to start evacuating civilians where they could and batten down the hatches where they couldn't. Anything else meant leaving entire islands undefended, or stringing out the entire Navy to be defeated in detail. At least this plan meant they could concentrate their forces and maybe launch a counterattack.
Another idea flitted through her mind, namely that this might be an opportunity to gently probe her friends about the possibility of joining the Masons. But that notion was dismissed as well, if only because such a tactic was guaranteed to leave an irrevocably bad taste in her mouth.
Which meant she was back to waiting for something to change. At least the wait proved brief.
"Don don—Puru—KA-LICK!"
After a moment's silence, Sengoku asked wearily, "It's time?"
"Yes sir, the snails just started ringing," the soldier on the other end confirmed, the snail mirroring his grave expression. "Your orders?"
"Put them on the screens," Sengoku groaned tiredly, pinching the bridge of his nose. "Whatever comes to pass, we will not be ignorant of the threat we face."
The snail nodded in confirmation before the other side hung up.
With one final, colossal gulp, Garp drained the last of the sake and carelessly tossed the bottle aside. "Well, let's go out and face the music," he growled.
And with that, the three stood up and moved to Marineford's highest balcony, looking down over HQ's main plaza. More specifically, they were looking down at the trio of titanic screens that had been erected on the masts of the warships in harbor, and watched along with the rest of Marineford's standing forces for the broadcast about to play for the whole.
It wasn't long before the screens lit up and the broadcast began. On screen was a swiftly moving shot that soared above the churning sea. The snail was moving fast, headed for a tower of stone that pierced the clouds, and upon reaching said pillar, the view panned around the pillar as it circled upward.
Upon the pillar, a thriving torrent of humanity, easily numbering in the thousands, was climbing the tower via a path winding around the stone. And from the generally rough appearance, the weapons they carried, and just the demeanor of strength and malice they all shared, there was only one conclusion that could be drawn.
"Pirates," Tsuru bit out, her wrinkled knuckles whitening on the balcony railing. "A traditional army, to go with the bioweapons he's already bred. That bastard… he's truly hellbent on world domination, isn't he?"
"And he's put together the perfect team for it, too," Garp groused, leaning forward. "I recognize some of these faces. 'Blueblood' Bourgeois Benjamin, worth ฿68 Million, Captain of the Esquire Pirates. Tre 'Triple-Tap' Timothy, ฿75 Million, Captain of the Dead-Eye Pirates. Avery 'Big Ben' Everie, ฿85 Million, Captain of the Nevermore Pirates." Garp growled, eyes narrowing. "And they all have their crews with them. Not a person there below ฿50 Million, and not a crew with less than a hundred members. He's gotten nearly all of Paradise's criminal underworld under his flag!"
The analysis, good as it was, missed one detail, a detail that nearly had Sengoku glowing. "The way they're wearing their coats," he ground out, the balcony slowly splintering under his fingers. "That's not coincidence, is it?"
"Considering how they're all wearing the same thing and the last time I saw Bourgeois he was wearing an actual royal cape?" Tsuru remarked. "Not a chance in hell."
The only response Sengoku had for that was a grunt of annoyance.
-o-
Apparently done taking in the rising army, the camera view suddenly ceased its circling and instead swung upward, breaking through the cloud cover and giving the world a view of the bottoms of the floating biomes that composed Merveille.
Even in this view, the looming shadow of the central fortress, upon which Shiki's palace was housed, dominated. One by one, crew by crew, the army of pirates marched up and into the central palace, entering via what appeared to be some sort of dock carved into the bottom of the island, which connected the island to the pillar.
The view flew up, around and over the edge of the island, providing the world with a head-on view of Shiki's golden palace, which was only emphasized by the camera swooping straight down the middle of the palace.
"Tsk, damn bastard," Red-Leg Zeff bit out. Though his scowling gaze was focused on the video screen, his hands didn't stop in their work. "Taunting us this much, this is insufferable… Salt!" Zeff snapped his hand up and caught the shaker that flew at him, laid out a layer of the preservative on the lunch he'd prepared, then boxed it up and passed it on to be stored with the other lunches he'd completed. "He never showed off like this before, but now that he has an audience, he's putting on a show for the whole damn world! That damn—Powder!"
Zeff held his hand out again, and he nodded when something was slapped into his palm… before glowering as he realized what he'd been handed.
"I SAID POWDER, NOT PEPPER!" Zeff roared, flinging the grinder back at the hapless cook who'd tossed it at him. Hissing irritably, he went to work cleaning out the gun he'd almost seasoned. "Morons."
The proper container came into his grasp, along with an excuse. "Sorry, Owner Zeff! We've never mixed cooking and fighting this much before!"
Zeff harrumphed but gave no more chastisement; after all, this was the first time in eight years that he'd had to work on preparing food and weapons simultaneously himself. But people needed to eat and those monster-things needed to eat lead when they inevitably came for them.
The remainder of the chefs in the Baratie may not have been going at the masterful speed that their boss was, but with clear evidence of war on the horizon, they were at least efficiently preparing boxed lunches and weapons. And not just for themselves. With how widespread the Baratie's reputation was, the whole crew expected an influx of refugees.
"I swear," Zeff growled to himself as he continued his work. "If anything, that golden bastard's taste has rotted over the past twenty years, and it was already garbage back then."
Meanwhile, the snail's point-of-view had parked itself on a vantage point that gave the world a top-down view of the palace's front facade. After a minute to take it in, the view abruptly shifted, the screen suddenly displaying what could only be a grand throne room in the Wano style, bordered on all sides by paper walls.
"What the—!?" Patty squawked in confusion.
Zeff, meanwhile, just gave the sight a disinterested grunt. "Must have shifted the broadcast to a different Vis-snail. Keep working."
"R-Right," Patty nodded shakily, resuming his work but never taking an eye off the screen.
The chef's attention to the screen intensified when the doors to the chamber slid open, and a number of imposing, jacketed individuals filed in. One by one, the pirates sat themselves on opposite ends of the room behind lap-tables that bore saucers, waiting for their host to arrive.
That scene triggered something in Zeff's memory, and he paused in his work when it came to him, his scowl deepening. And if that wasn't enough, his thoughts were also voiced by one of the ex-pirates on staff. "Is that… a sake ceremony? Why the hell—?"
"He thinks he's already won," Zeff interrupted, his gaze back on the rifle he had been checking over. "This is his victory lap. Showing every step of his conquest in detail, while we all sit back and watch while he takes the world all for himself. It'd almost be impressive, if he didn't make one colossal mistake."
All the cooks paused and looked at their head chef in confusion. "Uh, chief?" Carne raised a finger hesitantly. "I don't know if you've noticed, but he's got the whole damn Blue by the throat. We're all pretty damn licked."
"Yeah!" Patty nodded in agreement. "What's the mistake?!"
K-CHK!
Zeff shot a glare at his men out the corner of his eye, placing down the firearm he'd just cocked. "He gave us a warning, you idiots. That means that even if we're going down, we're taking as many of his hellbeasts down with us as we can. Right, men?!"
The answer was instant and unanimous.
"AYE-AYE, CHEF ZEFF!" the Baratie roared as one, before returning to their work with an almost possessed fervor.
Zeff nodded at his boys' enthusiasm before getting back to his own task.
But not before a brief pause. A pause brought about by Zeff contemplating the second mistake that Shiki had made.
Or… at least, he hoped it was a mistake that Shiki had made that would come back to bite him in the ass.
He really, really hoped so. For all of the East Blue's sake, if not the world's.
-o-
"Hurry! The caves are this way!"
Dashing ahead, Carrot, Pepper, and Onion very loudly led their parents and the rest of the inhabitants of Syrup Village to the hiding places on the island that they had identified while playing with the captain over the years. And they had sought out even more after the clash with the Black Cat Pirates, ensuring that they knew of every good hiding place that they could use in the unlikely case of another pirate attack. And if their parents had wondered about the practicality of such a thing before, they would never breathe a word against it after this day.
And speaking of impractical acts…
"I… I think the captain would understand if we stopped yelling about pirates coming after this," Onion said, furiously swiping at the fog that had misted up his glasses.
His companions looked at him, both with expressions of guilt on their faces.
"It's not the same as it was before… I'm scared. This…" Onion shook his head, unwilling to meet his friends' eyes. "This is what it's like to be facing a real pirate invasion."
"…You're right. The captain would understand," Pepper sighed, grinding the heel of his palm into his forehead.
"W-We'll find something else to—!" Carrot began.
"STOP TALKING NONSENSE!"
All three boys practically jumped out of their skin as Kaya—who'd been at their sides through the whole ordeal, in spite of Merry's fervent protests—shouted at them, the look on her face bringing back uncomfortable memories from when she'd faced down Kuro.
"Don't even think about stopping!" Kaya demanded. "And even if you do, then I'll just start doing it instead!"
"B-But Kaya!" Onion protested, his lip trembling miserably. "I-If we keep going—!"
"Boys," the heiress interrupted, dropping to her knees in front of them and putting her hands on the shoulders of the two on the outside, accompanied by a kind smile. "Stop. Think. You're forgetting why you do that. Why you always tell everyone that pirates are coming, and why it's a good thing."
The boys blinked incredulously. "A good…?" Carrot sniffed deeply, rubbing at his eyes. "Whaddaya mean?"
Kaya cocked her head to the side. "If you don't tell everyone that pirates are coming," she explained patiently. "Then how will they know when Usopp comes home?"
The Veggies froze in shock at Kaya's gentle reminder, and after a second to process it they teared up.
Kaya spread her arms further and drew the children into a hug, letting them cry into her shirt. "There there, it's alright, it's going to be alright."
The remaining villagers passing around them each spared an understanding glance as they hurried toward their shelters. Kaya, for her part, smiled down at the boys.
SLAM!
Until a noise made her snap up a glare at the image projected by the Transponder Snail the villagers had brought with them, so that they could keep a watch on the proceedings.
The pirates on screen had finished filing into the meeting room and had taken their seats, forming two lines, one of twenty-five and the other of twenty-six. All of them were perfectly motionless and patient, the image of surprising professional courtesy.
As such, the noise that had drawn Kaya's attention was the sound of the room's paper doors slamming open, and Shiki the Golden Lion showing himself in all of his glory.
Kaya looked at the face of the man who aimed to destroy her entire world, and her mind flashed back to what she saw on the face of the man she'd trusted for three years who shattered her heart and aimed to kill her, and then of the man she trusted for three days who had repaid that trust a thousand times over from what little she knew of him. With those thoughts in mind, she steeled her nerves and spoke:
"No matter what happens, don't forget this: That man…" Her lips twisted into a hateful sneer. "That monster is no pirate at all!"
-o-
All across the East Blue, panic, terror, and some measure of anger gripped the hearts of its citizens, and though he could not see it himself, Shiki knew it, and savored it. So many people hiding and huddling… it would only make it that much sweeter when they died. The fools who thought that they could escape on the seas he would handle himself. One touch to the hull under the cover of night, and the next thing they knew their precious shelter would be flotsam on the surface of his island, at the mercy of his living weapons.
And for those fools who dared to fight back… well. Go after them first to give them some illusion of saving their ocean that he could crush, or last to undermine what they were fighting for? Decisions, decisions…
Regardless, with how low his estimation of the sea was, he figured that there was, at best, one island that would resist him to their dying breaths.
Said island was currently in the process of vindicating those expectations, though neither the inhabitants nor Shiki knew it.
"Y'know, after that Straw Hat kid clobbered Arlong," Genzo growled as he sharpened his cutlass. "I'd hoped we could take all the weapons we'd stockpiled to fight him and just let them collect dust. So much for that idea. Asshole."
"It's not like the rest of us are any happier about it," Nojiko sourly responded, checking over one of the components of the old Marine-issue rifle she was reassembling. "But if we have a choice this time, between dying on our terms or his…" Cranking the bolt back, she grimly smiled as the weapon chambered a bullet with a final CLICK! "Then I choose ours."
Genzo grunted in agreement at the statement.
"MY COMRADES!"
And then Shiki's almighty bellow interrupted what he was going to say and drew everyone's attention to the screen. The would-be pirate lord was grinning from ear to ear, his arms spread wide and his chest puffed out as he lorded himself over the assembled pirates, who returned carefully restrained respect.
Taking the cigar from his mouth and waving it about, Shiki's grin took on a savage edge. "I would like to thank you all for joining me here tonight! Know that your presence here is the ultimate indicator of your skill and aptitude, and that you have been deemed worthy to live in the new world that we are about to create! I trust you all understand just how honored you should feel!"
Placing the cigar back in his jaws, the Golden Lion took a heavy drag, his expression gaining a morose quality. "Now, I will not lie to you, I do not expect this to be an easy task. Even with the weapons at our disposal, and our own considerable strength, world conquest is no laughing matter. Even by our most hopeful estimates, it will take anywhere from one year to two to properly bring the world to heel, and I can guarantee you that there will be casualties. Not all of you here will live to see our glorious future come to fruition.
"BUT! What I can also promise is that no matter how long it takes, be it a year, be it two, or even be it two hundred, we! Will! Stand! VICTORIOUS!" Shiki shot his fist into the air. "WE ARE THE GOLDEN LION PIRATES, AND THIS WORLD SHALL KNEEL BEFORE US!"
With hate burning in their chests, the villagers of Cocoyashi watched the other pirates raise their fists into the air and roar their agreement, from the depths of their blackened, tar-stained hearts.
-o-
"Ah… but, do note one little thing." Out of the blue, Shiki's entire demeanor shifted, his head bowed and shadows falling over his eyes. "While under my command, I will allow you to commit any evil, perpetrate any blasphemy, and indulge in whatever atrocities you so desire… save for one. One single, simple act… whose sentence is immediate execution. This act…"
Shiki slowly raised his head, and gave each and every captain before him a glare that spoke of nothing but the purest of murder.
"Is mutiny," he rumbled, his voice a murderous growl. "If any of you betray me, at any point, for whatever reason, then my judgement will be instant and merciless." Shiki then quirked up a grin. "So try and keep on my good side, yeah?"
The captains all chuckled, but with an underlying nervousness that made it clear that the message had been received, read, and then framed on the metaphorical wall. With underlines. In permanent marker.
[Hmph,] Captain Dugong snorted derisively. [I can't even respect that about him. If any of my crew tried something like that, I'd give them a chance to explain themselves before I tied them to the anchor chain and—]
[Captain, with all due respect, I still have nightmares from the last time you brainstormed punishments that would let you outdo Boss. Please shut up,] pleaded one of the many onlooking Dugongs.
[Or, if you have to think aloud, at least muse on what we'll do to them instead,] First Mate Dugong griped.
Captain Dugong winced at the admonishment, chuckling as he scratched the back of his head. [Ah… aheheh, fair 'nuff. Sorry, just got a lot of time on my flippers to think, you know? Not used to the sea being this calm.]
[Yeah, that's fair…] First Mate glanced out over the calm blue waters. [This place… it's nice. The commute's hell, obviously, but we should come back here sometime if we ever want to relax.]
Captain sobered up at that suggestion and repeatedly tapped the butt of his naginata on the deck. [Sounds good, but don't forget, we can only do that if this ocean's still standing after this mess. That's why we came here in the first place, remember?]
First Mate nodded back. [I remember, Captain. I remember.]
It was a difficult purpose to forget. Following the almost global identification of Shiki's primary target, the Dugongs of the Great Kung-Fu Fleet had unanimously voted to make a detour in their voyage down the Grand Line. Crossing the Calm Belt hadn't been easy due to the lack of currents to coast off of and the surplus of Sea Kings, but they'd managed. Now the Dugongs were floating as close to the dead center of the East Blue as they could manage, ready to deploy to wherever they were needed.
As such, all the Dugongs could do now was wait and watch the Vis-Snail they'd filched off a passing battleship and stuck in a waterproofed box. It was tense waiting and the whole fleet was raring to go, but it was the best that they could do, given the circumstances.
"Now!"
Though, as Shiki's imperious bark garnered the Dugongs' attention again, odds were good that they'd get their wish sooner rather than later.
"I hope you all don't mind," Shiki drawled, his entire demeanor utterly nonchalant. "But before we properly start our campaign, there is a little indulgence of my own I'd like to satisfy." Shiki took his cigar from his mouth and waved it about in a lecturing manner. "For years now, one ocean in particular in our world has been nothing short of an utter embarrassment to the rest of the world."
The Golden Lion's expression shifted into an out and out scowl of the purest disgust. "This pathetic, worthless puddle of water of which I speak has never once failed to produce anything but disgusting and reprehensible pieces of filth, and any time someone of note crawls their way out of the mire and manages to survive for more than a day, they show themselves to be the ultimate disgrace to our kind."
"For the sake of piracy and pirates everywhere, this ocean must be exterminated, and the shame it has brought on the rest of the world through its existence properly cleansed… with blood."
Shiki concluded by flinging his arms out wide, his eyes bugged out in sheer, bloodshot insanity. "PEOPLE!" he roared. "AS OF THIS MOMENT, WE SET SAIL FOR THE REPREHENSIBLE SEA OF SCHEMES! WE SAIL TO LAY WASTE TO THE EAST BLUE!"
[Not if we can help it, bastard,] Captain Dugong growled, a sentiment echoed by the rest of his tribe hard enough to shake the ships.
-o-
"So," Raoul, bartender and owner of the Gold Roger Bar, stated casually as he polished his old, well-experienced shotgun. "Guess this is it then, eh?"
"You know it, old man," Gambia grunted, knocking back the dregs of the bottle of tequila in his hand before reaching over the bar for another bottle. "If that asshat wants to rip apart the ocean where it all began, then he's gonna start with the town where it began, which is here. And when he gets here?" The gangbanger leered murderously and tapped the butt of his gun on the bar. "He's gonna get the bonafide Loguetown welcome! ISN'T THAT RIGHT, BOYS!?"
"YEAH!" the gathered members of the Barto club roared, some of them firing off their pistols.
"Oi, oi!" Raoul shouted. "No shooting in the bar, we've been over this a million times already!"
"And you're gonna do it a million times more!" one of the gangbangers jeered back.
Sighing, Raoul reached over and deftly plucked a fresh bottle of tequila and placed it just out of reach of Gambia. "Control your men," he ordered.
"Yeah, yeah…" Gambia grumbled, standing and turning around. "KNOCK IT OFF ALREADY, YOU IDIOTS! YOU'RE WASTING POWDER AND BULLETS!"
Sheepishly, the men settled down and stowed their weapons, at which point Gambia nearly knocked over the bottle in his haste to grab it and pop the cork off. Taking a quick hit off the bottle, he sighed contentedly and nodded respectfully at the bartender. "Seriously, though, thanks for letting us clear your stocks, old man."
"Eh, well, you know what they say," the old man shrugged indifferently.
Gambia cocked an eyebrow curiously.
"First off." Raoul held up a bottle and took his own swig from it. "You can't take it with you. And second, if you're going down…" His smirk became an outright malevolent grin as he held up his shotgun and pumped it forcefully. "Go down swinging!"
"YEAH!" Gambia immediately roared along with a forceful fist pump, a gesture that his boys eagerly mimicked. "WE'LL SHOW THAT BASTARD WHAT WE'RE WORTH!"
"Not that I need to remind you."
And then suddenly the good mood died hard and fast, and everyone in the bar shot glares at the image being projected by the snail the Barto Club had… appropriated from the town square.
Shiki's chin was raised proudly as he tapped his finger on the lip of the saucer he was holding while his bandaged science officer poured out the sake. "But the East Blue is the most defenseless and strategically expendable of the six seas. It'll be mourned, but there's nothing that'll be missed. So, be as thorough with your carnage as you like!"
"GONNA HAVE A HARD TIME RIDING THAT HIGH HORSE OF YOURS WITH ALL THE LEAD I'M GOING TO PUMP INTO YOUR ASS, YOU POMPOUS SHIT!" Raoul belted out, the rest of his 'patrons' cheering and roaring in agreement.
Heedless of—or more likely relishing in—the sheer amounts of pure hate being directed at him the world over, Golden Lion Shiki raised his saucer high, an honest grin on his face. "This is the birth of the Golden Lion Pirates!" he declared with—what else—pride.
"YEEEAAAH!" the other captains echoed, both in action and volume.
There was a moment of relative quiet, presumably from the pirates waiting for Shiki to drink his sake, when suddenly a new voice piped up.
"Y'know, so long as we're in such a celebratory mood…"
A very familiar voice. The eyes of the snail on Merveille snapped around and showcased a face that nobody in the bar could mistake.
"I-Is that…?" Raoul gaped in shock.
Gambia reeled so hard he almost fell out of his seat. "BOSS!?"
"I'd like to toast ta' something else," 'Black Bart' Bartolomeo politely requested, idly swirling his sake. "If'n you don't mind."
Raoul blinked in shock before slowly adopting a grin. "Well, looks like we might have a chance of seeing tomorrow after all. And you all know what that means, right?"
"Hell yeah!" Gambia cackled, pounding his fist on the countertop. "Pass the popcorn and prep the sake!"
"Well, that, yeah… buuut it also means that you all have to pay your tab after all."
"WHAAAAAAT?! SHIT-SHIT-SHIT!" Gambia leapt from his stool with a panicked yelp. "QUIT DRINKING, YOU SHITS, WE HAVE TO ACTUALLY PAY FOR THAT!"
"Heheheheh," the bartender chuckled, switching from polishing his shotgun to polishing a mug instead. "Ahhh, impressive as you younguns might be, looks like the old guard's still got some tricks of our own!"
-o-
Shiki stared at the rookie in mild irritation, but the sheer satisfaction from finally bringing his plan to fruition overpowered it. It was a most momentous occasion, and he had at least waited until he, Shiki, had said his piece. He exhaled briefly, but managed to crack a smile as he gestured for him to go ahead.
Bartolomeo nodded in acknowledgment, and raised his saucer high as he started to speak. "I wanna make a toast…" he started solemnly. "To an ocean. An ocean that has a reputation of weakness."
Wait a minute.
-o-
Dadan's jaw slowly dropped she divined where the rookie was most likely going with this. "Hooooly shit, is he actually—!?"
Whatever question the mountain boss was about to ask, it choked off when the broadcast suddenly changed, showing the well-guarded front courtyard of the palace… and blaring a heart-pounding fanfare.
"I-Is that…?" Dogra breathed in awe.
For a second, guards located below the snail just milled about their business as usual, but suddenly they started to react to something and pointed towards the sky. The snail was quick to follow their line of sight, glancing up at a sky that was mostly covered by clouds, but still had a gap that allowed the full moon to shine through.
A full moon that was silhouetting—!
"The Thousand Sunny!?" Magra gawked in shock.
"THAT'S LUFFY!" Dadan shot to her feet with a cackle and a roar. "HE'S STILL KICKING!"
"WE'RE NOT LICKED YET, YOU SON OF A BITCH!"
The bar paused in shock at the outburst. Not the language, that was tame by Mount Corvo's standards, but the source on the other hand?
"Makino!" Woop Slap gaped at the usually demure young woman.
"Cram it, geezer!" Makino growled at the mayor, fire blazing in her eyes. "I'm a bartender, of course I know how to swear! Now shut up and cheer!" She then refocused her rage at the screen. "COME ON, LUFFY! PUNT THAT ARROGANT BASTARD'S HEAD OFF!"
They gaped for a second longer… and then, they all joined in with a roar.
But even over the music and the shouts of encouragement, they could all still hear Bartolomeo speaking.
"An ocean that has a reputation for a lack of power, lack of wealth, lack of resources… but at the same time, its people are rich."
-o-
"I raise my toast to an ocean of people who are powerful, not in body or mind or whatever, but who are powerful in heart!"
"So somehow those crazy bastards actually managed to get their ship to fly on its own, huh?" Crocodile mused to himself as he watched the Straw Hats' ship descend on the compound. "I wish I could even start to be surprised by that."
Crocodile also wished that he wasn't watching the display, but it wasn't like he or anyone else on Level 6 had much say in the matter. Shiki had spared no expense in ensuring that the world would see his moment of triumph, to the point that he had even used his powers to deliver a crate to the very bottom of Impel Down, planting a video Transponder Snail there and forcing the prisoners that the Government was attempting to erase from time to watch the Golden Lion's show. Forcing them to watch as the Golden Lion succeeded where they had all failed.
The feat had gotten in Magellan's craw, too, seeing as Shiki had triple-locked it in a sea prism stone box and even managed to remotely bolt it to the floor such that none of the staff could access or even move it, so the guards had no choice but to let the prisoners watch.
A 'privilege' that none of the prisoners were exactly enthused about, if the way they were all raging in their cells was anything to go by.
Still, in spite of the commotion going on outside of his cell, Crocodile still had a perfect view of the Thousand Sunny crashing down into the courtyard. The impact destroyed the front gate and carved a huge trench into the ground, as well as kicking the guards into an absolute frenzy.
And before they could do much more than that, a series of almost simultaneous detonations and an indecipherable blur that sent anyone who came in contact with it flying came out of nowhere. The guard force was wiped out in less than a second.
Crocodile's eyes widened in recognition. "Really now?" he muttered to himself. "So even you…"
If the Straw Hats were surprised or put off by the guards' annihilation, they didn't show it. Instead, they dismounted from their parked ship and strode over the guards' bodies, silhouetted by the remaining smoke.
That's not to say they went entirely without greeting, however. Once they reached the very front door of the castle, they found them to be wide open. A pair of individuals were standing on the threshold: a dark-skinned man wearing a trenchcoat, and a blonde woman in a yellow-and-black dress.
"HEY, LEATHERNECK, WEREN'T THOSE TWO YOURS BEFORE YOU GOT PINCHED?" the somehow thoroughly inebriated voice of Vasco Shot echoed throughout Level 6.
"At least my soldiers are all still alive, you moronic lush," Crocodile snorted in response, ensuring his voice was carried to its destination. A goal that was accomplished if the slurred swearing that ensued was anything to go by.
Still, whatever previous animosity the ex-Officer Agents might have once held against those who had taken down Baroque Works, it was clearly long gone now. The pair of Ability-users bowed to the Straw Hats, bending at the waist and displaying the utmost courtesy and decorum.
"Straw Hats. We've been expecting you," Mister 5 drawled. "Welcome to the Imperial Golden Lion Palace."
"We've prepared a more… appropriate wardrobe for your soiree," Miss Valentine purred, giggles following her words. "If you'll follow us, please?"
For the first time in over a week, Crocodile laughed.
-o-
"An ocean of people who, no matter what, will always stand shoulder to shoulder for the sake of the person next to them, be they family or neighbor, be they criminal, civilian, or even the damn Marines, and never give in!"
The shadows and distant images of the Straw Hats marched silently through the hallways of the palace, the view swapping from snail to snail to follow them as they passed an indoor garden, and over to a side room where they each parted one of the doors, revealing a large dressing room. A dressing room with one side filled with a variety of suits and other such formal outfits - and the other with a Marine-grade armory.
"Right in here. I believe you will find the accommodations to your liking," 5 nodded.
"Please don't take long, our most g-gracious host will be expecting your arrival anyt-time now," Valentine said, visibly struggling to keep herself from cackling.
The citizens of Gray Terminal, however, had no such reservations and were hooting and hollering as they watched the Straw Hats file into the changing room. Originally, they'd been busy ransacking the manors that Goa's nobles had abandoned in their haste to evacuate the East Blue.
