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.
The villagers were up and ready for another day of fighting. The younger set woke earlier than their older compatriots and started their warm-ups in the street. Combat stretches.
"LEFT" the leading instructor said. Everyone punched left. "RIGHT" he shouted. Everyone punched right. "KICK" he shouted. Everyone kicked forward. "RIGHT" and they kicked right. "FALL" and they retreated four wide steps backward. "DOWN" and they all ducked. They were a well-oiled machine of fighting in perfect order. They took up their sharpened pitchforks and lined up to listen to the chants of their instructing leader as he stood upon an elevated fencepost.
"We're gonna KILL THEM!!!" he shouted. The crowd of fighters cheered back. "We're strong! We're fierce! We're powerful bastards!"
"HELL YEAH!!!" the crowd roared back. The rally continued just outside the house of the only two calm and controlled people left in the entire village. Emily and Jedidiah listened silently at their table, eating their flat loaf of bread and drinking their sparkling clear water.
"I apologize for the state of our meal, brother" Emily said sullenly. "My mind has wandered these past days...."
"I don't blame you" Jed said, taking a sip of water. His speech had thankfully cleared up to a normal yet still dignified and reserved manner, where Emily retained all her maidenly charm of eloquence that the brainwashing had given everyone. She felt the words rolling off her tongue oddly instead of not noticing anything anymore. The changes in her body allowed her simply to see what changes there were. "I don't blame anyone anymore.....not even the Demons."
"Art thou certain?" Emily asked.
"Yes" Jed replied. "I'm sure you've seen it recently. All the corruption, the lies, the fake exterior we've always believed is real....It's hard to blame someone when the whole world seems to be wrong anymore."
"But however can we live under such a trying sky of adversity?" Emily asked. "The people just outside our window shout cries for the blood of men whom we both know are good men deep down. These pirates never came hither to deal upon us the same torment as the demons of the yesteryears. It is not their fault nor their purpose to be despised by us all!"
"They're strong, though" Jed said. "They can deal with it. We just have to believe that they'll do something good soon...."
"But what good can they do?" Emily asked. Jed opened an eye at her from his lowered glance.
"Just look at all the good they've already done" he said as he stood from the table. He grabbed a garden hoe from the closet and hurried outside to join the mob that formed. Emily sat at her table, staring at her flat slice of bread, and wrung her hands on her dress. Her eyes teared up and drops of sad water fell onto her plate. She cried softly into her hands, wrought with her own indecision.
Jed stood at the edge of the gathered circle and observed his fellow rejuvenated villagers. Because he was recovering from his devastating blow from the dreadful demon Ramone for the length of time these raids of the pirates had been going on, he wasn't as strong looking as them. Regardless, he found that he had the same strength without the stature and testosterone-infused rage of his fellow village men. He stood among the cheering and jeering as the proud mob leader held up a bloodied kerchief stolen from the body of one of the pirates they had fought.
"This man!" he proclaimed. "This rugged yet jaded older man, the one they call 'Marco' in the heat of battle, his ass is GRASS!!!" He clutched the hand and squeezed the threads together with a creak. The company cheered at the object of their current conquest. All they had to show that wasn't bandaged out splinted for their efforts thus far was that single bandana with the corner reddened with someone's blood. Jed highly doubted it belonged to any pirate, judging by the condition his fellows were in, but he stayed open to the idea and became cheerful as well.
"He's their leader on the field" the man continued, stowing the bandana in his pocket, "but he is not our greatest threat. We know who they are! The renegade monster knight, Sir Drakengard, who stood by the heretics side as our king was killed!" A roar of battle cried out with a pump of arms straight into the air. "That phantasmal demon, with the straight hair angled like a damn pyramid on his head, the man with the piercings in his eyebrows! The ghost who can pass through our weapons and grab at our hearts within our own chests! The one they call 'Zan!'" Yet more roaring. Jed got swept up in the excitement and cheered for his death as well. "The dark-haired man with the swords which shoot tiny projectile pellets. They call him 'Rez!'" More cheering. It became a habit.
"Then there is the true leader of the heretic band" he began. The crowd was lowing, on the border between a harsh whisper and crying with the lusting roars of battle to the moving clouds of the sky. "The blonde-headed fiend with the cape of fiery black! The demon with legs that kick like lightning bolts! The heartless bastard who threw down the entire castle on our King's unguarded head!! That man! A man we all know simply by presence! The objective of all our work! His name! IS!!......." That was as far as he got as the leader. He had forgotten Bard's name and stepped down in a moment of confusion, only to have Jed stand up and take his place.
