*12/19/12:

Chapter 9 has been edited.

~Swaben

Chapter 9:

Minor Difficulties

A burgundy bandana covered the top of the ruffian's head and tufts of brown hair stuck out in disarray above his eyebrows. His fresh, restless eyes looked up and swirled with intense impatience.

Tap, tap.

Click.

Flick.

He impatiently fumbled with his knife, retracting and withdrawing its blade in the juvenile way that particularly annoyed the more experienced criminal of the situation.

Click, flick.

Kuro put a few fingers to his forehead and lowered an indignant, persona-breaking stare. It was offensive to see an inexperienced novice play with a weapon. That cocksure, immature look on his face was a reminder of how much he found children to be irritating.

But he would play his part. He flinched tellingly and drew one his hands close to his chest.

"Oh dear…"

He stepped aside and watched as the boy disappeared through the alley. A faded flurry of dust was kicked up after his shoes scratched against the path in his wake. Kuro furtively looked back at the inventor, who was making her way through the mess of disoriented people. She sent him an interrogative gesture.

"Didn't you see it?" he swept his hand. "That brat is after something important."

"Ah…" The woman's eyes darted back to her contraption several times, like a parent would do with a child left unattended. "My vehicle can't fit through there. It's compact, but the alleys are … Very thin."

"I think it's very possible," Kuro stroked his chin and proceeded to taunt her out of the corners of his eyes. "Are you afraid of a little boy with a little knife? Is this common Milltonian behavior?"

"No. … No! Of course not," she replied flatly. He could almost taste the denial.

Kuro knew her type—he knew very well of the sort of people who shrivel under the threat of a well-kept blade.

She frowned at him with tired eyes.

"You see, I'm afraid of this being stolen by imbeciles who can't understand how to drive it."

He had a feeling that her arrogance made such a statement honest. Nelle was turning out to be a prickly, feeble individual with more pretension than she knew what to do with. But her knowledge was important, her business experience advantageous, and her clean name absolutely essential.

"No matter. I never said that I preferred assistance," Kuro said manner-of-factly, and shifted as he remembered the shaking sensation he felt in that blasted vehicle. "Your noisy little abomination would just give me away anyways."

"Abom… Abomi…" Nelle's upper lip curled and she threw her head to the side in offense.
"Abomination…?" She appeared comically offended. Either that, or Kuro was wielding an invisible blade that managed to stab her through the chest. It was always a weapon of choice.

"Yes. An abomination," he twisted his lip. "It vomits smoke and growls louder than a bitch in heat." Kuro started off in the alley's direction, and the light tapping of feet was still audible. Nelle shot a quiet, savage growl in his direction, or perhaps it was just in his imagination. "You're going to have to explain to me later about how you plan to give it a patent…" He peered down the alley distractedly and bent his knees as if observing an animal.

"You haven't a beginning of a clue as to how difficult it is to engineer something like this. What an idiot," the inventor seethed at him with folded arms.

"What was that?"

"You know what needs to be done. I certainly know what I need to do."

He fleered at her under an otherwise cold face. "And what's that? Wait from afar?"

"I'm going to scope around for Mr. Sals. See, it's a joint effort," his employer paused to stick her head out into the shroud of shadows swathing the alley. The darkness was broken up by blotches of intense sunlight characteristic to a spring afternoon. "It just involves you doing the sort of work that would get someone like me possibly killed, and me doing the sort of work that you wouldn't bother with doing. Everybody wins."

"A little boy with a little knife…" Kuro echoed. "So be it. If there's any treasure he's hoarding, it's my property."

Nelle's expression flattened and dropped. She pressed her teeth together as if she were clenching her own discomfort.

"… The spoils are yours. But if there's any tab on his name, we split the money. I believe that's fair when you consider accommodations," her fingers tapped against her side. "Are you sure we haven't lost him by wasting time? It looked like he ran pretty fast."

"No," Kuro's neck bent forward while he started off into the shadows. "This is child's play."

He quickly caught up to the boy's running, and the novice struggled against his speed. He could hear his labored breathing in front of him, and his shoulders thrashed into a panicked sprint.

"Don't follow me, dandy! Don't think you're a hero!" The street youth flashed his knife at him and leapt like a squirrel onto a suspended ladder. After swinging with his weight, he flung himself airborne and landed into a narrow alley, sidling himself quickly to weasel into another.

Kuro disappeared.

"Heroes don't fight in alleys."

The petite rouge pirouetted into a clumsy, dizzying spin from the force of Kuro's hands thrashing him aside, and he took a moment to gather his balance and grab his head.

"Quit talking crap, you're just a creep!" He slipped away and kept himself under the awnings to cooperate with the shadows.

