Hello everybody,
watching Volleyball over here, I have the latest chapter for you with finally some answers ;-)
Thank you all for your lovely comments and kudos, I'm really gratefull for them. Have a great weekend^^
Like this week, the next chapter will probably come out ucomming Friday, if I have to work late, Saturday morning.
See you next week ;-)
Sharry
Chapter 7
"May I introduce: The Last Dragon, Angel of Death Bronze."
Sanji had no idea what was going on.
"The Devil's Hellhound," Franky whispered breathlessly beside him.
Somewhere Sanji had heard this name before, but he understood nothing.
The Last Dragon?
Dragons were fairytale figures, winged reptiles, but he knew they might still exist. So why the Last Dragon? The guy on the railing was a man with huge white wings perhaps and strange eyes perhaps, but obviously no reptile, no monster.
Angel of Death Bronze?
Why did this name sound so strangely familiar to him? Why did he feel like he knew that name? Why did he associate it with his childhood, why did it remind him of his siblings?
Suddenly he heard his father's voice talking about the Death Angel Bronze.
The Devil's Hellhound?
Somehow this title awoke a melody within him, a children's song if he wasn't mistaken. Wasn't there a song, in which the children were supposed to be at home by dawn, otherwise the hellhound would eat them?
Absent, he nodded slightly. Exactly, there was this old song his siblings had always sung whenever his father had spoken about Bronze. It was just a fairytale, an ancient legend, nothing more than a children's song.
The second verse said that children should not play too far away from the village, because outside in the forest the hellhound was waiting for them to rip their heads off and in the third stanza they should not be too loud, because the hellhound was found of noisy children and would tear apart their throats.
And between every single verse there was this chorus, echoing in his head over and over again.
Listen to your parents, don't be too loud
Otherwise the hellhound will take you out
Hellhound Bronze! Hellhound Bronze!
Behave well or he'll take you out!
For a second, Sanji was that little boy again, who was not as strong as his siblings, who got teased while the others were singing this song. The melody haunted him, the unnaturally distorted voices of his siblings chanting it, just like the deep voice of his father, who spoke about the Angel of Death's blood.
Then the winged man jumped down from the railing. His heavy boots pounced heavily on the wooden floor and Sanji was no longer the little, defenseless boy.
Confused, he took a step back.
"What the hell does that mean?" Someone to Sanji's left asked as he eyed the person in front of him.
It had to be Zoro, it was the same hair, the same narrow lips, the same worry wrinkles on the forehead. Even the three golden earrings on his left ear. But how did he get those wings, the tattoo? What about those weird eyes and what happened to his vanished scars?
"Rayleigh, could you please open Chopper's handcuffs?" The newcomer's voice sounded almost exactly like Zoro's, only a little deeper and almost echoing, almost not human, if it weren't for this uncertainty, which was hidden in every word.
"Of course." The former pirate passed Sanji and took the apparently unconscious doctor out of the other's hands.
"He's unharmed." The newcomer's statement made Sanji breathe a sigh of relief.
"You did it well." Rayleigh praised calm and gentle, keeping his eyes on the young pirate in his arms. "You saved Chopper."
The other did not respond but looked at his feet.
"Wait, what's going on here?"
"Is it really you, Zoro?"
"I don't understand anything anymore."
"Wow, those wings are awesome!"
"Luffy, don't! Uhm..."
The straw hats' captain had rushed forward, reaching for one of those astonishingly white wings, the familiar stranger had tried to stop him, but had been too late and winced now, not able to move away.
The next moment the wings behind the newcomer's back seemed to contract and growing smaller and then all of the sudden they were gone.
"What the...?"
"How…?"
"Wow, cool!""
The Dark King, who had casually removed the young reindeer's seastone handcuffs, laughed quietly.
"Oh, it's been a long time since your little wings were so sensitive, right?"
Confused, Sanji looked from green-haired man to the former pirate, who is still held Chopper in his arms.
"We should get going." The newcomer almost whispered, his voice hoarse. "Those Korekutas may have other problems right now, but we are not safe here."
"Agreed!" It was Nami who seemed to get a grip on herself first. "We really should be leaving. Take your positions! Franky, a Coup de Burst please."
