From The Sea - Dive rgence Chapter 32: Monsters, an one piece fanfic

This chapter is a bit shorter than the last one, but—

Actually scratch that, I put this not long after I started writing the chapter because I thought it would be shorter.

It isn't.

And as a bonus treat, all chapters now have TITLES!

(Which can usually be interpreted in different ways, including the one of this chapter, so have fun with that if it's your thing!)

Also I tried my best, but the timeline here is probably not completely exact, since some things happen at the same time —and the flow of time in anime/manga can be easily confusing.

You'll find a list of the songs used in this chapter in the end A/N if you want to give them a listen!

PLEASE READ THE FOLLOWING WARNING PART

Warning: Physical and psychological violence. Like, really. It includes murder, torture, dismemberment, and electrocution. Pretty graphic in some places, too.

If there's anyone who doesn't want to read the torture part, I put "〜〜⏆〜〜" at the beginning and the end so you can skip it.

I hope I covered everything that is to be covered, but feel absolutely free to tell me if I should add anything else!

Disclaimer: I do not own One Piece, so anything that you see in this fic and that you can recognise as belonging to One Piece is not mine. If I did own it, I wouldn't have to write fanfiction. Duh. Also, I don't own the picture.

Part One - Dive|rgence

Monsters

Oh, I know

And I hope you know that I know

that revenge will never give you back everything that has been taken

from you

(Revenge, darling, is like sugar.

It does you no good

but hell if it does not taste sweet)

〪〪〪〜〜⏆〜〜〭〭〭

"Come on, why the long face? Cheer up, kid! You're going to train at the Headquarters!"

"Almost all Marine officers do that, Captain."

"You suck at this comfort thing, soldier. Don't listen to him, Russell, it's still great! You'll meet plenty of people, and your first base as Lieutnant will be less scary once you go through the training!"

Elynna scrunched her nose at the fake surname.

One day she was going to forget which one she was supposed to answer to in the middle of her outing, she just knew it.

She would just have to blame it on Hawk.

"It's not about being trained at the Headquarters. It's about the three days I'll spend alone over there before the actual training starts. I'll definitely get lost, and there's no way I'm asking anyone there for help… It's a test, isn't it?" She grumbled.

"You're making it sound like a conspiracy theory, you know." The Marine sitting on her right deadpanned.

"Yeah, because it's a plot to make me look ridiculous."

"... I mean, you would look ridiculous if you asked for help." The oldest of them sitting opposite to her confirmed.

Both she and the younger Marine gave him a flat look, because wow, great attempt at 'the comfort thing'.

"But no worries," he went on without addressing their reaction at all, "you'll do just fine. Most if not all Marine bases follow roughly the same structure to avoid that kind of problem, since soldiers are often transferred. There are some added things at the Headquarters, especially in terms of protection against external attacks, and additional building for the administration as well, but even if it's not built on the same scale, the basic make-up of the place is the same when it comes to the military compound, which you'll be into."

Hm.

She cocked her head pensively.

"Now that you say it…"

"See? It's kind of mandatory anyway. I mean, even that bunker they built in Enies Lobby a few years back was subjected to that rule. Caused all kinds of problems."

She raised an eyebrow at that.

She went into this looking for information on the Headquarters, since it didn't seem likely for her to get any intel on places like Impel Down and Enies Lobby, which were much more secretive even among the Marines themselves, but…

Don't look a gift horse in the mouth and all that.

"Enies Lobby? But it's never been attacked since it was built… Why would they need a bunker now?"

The man snorted.

"It's not Enies Lobby that needs the bunker, it's the leading officer there. Practically demanded that the thing be built somewhere in the underwater passage between the Tower of Justice and the Bridge of Hesitation in case the island was invaded from both sides so he could wait safely for a submarine to get away. Not really leader behaviour if you ask me, but apparently he's a bit of a paranoiac."

"Don't see how being paranoid convinced the higher-ups to spend that much money on something that'll never be used." The younger Marine grumbled, slumping further onto the table.

"Eh," his superior shrugged. "Heard his father knew some people."

"Typical."

Elynna rolled her eyes in agreement, and leaned back to let the waiter set her drink in front of her.

"Your Virgin Mojito, ma'am."

"You tryin' to tell us something, kid?" The Captain laughed loudly with an exaggerated waggle of his eyebrows.

His subordinate groaned in embarrassment and did his best attempt at sliding away from the table while still being close enough to knock his forehead onto the wooden surface of it.

"Yeah." Elynna deadpanned. "That I'm fucking thirsty and this is pretty much the only drink offered by this place that won't make things worse."

And then she picked up the sugar shaker and tipped it over her drink.

"You deserved that one, Captain."

"... Brats like you two should learn to be more grateful. I just spent some of my precious time reassuring you, you know."

"I'll be sure to remember that whenever someone does something worthy of gratitude." She replied dryly.

"Yeah, what she said."

"Hope you're ready to suffer during training tomorrow—" The officer did a double take to stare at her. "How much more sugar will it take for you to be satisfied?"

"As much as I need to wash off the taste of that gross comment." She answered blandly without straightening the shaker in the least.

"Respect for the elders is dead."

"Don't invite me to the funeral."

"Dead." The older Marine repeated. "Dead and buried."

"This isn't sugary water," the younger man commented, still staring at her glass and looking just a tiny bit terrified. "This is watery sugar."

She glanced at him.

"Original. I'll keep it in mind."

"I think he meant 'stop trying to murder yourself with an overdose of sugar', Russell."

"Oh, well he should have said that first." She shrugged, finally putting the shaker back onto the table.

"That's a waste of a perfectly good drink."

"You say that like I'm going to throw it away."

"Well, it's not like you're going to drink that."

"Wanna bet?"

He slapped a handful of bills on the table.

She eyed the amount before giving a short nod of agreement, and then lifted the glass to her mouth, working her way through it leisurely before taking a spoon when she's done to scoop up the remaining sugar.

She walked out of the pub an hour later with slightly heavier pockets, enough sugar in her mouth to not be bothered by the stench of alcohol around her, and a very satisfied smirk.

〪〪〪〜〜⏆〜〜〭〭〭

Elynna lands silently inside the bunker's control rooom.

There's no one.

After checking thoroughly once more, she exhales a breath and straightens up from her crouch, shedding her raincoat in the process to throw it over the back of one of the chairs as she collapses in another.

At least this is the control room, although she wasn't expecting too much trouble finding the right place after all the Marine bases she has…

Visited?

Yeah, let's stick with that.

But she was hoping to not need to use that knowledge in the first place.

Unfortunately, the smoke bombs weren't enough to distract the agents guarding the elevator's doors from their job, so she had to either improvise or keep running towards them and become a bullet-riddled corpse.

Except now, she has no plan.

Kicking her feet up on the counter of the control board, she leans back until she's staring at the ceiling, twisting the chair this way and that as she ruthlessly shuts out the tendrils of doubt and fear trying to squeeze every one of her muscles and organs into something suffocating.

It's fine.

She's gotten quite good at improvisation lately.

She can almost feel the yawning gap opening under the silence, like the ground crumbling under her feet as it whispers yes, but—

She pushes with her feet to send herself spinning.

Before, the sight of this patch of ceiling spinning quickly right above her would have probably sent nausea crawling through her stomach.

After more than a year of sailing a ship on the most turbulent sea of the world, it's just distracting enough to help push the thoughts into background noise.

Amadeus was there.

Which means that she's probably stuck in this bunker with Spandam's security detail.

Meaning, would-be Rokushiki users.

Not as good as actual CP9 members, but then again there's about twenty of them, so.

Still training, though.

Her chair comes to a stop on its own.

She sends it spinning again nonchalantly.

Still training, which means unstable and incomplete abilities, inconsistent control, and skills that haven't become reflexes yet.

She knows how that works.

She hasn't been able to wield the ability she used against Charlie again, and her aura has apparently been all over the place for some time without her realising it.

When it comes to unstable abilities like those, emotions are a big factor.

Her chair comes to a stop again.

She hums, slouching even further in her seat as she raises one hand above her head.

Aura, huh?

The new position deepens the craning of her neck so that she's almost staring at the lightbulb coming from the ceiling.

She moves her hand slowly, making the lighting flicker with every movement depending on how much it blocks out the light from her sight.

Humming pensively, she absently starts drumming the first song that pops into her mind against the armrest of her chair before she realises that she's doing it and stops, fingers slowly closing into a fist.

"Yeah, that could work."

She lets her feet fall off the counter, giving herself enough momentum to get up from her chair, and transfers the necessary items from her raincoat's pockets to those of her pants.

The last two she takes out, and sets down on the control board in their respective positions.