But now that it looked like there was even a chance they would live to see tomorrow? They were far more eager to cheer on the prodigal son of the slums, whose cheeky grin they could all remember… and whose old 'I.O.U.' slips suddenly seemed leagues more valid.
As the Straw Hats started to outfit themselves in their newly provided attire, it was made blatantly obvious that Soundbite was in full control of what his visually inclined cousins did and didn't show. This fact was clarified by how the broadcast only showed brief flashes of the Straw Hats as they pulled on their new gear—
A trenchcoat's lapels yanked firmly into place.
A helmet slammed into place, polished metal gleaming in the torch light.
A tie cinched up to perfection.
A boot slamming into the ground, hard enough to crack the floorboards.
An ornate peaked cap adjusted by the tip of its brim, the golden skull emblazoned in its peak leering malevolently.
Gauntlets snapped into place, fingers stretching out to their fullest before snapping into a fist.
"I raise my toast to an ocean of people who will never back down and never surrender, no matter how much shit the world tries to pile on them!"
—And as they prepped their newly acquired weaponry—
The lever on a rifle ratcheted back, chambering a new round.
A pair of pistols spun into their holsters.
A break-action shotgun snapping shut on its freshly loaded shells.
A magnificent katana sliding into its snow-white sheath.
And finally, met with a roar of rabid approval, a massive rotary cannon hefted, and its barrel spun up with a mechanized roar.
—Until finally, finally, at long last… they were ready.
The world cheered as the Straw Hats marched out, ready for war.
-o-
"I raise my toast to an ocean whose spirit and legend can never be snuffed out, no matter what you or anyone ever does or says! I raise my toast to the Blue of Hopes and Dreams!"
The camera's eyes gave no clear view of the Straw Hats as they were led through the palace, immaculately chosen angles and distances blocking any clear view of them and giving nothing away save that they had swiftly changed into formal black outfits, and were all packing varying amounts of heat, from heavy rifles to outright bazookas, with Going Merry's form—clear from her size—carrying what looked to be twice her body mass in pure gun.
"Hooooly hell," Helmeppo wheezed in a numb voice, his eyes bugging out over his visor. "I don't think I've seen that much firepower in a warship's armory, much less on people!"
"I-I'm pretty sure carrying that many firearms without the proper permits guarantees five consecutive life sentences, doesn't it?" Coby questioned weakly, his brain trying and failing to make sense of what his eyes were showing him.
"Seven if it's determined they were held with intent to fire, minimum," Tsuru clarified, her eyelid twitching furiously. "And that's only if, by some miracle, the offenders can sell out enough names to miss the death penalty."
"What the hell, Luffy?!" Coby questioned incredulously under his breath. "I know you're mad, but—!"
"Ohohoh, my cute little grandson is more than pissed, brat," Garp chuckled through his rictus grin, idly scratching at the veins that bulged on his neck and betrayed his true feelings. "That bastard took one of Luffy's crew. If Shiki's still alive by the end of this… well, it won't be because Luffy intended it that way, I'll tell you that much."
"Get our fleet mobilized, I want us sailing according to that Pose within the hour!"
The two apprentices and the two veterans turned toward their superior, who was currently glaring at the receiver as if it'd just insulted his mother.
"We know where they are?!" Coby exclaimed. "But I thought—?!"
"Aegis 0 just delivered an eternal pose to Merveille, or at least the pillar it's currently anchored itself at," Garp answered, grunting in exertion as he hauled himself out of his seat and cracked his back. "Turns out they've been sitting on the damn thing for days now, and they only just decided to hand it over."
"What!?" Helmeppo squawked, boggling at his mentor. "Shiki's been a clear and present threat for a week, why didn't they give it to us before!?"
"Because," Tsuru sniffed dryly. "It was only today that a World Noble offhandedly ordered them to 'help those worthless insects'—that's us, mind you—'do the jobs we so generously pay them for'."
"And apparently they consider handing us that pose to be help enough," Sengoku grumbled under his breath. "Because we're sailing to that battlefield alone."
"U-Understood, sir," the rookies nodded respectfully, and prepared to depart as well.
The Marines proceeded in silence for a bit until the usual suspect inevitably broke it.
"…You do realize you're just gonna be—?" Garp began.
"I know we're Straw Hat's clean-up crew again and I don't give a damn!" Sengoku barked. "Even if we're just eating their scraps, even if we only manage to accomplish the least amount of good, I couldn't care less! This is a battle for the fate of the world, a battle that will never be forgotten, no matter what might come to pass! I will not let history show that when push came to shove, all we could do was sit on our asses and watch!"
The watchers processed this. Then Garp's face split into a malicious grin as he cracked his knuckles. "Well, when you put it that way, count me in. Let's get going."
"S-Sir!" Coby and Helmeppo saluted, following their superior out. Tsuru lingered behind, silently looking at Sengoku. Sengoku looked back.
"…Does it still seem hollow?"
"It's hard for me to say at this stage."
A pause.
"…Justice will still be served. But what will the world think?"
"They'll side with the Straw Hats for saving that ocean, I'm sure."
Another pause.
"And what do you say about all of this?"
"…I have had to think more about what I call Justice over the past few months."
"Then we feel the same way."
"Do we? I'm not so sure… but I regret that."
Silence fell once more. Then Vice Admiral Tsuru left for her own ship and Sengoku followed, leaving the room empty.
Much later, when the pair of them thought back on that conversation, neither one was quite able to recall who said what.
-o-
"I RAISE MY TOAST!" 'Black Bart' Bartolomeo roared, raising his saucer high above his head.
SMASH!
Before utterly horrifying the other captains present, who could do naught more than gape in equal parts awe and horror at the mohawk-toting maniac who'd just spiked his saucer between his feet.
"TO THE EAST BLUE!" he howled loud enough to shake the rafters of heaven.
Despite the ample warning given by the entire speech, Shiki's eyes flew wide open, every vein on his brow bulging in complete outrage. Angry beyond words or even noises, he drew a pistol and aimed right at the pirate's shark-toothed smile. The gun fired, the bullet flew… and then the lead ball deformed against thin air, falling to floor with a ping that everyone heard.
"HEHAHAHAHAHAHA! You really are a moron, wheel-boy," Bartolomeo taunted, his head thrown back and the air flashing a mere inch in front of his face. "Not only do you try to shoot a guy who ate the Barrier-Barrier Fruit…"
And then Barto snapped his head back into place with a roaring cackle, his tongue lolling from his fang-toothed mouth and both his middle fingers sticking straight up. "But you're stupid enough to recruit one of the only two primo badass captains of this generation to come from the East-fucking-Blue!"
"You…" Shiki rumbled, the veins down his arm bulging murderously, the wooden panelling of his pistol splintering within his grasp. "Do you even realize what the hell you're doing, you suicidal bastard? Do you really think that a pathetic little mongrel like yourself can even last two seconds AGAINST SOMEONE LIKE ME!?" The last few words were roared, the palace creaking ominously around the pirates' heads as though it were liable to rip itself apart any moment.
"Who, me? Alone?" Barto cocked his eyebrow inquisitively, not even looking at Shiki in favor of buffing his nails on his coat. "Psh, nah, I know when to pick my fights. You'd squash me, easy." He then shot a spike-toothed leer at the Golden Lion. "So it's a damn good thing I didn't come alone, ain't it?"
Precisely on cue, the unmistakable sounds of a beatdown filtered into the throne room, from right outside the chamber. And from the familiar screams of panic and pain, Shiki knew that it wasn't his men handing out the beatdown.
"Reinforcements, I take it?" the veteran growled, though calm slowly returned to him. He had armies waiting on all sides of the room, just waiting for a cue to break down the walls. No force would allow this scum and anyone fool enough to follow him to make it out of this alive.
"Hehahaha… you've got it backwards, Shiki," that damnable rookie sneered, slowly walking out of his place in line and positioning himself so that he was directly opposite Shiki, leering up at him without shame or fear. "My crew and I? We're the back-up dancers for this shindig. But them? Hehaha… they're the real main event. I mean seriously!"
Barto flung his arms wide as he stepped aside, the mad grin that had been on his face since the toast spreading even wider. "Just check out their grand entrance!"
Suddenly, the sounds of the beatdown stopped dead, and all the lights outside the throne room seemed to come on at once, harshly illuminating the exterior of the sliding doors.
A whisper of flying steel sang out, drawing everyone's attention to one of the screen walls. In an instant, slashes crisscrossed the entire left half of the wall, the screens holding for only a second before the sheer wind pressure blasted them out of their frames.
A number of the assembled captains shifted where they were sitting, glancing towards the display of force with vague interest.
Seconds later, with the sound of a bomb going off, the other half neatly disintegrated, the paper and wood shattering like glass struck by a hammer. Barely had the shreds from the devastated wall started to fall when a pillar of hellfire erupted and reduced the fragments to ash and cinders.
The captains gazed towards the carnage with restrained curiosity, scrutinizing the smokescreen for the perpetrators.
And then, all at once, they showed themselves.
-o-
"You know, in the earlier days of our training, I often questioned how practical it was to be dressed professionally when we were out on the job," Blueno drawled.
"I remember that, and they always gave us plenty of plausible answers," Kalifa said. "Covering more of your form leaves less opportunity to drop a trace of yourself."
"While at the same time testing you to ensure that you can execute without staining yourself," Kumadori brought up. "There is also the fact that the World Government would never have any employees of significance dressed otherwise while on the job."
"And the fact that limiting our mobility is supposed to give us constant training, in life and on the job," Kaku continued. "All valid reasons… and none of them the real one."
"The real reason," stated Rob Lucci with a bloodthirsty smirk. "Is that it's just so much more satisfying to hand someone their head if you look good doing it."
"Ain't that the truth," Jabra snickered. "Pity that this is probably the last time we'll see the Straw Hats like this, though."
"Either way, there is a fact we cannot deny…" Hattori cooed as he scribbled on a pad of paper, eyeing the Straw Hats as they strode from the smoke.
From 'Sniper King' Usopp's extravagant suit of samurai armor to 'Devil Child' Nico Robin's functional cowboy-trenchcoat combo, and all the spic-and-span suits worn by everyone else in between…
"Those bastards clean up damn good."
-o-
"Hey, what the heck!?" 'Winch Green' Yonji, youngest son of the Vinsmoke line, barked indignantly, strangling one of the vis-snail's eyestalks. "The hell's wrong with the image, you spineless lump of slime?!"
The reason for the ultimate human's ire was that while most of the Straw Hats were depicted in picture-perfect clarity, there were two whose faces were hidden from the world.
One was for a normal enough reason: one of the central figures in the crowd, standing next to Roronoa Zoro, was a chain smoker. So much so that any shots of his face were obscured by the haze of smoke he kept exhaling like a chimney. Unfortunate, but such was life.
The other obscurity, however, was far less forgivable: for whatever reason, the face of the tallest of the crew was rendered entirely inscrutable by a blur of static and warped color that prevented any details whatsoever from being made out.
"You! Stupid! Piece! Of—!" Yonji snarled, yanking harder and harder on the eyestalk, and undoubtedly preparing to yank even harder than that.
"Give it a rest, Yonji," his elder blue-hued brother, Niji, drawled from nearby. "This snail isn't the one in control of the broadcast. The camera must be crossing its vision in regards to that one. It's an old trick that usually takes years to train a snail to do, but the loud mouth one must be capable of it instead."
"I'm more interested in the smoker…" the blazing red elder, Ichiji, smirked as he eyed the fume-shrouded pirate. "Looks like he's a blond… probably that 'Sanji' they have on their crew. Heh, remind you guys of anyone?"
"No, and it doesn't remind you of anyone, either."
"Yes, father," the boys all immediately said, their heads bowed respectfully.
Even the unswerving loyalty of his perfect soldiers didn't prevent a derisive snort from Judge Vinsmoke. Not even their actions could soothe the inferno that had been pricked in the back of his skull. "That is not him," he growled, speaking as much to himself as to the soldiers present in his throne room. "It is a different Sanji, and not that worthless waste of time and flesh. As it is, I've already made it clear to the World Government that I want that embarrassment to our name wiped from the maps. We will speak no more of this."
"Yes, father," the heirs of the Germa repeated.
"As you say, my lord," the lone heiress demurred politely, even as, in the back of her mind, she harbored far less charitable sentiments.
'Wrong again, father,' Reiju thought with her dryest venom, her bile hidden behind a long-perfected mask of obedience. 'You were wrong about him before and you're wrong now.'
But when she looked back at the smoked-out face of her brother—her baby brother, alive and well and thriving—her mask softened into genuine compassion.
'That's right, Sanji,' she silently praised him. 'Tell the world your name… and don't ever let them forget you again!'
-o-
Furthest to the right from the viewers' perspective, Princess Nefertari Vivi rode sidesaddle on her loyal friend, whose helmet, chest plate, greaves, and wing armor made him the very picture of a war mount. And Vivi herself was clad in a purple and black V-neck blouse, black jacket, and black pants, a look of tranquil determination on her face.
Rebecca the gladiator stared at the unflinching form on the screen as she confronted one of the most infamous men in history, a man that even the tyrant Doflamingo feared to clash with, if the way Dressrosa's defenses were being raised was anything to go by.
She'd craved the sight of Vivi's face for several months, with how much her words and actions had affected her, and while she had seen the wanted poster, it wasn't quite what she was looking for.
Now, as she stared at the desert princess as she was at that very moment on the other side of the world, she found herself searching for an answer to a question she had harbored for so long.
Then, all at once, she stiffened and her eyes widened. The look in the princess's eyes crystallized something that had been stirring in Rebecca's mind from the very first SBS, from the very first words Vivi had uttered in defiance to the judgment of the entire world.
And now that Rebecca knew what it was she was feeling, she grabbed it with both hands and vowed she would never let it slip from her grasp again.
She slowly rose, discarding the wagers that she had picked up, and walked off toward the armory.
That day would later be noted as the last time that any of the gladiators saw fear on Rebecca's face. The last time she would let Diamante see fear in her eyes.
-o-
"Dear father, what kind of glasses are those?" Shirahoshi questioned as she took in the image in the town square. "The one that Boss Dugong is wearing?"
"Hmm?" King Neptune hummed, leaning in to see more closely. All five Dugongs in front of the Straw Hats' party were still naked from the 'waist' down, but wore suit coats, bandanas in their usual colors, and neckerchiefs or bowties around their necks. The TDWS all wore round sunglasses as well, evoking the image of yakuza soldiers, but Boss was different. In addition to the bandolier around his torso and the cigar in his jowls, he was wearing…
"Ah, those are triangle shades, dear, jamon. Designed more for appearance than for practicality, jamon. I hope you're not asking because you want a pair?"
"Oh!" Shirahoshi gasped, bringing her hands to her mouth. "No, no, I was just curious about them. I hadn't seen them before."
"They're not common, your highness," the Minister of the Left said, stroking his beard thoughtfully. "Though I do recall one child from a decade or so ago who was quite taken with them. He was a loud and boisterous kid with a good heart, but he kept trying to form something of a gang and he kept going on about the surface as well."
"I heard rumors that he tamed an orangutan sea king and rode off for the surface; he hasn't been heard from since," the Minister of the Right added.
Shirahoshi nodded in understanding, though her brow furrowed in thought. "Ah… Minister, what is an orangutan?"
"This may take a while, jamon," Neptune chuckled lightly as his left and right hands scrambled for answers.
-o-
"…Laki?"
"Yes, Wiper?"
"I'd like to take you up on that offer you made a few weeks ago to design a set of formal clothes."
"I told you so!" Aisa sang.
"You, however, are still not going anywhere near a ship flying a Jolly Roger."
"Sea King balls!"
"AISA!"
"Phhhbt!"
"Heheheh…"
"YOU TOO! I KNOW WHERE SHE PICKS IT UP!"
Apart from the banter, the source of this change in mindset for the Shandian was the image of the Straw Hats' gunner on the screen. White dress shirt and red tie, a white scarf that reached down to her thighs on both sides, and the rest of her in black: black shoes, black pants, black coat, and even the white beret they'd last seen her in swapped out for a black model.
And with Su completing the image by curling around her neck and toting a black fedora all her own…
"You go, gangsta girl…" Aisa breathed reverently, stars twinkling in her eyes.
-o-
"HAHAHAHAHAHA! Oh, that's just awesome," Paulie laughed, gesturing at the figure beside Conis. Even with all that they knew of the Straw Hat Pirates, the most famous of them on the island of Water 7 was Going Merry, the autonomous ship whom the crew had given a new life even when Galley-La's best couldn't fix her.
And currently, said ship was standing in the form that new life had given her: a young girl with white hair, clad in a black overcoat over a red shirt and a decorated peaked cap. Her face bore a quiet smile that held a clear tone of malice, and perhaps most notably, she was the one hauling the rotary cannon, a weapon both twice as tall and thick around her as she was, not counting the ammo drum, with absolutely no effort.
"How can something be so adorable and so badass at the same time?" Oimo snickered in agreement. "Those idiots are in for it now."
"Just like Enies Lobby all over again," Kashi laughed in agreement, fist-bumping his partner.
That good cheer only lasted until their captains' fists cracked down on their skulls.
"BACK TO WORK!"/ "WE'LL TELL YOU WHAT HAPPENS LATER!"
"BASTARDS!"
-o-
Not far from the end of Paradise, the two Marines whose actions had ultimately led to the founding of the New World Masons observed the lineup of the Straw Hat Pirates, their eyes falling on one figure in particular. Directly beside Nefertari Vivi and Carue stood the Voices of Anarchy and their partners.
Jeremiah Cross wore his gauntlets, greaves, and cap, along with a brown shirt with a wide collar and a loose tie colored a darker brown, framed by an open jacket and pants that were a shade darker still. He carried the sword Funkfreed in his right hand, the snarling Lassoo on his back, and Soundbite on his shoulder, a pair of sunglasses doing nothing to hide the glare he was burning over the shades or the fangs he was baring.
And as for Cross himself?
"Commodore Smoker… meaning no disrespect, I've found myself wishing often over the past few months that Cross could be a little more like… well…"
"Like me?" Smoker asked quietly.
"Y-Yes, sir."
"So have I," the Commodore admitted. "I've hated his smartassery since the first time we talked in Loguetown, and I kept thinking to myself that it would be so much easier to tolerate that someone like him helped us form the New World Masons if he were more serious."
The both of them looked back at Cross. His hat was tilted to shadow the upper part of his face, but they could see his eyes. And they were cold. Utterly devoid of humor, of enjoyment, of eagerness… of mercy. The last time Cross had faced down a man that he actually hated enough to murder, he hadn't once lost his witty, if sadistic, sense of humor.
He had long since lost that now. When the two Marines looked at their ally… their friend, who had opened their eyes to the truth, all they saw was a cold-blooded pirate who wouldn't hesitate to reduce any enemy in his path to a ravaged corpse.
"And what do you think now, Tashigi?"
The Lieutenant looked between Cross and Roronoa Zoro, whose eyes gleamed with even more promised murder.
"I really want him to start cracking jokes again…" she swallowed fearfully.
Smoker nodded tersely in agreement. "We'll just have to wait and see once this is all done, then. Right now, I'm more concerned with someone else: where the hell is Straw—?"
Before the Commodore could complete the question, the Straw Hats all parted and formed two rows before the gaping hole in the wall. And in the middle of them all…
Smoker's cigars dropped to the ground, forgotten as the two Marines gaped at just what they were seeing.
"Oh. My. God," Tashigi breathed, voicing at the same time her own thoughts, Smoker's, and the world's.
-o-
On the other side of the world, for the second time that month, the Totland Archipelago was completely paralyzed.
Only five individuals in the whole stretch of sea were left conscious. Four were the Big Mom Pirates' Sweet Commanders, who, at the epicenter of the event, had all fallen to their knees, with Katakuri only just managing to land in a three-point position and keep himself mostly upright via liberal application of Mochi supports as their mother and captain's rage billowed throughout the palace.
The fifth was the source of the event herself: the Emperor of the Seas known as Charlotte 'Big Mom' Linlin, whose mood had just pulled a complete 180.
Just moments earlier, she had been perfectly jovial as she enjoyed a casual tea party with her beloved family, enjoying many a treat while watching the old coot Shiki flail about in Paradise, and totally ignorant of her children and underlings subtly constructing bunkers and shelters all along the archipelago behind her back.
And then, out of the blue, her mood had flipped. Now Linlin was furious, the air itself rippling around her as she flooded her domain with her presence, and crushed everyone within her grasp. Crushed their very beings with the image of a giant, a colossus, a titan, large enough to blot out the very sun, arms outreached from horizon to horizon and threatening to smother the world.
And the source of this outrage was the picture being projected on a screen by a Transponder Snail that only barely remained half-conscious by Katakuri's sparse efforts.
While twenty-one of the Straw Hat Pirates stood on either side of a self-formed corridor, their captain was the last to enter the room, the light from behind him showing him only as a silhouette for a moment. A straw hat, a billowing coat…
And seeing that silhouette, only one thought came across Charlotte Linlin's mind.
One thought crossed the mind of every member of the old generation in the world.
One thought.
One face.
One smile.
One name.
"ROOOOGEEEER…" Big Mom breathed murderously.
-o-
Shiki ruthlessly quashed the vision that his mind's eye forced upon him at seeing the form of that straw hat-wearing pirate. He refused to see the resemblance to his former rival. Roger was dead, gone, no more. And no matter how much the world insisted that this man was his successor, he refused to believe that he would lose with his superior forces to a man from the East Blue. Not now, and never again. Never again.
'And yet, here they are,' a traitorous part of his mind supplied.
He schooled his angered expression into one of dull interest, lighting a new cigar. "So, you want another round. Color me surprised."
The Straw Hat Pirates calmly entered the room, marching between the commanders of the Golden Lion Pirates, who continued to observe them with vague interest. Behind them, Barto strolled up to his own subordinates, who nodded at him, before descending into hushed conversation.
"You're planning on attacking the East Blue," Straw Hat Luffy stated quietly, his hat shadowing his eyes.
"Finally caught on to that, did you?" Shiki scoffed.
The crew paused as they reached the middle of the room, and Luffy raised his head to show one furious eye. "And Nami, she's OK?"
The Golden Lion's grin took on a special kind of evil. "Sure, she's doing peachy!"
The assembled attendants snickered at the apparent joke. Shiki was quick to join them.
The Straw Hats, meanwhile, were just as quick to bristle. In particular, Cross and Zoro tensed up as though they'd been delivered electric shocks, their eyes gleaming with untold emotion in the shadows of their headwear.
"Jihahahahaha!" Shiki, however, was blind to the shift, be it through casual ignorance or his own will. "You sure put up a dangerous front. But you don't think this motley crew of yours is going to walk out of here alive, do you?" So saying, he raised his hand and snapped his fingers.
On cue, the remaining screen walls in the room fell, kicked down by the pirates on the other sides. It was quickly apparent that the Straw Hats were woefully outnumbered; hundreds of armed and sharp-dressed pirates filled the left and right side of both stories of the room. A small army, armed to the teeth and all focused on the one, single crew that stood opposed to them.
The Straw Hats' sole reaction was to give the soldiers the most cursory of glances before dismissing them.
"I figured only one of you would be naïve enough to believe that she could sacrifice herself to save her home. But now you're rushing in here, an entire suicide squad," Shiki drawled, puffing on his cigar. "Well, I suppose it's just for the best. If I can't toast my new alliance with sake, then I shall just have to baptize it in your blood."
"You're as dumb as you look," Luffy bit out, wiping the smile from Shiki's face. "Nami would never sacrifice herself, idiot. She joined your crew… so she could attack from the inside!"
As the captain raised his voice, the rest of the crew raised their weapons, cocking them and holding them at the ready. Rifles, blunderbusses, shotguns, cannons, all manner of high-power firearms, aimed in every direction around them.
"Now prepare yourself, Shiki the Golden Lion!" Luffy roared, taking a floor-shaking stomp in Shiki's direction. "We won't lose the same fight twice!"
Apparently, that was the cue for every Straw Hat with a ranged weapon—and at this moment, that meant every last one of them—to open up on everyone else in the room. Most of the pirates in the first ragged row had no time to react before they were enveloped in bullet hell. And those that did have time to react were either met with another weapon as they dodged or else had their cover demolished by the heavier artillery.
Ten seconds in, and already a quarter of the pirates in the room were down with bullet, shrapnel, or explosive wounds. And not only was the bullet hell not letting up, the complete and utter grim silence with which the Straw Hats were working just made things worse. It made some of the pirates long for them to say something. Anything.
"MWAHAHAHAHA! Entire crew is babies!"
"Go home to mommy! YOHOHOHOHOHO!"
On second thought, 'anything' did not include Merry and Brook cackling and taunting them. They could really do without that.
Witnessing the devastation and also seeing that the incensed rubber man out for his head was emptying his clip at an almost possessed pace, Shiki knew that there was only one smart option at the moment.
"Captain—!" one of the Golden Lion's lackies exclaimed, hastily running up to his captain.
"Right…" Shiki growled, turning to walk behind his throne.
WHOOSH! KRASH!
But he froze and snapped his attention back to the chaos when the utterly inconceivable occurred.
-o-
I could and most definitely would have continued my onslaught for as long as Lassoo would let me, but I cut myself off when everyone else started to click empty around me.
"Gngh, I'm out of ammo," Franky grunted, tossing the two bazookas he was using at Merry, who promptly shoved them into her jacket. The rest of the crew followed suit, the caravel-girl giggling ecstatically at the sheer amount of firepower she had housed within her hull.
"Never seems to be enough bullets to take 'em all down," Sanji quipped as he cast his gaze around the rest of the room, which was slowly starting to get its wits back together.
"Speak for yourself, hombre," Lassoo growled, morphing to his semi-form on my shoulder so he could shoot a smirk at our cook. "I've still got bombs for days."
"Ditto on that point, howlitzer," Merry giggled, knocking loose her steaming cannon's empty drum and just as swiftly fitting in a fresh replacement. "I've got a belly full of red hot lead and I intend to share."
"Sorry, Sanji, but they do have a point," Conis smiled at the Monster as she slotted in a fresh Flavor Dial. "We experienced gunners do tend to carry spares. Ah, by the way, Merry—?"
"Here ya go!" The ship-girl withdrew a large bundled object from her hold and tossed it to the angel.
"Aaaaand the dugong makes four!" Mikey snickered, earnestly spinning his pistols about his flippers. "Don't you feel foolish!"
"Oh, cram it," Sanji huffed out in a weary cloud of smoke.
"Enough," Luffy growled, cutting off the chatter. We all snapped to attention. "Cross?"
I nodded at my captain before scanning over our crewmates one by one. "Usopp, Chopper. You're our best trackers, find Nami and get her back in fighting condition."
"On it!" Usopp snapped into a salute as he finished shrugging off the heaviest pieces of his armor.
"And then Indigo?" Chopper questioned in a tight tone, thumbing his facemask over his nose.
"And then Indigo, right," I nodded before moving on to one of our larger and smaller crewmates respectively. "Merry, Carue. Work together, go nuts through this place, take anything that's shiny and isn't nailed down."
"WOOHOO! IMMA BE A LOOTER!" Merry cackled, leaping onto Carue's back as Vivi slid off, and almost flattening the poor duck on account of how she was still toting the one-ton cannon.
"Oh gaaaawd…" Carue wheezed, but despite his quaking knees, I could tell that he was still good for it.