Seconds later, the ship sailed through the air and Sanji left his position to return to the small lawn. At the mast sat Rayleigh next to Chopper, who had just woken up and inspected Zoro with suspicion, who was sitting in the grass in front of the Dark King.
"Are you sure you're okay, Zoro? They didn't hurt you or anything?"
"I'm fine, Chopper. Don't worry." The swordsman didn't sound nearly as quiet as usual, but he looked like he used to. Nothing was left of the strange tattoo, gone just like the wings, the one intact eye as normal as that of any other. Even his swords were finally back at his hip again.
Zoro looked exactly as Sanji knew him, as he should look like.
The Sunny landed almost gently in the water and strong winds filled the sails, as if Mother Nature knew that they wanted to leave in a hurry.
One by one all the crew members came together, Luffy threw himself into the grass next to the swordsman, the others stood around more or less relaxed.
Sanji immediately noticed that the three older ones from the crew, by name Brook, Franky, and Robin, had taken very defensive postures. They had all crossed their arms and were half-turned away from the swordsman.
Usopp and Nami, on the other hand, exchanged uncertain glances, while Chopper looked bewildered between the tense crew members and Zoro, who highly concentrated grinded grass between his index finger and thumb. Behind him sat Rayleigh and looked at them with a soft smile.
But Sanji wasn't stupid enough to be fooled by it; behind the reflecting glasses, watchful eyes flashed from one crewmember to the next one. The former vice-captain was ready to fight.
Only Luffy seemed absolutely unimpressed while he folded his arms behind the back of his head and exhaled deeply, obviously extremely satisfied with himself and his deeds.
"So Zoro, what's going on here?" Nami didn't sound as certain as she had just a few minutes ago, when she had asked this question for the first time.
"Is it true?" But Robin's icy voice shattered Nami's question with ease. Her voice trembled, as well as her whole body, while she faced the swordsman. Only now did Sanji notice that she was still holding the bloody neck ring.
"Did he say the truth?" She nodded at the Dark King, but her gaze lay relentlessly on Zoro.
He rose carefully.
"Robin," he began in a calm voice, "let me expl…"
"Is. it. True?"
Unusually unrestraint, the archaeologist threw the neck ring at the swordsman's feet. The rest of the crewmembers grew deadly silent. Sanji couldn't recall Robin ever raising her voice. The ring spun around itself for a few times before falling against the heavy boots.
Zoro gritted his teeth and nodded to the ground.
"Yes, I'm Bronze."
Slap!
Even before the swordsman could finish the sentence, Robin had rushed towards him and then she slapped him, her face distorted in pain.
"Robin?" Usopp tried to intervene, but Nami held him back.
"Captain!" Robin almost choke on her breath, as if holding back tears, still looking at the swordsman and shaking her head slightly. "Either this... either he leaves...," she said with a breaking voice, "or I will abandon the crew."
None of the others dared to say even a word as she spun around and rushed from the lawn to the bow of the ship.
"Robin!" Zoro tried to chase after her, but out of nowhere Rayleigh stood behind him and held him by the shoulder.
"Let her go. Give her some time to accept the truth."
"What truth?!" Usopp didn't seem as calm anymore as he made big hand gestures. "What's going on here? These guys, this weird birdcage, then... then these wings just now, and... and now Robin? What the hell is going on here? I don't understand nothing anymore!"
Desperately, the sniper looked around, as if one of them had the answers.
"Maybe you should sit down," Rayleigh recommended, "it could be a longer conversation."
Nami, Chopper, and Usopp followed this advice, the little doctor obviously still confused, but Sanji wasn't any less, while he lit another much-needed cigarette.
"No thanks, I prefer to keep standing," Franky replied hostile. Brook next to him, astonishingly, also looked quite mistrusting and shook his skull as well.
"What's going on with you guys?" Chopper muttered.
"Didn't you listen?" Franky murmured, nodding over to Zoro. "You claim to be Bronze? The Bronze?"
"Who is this Bronze?" Usopp asked, visibly insecure because of the obvious tension.
"A kid's song," Sanji replied, looking furiously at the others. He didn't understand what this hostile attitude was about, hadn't they just freed a crewmember? Precisely the crewmember who was now antagonized by Franky? Something wasn't right here, both the cyborg and the skeleton actually liked Zoro much more than Sanji himself did and now he had to remind them of that fact again?