"Bard!" he proclaimed. "Bard D. Samekawa is his name! He is a hearty, jovial fellow who most likely laughed as our King lay beaten before him only to have his own chest crushed by the fall of his great castle! This childish man, Bard, is the one who felled everything we know and hold dear on this island! He killed our King, our castle, and all our peace!!!"
"DAMN HIM!!!!" the crowd cheered.
"Now let us charge!" Jed ordered. "For the fallen glory of King Rupert Lioncrest!!!"
"YEAAAAAHHHHH!!!!" the crowd cheered. They stampeded up the street, the younger set of adults in front, followed by the slower-paced adults and elder gents and ladies, then the youngest children in the far back with their inefficient weapons wielded so that they may pretend to battle with the adults, though their true purpose was to hold the medical supplies needed for the battlefield. Jed led the charge up the hill and through the ruined barracks yard of the Argent Fist knights when suddenly something within him told him to stop. It was an unknown fear of procession that made him extend both his arms and the 'weapon' he wielded in one to halt the company as they pushed him forward a few steps. His foot hit against a rock which rolled forward, clacked softly onto a hidden length of cloth and then erupted out a roaring ring of fire! It encircled the area around the gate they had all desired to charge through and flickered with a proud, uncontrollable hotness.
"What the hell!?" Jed exclaimed.
"Is it magic?" a man asked. "Demon magic?"
"Looks like it" a rough, strong woman said. She sliced off a length of her long, flowing brown hair and tied it to the end of her harvesting scythe. She stuck it through the fire quickly, with a slight jab, and saw the flames trail back, caught on the scythe and licking her hair black. "It's a powerful fire, not just any common brush flame."
"BUCKETS OF WATER!!!" an elder man shouted.
"No!" the woman in front called. "Those won't help. This fire was started by means beyond our power. It will die down, in time." She tapped her scythe on the ground and drove the flames away and onto the stone where they died out in black soot embers. "They just did this to buy themselves time. They're obviously desperate now. We should wait, at least, and hope it doesn't spread to the trees....." As the villagers spoke and moved around the flames to camp themselves at the border of the raging heat, old Harriet watched them from her cave with a witchy cackle.
"Ah, those fools" she said. "Of course it's a prolonged flame! And it won't go down in just a few minutes, either! That's all the flammable eel oil I had stocked away in here since the last time my supplies were replenished! You aren't going anywhere until those fool pirates get themselves moving!" She switched her sights to another Den Den Mushi which was mobile and heading through the trees for a humungous ship....
At the hag's request, and for his own entertainment, Bard wore the Den Den Mushi that fed the audio and visual of his crew's final setting out from the island. All that they needed was loaded on board. Reginald and Kurateka were along as well to make sure things moved on in a graceful manner. Reginald was unloading boxes with the rest of the Buster Pirate's burly crew while Kurateka was talking with her crew of nurses as they checked crate after crate of working syringes and disposable needles. Bard ran up the long, steep gangplank of stairs to the deck and walked over to Kurateka, tapping her on the shoulder to get her attention. She turned to him and sighed.
"Are you still being so obnoxiously persistent?" she asked. Bard just grinned.
"Are you gonna join my crew?" he asked.
"This is the best I can do" Kura said, turning with open arms presenting her fellow nurses who wore their uniform bandages over their mouths and thick glasses over their eyes, the rest of their outfits alluringly flaunting their young figures. "I can't abandon my post here on the island. It's part of my duty to see everything through to the end, even if the end is so far away that it is simply out of sight. These girls, however, have nowhere to go. They were born on the island and trained by me since birth in the ways of medicine. Healing is the only art they know, and with a crew this size you'll invariably need all the help you can get in a medical sense."
"Alright" Bard said in a defeated voice. "I guess if you're certain, you're certain, and you seem pretty damn certain about yourself. I'm sure you ladies will be able to manage alright, right?" The girls all nodded respectfully. Quiet and polite, they were. Well trained royalty nurses able to set a broken bone as easily as placing an IV tube or setting a patient's bed. It was all in their nature, trained from birth, to nurture others with their healing hands. Plus, finally, the ship had women! Hot young women! Bard was pleased inside, but still kept his disappointment on the surface before Kurateka.
"I just hope" Bard began "that in a fight, they won't be who the enemy goes after first. I mean, if they can't fight, you know...." Kurateka sighed and rolled her only exposed eye at him.
