Author's Notes: Now that's more like it! I'm glad the last chapter was so enjoyable; reviews really are the fuel that gives me the energy to keep writing! Now, it's time for the chapter that you've been anticipating... let's see if I can earn this fic a Nightmare Fuel page on TVTropes, hm?
Just to clear up, I miswrote the KoFi link in the last chapter; it's Ko-Fi dot com forward slash RewindGoneNuts. If you wanna help me afford more arts for this fic (and art IDEAS are always welcome!) or to contribute towards my need to replace this decade-old machine I'm writing with, I'd be very much obliged.
Tellemicus Sundance: It is indeed a Street Sharks reference! Dyna complaining about missing her Firestorm Cannon is also a Turok 2 reference, by the by.
Bob of the A: ...Mind sharing what clues you picked up on in hindsight, because I'm legitimately curious?
Chapter 26: Escape from the Jungle of Blood!
"Get the storm lanterns!"
"Shampoo do, airen - ow! Ukyo, that Shampoo's foot!"
"Sorry, sugar..."
"That Shampoo's cousin! We not look at all alike!"
"Can we please talk about your family later, Shamps?"
"Somebody please just turn on the lights already!?"
"Engaging lumens..."
Crisp artificial lightning suddenly flared into life, nearly blinding with the sudden contrast from the impenetrable darkness that had engulfed them. After a moment's squinting and adjusting, Ranma turned to the source; Dyna, who had extruded several large glass bulbs from previously concealed ports in her spidery replacement body.
"I didn't know you had those," Ranma observed casually.
"You never asked," the robot girl dryly retorted.
"Eaten by a plant... well, I can't say that was on my list of things to do for the day," Nabiki observed, looking out into the gloom as far as she could.
With the great star-like jaws of their floral captor locked into place, the relatively narrow horizon was barely visible, given that Dyna was their primary source of light. Even as Shampoo, Ukyo and Kodachi hastily lit and placed the storm lanterns, it did little to further peel back the gloom.
Ranma turned to their native-born crewmembers with a serious look. "Okay; any of you guys know anything about what this thing is?"
Harumi and Miriam shook their heads as one, before they, and everyone else, turned their attention to Penelope.
The newly revealed mink was staring contemplatively off into space, tapping her chin with one long finger and swishing her tail slowly from side to side. She cautiously began to speak.
"There is not being much known of ze Grand Line in ze Four Blues, but... I remember reading in ze great library that ze Boin Archipelago is a dangerous land, said to be made of ze giant carnivorous plants. There was being a botanical expedition launched from ze South Blue whose last known point of call was to be ze Archipelago, but they were never heard from again... zat was twenty three years ago..."
"Well, that's encouraging," Nabiki grumbled sourly.
"I am sorry, mon capitan, but I am not knowing anything more about this... creature? Plant?" Penelope apologetically explained.
"What I wanna know is, how exactly is this thing supposed to feed? I don't exactly see any teeth," Ranma mused, cracking his knuckles and glancing at their surroundings.
"Uh... Ranchan? I think I found the mouth," Ukyo nervously called from where she was standing by the port-side gunwale.
Everybody rushed over to join Ukyo in looking over the edge. A great yawning abyss was revealed below the Stormbringer's hull, descending down, and down, and down into a distinctly maw-like orifice that slowly flexed wider and narrower. They could feel air gently billowing up and down against their faces, adding to the impression of some monstrous great beast inhaling and exhaling.
"...I vote we don't fall in there," Ryoga feebly proclaimed.
"For once, Ryoga, you got the right idea," Ranma replied, in the same tone of voice.
"As ominous as this looks, Captain Darling, it's actually a good sign," Kodachi noted, which caused everyone to turn her way with incredulous expressions.
"...Have you been brewing your hell-potions with inadequate ventilation again?" Nabiki asked her.
"One time! One time, I forgot to open the window first!" Kodachi shrieked, before she visibly held herself back, coughed genteelly into one clenched fist, and then continued as if her outburst had never happened.
"My point is, this... 'Stomach Baron' seems to utilize a hunting method that combines elements of the Venus flytrap and the pitcher plant. Rather than flooding its vegetative maw with digestive juices, it instead uses gravity to tip any suitably sized morsels into what is, for all practical purposes, a stomach. Being that we are suspended in mid-air, we need only wait for the plant to relax its... muscles, shall we say, and open back up again."
The tension palpably drained away as Kodachi's words sank in on her crewmates, eliciting a chorus of relieved sighs and nervous gestures. Kodachi almost visibly preened at the confidence her comments had been regarded with.
And then Ukyo noticed that Ranma was staring grimly back into the titanic floral maw so far below.
"Ranchan? What's wrong? Kodachi knows her plants, after all - you think she's wrong?" She asked, moving over to be closer to him as she did.
She wasn't trying to be overheard, but everyone else looked up at her statement with varying degrees of alarm.
Ranma shook his head. "Ain't that I think 'dachi' is wrong. It's just... Shiki was content to let this thing finish us off. And he put the damn thing here, so he should know how it works, right? That means either he thinks we're gonna run out of fuel and fall in before it opens up-"
"Highly implausible," interjected Dyna, her usually implacable features having twisted into a slight frown.
"Or... there's something down there," Ranma concluded grimly, ignoring the fembot's commentary, his gaze never having moved.
Ranma's words settled over his crewmates like a leaden shroud. As one, they peered nervously over the side of their ship, staring down into the abyss...
...And the abyss promptly responded to their scrutiny by, to all practical extents and purposes, puking in their faces.
From the ineffable darkness within the floral gullet poured a seething mass of bodies, a veritable geyser of flesh that surged hungrily forth and engulfed the Stormbringer, as if the darkness had taken offense to their little bubble and light and now sought to devour it. There was time for only the briefest of verbal exchanges - a disjointed chorus of exclamations of shock, defiant warcries and pointless orders - before the Kamikaze Pirates were fighting for their lives.
They had been swarmed by a cascade of creatures, a tidal wave of mutant horrors barely recognizable as whatever beasts they might have once been. Bats that were little more than gaping, needle-toothed maws born on razor-edged wings. Mosquitoes the size of pigeons with mouths like barbed daggers. Flies the size of turkeys, dribbling noxious sputum from obscenely slurping proboscises. But the swarm wasn't just made of flying blood-suckers and parasites - that would have been too sane. Writhing clusters of leeches the length and thickness of baseball bats drifted along like knotted balloons made of slimy flesh and sucking maws, impossible to tell where - or even if - one ended and a second began. Ticks the size of small dogs flapped along on sheets of slimy skin stretched between needle-bladed limbs. Fleas as big as a man's head frantically kicked hind-limbs that had morphed into whirring wings, clasping mantis-like grasping claws.
All these and more fell upon the Kamikaze Pirates in a ravenous horde. But their chosen prey had no intention of just keeling over and dying.
Dyna's rotary cannon roared into life, the thundering echo of its repeating shots competing with the chittering, buzzing, screeching cacophony as she blasted away with unearthly precision. Bodies exploded into showers of gore, bones and limbs as bullets tore through tiny bodies. Her screaming chainsaw scythed back and forth with mechanical repetition, chewing through whatever came within her reach.