"Robin," I glanced at our grim archaeologist. "Think you can—?"
"— Find whatever information Shiki's accumulated over the years and appropriate it for ourselves?" Robin smirked as she tilted her hat down over her eyes. "I think I can do something along those lines, yes."
"Fantastic," I nodded gratefully. And then I turned towards our most recent powerhouse, who was clenching and unclenching her hand. "Everyone else, fuck things up. And Vivi… think you're feeling up to bringing down the heavens?"
Vivi brought her hand up to stare at it before slowly looking up at me. "No…" she breathed. Then, before I could ask what she meant, her other hand combed through her hair and tugged out her hair tie, shaking her long blue mane free. Something crystallized in Vivi's eyes, and a miniature vortex spun into existence in the palm of her hand.
"I'd rather raise the roof."
And with that the Princess shoved her cyclone-bearing hand heavenward and clenched her fingers into a fist, crushing the vortex in her palm.
"RA'S WRATH!"
I whistled as our party was suddenly encircled by a roaring pillar of air that shot up, into and clean through the ceiling, blasting the roof apart with contemptuous ease. The glare Shiki shot Vivi's way through the clearing smoke was almost as impressive.
-o-
The throne room of Alubarna Palace was dead silent as the occupants all stared at the princess's display of might.
"She did it…" Cobra whispered, tears of so many emotions welling up in his eyes.
"My sincerest apologies, Shiki the Golden Lion," Vivi curtsied politely as the smoke dissipated, her gaze never once breaking with her enemy. "Did I forget to mention that I'm a Logia now?"
"She looks just like her mother," Pell breathed, pride in his voice.
"Right down to the 'repent or suffer' look," Chaka concurred.
"Heheheh, please," Accino chuckled with a wave of his cigars. "I was married once as well. You mean 'repent and suffer less'."
Cobra slowly allowed a vicious grin to come across his face. "The only difference," he stated proudly. "Is that Shiki has long since made his choice."
-o-
OK, now the way Shiki was glowering was impressive. If looks could kill, Vivi would have been a greasy smear on the floor, Logia or no Logia.
"SHIKI!"
Still, it didn't last long before Luffy made a beeline for Shiki and prompted the bastard to make a run for it. Gritting my teeth, I went after my captain, Zoro right beside me. And a good thing, too, because Scarlet and Indigo popped up out of nowhere right behind Luffy, the bandaged clown brandishing an oversized sabre and the gorilla sporting a pair of brass knuckles I just bet were laced with sea prism stone.
They turned to face us, and it wasn't hard to imagine them tearing into Luffy's unprotected back otherwise. I raised Funkfreed—
"OUT OF THE WAY, MORONS!"
—And then hurled myself out of the way when Soundbite blared a train horn in my ear and an annoyingly familiar voice shouted behind us. Zoro followed a split second later, but Indigo and Scarlet were slower on the uptake, which meant that Barto, a shimmering cow catcher projected a half foot in front of him, practically ran them over in his haste to… follow Luffy!?
I shook the dizziness of the dodge from my head before shooting a glare at Barto's retreating back. "Damn it all, Barty, what the hell do you think you're playing at!?" I grumbled to myself.
-o-
"WAIT UP, STRAW HAT!"
Luffy turned his furious gaze over his shoulder, prepared to slam his fist into whoever had dared to try attacking him while he was after Shiki. He aborted the attack, however, when his pursuer didn't make any aggressive moves. And… something else…
"Who—?" Luffy started to call back before jerking as his memory was jogged by the other pirate's bobbing mohawk. "Ah, you're that Barty guy, right? The one we met in Loguetown? What're you doing here?!"
"Wh-What do you think?!" Bartolomeo stammered, huffing as he tried to keep up with Luffy's insane pace. "I-I'm coming with you! I'm gonna help you k-kick Shiki's ass!"
Luffy's curiosity faded into annoyance, and he snorted and snapped his head forward. "I don't need your help! Go back and help the others!"
"Wh-What!?" Barto squawked, cold sweat breaking out over his brow. "Th-That's not—! Y-You can't—! Nnngh!" 'Black Bart' clawed his fingers down his face. "J-Just listen to—!"
"I don't need to!" Luffy barked impatiently, starting to increase his pace. "This bastard threatened our home and stole our crewmate! This is my fight! So stay out of—!"
"WILL YOU SHUT THE FUCK UP AND LISTEN TO ME, YOU DUMB BASTARD!?"
More out of surprise than actual fear, Luffy looked back at Bartolomeo, whose expression had morphed into a full-on scowl.
"I set out to sea because of you, Straw Hat!" the fang-toothed pirate bellowed proudly, his jaw set with ineffable determination. "I've followed your crew's journey every step of the way, even before the SBS! I know how you do things, I know that Shiki declared war on you the moment he hurt one of your crewmates, and I'm not going to stand in your way. BUT!"
Barto put on a burst of speed, actually managing to catch up to and run alongside Luffy, glaring dead ahead after Shiki. "The East Blue is my home too!" he declared. "I've got my boys there, my family! And I'm not just going to sit back on my ass when I can actually make a difference! I'm going to fight for them, tooth and nail, no matter what you or anyone else has to say about it! And if you don't like it… then you can get the fuck out of my way!"
Bartolomeo winced at insulting his idol like that, but it seemed to cement Luffy's attention on him. He was silent for a few moments, glaring at his fellow East Blue captain.
"How do you fight?"
Accurately interpreting the meaning of Luffy's question, Bartolomeo grinned as he locked eyes with him. "Good old fisticuffs crossed with my Barrier powers. I can hit anyone, but they can't hit me back."
Luffy nodded and refocused his attention ahead. "Alright. Let's go, Black Bart!"
Bart's leer stretched from ear to ear. "Right there with you, Straw Hat!"
-o-
I stared after Bartolomeo and Luffy, automatically climbing to my feet. I hadn't expected that, but with my annoyance ebbing I could admit that Barto was the best candidate to actually help Luffy against Shiki. This wasn't a bad thing, not at all, no matter how much the petty side of me wanted to say otherwise for getting a train horn blasted in my ear.
"What was that about?" Zoro grunted, massaging the spot on his thigh where Barto had clipped him.
"Barto's living his dream right now," I answered. "Don't worry about it, he'll either be a net help for Luffy or Luffy will knock him out before he makes too big a nuisance of himself. Either way, we should probably focus on our own situation."
Zoro snorted, slowly turning to look over his shoulder. "Yeah, speaking of which…"
As Zoro said, 'our situation' was, ah, not optimal, so to speak. I don't know how many pirates were in the room with us, but it was at least a few dozen, and these weren't the grunts that we'd mowed down earlier. No, these guys were all staring at us without any fear, without any hesitation, with total certainty in not only their own victories, but their having the strength to achieve said victories.
All that, coupled with the jackets they had slung over their shoulders, and I'm fairly certain that these were all captains, every last one of them.
"Soundbite, headcount?" I muttered out the corner of my mouth.
"FIFTY OF these guys out in the front," he answered. "AND, UH, DON'T PANIC, but we didn't get EVERY ONE OF THE GRUNTS. 'NOTHER FOUR HUNDRED AND FIFTY behind them."
I clicked my tongue in a sharp tsk. "So," I sighed out loud. "Final count, it's us two, a loud-mouthed third mate tactician with his partners and a first mate swordsman, against fifty of the strongest captains in Paradise, along with the top fighters in their crews. Close to five hundred pirates against two."
"I think we can take them," Zoro said as he retrieved and brandished his unsheathed Wado Ichimonji. "Do you think we can take them?"
"You always think we can take them," I groused, though that didn't stop an eager grin. It was this grin that I turned on the captains surrounding us. "So? What are you guys waiting for? An engraved invitation?"
That did it. One graybeard stood, drew his sword, and pointed it at us. "Get those little pests!" he barked. "Kill them all!"
Immediately, the crowd surged towards us, the larger part breaking for Zoro and a smaller but still significant chunk going for me. I grinned and hefted my partners. After the last week… I needed this.
Hefting Lassoo, I pulled the trigger as fast as I could, baseball bombs soaring over the heads of the frontline to thin out the crowd to the rear. Adding to the carnage was Soundbite pitching in with the Bass Cannon every time a bomb went off, creating veritable walls of sound that turned anything in their path to jelly. Gunfire rang out, but a swift swing of Funkfreed had him wrapped around me, the bullets pinging off his steel hide prompting the pirates to mostly abandon their guns.
Still, about twenty bombs later, the leading two captains were almost on me with the rest of the horde only reeling. One was a full-bearded fellow with a brown coat trimmed in fur and a painful-looking x-shaped scar on his forehead carrying a massive iron club, while the other was an aged woman, her black hair done up in a long pigtail and her Chinese-style dress torn at the waist to expose an armored breastplate, brandishing cutlass and dagger.
Both were also in the danger zone of Lassoo's baseball bombs. And neither of them were concerned as they charged toward me, the looks on their faces clearly expecting me to go down in a matter of seconds so that they could move along. If I were a little less incensed, I'd probably be grateful that the misconception that my voice was the only dangerous part about me had lasted this long.
I dedicated myself to disabusing them of that notion with an almost savage glee.
I snapped my arms—and weapons—out to my sides. "Pachy-Cryo," I uttered.
Funkfreed withdrew to his blade form, which made the captains pick up speed, but they were given pause by water spraying down the length of his blade from his hilt, courtesy of his old Water Dial. A moment later, his new Cool Dial flash-froze the water into a secondary blade of pure ice.
"Cani-Pyro!"
Lassoo followed suit, reverting into his cannon mode. He then coughed out a measured stream of gas that he swiftly ignited. Said flames coalesced into a controlled pillar of blue flames, easily as long and as thick as Lassoo was.
Preparations complete, I hefted up my partners and greeted the captains with a savage smirk.
"Beast Blitz," I chuckled grimly. "Bring it."
They were only too happy to comply.
The woman's blades not only froze over almost immediately upon slamming into my own, but the ice glued her hands to her own weapons and Funkfreed's edge, while Lassoo's blowtorch went through scarface's club like it was made of butter. The looks on their faces were priceless.
"GASTRO-nation."
And then Soundbite rang their skulls like church bells and put them right out of the fight. Good timing, too, because the rest of the crowd had arrived. This was no time for subtlety or fancy tactics. Instead, I simply waded into the fight, swinging Lassoo and Funkfreed around equal parts calculated intent and reckless abandon. With the temperature effects they were running, that was still enough to clear large swathes of pirates.
It was incredibly satisfying.
But it just. Wasn't. Enough.
Gritting my teeth, I tossed aside Funkfreed and Lassoo—who promptly swapped to their hybrid forms and took up the charge on their own—and punched one of the non-captains in a pinstriped suit square in the nose. That he crumpled like a sack of flour was so much more satisfying than using my partners.
And while Zoro and I were tearing through these guys, no one could ever accuse them of being stupid. Weak and as coordinated as drunken monkeys on a waxed floor, but not stupid. The nearest captain, one wearing a blue shirt and sporting fish-like fins behind his ears, charged me, clearly intent on grappling me, shouting, "Everyone, dogpile him! It's just that dumbass bigmouth Cross!"
I waited until he came close, then grabbed his hands as he made to strangle me. His eyes widened slightly when I didn't crumple immediately. And then I squeezed, his wrists crumpling beneath my fingers like empty soda cans.
-o-
"Brutal," Kid sneered appreciatively, his fingers twitching with potential violence just itching to be released as he observed the beatdown.
"Oh, God help me…" Killer dragged his fingers down his mask, groaning miserably as he contemplated the inevitable meeting of the two pirates and the fallout that would come of it.
-o-
"Wh-What?!" the captain gasped in shock and pain, staring numbly at his destroyed hands. Then I yanked his arms down and rammed my knee into his chin, dropping him to the ground.
"… 'just Cross'?" I chuckled with deceptive, icy calm as I made a show of dusting my hands off. "Ohhh nonono… let me explain something to you lot."
Several pirates, non-captains, tried to bum-rush me. A punch here, an elbow there, a dodge to let one fellow sprawl painfully against a wooden support beam. I helped him along to dreamland by planting my boot against the back of his head, and I was sorely tempted to give him a half dozen more for good measure.
"Now… this might come as a bit of a shock to some people, but the truth is?" I gestured at myself with a smile. "I… am an angry person. It's true, I am, I am a very angry person. Bit new to me too, seeing as it only really started up since I came to the Grand Line, but, well…" I shrugged as I shattered the jaw of someone trying to sneak up on me with a backhand. "There it is.
"Normally, this doesn't really show because I channel my anger constructively, I let it out through my words as I slowly but surely tear the World Government down, piece by piece. But see, for the past week?" I ducked as another pirate swung a bulky arm at my head. I then snagged said limb in a crushing grip and wrenched the limb around my assailant's back. "I haven't been able to do that."
I ratcheted up the pressure on my captive's arm as I spoke. "I haven't been able to do that, because for the past week, my crew and I have been trapped in a primordial hellhole, fighting for our lives against monsters that outweighed us fifty to one apiece, courtesy of an arrogant bastard who decided to ignore my every warning, my every repeated message concerning the sanctity of our crew, and made the fan-fucking-tastic life choice of fucking with me and mine in a most glorious manner. As such?"
SNAP!
My captive howled in agony and I let him drop to the ground as he lost all resistance in his shoulder.
"I am," I smiled politely, holding my fingertips less than an inch apart. "Just the slightest, tiniest bit, somewhat pent up."
Another captain joined into the fray, resplendent in a white uniform trimmed in gold with an impressively tall hat. He also had gray skin, black pits for eyes, sharp claws and teeth… oh, and also had a good three feet on me, height-wise. That's probably why he thought it would be a good idea to jump at me from the second floor like some panther on the hunt or something.
"Now, I'm no fool." I tugged down my hat and grinned, even as the rabid pirate descended on me. "I know for a fact that I can't even lay so much as a scratch upon Shiki, no matter how much I want to. I can't even touch him." I then snapped a glare up at the pirate. "But you."
Before dead-eyes could react, I snapped my metal-clad fists out and snagged the captain by the lapels of his oh so nice jacket, snatching him clean out of the air and holding him nice and high off the ground where all he could do was scrabble and squirm at and in my literal steel grip.
"You all who decided to join him, to stay allied with his flag, even after he, at the risk of repeating myself, fucked with me and mine, in a very public, impossible to ignore manner," I hissed venomously, grinning up at my victim-to-be. "You, I can touch. You… I can break. But still, just in case, just in case this all sailed clean over your dumb little heads… let me make this as easy for you as I can possibly make it…"
Spinning around, I shifted my grip and then slammed the captain into the floor, turning it into splinters and shaking the whole room.
I then, very slowly, very deliberately, turned at my heel and regarded the pirates who had all frozen in place like the disgusting scum they were, scowling with pure malice as I slowly cracked my knuckles, one by one, ensuring that they could all hear it.
"Daddy needs to express some rage," I rumbled grimly.
Ahhhhhh. That's the stuff. And the fact that the rest of the crowd around me—and it was a pretty sizeable crowd, still—was taking a fearful step back, terror written on every square millimeter of their faces, was the gourmet icing on this delicious cake. Then I blinked.
"Huh. This must be what Shiki feels like all the time. Explains a lot, really." I turned back to the crowd, who all took another step back. "Now, who wants some?" Not waiting for an answer, I pointed at a pirate at random. "You. You want some."
"Oh, God—GRK!"
That choking noise? That would be me holding him up by his throat, Funkfreed covering me while I made my point. "Don't bother," I chortled, sheer madness gleaming in my eyes. "My captain already punted him off his throne. Wanna guess who spat in his face first?!"
-o-
Mr. 5 eyed the sharp metal whirlwind that was Roronoa Zoro's position as he strolled into the chaotic mess that had once been Shiki's throne room. "My my, this is really turning out to be quite the party," he remarked, catching a sword-armed pirate with his foot. Which exploded.
"Kyahahaha!" Miss Valentina cackled, floating above the chaos. "And me without my banana! I feel so underdressed!"
One eyebrow rose above 5's sunglasses. "Why would you need a banana at a party?"
"You always take a banana to a party!" Valentine replied as she came crashing down on some poor fool who happened to be under her.
A muscle in 5's cheek twitched. "…alright, let's try again: What good is a banana at a party?"
"Excellent source of potassium!" Sanji answered as he skidded past, surfing on a pirate whose head he had under his heel.
"Thank you~!" Valentine called after him.
"Why do I even bother…" 5 shrugged with a defeated sigh.
Suddenly, a knot of pirates exploded. Literally. Both former Baroque Works agents glanced to the site of the explosion, and were thoroughly unsurprised to see Cross there, dog-gun retrieved and smoking on his shoulder. They were surprised to see 'Thief Lord' Ernesto Barbarossa among the fallen pirates, blood dribbling out of his ears. Taking a moment to catch an attacking pirate and explode his hand in his face, Mr. 5 sighed and turned to his partner.
"…Miss Valentine, what was that you were saying a couple of months ago, before we met the Kuja Pirates?" he asked in a tight, if conversational tone.
"I was saying that we need to let go of our grudge against the Straw Hats because of how much their stupid luck has rubbed off on us," the woman said, more focused on the display than the pirate fruitlessly trying to cut through her umbrella, the poor bastard entirely unaware that the parasol was, in reality, entirely steel down to the last fiber and was only portable due to currently weighing a mere fraction of its normal weight.
"That's what I thought," 5 nodded. "I'm starting to agree wholeheartedly with that."
Valentine hummed as she snapped her parasol shut, allowing her attacker to overcompensate with his next swing, and then brained him with the full weight of her weapon of choice, which hit like a ton of… well, anything. "That's good."
"That said," 5 plowed on. "I still want my shot at wringing Cross's scrawny neck."
"Oh, now that's an entirely different kettle of fish," Valentine scoffed, jabbing her umbrella's tip in the bigmouth's general direction. "You take everything above the waist, I call everything below."
"I heard that."
The two of them stiffened as Cross side-eyed them, the literally murderous look in his eyes freezing them where they stood.
"I'm only going to say this once: if anyone who is not on my crew attacks me right here, right now, I will not be held responsible if they don't survive it," his voice informed them, right in their ears, in a perfectly conversational tone of voice.
The two Devil Fruit users looked at each other. Then they proceeded to walk—not run, of course not, why would they run, they didn't need to run, not from him of all people— away without another word.
-o-
"…"
Something tried to pierce the hazy shade of Nami's mind.
"…i…"
Something tickled her senses, attempting to bring herself back to consciousness.
"…a…i…"
Something was pushing and pulling at her. She couldn't be sure if it was physical or mental.
"…ami…Nami…"
Her name. Someone was calling her name. That was the push she needed to stir into consciousness.
"Nami… Nami?"
She didn't recognize the voice. It sounded young, more male than female, and concerned. She also processed the fact that something was prodding at her face.
"Nami? Nami, please wake up, please wake up! I'm sorry! So so sorry! I'll do anything you say, I won't ever run away again, so please! Please!"
The prodding suddenly became a straight up jackhammer.
"WAKE U—!" SLAM!
"CUT IT OUT, YOU STUPID DUCK!" Nami shrieked as she slammed an uppercut into Billy's beak, knocking him off of her.
A second later, however, Nami nearly collapsed as the extra energy granted to her by her adrenaline cut out, leaving her right back at death's door. Her mind reeled from the green haze choking it, but her analytical mind was still capable of discerning three facts about her situation.
First, she had been cut loose of the bindings that Shiki had strung her up with, and she was laid out in the snow a good dozen metres away from the Daft Green grove.
Second, Perona was free as well, lying in the snow next to her, but was still incoherent on account of the green bruises that had mottled her face.
And third, most important of all…
"Billy…?" Nami wheezed through her too-tight throat, blinking at the red-yellow blur she could vaguely recognize as her avian friend.
"Nami!" the electric avian squawked in relief, flapping over her ecstatically. "You're alright! Oh thank heck, I was so worried! I-I'm so so so sorry that I flew away earlier, I-I-I was just so scared, and-and-and look!"
Billy held up his shaking wings, and Nami blinked at the large metal orb he seemed to be holding. "I-Is that… my Jet Dial?" Nami coughed in confusion.
"I-It was the b-biggest piece I could find and-and-and I'm so sorry I wasn't there to help and, a-and…" Tears welled in Billy's eyes as he bowed his head. "Please… p-please, y-you're my-my first friend… m-my only friend… s-so please, don't hate me…" the duck sobbed, rubbing at his eyes. "D-Don't hate me for running! D-Don't be mad, p-please don't be—GWAK!"
Billy was choked off by Nami throwing her arms around his neck and hanging onto him for dear life.
"Y-You came…" the redhead sobbed into his plumage. "A-And if you're talking… th-then that means the others came too… you're here, you're all here…"
Billy returned the embrace with similar relief, smiling at the forgiveness she gave so easily. Though concern returned immediately upon seeing her slump to the ground, struggling to breathe.
"N-Nami! What's going—?"
"The poison," Nami croaked weakly, shaking her head. "Billy… B-Back in the trees, the fuses… on the dynamite. Y-You need to ignite them, h-hurry…"
"W-Wha!?" Billy squawked with a panicked flap. "B-But if I do, th-then the Daft Greens! The others!"
"That's the plan," Nami breathed. "Shiki won't know what hit him…"
Billy stared at Nami in horror, but she shook her head. "Worry about us after… we need to—"
"Idiot."
Duck and witch started as a soft hiss suddenly came from nearby, and their attention turned toward the huffing, scowling form of Perona, who was clawing at her collar.
"Get… this… off. I'll… trigger… the bombs…" she panted.
Nami processed that and looked at Billy, who frowned as he looked at the collar.
"I-I dunno if I can…" Billy muttered noncommittally, nosing at the keyhole.
"Bring her—hurk," Nami heaved as her throat seized up on her. Grimacing with effort, she rifled her hand through her hair and withdrew a hairpin. "Bring her here, q-quick…"
Billy hastily complied, taking Perona into his talons and bringing her over to Nami. She put the pin in the lock and had it off in seconds. Black humor played across her face.
"Well… at least now I can say that I c-could literally pick locks on my deathbed," she chuckled.
"And I'm… supposed to be the one… with a morbid sense of humor," Perona wheezed, raising her hand. Slowly, strugglingly, a cluster of Mini Hollows spilled out and flew toward the trees.
Nami watched with grim satisfaction, and in a few moments more, when the only obstacle preventing Shiki from falling victim to his own monsters perished in fire, that smile widened into a visage of outright malice.
Billy swallowed heavily as he watched the Daft Greens burn, but then his trepidation became outright terror when he heard the incensed howls of his 'brethren' in the distance. "Sh-Sh-Shouldn't we be running or something…?" he quacked fearfully.
"Nah…" Nami shook her head with a delirious snicker. "No need… I'm hurt, remember? We don't need to run…"
Billy was about to protest that particular decision, but before he could say much of anything, he was silenced.
Silenced by the sight of a thirty-foot tall stag striding through the burning gap in the trees and plodding its way towards them. With a forest of spear-sharp antlers protruding from its brow, the beast's stature was emphasized even further, and coupled with the rows of razor-sharp teeth in its maw and the positively evil glint in its eyes… Billy was under no illusions as to what his 'cousin's' intentions were.
The duck gulped, and out of pure instinct he snapped his wings out, preparing to take to the skies but then he steeled himself and extended his tail as well, electricity crackling around him.
"Don't bother."
Billy hesitated at Nami's soft wheeze, but elected to ignore what he knew was the result of delirium, continuing to charge himself up.
"Don't bother, Billy," Nami repeated just as airily. "I'm hurt… and that means…"
Billy grit his teeth, about to unleash his energy—
"CHERRY BLOSSOM BLAST!" "EXPLODING STAR!" KA-BOOOOOOM!
And then he flinched in shock as a series of explosions enveloped the deer, followed swiftly by a gorilla-like figure skidding to a halt beside them, the familiar long-nosed form of another Straw Hat coming up quickly behind him. Both were panting with relief and satisfaction.
"Y'know… that deer looked a lot like my birth father…" Chopper mused as he walked up to them, gaze on the staggered, smoking stag. "And all things considered? I honestly think that I might have enjoyed that way too much."
"Considering how I'm planning on decking my own dad when I meet him before hugging him? I think your reaction was downright healthy," Usopp snorted in return.
"You're… You're here," Billy said dumbly. "You-You guys actually came! I thought she was delirious!"
"Oh, she is," the reindeer responded with a roll of his eyes, fishing a pair of vials out of his backpack and tossing one to the sniper. "Faith in her crew or not, she wouldn't be staying still instead of running when she couldn't fight back if she were thinking straight. Drink this, Nami. You too, Perona."
At Chopper's gesturing, Usopp held the vial to Nami's mouth while he held the other one up to Perona's. Two assisted swallows later and the two snapped up into sitting positions, hacking and wheezing in renewed agony.
"You conscious now?" Chopper asked tersely.
"What the hell did you just make me drink!?" Nami demanded viciously, the agony in her chest the only thing preventing her from ripping his scrawny—! "GRK!" Like that.
"Taking that as a yes,"Chopper said dismissively, getting his chemicals in order. "What I just gave you was an energy booster to accelerate the progress of the secondhand IQ you ate at the Sunny through your immune system. Bitter taste, better cure…" He then frowned grimly. "Except it isn't a cure, just a stopgap measure. Daft Fever is vicious enough over a prolonged period of time from secondhand inhalation, and you just got it from the source. We need to get the pure cure, and the only way to manufacture it is from IQ plants, and the only place on the whole island I can get those…"
All present recoiled a bit as Chopper's eyes glowed cyan. "Is Indigo's laboratory."
Usopp nodded in understanding, tapping his Kabuto on his shoulder. "Need any help getting there?"
"I—"
"N-No!" Nami interrupted with a wheezing cough. "I need you to do something else for me!" Before Usopp could question what that was, she pointed out the nearby wreckage.
"AAAGH!" Usopp squawked in panic, snapping over to and cradling the metal orb desperately. "THE WAVER!? WHAT HAPPENED TO IT?!"
"Shiki happened," Nami snarled savagely before allowing her expression to soften. "But I think the Jet Dial is still intact, so maybe we can salvage something from it. Just… Just get it back to the Sunny, alright?"
Usopp hesitated for a scarce moment before nodding and taking the metal shell into his hands. "No promises about finding my way back to you guys before this is over, but I'll be back in the fight as soon as I've dropped this off."
"Alright," Chopper nodded firmly. "Take care, Usopp,"
The sniper saluted proudly before grabbing onto the metal orb, and blurring out of sight.
The doctor then glanced at Billy. "And what about you? Feel up to helping?"
Billy hesitated slightly at the question, but only for a moment before he steeled his beak and nodded. "You take Perona, I'll carry Nami."
The human-reindeer nodded and promptly got to work. It took some effort to properly situate Nami on the duck's back, loop her arms around his neck so that she could hold on, and then finally get moving…
But once they started running, it wasn't a moment too soon because barely a second later…
"GROOOOAAAAR!"
The world itself howled havoc and set loose the everythings of war.
-o-
"Ho. Ly. Shit."
"RIKA!"
"Come on, Mom!" the young girl protested, incredulously flailing her arms at the screen. "If anything warrants swearing like a sailor, it's the end of the world! And that!" So said, she pointed at the screen.
