The Pressure of a Fight!

The Problems of a Slave!

Zesiro was extremely anxious. He was sitting there in the locker room tapping his foot trying to calm down. Nito and Ichi were trying their best, running around and fetching him sword after sword, which Zesiro almost always chucked behind him without a care. The discarded swords were actually starting to form a pile behind him. Zesiro didn't know if the swords were all really as lousy as he thought they looked or if it was his bad mood that made them look lousy.

He was anxious enough during his last fight, his first fight, but now...it was all so much worse. He may have been able to get over the fact that this fight had sent Hiro-Shu to the hospital, but then the sudden realization came to him. His opponent was Rosa. He lowered his head and tried to calm down. This was a place that praised fights to the death...it was a place where that was the norm...and now he had to step into that place and go head-to-head with friend! Oh...and then there was also the matter of his captain being kidnapped...he had nearly forgotten about that. His brain just wasn't handling the pressure well.

To make matters worse the fight before them was taking forever! The two opponent's were apparently equally matched and neither of them had taken any real wounds. If the fight continued at this rate...Zesiro would die of old age before his fight started! Either that or he would just fall to the stress at this point both of them seemed likely.

Ichi stopped short as he looked at Zesiro sit there and try to think with his head hung down. He jabbed Nito in the side and Nito also skidded to a stop. "Don't you think he looks kind of like..." began Ichi, but Nito jabbed him back to shut him up.

"Of course, he does?" muttered Nito under his breath, "that's why I like him. He reminds of...you-know-who." Ichi and Nito both took another look at Zesiro. "But like that...he really does remind me of you-know-who."

Zesiro's ears perked at the sound of his two loyal followers secretive whispering. His head had cleared of his anxiety and he had temporarily forgotten about his problems as he listened to them try to hide whatever it was that they were hiding. They were blabbering on about you-know-who and the like, but the problem was Zesiro knew nothing about their past aside from the fact that they were slaves which meant his only real idea about you-know-who could be would be their owner, which meant he reminded them of their sadistic owner who beat them...which didn't sound like a compliment.

"What are you hiding?" asked Zesiro as he nodded in their direction. Nito and Ichi both scrambled about realizing that they had been heard.

"NOTHING!" sung Ichi, which was soon complimented by Nito's high-pitched 'NOTHING AT ALL'.

Zesiro lowered his head and shook it. The two of them were surprisingly tight-lipped about their past. It seemed odd, since they were so goofy and odd that he found it hard that they could be secretive about anything. Zesiro was ignoring his problems and had decided to focus on squeezing the information out of these two, "okay, fine," said Zesiro with dejected disappointment, "I just assumed we were friends, but I guess I am no you-know-who."

"HOW DO YOU KNOW ABOUT SHIGORO!" shouted Ichi with a panicked tone. Nito slapped his forehead, he had somehow been smart enough to see through such a play, but Ichi was not. Ichi realized it soon after and sunk to the floor.

Zesiro searched his brain for the name Shigoro as it sounded faintly familiar. Finally, the name hit him. He took a couple more looks at Nito and Ichi as he found it hard to comprehend that they would know him. Shigoro was...Shigoro was the first mate of a New World Yonkou! Zesiro stumbled back in his chair as he tried to piece everything together. Every Fishman in the world had heard of Shigoro as besides from Fisher Tiger and possibly Jimbei he was the most famous Fishman pirate ever to be in existence.

The Yonkou he was with wasn't too shabby either. His power was the real deal. He had used it to basically conquer islands in the Grand Line and even a couple in the New World. Zesiro was a Mako Shark Fishman, but it was possible that even this once he was the small fry in the ocean. Shigoro's bounty was frozen solid at the 300,000,000 belie mark...but it was a moot point not too many bounty hunters chased after a pirate with a bounty like that. "How the heck do YOU know Shigoro?" asked Zesiro as he moved forward.

"That sounds kind of offensive..." said Nito as he distracted his gaze. He could tell Zesiro was genuinely interested and since he already knew the two biggest parts of their secret about being slaves and Shigoro...the rest of it didn't quite matter, so he finally muttered, "Fine..." Ichi looked panicky at Nito, but agreed with him and nodded. "Well, as you put together we were slaves. Me, Ichi, and Sanada, but Shigoro was also a slave. Our master was...a collector of Fishman species. He collected a wide variety for work...random work really. Stuff any species could do, but he specifically wanted Fishmen."

Zesiro nodded as he accepted it. There were a lot of freaks out there, who would do something like that, who would purposely hunt down a species and collect it. Most people he knew did it with insects or fish or other animals that couldn't yell 'stop', but there were people that did it.

"Well..." continued Nito, "we were all owned by this one man. We hated it and we wanted out..."

(~Flashback~)

Nito shook his head. He had burn and scorch marks all over his body from another day of shoddy work, apparently. Their master was definitely trying to rip into them. Ichi had gotten off light, only a couple of bruises. Sanada was too young to work, he was an investment and their master acknowledged that, he only watched his brothers toil away in the farms. Shigoro sat down collapsed with his head hung low as he thought about the rest of their lives just being copies of this day.

Shigoro was hunkered over as he pondered the day. He was dressed in nothing in cut shorts and a Hawaiian styled shirt. Their master distributed stuff like that to the Fishman because he believed that was what they all wore and despite his dislike for the hideously colored shirt Shigoro played along. Around his neck was the ever fashionable slave collar. One step out of line and Shigoro's neck would be blown to kingdom come.