The wind whipped violently against Kuro's face beneath his speed. A poster stuck to him and flapped against his nose and obscured his sight. He hissed and spat at the taste of paper and clawed at his face with his fingers. After he tore it off of his face, his assumption was correct: the Wanted poster's display was a grinning, dark-eyed boy, clad with a straw hat. The humiliation in his past simply wouldn't escape him. That Luffy's success was just growing and growing, wherever he was, while Kuro wallowed in the realization that he hit rock-bottom, and was scrounging and scrambling up a steep cliff. He threw the tossed poster to the wind behind him.

"Tell me what kind of trouble you're up to!" Kuro demanded impatiently while teasing him with a false sense of superiority.

"No!," the young bandit snapped. His eyes were wide, filled with hostility and fear. "Flag the cops on me, and I'll flay you!" Another flash of his knife cut the air.

"You little rodent, I know more than you think," Kuro chortled haughtily and blocked his sprint. "Your handling of a blade is also—" he swayed, catching the boy's parry and squeezing his wrist. "—Awful." He was debating twisting it, but he chose to keep him intact. His objective was to follow.

The bandit slapped him away, grunting angrily, and slid from under him, cutting a tether from above. A hanging net of fish was falling on him. He was being engulfed by a rapidly expanding shadow.

"Get lost!"

Kuro's eyes rolled. He side-stepped this effortlessly and heard a moist, heavy crash. The bandit cursed. His patience was thinning.

"If it's any trouble worth a bounty, then you're clearly doing it poorly. I'm going so pitifully easy on you." He messed with his glasses out of annoyance, pushing them up with his palm in a bizarre fashion.

There was one thing that you didn't want to gamble with when it comes to dancing with a deadly pirate: boring him. The irony was severe, and the only innocence this bandit held was the fact that he was so pitifully uneducated to his identity. Kuro was beginning to enjoy the instant anonymity of returning to Milltown, nestled on the prosperous corner of the island of Beagal— composed of level beaches, grassy hills, rocky flatlands, and the will to be explored and plundered of its wealth.

"Beat it already!" his opponent scrambled his way through a pile of empty boxes and scoffed petulantly. "I'm not afraid of some string-bean…"

Kuro easily pinned him. "Really? Do you really want to try without some negotiation? A young gentleman like yourself has no need to be such a little—!" his teeth grated and he held back his tongue and pursed his lips, swallowing a violent curse. "Savage."

He avoided a swift kick to the face.

Frustrated, the bandit snarled at him and swung his small knife with enough force to rip a slash into his sleeve. It was a clear miss. After realizing his blunder, the boy wriggled through a tangle of clothes lines and rolled forward, turning into a narrow street after nearly slipping from his own ratty shoes against a slick puddle. He then turned back his head and searched for the signs of his pursuer. He stepped cautiously, like a hind in a barren meadow. Paranoid, and suddenly alone. His feet made gentle tapping noises against the damp, clammy ground.

Kuro's eyes were darkened under a shadow and he remained still inside of a narrow space between two adjacent shops. His breath was silent. He eyed the bandit's path carefully. His hushed feet followed him until he reached the point where the boy paused, turned into another alleyway and began talking with an accomplice. He saw another figure, stone-still, in some sort of restrained sitting position. Kuro had found a spot within the shadows that concealed himself rather well, and allowed him to observe every movement, every word, and every subtle clink of a weapon.

"I'm here. Some weird guy had the nerve to try and chase after me. 'Bastard was fast..." the rouge flicked the sweat off of his forehead. "But, I… I made it…"

"Get the twine," ordered the taller, rough-mannered girl, who appeared to be a few years his senior. "What'd 'e look like?"

"Glasses," he pointed to his own eyes, drawing imaginary spectacles with his finger. He pushed up his nose to stretch his nostrils in a mocking gesture. "Really shiny, round glasses. Skinny, really thin, uh... Black hair, narrow eyes. A real creep."

"Idiot. He might've been an undercover cop! Keep your head screwed on, will you?"

Kuro bristled. The fellow he was chasing couldn't have been older than sixteen. The man that they intended to mug was none other than the affluent landlord and retired bounty hunter himself. The familiar man recognized him and locked eyes despite his hiding, and he gave him an affirmative, discreet wink. Sals had a phenomenal eye that cut through the grey of his stealth. It was almost intimidating, almost scary.

What if he knew?

What if this was all an elaborate set-up that his own mind had already predicted?

What if him and Nelle were in cahoots to bring him down, and he was already the loser, the caged, weaponless animal?