At the devastation raging through the Golden Lion's compound. Dozens of monstrosities of varying size but equal viciousness and savagery, tearing through the walls of buildings and ripping through the assembled troops with absolute abandon. Insectoid, mammalian, avian, even some amphibian-aquatic monstrosities that had decided to venture out of their comfort zone in their desire to join the carnage.
"That," Rika repeated firmly. "Is pretty much a scene right out of the end of the world right there. And it's also what's going to come down on our heads if Luffy and his friends lose! So if that doesn't warrant some swearing, I don't know what does!"
Ririka frowned heavily at her daughter's frustratingly valid reasoning, and ultimately decided to save scolding her about it for when the Straw Hats succeeded in saving them again. She wouldn't allow herself to believe that they could lose; there was too much at stake.
"Normally, I'd be right there with you, Ririka."
Mother, daughter, and patrons turned to see Commander Ripper coming towards them, an uncharacteristically savage grin on his face.
"But to be perfectly honest? This has got to be the most beautiful show of poetic justice that I've ever seen. When I think back of what it was like to be under Morgan's axe… for the sake of keeping our island and ocean safe from that, I'm overlooking any support that the base shows towards Luffy or any of his allies for the rest of the day."
Ririka's eyes widened as she made that connection: a tyrant enforcing his will upon what he saw as his dominion. They were once again relying on Luffy to save them from an awful fate, this time before it even began. And with that in mind, with that realization of how much it meant to them in particular that the fight worked in their favor…
She sighed and smiled lightly. "I seem to have gone temporarily deaf. It should be better by tomorrow."
Ripper smirked while Rika grinned.
-o-
Sanji thudded to the floor, grimacing in pain and frustration, one hand on a cut in his upper arm oozing blood. At least his opponents weren't in any hurry to attack him, either. Silver linings.
Surrounding him were five human-sized monsters in animal form. But for all that they were human-sized, they were a damn sight tougher than anything running around in the jungle. The wolf pacing around was blindingly fast; kicking the cobra opposite it was like kicking a metal cactus; the hare sitting well back kept pelting him with projectiles; and the steel-feathered falcon and nausea-inducing bat circling overhead were a consistent nuisance. Especially the bat. It was too bad there weren't any real recipes that featured bat.
Not to say that this had been entirely one-sided. The wolf, for one, was walking with a pronounced limp, to say nothing of their considerable caution. That meant one thing.
"Time to kick it up a notch," Sanji muttered, beginning his spin. His foot scraped on the wood, and soon bloomed with immense, crackling heat. The alphas around him all took a nervous move back, the fear of fire still ingrained in their instincts. So when Sanji leaned towards the wolf and the rabbit behind it, both flinched back, which left them completely out of position when Sanji instead took a flying leap towards the cobra, blazing foot held out.
The cobra, eyes wide, tried to slither out of the way, but it wasn't fast enough. What saved it were the falcon and bat launching metal-hard feathers and an ultrasonic scream respectively. Sanji flinched under the assault, slowing.
"You're…" he growled, planting his hand and pivoting. "Annoying!"
That pivot swung his blazing leg around and right into the bat's face. With a squawk of agony, the bat went tumbling back and hit the wall, slumping to the floor.
Sanji let himself go limp as the falcon dove at him, the bird passing over him and his foot coming up to meet it. Another squawk, a burst of feathers, and then the falcon bounded off the ceiling and plopped onto the floor, too. The remaining animals warily eyed Sanji, especially when he stood and flashed them a smirk.
"Who wants to be served next?"
As if on cue, one of the walls suddenly burst to pieces, a mid-sized crocodile with a raccoon and a scorpion on its back trotting in. The scorpion promptly launched a glob of venom at the cook, who dodged it, only to be met by a sudden raccoon dive to the face.
"Wargh!"
Only a hasty jump back saved Sanji from more than a few face scratches, and it didn't stop the rock that smacked right into his ribs. Worse, out the corner of his eye, he could see the two fliers starting to stir.
'This… could be bad,' he mentally admitted.
"Hey, Sanji, you look like you could use a hand."
Sanji glanced towards the door, where Gin was leaning against the frame, smiling like the devil.
"If you've got nothing better to do," Sanji grunted.
Now, with two fighters in the room, the animals were once again frozen, eyeing each as they tried to figure out what to do. That meant Gin had plenty of time to spin his tonfa. Time enough that they started sparkling and crackling, until the weapons were twin blurs of radiant light.
"Primum Imperium," Gin intoned, before rushing the crocodile.
Slow as it was, the crocodile probably wouldn't have been able to dodge the blow, and it didn't even try, trusting in its protective armor. That armor, sadly, was not built to withstand a massive iron ball slamming into it, nor to stop the load of electricity that followed. With a snapping noise and a keening wail, the crocodile twitched and flailed and then fell still, the smell of charred keratin filling the room.
"Who's next?" Gin asked, scanning the room.
Sanji, meanwhile, had started moving as soon as said the name of his attack. Spinning around, he raised his foot in an axe-kick that he brought down on the still-surprised cobra sitting behind him. The blow obliterated the tatami mat and left the cobra stunned. The next five ensured that it would stay that way.
Swaying out of the way of the wolf, Sanji spun and planted his non-fire leg right into its soft underbelly. With a yipe, the wolf tumbled out of the fight, at least for now. A rock, following in its wake, was obliterated with a single kick. The two fliers tried to stay at range, but injured as they were, Sanji had no problem Moon Walking up to them.
"Premiere Hachis Hash!"
The double-kick landed square on the falcon, pitching it away again. Evading another kicked rock, Sanji touched down, right as the wolf dove for him again. The dive was promptly halted by a flaming boot to the face.
The poor abused wolf went down with a piteous whine, and Sanji turned his attention to his last two annoyances: the rabbit and the hawk.
ZZT!
In his peripheral vision, he could see Gin finish off the raccoon with just the edge of his weapons' electrical field. The last two alphas evidently saw that, too; the rabbit kicked a hole in the wall and bolted through, the falcon following shortly behind.
"Should we go after them?" Gin asked.
"Nah, waste of energy," Sanji waved a hand dismissively, his other hand occupied with lighting up a new cigarette. "Let them run off and either raise hell or get crushed elsewhere, I don't care. I only fought them because they cornered me. More importantly…" Sanji eyed Gin's weapons appreciatively. "Nice technique. Let me guess, magnets in the orbs?"
"Heh!" The dead-eyed man smirked and nodded in confirmation. "Good eye, yeah. It just came to me. Amazing what you can do when you really buckle down, huh?"
"Tell me about it…" the cook chuckled as he shook the lingering smoke from his leg. He then frowned thoughtfully. "The name's got me curious, though. Primum, where have I heard that before…?"
"The Primum Mobile, from Dante's Paradiso," the gaunt man explained with a sage nod. "It's the layer of heaven where angels reside."
Sanji's curly eyebrow quirked. "I thought your epithet was 'Man-Demon'—?"
"Yeah, I completely flipped my image the first chance I got once I broke ranks with Krieg," Gin snarled, scowling. After a deep breath, though, he shot his old friend a cocky smirk. "Anyway. You're now looking at the man known as the 'Empyrean Envoy', worth ฿80 Million."
The Straw Hat's eyes shot wide in shock. "Okay, I know what that one means, and you'll excuse me if I have a hard time believing the Marines would actually give that to you of their own free will."
"Weeeell," Gin's grin slowly darkened tauntingly. "In all fairness, I did have some help in getting it to stick."
Sanji's eye narrowed accusingly. "Help-help, or Cross-help? No, wait." He snapped a hand up before Gin could respond. "On second thought, I'd rather keep well out of that bog of secrecy. Just… one more question." He tilted his head in confusion. "Angels? From you, of all people?"
Gin slowly cracked his neck back and forth. "Do you know what the first thing angels say is whenever they appear?"
"Er…"
"They always say 'be not afraid'. And the reason they say that, it's not to be comforting…"
Gin tilted his head at just the right angle so that his grin was at peak malevolence.
"It's because angels, in their truest forms, are fucking terrifying."
"… well, I'm sold," Sanji declared. He then turned an evil eye out of the room. "But now that that's cleared up… want to go and help me put the fear of both those above and below in these bastards?"
Gin matched the grin tooth for tooth as he slowly started to spin up a fresh charge. "I thought you'd never ask."
-o-
Dr. Indigo was a genius. No how much they hated how he used his surplus IQ, nobody could deny that fact. So when he heard the commands that Jeremiah Cross gave to the Straw Hat Pirates and failed to stop Luffy (and 'Black Bart' Bartolomeo, the damn traitor) from pursuing his captain, he knew there was really only one thing that a genius like him could do: flee the center of the chaos and ensure that if he had to fight, it would be on his terms, on his ground, and most importantly, in a way that ensured that no Human Zoans were getting their grubby paws on his precious research.
So Dr. Indigo had arrived at his laboratory mere minutes after the Straw Hats' invasion commenced, and had spent that time ensuring that all of his most valuable devices and notes were sealed away. He might have worried if their navigator was still up and about, but nobody else would have the skills to get through his security. After everything was secured, he finally got around to unwinding the bandages from his head and reapplying his makeup.
The Hollow-girl's parting shot had destroyed much of his hair and left more than a little bruising on his face, leaving his appearance different than he was used to. This and the fact that they were invading the East Blue, vindicating his ingenuity to the world, inspired the doctor to redesign his appearance. White was the base as before, but several black markings adorned it.
His reasoning behind donning it was that he thought it would made him look more dangerous. He was right. With his makeup applied, he parked himself on the railing of the second level of his lab to wait for the Straw Hats' inevitable invasion. With his preparations complete, his wait was brief.
The doors swung open, and Indigo scowled, then grinned as he saw the very object of his ire before him. And with one of his most ingenious test subjects and the two other objects of ire in his life following behind him to boot! Today was actually looking up after all!
"Tony Tony Chopper. I've been expecting you," he said, chemicals brimming in his palms and ready to form into his Chemical Juggling at a moment's notice.
"Indigo," the Zoan growled ferally, glaring bloody murder up at the other 'doctor'. He paused, passing Perona's barely conscious frame off to Billy before straightening a touch. "Going for the Juggalo look?"
Indigo blinked, glancing into a nearby mirror. "I wasn't aware that this was a style… But then again, one does tend to miss a few developments when secluded from the world for twenty years."
Chopper snorted. "I only heard about it from Cross. It's appropriate, really; he described it as the 'Insane Clown' look, and that just sums you up perfectly."
Indigo's anger returned, earning Chopper a glare, but the mad doctor reeled it in enough to change the subject to what he knew would enrage Chopper the most. "I assume that you're here because you've found the sad state of your crewmates. The IQ plants are the only cure for Daft Green poisoning, but unfortunately for you…" Indigo flipped a vial of pink liquid into the palm of his hand. "The only sample of the antidote in existence at the moment is right here…" His grin widened maniacally as he crushed the vial in his grip, letting the liquid drip out from between his fingers. "And now it's gone. It took a great deal of research for me to figure out how to make it, so obviously an ignoramus like you doesn't have even a ghost of a prayer of—!"
"I already have the formula."
Indigo froze as Chopper took out a pair of vials that bubbled with milky white liquid. Indigo's eyes widened in shock and fury; he knew that appearance, it was his precise brew of antidote. All that was missing was the key ingredient of IQ that would stabilize the concoction and turn it pink.
"Warmth. Sympathy. Understanding," Chopper recited frigidly, ignoring Indigo in favor of the batch of curing IQ plants that the clown doctor had left out as a taunt, and which Chopper was now walking towards. "Hogback only considered the surgeon's knife, and you only consider the chemist's drug. You've forgotten what it means to be a doctor… if you ever were one."
Chopper spared Indigo a scathing look.
"Can you think of how I managed to reproduce the antidote with only a few hours of preparation, only missing the key ingredient?" he asked quietly.
"YOU COULDN'T HAVE!" Indigo screamed in denial, his already strained restraint snapping like a twig. "I'VE STUDIED THESE ISLANDS INSIDE AND OUT FOR THE LAST TWENTY YEARS, THERE'S NOTHING THAT COULD HAVE LET YOU FIGURE IT OUT THIS FAST!"
"Oh, but there is," Chopper corrected, tossing a handful of the plants into a mortar and grinding them up. "One thing that you overlooked. One thing that would have let you figure out all that you needed to in less than a day, the same way that I did."
Indigo silently fumed as Chopper raised his head and glared straight into his eyes.
"The natives have been fighting off Daft Green for years. All I needed was to ask how they did it, and while their means weren't the most efficient or the most effective, they were enough. What I've made here, it was only possible by perfecting what the inhabitants of Merveille spent generations constructing." Without looking, Chopper poured the ground up IQ plants into his vials, swirled them slightly, and held them up to his eye as the concoctions turned the proper healthy pink. "All thanks to the intelligence and diligence of the very people you enslaved."
Indigo didn't move for several moments. Taking the opportunity for what it was, Chopper hurried back to his patients and carefully coerced the antidote down their throats.
The second the mixture hit the girls' digestive tracts, they started heaving and coughing, feeling as though their innards were being run through by rusty nails, but the fact that they could move or breathe at all, combined with the steady disappearance of their ruddy green bruises, proved just how effective the doctor's cure was.
Nami blinked and gazed unsteadily at her crewmate as the haze cleared from her mind. "Ch-Chopper—? What's—?"
"Stay still," the human-Zoan ordered. "The antidote is working, but it still needs to clear the toxins out of your system. Just let it work and you'll be fine in a matter of minutes."
"B-But what about—?!" Nami cut herself off with a choked gurgle as she noticed Indigo over Chopper's shoulder. "Ah. I see. Right, I-I'll just leave it to you, then." Nami quickly got into a sitting position on Billy's back and helped position the still-dizzy Perona across the giga-duck's back. "Stay safe!"
Perona shook her head in confusion. "Wait, wha—? What's going—?"
Before she could get any further, Billy spread his wings and shot out of the lab.
"WAAAAAH!"
Satisfied that his friends were safe, Chopper turned to face Indigo, slipping a gas mask from his pack and positioning it over his face. And not a moment too soon, as Indigo finally managed to reorient his thoughts, and in a bad way.
"…You… You honestly think," Indigo snarled, his face twisting as flaming bubbles of chemicals started forming around him. "That you can waltz in here and challenge my mastery straight to my face?!"
A look of honest confusion flashed across Chopper's face. "Well, yeah? I mean, I'm a Straw Hat. It's what we do."
Something snapped within Indigo and, screaming wordlessly, he launched every single one of the nitroglycerin bubbles he'd generated at the furry blasphemer in an attempt to obliterate it. They certainly did a good job obliterating the far wall in blossoms of fire, smoke, and shock.
Panting, the clown felt his rage recede, and warily eyed the site of the explosion. As much as he wished otherwise, there was no way that would be enough to take down a Straw Hat.
"Nitroglycerin. Used to reduce heart pressure, but also a powerful contact explosive."
'Sometimes,' Indigo mentally growled. 'I hate being right.'
Turning, the mad doctor put Chopper out of his peripheral vision and into his main. To his aggravation, the Zoan was entirely unscathed from the explosion, and calmly pulling on some gloves at that.
"How—?" Indigo managed to choke out through his fury.
"You're smart, figure it out," was the terse reply.
The rage boiled up again, threatening to overtake him. But Indigo shoved it down with the ease of experience. He could not win this fight in a blinding rage; that wasn't his style. He needed calm analysis, and some space. Which decided his next move.
Reaching into one of the many pockets of his voluminous lab coat, Indigo pulled out what looked like the unholy offspring of a horse syringe and one of those newfangled revolver pistols, the cylinder loaded with a variety of color-filled vials. With most of his gasses likely defeated by that gas mask, the acids were his best chance at doing away with the pest before him. As such, the malevolent doctor spun the cylinder to the vial loaded with hydrofluoric acid and, without a moment's hesitation, plunged the syringe into his veins and injected the payload.
Immediately in response to the infusion, Indigo's tattoos shifted so that they were entirely transparent, and Indigo called up more chemical balls, half more nitroglycerin, and half the hydrofluoric acid he'd prepared. The acid was launched at Chopper, and Indigo took some satisfaction from the look of shock that produced on what he could see of the fuzzball's face. The nitroglycerin, meanwhile, took out the wall behind him, and he jumped through the new hole, landing on one of the bridges connecting the towers of Shiki's palace.
Then a masked reindeer bounded onto the other side, still unscathed.
"Hydrofluoric acid," the Zoan recited, casually tossing a vial up and down in the palm of his hand. "A powerful acid, and an equally powerful contact poison. Treatment is calcium glutamate for the skin and calcium chlorate for the internals."
"Piropiropiro!" Indigo laughed mirthlessly. "You certainly know your chemicals! And I'll bet you have a treatment for almost any poison I have!" The doctor spread his arms eagerly, syringe spinning in one hand and a ring of Chemical balls spinning to life in the palm of the other. "Let's see if you missed anything!"
Chopper was moving even before the balls lashed out, and they sprayed a bewildering array of substances over the area. More acid, as well as honey and oil, sprayed in all directions, the latter igniting when nitroglycerin and other chemicals burst in explosions or gouts of flame or crackling electricity.
And all the while, that damn furball kept naming off every chemical he used!
"Hydrochloric acid. Less toxic, but no less corrosive. Wash with water immediately."
"Oil. Slick, and flammable, but otherwise not dangerous."
"Sulfur. Irritant, pain aggravator, and sensory inhibitor."
"Strontium. Explosive, radioactive, and prone to generating electrical currents. Recommend good pair of running shoes."
"Honey. Sticky. Very tasty."
Growling, Indigo kept up the barrage, and drew a baton from a hidden pocket. This opponent would require something more… hands-on. A quick sniff confirmed that the substance spread over it was still there. Turning back to his barrage, he watched, waited… and then moved. Chopper, who had been focused on evading the chemicals, didn't notice Indigo switching to melee until the baton cracked in the side of the head, sending him pitching onto the bridge.
The Zoan immediately tried to rise, but it was unsteady. "Aconitine," he heard Chopper growl.
"Got it in one, piropiropiro!" Indigo cackled. Mentally, he switched chemicals again, stripes turning white. "I'm sure you can feel the stinging, see the blurred vision! Now, decisions, decisions…" Indigo hummed thoughtfully, looking up into the sky. "What should I kill you with… Oh, silly me, I've already decided! Mass Jugg—!"
"Heavy Gong."
A fist the size of his own head slammed into Indigo's chest with an ominous cracking sound. The clown's eyes bulged, right before the laws of physics reasserted themselves and sent him crashing into the wall at the other end of the bridge. The chemical ball, now with no one to hold it up, splashed onto the bridge, Chopper hopping over the spot to stalk up to Indigo. The clown was digging himself out of the splintered wood when he arrived, confusion written all over his features.
"H-How…" he wheezed through grit teeth.
"Paeoniflorin," Chopper explained, holding up a small vial of pills as he calmly marched forwards. "It has a detoxifying effect on aconitine."
"Th-That's… I've never heard of that!" Indigo protested.
"You wouldn't have, being twenty years out of date," Chopper replied coldly, exchanging the vial for a far more volatile form of ammunition. "It's only ever gone through animal trials. But, well, I was an animal at the time, and my teacher does have a reputation of being something of a crazy old witch, so I probably won't suffer serious side effects."
Growling, Indigo raised his hand to continue Chemical Juggling and then yelped in pain as a hoof came down on the appendage.
"You've lost, Indigo," Chopper stated, as if discussing the weather. "You lost because of short-sightedness, because you shut yourself away from the world, and above all else…" Chopper leaned forward and met Indigo's gaze with his own cyan glare. "Because you're simply not as good at either medicine or combat as I am."
Once again, something snapped within Indigo. "I will not," he growled. "Be looked down upon by some stripling pirate doctor barely out of medical school! Mass Juggling!"
A massive, pale-blue ball burst into existence above the two, and for the first time Chopper showed panic, especially when Indigo grabbed his hoof.
"Piropiropiro!" he cackled, a madness all his own glimmering in his eyes. "Time for us to enjoy a nice cyanide bath! Come, let us venture into the great beyond together! Piropiropiro!"
And then, it fell.
Immediately, the initial effects made themselves known: dizziness, headache, pounding heart and sucking lungs. Gritting his teeth, Chopper shifted to human form and plunged a hand into his bag, pulling out a syringe that he jammed into his arm, pressing the plunger.
After a few seconds, the symptoms receded, and Chopper heaved a sigh of relief. His eyes turned towards Indigo, who was visibly wrestling with his own symptoms. For a moment, Chopper considered his options, and then sighed.
Kneeling down, he retrieved a canister with a mask and another syringe. This was not missed by Indigo.
"Wh-What are you doing?" the clown groaned.
"Treating you, obviously," Chopper replied, shaking his head with a grimace in an effort to clear it. "You might be a bastard, but I'm still a doctor."
"N-No. No!" Indigo roared. "I-I r-refuse to—"
A cloven hoof slammed into a specific pressure point—read: Indigo's temple—and the other pirate's protests ended. "That's better," Chopper sighed. "Especially since I have to use the less pleasant antidote."
He was left to work quietly for a bit, stabilizing the mad chemist and then injecting him with a paralyzing agent. Then he hefted Indigo onto his shoulder and carried him back to his lab.
"Funny," a familiar voice remarked as he went. "I thought you'd be carrying back a mangled mess of bones and tissue like whatever you did to Hogback. And that you'd be just as raving now as you were back then to boot."
Chopper exhaled heavily, sparing the grinning specter beside him a glance. "Hogback was a hero of mine, and I let my anger overtake me when I got my hands on him. The kind of hatred you feel for someone you used to look up to… it's so much worse than someone that you always knew was a monster."
He shook his head as he dropped Indigo onto the floor of his lab. "If he's a half-decent scientist, his laboratory should be strong enough to withstand the fall of Merveille. The Marines will handle the rest. But so long as you're here, you think you'd be willing to help me get past—"
"Sorry, furball, I've got bigger things to worry about than 'science'," Perona air-quoted impishly. "Buuut hey, since you saved my life, I'll tell your old ship to head your way; she's as good at lockpicking as Nami, right?"
Chopper exhaled and nodded. "Alright, thanks."
With a final grin, the Hollow flew off, and Chopper stalked past the fallen Indigo toward the most secured looking door he could find.
"Alright, now let's see…" Chopper spun a scalpel in his hand contemplatively. "How does that old saying go… ah, yes!" The reindeer's eyes flashed eagerly. "How much IQ could a reindeer store if a reindeer could store IQ?"
-o-
Elsewhere on the Grand Line, Miss Merry Christmas sneezed.
And she wasn't the only one, either.
-o-
"WAHCHOO! Urgh, damn allergies…"
Usopp sniffled and rubbed at his nose as he ran down the halls of Merveille. He could do this because he wasn't going as fast as he could; after all, for the moment he was looking for another Straw Hat, or at least another Barto Clubber, to attach himself to. Idly, he reran just how tightly he'd secured the ex-Waver's Jet Dial in his workshop through his head. At least Nami was unlikely to do anything to him once this was all over.
Skidding slightly as he took a corner, he gritted his teeth at the distinct lack of combat sounds in his immediate environs. Why was it that the one time he wanted to run towards the fighting, he couldn't find any?! There were, like, ten thousand pirates in here, and over twenty combined Straw Hats and Barto Clubbers! That he hadn't found something was mindboggling!
Another corner, and this time Usopp skidded to a halt, his mind going back to Cross' lecture on tempting fate. Definitely one he'd be applying a little more from now on, since there was a pack of about a dozen pirates blocking his way. The only way, besides going back. Who designed this place?!
"Hey, it's one of the Straw Hats!" one of the pirates barked, and to Usopp's delight, most of them looked nervous.
"Don't worry, it's their sniper, the weak one!" another pirate added. "We can take him!"
One eyebrow twitched. Okay, being underestimated was nice, but were the insults really necessary? Regardless, Usopp plunged his hands in his pockets, getting a nice, gratifying flinch from the pirates.
"Oh, really?" he said levelly. "Do you really think you can take me?"
"Hell yeah!" replied that pirate, the rest of the mooks responding with a cheer.
Sighing, the sniper dove to the floor and rolled left, and none too soon. Bullets from the pirates tore gouges into the wooden floorboards. With the melee pirates now closing in on him, Usopp finished his roll in a crouch and brought his hands to his sides, cupped.
"Usopp Ultra…"
The pirates immediately all came to a screeching halt, visibly torn between running away or finishing their charge.
"Mega…"
"Come on, you cowards!" the talkative pirate screeched. "It's a bluff, you know that! And that isn't even the same move!"
One last hesitant glance, and the pirates resumed their charge. Usopp smirked.
"Turtle Wave!"
The sniper thrust his hands out. And the hapless pirates had just enough time to get a whiff of gas before the Flame Dial in one hand ignited the emissions of the Flavor Dial in the other. The result?
Instant flamethrower, and a lot of charred goons running back the way they came. Right, in fact, towards the gun-armed pirates that had hung behind, a fact that did not escape said pirates.
"Wait, stop!" the cry arose, too late before their comrades were among them and also lighting them on fire. And, by extension, igniting the gunpowder in their weapons. The resulting explosions were a bad time… well, except for Usopp.
"Don't forget to stop, drop, and roll!" the sniper taunted, diving back into the fray a few seconds later, hammer lashing out and dropping the pirates to the floorboards.
Once the disparate outlaws were all laid out, Usopp raised his hammer high with a whoop of victory. "EAT IT! NONE STAND BEFORE THE KING OF SNIPERS, AT LONG RANGE OR SHORT! HAHA—!"
"THERE HE IS!"
"GET HIM!"
"Oh crap there's more of you guys!?" Usopp's face contorted in shock as he caught sight of the mob rounding the corner and charging his way. Spinning on his heel, Usopp beat feet in the other direction, this time at full speed. Unfortunately, going around the first corner found himself blocked by a wall of solid muscle. Solid muscle that was cracking her knuckles.
"Gotcha!" the female pirate crowed, pulling back one meaty fist.
Instead of screaming or running, though, Usopp reached into another pouch and pulled out a long stick, one end of which quickly unfolded into the empty frame of a large black hammer. Ducking under the punch, he swung the inflatable hammer right at the bruiser's ribcage.
"Usopp Kinetic Pound!"
Said bruiser had just enough time to smirk as the hammer hit her ribs.
And then the Impact Dial attached to the frying pan face went off.
The sound of snapping bone sounded out, accompanied by a "GLURGH!" as the bruiser coughed up blood. Momentum asserted itself, and the bruiser went soaring down the hall, through one of the flimsy rice paper doors, and out of sight.
Simultaneously, the recoil of the Impact Dial shredded the frame and sent the frying pan it laid on right into the one behind it, with the results that both went careening behind Usopp to the tune of squawks of pain. Catching the Dial in his hands, Usopp turned around and smirked at the pile of groaning bodies that had been his pursuers.
"All according to plan!" he crowed, adjusting his goggles as he palmed a Vision Dial and aimed it at himself as he assumed a very cool po—
BLAM!
"Right, crowd chasing and shooting at me, preen later, run now!"
This chase persisted, stretching through several more buildings of the compound. Not only did no one pop in front of him to cut him off, and not only were these pirates lighter on their feet than the last bunch, but he was running out of tricks; caltrops and stars alike only took out some of his pursuers and slowed down the rest.