Honestly she thought. All he thinks about is fighting. He doesn't even consider the sex appeal he could attract with women on board his ship! These girls aren't at all bad looking. They're quite attractive. Possibly even more so than I. I mean, I'm not as young as them anymore. At the least they're eighteen and I'm....Kurateka was suddenly startled and her eye turned demonic white. She kicked Bard in the gut with her high-heel shoe and forced him to take a step back and weight the damage of the sharp impression in his rock-hard abdomen.
"You see?" Bard said. "Like that! Can they fight like that?"
"How dare you!!!" Kurateka growled as she lowered her leg with a stomp. "You were trying to get me to confess my age to you, weren't you! You horrible man! Can't you even add!? I'm thirty-six going closely to thirty-seven!" The secret was out. Kurateka clapped a hand to her mouth and growled with rage. The nurses came up from behind and trapped her behind a barrier of interwoven gauze restraints as she was curling her fingers and holding a syringe with killing intent. "I'LL KILL YOU, BOY!!!"
"Hehehe" Bard nervously chuckled. He turned around and dashed away towards the entrance to the lower deck. He side-stepped a pirate rushing back up to gather supplies and meandered his way around until he found Zan, who was standing half-in, half-out of one of the Grand Mast beams smoking a cigarette. "Hey Zan!" he greeted.
"Hello, captain" he said. "Trying to find someone?"
"Drakengard" Bard said. "I though, since we're about to shove out, I should ask him one last time."
"If you think it'll help" Zan said. "He just passed by here carrying some barrels. I think he's going to the drink storage room, behind the kitchen, near the dining room, so a few levels down." Bard nodded. He knew where those places were. "In the mean time, I'm going to go for a final headcount before we get any more unexpected crew members joining."
"Good plan" Bard said. "I'm off!" And off he went in a quick jog through the halls and stairways that led down. Zan phased his way up through the floor and walked vertically up the wood of the mast until he was a sufficient distance up to see all the pirates coming and going without losing their features. He counted the thirteen newest recruits right away, the men in black overcoats and buckled hats that sang as they heaved and hauled heavy wooden boxes of timber over their shoulders. The other pirates were easy enough for him to recognize.
His detailed assassin's eye didn't miss a thing. He saw Kurateka's nurses and excluded her as she wasn't joining and she was currently laid on the ground with foam bubbling between her bandages around her mouth. Maxwell as asleep in a chair near the aft of the ship. Araly was in the captain's cabin and Rez was in their charting what was left of the island for future reference with her notes. He saw a large group of men loading bags and rough loads of material from their interim camps and tents set up on the plateau during their last stands against the wild villager horde. He saw one individual with a long, red cape and a pulled-up hood wearing a mask. A golden mask of a fang-faced demon.
That's no good Zan thought. He quickly jumped from the mast and landed on the deck with a loud thud. He dashed across the expanse and saw the group from the side.
"Hey!" Zan shouted. "This is dangerous. Don't march in such a tight formation! Break up!" The pirates shrugged and moved away from each other. Zan searched their ranks with steel eyes, but saw nothing. The cloaked figure was gone, and with them whatever sharp dagger they carried. Their load wasn't like the other pirate's either. It was luggage. Zan could tell from their way of carrying and stepping in the group that they were being as careful as they could to make sure their items weren't jostled or shifted as they walked.
Crap he thought. Time to play hide-and-seek, is it? Zan phased straight through the floor and dropped in front of a pirate carrying a bundle full of plates which he nearly dropped. You picked the wrong man to play with, pal. He tossed his cigarette aside and let someone else step on it while he moved through the walls, ignoring their very presence. The figure had vanished, or had they been there at all? Zan was determined to find out....
Bard ran through the halls into the long and elegant dining hall and managed to catch Reginald departing from a storage room with empty shoulders and a grin on his face.
"What ho, young Bard?" Reginald said, stopping Bard's flight right at his feet.
"Join my crew" Bard said, short and sweet. He stood before Reginald with his arms on his hips and his black coat's frayed edges hovering over the floor with a great smile and prying glare on his face. Reginald looked away and stroked his solid, pointy beard with deep thought. He seemed to be seriously considering each side of any potential argument that could arise, and beating down any potential points that could counter his own decision. He thought deeply and leaned against a creaking chair for a while until at last he stood with his arms crossed and his eyes forcing down upon Bard down the glaring bridge of his nose.
"I refuse" he coldly said.
"Alright" Bard said gladly. "Worth one last try at this point, I guess, but you've got something more important to do, right?" Reginald nodded his head.