Then she washes the makeup and the powder that was used to slightly darken her skin tone in the washbasin affixed to the wall at the back of the room, and starts moving the few pieces of furniture that can be moved to barricade the door.

When she's done, she steps back and takes a deep breath as she clenches her fists as tight as she can.

And as she exhales, for every little inch that she allows her fists to uncurl, she drops the mental walls she raised to ensure that she wouldn't lose her cool, starting the moment she realised Robin was taken away from them.

Anger is really not the dominant emotion in her life.

She's the type of person who reacts with fear much more often than with anger.

But right then, she allows herself to really dwell on everything she's seen and heard since boarding the Sea Train, and really—

She's feeling pretty damn furious.

Enough to disregard the fact that the men she's been locked up with don't have much to do with the tears Robin shed and how pleadingly she leaned into the blade Elynna put against her throat for the sake of the show she was giving.

She doesn't have what it takes to be able to take out her anger on the ones actually responsible, at least when it comes to the people who ordered the Buster Call on Ohara in the first place.

So these poor sods will have to do, and they will have to deal —with her.

She rolls her shoulders, cracks her knuckles, and sighs.

"Alright. Do or die, I guess."

〪〪〪〜〜⏆〜〜〭〭〭

Chopper thought he could handle it.

He couldn't let this weird guy bother Nami while she was fighting the blonde woman, especially since there's a good chance the only female agent has the key that will unlock the cuffs on Sogeking and Zoro's wrists.

This is the one member of the CP9 whose abilities Elynna's note gave no information about, so Chopper thought it was better for him to fight the man.

Analysis is one of his strong points, after all.

He was wrong.

This is a man who is weird, ridiculous, and so much stronger than him that the most damage Chopper was able to inflict on him was to lock him up in a fridge.

Now he's on his second Rumble Ball, has lost any semblance of control on his transformations, and his head is fuzzy with the heat of the flames around the two of them —or maybe the blood loss from the wounds punctured into him by the man standing a few feet away from him.

Chopper thought he could handle him, but he was wrong.

He was wrong. He should have known he was.

(Should have known that he can only match the others' prowess in the medical field, not on the battlefield.

Should have known he would only ever disappoint his nakama.

No matter the fact that he took his tallest, most human form, he doesn't have the shoulders to carry the faith of his crewmates and support them.

Because in the end, he's so small, isn't he?

In the end, he'll always and only be an animal, and animals are inferior.)

It takes him a dozen more heartbeats than it should to understand that the sound he hears for every additional breath he's allowed to take is his own keening.

It sounds… terribly human.

Terribly alike to the sounds he heard from Robin through the continued crash of water down the waterfall.

And the smell of his own blood is overpowering, so alike to the smell of blood and recent wounds he smelled from Sogeking along with that scent of gunpowder that always masks most of Usopp's actual scent, too.

(Usopp, who called his friend for help before he went ahead, just like their Captain and Elynna have.

Usopp, who often discusses the fabrication process of his munitions with him because he says that he's the only one who can actually follow what I'm talking about, bless your genius little brain.

Usopp, whose friend Sogeking needs Chopper's help.

Just like Zoro.

Just like Robin.

They all trusted him to be able to help, not as their doctor, but as their nakama.

Just like Luffy left, trusting that they will be able to collect all the keys and come out alive.

Luffy is their Captain.

Chopper's, too, animal or not.

And he's never wrong about things like this.

So if he trusted Chopper…

Then he must be right.)

For a moment, though, it's not overpowering enough to prevent him from remembering why he's shed all that blood in the first place.

Who he's shed all that blood for.

He's not quite sure how, but somehow he's standing again in the next moment, barely escaping another blow.

And then he's running and bouncing through failed transformation after failed transformation, barely cognizant enough to notice it when he does manage to shift into Arm Point.

He collapses and hits the ground in the same breath that he delivers his own attack.

And for a moment, he thinks that he's done it.

But everything isn't so blurry and he isn't so numb with all the pain like a weighted blanket around him that he doesn't feel the foot that brutally digs his head further into the floor, or the thick strands of hair that take hold of his limbs to lift him up in the air.

Turns out, he's wrong again.

Turning back into his usual form to slip out of the trap is much more instinct than thought.

(An old memory of the need to make himself as small as possible,

anything to lessen the pain dealt by the other reindeers who most often aimed for his face and the shameful blue nose in the middle of it.)

In fact, he doesn't hear the voice calling his name, doesn't feel the arms that cradle him before he can hit the floor.

Doesn't know how the third Rumble Ball makes it between his teeth.

But he bites down on it anyway.

(Because if he has to bleed,

—if he has to die—

then he might as well get the job done before he does.

You turned into a monster because you had no control anymore, Doctorine told him the last time he tried to do this.

You have the same virus as your father. Always with those crazy experiments, she told him on the same day.

But those are monsters they're facing now,

monsters they declared war on,

monsters who hurt Robin like this.

And he belongs to a crew of people who don't mind the monstrous and the animal in him, a crew with monsters in it too.

Monsters so much better than the ones they fight and the humans he wanted to know once.

Monsters he has faith won't let him hurt them.)

His last thought before he loses consciousness is that the man who was stepping on him a moment ago really is so very… small.

〪〪〪〜〜⏆〜〜〭〭〭

"People who say that cigarettes after sex is the best have it all wrong." Kaname informed her while stepping back into the bedroom in nothing but his briefs and the towel he used to dry his hair as he settled himself onto the bed again.

Face smushed into a pillow, Elynna made a sound.

"It's actually cigarettes after shower after sex. Now that, is actual heaven, I tell you." He went on as he leaned over her to reach the nightstand and plucked what he needed from its surface to light himself one.

The sound coming from Elynna's throat in response went from neutral to fuck off with your bullshit and let me enjoy my post-fuck bliss in peace.

Kaname chuckled, reaching up to tie his still somewhat wet hair into a top knot.

"Pillowtalk isn't actually supposed to mean talking into your pillow, you know."

Elynna lifted her face.

"It makes for better conversation than you."

Her face fell back into the pillow.

"Oh yeah? How?"

…

She was going to stab him.

Seriously.

She didn't bring her weapons, but there were bound to be some knives pointy enough to do the job in the kitchen.

She lifted her face again out of pure spite.

"By shutting the fuck up."

"... You know what, you should keep doing this. It's actually pretty funny."

The sound coming from the pillow was closer to a very heavy sigh this time around, and she started shimmying towards the lower end of the bed.

Then she flipped on her back and sent herself tumbling right off the bed, taking the bedsheets with her.

Not all the fabric followed though, the last of it pulling taught instead.

She sat up, grabbed it, and pulled.

"Fuck!" Kaname yelled as the sudden shift of fabric under him forced him to windmill in an effort to regain his balance.

The curse was followed by a crash.

She sniffed in satisfaction and rose to her feet, wrapping the sheets around her to make her way to the bathroom.

"What was that for?!"

"Revenge."

"What?! But you said it was good!"

"Yeah," she confirmed from behind the door. "Until you opened your mouth."

"Oh yeah?! Well you better not count on the shower sex, then!"

She dumped the sheets on the floor and stepped into the shower stall.

"Wasn't planning on it."

She was on a schedule, after all.

And since she was in the house of a guy working on security matters at the Marine Headquarters, she might as well make the most of the time she had left.

Good thing he introduced himself before she did back at the pub so she was able to switch to Identity Number 3's cover story (aka the merchant-in-training travelling with her father to learn the ropes) instead of the one about being a Marine about to move to the Headquarters.

She couldn't be sure she wouldn't have slipped if detailed questions were asked.

"Make yourself at home, why don't you." The Marine grouched when he found her digging into the fridge after her shower.

"Thanks."

He shot her a deadpan look from where he was leaning against the doorway.

She ignored it, and lathered a generous amount of jam on the first piece of bread.

"So why the sudden need for a cigarette?"

"I literally told you I like smoking after sex. And a shower."

"Yeah, but you were talking about how you stopped smoking back at the bar."

"Ugh, well I did, except for my guilty pleasure, okay? Although, if I have to keep seeing that asshole from Enies Lobby at work, I might just go back to smoking one pack a day."

She paused.

Tilted her head.

"I thought you worked at the Headquarters."

He shrugged, straightening to go sit in the chair opposite to hers.

"Yeah, but me and a couple of guys got requisitioned to take care of checking and upgrading the security in a bunker on the main island, and one of the officers who have an office inside keeps insisting we put something to 'get rid of any filth who might tried to get within ten feet' of his precious person. Chose the fanciest stuff and won't listen when we tell him he has better options. If he was my subordinate, I would have punched him long ago."