Shampoo was a blur of motion, the hybrid-form cabbit zoan lashing out indiscriminately with the foot-long razor sharp claws on all four appendages. She leapt and bounded like a rabbit on cocaine, twisting with the agility of a cat to evade nightmarish mouths that came thirsting for her vulnerable flesh. Ribbons of gore trailed in her wake as she clove through verminous bodies.
Ukyo snarled, cursing as only an angry Osaksan could as she frantically twirled her beloved battle spatula. She poured her rage into the metal, heating it until it glowed with shimmering waves of heat, immolating anything that wasn't shorn in half by her razored edge. When she swung it with all her might, it created a veritable cannonball blast of wind that smashed brutally through the clouds of her foes; anything not pulped by the sheer force was then engulfed in blazing flames fed by the very wind on which they were carried.
Miriam was, ironically, probably faring the worst of them all. Her sheer bulk, normally her greatest weapon, was nothing but a liability in the face of an enemy of tiny multitudes that ebbed and flowed like the very tides. She swatted and slapped and flailed with hands and tail, crushing anything she caught, but leaving herself open for countless more hungry little mouths. Hundreds of tiny wounds now dotted her body - pinpricks against the body of an elephant, to be sure, but enough wounds would bring down even the biggest creature, given time.
Fortunately, Miriam's crewmates spotted her distress and fought their way to her. She slammed her palms together with all her might, the shockwave of displaced air pushing back the vicious but lightweight multitudes and giving them all a moment to regroup. As the bloodsucking legions closed back in, they found themselves facing a far more fearsome resistance.
Kodachi twirled her whip-sword in impossible arcs, the razor-edged lash twirling and twisting through intricate knots of death that diced and sliced anything caught in its wake.
Penelope hacked away grimly with a machete, cleaving and carving, chopping and slashing wildly. It was a far cry from Kodachi's elegance, but it got the job done.
Ryoga and Nabiki fought practically back to back with Miriam, having armed themselves with improvised weapons - twin belaying pins for Nabiki, who bashed away desperately at anything that came near her, and a belt that now cut like a sword for Ryoga.
And then there was Harumi... With blades in hand, the crossdressing swordsman was a dancing demon, his dress thick with noisome ichors and unspeakable fluids, gut-choked hair clinging to filth-slick skin, his hands visible only as glints of silver that saw bodies parting like mist in his wake. Faster and faster he gyrated and twirled, a perverse grace infusing every motion, an erotic dancer at an orgy of death.
The beasts were no individual threat, and they died in droves, their bodies crunching underfoot, their vital fluids painting the deck in slick patterns of ruin. But there were so, so many of them...
"Keep fighting! We're winning!" Ranma cried defiantly, fists and feet brutal blurs that crushed and pulped, smashed and smeared.
'Course, somethin' a little more wide-hittin* wouldn't go amiss!'
Not for the first time, Ranma found himself grateful to Cologne for her Soul of Ice training as he pushed aside his fears and concerns, trusting the safety of his precious bodily fluids to his finely honed physical instincts as he centered his mind and soul in that state of total emotionless void. He could feel the chill in his core, burning like a freezing flame in his guts, but the training he'd devoted to exploring this aspect of ki manipulation allowed him to turn the pain in on itself. He twisted the frigid energy in on itself, condensing it tighter and tighter, letting the pressure build up until something had to give...
His eyes snapped open as he screamed, "Mourning Mist!" and flung his arms out wide, unconsciously imitating something he'd seen on the television one day, when he'd happened to catch a few minutes of some new anime called Dragon Ball Z. Ghostly fire colored in a shifting rainbow of icy blue, black and white burst into life on his skin and then leapt hungrily outwards, turning him into the epicenter of an explosion of unflame that engulfed the entirety of the Stormbringer's deck. Ranma could feel the chill in his bones, the blood growing sluggish in his veins as his body protested being used to channel such frigid energies, but they were a pale shadow of what happened to everything around him.
Everything the heat-sapping anti-fire touched withered like a new flower before winter's frost. Flesh and blood froze rock solid in an instant, bodies falling like hail and shattering as they hit the ground. Anything large enough and tough enough that the sudden deep-freeze didn't kill them was left fluttering blindly in utter agony, covered in body-wide frostbite and spiraling slowly to join their dead comrades on the deck, which now looked like the bottom of a flash-frozen abattoir.
Ranma inhaled and exhaled slowly, feeling the throbbing chill slowly dwindle from his core as his ki flow resumed its normal currents, taking in the sights of his handiwork.
"Well, not bad for a first try," he proclaimed, rolling his neck and massaging stiff joints.
"We beg to differ!"
Startled, Ranma turned towards his crewmates, then flinched as he took in their shivering forms, arms wrapped desperately around their torsos, teeth chattering madly as shivers visibly wracked their collective frames. Clothing suited more for a semi-tropical climate and a sudden burst of extremely negative temperatures weren't a very comfortable mix.
"Sorry guys; not a lot of fine control on a move like that," he sheepishly replied, grinning weakly and rubbing the back of his head as they all scowled at him. Honestly, it was almost a relief when the carefully honed part of his subconscious that warned of incoming attacks suddenly started screaming at him.
"Look out!"
They immediately broke apart as an enormous shadowy bulk suddenly came slamming into the deck, hard enough to make the Stormbringer sway even with its hot-air balloon in place. Long limbs flexed impossibly with unnatural grace as the form of a spider the size of an African elephant lifted itself into an attack position.
Had any of the Kamikaze Pirates been even an amateur entomologist, they might have been able to identify the species... assuming it had a recognizable species and wasn't some unholy new mutant strain emerging from Merville's nightmarishly magical ecology. But none of them were, and so as far as they were concerned, the only identifiable features were its sheer repulsiveness. Chitinous plating the color of bleaching bone. Bristling black hairs, long and stiff as cutlass blades, and dripping with rank-smelling, greasy secretions. Soulless black eyes the size of tractor wheels. A twisted, almost-but-not-quite human face, dominated by enormous great black fangs dripping with ichors that smoked and hissed where they touched the wood of the Stormbringer's deck.
It swayed back and forth with an almost sensual flowing gait, its crooked legs eating up the distance as it undulated towards Ranma, the joints in its armored skin clicking against each other as it moved with a sound like breaking bones.
"Oh, hell no!" Ranma cried, retreating instinctively as the spider came scuttling after him with the same incredible speed as its smaller cousins.
"Leave the captain alone!" Miriam bellowed, swinging one of her anchors at the oversized spider like a giant-sized bladed flail. Instead of slamming into the beast's side, however, the spider leapt nimbly into the air like some perverse parody of a ballerina, allowing the weapon to scythe through the air where it had been standing before it landed delicately back on the deck.
"...Well, you don't see that every day," Miriam noted in disbelief as she reeled her weapon back into her grasp.
Her actions galvanized the rest of the crew into action, who charged into the fray...
"Leave my Ranma alone!" Kodachi shrieked in outrage, raising her pistol and firing three times. The bullets ricocheted off of the spider's chitinous hide with shrill whines.
"Heavier ordinance required!" droned Dyna, detaching her rotary cannon and replacing it with her heavy rifle. The miniature cannon boomed as she fired twice, but the spider sharply swayed to the side, its bulbous body swaying almost disjointedly from its many spindly limbs so the bullets whistled harmlessly past.