"Yes, Bard" Reginald said. "At this point in time, what's most important to me is the experiment I've already started. My entire life has been dedicated to this unprecedented important task thus far, and I cannot surrender it to anything else in the world. Not even the long-aching cry for adventure that rests within my old bones. I am sorry, but I have more than just research on this island. Here, I have a home."
"Wow" Bard said. "That's neat!"
"Yes, it is" Reginald said, "for lack of better....words, I suppose." He and Bard laughed with each other for quite a bit. Bard's warm and childish laughter quickly loosened the nerves in the old warrior and soon they were both laughing from their hearts and lungs and the pits of their guts.
"I am honored to have you consider me, Bard" Reginald said. "To be thought of so highly by a young captain as strong as you is a great honor for a man my age. In my hayday I would have made a bang-up pirate, but alas, those days are gone. It is unfortunate, to say the least, that we couldn't meet sooner."
"Well if we had met sooner" Bard began "I'd just be a little kid and you'd never have taken me seriously. Plus, I'd never have been as strong as I was when I got here if I went on the Grand Line as a kid! That's just common sense! Hehehe!"
"I suppose it is" Reginald said sullenly. The wight of so many years was catching up with him. The remorse and regret of the past two decades, and all the restraint and obstacles that had held him down for those twenty long years had been so suddenly lifted from him that his weightless heart rose up into his throat and he swelled with prideful tears. "Bard, you take great care of yourself. Never give up. Always keep going. Even if the tires are against you, you must push onward. You must make your own current to sail through this sea!" Reginald offered out his hand and Bard, without a second of pause, took it in a firm and manly grip.
"That's what I always do" Bard said. "The sea doesn't know who it's messing with if it tries messing with me!" Reginald smiled. He saw himself in Bard, and only hoped that Bard could see his strength in him the same way. Zan phased down through the ceiling an landed on Bard's shoulder to break up the moment.
"Hey Zan!" Bard greeted. Zan nodded to him and Drakengard and hopped off to phase down even further to the bilge hold.
"Bard, you should get outside" Zan said. "You need to return that Den Den Mushi, then you need to push the boat out before the tides go wrong on us..." Zan phased clear away and reminded both men of their urgent position for the cast off, which neither of them had remembered and broke out in a mad-dashing panic over once they had. It was Bard and Reginald who were to push the boat as the tides that filled its dry-dock trenching pulled back out to sea and they had but one shot for the rest of the day to complete it. If they failed the villagers would find their abandoned camp, search for them an inevitably die in the woods without seeing the pirate ship successfully retreat from them as they sailed off onto the ocean. Bard and Reginald stopped after climbing one floor and ran to the side where the cannons were positioned against the wall beside each port hole that they would jut from in battle.
"This way!" Bard declared. He opened the door and leaped down, landing with a loud, ground-sundering shake of the earth. Reginald followed, slowing himself down by leaping from ledge to ledge until there was nothing left. He groaned as he got up from the ground and followed after Bard. There waited Kurateka, with a syringe filled with a light red liquid.
"What is that?" Reginald asked.
"On your command" she said "I will administer a minor dosage of this instant-strength boosting adrenaline steroid. It's not too potent, but it should do just what you need it to do."
"I'm fine" Bard said. He was already pushing up against the bow of the ship. Reginald positioned himself on the other side of the keel and started pushing.
"I hope we're on time!" Reginald said. He looked over into the trench full of water and saw it begin to fill and retreat back out into the ocean. "Hit me!" he called. Kurateka rushed over and stuck him with the needle, directly in his biggest exposed shoulder vein. Roaring power began to fill him. She disposed of the needle and ran over to Bard, to even him out, but to her surprise their power seemed equally matched.
"KURUUUUUU!!!!!!" Reginald roared.
"SORU PUUUUUUSHHHH!!!!" Bard announced. His legs blasted mud and dirt from the swampy earth beneath him and sped up his push with the gathered energy of a powerful, dashing sprint forward. He and Reginald powered through their vain struggle and the ship, finally, began moving with the tide out to sea! The water continued to pull it along while the two immensely powerful men pushed it from behind. Their collaborated efforts were nearly a success! Finally, a strong wind picked up that rolled fatefully down the cliff-side.