A bunker on the main island…

Ah.

Didn't realise he mentioned Enies Lobby until it was too late, huh?

And now he's feeding her lies with the truth to keep things as safe as he can.

How cute.

"You could always trip him in the stairs." She shrugged. "With any luck, he might just break his neck."

Kaname sniffed.

"His rank is way higher than mine. Do you merchants have no respect for rank if it's not about the money it can bring y—"

She stuffed what was left of her second slice in his mouth.

"I don't feel like starting a marital spat with my one night stand. I'll get going."

"... Without your clothes?"

She rolled her eyes as the question reached her from the kitchen, the towel falling to the ground next to where her clothes were heaped in a pile.

"I'll pretend you weren't actually asking yourself that question—"

"What?! No! It was a joke, stupid—"

"—but yes, without my bra, since you couldn't be bothered to take it off properly." She finished while coming out of the bedroom to join him in the entrance of his apartment.

"The hell am I supposed to do with a torn bra?"

"I don't know, frame it and put it over your bed for the next woman to see?"

He shot her a horrified and clearly weirded out look.

Stupid question, stupid answer, dumbass.

"... That was a joke, right?"

She didn't even bother to dignify that with more than a flat stare, and turned around to grab the handle.

"Thanks for the souvenir, I guess?"

"Thanks for the sex." She answered dryly.

The door closed.

She realised it was the first time she left a trace of her presence other than the lies and the jokes she told.

As far as she knew, fingerprints and DNA weren't exactly something commonly used in this world.

She figured it was fine, though.

Even if the Marines did get suspicious about the whole Alice Ryan thing and managed to track her back here, she doubted they would get much from a piece of underwear —that would probably end up in the trash before she's out of the building anyway.

Although, she kind of wished Kaname would keep it.

The faces Smoker or Allan would make trying to get clues from her bra would be totally worth it —especially if she can get pictures of said faces.

The thought made her cackle, and the disapproving glance of the old man who already glared at her when she followed Kaname up the stairs two hours earlier became downright suspicious.

〪〪〪〜〜⏆〜〜〭〭〭

Isao soon calls back most of the agents from their search of how Heidi Schwarz escaped the barrage of bullets they attacked her with.

It's important to know, of course —they don't want her coming back into the room without them being able to see her.

But he doubts she'll try to attack them directly without some kind of plan, given that they're twenty-four and she's alone.

Twenty-five of his colleagues soon surround him, and he raises his voice to be heard by all.

"We're going to need a plan, so I'm open to suggestions."

"A plan?" Amadeus frowns somewhere on his right. "Why can't we just wait here? Getting separated or straying too far from here might not be a great idea, especially since we're just supposed to keep her in the bunker."

Isao gives a shake of his head.

"Normally, I would agree with you, but she expressed quite clearly her intention to get out, even if she has to use violence to do so. In those conditions, leaving her time to come up with a plan isn't a good idea, especially if she has other smoke bombs or similar weapons. We have the advantage of numbers, but that doesn't make us invincible."

"Yeah, well we also have the advantage of strength." Another one of his men intervenes. "Marines ain't really known for being Rokushiki users, and this one's a spy, so it's even less likely."

"You aren't either, Dazai." Isao reminds him —again. "And for your information, the Rokushiki aren't a privilege exclusive to the World Government agencies. Some Marines do know how to use them, and some don't need to master them to be stronger than all of us combined. As for Schwarz, she might be a specialist of undercover missions, but you saw how she reacted to the chief shooting at her in his office, Amadeus —just like me. She's an experienced fighter. We can't afford to underestimate her, especially if she's armed."

They all have experience.

Only agents who have gone on a number of missions and shown their aptitude during those can apply for training to become part of the CP9 elite, whose members are usually handpicked and trained from a very young age instead.

But they also haven't been on a mission since their training started two years ago. Some of their reflexes are bound to have become rusty during that time, no matter how much sparring they've done.

Most of the other agents seem to think the same, because there's little protest beyond that.

Which is good, because the only authority he has on these men is the fact that, beyond the almost two decades he has on most of them, they respect him for waiting so long to apply (and yet still being accepted) for this training that also leads to much more dangerous missions so he had a better guarantee of coming home to his daughters whenever possible until they were old enough to build their own life.

They start discussing possible maneuvers, but quickly find themselves blocked by the biggest problem.

They don't know where Garp's soldier currently is.

Or at least, they don't until the lights start to flicker.

At first Dazai and a number of others start cursing, thinking it's a technical problem.

But then the lighting stabilises again before it starts circling through various levels of intensity, then through different lighting modes, and then—

Everything turns black.

Or rather, the lights are switched off.

This was done by someone.

"She's in the control room." Amadeus concludes.

"Isn't it bad?" Jim asks next to him, somehow feeling the need to whisper in the sudden and almost complete darkness that surrounds them.

"It's pretty good, actually." Tetsuo's deep, calm voice answers from the other end of the circle. "Now we know where she is. If we move quickly enough, we have a chance of cornering her, or at least of getting clues on where she ran in case we're too late."

"He's right." Isao agrees with a nod. "Terrence, take three others and go see what you can find. Neutralise her if you can, and keep us updated through the baby Den Den Mushi anyway."

"Got it." Terrence agrees with a nod. "I'll call you when we reach the control room."

〪〪〪〜〜⏆〜〜〭〭〭

They've almost reached the control room when the music starts filtering through the speakers posted in the bunker.

The first, lone piano key makes Terrence frown in confusion.

But when the first words come out, he curses under his breath.

Given the volume of it, it might not be possible to understand what is communicated through the baby Den Den Mushi very well if more instruments come into play.

And the voice that just started singing is definitely not speaking the universal language.

If the girl is really coming from the Low Lands and Spandam knows it, then Terrence thinks he might know why the girl seems so unwilling to go along with her orders to stay put.

The opinion of the chief of the CP9 on the peoples of the Low Lands is as well-known as his inability to stay quiet about any of his opinions —or his ability to piss off most people remarkably quickly.

Regardless of all of that, the song in itself makes him wince.

It's loud.

It's loud, and everything is quiet.

In some ways, it reminds of the chants he used to hear when he attended religious ceremonies with his parents as a kid.

Except this is nothing like the uplifting, transcendent beauty of those chants, especially when hearing it in the almost complete darkness of an underwater bunker as it ricochets across hallways, instead of in an illuminated church surrounded by smiling faces.

This…

This sounds like the silence on a battlefield that isn't quite one yet.

(—and won't be until it has been inaugurated in the blood of thousands and the screams of thousands more.)

He shakes his head, knowing that he's just imagining things.

But his eyes have adjusted to darkness, and he sees that the three others have slowed down as well, as if they're taking the warning of the music seriously and slowing down in favour of focusing more on any possible movement or sound around them.

Nothing happens, however, and they reach their destination without any issues.

Except—

"It's locked!" He explains loudly over the music to Isao. "And trying to force it open hasn't worked! She probably pushed a lot of things in front of it—"

"But it confirms that she's still inside. Keep trying and call me back in three minutes. We'll send you reinforcements if needed."

"... Alright." Terry agrees with a frown as the Baby Den Den Mushi falls back asleep and he signals to two of his colleagues to keep kicking at the door —they don't want to risk firearms when they don't know what is on the other side.

He and the last member of their unit position themselves so as to keep guard on both sides of the door, just in case.

The tempo of the song has just started getting quicker, and now he feels uncomfortably sweaty as he tries to swallow with a suddenly dry throat.

(Like the indefinite stretch of time before two armies collide,

rushing towards each other knowing what awaits them—)

A heavy sigh escapes him.

Honestly, he can't believe they're wasting this much time on a Marine when Enies Lobby is being attacked by pira—

He freezes.

Then he curses, fumbling for his tiny Den Den Mushi wristwatch again, the beat of his heart uneasy and stumbling along the beat of the music.

"Terry? It hasn't been a minute yet—"

"We got it all wrong!" He says loudly over the increasing volume of the music.

They all assumed the girl panicked upon understanding that the elevator only communicated with one level in the entire bunker, that she gave herself away because she was trying to find another way out and messed with the light commands accidentally.

They've been following their training since the beginning and took the mindset that their enemy is a criminal.

Except the girl is a Marine.

And pretty much all Marines, apart maybe from the chore boys, have basic knowledge of how to work in control rooms, just like they know by heart the basic layout of a Marine base —which this bunker also follows.

"She knows everything we do about this place!"

Light control is one of the most basic functions in control rooms.

It's literally impossible for Schwarz to not know it.

Her messing up the lights can't be accidental.

She meant to draw them here.

In other words—

"It's a trap!"