"It's just a stupid children's song to scare off brats. The Hellhound Bronze never existed. Just one of many fairytales people have told about the Pirate King."
"Ha!" Franky laughed coldly. "There you can see how much history gets lost within a few decades. Back in the days we were still afraid of the Angel of Death, but look, now he's nothing more than a children's song."
Zoro was still standing almost in the middle of the uneven circle without saying anything, not even looking at any of them, his face a stern mask, showing no emotion.
"The children's song may be the only thing that remained of history, but I remember when I was a little kid, how people talked about the Angel of Death Bronze, the Hellhound from the underworld, obeying only Gol D. Roger. The monster Bronze has destroyed countless islands with nothing more than snapping his fingers."
"Well, now you're exaggerating," Rayleigh grumbled, but Franky didn't bother as he continued: "It's said that the beast Bronze became so unpredictable and dangerous that Roger had to kill him with his own hands in the end."
"That' s a lie!" Suddenly Rayleigh was standing in front of Franky and although the cyborg was much taller, he seemed to shrink under the furious eyes of the Dark King.
"Let me say this once and for all," he hissed in a loud, trembling voice, "no one, not a single crewmember, wouldn't have wanted Bronze in our crew."
Now the former vice-captain looked at each of them.
"He was our crewmember, our friend, and each of us suffered the loss when Bronze decided to leave the crew. So don't you dare..."
"Silver," Zoro pleaded weakly.
"No," the old man growled. "Don't you hear those lies they spread about you and Roger? Don't you care that they twist your history in something you're not?"
Frightened and confused, some of them gasped for air.
The former vice-captain of the Pirate King turned to Franky. "Roger would have died to protect Bronze, I would have died, each of us would have done that. So don't you think he was a monster just because of some old stories. People have no idea who the real monsters are!"
The ship's carpenter swallowed heavily and fell silent.
For a second, nobody said anything.
"So," Nami finally muttered, "you want to convince us that Zoro – our Zoro – is nobody else but the Hell's Trio's last member? The trio that terrorized the world thirty, no, more like forty years ago? The Devil, his Right Hand and his Hellhound?" She shook her head. "Zoro wasn't even born back then, it's impossible."
Rayleigh turned to the navigator and nodded, before looking at Zoro.
"Isn't it time for you to start talking?" He sounded much calmer now than mere seconds before. "You see that they have a lot of questions."
"Yes, could we start with what you mean by the Last Dragon?" Usopp threw in, while rubbing sweat from his forehead. "Are we talking about reptiles? Like winged lizards or what?"
"Dragons," began Brook, who also sounded unusually serious, "are nowadays colloquially associated with reptiles, but the term once stood for a completely different breed. They used to be called heavenly people or sky-men."
"You know what dragons are?" Rayleigh asked, quite surprised.
The musician nodded. "Of course, there were still some left during my youth, but I am not surprised that nowadays people hardly talk about them. Even then, only a handful of them were still alive and most people thought of them rather as a myth than reality. Just like fish-men, they were superior to ordinary people and were also considered to be rather violent, the World Government had promised large amounts of money to those, who brought them the head of a real dragon. Instead of bounty hunters, everyone who wanted to make quick money at that time, became a dragon hunter to chase the last living individuals.""
"That's true." Finally, Zoro raised his voice and looked at them, one by one. "Just like the waterly people, the heavenly people were once a mighty folk. But more than 800 years ago, people started chasing my ancestors. When I hatched, there were barely more than a dozen left and these few were all killed during my childhood."
One second everyone was silent, all but the cook.
"Hatched?" Sanji asked, bewildered. "What do you mean by hatched?"
He knew this probably shouldn't be his first reaction, a slightly more sensitive question would have been appropriate, but his mouth had been faster.
Zoro looked at him with his eyebrow raised. He did not seem mad about Sanji interrupting the oppressive silence. Almost mockingly he observed the blond, now looking more and more like himself again.
"It's no coincidence that people nowadays think of winged reptiles when talking about dragons," he explained, almost as if it was basic knowledge everybody should be aware of. "Without getting too much into the details, I'd just say that adult heavenly people can transform into what you'd imagine a dragon to look like. However, they are not comparable to the beasts, which are now commonly referred to as dragons."