Harumi, Penelope and Ukyo all attacked from the sides, but the spider "kicked" (for lack of a better word) at them with three of its hind-legs, the edges revealing they had been sharpened to razor-like sharpness, chitin shrieking against steel as they were forced to parry.
Ryoga and Shampoo, coming from the front, found themselves forced to reassess that plan as the spider lunged for them, venom-slick fangs scything for their vulnerable flesh. A flying kick from Ranma made it recoil, for the moment, but it doggedly came after them again.
It said something for the fray that nobody noticed a meter and a half long snake suddenly falling from the underside of the balloon to land on the giant spider's head. But everybody noticed when it suddenly sank its fangs into one of the fist-sized secondary eyes that wobbled atop the spider's head like bloated pustulant boils, bursting it in an eruption of ichor.
The oversized arachnid reared, letting out an ear-piercing stridulation as its forelimbs flailed in distress at its injury. The Kamikaze Pirates felt no sympathy for its wounding, and instead pounced upon it in fury. Miriam's anchors hooked against its hindlegs and tore, shattering them into pieces, whilst the blade-wielding members of the crew attacked the now-vulnerable joints on the other limbs and cleaved their way through the softer flesh, severing the arachnid equivalent of tendons. Its legs literally cut out from under it, the spider's bloated body came crashing to the deck. It stabbed erratically with its remaining legs, but the pirates withdrew, allowing Dyna to calmly shoot the thing in its head with her cannon, blowing a hole clean through it. Even though it crashed lifelessly to the ground, Dyna fired a second shot through its primary eyes, effectively disintegrating its face.
"Well, that was unpleasant," Nabiki dryly assessed.
"Yeah... ugh! Gonna be having nightmares about that one," Ukyo proclaimed, shuddering in only slightly feigned disgust.
"Is still one more threat!" Shampoo suddenly warned, causing everyone's attention to snap to her - and to the large snake currently sitting placidly on the deck in front of them, an unmistakable hood spread to reveal its identity as a cobra.
Kodachi immediately raised her pistol and took aim, but before she could pull the trigger.
"Wait! Please! I'm human!" the serpent suddenly cried in a quavering, feminine voice. Its words shocked the Kamikazes into stunned stillness, and suddenly the cobra's form blurred, expanding and shifting, contorting and twisting faster than even Ranma's eyes could follow, until where a reptile had coiled now stood what was unmistakably a human woman.
And what a woman! Standing before them was a beautiful young woman, barely into her twenties, with dusky dravidian skin offset by shockingly bright red hair, perhaps a shade or two darker than Ranma's when cold water had been applied. This hair had been allowed to grow impossibly long, braided into a singular tail that easily stretched to the floor, almost an imitation of her serpentine form. She was easily 160 centimeters tall, and had a dancer's build, with long, slender, supple arms, legs and neck paired with a willowy frame. And yet, at the same time, nature had seen fit to bless her with curves befitting a fertility goddess; wide, flared hips that would give an unmistakable sashay to her walk, and enormous tear-drop breasts that clearly outclassed any of the non-giant women aboard in terms of size, even the amply endowed Penelope. She was dressed in the torn, shredded rags of what had clearly once been a beautiful, full-body dress, which exposed a bright purple tattoo placed on her stomach; an eye shape centered so that her navel formed the pupil, with three triangular spikes along its top and a single tear-drop hanging from its underside. Emerald green eyes glittered with unshed tears as she clasped her hands before herself in an unspoken prayer for mercy.
"A zoan?!" Ranma blurted, putting two and two together whilst also trying not to stare at the voluptuous beauty currently standing near-naked before him.
Slightly beside and behind him, Ryoga crashed to the deck, blood pouring from his nostrils, but nobody noticed.
"My name is Lilith... please, you must help me!" she pleaded, tears starting to flow down the cheeks of her heart-shaped face.
"Hey, hey, easy there! You're safe here! How'd you get here, anyway?!" Ranma asked, the instinctual panic when a girl started to cry flaring its ugly head.
The woman - Lilith - opened her mouth to say something, only to be cut off by a monstrous groaning noise from her gut, causing her to wrap her arms around her midriff.
"Ah-hehehe... some food, please, kind sir? I haven't eaten in a week," she pleaded, cheeks flaring bright red.
Ranma blinked, and opened his mouth, but whatever he was about to say was cut off by a chorus of similar noises, the entirety of the Kamikaze Pirates' crews stomachs rumbling in unison, including his own.
"Ah... well, we kinda skipped dinner, and nothing like a fight to the death to work up an appetite..."
He did his best to ignore the awful crunching noises as Miriam tried to surreptitiously pick up and bite into one of the spider's severed legs, chewing straight through the chitin instead of trying to peel it.
"So, yeah, come inside and we'll eat, okay?"
Soon afterwards...
Dinners aboard the Stormbringer were not a formal affair by any stretch of the term. Conversation, arguments, bickering, playful pilfering from each other's plates, and even the odd knock-down, drag-out brawl were the usual order of the day.
So it said something that the Kamikazes were collectively staring in disbelief at their new guest's table manners... or lack thereof. The previously dainty, delicate beauty was now shoveling food down her throat with the abandon of a wild hog, her jaws stretching like a snake's to allow her to take in massive mouthfuls of fried rice.
"Easy, easy! Nobody's gonna steal it from ya!" Miriam protested as Lilith picked up her serve - a literal bucket full of rice and assorted meats and veggies - and virtually poured it down her throat, distended mouth letting her empty it in about three or four massive bites.
"Last time I saw somebody open their mouth that wide was Picolet Chardin," Ranma noted in mild disgust.
Lilith slammed the now-empty bucket down on the table, panting softly before she leaned back in her chair, delicately wiping her face with a previously ignored napkin.
"Phew! That hit the spot! Oh, pardon my manners - I haven't eaten so much as a bite for a week, I was absolutely starving," she explained, blushing brightly and stifling a belch.
"Okay, now you've eaten, would ya please tell us why you're here?" Ranma insisted, pushing aside his own mostly empty plate.
"Yes, yes, I do owe you that much... forgive me, but it's such a long story, I don't know where to begin..." Lilith replied, casting a demure look at her tablemates.
"An explanation for your wings would be desirable," Dyna suddenly interjected.
Ranma and his crewmates blinked, staring in confusion first at Dyna, then at their new guest. The cobra Zoan simply smiled softly and turned partially away from them, allowing them to see the songbird-like white feathered wings sprouting from her back, fluttering gently amidst her ragged dress.
"Why, these? All denizens of the Sky-Seas have them," she explained sweetly.
"Skuh-Sky-Seas?! You're from the Sky-Seas?!" They cried as one.
"You're familiar with them?" Lilith asked politely, having turned back to face them.
"That's where we're headed! Uh, once we get outta this stupid plant," Ranma amended himself.
"But that still doesn't explain how you got here," Nabiki pointed out.
"Well... to make a long story short, a week ago, I was a guest in the palace of Shiki the Golden Lion... I'm presuming you're familiar with him?" Lilith asked, eliciting scowls and nods from the assembled crew. "There was a little misunderstanding, he accused me of theft, and the next thing I knew, I was running for my life. I leapt from the edge of one of Merville's islands to here, and he suddenly backed off - I found out why when the Stomach Baron closed up on me. When it finally opened again several days later, it was too far from any of the other islands for me to have a hope of safely leaping to them..."