"What—"

"Isao, tell me you didn't send others elsewhere! She's probably heading your—"

The music comes to an abrupt stop, leaving his ears ringing with a silence that bursts through him with a rush of chills.

"Not exactly." A voice whispers against his neck.

He screams, letting out a string of curses.

"Terry?!" One of his colleagues yells back.

With a burst of Soru Terrence quickly distances himself from the spot he was standing in and whirls around, taking out both of his pistols.

His eyes latch onto an impression of movement in the darkness in front of him, and he doesn't think.

The song starts again, just as abruptly and even more aggressively loud than before, and he just—

Presses the triggers.

His pistols scream over the song and the song screams through his veins, and someone's voice screams in his ears like dying—

"Terry!"

His fingers falter, his mind startled awake.

He blinks, confused.

The music is still the same.

It still owns his heartbeat.

Until he blinks again, and understands what his eyes see.

The small but thickly muscled form of Wang is standing in front of him with his two forearms protecting his face, still in the way that only Tekkai users can be.

He can't hear his two other colleagues, but—

The hallway reeks of blood.

"What the hell happened, Terry?! You just killed them, for fuck's sake!"

He can't feel his pistols slipping from his numb fingers.

Can barely feel the tears slipping down his cheeks as he stares at the forever still forms of his teammates.

They're dead.

Because of him.

His knees give way under his own weight as if his guilt is something physical.

The only reason why they don't hit the floor is the sudden stab of pain that flares from his back.

〪〪〪〜〜⏆〜〜〭〭〭

"Wang… Kill me! Hurry—"

Wang scoffs, and it's hysterical enough that it sounds like it should come from the throat of a little girl instead of a fucking grown man.

Everything is dark, too dark to see the face of the man he wrongly trusted with his back in this darkness, but he thinks that Terrence shakes probably as much as his voice does, and even ten feet away from where Wang knows his two other colleagues lie dead he can still taste the blood on his tongue like they're at his feet.

Their killer gulps air in and out like a dying man, every breath this close to the sob of a child as if what he did physically, mortally wounds him, and Wang hears the pain there and has the vicious thought of serve him right.

(It happened way too fast.

There was no warning.

One moment Terry was screaming, the next he was turning on them to start firing.

He was the only one of the four who knew how to use Tekkai, and the only one who reacted fast enough.

The two others could have used Soru, maybe, but in such a small hallway they might have been shot by stray bullets all the same.

More importantly, he was on kicking-the-door-down duty before everything went to shit, and he heard some noise inside.

Schwarz was in the room, he was sure of it.

So how the fuck did she come out to scare Terry like this?!

That—

That's not a fight.

It's a fucking nightmare.)

"Kill you?! If you think I'll help you escape an actual trial, you're hella wrong! Now tell me where is that—"

"Be… hind—"

Dropping Tekkai so he can move, he whirls around, but—

There's nothing.

An agonising groan is the only warning he gets before Terry collapses, and he catches him just in time.

His hand dips into something warm and wet where it lands on the man's back.

Wang freezes as he realises that—

Terry meant behind himself.

The dying body hits the ground as Wang lets go, but it's too late.

A blunt weight slams against his chest, and he crumples to the ground.

〪〪〪〜〜⏆〜〜〭〭〭

Still holding her folded tessen whose head she used to attack the last member of the four-man unit, Elynna exhales a sigh.

She was aiming for his throat, but looks like she hit the sternum instead.

Oh well.

A faint wheeze alerts her to the fact that her weight is still standing on the wounded man she stepped on to reach her last target, but she doesn't pay it much attention.

She stabbed him under the rib, but close enough to the spine that her blade ripped through a good chunk of his flesh —and his digestive organs.

She wasn't particularly careful when she took out the blade before shoving him forward, either.

If only due to the blood loss, the man doesn't have much time left.

There's no need to be careful with a soon-to-be corpse.

The song has slowed down to a trickle of piano keys, now, allowing her heartbeat to fall back into a more restful rhythm.

With a sigh, she straightens up and sheathes her war fan to go to each of the four men, checking their status and delicately taking out the receivers and dials from the tiny Den Den Mushi, the way Usopp explained to her once when theirs got sick.

Then she gathers them on the same spot, and stomps down hard.

〪〪〪〜〜⏆〜〜〭〭〭

Silence reigns next to the elevator where Isao and pretty much everyone else gathered as soon as Terrence hinted at the possibility of their opponent being on her way to them.

No.

Not opponent.

Enemy.

Because four of their Den Den Mushi are wide awake and calling the numbers of the four-man cell's members.

And the four little snails keep ringing in the empty air filled only with the fading notes of that damn music.

After what they heard from Terrence's comms, it can only mean one thing.

Four of their comrades are dead.

"What—" Amadeus starts in a whisper that suddenly gets much louder, even louder in the dark that they're all still trapped in. "No, seriously, what the fuck! What the hell just happened?!"

"Calm down, Amadeus."

"Calm down?! You want me to calm down?! She just—"

Isao grabs his arm and quickly drags him away from the rest of the group so they can speak more privately.

"Losing our cool is exactly what she wants us to do. So yes, I want you to calm down."

"... What?"

"She's trying to psych us out." Tetsuo explains as the hulking outline of his silhouette reaches them. "The darkness, the loud music… It's all designed to put us on edge so that we make mistakes —and to make surprise attacks easier for her. It would be stupid of her to attack us upfront, and she knows it."

Amadeus gulps, and looks back at the rest of the group.

The others are well-trained enough that they haven't lost their shit, but the shuffling and muttering tells him how uneasy what they understood about what happened makes them feel.

The girl's silence is like saying I have no need for discussion. Cold bodies don't talk.

More than that, they heard what Wang said.

It wasn't Schwarz who shot their first two comrades.

It was Terry.

It's obvious that he didn't mean to do that, but there's nothing worse than not knowing whether you can trust the people who are supposed to watch your back because they might get spooked and shoot you instead of the enemy.

He sighs, hand ruffling through his hair harshly.

"Fine, I get what you're saying. But you're wrong on one thing. She's not trying to psych us out."

"What do you mean?"

"I mean that all of this is just a game, for her."

"I doubt—"

"You weren't in the Chief's office, Tetsuo. I'm telling you, that girl is a psychopath. She pretty much admitted that her hobby is to bring people to tears!"

"That doesn't change what we have to do." Isao interrupts them. "The first thing we need to take care of is the lighting. The control room is too dangerous right now, but Seb's father is an electrician, if I'm not wrong, and had enough time to teach him a lot of things before Seb enlisted. We're going to send him and a few others to the electrical panel so we can get the lights back."

"Shouldn't we separate in two equal groups?"

"No. The rest of us should stay here. It's more likely that she'll either stay in the control room to watch our next move or that she'll come here directly to try and get to the elevator. It's more important to protect this spot."

Amadeus scowls.

"I disagree. I told you, she's not a soldier trying to get out as quickly as she can. She's a psychopath. She just wants to toy with us as long as she can. Sending just three or four people alone is crazy, she's going to slaughter them."

"Have more faith." Tetsuo chides him quietly. "It's three or four CP9 trainees against one girl who is unlikely to know any of the Rokushiki arts. Besides, she's bound to be hindered by the lack of lighting as well. And now that we're prepared, her tactics aren't going to work as well as they did against Terry and the others."

"... You're not even going to go with Seb?"

"No. I agree with Isao-san. Protecting this spot is more important."

Amadeus presses his lips together, but eventually shrugs off his doubts with a slow nod of agreement.

Maybe he's the one in the wrong, after all.

A Den Den Mushi watches the proceedings blankly from the wristwatch of one of the agents as orders are given and four other agents set off.

〪〪〪〜〜⏆〜〜〭〭〭

Elynna tightens the knot with a grunt, and gets back up once she's satisfied.

The only agent left alive now has both his hands and his feet tied and knotted together on top of it —not to mention that he's going to be out of it for some time.

She closes the door of the cleaning closet she found in the next hallway over and shoved him in with a sigh.

Tilting her head, she brings the only Den Den Mushi wristwatch that survived her cleaning operation close to her ear.

Electrical panel, huh?

It's just four people again, though.

Still leaves too many guarding the elevator doors.

She'll just have to draw out more of them, then.

〪〪〪〜〜⏆〜〜〭〭〭

As Franky falls into the water whose current immediately drags him towards the edge of the biggest waterfall he's ever had the displeasure to see (and he says that as a connoisseur of Water Seven's yearly floods), he attains enlightenment.

Unless you're a Fish-Man, fighting above the sea when your opponent can basically fly is…

Perhaps not the greatest idea.