"Open the port sails!" Rez commanded as he took up the steering wheel. The pirates rushed to the side and down into the under-deck to open the sails on the ship's port side to catch the wind. Reginald's side was lifted of its weight just as he ran out of land to push on. "Starboard sails!" Rez proclaimed. The sails on Bard's side unfolded and opened up, catching the wind. The ship sailed from its harbor in reverse along the pulling current. "Now! Port sails up!" At his command the port sails were raised and the wind started to turn the humungous galleon to the side as it left the swampy shores of the island.
"Farewell!" Reginald shouted. "May your adventures never cease!"
"Make sure my nurses follow their teacher's lessons" Kurateka called. "And make sure they stay honest, pure ladies!" The men from the deck laughed coyly as the girls shyly giggled and waved away. Rez turned his head and looked down the side of the deck, trying to see a trace of Bard. The boy was gone, however, and appeared as a shadow that stomped on the bowsprit right in front of Rez with his legs bent in a crouch and a triumphant, cocky smile on his face. Rez glared up at him.
"Don't break anything" he said sarcastically. Bard turned and looked down at Reginald one last time, a friendly glance above his cocksure smile, and he waved with a fist thrust straight up in the air. The salute of men, from one powerful arm to another, which Reginald replied to with the last bit of his natural strength, extending his arm and halberd straight up in the air! He then fell over into Kurateka's arms.
"Don't exert yourself so" she said. She looked back and heard the cheerful hollering of men from the deck of the boat as it straightened itself out. The sails folded back up, then with a loud unfolding of cloth in the wind, the Grand Sail fell from between the two Grand Masts and caught the breeze, steering them away and along the side of the island's farthest reach. "I wonder how far they'll get to go in this world?" she said.
"All the way, my dear" Reginald said. "A man that young has a long, long ways yet to go...."
And up upon the high-elevated plateau where the ruined castle lie and where the abandoned encampment of the Buster Pirates was freshly cleaned away, the villagers reached the end of the cliff just in time to watch the pirate begin sailing away, with Jed still at the lead of the mob.
"We're too late" he said, evoking great frustration and anger in the mob behind him. Weapons and hats were thrown down and stomped upon in rage. Growls and roars of rage and fury sounded out as the army arrived to a battlefield long lost to the fairly victorious army that now left with the spoils of their war, the pride of the awakened people hauled in their great, demonic vessel. Jed fell to the ground and wept with tears of hidden joy.
"It's over...finally...." he sobbed.
"Cheer up, lad" an older man said. "There will be more heretics, more demons. This is the last batch of bastards we let slip through our fingers!" Even in their despairing times, the crowd managed to cheer for themselves and shook with the vindicated rage and reassurance that their next war against evil would be won. They were unequivocally certain. They were positive. Dead sure. All of them, even Jed, which is why it made him so joyful to watch the man he knew to be good leaving, hopefully never to return again to be a part of that war....
"Hey, where's she going?" a woman asked. Jed stood up and saw a figure in a dress retreating along the side of the plateau, running along with the ship in the distance to keep up with them as much as possible. "Who is she?"
"Emily....?" Jed whispered. He dropped his weapon and began sprinting after her, sure by his first step that it was his sister running away. "Emily! Wait!!!" Emily huffed and panted after the ship in the far distance, keeping her eye on it, hoping it could see her as well as she could see it.
"Fare thee well, sir Bard" she shouted. "Fare thee and thy company well! Safe voyages! Safe passage! I pray thee well! I pray thee weeelll!!" Jed stopped her with a tackle and held her to the ground, shushing her up close.
"Don't be stupid!" he said. "If these riled-up idiots hear you say that they'll try and kill you!"
"I care not!" Emily said. She rolled out from under him and watched the ship go as it steered its way out to the open ocean. She and Jed watched it flee until the crowd had gathered up behind them to watch in a respectful silence.
"Goodbye, Bard" Jed said. "I......thank you...." He wasn't unheard, but the villagers didn't care. They stood him and his sister up and together they walked along the castle ruins back to the village. There they would rebuild and continue their lives. At least, that's what they thought to do. Jed broke from the group suddenly and walked up to the ruined castle remains.
"Hey" he shouted. "If we're planning for a war, why not build a fortress?" At first there was silence, then a hushed quell of enthusiasm, then the emphatic and exclamatory cheers of approval. The villagers would go nowhere! This was their home now! This was their land, their castle, their island to do as they pleased. Nature took hold once more over the feeble grip of science and humanity overpowered the falsities of a manufactured reality. Nature overcame nurture in these people, and the peace of existence was restored among them.
All thanks to Bard and his crew, the demons in the woods, and the life-long research of a powerful, tired old man.....Ah, the sea is a wondrous place!!!