"G-g-g-grrrgh—!" Usopp snarled to himself as he ran, his breath wheezing through his tightly clenched teeth. "What does a guy need to do to get some decent, sane help around here!?"
"Well, if you're actually ASKING FOR IT…"
Briefly, Usopp entertained the idea of flipping off the snail and continuing on his way. Then a bullet nearly took his bandana off.
"Yes, yes, I'm asking for it!" the sniper pleaded. "And I don't give a damn just how suggestive that sounds or how you can twist it, I'm that desperate, so just help me already!"
"ALRIGHT, YOU JUST HAVE TO HIT UP UP DOWN DOWN LEFT RIGHT LEFT RIGHT B A START."
"WHAT THE HELL DOES THAT MEAN, YOU LITTLE—?!"
"Eh, I'm just screwing WITH YA. Take the next left."
Nearly running past it, Usopp careened around the corner, only to be confronted by a completely unmistakeable dead end. He opened his mouth to roast the stupid snail—
"I RECOMMEND ducking."
Before throwing himself to the floor, joined by the sound of his pursuers skidding around the same corner behind him.
KRAK-THOOM!
That sound was utterly engulfed by the sound of thunder, and for days afterward Usopp would swear he felt a sizzle on his butt. At least his goggles prevented him from getting temporarily blinded. After a few seconds, the sniper slowly eased up and looked behind him. Surrounding a scorched hole in the far wall were his pursuers, strewn on the floor and twitching with lingering… static!? What on earth—?
"Usopp! Are you alright?"
And then he heard a familiar voice and it all made sense.
"You have no idea how happy I am to see you, Conis!" Usopp half-sobbed. It took an effort of will, but he managed to avoid clutching her leg, at least. Instead, he just hung on to the arm she gave him for dear life. "For a second there, I thought that damn snail had rung my bell for good!"
"Naaah, Soundbite wouldn't off you like that!" Su waved her paw dismissively. "He'd make sure there were far more bells and whistles on the ordeal. But anyway, you take care of Conis for me for a second, would you? I've got a little errand I need to run before we get out of here."
So saying, Su leapt off of Conis's shoulder and scampered off, taking the time to hop-stomp on a few stirring mooks as she went.
For several seconds, the two just stared, and then Usopp looked back at Conis. "So! Blitz Bazooka's working out like we hoped?"
The angel-gunner promptly brightened up and nodded eagerly as she showed off the second bazooka she was wielding in an underslung fashion with her left hand, mirroring the Burn Bazooka she had in her right. "Very well, yes! The charge time takes some getting used to, but your idea of swapping the Flavor-Flame combination for a Cloud-Thunder pair worked wonders! Ah, but more importantly…" She cast an analytical gaze over her unwitting opponents. "Any idea for your headcount so far, Usopp?"
"Huh? Uh…" The sniper's face scrunched up in thought. "Let's see… there were a few dozen in that first group—"
"Graaaaaahhhhhh!"
Both looked up to see a ragged, gaunt man brandishing a flaming sword charging straight at them. Up went Kabuto, up went Conis' bazookas—
CLANG!
And then Usopp and Conis jumped back in surprise when, of all things, an anvil slammed through the ceiling and fell on the man's head, burying him in the floorboards up to his shoulders.
"I really wanted to keep that anvil, too…" came Merry's whining voice through the hole.
"Twiage is twiage, Mewwy," Carue sighed in response.
"Urgrgrghhhh," the man groaned, somehow still alive.
"Did… that just happen?" Conis wondered.
"Let's not question it…" Usopp replied, shaking his head. "Now, where were we… oh, right, body counts."
"Ah, yes," Conis said with a serene smile, patting her weapon. "A few dozen, you said? Impressive, though I think I have the advantage. This bazooka has taken down at least a hundred pirates every time I've fired it."
Usopp froze for a moment, then rallied. "You don't say? And how many times was that?"
-o-
The squawk of disbelief and sob of inadequacy at the answer echoed all the way in the courtyard, where another brawl was going on between the Golden Lion Pirates, the beasts of Merveille, and the TDWS.
"Did anyone hear that?" Mikey idly queried. Tightening the grip his nunchucks had on the massive snake he was currently sitting on the back of, he hopped off, flipped, and piledrived the snake straight into the dirt.
"Yeah. Sounds like the noises Leo makes whenever Zoro forces him into a spar," Donny replied. Planting his staff, he spun around in place, smacking his tail off the faces of every pirate in a radius the length of his body.
"YOU'RE THE LAST PERSON I WANNA HEAR THAT FROM, MR. 'GOT PRESS-GANGED BY THE MAD DOCTOR'!" Leo roared, his anger transferring into his blades, which launched two wind-slashes that carved a swathe through the pirates and downed a giant, saber-toothed jaguar that had been roaming the perimeter of the brawl.
A sharp-fanged, demonic-looking grey kangaroo took that opportunity to leap at Leo, only to eat a sai each to the arm and chest. Raphey slammed into it a moment later, smashing it into the ground and grabbing her weapons back simultaneously.
"Watch your back, idiot!" she snapped, hopping off the kangaroo. As she blocked the swords of four separate pirates, the beast shakily got back to its feet, only to get smashed on the skull by Donny's staff.
"Pot, kettle!" the purple-clad dugong shot back.
"That's different, Leo got careless, I'm just being a good teammate!"
"Yeah, well—ack! Shell Body!"
Donny soared into the crowd, propelled there by a kick from the kangaroo. That was the last thing it did, as Leo swiped its hamstrings with his swords as he passed, joining Mikey and Raphey as they charged into the crowd after their teammate, tossing about any pirate with bad enough luck to be in their way.
Not that Donny especially needed the help. His staff was a blur, striking faces, necks, thighs, and all sorts of other soft spots. Already, he had a dead zone around him marked by bruised, unconscious bodies, and the pirates were calling up those of their number with guns.
It was those gun-wielding pirates that the remaining dugongs slammed into like falling anchors, Mikey even pulling out his pistols and shooting up a knot of rifle-armed pirates. As such, he was the first one to notice the new problem.
BOOM!
"Nori Arts!" he frantically yelped, swaying out of the way of a cannonball that had been ready to take his head off. "Look out, guys, someone got the bright idea to wheel in a cannon!" He glanced in that direction again. "Correction: someone got the bright idea to wheel in a lot of cannons!"
"Dammit!" Leo cursed. "Alright, I'm the fastest, so I'll see if I can go get at the gun crews! Can you guys hold on by yourselves?"
"Um…" Raphey said nervously, her head tilted up. "I don't think we're gonna have to…"
The other three Dugongs followed their sister's gaze. A moment later, all four of them were in the middle of a Rip Tide, and not a second too soon.
While nothing was going to upstage the Straw Hats' grand invasion of the Golden Lion's palace, the sight of a group of mismatched, SIQ-gorged birds that had clearly been tamed from the archipelago's mutant menagerie carrying a galleon-sized ship over the palace was a close second.
Even more so if one were to see that the ones conducting the birds were a young girl that was communing with them without saying a word and the rhinoceros-sized dragon she was riding, whose glare alone was enough to show why the birds were going against their fighting instincts.
Of course, this was leaving aside that there were several others who sailed onboard that ship that were just as scary as the dragon, if not scarier. The birds anxiously awaited word from the tamer below that they were free to fly away and never look back.
The reason that the Dugongs fled was not due to the birds, the girl, or the dragon. Rather, it was the fact that there was a galleon hovering above them, and it seemed as though it was about to—
KA-BOOOOM!
Fall. And many a hapless man and beast never knew what hit them.
The TDWS all winced as they recovered from the shockwave of the dropped vessel.
"Soooon of a…" Mikey cursed and coughed in the same breath, waving his flipper in front of his muzzle in an effort to get rid of the kicked up smoke. "Did we just get upstaged?"
"That's what you're focusing on?" Donny groaned incredulously, shooting a glare at his brother through his teary-eyed vision.
"Nah, not really," Raphey assured Mikey. "They're arriving late in the game, after we already kicked things off. They're building off of us and all that, see?" The female Dugong pointed at the ship in demonstration.
Her stance then became a bit more rigid when the girl and the dragon she was riding took off from the deck of the galleon and landed in front of a group of nearby soldiers that had been stunned into silence by the ship's appearance.
"Lindy," the girl stated calmly, arms crossed as she regarded the soldiers with something akin to boredom. "These men planned on burning down the East Blue. Your home and mine. Kindly cut loose."
"With inappropriate amounts of pleasure, milady," her dragon purred in a deep, rich and rolling voice.
After that, things got… violent.
"… Okay, that's just not fair," Mikey whimpered in despair.
Neither Leo nor Raphey nor even Donny objected to Mikey's assessment of the situation. How could they when they had to compete with an actual, honest-to-Sebek dragon?
"We're just awesome that way, sorry."
The Dugongs jumped and looked at the girl who, at some point during the chaos, had dismounted the dragon and had walked up to the Dugongs. She rubbed her head sheepishly.
"Sorry, still not used to talking to animals verbally; I usually use my Whisper-Whisper Fruit to talk straight to their minds," she explained before beaming and rocking back and forth on her heels. "Anyway, I'm Apis, lookout of the Barto Club Pirates! I met with one of you earlier… Donny?"
"We got that you were on our side when you said that Shiki threatened your home," Raphey snorted. "Nice entrance, though."
"Heheh, thanks!" Apis smiled eagerly as she rubbed her finger beneath her nose. "But really, it was all Lindy. He's been having a lot of fun ever since he reincarnated and we joined Barty and everyone else!"
"RUN, YOU LITTLE MORSELS! RUN FOR YOUR LIVES AND MY AMUSEMENT! OM NOM NOM NOM!" the dragon in question chortled as it chased after a horde of fleeing… everyone, to be honest, wings flapping like he was a titanic, green and furry chicken with a long neck. So, not like a chicken at all, really.
Apis' smile twitched slightly as she watched the display. "…maaaaybe a little too much fun."
"Y'think!?" Donny snapped incredulously.
"In all fairness, he did just reincarnate after plodding along in his old body for the past few centuries, so I think he's a bit high on his youth right now…" Apis reasoned.
The dugongs all stared blankly at her before sagging in defeat.
"It says a lot about the past few months that we don't even question that sentence, doesn't it?" Leo sighed.
"Yuuup," his siblings all groaned in agreement.
-o-
Nefertari Vivi was on cloud nine as she marched down the corridors of Merveille like she owned the place. And she did. The only person who could threaten her was Shiki, and he was busy being chased by Luffy and Bartolomeo.
With that in mind, as well as the lack of enemies nearby, she was mostly ignoring her surroundings in favor of practice with her powers. This took the form of swirling wind around her fingers, which was surprisingly hard. Working with so little air, getting it to go where she wanted instead of the wind's natural tendency to do what it wanted. But she was making progress as she passed another cross corridor, creating rudimentary shapes with the air, and she glanced down the corridor.
"Oh, that's a cannon," she remarked - and her eyes had just enough time to widen in recognition right before said cannon fired and the cannonball took her head off.
For a moment, her headless body stood there, air visibly swirling above her neck. Then the air re-coalesced back into her head, and she gave it a hearty shake.
"So that's what that feels like…" she muttered, her mind still spinning a bit as her gray matter reformed from gas. Turning her gaze down the corridor, she stepped towards the cannon and its crew, who had just finished frantically loading another cannonball and its powder charge. "Oh, no, none of that."
Holding up her hand, air swirled around it, wrapping around her arm.
"Sekhmet's Might!"
At the call, a massive gust of wind burst forth, picking up and hurling the cannon off of its carriage, also bowling over the pirates surrounding it. That the cannon then went off, blowing a hole in the wall, was salt in the wound.
The pirates took one look at the Logia now advancing towards them, and then at their wrecked cannon, and as one turned on their heels and sprinted the other way.
"Hmm, disappointing," Vivi noted, though she still followed them at a slow walk.
A few minutes of such walking turned up the same group of pirates, but joined by a good dozen of their fellows, all armed with a musket and brace of pistols.
"There she is!" one of the pirates, dressed a little more fancily than the others, shouted. "Fire!"
A hail of gunfire tore down the corridor, with a similar result to shooting a shoebox. Well, a self-repairing shoebox. Made of sand. That was alive and kicking nine kinds of—you know what, let's just say not really a shoebox at all.
"You do realize that I'm a Logia," Vivi pointed out slowly, her head tilted questioningly. "So unless you're packing seastone ammunition, you're just waving a fan in a sandstorm, correct?"
The only response from the pirates was to pull out their pistols and keep shooting.
Rolling her eyes, Vivi twisted up another wind, intoned "Sekhmet's Might", and launched it downrange. Six pirates were hurled about, and the wind blasted a sizable hole in the wall. That still left quite a few pirates, albeit very nervous ones.
"Hmm…" Vivi hummed, tapping her chin thoughtfully. "Could use a bit better area of effect." Grinning, she produced a pair of miniature twisters in the palms of her hands. "Time to practice! And thank you ever so much for volunteering! I assure you, your contributions will be noted…" Her expression took on a feral quality. "Posthumously, of course."
If the way the goons all bolted was anything to go by, they were not keen on that idea.
Vivi cocked her eyebrow as she watched the dust settle behind the terrified goons. "Was that too much?"
After a moment of consideration, her grin took on an impish quality.
"Naaah!"
And with that, the hunt was on.
-o-
In a tunnel network beneath the palace parallel to the plumbing, one of Indigo's more recent creations bounded down the hall with an annoyed, somewhat afraid expression on her face.
A skeleton was sprinting after the beastie with an angry, very determined expression on its face. Or at least, it would have had one if it had a face in the first place.
"YOHOHOHO! META SKULL JOKE!"
"WILL YOU SHUT UP AND RUN FASTER, YOU SENILE OLD COOT!"
Bringing up the rear was a pompadour-touting cyborg, who was glaring after them with a livid expression.
…Let's back up a bit.
The mutated doe, which Indigo had altered at his captain's request a few weeks back to evolve more for speed than aggression, was running because Franky and Brook had specifically tried to capture it, because strapped to its chest in a well-secured harness was Cross's Snail Transceiver along with a vis-snail. And the moment that they had tried to seize it, the doe bounded off through a twisting labyrinth of earth, air, and water that only the Float-Float Fruit could have created. Shiki had chosen speed over bulk to ensure that the creature would be easier to control than his simian majordomo, but at the same time impossible to defeat, or at the very least, to catch.
Franky fell behind quickly as the chase continued, Brook maintaining pace for some time thanks to the unnatural lightness of his form, even allowing him to follow the doe across water. Ultimately, however, he met his match when the doe came across a lengthy chasm, blurred from view the moment she reached the edge, and reappeared on the other side a few moments later. Brook skidded to a halt, gritting his teeth as he observed the length of the gap, and the fact that it led right back to the blue sea. The doe faced him with a look that could only be the smuggest of satisfaction before bounding out of sight of the pirates.
"…Cross will not be pleased with this development, will he?" Brook mused uncertainly.
"This whole place will cave in on itself when Luffy beats Shiki, we'll get the transceiver back after that," Franky growled back, before turning around and trudging off towards the battle. "Come on; if we can't get the snail's box, we need to be out there helping the others against the rest of those monsters." A far more eager smirk flashed across the cyborg's mug. "And I've got just the plan for that."
-o-
The doe bounded on for another few minutes until it was sure that it had left the pirates in the dust, whereupon it slowed down to regain some stamina. She also took the opportunity to scan the surrounding landscape for a stream; Indigo's stamina enhancements were effective, but they sucked up water like nobody's business.
Finally locating the scent of fresh water off in the distance, the doe leisurely trotted in that direction, though she kept all her senses on high alert in case the pirates had found some way across the chasm. She only let down her guard when she reached the actual stream; the only signs of life were a flock of mundane seagulls sitting on the surrounding branches. The doe shuddered. Both Shiki and Indigo had had words about the fact that seagulls seemed blithely oblivious to the "rules" of Merveille. Very loud, very angry words.
Whatever. The doe bent down to drink. They were just seagulls, after all.
[Mine?]
The doe jerked her head up, ready to—oh. Just a seagull on the rocks next to her. Wearing a cute little hat, too. Bah, pointless. Back to drinking.
[Mine!]
This time, when the doe looked up, the seagull had produced… a french fry? Held in its wings. All her instincts blared at her that she was in danger, but it was a french fry.
[Mine.]
Slowly, and with great trepidation, the doe looked back up at the tree-bound gulls. Every single one of them had its eyes on that french fry. Her gaze whipped back to the seagull next to her, expression screaming 'Don't you dare'.
The gull tossed the fry right at her.
Immediately, the doe was swamped by what seemed like every seagull on the Grand Line, all pecking and flapping and trying to land on her. Despite the ensuing confusion, she did notice when the weight of the transceiver on her chest suddenly vanished. Snorting, the doe shook off the last few seagulls and tore after the speck of white she could see flying away as fast as it could manage into a patch of forest. Why a seagull wanted the thing The Alpha had given her to keep was beyond her, but given the consequences of failing that psychotic ape, she was not letting it get away with it.
Of course, there was one small problem with that idea: the gull could simply climb above the trees, while the doe had to slow down to avoid slamming into said trees. And yet, it simply didn't climb out of sight and fly away. The answer to this conundrum was obvious: it was taunting her. It had to be!
The gull glanced over its shoulder down at her, and then waggled its tail feathers in a way that was somehow smug. Oh yeah. It was taunting her.
Snorting angrily again, the doe picked up speed. Screw hitting a tree, this was officially personal, she would plow through them if she had to! And even better, the trees were thinning out! Once she was out of this stupid forest, she could bound off one of the trees, get some altitude, and take down that stupid seagull!
Bursting out of the trees, the doe prepared to execute her plan… only to hit a bit of a snag. A "pirate mosh pit" kind of snag. And she was currently sitting in midair.
[I don't wanna be venisooooon!]
-o-
Flying high above, Coo smirked at a plan well executed. That deer wasn't going to be a problem anymore. Now, he just needed to get the transceiver to Cross, and—
Wait. What the heck was that whistling—?
Snapping his head up, Coo let out a squawk of panic at the eagle diving towards him talons-first, and immediately dove for the ground. That action probably saved his life; the eagle slamming into his neck from behind and driving him into the ground probably would've snapped his spine otherwise. Even then, both impacts served to knock Coo for a loop, and gave the bird of prey the time it needed to completely pin him to the ground with a single foot.
[A merry chase you led us on,] he heard the eagle gloat from on high. [But now, your flight is at an end.]
[Could you be any more clichéd?] Coo grumbled, only to grunt as the eagle ground his beak a little deeper into the dirt.
[Right, if that's how you're going to be, down to business, then,] the eagle sighed as it examined the talons on his free foot. [Hand over the transceiver, and I will ensure that you are dead before stripping the flesh from your bones.]
[Nice threat. But I'm afraid you've been outfoxed.]
Out the corner of his eye, Coo saw the eagle gain a hilariously surprised expression, whereupon he was knocked off the newsbird in a pained squawk and flurry of feathers. Sitting up, Coo watched the featherhole tumble for a bit in the dirt, before he was suddenly pummeled into the ground by a blur of white slamming into the eagle, again and again and again, until the pompous hat-topper was little more than a twitching pile of broken bones and feathers.
Her job done, Coo's savior strolled up to him with her head held high and her tail waving daintily behind her. Her swagger faltered as Coo cuffed her upside the head with his wing.
[I could've done without the awful one-liner,] he groused, brushing the dirt from his wings before glancing up at Su. [But thanks for the save. Though, how did you know to get here?]
[You're welcome,] Su rolled her eyes with a derisive snort, rubbing her ear. [And for your information, the slimeball directed me this way to get his box back; you actually saved me a lot of trouble on that front.]
The two animals fell silent for a moment, both of them processing the fact that they were speaking in their native tongues, and then looked up expectantly.
"Head for the throne room, BUT TAKE YOUR TIME," the Voice of Audio-God said grimly but distractedly. "CROSS AND I have never been THIS MAD BEFORE." And then he was gone.
Coo cocked his eyebrow. [Well, that makes sense…] He then glanced at Su out the corner of his eye. [And convenient for you, I expect?]
Su shot her own clench-eyed glare at the gull, before sighing and scratching at her ear. [Alright, I suppose that's… mostly fair, but!] She snapped her head up and jabbed her paw in Coo's breast. [Let's be clear here! I can be dickish, and I was dickish in how I asked you for help, I'll admit—!]
[But that doesn't mean you're actually a dick, of course,] Coo nodded without missing a beat. [Don't worry, I get it. You'd just gone through hell when last we first talked, you were impatient when you talked to Windy, it's fine. Besides, you saved my tailfeathers just now, so I'd say our tabs are about even right now, ya know?]
Su pawed despairingly at her muzzle. [Saved them while you were helping us out, so…]
[Let's, not get bogged down in that particular morass, alright?] Coo waved her off. [And… while I did decide to help you guys out while I was around, I flapped my way up here for another reason.]
The cloud fox's ear twitched slightly and she snapped as shocked a look as her pinched eyes allowed at the gull. [Wait, you mean—?]
[Eh…] the News Coo wavered his wing uncertainly. [We dug up something. Whether or not it's useful, or even all that actionable, well…]
[I'm a Straw Hat, remember? We've gone off of worse,] Su scoffed. [Gimme gimme, quickie!]
[Well, alright,] Coo sighed in defeat. [Just don't say I didn't warn you when you don't like it.]
And so Coo told her what he knew, and Su did indeed not like it.
-o-
"My, my, Shiki, you've been quite busy," Robin purred, thumbing through one of the many folders that she had found in the Golden Lion's library. "I do believe that Cross is going to be immensely pleased with these reports on the Blues' Marine bases. With any luck, some turnover of the chains of command will be… beneficial, to say the least."
It did make sense that Shiki would ensure that there was no threat to his military might in those oceans; forewarned was forearmed, as Cross himself had demonstrated many a time now, and Robin had a vested interest in making sure that her foster brother was well-armed indeed. And the details in the folders she read promised to be quite useful to him and his.
"Now let's see…" Robin hummed to herself as she cast a thoughtful gaze around the ornate bed chamber her myriad hands were in the process of ransacking, flinging books left and right and ripping boards from the walls. "If I were a megalomaniacal self-zealot intent on world conquest…" She trailed off for a moment before smirking and thumbing the brim of her hat. "Correction: if I were Crocodile, where would I hide my log of information on—GAH!"
The archaeologist cut herself off with a pained yelp as she snapped her original hand to her left eye, which was clenched shut on account of the rivulets of blood streaming from the eyelid. "Now I remember why I stopped using Ojos Fleur in full scale theatres…" she groaned to herself, blooming another eye on her palm to see the damage. She frowned slightly; bloodshot and crimson, most likely a popped vessel, but she'd had worse and healed from it, even if this would take a bit of time.
With that done, she reordered her thoughts and focused on what had just happened. Robin took a swift inventory of her remote eyes, closing them as she went for her own peace of mind. In the end, all eyes were accounted for… except for…
"The one I had… on this room's outer wall…" Robin groaned, dragging her hand down her face. "Oh, this is going to hurt, isn't it?"
"OOK!" CRASH!
Robin was proven right—much to her chagrin—by a massive hairy palm crashing through one wall pancaking her against the wall opposite, leaving her with more than a dozen bones fractured and half as many outright broken. Chopper would not be pleased with her, and it said a lot about both her faith in her crew and their doctor's prowess (and temper) that that was the first worry that came to her mind.
Or maybe it was just the concussion jumbling up her priorities.
Either way, when her senses returned to her, she found herself gripped tightly in the giant fist of a gorilla clad in red clothing, holding her very high off the ground.
The first instinct of Robin's scrambled mind was to rip her captor apart with a multitude of arms. She barely managed to keep this instinct under control due to the height; she may have the means to slow her fall with her Wing technique, but that technique needed more focus and less risk of being ambushed while she recovered than she had at the moment.
As she ran through her other options, her eyes fell on the gorilla. And upon seeing the look in its eyes, she did the only thing she could at the moment:
"Someone… get this damn dirty ape… off of me!" she shouted, shoving as hard as she could against the iron grip she was in, with as many arms as she could comfortably muster.
"Grrrr," the gorilla growled menacingly, the other hand pulling back to do… something to her.
"Ahem."
Pirate and gorilla turned to witness a very specific aquatic mammal perched on the larger mammal's shoulder, nonchalantly smoking a cigar and giving the ape a flat look.
"You heard the lady. Let her go," Boss said calmly.
Predictably, the gorilla turned his ire on the dugong, instantly swatting his free hand down on the martial artist amphibian.
Less predictably, the gorilla's palm halted directly before the dugong, whose flipper had stopped the larger beast's hand in its path. Said Dugong now had a vein popping on his forehead.
"Let me clarify something for you, simian," the martial artist drawled. "What I just said? That wasn't a request. SQUALL PISTOL!"
In the space of a second, Boss pulled back his flipper and jabbed it forward again.
CRUNCH!
"OOGRAAAAAAAAH!" Scarlet howled, flinging his captive aside in favor of cradling his broken hand. Boss immediately dove down, catching Robin in his flippers and setting her back down into the room she had been looking over before.
"Thank you, Boss," Robin said.
"Don't thank me yet," Boss said as he glowered past his friend's shoulder. "Find whatever you were looking for and then get the hell out of dodge. This isn't going to be a one-stop shot; I don't know how much SIQ he's had, but it's gotta be a massive overdose."
The archaeologist blinked in confusion. "How can you be so sure?"
The dugong pointed his flipper without a twitch of his expression. "Because while we Grand Line animals are freakishly tough, that is not typical of any natural evolution I'm aware of."
Robin followed Boss's flipper with her eyes, one of which started twitching when she saw the, to reiterate, very unnatural occurrence which Boss was speaking of. Namely, the fact that the gorilla's hand was pulsating before her eyes, the shattered bones within shifting and restructuring themselves back into their proper shape.
Robin nodded, shoving her hat down. "Right. You have fun with that."
"Ohohohoooooh, believe me…" Boss tilted his head just so, letting a vicious glint bounce off of the point of his glasses. "I intend to."
The gorilla, meanwhile, howled and pounded its chest before ignoring Robin entirely as she escaped to bring his palm down on the floor. As he had intended to bring it down on Boss' head, this prompted a slow, stupid blink of confusion.
"Nori Arts," Boss intoned, reaching for something behind his back.
Snarling, Scarlet brought his palms up again, and slammed them down repeatedly.
"Nori Arts, Nori Arts, Nori Arts."
And Boss merely swayed out of the way of each one of the room-shaking slaps. After the fourth, he flicked his flippers, sending something blurring towards his simian opponent.
That something was his blazing rope-dart, which slammed into Scarlet's gut with about as much force as a Diable Jambe. Between the heat and the impact, for a brief second all the gorilla could do was hunch over wheezing in pain.
It was a second Boss took full advantage of, looping the rope around Scarlet's neck and then jumping onto one of the roof beams.
"Rip Tide," the dugong intoned, blurring out of sight, but up. "Shell Body."
Reinforced dugong smashed through the roof like so much sugar glass, carrying Boss onto the roof and yanking Scarlet along by the neck. For a moment, the two hung in the air.
"TIDAL SWIM!"
Before Boss flipped in mid-air and kicked off with all his might. Once again, massive forces carried Scarlet along for the ride, neck first, and when Boss landed, another flick of his flippers unlooped the gorilla and sent him hurtling towards one of the towers… towering above the palace. And then into the tower.