He spits out a mouthful of water that he almost choked on because he was still screaming when that stupid zip-mouthed guy punched him back into the sea, and then proceeds to let out a slew of curses.

In his head, obviously.

He's not nearly as much of an idiot as some people think.

(Then again, a fair number of those people are dead or in pretty bad shape, since they were trying to fuck him over when they made that mistake.

Less idiocy in this world, as far as he's concerned.

The world clearly needs help on that point.)

Moving on.

This is starting to be pretty bad for him.

He might not have it as bad as Devil Fruit users, but he's still much heavier than most people, and his lung capacity is limited.

Pretty hard to fight in those conditions when the other guy is the only one of them who's able to keep his weight out of the wat—

Or not.

He grins.

After all, he's a regular at the art of dirty tricks.

If there's one thing he learned during all those years of fighting for his spot in the underground, it's that at some point you always find someone who has the upper hand on you.

Sure, you can build yourself up to match their level, and he's always up for some upgrading.

Except sometimes you don't have the time or the possibility to do that.

But not being able to straight up beat someone in a fight doesn't mean you can't win, as long as the other guy can't use his advantage.

He swims against the current to gain a few feet.

Alright.

Plan N like Nice and Simple is ready to go.

A miniature Coup de Boo is enough to send him high into the air (and above solid ground, which was the goal), angled just nice and right to slam his fist in the owl bastard's smug face—

Or that was the plan, at least.

Until the bastard in question pulls another weird technique right out of his ass and starts folding around his blows like a piece of paper.

(A wet and ugly piece of paper, but well.

Not everyone can be as cool as him.)

All that to say, he ends up being sent flying back towards the water.

Plan S like Super Dirty it is, then.

He launches his right hand through the air, and smirks when his fist closes around the agent's calf.

Then he quickly reels himself in before the bastard can do anything to try and shake him off —after hauling the both of them further down the waterfall for good measure.

That's when the agent lets out a stunned Chapa! —which Franky liberally translates as Super shit!

It just makes him laugh harder as he watches the agent start to frantically kick them both back up through the air.

"Sup, Fukurō-kun! You're not the best fish I've ever caught, but you're definitely the biggest, I'll give you that!"

"You rotten—" His opponent starts before he's cut off by his own panting breaths. "I can't carry two people when I can only use Geppō with one leg! We're going to fall!"

"Looks like it, uh? Well, you should have gone along with Plan N, then. I was trying to be nice, you know! But since you insisted on playing it like this, time to break your limits and bring us both back on solid ground, because I've got no reason to fall to my death all on my lonesome, eh? Seems to me like our fates are tied on this one!"

"Ugh… I'm warning you, I'm going to kill you as soon as I'm done with this!"

"That so?"

"Chapapapapa! Yeah! I've even found a way to do it all in one blow!"

"Oh yeah? Well lucky you, same goes for me, Fukurō-kun!"

He doesn't, but bluffing is part of the job, and he's got it down pat.

Besides, flying by the seat of his pants has always worked out best for him in battle.

(Outside of battles—

Well.

He's learned to be more careful.

At the very least, to consider the possible consequences of his actions before following his own whims.)

When they do reach ground level though, the CP9 agent just… keeps going.

"Not that this isn't nice, Fukurō-kun, but when are you going to stop stalling and get us back on the ground so I can bash your face in?"

"Shut up, Chapapapa! I'm not taking any orders from you! I'll make you eat those words!"

And then he starts spinning on himself through the air and heading straight for the Tower of Justice.

"This is it for you! My body is protected with Tekkai, but the momentum is going to crush yours against this wall!"

Franky clings harder to the leg he's holding on.

"Sure, I'll definitely end up as pulp if you do that…"

Quickly deploying the Franky Centaur, he tightens one set of legs around both of the agent's legs to land on his torso where the rotation has less chance of sending him flying straight off.

"Key word, Fukurō-kun: If." He grins as he joins both hands together. "Now that your legs are blocked, you can't change directions!"

"So what?! That's not going to help you stop my momentum!"

"Oh, it will! Let me show you a cool thing!"

He turns slightly to the side at the last moment and uses his Small Wind Cannon, the burst of pressure counteracting the direction and power of the momentum just enough to bring it to a stop.

The agent's face goes slack with astonishment.

Too bad.

He should have known better than to try that shit against a former shipwright, especially one who was an apprentice of the most skilled shipwright in the world.

Franky might not do that job anymore, but that doesn't mean he's let himself forget all the knowledge he learned from that time —the mathematics and physics of it included.

"Don't look so pale!" He laughs. "We're above the ground right now, so you might just survive! Now how about you try that one! It's a super cool thing, this time!"

The stubborn bastard manages to get a few hits in before Franky can fire his Max Cola Power Wind Cannon in his face, but it doesn't really matter.

He's never seen any wannabe crime group —or their headquarters— resist the Coup de Vent.

Those CP9 guys might be superhumans, but they definitely don't understand the meaning of the word like he does.

The bastard's body cushions Franky's own landing, caved in stomach jostling under his weight with the wet crack of broken bones and bruised organs.

It still takes him a surprising amount of energy to make it out of the crater his own attack created, though.

"Ugh, even though I've been super this whole week… Looks like I'm already out of cola."

So he makes his way towards the wall of the Tower that will bring back to the kitchen the quickest and starts climbing.

He doubts he can afford to spend much time here with almost empty reserves.

Besides, he's kind of worried for the tiny reindeer.

He doubts that the dude he was fighting is going to stay in that fridge forever.

The little guy is a Straw Hat, so he's probably stronger than he looks, but still—

"Finally…" He grunts as he reaches the balcony of the right level.

His fingers grasp the edge of the railing—

And then a hand grabs his wrist tightly, and he finds himself hauled up over the barrier and into a corner of the balcony.

"Woah! What the hell!"

"Lower your voice, damnit." The Straw Hats' cook hisses at him.

He's not even looking at Franky, and when Franky follows his gaze he—

definitely understands why.

Because standing right where he was ready to jump is a…

Actually, he doesn't know what it is exactly.

What he does know is that it's freaking huge, as tall as the whole storey and probably four or five times larger than him, with fists that look like they could break down buildings in one blow with the same effectiveness as the Coup de Vent.

They probably can, given that one of said fists is holding the badly injured form of the CP9 guy who was locked in the fridge.

Just looking at the man makes Franky wince.

He probably has more broken bones than not, blood and white piercing through the black of his suit jacket where the creature's blows have snapped his limbs like twigs between the jaws of a playing dog.

The creature suddenly and negligently throws the body aside.

Franky gapes as he watches the agent sail through the air at high speeds and disappear somewhere all the way above the Main Island.

"Wait a damn minute." He breathes as he points at the large pink hat that covers the creature's head. "Is that—"

"Yeah." The cook confirms with a tight voice. "It's Chopper."

"... Yo, Eyebrow, what the hell?"

"I was about to help him because things were going badly for him," Sanji starts to explain as they both eye the giant reindeer warily for any sign of movement. "But then he transformed into… this. He didn't recognise me, either —I almost got stomped to death."

Then he sighs, eyeing the giant creature in front of them with a look that tells Franky he's more worried for his crewmate than the danger he clearly represents for the both of them right now.

"Look, Chopper uses a specific preparation to augment his abilities. I don't know the details of it, but it's like any kind of food. If he takes too much of it over a given time frame, it starts to have negative effects on his body. I've never seen him take this form, though, so he probably pushed way too far this time around."

"Well we better find a solution fast, because in his state he could attack any of the others, and all that super vibe of power he's got going on isn't going to be all that helpful if he can't control it. Were you dealing with one of them too? Because we can't afford a distraction while we're taking care of that." He argues with a jab of his fingers towards where the giant reindeer has started climbing the wall of the Tower.

Tower that is definitely not structurally sound anymore, even without that kind of weight to further endanger its stability.

"It's fine. I don't have anyone to fight for now, since I was in charge of managing things here between those of us who stayed. I might not be as good as Elynna-chan with information gathering, but I got some intel from the few small fries who were left too, since we have to prepare our escape."

"Can't we just use the ship that was supposed to take me and Nico Robin away?" Franky asks with a raise of his eyebrows, because damn, he completely forgot about this, and—

Who is Elynna, anyway?

He's pretty sure he already heard the name —or something close to it— from other members of the crew, but he only saw one other woman besides Nico Robin, and he's pretty sure that's not her name.

"I doubt it's a big ship. If the Buster Call is launched, we'll have to deal with warships, so it might not be enough. Besides, between the size of those doors and the waterfall, the currents are probably working weirdly. Even Nami-chan might need some help to get through those."

Franky shrugs.