The paranoia could've made his heart race. It could've made him absolutely mad. But he calmed himself. He was Kurt of the South Blue, a bounty hunter. Perhaps even a skilled assassin. An honest, self-proclaimed arrogant man with a quiet penchant for reading and sleeping. He needed to play him convincingly. And maybe an obscure part of him wished that it was all true.

The young bandits resumed talking after the boy busied himself with the twine.

"It was like… It's like he knew taekwondo or something—I swear."

"Taekwondo? They don't even teach that around here, you dork. Hell, I dunno what you're even talking about…"

"Well, maybe not taekwondo, but he was like a ninja or something. Do you think…" His wistful muse was cut off.

"Ninja? Taekwondo? Jeez… Stop listening to those dojo stories. They don't have any of that around here," she slapped her hand to her forehead. "Just keep a look out and make sure that guy doesn't come back. If you fended him off once, you can do it again…" She then ignored her accomplice, and resumed her interrogation. "I'll make this easy for you, aristocrat," the bandit girl paced. "Just give us your money. Give us your address, and… Mm…" she paused and drawled out the sound while in thought. "Give us your house key."

The restrained man looked unfazed. "Are you sure that you even know how to open a door?"

Her voice became sharp. "What?"

"You kids just lock-pick your way through everything," Sals clarified. "I've seen it too many times. I've dealt with so many like you."

She spun the small switchblade in her hand. She picked up the pointed cane that was left out of his reach, and ran her calloused fingers across the polished crystal on its top.

"Oh, boy. I wonder how much this'll sell for," she giggled at it triumphantly and spun it round her hand. She jabbed his chest lightly in a taunt.

"Dear, do you even know who I am? Who I was?"

"Ah… No. Now, hand over your keys. I don't want to have to clean my knife. Go on. Hand it over. Tell us everything. I reckon you've got a lot in those pockets of yours," the young woman snaked towards his face. She pressed the blunt edge of her knife onto the thin fabric of his ascot, which barley covered the vulnerable skin of his neck beneath it.

"I'm not giving up anything," Kuro heard the landlord insist doggedly.

His fingers tapped against the wall that he was sidled against and he stood in wait. His cue was soon and he was growing impatient with the bandits' ineptitude. To call them true criminals would be a false title and an honor that Kuro thought they didn't quite earn nor deserve.

"Why's that?" the girl asked. "You've got nothing but weak knees to fight with."

"I don't need to."

A sharp, whipping noise cut the air, and her accomplice was thrown back into the wall by unseen hands. The boy squealed in pain as he met the ground's grainy surface. Hot tears welled up in his eyes and quickly wet his youthful face. He hyperventilated and was slipping into a state of pained, confused shock.

"My wrist's broken, my wrist's broken… My wrist— My wrist…" the boy moaned pitifully, and the sound was slowly dying under an escalating bout of sobbing. "Sha—shattered…"

"Shut up! Shut up! We'll get caught!" the bandit girl snapped at him icily in sudden panic. "Quit crying! Do you hear me?" It seemed to make their situation worse.

This wasn't on his agenda either. The breaking of his wrist would cause unneeded attention. Idealistically, he would've been cleanly knocked out. But Kuro realized, over and over, that people were fragile against walls. A young bandit in such pain was a pitiful sight, but his mind offered him no sympathy.

Skittishly, the young woman with the hat patrolled the area around her younger accomplice, and glints from her small knife were flashing signals of vulnerability.

"I see a shadow … A hand, over there. A shoulder… Look!" the boy attempted to point.

"Where? Where?"

"I, I don't know," he massaged his hand. "It's gone now."

"Well, where the hell was it when you saw it? Where?"

"Over there!"

"Where over there?" the bandit's face grew red with frustration over her inability to find her attacker, and from the small voice and little noises from her incapacitated accomplice.

"It's gone. It's gone. It doesn't matter. 'Was probably nothing... " his voice quivered with paranoia. "But I felt hands, hands on me, outta nowhere, like a ghost," he clutched his wrist with wide eyes. He sniffled up a bout of mucus and tears. "I need a doctor."

"We'll getcha a doctor, alright?" she caught her breath and her voice softened as her hand clenched the knife. She sighed. "There's no such thing as ghosts. It isn't the end of the world with a broken wrist, alright? Come on. You've got your other hand. 'Might as well make yourself useful."

The captive waited expectantly, nearly bored and entirely calm, contrast to the frantic muggers. The girl's eyes darted around and she bore an anxious knife hand. It was quivering under the stress of the unknown and her stance told Kuro that she was highly hostile and increasingly paranoid by reflex.

"That's him! I told you!" the bandit yelled timorously at the emerging figure.

"Glasses!"