"Hmm, that should be enough," Boss muttered, eyeing the impact point. The rubble there shuddered. "Or not. Sebek's Scale-Rotted Tail, that SIQ is—"
Boss' words died in his throat as the top-half of the tower shuddered, and then rose. And with the pink shirt Scarlet wore standing out in the blizzard-wrapped gloom, the cause was pretty damn obvious.
"You've gotta be kidding me…"
With a shout of "ORA!", Scarlet hurled the chunk of tower like a javelin at Boss, who knew immediately that he had no chance of blocking or deflecting it. And dodging would leave him open.
Time to think a little laterally.
"Typhoon Lash!" Boss roared, spinning on his flippers before unleashing the attack from his tail. It worked like a charm, neatly slicing the tower in two, at which point Boss hooked his rope dart around the top half and went along for the ride.
Whereupon Scarlet peeked over the side.
"Okay, so you're not a complete meathead…" Boss muttered. Tugging his rope dart again, he swung around, aiming his free flipper for the gorilla's unprotected back. "Squall Pistol!"
"Ook!"
WHAM!
The Squall Pistol landed, sending Scarlet staggering back clutching his face. The punch Boss took in return sent him reeling, a fifty-piece marching band practicing in his skull.
"Note to self…" he groaned, shaking his head. "Don't take hits unless you have Shell Body on. And maybe not even then…"
The last of the cobwebs cleared, and Boss turned back to Scarlet, who was also up and about—and gaping in panic?
The dugong looked behind just as the pillar slammed into the central dome of Shiki's palace. "SHELL BODY!" Boss squawked, and a good thing, too, as the sudden stop hurled him into the side of the building. Scarlet, too, actually, which gave Boss an excellent view of what a gorilla ass looked like.
Grumbling, Boss pulled himself out of the wall, and glanced up at his opponent. "Hmm, attack or reposition…" he mused. Below him, the pillar shifted. "Right, reposition it is!"
Spinning the head of his rope dart, he hurled it up, grasping one of the ledges, and then yanked himself up to land softly on the roof of the dome. No sooner had he landed than the dome shook.
"Whoa! Rip Tide!"
Blurring away, he saw, through the haze of the technique, a massive gorilla fist punch through where he'd once been, followed shortly by the rest of the beast, still no worse for the wear. That called for a change in strategy.
"Let's see how you like ranged combat!" Boss barked as he came out of his Rip Tide. "Typhoon Lash!"
Super-sharp wind gusted out, Scarlet dodging by a slim margin. Another followed, that dodged as well, and Scarlet decided that he didn't like being shot at. Roaring, he charged Boss, who simply Rip Tided out of the way and repeated the process.
This dance repeated two more times until Scarlet dodged another Typhoon Lash. This time, he was met with a rope dart to the face. Repeatedly.
"Got your dodging pattern down, ape!" Boss crowed, repeatedly swinging his rope dart. "You're not escaping this!"
Suddenly, the dart stopped. And wouldn't budge no matter how much Boss tugged on it. That Scarlet was gripping the hook despite the flesh of his hand audibly sizzling probably had something to do with that.
"Uh-oh," Boss muttered, which was as far as he got before Scarlet gave the rope dart an almighty yank.
A hasty Typhoon Lash cut the rope—he could retrieve the hook when he didn't have a 500-lb gorilla trying to bash his face in—but by the time he was done, a massive fist was heading for his face. And he had neither the time for a Tidal Swim nor the leverage for a Nori Arts.
"This is going to hurt… Shell Body!"
The fist struck home, slamming Boss into the surface of the dome. Sensing blood, Scarlet didn't let up, slapping and punching the same spot repeatedly. Each shook the dome, and caused a spider-web of cracks to grow ever-larger.
Unfortunately, he didn't notice Boss simply roll out of the way of the blows. So the Squall Pistol that hit him in the chin came right out of nowhere.
Grimacing, Boss watched the gorilla go down again, simply waiting for it to get back up. Even with Shell Body, that had hurt, though nothing that would stop him from putting down this ape. Especially if…
Yes, it was taking longer for Scarlet to get up. Quite a bit longer.
"Like I thought, SIQ regeneration can be used up," Boss remarked. "And without that… well. You're strong. Stronger than me, even. But there's more to combat than just strength." Boss shifted his stance, drawing his arms together at his side. "And I'm superior in every other way."
Shaking his head, Scarlet narrowed his beady eyes at Boss before roaring and charging.
"Six Arts for Six Kings," Boss murmured. "Six Kings for Six Oceans."
Deep within Scarlet's simian brain, he recognized that his opponent wasn't dodging. A small part screamed that this was a trap. The rest just wanted to get this pest out of the way. So he kept charging.
"Full Shell Style: Six Oceans Gun!"
Wrapped up in all six styles, it was child's play for Boss to first weave between Scarlet's crashing fists, and then deliver the Six Oceans Gun straight to his chest.
Bones shattered and organs pulped under the force, the momentum sending Scarlet hurling through the air. SIQ-fueled regeneration went to work, patching up the damage, but it was overtaxed by the rest of the fight, and running out of raw materials to work with anyway. Then that whole point was rendered moot when Scarlet hit the remaining tower. That was a level of damage the weakened regeneration simply couldn't cope with.
Back on the dome, Boss eyed his handiwork, and when after a minute Scarlet didn't budge, let out a sigh of relief and sagged in pain, particularly his left flipper. Flexing tentatively, he winced as he felt his bones rub together just out of alignment. Annoying, but maybe he could subtly fix it while no one was—
CRACK!
"SON OF A BARNACLE-LATHERED BUOY!" Boss howled, clutching his shoulder in agony. "WHAT THE HELL—?!"
"Take better care of yourself, shitty blubberbutt," Sanji interrupted, idly tapping the boot he'd used to kick the dugong's shoulder back into place. "It'd be a damn shame if the only decent sparring partner I had on the ship was the mosshead."
Boss grit his teeth together before slowly looking at the nonchalant smoker and his gaunt companion behind him. His jowls slowly twisted into a wry smirk.
"…Will do, Sanji. So… how many idiots do we have left to smash into pieces?"
"Not enough to make it our main priority anymore," the gaunt man responded, fingering the heavy-looking tonfa he was carrying. "Guess now we turn to the loot, pillage, and plundering part."
Boss exhaled in what was almost a snort, but nodded. "Fine by me; I'm satisfied after that fight."
"Except that I'm not," Sanji snorted out a cloud of smoke, glaring daggers at the downed ape. "You did a pretty good job, but that damn thing dared to lay a hand on a woman! You should have beaten the gorilla way worse."
"Oh, yeah?" Boss cocked his brow at the cook. "Well, he's certainly not going anywhere. Go ahead, finish what I started."
"I'll do just that," Sanji huffed, eyeing the downed Ape still embedded in the remaining tower. Once he had calculated the appropriate amount of punishment to dole out, he hauled his leg back… and kicked a rock that tapped off of Scarlet's skull.
"Now he's had it," the cook declared with a satisfied nod. "Now come on, let's help our helmsgirl steal everything that's not nailed down!" And with that, Sanji ran off.
Boss blinked after his crewmate before slowly looking up at Gin. "Just confirming, seeing as there was a big chunk of time before I met the band of mental patients I decided to shack up with…" He pointed at Sanji's retreating back. "Was he always this crazy?"
"You'll need to be more specific," Gin deadpanned. "About women, or in general?"
"Both."
"Well, in that case… no. When I first met Sanji…" A smirk slowly spread across Gin's face. "Honestly? I think it was just bubbling below the surface back then."
Boss donned a smirk of his own. "Good."
"Good?"
"Good," Boss started to waddle off with a contented nod. "Means he's finally being honest with himself."
-o-
Though there were far more than 88 nutcases who had attacked the roaring, rampaging sword-wielders that had come after the highest authority in the palace, the fallen bodies, the many homeless limbs, and the streaks and puddles of blood dying the room red would have given even a certain Black Mamba a run for her money. Were Soundbite less incensed, he may have even pointed it out.
Unfortunately, that furious rage was still there. And so were the enemies who somehow thought that they would succeed where hundreds before had failed to take down the two Straw Hats tearing them to shreds. Adding to the misfortune was the not unsound logic that led them to keep trying: no matter how powerful they were, they could only handle so many bodies, both at once and over time.
And while that was unsound logic against most of the Straw Hats, despite rumor to the contrary the crew was still mostly composed of humans. As such, Cross's stamina was wearing thin, and Zoro…
"GRK!"
Zoro grunted in pain as another tremor wracked his body, creating a split-second opening that a particularly persistent spearman shoved his weapon into. Thankfully, it was with the butt of the weapon, which allowed Zoro to dive right back in instead of fall to his knees clutching the new hole in his gut, but the slip-up was blatantly obvious.
"KEEPING A STRONG FACE AND ACTING LIKE nothing's wrong is fine when the carnage is done. NOT WHEN WE'RE STILL CREATING GROUND ZERO!"
"BITE ME!" Zoro shot back. Calling up the aura of Asura, he waded into the crowd, the flickering illusion carving through everyone in his path.
"AND AS FOR my personal armchair…"
"Kiss!" Cross snarled, braining and burning an overeager mook with Lassoo's smoking muzzle. "My!" He then caught another enforcer's blade with Funkfreed's tusks and used the lock to drag the enemy into a bone-fracturing headbutt. "Ass!" The final word was punctuated by Cross flinging Funkfreed and Lassoo at his opponents. The two weapon animals transitioned in midair into a rime-tusked elephant and a flame-spitting hound, respectively, smashing into the Golden Lions' frontlines and smashing them quite thoroughly, giving Cross the space and time he needed to catch his breath.
Time he took to shoot an offended, if slightly dizzy look at Soundbite. "I'll have you know that I am in peak physical condition, and that we are doing perfectly fine at breaking these bastards all on our—!"
BOOOM!
Cross's boasting died quickly when perhaps the worst possible scenario introduced itself into the fight. See, while Vivi blowing the roof off the palace did achieve the desired effect of intimidation by expressed fury, that left the fighters within vulnerable to attacks from above. And in this case, said attack took the form of one of Shiki's more fortuitous recruits.
Said recruit was gray-skinned, bald, and slender, with a moustache that was halfway between imperial and horseshoe, gray beard stubbles, a black and purple vest, a red sash, blue pants, pointed black shoes, clawed knuckle dusters on his hands, and a scowl on his face.
Ah, yes, and he also happened to be forty-five feet tall.
"Motherfu—!" Zoro growled.
"MOVE ASIDE!" the giant roared, stomping through the crowd, heedless of the allied pirates he crushed underfoot. "I'LL SHOW YOU THE TRUE MIGHT OF THE GRAND LINE!"
The pirates who weren't stepped on may not have had sense enough to stop fighting a losing battle, but they at least had enough self-preservation instincts to not get in the way of someone who was towering above them. This good sense backfired hard when Cross and Zoro batted the retreating pirates aside like lint, leaving the area around them clear of obstacles.
"Still not worried?" Soundbite asked flatly.
The first and third mates exchanged glances.
"Like hell," they answered.
Zoro crossed Kitetsu and Shusui in an X before him, flats facing outward. Cross ran toward him, jumping onto the blades. The swordsman's muscles bulged, and with a roar he uncrossed his arms and flung Cross upward - away from the giant, instead impacting high up on one of the room's undamaged pillars. Cross reached out, metal-encased fingers digging into the wood of the pillar.
The giant sneered, betraying his brawn to brains ratio; as fast as Cross was going, either the pillar or his arm should have broken. With great hypocrisy, he bellowed, "YOUR BRAINS ARE AS SMALL AS YOU ARE! YOU MISSED! NOW YOU DIE!"
Then he simply swung his blade-enhanced fist at the smaller pirate, and Cross leapt again to avoid the blow. Landing on the giant's arm, he ran up, reared back his right hand, and slammed his palm into the giant's face with all the force he could muster—
"IMPACT!"
—along with all the force he had just absorbed.
The giant reeled, stunned but still on his feet and not liable to go down anytime soon.
"And just for kicks—!" Cross snarled, flexing his palm again and firing half a dozen more blasts of kinetic force in the giant's face.
That was more than the giant could take, his head snapping back from the sheer impact, his knees buckling under him. Like some titanic tree that Paul Bunyan had taken an axe to, the giant tilted back and collapsed, shaking the entire building on impact.
"Tch," Zoro scoffed dismissively as he walked up to the downed opponent. "Still worried about this wimp?"
"…y'know, I WOULD SAY I wasn't and never was…"Soundbite sighed, slumping his eyestalks in resigned defeat. "IF ONLY I COULDN'T HEAR THE FACT THAT HE'S STILL AWAKE."
Cross and Zoro snapped incredulous looks at the snail. "What!?"
"GRARGH!"
The giant cut off any response Soundbite could have made by suddenly shooting back to his feet and batting Cross and Zoro aside with a single, almost offhanded sweep of his arm.
"CROSS!" the Zoan-Weapons cried in concern, breaking off from their assaults at the sight of their wielder being sent flying.
Cross grimaced, eyes clenching in preparation for the impact that was to come, but what actually came was most unexpected. He slammed hard into something, yes, but it was something that was soft like a cloud, and yet, at the same time, somehow as firm as iron. And it was massive - and moving to set him back on his feet. He realized exactly what was going on long before he set eyes on the one controlling the clouds, who was standing at the exit of the room where Shiki had departed.
"You morons," the Straw Hats' second mate scoffed with a shake of her head, not even sparing the pair a glance as she casually observed the room. "Remind me, who's supposed to be saving who here?"
"I dunno," the third mate responded with a frown that didn't quite seem convincing as he tried to push himself out of the cloud, though the 'footing' wasn't giving him any luck, and most likely not by chance. "We're here to rescue someone who's going to catch absolute hell for being a bonehead once we're free and clear. What about you?"
"A pair of jackasses with no sense between them." Nami finally turned her head to the pair to give them a catty grin. "Sounds like we both have horrible jobs, doesn't it?"
"Not as bad as them," the first mate snorted, gesturing to the giant and the remaining mooks, who were getting their footing and nerve back. "And if you're here to save us, how about finishing this?"
"The bloodthirsty Pirate Hunter conceding a group of opponents to the elegant Weather Witch?" she purred, her expression taking on an especially malevolent gleam. "Oh, how the mighty have fallen."
"The ones that fell ain't the mighty ones, and more than 80% ARE ALREADY DOWN. YOU'RE JUST SWEEPING AWAY THE SCRAPS," Soundbite snarked.
"Snark later, zap now!" Cross demanded, staring at the pirates who were aiming their guns at them.
"I have something else in mind, actually," Nami said, spinning a portion of her Clima-Tact at her side. "Let's see if this worked…" She snapped her arm up and flung a Cool Ball skyward. "GLACIAL TEMPO!"
THUNK-CRASH!
The giant was not getting back up this time. Not with a hailstone as big as his head squatting on his skull. Not skipping a beat, Nami made a few more movements with her staff.
"And now," Nami hummed to herself, spinning her full Clima-Tact at her side and causing a new offshoot of her Eisen aura to split off and form a sphere of clouds, the clouds roiling and churning. "A weather forecast for all listeners! Exercise extreme caution in today's ventures, as a wind god has been sighted roaming the environs of Merveille! This deity is extremely dangerous, and has been noted to have a penchant for loosing holy hellstorms of pure wind. If by some chance you manage to attract this deity's gaze, then in this weather woman's professional opinion…"
Nami's face became a mask of frigid fury as she jabbed her staff at the rapidly panicking pirates.
"You are royally fucked," she declared. "Divine Tempo: Aeolus' Ire!"
The ball of clouds split open, and a gust of wind blasted out from its cradle. A gust so strong, it was like the divine bent to Nami's will: the entire back half of the main hall was blown clean off its foundation, and the pirates along with it. It didn't matter how big or small they were, how tired or fresh, all were swept aside as though some greater entity had just decided to brush them aside like so much dust.
The male officers of the Straw Hats could only gape at the devastation wrought by their compatriot. So engrossed were they, in fact, that they barely even reacted as Nami's Eisen Tempo retracted and deposited them on the splintered ground.
"Ahhh, the power rush," Nami practically shivered as she balanced her staff across her shoulders, tapping her fingers along its length. "I'll never get tired of it, you hear me? Never."
Cross, never one to be left speechless for long, rebooted his brain first. "I can imagine how you feel… but at the same time, I don't think everyone is going to be so appreciative."
"WATCH OUT FOR YOUR CREW WHEN YOU'RE DOING AN AOE LIKE THAT, WITCH!"
"Case in point," Cross said as Lassoo and Funkfreed burst free of the rubble that was once the remainder of the room, literal steel in the glares that they fixed on Nami.
"Oh, come on, it's not like you two aren't literally as tough as nails," Nami shamelessly purred.
The beast-weapons promptly reversed to being perfectly cordial, blushing and scratching the backs of their heads.
"Aw, shucks," Lassoo chuckled.
"Well, when ya put it like that," Funkfreed giggled.
"Morons, the both of you," Soundbite rolled his eyes.
"Morons or not, you can't deny they're still pretty damn useful," Cross reprimanded with a light grin, picking up his newly reverted weapons and sheathing them on his back and side. He then glanced back at Nami. "And as pissed as I still am at you for your bullshit… I can't deny it's good to have you back, too."
Nami blinked at Cross before shaking her head and waving him off. "I'll deal with whatever the hell you're talking about later. For now…" She jerked her thumb over her shoulder, a particularly demonic grin spreading over her face. "Mind following me and helping me utterly ruin what little of Shiki's day has been left intact?"
The way that Cross and Zoro grinned back was answer enough.
-o-
Shiki flew down the halls of Merveille, occasionally dodging a rubber fist or busting a hole in the wall or floor or ceiling to fly around a shimmering barrier that boxed him in. Contrary to appearances, he wasn't really running away. The confined corridors of his palace simply didn't provide the most advantageous battlefield against the Straw Hat brat and his unexpected companion. The barriers were a constant reminder of that. Out in the open, though? Well. Then they would die.
The one fly in the ointment was that he did have a few other loose ends to tie up before killing those two, and they were doing a good job at sticking to his tail like glue. What he needed was a diversion…
A grin spread on Shiki's face as he recalled a certain gambit he'd used on Garp more than once back in the day. Yes, it would do nicely, especially since his pursuers definitely took after the Hero in temperament.
And so, picking up speed, Shiki shot out of the palace and immediately ducked behind a corner before stripping off his jacket. A simple application of the Float-Float fruit, and the jacket shot off deep into the floating islands, well away from both his hiding spot and where he needed to go.
After a few seconds later, stomping feet and voices rewarded him.
"Damn! Where did he go?"
"There! Floating off way over there!" A pause. "Wait, how are we gonna follow him?"
"Lemme try something…"
Curious despite himself, Shiki glanced around his hiding spot to see Straw Hat and Sharktooth jumping after his coat on platforms made from shimmering barrier. Perfect.
"Puru puru puru puru!"
"OF ALL THE TIMES!" Shiki hissed, withdrawing a snail from his pocket and pointing it at the nearby wall. One of his skilled navigators appeared on the view, looking rather nervous.
"Navigation to Captain Shiki! Come in, Captain! It's urgent!"
"It had better be, or else your head's going to part ways with your body!" Shiki snapped.
The navigator cowered fearfully. "S-Sir, we need to turn toward the east! A storm is coming!"
"Oh, that's just what I needed…" Shiki grumbled, giving an offhand gesture of acknowledgement before making to terminate the connection. Then he paused, and turned a more attentive eye on his navigator. "By the way, while I have you, what's the damage thus far?"
The gulp he got wasn't reassuring. At all. "Ah… with all due respect, I don't think I can say anything good, Captain. All of the Straw Hats are still going strong, the prisoners have escaped, Dr. Indigo and Scarlet have both been defeated, the snail transceiver has been stolen, and the Daft Green barrier has been destroyed. And the palace… the cyborg and the skeleton hijacked a group of the monsters and have them strung up like… like motorcycles! They're tearing the whole palace apart!"
Murder sang in Shiki's heart. But he could still salvage everything that he needed to. First, however, he had revenge to deal with.
"Where is the witch?"he growled.
"A-A-Ah… sh-she's in the throne room with Jeremiah Cross and Roronoa Zoro, but they look like they'll be moving on any moment!"
"Moving on to the next world, that is," Shiki snarled, terminating the connection and flying back the way he came as fast as he could, barely sparing enough attention to heed his navigator's request to redirect the islands to the east.
The Golden Lion scanned the flaming wreckage of his palace—his palace, that he had spent twenty years constructing, twenty years planning, preparing—!—searching for hide, hair or otherwise of any of the blaspheming bastards who were wrecking the monument to his greatness, but he came up snake eyes, and instead came upon the half-collapsed husk of the throne room first.
A husk filled with utterly defeated pirates, at that.
Shiki's already trench-deep scowl twitched violently as he took in the supposedly 'best and deadliest' pirates in all of Paradise, the pirates he had personally chosen to act as his soldiers, to represent him, laid low by a band of pathetic, worthless, East Blue weaklings.
"You. Incompetent. Scum," Shiki hissed, if only for his own benefit. Then, without a trace of concern, he shot his arm out to the side, gathered up a goodly mass of the fallen snow, and coalesced it into a snarling lion's head hovering above the hall.
"I will burn the East Blue," the Golden Lion swore imperiously, as though delivering a mandate. "I will conquer the world! And I will let nothing slow my path! Not trash like them…" Pure madness shone in Shiki's eyes as he dropped his arm, and the lion dropped with it. "AND NOT TRASH LIKE YOU!"
The leonine flurry roared Shiki's fury to the world as it descended, intent on shredding each and every last one of the traitors who had so stupidly forfeited their right to live by sullying his reputation with defeat.
And the construct would have achieved its goal, too, had Shiki's age-old instincts not suddenly blared to life, prompting him to snap his arm out and backhand some kind of explosive ordinance away from him, halting the Lion's descent in the process.
Quite unfortunately for Shiki's fraying-to-nonexistent temper, he didn't have to wonder where the projectile had come from.
"We'd really prefer if you didn't do that, if you don't mind!"
Shiki snapped his attention down towards the source of that voice, and indeed, it was exactly who he expected: the annoyance, Jeremiah Cross and his pest pet, the captain's mutt, Roronoa Zoro… and her.
Before he could deal with the traitor, however, Cross's ever-present leer quirked up into a direct taunt. "It might sound counterintuitive, but the thing is? Our crew prefers to leave our enemies alive. Let you bastards stew in your failure, see? So!" He spread his arms invitingly, his mutt-cannon weighing heavy on his arm. "If you could do us all the massive favor of shoving off?"
"Or just lay down and die, if you don't mind," Nami invited with a frigid smile. "That'd be great."
To make a very long if simple story short, something in the back of Shiki's mind snapped.
"You first," he rumbled, and his lion redirected itself at the Straw Hat officers.
It was close, so so close to chomping down on them and ripping them to shreds, but alas, not close enough.
"GUM-BARRIER CANNONBALL!"
Because he had to suddenly rip apart the snow golem in order to throw up a snow barrier to stop the ballistic rubber man that was flying at him. And then, before he could crush the persistent little brat, a cackling ball of shimmering energy barrier plowed through the snow like it wasn't even there, hitting him full body and jarring every bone in his body.
Momentum transferred, Shiki hit the ground and skidded, the impact giving him something to focus on. And none too soon.
"GEAR SECOND! GUM-GUM JET AXE!"
He got his wits back just in time to shoot away from a red-skinned, steaming Luffy, or more accurately, his sandalled foot, which neatly obliterated the section of ground where Shiki's head had been a half second before.
Floating upright again, Shiki scowled mightily when he found that Luffy and Barto had put themselves in between him and that traitor, their intent clear.
"Fine," he bit out. "You want to die first? I can oblige that."
Luffy glared right back. But when he opened his mouth, it wasn't to Shiki.
"Cross."
"Keep ripping the place, snatch everything not nailed down, rip up what is, then set the place to blow and GTFO?" the loudmouth ventured.
"Go."
"Goin'!"
And with that, the three mates hightailed it out of there. Shiki didn't pursue. So he would be doing things out of order. Whatever. He could take out his frustrations on the two people who had oh-so-kindly put themselves in his way. Slowly, he began to float higher into the air.
-o-
'Black Bart' Bartolomeo, for the first time since Luffy and company had arrived on Merveille, felt nervous. The reason was that slide maneuver Shiki had pulled off to evade Luffy-senpai's Gum-Gum Jet Axe. If he could pull of something like that on a dime… well, Barto knew he wouldn't be matching that maneuver on his barriers even on his own. Supporting Luffy on top of that? Hopeless.
"That's a problem, Luffy," he pointed out as Shiki continued to rise.
"Yeah, I need a better platform," Luffy agreed.
High above, Shiki flicked his leg, an air slash flying down towards them. It splashed off of Barto's barrier, Luffy responding with a Jet Pistol. Unfortunately, the punch didn't reach Shiki before it started to arc down.
"Jihahahahahaha!" Shiki cackled. "Too bad, boys!"
Gritting his teeth, Barto jumped up and onto his barrier, then pushed off, cancelled the first, and jumped to a new one. He repeated this the many times it took to get to Shiki's height - at which point Shiki merely floated above the haymaker Barto threw and then floated down and slammed his knee right into Barto's gut. Stunned, the pirate ragdolled down until he hit the ground hard enough to embed his silhouette in it.
"Well, that didn't work…" he groaned, scratching his mohawk miserably.
"COME DOWN HERE, BASTARD!" Luffy roared, glaring hellfire at the object of his ire.
Surprisingly, however, it was not Shiki who responded.
"Hey, ah… do-do you think I could lend a hand?"
Luffy blinked clean out of his Jet-enhanced state as a brand new voice interrupted his train of thought, and he looked up to discover a familiar entity perched on a nearby eave.
"Billy?" the rubber-man gaped.
The electro-fowl glanced skyward at Shiki before looking back at Luffy with a shaky but determined frown. "I-I-I ran away with Nami, I-I ran away at the village… and if I run away now, I know I'll never stop! S-So I'm not running away anymore!"
Billy hopped down next to Luffy and extended his wing, staring upward in fierce defiance. "I'm not running away from my fears any more… I'm charging headlong at them! Though, uh…" Billy shot a shaky sidelong grin at the rubber man. "I don't quite have the firepower for that. Think you could help me out with that?"
It only took Luffy a second to make his decision, and once he did he grinned eagerly and hopped on Billy's back. "Hell yeah!"
Bartolomeo, however, was notably more resigned in his enthusiasm as he gave the duck a once-over. "Eh…" he tentatively raised a finger. "Don't suppose you've got some spare seats on ya or somethin'?"
"Or you could always take your own ride."
Barto spun around at the voice behind him, then blinked slowly, wondering how the hell two tons of dragon had snuck up on all of them. He gave the dragon a once-over before doing the same to the duck, and ultimately, he came to a simple conclusion:
"Mine's bigger."
"Shiki's still un-clobbered," Luffy pointed out.
"Message received, getting on the fucking dragon!" Barto crowed, doing just that. Luffy hopped onto Billy's back, and then they were soaring into the sky after Shiki.
And they weren't the only ones who took to the skies; with phrases such as 'your master will prove who is reallythe strongest' and 'I'LL DEAFEN YOU AT MINIMUM, and this time there's jack all YOU CAN DO ABOUT IT' ringing in their ears, every last one of the Golden Lion's golden eagles took to the increasingly stormy skies, they and their snails submitting to the Voice of Anarchy and ensuring that Shiki got exactly what he wanted: all the world watching him.