She looked downcast, exuding an air of hopelessness that tugged at the heartstrings of those around her.
"Well, don't worry! You can fly out of here with us! Like I said, we were going to the Sky-Seas anyway - we could use a guide!" Ranma assured her, smiling broadly.
Lilith looked up and gave him a soft, sad smile in return. "Thank you - uh, I never got your name?"
"Oh, where are my manners? I'm Ranma Saotome, Captain of the Kamikaze Pirates! This is my crew - Ryoga Hibiki, Kodachi Kuno, Nabiki Tendo, Shampoo, Ukyo Kuonji, Umok, Miriam Ransdottir, Harumi Tsukuyomi, Dyna, and Penelope laFloo."
He gestured to each of them as he spoke, and they all gave the newcomer a polite greeting as he did.
"It's a pleasure to meet you, Captain Saotome... but I fear it may not be for very long," Lilith sighed, looking forlornly off into the distance.
"What's that supposed to mean?!" an incredulous Ryoga blurted.
"This island... it's dangerous. I don't know if we'll get off it, even with your ship," Lilith explained, wringing her hands.
"We killed all the bugs, there's nothing to worry about," Ranma insisted.
Lilith shook her head, a grim expression on her face. " That was just the first wave. There will be more - lots more, and much bigger and nastier. I've been here for a week... a week of nonstop running, and hiding. This place is full of monsters, and they go after anything that they can sense. It's safer during the day when the Baron is open, they can't stand the light. But in the dark, they won't stop coming... not until the sun comes up or we're all dead."
"We can handle monsters!" Ranma protested, wounded pride stinging.
"...But if one of them gets past us and damages the balloon, we'll be stranded here," Kodachi grimly interjected, her crewmates' faces falling as the realization sank in.
"Ah, geeze, what kind of hellhole is this?!" Ryoga snarled.
"Even worse than you think. We're not the first people to end up here," Lilith softly declared, fishing out a weathered, battered ship's log from amongst her ragged clothing.
"This belonged to a crew called the Dracul Pirates. Their captain was a Devil Fruit user... before he fell into this plant's mouth and was devoured, anyway. I think... I think this plant has somehow absorbed his Devil Fruit powers, at least to some degree," she elaborated.
"What kinda Devil Fruit did this guy have?!" Ranma spluttered.
"According to this log? A Mythic Zoan; the Bat-Bat Fruit, Model Type: Vampire," Lilith calmly proclaimed.
A silence fell over the assembled crew as those words sank in.
"...Yeah, that fits," Nabiki weakly observed.
"How does a plant get a Devil Fruit power?!" Ukyo demanded.
"It probably helps if it washes it all down with a ready supply of mutagen," Lilith absently replied, having opened the log and begun to flip through it.
"What mutagen?!" Kodachi barked.
Lilith looked up at her, visibly confused. "You didn't know? The monsters in Merville aren't natural; they're all dosed up on some kind of mutagenic plant that grows here, called IQ. Actually, Dr. Indigo's been cooking up some sort of distilled version he calls SIQ and giving it to all the animals on these islands to amp up the process - don't ask me why or what for."
"And how exactly do you know that?" Ranma asked suspiciously.
"I stumbled across Indigo's secret lab when I was looking for his private moonshine brewery; that was when Shiki decided I was a thief," the young woman replied nonchalantly, still thumbing through the log.
"...Dr. Indigo has a private moonshine brewery?" Ryogoa asked in disbelief.
"He's a pirate doctor; of course he has a private still to cook up alcohol," Lilith patiently explained to him.
"She right; Shampoo seen it," the Chinese Amazon confirmed.
"Can we please focus on the mutant killer plant problem?" Nabiki pleaded.
"As it so happens, the Dracul Pirates may have done something to help us with that... in their last entry, they write about a plan to carry all their gunpowder, pitch, tar and other flammables down into this plant's core to rig up an explosion," Lilith declared, tapping her finger gently on the book's open page.
As one, they craned forward to look at the tattered pages. Nobody spoke about the obvious implications as to what had happened to that last crew of pirates.
"...Somebody please tell me we have a better plan?" Nabiki begged, looking around the table in desperate hope, wilting at the grim resolve she saw taking place on her crewmates' assorted faces.
"Doesn't seem like we have much of a choice... go down there and blow it up, or wait up and gamble we can keep the ship intact until this thing opens its mouth - and that'll probably take more than a few hours," Ranma gloomily observed.
"When I first arrived, it stayed shut for three days," Lilith confirmed, nodding her head in Ranma's direction.
"Then there is no choice. Alea iacta est," proclaimed Kodachi solemnly, nodding her head.
"It does seem to take a few hours before the big monsters actually come awake - if we're going to do this, it's probably safest to go as soon as possible," Lilith interjected, raising a hand as she spoke.
"Well, you heard the lady; grab what you need, guys, and let's prune some weeds!" Ranma ordered, slamming his hands on the table for emphasis.
And so...
The Stormbringer sank slowly downwards through the air, the carefully coordinated efforts of Kodachi, Miriam and Dyna ensuring their descent was purely vertical. The 'mouth' of their captor yawned before them, seeming to stretch wider in anticipation of their arrival, clearly large enough to allow them passage straight into whatever floral gullet lay beyond.
Nabiki stared piteously over the gunwale into the yawning abyss below, whining, "I hate this plan..."
"You can just stay here aboard the ship with Umok," Ranma reminded her from where he was tugging on a rope whose purpose he had no idea of, but just knew that Kodachi had told him to pull it.
"Oh, yeah, and then I'll be the one who gets picked off by monsters that double back to get the vulnerable survivors! Haven't you watched horror movies on late-night TV?!" she snapped, glaring at Ranma.
"No," Ranma bluntly shot back. "But I ain't gonna let nothing bad happen to ya, so stop worryin', okay?"
Despite his best intentions, Nabiki didn't look particularly relieved by his assertion. She turned back to staring into the darkness, and Ranma unthinkingly did the same.
'Course, I don't blame her for worryin'. But it ain't like we got any real choice here! Just gotta do what Lilith said - hit 'em hard, an' hit 'em fast!'
Strangely, the thought was little comfort as the Stormbringer dropped down, and down, and down...
Once they had passed through the plant's mouth, it was a relatively short descent to reach the organ that gave it its name. Below the surface lay a great circular depression filled with digestive juices, looking like an ocean of blood in the light from the Stormbringer's lanterns. The airship hung just above the unnaturally still surface, darkness surrounding them on all sides.
"Alright, Shampoo, it's up to you - are you sure you can find where those guys took their bombs?" Ranma asked, turning to the Chinese Amazon now standing proudly at the prow behind their figurehead.
"Shampoo can do, airen! Gunpowder give off very strong scent; Shampoo can tell that anywhere," she assured him.
Lilith coughed genteelly into a fist, drawing their attention to her. "If I may, Captain Saotome? My cobra form also has a powerful sense of smell; it wouldn't hurt to have two predators scanning, would it?"
Ranma tilted his head, bit his lip for a moment, and then nodded. "Yeah, sure, makes sense to me."