Shigoro was huge even for a Fishman. He stood at 8 foot tall and had muscles on top of muscles, it was one of the few benefits to a slave the work-out program gave him monstrous muscles. His Great White Shark Fishman blood only added to that work-out program making his monstrous muscles even bigger. The fin on his back was broken and had a chunk taken out of it due to some fighting on the island.

"We need to get out," Shigoro muttered as he looked at his fellow Fishmen brothers. They all gasped and looked around frantically.

"Don't say that!" screamed Ichi louder then Shigoro muttered, which attracted the guards over to them. After a couple of minutes of persuading the guards it was nothing, the guards left leaving them by themselves once more. "Don't say that," muttered Ichi keeping his voice down, "if the guards were to find out that we even thought of doing something so despicable...we'd be sashimi!"

"I'd prefer being sashimi over being somebody pack-mule," muttered Shigoro as he leaned back and stared at the ceiling. "Besides we need to get Sanada out of here until he's ruined too...the sound of a whip makes both of you two jump to the moon in fear!" Nito and Ichi distracted their gaze towards the ground, it was true and it hurt them dearly. "Sanada is our little brother...well, our younger brother and he deserves the fresh sea and sunlight! Hell, he deserves more then that."

Nito and Ichi nodded as they looked around making another note of the guards around them. "Maybe we can pull something together," said Nito and Ichi as they thought about it. Shigoro was more then strong enough to handle all of the human guards with his pure brute strength, combined with Nito and Ichi they may just be able to defeat all of them and escape. However, the problem was the damn colors that were locked on their necks. Nito was picking at his trying to figure out the proper way to break free.

"We need the keys," was the only idea they had. Shigoro nodded, it was a simple answer, but it was one that required a ton of work to achieve. The guards didn't keep the keys on them only the master did. He was the only one who had the rights to free the the Fishmen whenever he saw fit, which was usually when they died or he traded them for a rarer model.

After an entire day of thinking it over Shigoro and the rest of the brothers came up with nothing. They shrugged it off and nodded off to sleep. Staying awake after the torturous work day was something that even they couldn't do. They had decided that the problem was something that they could think about when they working.

And work they did. The next morning before even the crack of dawn they were sent out into the master's precious coral farm. Certain kinds of coral were becoming expensive as it had some special properties, but since it could only be grown at 500 feet below sea level Fishmen were the only people capable of doing the work. It was hard to know whether or not the master liked Fishmen because they could mine for coral and he liked mining for coral because he got to use Fishmen. In the long-run it didn't matter to Nito and Ichi the work was the same for them.

Next to Nito was a fellow Jellyfish Fishman, he was new to the farm and he didn't have very much muscles built up yet so tearing the ground up or ripping the coral off of the plants was out. So he mostly just talked to Nito. He floated around and hauled the coral back up to dry land whenever Nito pried it free, but that was the limit of his usefulness. His incessant blabbering kept going though...he talked more then he worked.

Nito was growing annoyed. First, his talking kept him from working and then his talking also kept invading his mind and stopping him from figuring out about the keys. Nito finally snapped as the Jellyfish moved into his next topic, underwater underwear. Nito turned around and landed a good punch onto his face, knocking him back. Nito was a veteran and an old worker at the coral farm to say that like most Fishmen he had twice the strength of a normal human was stupid. His strength was closer to 20x that of a normal human. Nito swung around and hit the Jellyfish knocking the gelatinous blob backwards.

A fight broke out 500 feet below water, by the time it was over. The guards had managed to drag an unconscious Jellyfish Fishman, who had more bruises then braincells at this point, out of the water. Nito followed. Nito was dragged through the farmland and to the main building. Opposed to their small little huts on the outside of the farms...the main building was something else. It was large, majestic, a big castle built off of the toils of slaves. Nito chuckled as he was dragged through the room.

He finally laid eyes on his master. The man who had owned him and made him work. The master liked running through the farms while they working and taking his anger out at them as well as other things, but this was the first time he saw him without any other Fishman around and it was first time he saw his family.

The man was big. He looked like a ball with arms and legs, the life of a fat cat Nito presumed. He shrugged it off and sat down, ready for whatever his fate was. Whether it was a lecture or death, he had to accept it. Nito didn't lower his head, though, his eyes remained fixated on the fat man's son. He looked like he was eight...Sanada was just about to turn 20...so in Giant years, he may have been right around eight as well.

"He's looking at Oliver, honey," whisked his the man's wife. The man slapped Nito's face away...his slap was weak even for a human, but Nito played along and pretended like it genuinely hurt him. Nito tossed himself to the floor and laid their sniveling on the ground. All of it was pretend of course. However, in a couple of seconds that stopped as Nito looked at the man one more time. He had seen something, something important.

The lecture and beating lasted about two hours each, but Nito didn't care when he got back to his brothers they were all anxious to hear how it was and treat his wounds. Nito didn't mind it and didn't object, he only said one thing, "Boys...we are getting out of here."

The Escape Plan in Action!

I haven't slowed down just yet. I still got a few more chapters to go until that will happen. Nito has unexpectedly taken the role of spokesperson amongst the Fishman brothers.

This arc has a lot of stuff in it, hasn't it? I mean I had Valerie and Karasu return, I had Mikoto get kidnapped, Hiro-Shu beaten, and now I mention something about the Yonkou? What's next? Well, how about a hint: Rosa and Zesiro's fight!