-o-
"Well, it looks like his monopoly on aerial combat just expired," Helmeppo said with a smirk.
"Feeling bold, Helmeppo?" Garp asked with a hint of warning.
"Either Shiki loses or the East Blue dies. I'm not going to apologize for hoping that it's the first one that happens," the apprentice responded.
Garp considered that… and shrugged. "Eh, fair enough."
On screen, Barto and Luffy and their respective mounts closed in with Shiki, the odd duck-like bird soaring ahead. The feed abruptly switched to one closer to the action, allowing the Marines to watch as Luffy threw himself off Billy, fist reared back. Naturally, Shiki lazily floated above the punch - at which point Luffy spun in mid-air and, with a cry of "GUM-GUM SPEAR!", launched his clapped-together feet into Shiki's gut.
Oh, and then Shiki was squashed against a barely-visible barrier. All present winced.
Billy snatched Luffy out of the sky a moment later, leaving Shiki to try and slice up Barto instead. The attack, however, splashed against a new barrier, and with that the combatants were on the move again.
"Ah, Vice Admiral?"
Garp and Helmeppo looked at Coby, who was staring at the screen in confusion.
"With how much experience Shiki has… he has to have Haki, right?" he asked hesitantly. "So, why isn't he using it against Luffy and Black Bart? That attack Luffy did, the kick to the gut… either Observation or Armament Haki would've countered that move. So… does he not have it?"
"He does, but it doesn't matter."
All eyes turned towards a grim-faced Sengoku. "Everything that this man is doing, he's doing because of his lingering grudge against Roger, his shame from losing to a man from the weakest sea in the world. Now the man who is increasingly considered his successor has stepped up against him… and he's only in Paradise. The Golden Lion has long since missed his chance, in his mind, to use Haki to beat the Straw Hats."
The two apprentices looked confused, and Garp took over.
"There are only two reasons that someone proficient in Haki would use it against someone who can't use it themselves: their opponent is so far beneath them there's no point in dragging out the fight, or their opponent is too strong to win without going all-out. Shiki has had too many chances to snuff out the Straw Hats at this point; now that it's come to the crunch, the entire world is watching him, and Luffy has surpassed any expectations he had. If he went all-out at this point, he might win in deed, but in spirit it'd be a complete defeat. He'd never forgive himself if he resorted to Haki to win against a couple of rookies from the weakest sea, so he's left with his wits and his Devil Fruit."
The Vice Admiral grinned wryly. "And something tells me that that's just not going to be enough to beat my stupid grandson."
Sengoku sighed, removing his glasses and massaging the bridge of his nose, eyes squeezed shut. "So, I'm reduced to hoping that the Straw Hat Pirates, who have caused me more stress than anyone in my life, will be able defeat Golden Lion Shiki and prevent a massacre in the East Blue. I am—"
"Conflicted?"
Opening his eyes to give Garp a glare, Sengoku said flatly, "Too old for this shit…and conflicted, yes."
Garp chuckled to himself. "Well, I won't deny that I wish it was us handing him his head like the good old days… but if this is the only way, then there's only one thing for me to do."
Sengoku knew that he should have turned around and not given Garp another look for the rest of the night. Unfortunately, as the image of the snail was in one place, it left him vulnerable to the sight just within his peripheral vision: Garp raising a large foam finger with "East Blue #1" written on it and his two apprentices doing the same.
He groaned even as they began cheering like cheerleaders. He groaned more as the image of Garp in a cheerleading outfit crossed his mind. That would be taking the place of Akainu taking over for him as Fleet Admiral in the 'screaming nightmares' rotation.
-o-
The current maneuvering phase only lasted a few minutes, but that was long enough to take the combatants into the outer islands of Merveille. And Shiki wasted no time demonstrating why he'd taken the fight out there.
He came to a stop, and threw both hands out to the side. Barto and Luffy had only the barest of warnings—the sounds of splintering wood and rock—before a hail of stone shrapnel and splintered tree trunks shot off the nearest islands like the world's largest shotguns. Bartolomeo immediately threw up a barrier to halt the trees, but his attempts to curve it around were agonizingly slow. So, Lindy and Billy did the only thing that would save them.
They went vertical.
Unfortunately, being neither psychic nor experienced to the point of near-psychicness with each other, they went in different directions. Billy flew down, Lindy flew up.
Which was what Shiki wanted the whole time. The speed with which he dove for Billy meant nothing else.
"Shit! Lindy, dive dive dive!" Barto roared the minute he saw that. Luffy, of course, tried to counter with a Gum-Gum Gatling, but Shiki once again smoothly flowed out of the way of the attacks and stuck out one leg, dive-bombing the Straw Hat. Billy dodged - and then Shiki borrowed Luffy's earlier trick by spinning and launching an air slash back up at his opponent.
That splashed against a barrier. But this time, Shiki didn't get angry. He instead spun again, and launched another air slash at Barto. With his barrier still protecting Luffy, and Lindy already committed to the dive and unable to easily pull out, it seemed like he would take the full brunt of the attack.
But it was not to be. Gritting his teeth, Barto jumped off Lindy's back at just the right angle to let the slash carve a nasty gash in his side rather than slit his belly open. Diving down, he reared back his own fist. Shiki evaded, of course, which was when Barto rematerialized his barrier and jumped off of it, planting his fist in Shiki's cheek right as Luffy, red and steaming again, slammed his foot into Shiki's ribs.
The Golden Lion, staggered, fell several feet. But it was not long before he again caught himself and soared around to go on the attack again, large rocks ripping themselves off a nearby island to orbit around him. Luffy didn't wait, tapping Billy to charge straight at him, leaving Barto behind to get back on Lindy.
The past and present of the Pirate Age rumbled towards each other like armored knights in a joust, closing at frankly painful velocities. But a direct clash was not to be. The ring of rocks orbiting around Shiki suddenly switched to shooting themselves straight at Luffy. And while Luffy himself, with his rubber body, could weather an attack like that no problem, Billy was made of much less ductile flesh.
"GUM-GUM JET GATLING!" Luffy roared. His fists lashed out and smashed the rocks into gravel that harmlessly brushed off of both him and his mount.
And then Luffy spun around, just in time to take a sword to the gut, grunting in pain.
"End of the line, brat!" Shiki roared, bringing his other leg around to chop Luffy's head off. Instead, Luffy caught his opponent's leg, and to the Golden Lion's dismay, the grip was ironclad.
Luffy's other hand, meanwhile, was shot behind him. "Gum-Gum…"
Frantically, Shiki slid his other leg-blade out of Luffy.
"Jet Bullet!"
"Comin' through!"
Too late. Luffy's fist hit Shiki square in the nose, and half a second later, Barto slammed into him from behind, cow-catcher-shaped barrier raised once again. The Golden Lion shot off into the distance.
"A third of the Supernovas, the first Pirate King, the next one too, and the birthplace of all three crews that once and currently are punting your tail! Not bad for the 'weakest sea', huh!?" Barto shouted after him.
Perhaps fortunately for Shiki, the time it took him to recover from the blow and regain his wits prevented him from hearing Bartolomeo's taunt. When he had his head straight again, he didn't go on the offensive, or start another gambit. All that had gotten him were two wounds—albeit serious ones—and a collection of contusions for himself.
'What am I doing trading punches with them?' he mentally demanded. Some need to prove his superiority? Raw rage that needed to be expressed?
Well, whatever the reason, he was done with it. Now, he would be fighting smarter.
The facts were thus: close combat devolved into mutual exchanges, something the rookies were… better suited to handle. Because there were two of them, and for no other reasons. Black Bart was covering Straw Hat; he needed to get both at once. And Straw Hat kept charging after him.
Shiki glanced down at the island below. Perfect.
Drawing on the power of the Float-Float fruit, Shiki fired off more impromptu projectiles at the pair. They missed or were blocked, but that wasn't the point. The point was that Straw Hat and that stupid pea-duck were now flying straight at him again. Surreptitiously lowering one hand, Shiki levitated a large ball of water out of the small lake below him. And then, when Straw Hat was close enough, he sped it up.
The look on Straw Hat's face when the water engulfed him was a soothing balm to his embittered soul. As was the shocked yelp Black Bart let out. Granted, the bubble barrier the traitor had managed to create around the two of them, preventing them from immediately drowning, was annoying, but from the water-leaking cracks, that would not last long.
"Jihaha… JIIIHAHAHAHAAAA!" he cackled, floating his way around the ball of water as he basked in the glory of his victory, the glory of the brats' defeat! "You think you can come here to my island, my kingdom, and do whatever you want, hmmm!? You brats! You rookies! YOU FAKE PIRATES!"
Shiki's already present smirk widened as the brats froze in their panicking, their attention locking onto him. That had gotten their attention something fierce.
"You actually listening for once?" he asked mockingly. "Good, then open up your ears!" Shiki swept his arms out wide. "Let me educate you on just how the world truly works!"
-o-
"It's really quite simple, you know. So simple even a pair of total morons like you can understand: the strong rule over the weak!" Shiki raised his palm before his face, fingers clenching and unclenching menacingly. "We in the world who have power, we who stand head and shoulders above the weak, are granted this ability because we are worthy! Because we are inherently better than our lessers! To take what we want, when we want, solely because we want it and because we have the ability to take it! This is our right! The right of the worthy!" Shiki's hand snapped into a fist. "THE RIGHT OF THE STRONG!"
A murderous growl erupted from X. Drake's throat as he snapped his titan-sized jaws at the screen, positively itching to tear his fangs into the real thing rather than a simple simulacrum.
Because right then, in that moment, there was truly nothing Drake desired more than to devour the monster who so thoroughly reminded him of the other monster that had slaughtered the first family he knew in his life.
Or perhaps more accurately, he wanted to slaughter the monster that reminded him of his first family, full-stop.
Bottom line… Drake wanted Shiki dead.
And he wasn't alone.
-o-
"And as for the weak?" Shiki's leer turned sadistic. "The only right they have is to be crushed beneath the might of the strong! To serve at the beck and call of the ones whom they have no right to stand against, whom they should face with the utmost reverence by having the utter benevolence to allow them to set foot upon their dominion day by day… and then to perish as soon as it would benefit the strong ones best! The world is full of weaklings who will never amount to anything, a waste of space and breath for those who can make so much better use of it. The only worthwhile thing they can do with their existence is serving and nourishing the strong!"
"That son of a bitch…"
A good number of incredulous eyes turned toward the punk-like speaker. He met them with a scoff.
"You honestly think I can put up with this? Please!" He waved his hand dismissively. "I'm no hypocrite, I agree with what he said about strength. I don't have a problem with killing. I don't have a problem with pillaging and burning. It's how I live my life, and it's how I'm going to reach for One Piece."
Kid glared bloody murder at the screen.
"But… blind reverence? And this chickenshit having the utter gall to demand it!?" Kid's fist split the wood of the table. "Fuck that. I want enemies, or I want loyalty, and both ways, that shit's earned. This asshole? He wants a flock of sheep." Loudly clearing his throat, Kid spat the resulting loogie right onto the screen. "Makes me fucking pissed off that I'm lumped in with him."
-o-
"And the strongest of all in the world? Why, there's no doubt about it!" Shiki flung his arms wide with a mad cackle. "It is us pirates! We, who fly our own flags and allow no limitations to hinder us! We, who cast off the shackles of the world, and are nations unto ourselves! There should be no doubts, no misgivings! We pirates, we conquer storms that send the meek fleeing for the shores! We defy all who stand in our way, be they beast or man!"
Shiki soared above the bubble, his face a rictus of rage as he glared down towards the world below. "WE FACE ALL DANGERS WITHOUT HESITATION! WE SAIL BEYOND THE HORIZONS THAT THE MEEK DARE NOT CROSS! THERE CAN BE NO DOUBT ABOUT IT!" Shiki shot his finger downward. "I TELL YOU NOW THE TRUTH I TOLD THAT FOOL ROGER, ALL THOSE YEARS AGO: THE SEA BELONGS TO US, AND US ALONE! AND I, AS KING OF THE PIRATES, WILL BE THE STRONGEST MAN IN THE WORLD! THE OCEAN WILL BELONG TO ME! JIHAHAHAHAAAA!"
"Twenty years of isolation has clearly not done the man's sanity any favors," the greatest swordsman in the world dryly stated, one hand reaching for a glass of wine. "Honestly… a veteran of the New World should know better than to assume he could actually get away with something like this."
"You know, up until that last line, I was actually prepared to agree with every word he said," the youngest of the Four Emperors concurred, a jug of sake in hand. "But you've got the right of it, Hawk-Eyes. He's completely lost it."
"He lost it when the captain died by a hand that wasn't his, brat, if not long before that," the Dark King groaned into his cup. "The world's just seeing it on display for the first time."
The three men exchanged looks, the same emotions between them, and drank deeply from their respective vessels.
"So, are you ready to set out, then?" Mihawk posed, cracking his neck in preparation.
"SHUT UP, SHIKI!"
Their attention redirected at the screen as an infuriated roar shook dust loose from the rafters.
"…Not yet. We'll see this fight to the end first," Shanks said firmly.
"I expected nothing less," the swordsman sighed. "You still hold the hope that your protégé can triumph over one such as Shiki?"
"You just said it yourself: his pride has inflated to the level of insanity."
The younger superhumans turned to the older, who was studiously observing the fight.
"He has the willpower, the potential, and he's not alone. All of that gives him a chance against Shiki."
-o-
It happened all at once. Rather than collapsing, Barto dropped his barrier of his own free will, so that at the exact same time, Luffy could throw a punch at Shiki - and to the shock of everyone watching, his hand managed to shoot out of the bubble, grab Shiki's collar and haul himself out of the aquatic prison, laying a punch on his opponent. There wasn't much force behind it, but the Golden Lion's face still twisted in pure, incandescent rage. Well, more so than before.
"Accursed brat!" Shiki roared, bringing up one of his legs. Counterintuitively, Luffy simply let go, and then punched the empty air to his left. Those few viewers with training in the Six Powers recognized the half-assed Moon Walk for what it was; everyone else was simply left gobsmacked by Luffy punching the air to dodge. This included Shiki.
That was when Barto and his dragon blindsided him.
Rookie and legend slammed together, Barto's barrier shimmering between them as Lindy gave him the velocity he needed to knock Shiki out of the sky. Gathering his wits, the veteran slipped out from under Barto, only to catch Luffy's sandal blasting him in the face.
Stars burst in his eyes as he flew back, taking the time that he needed to regain his sight. He turned his gaze back on them. And then his vision faded again as a blinding, crackling blur seared across his vision.
"A VALKYRIE?!" he exclaimed, open-mouthed.
"Not far off, you bastard."
With Nami's voice in his ears, Shiki snapped back to furious. "What have you done, witch?!"
"Tonight's weather forecast for Merveille is showers, thunderstorms, and cyclones, with a 100% chance of the entire archipelago falling back to the sea where it belongs, drowning and crushing every last monster that the last twenty years have spawned. This could have been avoided had a certain lion-bastard realized that his navigator was being held at gunpoint to lie to him and lead his base into certain destruction. And now, here's Straw Hat Luffy with the news."
"YOU'VE LOST, SHIKI!" Luffy roared, slamming his knuckles together.
"You only wish," Shiki drawled, spreading his hands. At first, it seemed as though nothing was happening. Then Nami spoke up again.
"You… You're lowering the islands?" she gasped in horror.
"And you call me an idiot," he responded with cold smugness. "My powers will uphold these islands until the day I die… but I will admit that if too much force from the Grand Line's weather struck an island and sent it falling, my weapons would perish. But thanks to your warning, we are now at an altitude that should ensure that at least the strongest of them will survive. Any further advice, baby girl?"
"… Luffy? Break him."
Roronoa Zoro and Jeremiah Cross's voices spoke alongside Nami's for the final words, and their captain raised his head with a ferocious scowl.
"You were wrong, Shiki," Luffy said firmly.
-o-
Shiki's entire being twitched at the accusation, and he shot a positively evil look at the other pirate. "Care to run that by me again?" he rumbled, a vein pulsating on the side of his neck.
Straw Hat shook his head in disgust. "You've had your head in the clouds for so long that you've forgotten all about the sea. It actually shows just how stupid you are: you can fly and you don't even realize the most important thing in the world. You talk about strength like it's everything, but it's nothing compared to freedom. You say that the ocean belongs to you? Belongs to pirates!?"
Luffy flung his arm out in denial. "YOU'RE WRONG! THE OCEAN… IT BELONGS TO EVERYONE! There's nothing standing in the way of sailing from your home to the end of the world; you're free to go wherever you want to go. No matter what comes our way, no matter how much it hurts, we can still sail on! THE POINT OF BEING A PIRATE ISN'T TO BE STRONG!"
Luffy spread his arms and bared his teeth in bestial defiance. "PIRATES ARE FREE! THAT'S WHY I'LL BECOME THE KING OF THE PIRATES! SO THAT I CAN BE THE FREEST MAN IN THE WORLD! ME! NOT YOU!"
In the relatively new secondary commander's office in the fortress of Navarone, an imposing violet-haired man let out a low growl in response to the rookie's words. The words that, almost against his will, cracked ever so slightly through the cloud of hatred that the Kid Pirates had cast over him, and allowed him to look upon the rubber kid with something other than loathing.
But it was only hearing him say those feelings of the sea, the feelings that he himself agreed with, that caused 'non-loathing' to grow into what he was barely able to consider respect.
Behind him, his most loyal lieutenants had softer expressions as they too observed the fight between the two pirates.
"…he's… different, isn't he?" the woman mused. She rolled her eyes as her comrades snapped accusatory looks at her. "He's still a pirate, I'm not denying that, but…" She jerked her chin at the screen. "If nothing else, this Straw Hat Luffy, he's certainly shown he's nothing like Kid or Shiki, hasn't he?"
A tense silence fell. Then her superior let out a lengthy sigh before inclining his head the slightest amount.
Just as slightly, the corners of Ain's mouth turned upward.
"You… YOOOUUU!"
Apparently, however, not everyone was of the same opinion.
-o-
"YOU! LITTLE! BRAAAT!" Shiki all but literally erupted, raw fury blazing from his person, glaring at the rookie with unbridled hate. "YOU'RE AS DELUSIONAL AS ROGER WAS! But you know what? That's perfectly alright! THIS IS MY WORLD! A WORLD WHERE MIGHT MAKES RIGHT! WHERE STRENGTH MEANS EVERYTHING! YOU WANT TO PROVE ME WRONG?!"
Shiki put his arms out to his sides, a grimace of pain coming over his face. The reason why became clear a moment later as blood erupted from his lower half where his knees once were, the stumps no longer stopped. Then, just as suddenly, the blood flew back where it came from. Shiki hardly heeded this, more focused on the trade-off of leaving him legless once more; without a flinch, his hands reached out and closed around the newly freed hilts of Oto and Kogarashi for the first time in twenty years.
"THEN LET OUR CAUSES FACE ONE ANOTHER HEAD ON!" he roared.
"My freedom," Luffy snarled, pumping his legs and causing steam to course over his body as he swung his pipe out viciously.
"My strength," Shiki growled, effortlessly taking on one of his old fighting stances.
"I'LL PROVE ITS RIGHT!"
And with that, the two shot at each other, each swinging their weapons.
Right from the start Luffy was driven back, Shiki hooking the pipe out of the way with one of the swords and nearly taking Luffy's head off with the other. Only a frantic duck prevented the latter, and only an ironclad grip prevented Shiki from twisting the pipe out of his opponent's fingers barely a second later. Out of position, Luffy had to have Billy outright fly off to avoid the follow-up flurry of stabs. He still had to add a few thin cuts to the balance sheet.
Circling around, this time Luffy went on the offensive, swinging his pipe in a wide arc at Shiki's head. Shiki's swords flashed up, one neatly pushing the pipe out of the way and the other stabbing for Luffy's throat. Another frantic dodge saved his life, though the cut on his neck was still dangerously close to the all-important blood vessels.
"Jihahahaha, too bad!" Shiki cackled. "A sheet of paper more, and you'd have been dead!"
"Yeah, well, I'm still here!" Luffy roared. But he didn't order Billy in again. Instead he pulled back, to where Barto had unsuccessfully been circling for an opening. Shiki, for his part, let him, either confident in his chances or unwilling to risk hopping on the close-combat pain train again. Or a bit of both.
"This isn't working," Luffy grumbled.
"Well, I've got a new move to try out," Barto replied. "Should be able to brute-force through his guard. If you can get him to loosen his grip on his swords…"
Both pirates grimaced in thought. Then, Luffy blinked as something occurred to him.
"Hey, he's probably using his power on those swords in case he drops 'em or something, right?"
Barto frowned, turning that over. "Yeah, probably. Why?"
For the first time since the fight had started, Straw Hat Luffy smiled. It was not a nice smile.
"One loosened grip coming right up!" Luffy declared, tapping Billy and charging forward again, pipe raised high.
"The same thing again? How primitive!" Shiki scoffed, bringing up his swords in preparation for the attack.
Once again, Luffy's straightforward haymaker was brushed aside by Shiki, just on a different spot on the pipe. But this time, Luffy adeptly spun the pipe so that the other end tapped Shiki's other sword.
And suddenly, Shiki flinched and nearly fumbled the hilts out of his hands.
-o-
Back on the Sunny, the rest of the crew, who had by now finished their work and reconvened on the ship to watch the fight, had mixed feelings about the maneuver.
"LUFFY DID WHAT!? HE DOES REALIZE THAT ONE BRUSH WITH SHIKI AND WE'D HAVE FACEPLANTED ON THE OCEAN, RIGHT?!"
But with every iota of their attention trained on the brawl, and with the noise of the storm around them, none of the Straw Hats noticed that for a good while now, Soundbite's eyes had been blanked out, and static sang in the air.
-o-
Shiki stared at his swords. They'd gotten… heavy. Heavier than they'd been since Impel Do—
Sea prism stone! How had he forgotten that the brat's pipe was reinforced with sea prism stone!?
"Yo, Shiki!"
Glancing up, Shiki beheld a gleaming, barrier-made sword - the size of a galleon's mainmast and three times as wide. And it didn't hide the shit-eating grin on Barto's face.
"Take this! Barrier-Barrier Buster!"
With a heave of his arm, Barto sent the barrier-sword hurtling down. Shiki crossed his swords and caught the blade on them, intending to deflect it out of the way. But they were heavier than they'd been in twenty years. The weight distribution was entirely off.
"Gah!"
The result was that the massive cleaver knocked the swords clean out of Shiki's hands, also opening up a nasty gash in his left shoulder.
As he watched his beloved companions plummet down through the clouds to the sea below, Golden Lion Shiki felt… numb. For a little while, at least. Pretty soon it was overtaken by blinding rage. And then… then it passed from blinding back into numb. Oh, the anger was still there, but it was ice in his veins instead of magma.
So it was with calm and forethought that he executed his next move. He stretched his power further than he had since lifting Merveille into the sky, pulling four specific islands closer to him. From the Winter Island, he drew the snow that fell and compacted there. From the Summer Island, he drew sand hot enough to burn and rock the color of a setting sun. From the Fall Island, he drew scraps of leaves and wood, ignited by the lightning that witch had summoned. And finally, from the Spring Island, he drew air, and the cherry blossoms that wafted within.
And these elements, drawn from the four seasons, shaped themselves before the East rookies' eyes into lions of snow and sand and fire and air, nothing at all like the beast Shiki had summoned earlier to squash the witch.
"Celestial Emperors: Elemental Lions," he intoned, before jabbing his finger at Straw Hat and Black Bart. "Kill."
Luffy and Barto and their mounts all tensed up as the lions charged at them. The Wind Lion arrived first, splashing against and then around Barto's barrier. As Luffy prodded Billy to take the rear position, Barto shifted his barrier against the Sand and Ice Lions, wincing as they butted heads with his barrier. The Fire Lion followed that by breathing a gout of flame that also harmlessly splashed against his barrier, allowing the other two Lions to flow around his barrier.
"Luffy, you've got incoming!" Barto barked.
"I know, but the Wind Lion's run off, and—!"
Both rookies froze as a terrible thought came to them.
"Taking a few moments to think about it, I realized that I've been doing this all wrong," Shiki said with an icy smirk. "If I'm going to crush you brats… I need to crush your spirits first!"
"The Sunny!" Luffy cried out in horror, spurring Billy on. Barto would have followed had the Fire Lion not again thrown a fireball at him, and it didn't matter. Luffy's attempt to disengage was met by a rain of projectiles that forced Billy to hurriedly change course.
"Go ahead and see if you can stop them. But as soon as you turn your backs, I'll shishkebab you," Shiki drawled, curled javelins of rain and earth floating around him.
"Hey, dumbass? You're supposed to learn from your enemies' mistakes."
The grin fell off of Shiki's face as Boss Dugong's voice reached him.
"Forewarned is forearmed, and in case you forgot, the rest of us are still in fighting shape. Three Sword Style: 108 Caliber Phoenix!"
"Coup de Vent!"
"Aperitif!"
"Typhoon Lash!"
"Sekhmet's Might!"
Two wind cannons erupted from the Thousand Sunny, tearing through the form of the wind lion and leaving it to disperse. Two smaller ones followed, the remaining Lions having enough forewarning to dodge… right into a bracket pattern of explosives that tore the Sand Lion to shreds and batted the Ice Lion around like a rock in a tumble drier.
Assured that his crew could take care of themselves, the panic melted from Luffy's face, leaving behind only the icy rage that had held him the entire fight. "I'm not going to let you threaten my crew again," he said evenly.
Shiki's only response was to hurl the projectiles of earth and rain that he'd collected. But instead of hitting, or harmlessly flying by, they instead hit Barto's barrier - and the Fire Lion still plastered to the front of it. The earth, of course, was no harm to it, but that much water put out its flame with a hiss of steam.
"Ewps…" Barto drawled, shoving a finger up his nose.
Roaring in frustration, Shiki pulled more ammunition from the islands and from the sky, throwing it indiscriminately at the two rookies so determined to vex him. And to Shiki's delight, some of them actually hit, drawing blood as they stabbed in. How? Their mounts were flying slower, and the fighters were less nimble in dodging and deflecting; Barto often moved his barrier off himself and in front of Luffy to his own detriment. Grinning, Shiki upped the tempo, only to have his opponents duck behind an extra-large barrier and charge straight at him.
Rolling his eyes, he merely floated out of the way, only for the barrier to vanish and then appear right in front of him, too close to dodge. The collision was painful, and disorienting, and the kick that thundered into his kidneys even more so.
Whirling around, Shiki did one thing he almost never did: he grabbed Luffy by the leg, yanked him in, and punched him in the face. It didn't cause much injury, but it allowed Shiki to claw for distance.
"We're wearing him down!" Barto declared as Lindy flew up next to Billy and Luffy. "Heh. Good thing he didn't think to just, y'know, wrap up the Sunny in rock or tilt it into the ocean or something. Or heck, he's touched it before, he could—"
Suddenly, a low, grinding rumble caught their attention, and the two pirates looked around for the source.
"What the heck?" Luffy wondered. "It's like Cross' stomach after he's eaten a biscuit."
"Uh, Luffy?"