The guy seems like he's got it handled, and they have bigger problems to deal with right now, anyway.

"As long as we don't have to worry about being interrupted. Know any way to fight the effects of the little guy's drug?"

The cook's face scrunches up at the word, but he doesn't seem to find any good reason to call it wrong and just ignores it altogether.

"... No. Though I doubt he can hold a form this huge for long. The Rumble Balls themselves don't last more than a few minutes."

"Yeah, I don't think that's gonna work out. There are several fights happening upstairs, and there's those two friends of yours who got themselves trapped in seastone—"

"Don't remind me." The boy grumbles.

Franky snorts in amusement.

Honestly, those kids.

"Chopper's a Devil Fruit user, though."

"Well, now we know what we're going to use. Just need to get him there. Say… How hard can you kick?"

But the cook shakes his head.

"It's not so much the weight that's the problem, as long as I can get several kicks in. But in this form, his fur is pretty much a reinforced armour. That asshole from the CP9 tried pretty much all his techniques against Chopper. None of them did anything worth noting."

Franky whistles at that —and the fact that the weight apparently wouldn't have been a problem in the first place.

Talk about a bunch of monsters.

Maybe they didn't come all the way here just because they're crazy, after all.

"That's one hell of a reindeer you guys found yourselves! Well, you're super lucky I'm the one you found first, 'cause I've got exactly what we need! … As soon as I get some more cola in me."

"I took some. Better safe than sorry, I figured." The cook replies as he throws three new bottles in his direction.

"Nice! C'mon, Eyebrow, let's do this!"

"The name is Sanji, though."

"Sure thing, Eyebrow!"

"I put poison in your cola, by the way."

Loud coughing erupts through the air.

"For real?!"

"No, but I will if you keep calling me that. Now hurry up."

〪〪〪〜〜⏆〜〜〭〭〭

The island they stopped at that day was welcoming someone from the Marine administration with a pretty high level of clearance, which meant that Nami and Usopp hid their flag, tied Luffy up in the boys' room and made sure to imprint upon Zoro and Robin the importance of not leaving the ship considering their wanted posters so that they would actually get out alive from the town, which was pretty much swarming with soldiers compared to its usual frequentation.

It also meant that Elynna decided to hit the local Marine-only bar rather than try her luck at getting inside the base like she first planned.

There were a few important-looking people there, but she ended up sitting at a table with the common soldiers instead.

No need to put too much attention on herself.

The conversations were probably more fun, too, and she got to meet Akira.

Akira, who worked as some kind of secretary for one of said important-looking people —and thus handled some pretty important communication.

Akira, who definitely couldn't hold their alcohol as well as they thought they did.

Also known as: a perfect occasion to get out of the bar early and talk to them alone.

They were definitely careful while she walked them home, though —even with the amount of alcohol in their bloodstream.

Most people weren't so careful within their personal space, though.

As shown by the coded documents she found on Akira's desk while they were taking a shower.

She fished an apple from the bowl of fruits in the kitchen, and checked for any Surveillance Den Den Mushi.

Then she proceeded to fish the Baby Cameko out of the inside pocket of the thick jacket she threw on over her uniform to take pictures of said documents, all the while biting into and chewing loudly on said apple to cover the noise as much as possible as she idly tried to find some kind of logic in the encrypted lines that Robin learned how to read a long time ago for her own survival.

Good thing the older woman was with her and Usopp on Zephrim —and that she was pretty much down for anything that might involve messing with the Marines.

When Akira stepped out of the bathroom, she was lounging on the couch and finishing her apple.

"You good?"

"Uh… Yeah, thanks for walking me."

"Don't mind it. You might want to drink some water and eat something before sleeping, though. Future you will thank you for it." She commented lightly as she got to her feet.

"Oh." They said, features falling a bit under the shadow of the towel they were using to dry their hair and piercing glinting in the low lights as they scrunched their nose in what appeared to be embarrassment. "You're not… staying?"

She paused, regarding them for a moment before stepping closer.

"Nah. Maybe next time, but…" She leaned in just a bit closer, inspecting the flush under their heavy tan and the slight widening of their grey-brown eyes. "You'd taste a bit too much like beer tonight."

She threw the apple core in the nearest trash can upon getting out of the building, and bought some snacks for the Cameko.

Turned out, the documents were minutes of various meetings.

Not directly useful on their own, but still.

She heard enough rants from her sister to know who Spandam was even if his existence and that of the unit he commanded was basically a state secret in this world.

It was definitely interesting to learn that Garp and him clearly didn't get along.

〪〪〪〜〜⏆〜〜〭〭〭

It takes another song for Jim, Seb and their two colleagues to reach the electrical panel.

By the time they do, Jim is seriously getting pretty annoyed with how disturbing the sounds are as the volume of them vibrates through his bones like a physical touch.

He's pretty sure he's jumped almost every time the music was changing in one way or another, expecting some kind of attack.

He's the one who specialises in assassination, which means that he's the one who's supposed to scare others while hiding in the shadows, not the other way around, damnit!

He sighs as Seb curses again.

This is going to take a long time.

Then again, he's working on tiny electric wires with only the flickering light of rapidly consumed matches to help him.

They're already lucky that Seb knows his way around those wires enough to work half-blindly like this.

As the whispered beginning of a new song filters through the air, he steps away to light his cigarette so that the noise of his lighter won't bother his colleague, breathes in a first breath of smoke—

And almost chokes on it and his cigarette.

What the fuck—

Now he knows why Terrence got spooked into shooting his own friends so easily compared to the rest of them, who were waiting by the elevator and heard only the darkness and the music.

That idiot absolutely sucked at any kind of hyperawareness abilities, but Jim has always had something of a talent for it, and something—

Something's seriously wrong.

Even the strongest humans can't project their aura too far.

Aura has to do with vital energy.

By definition, it's tied to the owner's body as much as their soul —or whatever else you call the not-corporeal part of living beings.

He's spent six months on a mission in the Marine Headquarters, so he had the opportunity to see what Conqueror Haki feels like, but this isn't it either.

Conqueror Haki has to do with will. Where aura is static, Haki is dynamic and can be projected pretty far away from the body. Except, Conqueror Haki is an attack you feel in your mind first and in your body second —if your mind loses the fight.

But right now, his hands and his heartbeat are trembling a lot more than his mind, although it's bound to be affected if this goes on for too long.

No.

Whatever this is, it's too slow to be Haki, and too dynamic to be aura.

The lights are starting to come back now, still flickering but enough to tell him that the guy guarding the other end of the hallway is feeling it, that it has seeped through the entire corridor and maybe even beyond.

But it has only become strong enough to make breathing and swallowing difficult now —so ridiculously dense it feels like he's trying to breathe in water instead of air— and in that instant Jim knows three things.

Someone is here.

That someone is almost definitely not human, because he doesn't know of any human being or any power that can make… whatever this is.

And he doesn't know if the heaviness comes from sheer power, killing intent or just the whole not-human-thing, but what he does know is that they're deep in shit, because their group is this small precisely because they assumed Schwarz would attack the elevator room.

Not them.

"Everyone on guard!" He barks as he quickly dials Isao's number. "She's here!"

The others having contacted them to explain that the girl seemed to have used the ventilation shaft to leave the room after throwing those smoke bombs, he quickly moves to press his back against the wall so he can see the air vent not far above Seb and the agent guarding him without having to worry about his own back.

He sees his colleague on the other side of the hallway mirror him.

"Jim." Isao calls out, barely heard over the increasing volume of the song that sounds like a threat closing in, the flickers of the lights like steps coming always closer. "What do you see?"

"Nothing for now. Seb!"

His colleague yells back that the flickering doesn't come from a problem with the wires, at least as far as he can see.

"I'm sending you a few others. They're taking the same path as you."

"Heh." Jim chuckles breathlessly from a dry throat. "Won't say no to that."

But the crescendo of the song is coming to a head, and he knows that the others won't arrive in time to help them deal with the first attack, because he's almost sure that Schwarz likes to time her attacks with the song for better scare effect.

He hates how well it's still working despite the fact that he knows.

The song fades into silence, and he frantically looks around to try and spot where the attack will hit.

And then he sees her.

In the periphery of his vision, right where his side of the hallway corners into another.

The light flickers on, and she's there, standing barely two feet away from him.

Staring at him.

(Her eyes look black, look like holes swllowing the sallow paleness of her face.

It hits him like a punch in the lungs.)

The song explodes into sound again through the speakers as he fires.

The lights flicker off, then back on, and she's gone.

"Jim?!"

"Regroup!" He shouts back at his colleagues as he quickly backs off towards them. "We're meeting the others!"