Lilith calmly walked over to stand beside Shampoo. The hybrid-form cabbit zoan watched as the older woman shifted into her cobra form, their close proximity giving Shampoo a chance to realize that the symbol tattooed on Lilith's belly was repeated on the interior and anterior of her hood. Then she turned her attention back to the darkness of their captor's stomach, closed her eyes and stuck up her nose, inhaling deeply and focusing on deciphering the complex array of scents that greeted her.
She easily filtered out the familiar odors of her crewmates, starting with the older members of the crew. Frankly, some of them were more pleasant than others, but she was too well-bred to comment on that. Then it was time to take in their surroundings proper. At once there was an overwhelming acrid stench, the unmistakable aroma of digestive acids sizzling in her nostrils with an almost antiseptic odor. Competing with that was the heady coppery aroma of old blood, mixed with the bitter-sweetness of pustulent rot.
'I must succeed... I will not let a newcomer show me up!'
Buoyed by pride, however foolish it may have been, Shampoo focused her will into a laser-like intensity. Suddenly, it came to her, cutting through the overlaying funk like a knife through butter; the unmistakable stink of gunpowder, a scent she'd memorized after countless battles against the marines. There was something a little...off... about it, but she could still tell it for what it was.
"That way!" she declared, pointing without looking in the direction that the scent emanated from. She listened to Ranma shouting directions back to Kodachi, heard the engine kick into life and felt the Stormbringer start sailing forward, and smiled triumphantly to herself.
Within minutes, the Stormbringer had sailed across the open expanse of the vegetative stomach and reached the edge. There, a massive cavern opened up in a surface seemingly composed of countless vines twined and braided together, their surfaces bristling with razor-edged, serrated thorns. Its bottom reached low enough to almost touch the surface of the steaming pool of corrosive fluid, and the cavity was just wide enough that the Stormbringer could nose its prow inside.
"You're sure this is where we gotta go?" Ryoga asked, even as the Kamikaze Pirates filed to the prow and began jumping down to the cavern's floor.
"Shampoo's nose not lie - smell of gunpowder is coming from here!" the Chinese Amazon insisted.
"My tongue confers with her nose, as well," Lilith chimed in, slithering along at Shampoo's side.
Nabiki clutched the lantern she was carrying - obviously busy-work, given the lightbulbs extruded from Dyna's mechanical frame, but it gave her something to focus on beside the bone-chilling dread writhing in her guts.
'Going down into a spooky cave full of kami-knows-what kinds of creepy-crawlies... when did my life turn into a horror movie?! Just hold it together, Nabiki; you know Ranma won't let anything hurt you... damn it, I hate having to rely on somebody else to protect me! I need to get stronger... I'm sick of being the weak link on this crew...'
Other than the strange, eerily breath-like whistling of the wind as it lightly gusted past them, the tunnel was eerily silent. The only noise to hear was the sound of their footsteps - Dyna and Miriam tried to be stealthy, but sadly they just weren't very good at it. Around them, the tunnel twisted and contorted like the trail of some immense worm, dominated by vegetative masses that formed a crooked, uneven surface - bulging up into humps that had to be carefully evaded or crossed over here, dipping into divots filled with noxious ichors there.
"...This place remind Shampoo of Brinstar region in Super Metroid," murmured their guide, her long cabbit ears twitching back and forth as she listened to the slightest sound.
Suddenly, she stopped dead in the middle of her path, her crewmates stumbling to avoid walking into her as she peered intently into the darkness.
"Anyone else hear that?" she asked, ears swiveling like radar dishes.
"We don't have your ears, honey," Ukyo gently reminded her.
"Can we avoid whatever's making it?" Ranma asked Shampoo, who shook her head.
"No, is coming from same direction as scent. We go exact same way."
"Terrific. Well, how bad can it be?" Ranma asked, looking hopefully between them all.
Two minutes later...
"How bad can it be, he says!" Ryoga snarled, his overly long canine teeth only adding to the bestial aspect of his expression.
"Oh, shut up, bottle-blonde! How could I have predicted that!?" Ranma demanded, gesturing at the latest obstacle in their path.
'That' was a large pit, crossable only by a natural bridge of stone-hard, near-petrified vegetable matter. The bridge was fine, clearly large enough to support even Dyna and Miriam... the problem was the pit. Or, more accurately, what was in the pit.
"You know, I never used to consider myself prone to entomophobia... but now I may have to reconsider," Kodachi declared in a calm, conversational tone, before shivering with what they probably would have considered an overabundance of drama if they weren't all looking at the same thing.
The pit was a seething mass of squirming larvae; armor-plated, slime-slick maggots the size of human babies writhing in their own noisome fluids, crawling all over each other and emitting a sound disturbingly like infants sobbing. Faces that were little more than random clusters of eyes around mouths raised towards the light, many-forked tongues studded with leech-like maws flicking in their direction as if tasting their presence.
"...This is the most disgusting thing I've seen since coming to this awful place," Lilith quivered, sticking out a tongue that was surprisingly human-shaped, apart from being thirteen inches long at least.
"We will not achieve our goal unless we advance. Unless you have concluded it would be optimal to simply pitch ourselves in now and avoid the confrontation?" Dyna stated, pistons hissing as she began to scuttle towards the bridge. As she went, the light moved with her, darkness creeping towards the group's rear with every step she took.
"Hey, wait up, we're coming!" Ranma said, hurrying after her and jarring the rest of his crew into following him. They filed across the bridge in ones and twos, Nabiki glancing repeatedly in all directions as she went.
"Something wrong, sugar?" Ukyo asked her, having ended up walking beside the Tendo girl through luck of the draw.
"I'm just wondering... if those things are the babies... where's the mommy?" she asked grimly.
Out of nowhere came a sudden high-pitched stridulation, a rasping, shrill buzz like a cross between a demonic cicada and a whole swarm of angry Asian giant hornets.
"Me and my big mouth!" Nabiki wailed, clutching her lantern like it was the teddy bear she'd had as a toddler.
Suddenly, from an unseen nook in one of the shadow-shrouded walls, an enormous insect came buzzing into view. It was an indescribable arthropodic horror; part cockroach, part stag beetle, part explosion in a knife factory. Three pairs of mantis-like grasping limbs bristling with spikes clawed spasmodically at the air, a tri-pronged horn like an insectile set of tusks jutting from under a tiny head. A wing-case adorned with sword-like barbels was spread wide, allowing four great translucent wings to propel the Miriam-sized beast through the air and generating the hellish chittering that had alerted them before.
Dyna snapped up her left arm, outfitted with her heavy rifle, and opened fire, blowing a hole clean through the bug's lower abdomen in a geyser of chitin shrapnel and gooey guts. It shrilled in verminous fury and rocketed towards her, unphased by the sucking wound in its belly. The robot pirate fired again, hitting the creature in the base of its left pair of wings, creating an explosion of pulverized flesh that detached both appendages. Despite this crippling its ability to fly, the creature had enough momentum that it reached the bridge, hooking itself onto the stone-hard vine-based surface and swiveling around to face them, blocking their route forward.
But that was all the time Dyna needed to fire again and again, both bullets slamming into the giant bug's primary eyes and obliterating its head into a shower of mulch. Bilious yellow sludge began pouring from the gaping wounds, filling the air with a noxious stink of rot and bile, as the massive bulk settled seemingly lifelessly to the ground, limbs twitching convulsively before falling motionless.
"Nice shot, Dyna! That could have gotten ugly," Ranma brightly announced, patting the robot on her shoulder.