For a moment, Zoro looked to the side and muttered half-loudly: "After all, these are just brainless descendants of dragons who mated with wyverns." Then he shook himself slightly and said aloud: "Therefor dragons lay eggs that hatch after two years."
"So you hatched from an egg?" Nami quipped. "More than 50 years ago?"
"81 years ago," Zoro confirmed with a swift side-glance to Rayleigh, who nodded reassuring, "but I'm not the last dragon – my former crewmembers gave me that title - because my mother was actually a human being, only my father was a dragon."
"Okay?" Usopp looked just as confused as Sanji felt. "So you're half human and half reptile?"
The shadow of a grin hurried over the otherwise stiff lips of the swordsman.
"Something like that, dragons are shape-shifters, and from a certain age on they can transform into such a reptile. As a hybrid however, I have had different forms since my birth. What you just saw a few minutes ago, that's how I look in my natural form, half dragon, half human. This right here," he put a hand on his chest, "this is how I look like as a human being."
Nami rubbed her hands through her face.
"All right," she muttered, "okay, let's say we believe all that stuff. What happened to you? Why did you never tell us?"
The swordsman sighed.
"It will take longer to explain."
"We have time," Franky replied coolly.
Zoro looked at him and nodded sharply.
"Of course. So, the short version: humans are not made to carry eggs, so my mother died, and I grew up with my father's tribe. His name was Wood, and he sacrificed himself so that I could survive and escape when our tribe was attacked." He kept a straight face, his voice as rational and emotionless as always. "In search of other dragons, I fell into Korekuta's grasp. Dragons have special abilities that the world nobles were interested in, so they captured me instead of killing because as a child I wasn't any danger to them. After twenty years I was able to escape and became..."
"Well, that's not the whole truth," the Dark King interrupted, but apologetically raised his hands as Zoro looked at him seriously, before Zoro continued. "Anyway. Shortly after I fled, I met Rayleigh and Roger, who lied to me about being just like me."
"Oh, come on, I just didn't say we were not dragons."
"You introduced yourself with Silver and Roger with Gold, what else what I supposed to think?"
They glanced at each other for a second. Brook coughed silently and Zoro turned back to them again.
"So, I became a Roger's crewmember and..."
"Then you know what the One Piece is?" Usopp heckled, slamming his hands against his mouth in shock almost immediately. His eyes grew big and it was obvious that he already regretted his question.
Zoro, on the other hand, raised only a finger.
"Just wait for me to tell the story, because no, I wasn't on board on Roger's last trip." Sanji gulped heavily; although Zoro spoke quite matter-of-factly, he sounded somewhat wooden. "As I said, dragons are different from humans, especially when it comes to devil fruits. Those usually have no effect on dragons. However, as I said as well, I am only a hybrid and therefore the exception of most rules. About forty years ago there was a dispute with some other pirates. Me and some crewmembers fought against a user of the Reverse-Reverse-Fruit and he unintentionally cursed me."
"Wait a minute," Sanji muttered, remembering the fruit from the Book of Devil Fruits. "While this fruit can rewind or fast-forward the lifetime of objects at incredible speed, it doesn't work on living beings. A ship can decompose to dust within seconds and metal becomes liquid, but how should that affect you?"
"And if you ever find the answer to this question, let me know," the swordsman replied bluntly. "I don't know why or how, but after this pirate touched me briefly, my lifetime ran backwards and twice as fast. Of course, I didn't notice it in the beginning, but at some point we did realize something was off and after we came up with the idea that it could be because of this devil power, we went after this pirate of course. But no matter what we did, the curse didn't break."
"That means," Chopper, who sat at the mast next to Rayleigh, asked, "that you weren't getting older, but younger and that twice as fast?"
The swordsman nodded: "Within five years I deaged by ten and what had been funny at first and amusing for some, became very annoying at some point, because no matter how much I trained, from a certain age on my body couldn't keep up and I became weaker." Now the other looked back to the ground. "About thirty years ago I left the crew to find a cure and ended up on Ohara, where we still knew allies from our last visit."
"Wait a moment," Franky murmured, now not as hostile as before, "when you say Ohara, you mean Robin's home island?"
Again, Zoro nodded.
"Clover was a good friend of mine, but he couldn't help me either."
