Disclaimer: One Piece is the property of Eiichiro Oda. Many of the characters in this story are property of me. Do not use this story or its characters without my permission. Thank you.
Bard and Arthir clashed fists again. Arthir's fist smashed down hard into Bard's and forced him to guard with only his one good leg. He sank far down with his block and felt his boot touch his rear. That was the signal that his defense was getting too risky and he backed off. Still, with only one leg to use Soru with, he couldn't get too far and Arthir pursued.
"Why fly away, sir!?" Arthir growled. "Should you not stand like a man and take thy righteous punishment!?"
"Pirates that get punished stop being pirates and start being dead" Bard said, dodging a righteous foot stomp by Arthir. Still quite taller that Bard, the weight advantage was the obvious thing for Arthir to use in battle, but Bard was still confident in his own expertise as he saw Arthir breathing with exhaustion. The body is naturally build for the arms to swing upwards, not down. He's using extra force to punch at me and I'm flowing with my natural rhythm! IF only I could use both legs to the max, though...
"Verily!" Arthir did shout, "Now is thy eve of destruction!"
"Un-Verily!" Bard shouted back. "You're a moron!" Arthir was nearly toppled by words alone and stumbled to a stop in his advance.
"Wha-what?" Arthir calmly asked. "Ye think me a fool? A jester?"
"...uh, sure" Bard complied. "I mean, you're saying a bunch of weird stuff, like 'ye' and 'thou'. The weirdest word I ever heard before coming here was 'scalawag' and that's pirate talk."
"It is an odd word" Arthir said. "Let us not stray too far from the point! I shall agree, no more babbling. We shall fight with our fists until they break, rather than chatter until the tides swallow the land..."
"Yo-HO!" Bard agreed, not using words to speak already. He jumped up into the sky and pointed his good leg down in a spearing motion. He didn't name his technique, as he normally would, by shouting it into the air. Instead, he just labeled it quickly in his head. Descending Spear Kick! As he approached Arthir's head, he drew back his leg into a full fold and prepared to make a much more devastating impact than before.
So simple Arthir mocked internally. I shall step to the side and avoid this foolishness! So he did, taking a large bound away. Bard smiled, expecting the even more obvious move, and revealed his fake by kicking the air with Geppou and jetting towards Arthir while he couldn't move out of the way again. This time, Bard held out his whole arm and toughened it with Tekkai.
Fake into Tekkai Clothesline! Bard narrated uselessly. He flew straight into Arthir's mouth, a little above the intended target, but the hit was still resounding. With his iron-tough body, Bard tried to flex his arm and push his way off of Arthir's body and out of his grip, but his concentration slipped and he was stuck in Tekkai. His whole body tough and firm and malleable as iron, his muscles strained to make even a small crease in his skin, but to very little effect. The attack followed through all the way and Bard crashed Arthir into the ground, transforming his original clothesline into a full-on tackle.
Oh crap Bard said, still in his flying clip pose, I'm stuck. Okay, calm down, must imagine something to calm my body down...
Mine teeth!!! Arthir mentally anguished. They are broken! This cur, I shan't stand for such trickery in an honorable battle! Now angry at his pirate adversary, Arthir picked Bard up by the solid, injured leg and drew him over his shoulder like a mace. Then, taking a striding step forward, he slammed Bard's back onto his knee. Now Arthir and Bard were matched in handicaps, as Bard's unbreaking Tekkai imitated the impact of an actual hammer to Arthir's knee and fractured it.
"GGNNNNNRRRRRRKKKAAAAH!!!" Arthir groaned. He tossed Bard away, and in mid-air he snapped back to his flexible normal state and flipped onto his feet. Then, he sank quickly with a gritted mouth and shut eye to his injured leg. Arthir couldn't even stand, and was reduced down to his hands on the ground for support. C-Cur! Arthir mentally growled.
Rankyaku! Bard shouted. He made a quick hop up on his good leg, then swung it vertically and landed on his hands. A quick break-dance later and one bash to Arthir's tough head and Bard was in another solid stance relaxing his hurt knee. Damn, it's a lot less cool when I don't say it...
"This is getting good" Rez noted. "I'm actually rooting for Bard."
"Hmm" Zan hummed thoughtfully. Rez looked at him and saw a hand cupping chin and made the assumption that Zan had something important that should have been noticed already.
"What's up?" Rez asked.
"Something here feels...fake" Zan said. "It's like one of them is hiding something from us and that something is altering the course of the battle."
This bodes not well, indeed Arthir thought dreadfully. Although I wear these magical scrolls that, as the witch said, 'propel objects under pressure', I am losing this fight! My strength lies now in my mighty hands, and I must use that heavenly force to crush this man!!!
I still have time Bard told himself with a relaxed sigh. My trump card isn't going anywhere anytime soon...still, I need to ease up on using Tekkai like that. I could get seriously thrashed if I get stuck again. This guy looks like he could eat steel if he wanted to...
So the fight continued, with Arthir pressing both his stealthily hidden slips of magic paper to the ground and pushed himself up into the air with his arms. "RAAAHHH!!!" he roared,drawing back his right arm with the paper clenched tight in his fist. The paper sped up anything with kinetic energy that was under pressure. It was indeed meant to be placed in one's hands or feet, between the skin and the metal of the armor protecting one's limbs. Once this paper was clenched, any motion made would flash forward with intense kinetic energy and speed, and now such an attack was aimed at Bard!