"Correction; suboptimal. Ammunition reserves require careful management," Dyna retorted, shifting to the side as much as she could to let Miriam inch past, the wotan literally stepping over her smaller comrades to reach the corpse, grab it by its oversized tusks, and roll it off the bridge and into the pit, where the larvae began voraciously swarming over it.
"Better to spend bullets than your blood," Ranma retorted.
"...Logic irrefutable," Dyna conceded.
"Ugh, stupid bug stink," the Chinese Amazon grumbled, picking up Lilith and slinging her fellow zoan around her shoulders before literally leaping over the great pile of greasy gore.
Six minutes later...
"We here! This it! Gunpowder all around this room!" Shampoo cried excitedly.
"And I can see why - I admit that this plant defies my expertise, but that certainly looks important to me!" Kodachi added, a bloodthirsty eagerness in her voice.
Their meanderings through the tunnels had brought them to another large chamber, this time centered around a great pillar of intertwining vines and tendrils that linked the floor and the ceiling. Suspended right in the center was a dark red sphere that visibly expanded and contracted in a slow, steady rhythm.
"That looks way too much like a heart for my liking," Ryoga muttered.
"What's that thing coming off of it?" Ranma asked, pushing forward to get a better look.
Sure enough, as the group closed in on the sphere, they could see a great knot of thorny tendrils sprouting from the sphere's side and stretching down to hang just above the floor. And right at the very tip, which had narrowed to an almost dainty curl of greenery, dangled a single fruit.
And its status as a Devil Fruit was unquestionable, because none of them had ever seen anything like it before. Oval shaped, and perhaps half again the size of a good apple, the fruit was covered in a dark purple pith that bristled with thick, sharp spikes whose bleached white color made them look like fangs. At the base of each spike emerged a spiral of bloody red, creating a tracery that almost resembled pulsing veins across its surface. At the tip of the plant, two small leaves jutted from the stem that connected the fruit to the vine, bright crimson in color and with a shape reminiscent of cartoon bat wings.
"That must be the Devil Fruit!" Nabiki cried, before she took off running towards it.
"Wait, Nabiki!" Ranma called after her, but she didn't even glance back at him, causing the rest of her crewmates to hurry after her.
The Kamikaze's quartermaster had almost come within arm's length of the Devil Fruit, when her gaze dropped lower, and what she saw brought her to an almost literal screeching halt.
"...Well, guess we know for a fact the Dracul Pirates got this far!" she quivered, eyes wide as she instinctively backed away, barely swallowing a scream as she accidentally walked into Ranma.
Now that they were closer to the... whatever it was, the 'core', for lack of a better word, they could see the detritus heaped at its base. Bones, human bones; picked clean of flesh, some perversely intact, and others crushed and mangled. Weapons and shreds of clothing were scattered around, heaped amongst barrels of gunpowder, congealed puddles of pitch and tar, gleaming slicks of grease and oil, and shredded rags.
"Poor devils," Kodachi quietly proclaimed, taking in the carnage.
"They clearly went down fighting," Penelope observed, poking at a skull missing its scalp and right eye socket.
"Query; if the Dracul Pirates reached this location before perishing... what was responsible for their demise?" Dyna pondered aloud.
Those words would have been chilling enough, but when combined with the whisper-soft chittering that suddenly reached their ears, icy fingers began to dance up their collective spines. As one, they reluctantly looked upwards.
Skittering out of the darkness, creeping across the surface of the core from where it had been hiding behind its massive bulk, came a creature that had clearly once been a mantis. Now it was something... else. The basic structure was identifiable, but the creature was now easily six meters long, with saurian toes on its four feet and two arms that had morphed into blade-fingered, disturbingly human hands. Downward curving "tusks" of chitin made its head seem almost like a secondary smaller insect that had bitten off the original head and taken root in the stump. Bulging red eyes stared down at them dispassionately for a long moment... and then it screamed, an ear-piercing shriek that made them all clap their hands to their ears in pain.
And then the darkness began to writhe around them, an impossible array of twisted forms materializing from the gloom beyond the edges of their limited light sources. There was no time for clever speeches as chittering, braying, squealing, howling horrors came hurtling towards them - only the choice to either fight, or die.
As one, the Kamikaze Pirates chose to fight.
Nabiki clutched her storm-lantern to herself, nearly burning herself on the hot glass as she stared wide-eyed at the chaos that now surrounded her as her crewmates battled for their very lives.
Miriam drove the bladed tine of one of her anchors up through the jaw of a rat as tall as she was, the steel bursting through its skull in a spray of gore as the wotan bellowed her defiance. Even as the beast fell, its bloated stomach writhed and then burst open, disgorging a tangle of thrashing, gore-slick worms that swarmed over her weapon and forced her to drop it before they could begin burrowing into her own flesh.
Kodachi's whip-sword flashed in the light, its razored edges scything through a swarm of giant mosquitoes. But there were so many of them that even as the first wave perished, a second wave charged through the opening their sisters had bought with their lives, forcing Kodachi to stay on the move lest she be impaled and sucked dry by dozens of hungry syringes.
Shampoo's claws tore open something that looked like a cockroach that walked like a man, rending it into greasy gobbets of guts. Even as she did, six of its comrades swarmed after her. One raked a jagged claw of a forelimb across her side, drawing a shriek of pain and opening a shallow wound across her side, forcing her to leap away before they could properly corner her.
Harumi's twin blades hewed through a swarm of flying ticks like a combine harvester through a field of wheat. But they pressed him so hard that he was barely able to keep up, many of the fliers merely maimed and thus continued to swarm after him on the ground, forcing him to alternate strikes down at the earth so they couldn't claw their way up his legs.
Penelope took a machete in both hands and hacked desperately at a bear-sized naked rat whose body bristled with giant leeches. Each blow scythed a leech in half, but they just seemed to multiply with every strike.
Ukyo's spatula glowed almost white hot as she placed its burning mass as a shield between herself and a maggot the size of a horse. But the thing seemed oblivious to the pain, nearly burying the desperate girl under its slimy bulk even as its flesh sizzled against the searing steel.
Ryoga had one of his hands wrapped around the throat of a massive, white-furred hyena, the other holding its scorpion-like tail at bay as he crushed its windpipe. He kicked desperately at a second that tried to grab his ankle in its bone-crushing jaws and yank him to the ground.
Dyna's chainsaw spewed gore and chips of bone as she sawed open a giant bat that had tried to envelop her in its parasite-laden wings. Despite the mortal wound, it pressed furiously against her, and its weight had her skittering backwards, legs pumping furiously as she tried to keep from being toppled over onto her back.
Lilith ballooned into a monstrous hybrid of woman and serpent, six meters of lashing coils wrapping around a two-headed rat-wolf the size of a pony and squeezing until its bones audibly broke. Even as that happened, she spat venom into its conjoined faces, eyes bursting like zits and flesh sloughing from its skull before she unhinged her jaws and engulfed it, swallowing it whole. Then six more of the wolf-rats swarmed over her and she rolled over and over, thrashing her scaly body around in an effort to shake them loose.
Ranma spat curses as he boxed with a man-sized tick-thing, which kept coming even despite the punishing blows he rained down on it, each strike merely pushing it a step back. He barely twisted aside in time as a limb like a chitinous scythe whistled toward his face, cutting a small wound on his cheek instead of slashing through his eyes.