"When Roger decided to visit the wide world for his last big journey, he wanted Bronze to accompany us of course, so we visited him on Ohara," Rayleigh continued.
"But I was in a child's body, so I would have been nothing more than a burden," Zoro grunted slightly. "So they traveled to Raftel without me. Instead of me, some of Ohara's researchers went along with them, including Nico Olvia, Robin's mother."
For a second they were all silent, while the puzzle's pieces of different stories were slowly coming together in their heads, then Rayleigh took the floor: "After Roger had turned himself in, I immediately rushed to Ohara, but everything left from our friend was a damn egg." He sounded bitter.
"None of us knew what would happen to the egg through this curse, so I took it with me. I thought it would just dissolve into thin air at some point, but I had no idea." Zoro remained silent. "I must confess that I had almost forgotten about this stupid egg, but two years after Roger's death a screaming baby woke me up."
The old man shook his head.
"So I stumble into the room and there's this baby just lying on the floor. A little human baby in the middle of bronze-colored eggshells."
Sanji tried to imagine the picture and looked at the swordsman. This was how his favorite enemy was supposed to be born?
"Of course, I didn't know what to do. I wasn't even sure if he would hatch at all and then as a human? You have to know that he almost never ran around as a human at that time, except when he had to, and sometimes not even then."
Sanji gripped the railing. This story became more and more abstruse and he was getting a headache.
"I was still very actively hunted at that time, like many of our crew, and this was absolutely no place to have a small child with me. Therefor I decided to leave him the East Blue with good friends who knew Bronze's story and had always wanted a child."
"I grew up among humans," Zoro continued, "and had no idea what kind of past lay behind me. I was always just Roronoa Zoro. I knew my parents weren't my biological parents, but I never thought much about it. It wasn't until two years ago that I began to remember. I've never said anything before because I didn't even knew who and what I am."
The rest of the crew members exchanged glances.
"But that's no longer important. I'm going to talk to Robin now and then I will leave the crew."
"Wait Zoro," Usopp threw in and took a step towards the swordsman, but immediately bounced back when the other looked at him coolly. Without anyone else trying to stop him, Zoro went after the archaeologist. The ones staying behind stared at the ground.
"I don't get it," the sniper murmured unhappily.
"Oh Usopp, it's not that difficult," Nami scolded him, obviously irritated, "so actually Zoro is called Bronze and is a..."
"No, I did get that," the sniper mumbled. "But why does Zoro want to leave the crew?" He folded his arms. "Zoro is a crew member like each one of us and I thought our past wouldn't matter anymore, right? Then he's a dragon, so what? Our doctor is a reindeer, our ship carpenter a cyborg, and our musician a skeleton. I don't even want to talk about our captain. So why should it matter who Zoro was in the past or what he is? He's still Zoro."
Sanji nodded approvingly.
He was far from happy with the development, but Usopp was right. They were a crew of misfits, outsiders. So if the Marimo's past provided a few new enemies, then that was just how it was. They had never been stopped by anything such trivial before, right?
"It's not that simple, Usopp." Franky, however, seemed to have a very different opinion. "You may be too young to know what happened back in the days. I don't really care what these dragons are all about – and if they were the most dangerous beasts the world has ever seen – I really don't care what's true and what's not. But as far as Bronze is concerned..." He shook his head. "Sorry Rayleigh, but Bronze is a monster, the children's songs aren't by chance. When I was little, Hellhound Bronze was still considered the worst insult, and the Angel of Death was the most horrifying nightmare, even for grownup warriors. He may have been your friend, but for the rest of the world he was an unpredictable and - above all - merciless danger."
The Dark King wanted to take the word, but Nami was faster.
"Maybe that's all true about Bronze, Franky. But please don't forget, we're talking about Zoro, not just Bronze, and if we're honest, have you ever heard the stories about him or any of us? None of them are flattering."
"What do you say, Luffy?" Sanji moved away from the railing and walked over to the captain, who was still lying on the lawn and had not said anything at all up until now.
"Even if we don't have a problem with it, Robin said she would leave if the Marimo stays. She seemed pretty determined."
The black-haired boy on the ground did not react.
"Hey Luffy, could you...?" Sanji groaned loudly. "That idiot is asleep."