The four of them meet right as the lights flicker off again.

Then they're back on, and Seb is dead, a strange blade stabbed straight through his heart.

For a moment, they freeze.

Then Jim is picking up the weapon and yelling at the others to follow him as he runs down the hallway.

A slight clicking sound reaches his ears, and he skids to a stop just in time to see another smoke bomb go off right at the bend.

"The other way, quick!"

The other two look completely panicked, so he speeds up to lead them.

It's only as he turns into another hallway that he realises they're running away from the guys coming to help them.

It might just be bad luck.

But Schwarz shouldn't have known they were coming to the electrical panel either until she saw it on the screens of the control room, and she was there too soon for that.

The music is so loud, but he still hopes that his own message can go through the Den Den Mushi clearly.

"Isao, I think she knows which path the others are taking, she blocked it off! The comms aren't saf—"

A scream interrupts him.

He chances a glance over his shoulder, but another smoke bomb has probably been thrown, because the smoke is catching up to them, and what is likely now only a dead body has been swallowed by the rushing grey cloud.

He doesn't have it in him to yell at the newbie following him to hurry the fuck up as he turns back to round another corner.

He's more than fit, but his feet are hurting with every step he stomps into the floor with more energy than he needs to use, and his lungs ache with panting so hard.

Nothing happens to warn him that he's alone until a weight pounces on his back, too suddenly for him to use Kami-e to escape.

He powers Soru through his legs, but the weight of his attacker has grabbed him too tightly to be thrown off by the sudden burst of speed, so instead he stabs blindly over his shoulder with the knife he's still holding—

and finds himself being strangled by his own arm instead.

"Thanks for holding on to it, but that's mine."

〪〪〪〜〜⏆〜〜〭〭〭

"I told you!" Amadeus explodes as soon as the music is quiet enough to confirm that no one will respond to their calls. "I fucking told you that sending them alone was suicide!"

"It doesn't seem to fit someone like Garp The Fist to have an actual psychopath in their ranks." Tetsuo counters grimly as he crosses his arms. "And it was hard to gauge her motives from just one attack. Besides, Isao-san couldn't have known she was going to know what our next move was."

Isao presses his lips together.

This is getting out of hand.

Some of the agents around him seem angry, but most are starting to look genuinely scared about facing the lone girl younger than them by at least a decade who is slowly strangling what should have been their territory with fear.

And she's still neither talking nor showing herself.

What should he do?

What are his options?

He still thinks that staying near the elevator would be for the best, but he's not sure his already undermined authority will allow him to keep all the men here when some look definitely ready to go out and avenge their colleagues, not to mention that staying here to wait might just turn out worse than moving for those who are getting increasingly jumpy.

The still flickering lights really don't help.

His Baby Den Den Mushi's call draws his attention to the support team he sent after Jim's unit.

For a moment, he hesitates to keep the communication private.

But he's not actually the leader of these men, and he's a firm believer in the fact that the not knowing can have much worse consequences than the knowing everything and especially the worst.

So he stays in the middle of the group the others form around him as he takes the call.

(The music rolling in the background is still loud, but

slow-paced like his resignation

or a war already fought and lost.)

He regrets it almost as soon as the first words reach him.

"It's a massacre." Dazai tells him grimly. "They've been cut to pieces. I can't even tell which arm belongs to whom. And from the screams we heard… They might have been alive when it happened."

Amadeus curses.

Tetsuo's face somehow becomes even more closed-off.

Someone whimpers.

"... Are you all okay?"

"... Yeah, we're getting back to base and watching each other's back."

"What about the Den Den Mushi?"

"They had all been set free from the wristwatches from what I saw. Why?"

"I have to check something. I'll see you in a few minutes."

Then Isao hangs up, and starts dialing the numbers of all the other members of Terrence's team, one by one.

"Isao-san?"

"What are you doing?" Another agent asks.

A third one just blanches as he seems to come to the same conclusion Isao just reached himself.

When they tried calling their colleagues, all four Den Den Mushi were awake but mute.

They thought it meant that the four numbers they tried calling had no receivers left to even take the call.

Except they couldn't identify four dialling tones and differentiate them when all four snails were calling at the same time.

So—

It's perfectly possible that one of the calls did connect, and the person on the other end just had no interest in making their presence known.

At the third and last number, the Baby Den Den Mushi stays silent as well.

But it wakes up.

"She kept one of the receivers. She heard everything we said since the beginning." He concludes in the stillness that falls upon them like an execution.

"You're the smart one, then."

The voice is low-pitched for a woman, casual, and surprisingly level for a murderous psychopath.

It's the voice he heard coming out of Heidi Schwarz's mouth not even half an hour before.

"Well, maybe not so smart." She goes on, lackadaisical and offhand. "You haven't been using your pawns very intelligently so far."

〪〪〪〜〜⏆〜〜〭〭〭

"Schwarz! Where the fuck are you?! Come fight me, I'll show you smart when I cut you to fucking pieces!" The tiny Den Den Mushi spits at her with a different voice.

Elynna inspects her kukri, and hopes she can clean all the blood off it.

It makes the handle slippery.

More importantly, Fang will kill her if she comes back with blades that are in any way not fucking pristine, regardless of how many people she had to kill with them.

She sighs.

Maybe she should have read one of Hebi's books on autopsies.

There might be tips in those on how to not shower oneself in blood while cutting off limbs.

Then again, autopsies are made some time after death, and on cold corpses, at least as far as she knows.

In her case, the bodies in question were…

Well, freshly dead.

At least strewing random limbs through the hallway after waving them at the walls and the floor like an idiot to spray some blood here and there seems to have had the intended effect.

The scaring —and scarring— them part, not the turning herself into a psychopath part.

Collateral damage, she supposes.

"Schwarz! Don't you fucking dare to leave!"

She glances at her stolen wristwatch.

Not a bad idea, though.

But she's not exactly sure how to behave to keep up the charade.

She never thought she would regret refusing to watch any and all horror movies until now.

She stretches her hands above her head, spine popping with the movement until she's satisfied and lets her arm fall back down.

Looks like there's only one option left.

Channel your inner Joker, your inner Cheshire Cat, and wing it.

〪〪〪〜〜⏆〜〜〭〭〭

"Stop screaming. I'm not dead."

The voice is mild, the eyes flat.

Isao doesn't think he's ever seen a Den Den Mushi look so close to scary.

Amadeus' face has suddenly gone from an enraged red to an ashen paleness, his voice from a scream to complete silence.

Isao doesn't feel much better.

The jab is made all the more cruel by the flippant delivery.

But he has to make her talk as much as possible if he wants to understand her better.

A psychopath she may be, but that doesn't mean there's no logic to what she does, and the more information they have, the more the men around him will be able to rationalise their fear of her.

"None of us here can be pawns, since this isn't a game."

"Everything is a game, Isao-san. The stakes are just higher in some games compared to others. But whatever the game you're playing is, it's always harder to win when you don't sacrifice your pawns. And by sacrifice, I mean that their loss is supposed to be useful."

Under the flickering lights, one of the agents next to him looks as pale as Schwarz herself seemed to be, wide eyes staring down in unblinking horror at the baby snail's monotone expression.

"You can't start over once you're dead, Heidi-san."

"No one knows that. The only thing that matters is what your pawns believe about that, anyway."

Isao swallows down a surge of acidic bile.

A few other agents are taken away to calm down before they run off on their own to try and kill the Marine.

"I disagree. And I'm not their leader."

"Well, who am I supposed to play, then?"

"... Play?"

"Obviously. You're keeping me down here when I could be watching Marines Buster Call one of their own sacred spots to hell and back. I'm bored as fuck, you know."

That's when Isao feels himself go pale, too, thinking of how young she looked when she was standing just a few feet away from him.

(Just a few years younger than his youngest daughter, really—)

The music is still there, but the silence in the room reminds him of the silence on some of the battlefields he stood on, once all the blood was spilled.

(Not quite alive,

with all the horror and none of the victory.)

"I'm going to kill her!" Someone yells a few feet away, and it seems to break the spell, at least just a little bit.

"What kind of game do you want to play?" Tetsuo asks, staring hard at all those whose heads whip towards him in shock until they fall silent.

The more they know about her tastes and the rules she set for herself, the better they'll be able to predict her moves.

The girl hums.

"Let's say cat and mouse."

Isao only realises that Dazai and the others are back when one of the group's members makes a sound that suggests he's this close to puking his guts.

He honestly doesn't feel much better about hearing a manhunt being treated like a game played for fun —and named after a game he has played with his own daughters numerous times.

"... You're the cat, then?" Tetsuo asks anyway, voice hard and features stony. "And we have to escape from you?"