And more monstrous shapes crowded in by the moment, surging towards the beleaguered pirates... and closing in on the vulnerable normal girl at the center of their group.
'This is insane! I'll fight men, but these are monsters! The only way you can beat monsters...is with another monster...'
Buoyed by that sudden thought, however irrational as it might be, Nabiki knew what she had to do. She dropped the lantern and then, as the battle raged on around her, Nabiki reached up and grabbed the Devil Fruit, which almost literally fell into her grasp. She expected it to be hard as bone and sharp as spite, but the pith was as soft as something bloated by rot; the barest pressure of her fingers caused the dark bruise-purple skin to split and gory crimson streamers of juice to seep forth.
'Please, give me the strength to save us!'
And with that thought burning in her hindbrain, the first prayer she had made in a long, long time, Nabiki unflinchingly sank her teeth into the Devil Fruit, burying her whole face into its yielding surface.
The juice within was cloying and treacly, clinging to her tongue like honey, but the TASTE! The acrid coppery tang of hot blood, mixed with the spice of vanilla and the bitter sweetness of pustulent rot. It flooded her nose with a charnel stink, her eyes watering as the sheer vileness consumed her senses. Her gorge recoiled, spasming in its desperate need to purge itself, but Nabiki clamped down with all her willpower and tore into the Devil Fruit like a starving animal. She wolfed down great gobbets of gore, bloody syrup pouring down her chin, smearing her cheeks and coating her breasts as she gulped and slavered and suckled, cramming it down her throat as fast as was physically possible.
Finally, the last morsel disappeared, Nabiki practically shoving it down with her fingers as she swallowed desperately. She panted wildly, then arched sharply, face contorted in a silent scream as every drop of blood in her veins seemed to boil and freeze simultaneously. Waves of hot and cold billowed from her core and flooded every limb, racing through the marrow of her bones, coiling up her spine and stabbing into her brain. And yet, as fast as the pain devoured her, it was devoured in turn by a dark pleasure, a deceptively creeping, seeping bliss.
Nabiki could feel her muscles swelling with power, her bones thickening. She grinned so hard it felt like her cheeks would split, her teeth squirming in her gums, stretching into razor-sharp fangs. Her hands curled into claws, and she could feel her nails sharpening into talons. The darkness that had seemed so suffocating before receded as if lit by some ghostly dawn, and her ears were assaulted with the cacophony of countless thundering hearts. They sounded...
...Delicious...!
A brain-rattling, high-pitched shriek of joy and hunger split the air, the whole battlefield halting under the weight of that surprise assault to their ears, and then the newly reborn Nabiki Tendo moved...
The world seemed to freeze-frame around her, giving her a moment to admire the languid beating of the wings of a swarm of giant mosquitoes before she leisurely reached out and swatted them, her fingers reducing them to sprays of mush with what felt like the gentlest touch.
She slapped the jaw of a rabid wolf-rat with the back of one hand, and its head came away, arcing high into the air. Then she reached out and scraped her fingers down the throat of a bear whose scabrous hide was covered with ticks the size of oranges, disemboweling it as easily as opening a can of soda, hide and fat and bone parting beneath her claws.
The newborn Mythic Zoan leapt high into the air, soaring a dozen meters or more with no effort at all, seeming to defy gravity before she came hurtling down like a comet, landing on a syringe-mouthed bug the size of a tank and crushing it to a pulp like a fat roach beneath an iron-soled boot, noxious gore squirting in patterns that Nabiki giggled and clapped to see.
She all but danced through the swarm, crushing and clawing, shredding and tearing with her passage; wherever her gaze fell, she brought death, leaving only broken corpses in her wake.
'Is this all? More! Give me more! Wait - Ranma!'
Ranma hopped back as the tick-thing lashed out with its jagged claws, arms curled ready to punch... And then suddenly a set of long, taloned fingers punched clean through his mutated opponent's midriff, blood spattering on Ranma's cheek. The malformed arachnid voiced a high-pitched keen of death, and then its killer spread their hands wide, splitting it in half up the middle as easily as somebody breaking apart a piece of ripe fruit.
He readied himself for a new opponent, only for his eyes to widen in shock as he took in the gore-spattered form standing on the other side of the giant bug she had just split in twain.
"Nabiki?!"
Nabiki giggled like a schoolgirl... well, she was a schoolgirl, but Ranma had never heard her laugh like this before! She was dripping with gore, sheets of skin and scraps of entrails having stuck to her, but she didn't even seem to notice. Her cheeks were flushed, and her eyes - the once chocolate-brown irises now a bright, unnatural crimson - were hazy. She looked... for lack of a better term, drunk!
Even as Ranma took that in, Nabiki reached out - with hands that now bore bestial claws - and gently cupped Ranma's cheeks, holding him tenderly in place as she stepped closer to close the gap between them, letting him see her newly elongated, almost elf-like ears.
"Mine..." she purred sensually, leaning in close and opening her mouth, needle-like canines gleaming as she extended her tongue - had it always been that long?! - and slowly, purposefully ran it across Ranma's cheek.
"Okay, snap out of it Nabiki! This ain't you!" Ranma barked, feeling his cheeks flush bright red as he yanked himself away from her as if she'd just touched him with a burning brand.
The new Zoan - because what else would explain these changes?! - looked almost hurt, pouting sadly at Ranma.
And then the wasp-mantis-thing attacked her from behind, driving a serrated forelimb the length of a sword clean through her midriff and out the other side.
"Nabiki!" Ranma screamed in shock.
Nabiki snarled, face contorting into a bestial mask of fury, and whirled around, backhanding her assailant so hard it literally exploded, chunky body-parts flying across the cavern. The only thing left of it was the bladed limb still impaling her, and she grabbed it with a guttural growl.
"Don't!" Ranma tried to order her, but she yanked it free anyway.
"What've ya done?!" he cried, rushing over to try and put pressure on the wound, an action he instinctively knew would be pointless... only to stop and watch in shock as the gaping, should-have-been mortal wound sealed up before his eyes, shredded tissue and torn skin twining together until there wasn't even a scar left.
"...Well, that's handy," he dumbly proclaimed.
Nabiki gave him what was unquestionably a smug look, despite the lingering air of somebody who was drunk out of their skull.
Whilst that was happening, Dyna blew the brains out of the malformed skull of a mutant, only to then be attacked by a creature that resembled an enormous stag beetle with biological chainsaws for pincers. Instinctively, she fended off the whirring mandibles with her own chainblade, the opposing teeth clashing and throwing off sparks... that drifted down into a nearby puddle of cooking oil.
With a whoosh and roar, flames burst into life throughout the chamber, the Dracul Pirates' handiwork finally catching ablaze - and devouring anything caught in its path. Bestial screams and shrieks filled the air, monstrous forms writhing and twitching in psychosomatic or justified agony as the blaze rapidly grew into an inferno, thick plumes of choking, acrid smoke filling the air.
"Captain, I advise retreat!" Dyna declared, shooting her former opponent whilst it thrashed around, having been engulfed in flames.
"Agreed! Let's run for it!" Ranma shouted as loudly as he possibly could.