Drawn by the uncharacteristic tone of fear in his usually cocky voice, Luffy looked where Barto was looking. His immediate conclusion?
Yeah, fear was the appropriate response to someone—almost certainly Shiki—ripping an entire mountain out of a nearby island.
"JIHAHAHAHAHA!" Shiki laughed, obviously at the very dregs of his sanity, drawing the pirates' attention back to him. "LET'S SEE YOU TRY BLOCKING THIS!"
Luffy grimly eyed the massive mound of stone now flying towards them with deceptive speed. "Can you block this?" he asked Barto.
Barto also eyed the stone, trying to ignore the headache driving railroad spikes into his skull. "Yeah, I can," he reluctantly groaned. "But I'm probably going to be useless after."
"…Thirty seconds." Once again, Luffy bit his thumb. "Gear Third!"
Gritting his teeth, Barto threw up the widest, thickest barrier he could. The sheet of light then folded in on itself and doubled the thickness of the barrier, heedless of the railroad spikes in the caster's brain upgrading to steam-driven piles.
Then the barrier folded in on itself again, making it four times as thick.
And once more, for a barrier eightfold stronger than any Bartolomeo had ever produced.
"Barrier… Barrier…" Barto groaned in agony, before roaring and throwing his arms wide, which expanded the blockade to the size of a small fortress. "BASTION!"
The agony was all but literally blinding, and that was before the rock actually hit. Beyond the headache, Bartolomeo's arms were what supported his barriers, were the physical connection. And under such a strain… they snapped, in multiple spots. Combined with the headache, it was a wonder Barto didn't pass out on the spot.
Instead, his arms and the barrier fell, the mountain falling to the ocean in shattered pieces. "FINISH HIM!" he roared.
Luffy's arm inflated, the air this time travelling down his body, into his foot. This required him to hop onto one foot, and use his hands to direct Billy to soar at Shiki… and also do something the duck hadn't done in the fight yet.
"GUUUUM-GUUUUM…!"
"I refuse!" Shiki howled as Billy weaved between the projectiles he haphazardly flung at the rookie. "I refuse I refuse I REFUSE! YOU CAN'T WIN! GRAGH!" The Golden Lion clawed his hand forwards, throwing a chunk of rock in all but effigy. "YOU ARE ALL NOTHING! YOU! YOUR DREAMS! YOUR OCEAN! ALL OF IT, WORTHLESS! DESTINY, FATE, DREAMS!? PAH! ALL DIRT! THE ONLY THING THAT MATTERS IN THIS WORLD! RAAAAGH!" An entire cliff tore itself from the coast of Merveille and started splintering as it shot itself skyward. "ALL WORTHLESS IN THE FACE OF POWER!"
For all that there was a variety of projectiles, however, they meant naught when they couldn't hit their mark. The majority were inaccurate enough as it was, but the few accurate projectiles were easy for Billy to dodge.
Meanwhile Luffy, grunting with exertion, sent his foot into the sky, piercing through the clouds.
And given how the battle was taking place in the middle of a cyclone…
KEE-RACK!
There was only one logical outcome.
"HOLY—!" Bartolomeo flinched away as a full-blown lightning-bolt struck Luffy's foot, the astral light dancing over his idol and illuminating him in the darkened sky.
But where Barto was shocked into silence by the display, Shiki only got louder.
"JI—JIHAHAHAHAAAA!" Shiki roared in hysterical joy, his face the picture of madness at the spectacle before him. "DO YOU SEE, STRAW HAT!? EVEN THE GODS REJECT YOU, THEY SMITE YOU DOWN! THIS IS MY VICTORY! MY STRONG WORLD! ALL MINE TO RULE! ME, AND ME ALONE!"
"No. Not you. Never you."
Shiki twitched as hisvoice whispered harshly in his ear, but before he could respond—
"Don't you remember, Golden Lion Shiki? Remember the last time Luffy fought God?"
The synapses fired in Shiki's brain, and horror set in. "No…"
"GIIIAAANT!" Luffy's voice echoed throughout the heavens.
"No—!"
"Yes."
"THOOOOR!"
"Nononono—!"
"Yes, yes, and forever yes. The gods haven't rejected Luffy, you braggart. They. Reject. You. This is the end."
"NOOOOOOO!" Shiki wailed, desperation, terror and denial mixing in equal parts in his voice as he threw as much stone, as much power, as much of his Strong World as he could manage at Luffy. He dug deep, he threw it all…
"AAAAAAXE!"
And it was all for nothing, as the judgement came down.
Shiki stared in horror as the titanic limb descended on him, wreathed in light and energy. The attack couldn't have lasted more than five seconds, but to the Golden Lion it was an eternity of hell. For in that eternity, he could not stop hearing, and he could not stop seeing.
"SHIKI!" Straw Hat Luffy's voice roared out, divine fury lacing his every word.
Shiki's eyes widened as the axe fell, but not because of the actual attack.
"STAY AWAY FROM MY CREW!"
"No… you can't… you can't do this to me!" Shiki howled, screaming at the heavens in desperation. "YOU CAN'T DO THIS TO ME!"
"AND STAY AWAY!"
"NOT AGAIN, DAMN IT!" The Golden Lion wailed, shoving as much earth forwards as he could, trying to block what was coming, what he knew was there, to shield himself from the reality. "I CAN'T LOSE TO YOU AGAIN! NOT TO YOU! YOU CAN'T DO THIS TO ME! YOU CAAAN'T!"
But no matter how he tried to block it, how he tried to deny it… his desperation just wasn't enough.
"FROM THE EAST BLUE!"
Stone shattered, his will shattered, he shattered.
And so did Shiki the Golden Lion lose, once more, to a man from the East Blue.
And as he lost, as the light of the divine judgement burst through his defenses and laid him low, the entire world bore witness as the Golden Lion's wrath, his despair, his misery, the totality of his being manifested itself in one final scream, cursing the name of the one who had somehow, against all odds, bested him all those years ago.
The name that had started everything.
"ROOOOOOGEEEEEER!"
And then, with his pride conquered, everything fell.
-o-
It would be a surprise to nobody that the Straw Hat Pirates had set up a plan in the eventuality—inevitability, in all honesty—that Merveille would fall toward the sea. The moment that the palace was emptied of valuables and enemies and set to explode, they had returned to their beloved ship, strung the biggest piece of cloth in the palace that they could find to it, and braced themselves.
To be blunt, 'having the ground pulled out from under you' was an idiom for a very good reason.
"That parachute had better work!" Sanji yelled out in more than a little panic as gravity reclaimed its hold on the land, dragging it and everything upon it back toward the sea below.
"What, you don't have confidence in my ability to sail us through hell and high water?" Merry sardonically called out from the helm.
"My lack of confidence is in the only thing keeping us from dropping like a stone," Sanji clarified, shooting a nasty look at their makeshift parachute.
"Ah c'mon!" Cross cackled with a careless wave of his hand as he yanked hard on a line that kept Shiki's flag secure. "If there's one thing we can take confidence in, it's how much effort Shiki would have put into reinforcing his own ugly-ass symbol!"
"Personally?" Merry added. "I'm not exactly enthused about Big Bro going through that scare that Cross put me through after Skypiea!"
"I said I was sorry!" Cross spread his arms in a show of innocence, though his shit-eating grin said otherwise.
Mrrrr…
The tactician flinched as the ship growled. "OK, fine, ya called my bluff, but in my defense—!"
"He's not talking about you!" Merry cut him off with a shocked look. "Sunny just said that Perona isn't onboard!"
"WHAT?!" Nami yelled, shooting a look back at the land that they were slowly sliding off of before running to the side. "WE HAVE TO—!"
"IT'S TOO LATE, NAMI!" Usopp interrupted, both verbally and physically as he Shaved behind her and grabbed her forearm. "WE'RE ALREADY FALLING, THERE'S NO TIME LEFT TO GO BACK!"
Nami made no attempt to struggle, the cold truth of Usopp's words persuading her against her will. A moment later, a firm hand grabbed Nami's shoulder, and she looked at Zoro's unflinching expression.
"She can take care of herself," he said.
Nami cast a tortured look for the shore, and for an agonizing minute it seemed like she'd actually fight to disembark the ship.
And then she snapped her head away and marched back to the center of the Sunny, eyes screwed shut. "BRACE FOR—!"
"Hold it!" Cross cut in. He then readopted his shit-eating grin as he brought his mic up to his mouth. "Well, loyal viewers, there you have it. One week ago, Shiki the Golden Lion, former rival of the Pirate King himself, attacked our crew, stole one of our crewmates, and threatened our home sea, the East Blue. And not even he managed to get away with it; by the efforts of my captain, Straw Hat Luffy, and another rookie from the East Blue, Black Bart Bartolomeo, Shiki and his twenty-year plan are going down in flames. With the East Blue and our crew safe and sound, it's time to head back to the sea of adventure, and you can also look forwards to the SBS resuming its regular broadcasting once we've managed to get some well-needed R&R! But for now, this is Jeremiah Cross!"
"And Soundbite!"
"SIGNING OFF!" Cross and his snail crowed in concert as he slammed the connection shut, jabbing his finger at Merry. "ALRIGHT, HIT IT!"
"YOU HEARD HIM!" Gin roared from the deck of the galleon parked next to the Sunny. "WE CAME, WE SAW, WE KICKED THEIR ASSES! NOW LET'S GET THE HELL OUT OF HERE! CREW!"
"EVERYONE!" Nami concurred in the same breath.
"SET SAIL!"
With that, the sails of the Thousand Sunny and the Cannibal unfurled, and the rushing wind of their descent seized on them immediately. In short order, the ships tipped over the edge of the island, and for the next several seconds, they were free-falling.
Hirahirahira—FWUMP!
And then, as a final insult to the Golden Lion, the fall of the two crews that ended him and his ambitions was arrested thanks to the flags that they had stolen from Shiki's flagship. And as the aftershock of the snap wore off, both crews got to their feet and turned their attention back toward the falling islands.
"Where are they?" Usopp muttered. "Come on, Luffy, come on…"
"Barto, I swear to hell, if you actually died to that bastard—!" Gin snarled around the thumb he was chewing on.
Despite themselves, most of the Straw Hats and Barto Club were holding their breath.
"THERE! HERE THEY COME!"
Then, barely visible in the distance, a speck of yellow appeared, which slowly grew into the familiar forms of Billy and Lindy. And on their backs, exhausted from their ordeal but still very much alive, was the slumped and groaning Bartolomeo and the panting and shrunken but grinning Monkey D. Luffy.
"Hey guys! I'm alive!" the miniaturized rubber man greeted as exuberantly as his shrunken vocal cords would allow.
"Why do you say that like it's a good thing, dumbass…" Barto groaned, his limbs swinging lifelessly at his side. "I swear to heck, my arms feel like they're gonna fall off, so if you guys could be real gentle about getting me—WA-AAAAAGH!" Barto cut himself off in a pained and panicked yelp as Lindy bodily bucked his captain from his back.
The Barrier-man spent a second writhing in utter agony from the impact before shooting a scathing glare at the dragon. "Fucking fuckstupid fucking fuck why the fuck would you fucking fuck that!?" he hissed viciously.
"Well, that demonstrates the flexibility of that word…" Robin muttered.
Lindy's response was to flash a cocky smirk. "Cause I felt like it," he rumbled without a hint of remorse.
Barto's responding slew of profanity was without a hint of censor.
A round of laughter echoed across the two ships, relief and good humor lightening everyone's spirits—
"Wait, what about the villagers?!"
Until Vivi's exclamation killed the mood hard and prompted them all to turn back toward the falling island. Thankfully, it wasn't long before more silhouettes came into view, not unlike a flock of birds in appearance. Amazingly, it was by all appearances the villagers, gliding on the air with the feathers on their arms.
"…How?" Carue asked through a dropped beak, his tone weak.
"I should be surprised by this. I really should. Buuut after a few weeks with you guys, I'm not," Perona shrugged her shoulders with a defeated sigh.
"Agreed," Robin nodded in, well, agreement.
"I wonder if I'll be able to do that with my new wi—ERK!" Conis started to muse as she fluttered her wings before yelping as a large, gorilla-esque hand grabbed the once-vestigial limb.
"Not until we've recovered from this mess," Chopper firmly stated.
"Y-Yes, Doctor!"
"He does raise a good point," Su said, flopping onto the deck as she kneaded her paws into her temples. "Now that the fight's over, I just wanna sleep…" She cracked an eye and glared at their current interloper. "But first, care to explain what you think you're doing, Ghost Princess?"
Those who hadn't already realized who the second speaker was turned towards the floating form of the lolita.
"Perona!" Nami gasped in relief, running up to the ghost with tears in her eyes. "Oh thank God, you're still alright! Look, just tell us where you are, and, ah—Billy!" The navigator waved at the electro-duck. "Billy, get ready to fly, we're going back for—!"
"Ah, actually?"
Nami was interrupted by Perona, who'd floated before Nami and was wearing an… actually contented smile.
"I'd… really prefer if you didn't do that? Please?" the Ghost Princess asked politely.
Nami blinked, utterly dumbfounded. "Wh-What? Perona? Why on earth—?"
"And I'd prefer you not do that, because… well, as fun as our time together has been…" Perona's smile became slightly sheepish as she floated back, off the edge of the ship, and in the direction of the falling Merveille. "I'd really rather not leave."
The navigator's mind flat-out stalled as she tried to process just what on earth she was hearing. "Perona?" she breathed.
"Horohoho… what, did you already forget?" Perona tucked a lock of hair behind her ear in an almost shy manner. "I never planned on joining your crew to begin with, remember? And, don't get me wrong, after the past few weeks, I can definitely understand how it could have happened, how in another life, maybe… and even now I probably wouldn't mind…" The spirit trailed off for a moment before shaking her head with a wry chuckle. "But… But no. No, I have other plans in mind now. So… Sorry. But I won't be coming back."
Perona then turned towards Luffy, and curtsied, tugging her skirt out in an overly cutesy display of deference. "And as such, thank you, Straw Hat Luffy. You had no reason to trust me, no reason to let me stay on your ship… but you did anyway. You showed me unconditional kindness where every time before someone wanted something from me, and I honestly can't thank you enough for that. And, when the day comes that you're crowned as King… I'd very much like to be there to see it."
"Shishishi!" the newly restored rubber man chuckled. "Mah, no problem!"
Perona nodded gratefully. She then turned towards Nami with a tearful smile. "And Nami…" She shook her head with a hiccup. "God, where do I even start? Thank you for being my friend, Nami. You-You aren't just the first friend I've ever had, you're the best I could have asked for. And I am… going to miss you so much."
"You're…" Nami rubbed the tears from her eyes with a heavy sniff. "Y-You're sure you don't want to come with us? W-We could let you keep the crow's nest if you want!"
"Veto!" Zoro and Cross interjected.
"Horohorohoro!" Perona chuckled. "I'm sure, Nami. But as it is, I have different arrangements in mind. A palace perfectly empty for me to move into… and a load of cute new pets just begging for my love."
Nami blinked in confusion. And then Perona pointed skyward, Nami looked up, and promptly paled as she caught sight of the trio of giga-birds circling on high.
"Peronaaaa," Nami breathed numbly. "What exactly were you doing during the raid?"
"Ohhh, this and that, this and that," Perona giggled with her more normal impishness. Her expression then softened kindly. "Goodbye, Na—ah!"
Perona jerked back in shock as Nami lunged forwards and threw her arms around the ghost in the closest approximation to a hug she could manage. Once she got her wits about her, however, the Ghost Princess returned the hug in the same capacity.
"We would have raised hell together, wouldn't we?" Perona whispered through her tears.
Nami hiccuped a laugh of her own, drawing in even closer to the ghost…
"We still could," she breathed in her ear.
Perona blinked in surprised confusion, but before she could do or say anything, Nami hissed a string of numbers in her ear before drawing back, a smirk and a finger on her lips.
The Ghost Princess blinked a bit more. She then readopted her smile and nodded.
"Goodbye, Straw Hats," Perona breathed in farewell. "Till we meet again."
And with that, the Ghost Princess… dissolved, her astral form collapsing into motes of ectoplasm and wafting back to the plummeting island.
Chopper let out a sigh as he kneaded his brow. "I would have appreciated a chance to make sure my treatment was working. Well… alright, let's see what the damage is this time, Luffy," he said, fond exasperation in his face as he retrieved Luffy and laid him down on the grassy deck. "Nami, you're next."
"Right," the navigator nodded fearlessly, directing her attention to the rest of her crew, and then slumping down. "It looks like we won't be navigating anywhere until we touch back down… I think I'm just going to take a little rest."
"Heheh, trust me, I think we could all use some rest," came a new voice from beside the Sunny. A quick look revealed one of the last people either of the crews ever expected.
"Ever?" several voices inquired.
"Who?" was the question that several more asked.
"Ah, she was one of the slaves working at one of Shiki's bases," Robin explained with honest surprise.
"Yeah, one of the slaves who went free with all the rest!" Valentine gaped in confusion. "Ever, shouldn't you be back with your family!?"
"Oh, I went back to them alright!" Ever nodded in confirmation, beaming with unbridled positivity. "Found them after our village was wrecked, had the whole tearful reunion bit, very dramatic…" She smirked confidently as she cocked her head to the side. "Aaaand then I joined the bandwagon a lot of others were hopping on."
"And by 'bandwagon', you mean…?" Goldenweek trailed off curiously.
"Weeeeell," the winged-woman pointed up at the sky. "You see everyone splitting off here and there?"
The pirates looked up and saw that, indeed, while there were plenty of citizens of Merveille circling above the island, waiting for it to land in the ocean, clusters were splitting off and starting to flap away.
"Seeee, we were all trapped on that island under Shiki's rule for twenty years," Ever explained, grimacing. "Meaning that some people, like me, have never actually had the chance to live free. So now that Shiki's gone? A lot of people just want to leave, see the world, and never look back. People like me. And while most folks are winging it on their own… weeell…" She smirked as she folded her arms behind her head. "I thought that I'd save myself the effort and hitch a ride."
"Wait, you want to join us!?" Donny sputtered in shock.
"Them, specifically," Ever said, jerking her thumb at the Cannibal with a flat look. "No offense to you guys, but you all are a whole 'nother brand of crazy that I don't feel like dealing with. I'll settle for 'relatively deranged', thank you very much."
"Preach it, sister," Goldenweek deadpanned as she held out her knuckles to the feathered woman, who promptly bumped them with her own and a grin.
"You've got spirit, Ever," Bartolomeo rasped, pinning Ever with a serious look. "But can you actually fight? I run this crew like I ran Loguetown: I can't let you join if you're going to be dead weight when it comes to combat. Everyone on this crew needs to be able to hold their own against the other monsters of the Grand Line."
Ever returned Bartolomeo's gaze evenly for a few moments. Then she flapped her arms, flipped herself in the air and brought one leg down in an axe kick aimed straight at his skull.
SKRANG!
She winced as it made contact with a barrier instead, and withdrew her leg with a pained flex.
"Ffffucking hell, I think that broke my heel, you bastard," she grumbled with half-hearted acid.
"There's a reason I say that they're indestructible, seeing as it took Shiki using mountains to break them, and even then, my arms are what broke first," Barto snorted with a snaggle-toothed scowl, which he shoved in Ever's face. "And besides that, how the hell do you think that attacking me while I'm exhausted and nursing two broken arms would do anything to convince me that you were capable of lasting in a real fight on this ocean?"
The Merveillan shook out her foot a bit more before looking at Bartolomeo with a pleasant smile. "Oh, no, I attacked because I knew you'd be able to put it up, even while looking like some of the nastier beasties back home had chewed you up and spat you out."
"And if I couldn't?"
Ever rolled her eyes dismissively. "Well then you'd hardly be worth following, wouldn't you?"
Bartolomeo processed that with a carefully blank face.
"…heh… hehahaha… HEHAHAHAHAHA!"
Then he started laughing. It only lasted a few seconds before a spasm of pain cut him off, but the message was clear even before he shot Ever a grin.
"That's good enough for me!" he said. "You'll have to carve your place out amongst our band of bozos by hook, crook, and whatever other cheap shots you can throw, and if someone pisses you off or something then don't bother coming crying to me, but other than that?" He shrugged, wincing his way through the pain. "Welcome aboard, Ever."
Amongst the Straw Hats, Sanji chewed on his cigarette doubtfully as he leaned in close to Robin. "Nnnooot to tell somebody how to live their life, but… she is a beautiful young girl with limited life experience signing on with one of the roughest and most certifiable crews alive. Shouldn't we… I don't know, say something?"
Robin made to answer, but was cut off by Ever leaping onto the Sunny's railing and shooting her fist in the air.
"LOOKS LIKE YOU'RE STUCK WITH ME, BITCHES!" she crowed, basking in the round of boisterous cheers that erupted from the Cannibals.
Robin let a playful smile play across her face. "Counterpoint," she purred. "She's a young girl whose entire life experience comes from serving as a waitress in a pirate bar. I think she'll be just fine." She patted Sanji on the cheek as she walked off. "It's cute of you to act so concerned, though."
Sanji's head hung with a groan. "On the one hand, I love being touched by a beautiful woman. On the other, even I can't just brush off being stepped on that badly…"
"If you've gotten over that by tomorrow, Sanji, I need to talk to you about something," Cross said, tilting his hat over his eyes as he reclined on the grassy lawn, armor shed beside him. "You too, Donny."
"Huh? Uh… OK?" the Dugong in question agreed before returning to resting with his siblings.
"HEY, LOOK! IT'S THE MARINES!" Apis called.
All eyes turned downward, where a fleet of battleships could be seen turned toward where the ruins of Merveille were settling.
"Oh, this should be good," Barto leered viciously. "What do you say to a little taunting about beating them to the—?"
"No."
All eyes snapped toward the supine rubber man, who had a firm frown on his face.
"What do you mean, 'no'?"
"They came here to stop Shiki. They came here to fight for the East Blue. They came here to fight for the same reason that we were fighting." Luffy closed his eyes. "We would have been on the same side. Why would we make fun of them for wanting to help save our home?"
"…There he goes making way too much sense again," Usopp heaved his shoulders in a sigh. "But hey, if they leave us alone, then—!"
BOOM!
All attention snapped back down below, and Usopp brought down his goggles to see what happened.
"…Kind of anticlimactic. Yes, they're firing at us, but we're still too high for their cannonballs to reach us," he said.
"MEEHH, and we're not close enough for me to taunt anyone anyway," Soundbite crossed his eyestalks in consternation. "SOOO FRUSTRATING!"
"Eh, I don't mind it," Merry yawned, idly steering the Sunny with a few stray taps on the woodwork. "We've kicked enough ass and torn apart enough psyche for tonight. Let's just enjoy the trip down…" She hopped up onto the nearest railing and leaned back on her palms as she gazed out at the horizon, a lazy smile on her face. "Man… never thought I'd ever be lucky enough to see this again."
Everyone else stilled at the musing, and the crews all wandered over to gaze over the edge and off into the distance.
"This is impressive," Mr. 5 whistled, eyeing the ocean below. "I guess you see this all the time, Miss Valentine?"
"Hmhm," Valentine giggled, leaning on her umbrella. "This a whole different scale, Mr. 5."
With that, the two crews eased into relaxation. Which, for the Straw Hats, soon turned into rest, which just as quickly turned into straight out collapsing so that they could sleep off the fatigue of the last week and the final fight against Shiki. This, in turn, led to no small amount of panic from their erstwhile travel companions.
As ever and always, not a quiet moment on the deck of the Thousand Sunny.
-o-
A few hours later, on an uninhabited island not far from the ruins of Merveille, a bloodied, legless form cracked open a bloodshot eye. Ragged gasps tore out of his throat as consciousness rudely intruded. Memories of recent events coalesced in his mind, and as he felt the stumps where his legs once were, now bereft of his precious swords, hatred crystallized in his heart.
"Monkey D. Luffy," he snarled, forcing himself upright. "I've lost everything to another rookie from the East Blue… no."
A mirthless smile came over his face. "No… I still have my powers. That's all I need. I'll take the time I need to clean my wounds."
He turned his gaze upward. "I'll fly to the White-White Sea, nobody will be able to find me there. I'll form a new plan, new weapons, a new army… and next time, I'll break his spirit first. I'll find his home, and I'll slaughter those he cares about most! Ji… JIHAHAHA! JIHAHAHAHAAAA!" Shiki threw his head back and roared with laughter, heedless of the blood he was hurling with every guffaw. "I HAVEN'T LOST YET! I'LL HAVE MY REVENGE! I'LL BE BACK! DO YOU HEAR ME!? I'LL BE—!"
"You shall not, cretin."
CRACK!
A Haki-enforced heel slammed into his skull, sending Shiki back into blissful unconsciousness. A red and white serpent bound him in its coils before moving back toward its master, who had a Transponder Snail out and in her palm.
"Fleet Admiral Sengoku, I have located the fallen form of Shiki the Golden Lion," Pirate Empress Boa Hancock announced with a prim sniff. "And quite fortunately for your Government's reputation, he is still alive; you may retrieve him and do with him whatever you will."
The line was silent for a few moments, the snail's expression slightly wide-eyed. Then…
"…I am grateful for your assistance, Boa Hancock. But I thought you generally made it a rule to not care about anything outside the Calm Belt?"
Hancock tossed her hair dismissively. "I decided to make an exception."
"That's the best I'm getting out of you, isn't it?" Sengoku sighed, grimacing. He forged on before she could reply. "And if I asked you to extend that 'exception' to the Straw Hats?"
KA-LICK!
Hancock smirked as she pressed her finger into the receiver's cradle. "I suspect that that will suffice as answer enough."
"Honestly, some men, they just can't be satisfied with what they get, can they?" Marguerite sighed wistfully.
"Indeed, indeed," Marigold snickered before giving her sibling a contemplative look. "Though… I am curious, sister. Why did you decide to intervene, when we never have before?"
"Did you not hear me, Mari?" Hancock raised her chin as she strutted past her larger sibling, Salome at her heels. "I decided to make an exception. But, quite unlike what Sengoku believes, I did not make this exception for the sake of this," she sneered as she snapped a kick across her captive's jaw. "Pathetic wretch. Rather…"
Boa Hancock turned her gaze skyward, smiling fondly as she recalled the sight of a pair of ships gliding into the sunset as she had seen a time ago.
"I made an exception," she breathed warmly. "For the sake of an exceptional man."
Cross-Brain AN: Our sincerest apologies, ladies and gentlemen, but we will be ending the chapter here. We intended to finish Strong World with this, but the aftermath is shaping up to be much longer than we expected. But you can't be too mad as us since we got all of the action out of the way first, right? In any case, it shouldn't take too much longer for us to finish up part 4, which will be the final part before we move to the last pre-time skip saga.
Also, here's a tidbit: hidden in this chapter are expies to the original work that we, the Cross-Brain, will be working on during our hiatus! Locate them if you can, and look forward to our work!
Patient AN: And if you were wondering about Hornet's AN from part 1? We were referring to Perona joining the crew. Don't get us wrong, Ego and I both wanted her to join… but at this point, we need to be very selective about whom we add to the crew, and Perona just doesn't add enough. We do have other plans for her, though… and you've probably already guessed what they are.
Ah, yes, and one more important matter: credit for the analyzation of Indigo's Chemical Juggling and the mechanics of the subsequent fight scene belongs to the love of my life, the amazing Vikingr.