Crap! Bard exclaimed. Soru! So he dashed away, narrowly avoiding the ground-demolishing smash made by Arthir's righteous fist. The impact was fierce enough to disrupt the ground and send Bard careening toward a broken barracks wall. Bard screeched to a stop on his good leg, however, and avoided more environmental damage. He's...stronger? Than just a moment ago!?"Okay" Marco proudly began. He raised a thumb up with a smile and said "We're totally lo-"
"DAMN YOU MARCO!" one burly pirate shouted, knee-dropping Marco in the gut. "We never should have let you lead us! Now we're hopelessly lost in these damn, endless woods!"
"What's worse" another pirate began, "is that these trees aren't even that thick or tight together. If we stop long enough and get a telescope out we could see a way out, but admiral moron insists that we rush ahead!"
"Sorry guys" Marco coughed. "I didn't think my sense of direction was this bad."
"Of course it is!" all three pirates shouted in unison.
Meanwhile, at the normal campsite,the rest of the crew had become restless and near the brink of rioting. Now, however, they were just bored and slouched around with nothing to do.
"When's dinner?" one pirate asked the group of chefs.
"Marco's the head chef" one of them said.
"And even without him," another noted, "we can't do anything properly without official captains' orders."
"Bears!" Maxwell excitedly muttered in his sleep. The crew initially chalked this outburst as a random act of their delusional comatose captain-figure, but this time he was really onto something. It took the crew a moment to realize it, but their combined intellect eventually figured it out.
Then a bear attacked them from the woods.
"Grooooaaah!" it roared.
"Shut up!" the muscular soldiers shouted, giving the great, huge bear a stern seven-fold uppercut to the jaw. The bear submitted and started away, but was quickly wrangled by the spare ropes left over from the pulley.
"Hang on now" a chef said with an evil grin, "we can use you for something!"
"Yeah" lowed another, beefy pirate. "Stew! We haven't had a good soup in a long time!" The bear looked especially distressed and began to growl in panic.
"Moron!" a chef shouted, smashing a piece of wood over the pirates' head. "We're gonna use the bear to track down Bard and Araly!"
"And Marco?" another chef asked.
"Maybe" the wrangler said. "He could just be plain lost, in which case he'll find his way back eventually. Someone should stay behind just in case he does decide to stop being an idiot and listen to the others."
"I'll stay" Birdman offered. And so the Buster crew was divided yet again, as was their building custom. The chefs and some well-armed guards took the bear as a mount and rode it through the woods as fast transport to find their captain with. More than half the crew stayed behind, under the expert vigilance of restful captain Maxwell.
Elsewhere still, in Harriet's cave, Araly worked to combine the potions her new tutor showed her to make glowing and glistening potions of extraordinary magical caliber. She had already perfected the most basic alchemy and was now writing her own dragon-skull design on a patch of black silk. It glowed gold with a natural border of platinum.
"Ms. Potecceli?" Araly asked politely. Harriet withdrew from one particular and peculiar carven hobble of the cave wall and walked over.
"Yes, deary?" she replied.
"What does this mixture do?" Araly asked.
"Oh, not much in particular" she replied. "I always found it odd that the pretty and more glamorous colors had less of an effect than the uglier and more bland ones. It's a very nice design, though. You're quite good at painting."
"Well, thank you" Araly said. "Still, I think we got off topic. What does this color do exactly?"
"It's a dampener" Harriet said plainly. "It dampens things, like anxiety or pain. Basically, it's the same as any good opiate or a couple mugs of rum, eh? Eee hee!" Harriet noticed that Araly was just smiling awkwardly, not laughing. "You're a pirate, right?"
"Well, I'm not a drinking pirate" Araly noted, "nor am I legal to do so anyway."
"Don't let that nonsense stop you" Harriet said, moving back to her curious hole in the cave. "I was getting twice as drunk as most men my age when I was your age! Live a little."
"Well...I don't know" Araly said. She looked at her design, watched it glisten as it dried and threw it around her back. The colorful ooze cemented and sank deep into the fabric as she wore it tightly. The cloth she printed it on, black and familiarly smooth, was to be a part of Bard's new coat for cold weather she was designing and stitching together. Oddly, she felt so warm and cozy with the cowl wrapped around her back, she didn't want to take it off. It was a powerful enhancement indeed.
"Eee heeheehee!" Harriet cackled. "What a hit! What a fight! Oh, yeah, knock him in the kisser! POW!"
"Um, miss?" Araly said curiously, "what are you doing over there?"
"Come and see, come and see!" Harriet offered excitedly. "I have a whole network of Den Den Mushi's feeding me visual information all around the island! Those morons down there think these things are just snails and never bother to look at them differently. There's a mighty brawl going on between some blond-haired kid and-" That was enough info for Araly. She watched in shock at the screen and awe as she saw Bard, who was missing, fighting some man at least two heads taller and a whole tree wider than him!
"B-b-b...Bard!?" she stuttered. She would have otherwise yelled,but Harriet saw that the golden alchemy paint had seeped through her original fabric and was now carefully placed upon her back as a glowing tattoo.
Oh my Harriet thought. If she's as much of a stickler about drinking as she is about tattoos, she's in for a rude awakening...