Nabiki spread her arms wide, and Ranma watched in morbid fascination as her features shifted through yet another transformation. Her ears migrated to the top of her skull and became distinctly bat-like, whilst her hands twisted into the unmistakable form of bat's wings, and her boots exploded into shredded shards of leather as her feet warped into hand-like grasping claws. A flap of her new wings, and the vampire zoan was airborne, reaching out with her lower talons and seizing Ranma by the shoulders before she took flight, hurtling off into the darkness in the direction of their ship.
Below and behind them, the Kamikaze Pirates surged off to safety; Miriam reached down and scooped up Dyna, tucking the relatively slow and clunky gynoid under one arm whilst Harumi scaled her back and clung to her neck as the wotan charged to safety, long legs eating up the ground. Lilith slithered along at breakneck speed, Ryoga and the other girls riding her like she was a prize pony, clinging to her scaly frame for dear life.
The first detonations rocked the caverns as they fled for the exit tunnel, hurling fire and shrapnel in all directions, the beasts behind them too panic-stricken to do anything but flail and die.
It felt like only seconds before they were piling onto the Stormbringer's deck, yanking the anchor aboard and kicking the propellers into overdrive, desperately turning the ship towards the Stomach Baron's mouth.
"Careful, careful! We crash, and it's game over for us!" Ranma cried as he helped Kodachi at the steering wheel.
By now, flames were vomiting forth profusely from the faux-cavern they had just vacated, and where they touched the Baron's digestive sap, they spread as if it were an oil slick. The air was thick with pungent smoke, and yet the hellish scene had one advantage: it gave them all the light they needed to orient themselves towards the mouth.
Just as the Stormbringer was climbing towards safety, a huge shadow came buzzing through the inferno and slammed into their hull, the whole ship swaying from the impact. A massive insectile claw thumped onto the deck as the charred and smoking form of the giant mantis that had seemed to preside over the hellish court they had just battled hauled itself partially onto the deck.
The engines that Kodachi, Miriam and Dyna had so painstakingly assembled emitted ominous groans, the Stormbringer trembling violently beneath its air-filled sack.
"Weight limits exceeded! Recommend immediate jettison of excess cargo!" Dyna declared, her voice raised loud enough to be heard over the engine as she fitted a fresh clip of ammo into her heavy rifle.
"Don't need ta tell me twice!" Miriam roared, charging across the deck and swinging her anchors at the mantis-thing. Steel clashed against chitin with an audible crash as it fended off her weapons with its fore-limbs.
"Don't worry about killing it, just break its grip!" Ranma ordered.
Nabiki suddenly let out a keening shriek and took off, wings flapping as she propelled herself out into the void. The mantis tried to reach for her with one of its arms, but Miriam hooked it with an anchor and bodily yanked it back, twisting just so and causing the tine to catch in its soft, fleshy joint. With Miriam's considerable strength behind it, the unusually shaped weapon half-severed, half-snapped the mantis' arm.
That was all the opening that Lilith needed to spit in one of its bulbous eyes. The evidently corrosive venom flash-boiled the orb of compound lenses, which burst with a noise like somebody doing a body dive into a dozen cartons of raw eggs.
At the same time, Nabiki wheeled around and swooped towards the monster's hindquarters, using her momentum to fuel a picture-perfect high snap-kick that slammed right into the base of one of its larger legs. The blow absolutely pulverized the soft, sensitive tissue of its hip joint, shattering the surrounding chitin into ragged edges that further tore into the sensitive wound.
The mantis-thing shrieked with an eerily human voice as, with one of its major anchor-points destroyed, its whole weight shifted unsteadily.
"Get off my SHIP!" Ranma snarled, hurling an icy ki blast into the "wrist" of the massive, human-like claw biting deep into its decking. He followed up with a spin-kick right into the flash-frozen meat, shattering it into a worthless stump.
Now devoid of a solid grip, the mantis fell backwards, twisting around in mid-air as its huge wings blurred into life, arresting its fall...
And that was just what Dyna was waiting for. An explosive round slammed into the mantis-monster's back, right about where all four wings joined. The shrapnel shredded the muscles powering the wings, rendering them inoperable, and with a high-pitched scream of rage, the mutant insect fell like a stone into the roaring flames below, vanishing into the all-devouring fire.
"Go-go-GO!"
Having been relieved of its unwanted burden, the Stormbringer hurled itself skyward, rocketing towards the island-plant's mouth and just barely avoiding the enormous plume of flames that came searing after them like a ravening elemental tongue.
"That was too-too close!" Shampoo cried, rubbing her eyes as stars danced in her vision.
"Yeah - Nabiki!? Where's Nabiki!?" Ranma shouted, looking around for his quartermaster.
"There she is, captain!" Harumi shouted, all eyes following his pointing finger as Nabiki came fluttering through the firelit gloom to land on the deck.
Evidently, it had been a close call; her clothes were scorched and full of holes, but her Devil Fruit-granted healing powers had already wiped away most of the burns she'd taken. The last of them faded away into mere red tinges on her skin as her crewmates gathered around, and the now-sober-looking zoan cast an irritated look at her ruined dress.
"I liked this outfit!" she whined, unconsciously flapping her wings for emphasis.
"...Nabiki? You feeling okay now?" Ranma cautiously asked her.
"Huh? Yes, yes I'm fine... wow, what a rush! I...I don't know what came over me!" she explained, spreading her wings wide.
"We worry about that later - now we get out of here!" Shampoo interjected.
"I certainly hope this plan of ours works!" Ukyo added, looking over the gunwale and swallowing loudly.
The others followed her gaze, and flinched collectively as they saw the flames were now spreading like only wildfire could up the star-like arms of the massive plant that had entrapped them.
Suddenly, a loud, ominous creaking filled the air, and before their eyes, the jungle-covered petals visibly wobbled and rippled. Deceptively slowly, they began to sink apart, opening expanding rifts that revealed the starry night sky beyond.
"There's your answer, Ucchan! Set a course for open sky, and let's burn sail!" Ranma declared, pointing authoritatively at the nearest gap.
The Stormbringer roared proudly forward, sailing as straight and true as a spear. As the Stomach Baron's petals withered and blackened, consumed from within and without, the Kamikaze Pirates sailed away from the burning wreckage of what Shiki had anticipated would be their doom and soared off into the night.
Chapter End & Closing Notes
So, at long last, the teased debut of Nabiki's step towards true piratehood. What did you all think? Did I do her justice?
There's one more chapter to go before we truly enter the Sky-Sea; the next chapter will be a "breather" chapter, covering the time period between escaping the Stomach Baron and entering the White Sea; this will give ME a chance to brush up on the Skypiea arc, and our heroes a chance to get to actually know Penelope, Lilith and the "new Nabiki" properly, without the other hassles in the way. If there's stuff you'd like to see during this chapter, please leave a comment and I'll see what I can do about including it.
Speaking of Penelope and Lilith... you'll note that there's no Journal Entry for them yet. This is because, right now, their membership is "probationary" - I would LIKE to make them part of the crew, but I'm worried about the reader's reception to them, especially given the backlash I've gotten about using OC crew instead of canon One Piece characters as crew. So, I'm going to make it a poll (I would do so formally on SpaceBattles, but I don't know how); leave reviews through this arc commenting on which, if either, of them should stay after the Sky-Sea Saga is done, and when I reach the penultimate part of the arc, I will formally declare their membership or departure, depending on how the tallies fall.