"Maybe, maybe not. I'm alone, and Spandam did seem to trust that you could kill me if he sent me here with you."

Dazai lets out a string of slurs, and Amadeus struggles so hard in Tetsuo's heavily muscled arms at the thinly-veiled condescension behind the words that the latter grunts with the effort of keeping him still.

"Who's the cat and who's the mouse, then?" Isao takes over again.

"How am I supposed to know? That's the point of the game."

It might just be the flickering of the lights, but there's the slightest hint of mockery in the line of the Den Den Mushi's mouth, and Isao grits his teeth.

"And the rules?" He asks tightly.

"No cheating, of course. It's a must in any game."

There's a pause that she doesn't bother filling with any other rule, and that's when Isao realises that this is all pointless.

None of this is going to tell them anything.

He forced himself and all the men around him through an entire conversation that made him sick, but every word of it was said purely to confuse him and toy with him.

There's no game, no rules, and no structure to anything this girl says.

She just wants an all-out slaughter.

"Try to entertain me, won't you?"

The baby snail on his watch falls asleep.

He looks up, and meets Amadeus and Tetsuo's eyes.

"Change of plans. Bring her to me."

"What?!" Dazai spits. "You still want to keep her alive after—"

"No. But I do want to know the actual reason why she came to Enies Lobby."

"What's the point?" Amadeus scowls. "It won't matter when she's dead."

"It will. Either she's actually the psychopath you think she is, or she's actually part of Garp The Fist's unit, and in that case I doubt that she's really killing for the sake of it considering his reputation —which means she might have a mission of her own that is important enough to warrant killing Government agents to fulfill it. I knew this kind of thing happened, and sometimes the CP9 agents have to kill Marines to fulfill their mission, but…"

Isao meets Dazai's gaze, shoulders set with the determination of a man who knows how the truth of his decision will reflect on his daughters' lives and his own name if his colleague doesn't go along with what he wants.

"I'm not going to accept whatever is happening behind the scenes right now. Not when we're risking our lives like this. I need to know what she's really doing here because if we're interrogated about her death once this is over, I don't want to leave anyone any room to argue that the death of eight of my friends was justified for her little mission. I want all the details I might need to tell the story of how Heidi Schwarz was failing so badly in her mission that it endangered us, and us killing her was a favour we did her superiors. If I'm going to be responsible for the death of this girl, then I won't be blamed for it, just like I won't be killed for following the orders of my superior. If they wanted us to not get in her way, they should have told us about her mission."

〪〪〪〜〜⏆〜〜〭〭〭

Somehow, she manages to mostly clean her kukri despite how tiny the sink of the control room is.

They'll soon get stained again, anyway.

She moves close to the wall of screens, nudging the tuning knob for overall light intensity up just a tiny bit so that the bunker's lights actually work like they should, adjusting them to a setting low enough to get something more dark than light, but not so low that they start flickering.

She reaches up to rub the ache that the almost stroboscopic effect of the last ten or so minutes created behind her eyes, and then squints to make sense of all the different places that are being shown.

The room where the elevator is seems to have been locked, and it looks like they're laying traps inside the air vents connected to it.

They might be simple, but they might also be complex, and she doesn't want to try her luck only to lose a goddamn hand.

She's not Usopp.

Besides, it looks like the others are scattering through the bunker.

Meaning much less people guarding the room she's trying to reach, but it also makes it harder for her to reach said room.

It would be easy to get caught between two teams of agents with so many mobile groups whose movements she can't follow, since they seem to be moving independently —and using signs to speak to each other.

She's managed to learn a few by observation, but she mostly tried to avoid that topic during her escapades, since it would have blown her cover.

Not to mention, she's not going to be able to come back here all the time to check the different groups' positions on the screens.

And she'll have to put a maximum if not all of them out of commission if she wants to avoid possible survivors being a problem for her crewmates when they'll come through the tunnel, because she's not sure she can block the elevator with her very limited knowledge of how it works.

She does a quick count.

Sixteen people left and very little margin for error.

She thinks of Robin crying out on that balcony, of the nakama she last saw all the way on the other side of that canyon.

She never promised to keep winning until she makes it out alive to join the others, and she's not sure she believes in miracles and the impossibility of impossible things the way her Captain does.

But she did make a promise.

At the very least, she'll keep holding on to those odds until she has no limits left to break and nothing left to hold on to the odds and break the limits with.

〪〪〪〜〜⏆〜〜〭〭〭

It's Chopper.

It has to be.

It's Chopper, and he doesn't recognise her.

The realisation comes at the worst moment as Nami stares up at the huge fists her crewmate is about to slam right where she's standing.

She screams, scrambling on slippery feet to get away.

And then a shoulder is digging into her sternum as an arm wraps around her waist to haul her away.

She recognises the feel of the fabric under her hand through the layer of soap Kalifa covered her in even before her head is tucked into someone's chest to protect her from the shocks as they roll across the floor.

"Are you okay, Nami-chan?" Sanji asks urgently, keeping his voice low as he untangles himself from her.

"Yeah—" She breathes out, gaze sweeping through the room to find dust everywhere, offering them probably a minute or two of relative protection from the CP9 agent's attacks. "Thanks, Sanji-kun. Was that—"

The worry returns twice as strong, wiping out the cook's relieved smile.

"I think he took more Rumble Balls than he could handle to make sure he would win."

It doesn't surprise her.

When it comes to being able to pull his weight, Chopper can be as stupid as their sharpshooter, no matter how intelligent he is.

So really—

It would be just like Chopper.

It would be just like each and every one of the Straw Hats, maybe.

"It never happened before. What should we—"

"You don't need to worry about it, Nami-chan. Franky took care of his own fight, so we had the time to come up with a solution while we followed Chopper."

She sags with relief.

She almost asked him to go after Luffy and Elynna to help them when he had the bad luck of coming across the one enemy he would never be able to handle right off the bat and came straight to her, but he left right after saying he would coordinate things here and watch out for Usopp and Chopper, since the two of them tend to be less confident in their fighting abilities when alone —not to mention that the sharpshooter has very specific skills that can leave him vulnerable against close-range opponents and is already severely injured from their time in Water Seven.

It was clearly a good call on his part, and she's glad he made it.

After all, apart from Elynna, he's pretty much the only one who is able to still think about the bigger picture while focusing on a fight, and it's precisely the kind of help they need given the way they're all scattered around.

"Alright." She smiles as she leans in for a quick hug. "I'll leave it to you guys."

He beams at her.

"We'll take care of it! Oh, can you bring the key downstairs when you're done? Usopp and that stupid seaweed face somehow managed to cuff their hands together with seastone, and they need your key to free themselves."

Nami stares blankly at his disappearing back and then lets out a loud groan, torn between sheer disbelief and the thunderous scowl that wants to take over her face.

Honestly, it's like all the intelligence of the human and male members of the crew is concentrated within one of them.

Still.

When, not if.

Back when Sanji first met them, he never would have dared to leave her alone against someone this strong, and while he still shoots a worried look her away over his shoulder as he runs after Chopper's bellowing, the fact that he allows his trust in her to dictate his moves instead of his worry makes a smile win over the scowl.

Nami stares some more at the hole Chopper tore through the wall, unable to completely swat away the worry given how painful his breathing sounded and still wishing she can help somehow.

But right now, the only thing she can do is swallow that wish back down and hope the others will be fine, because she has her own shit to deal with—

"You're not looking in the right direction!"

Shit.

Head whipping towards the rest of the room, her breath stops short as she sees the flash of a Rankyaku spinning toward her.

She flails, smoothed over feet slipping against the stones and carpet of the floor and sending her sprawling on the ground.

And then she finds a grip just in time to throw herself out of the attack's trajectory, crashing against the ground just two feet away.

"Ack!"

Panting from the scare she just gave herself, she blinks confused eyes down at her own legs, only to find that one of them is back to its normal state.

How—

She pats the skin with both hands in an attempt to understand why this part of her and not the rest, but only finds—

Water.

Of course.

She has the distant thought that it's a good thing it's not Luffy who's fighting this woman.

He and Zoro might have learned to take a bath or a shower at least every other day, but she's pretty sure her Captain hasn't understood how soap and water bring about cleanliness —and being clean probably comes last in the list of reasons for why the two wash themselves.

Luffy is much more interested in the fun games or the nice, relaxing time Usopp or Elynna bribe him with to get him into a bathtub in the first place.

Zoro just wants to escape Sanji's threats of getting only the nutrients and none of the nice tastes from his food, and avoid getting shoved into the sea or woken up with a bucket of cold water upended above his feet by Elynna, since she's spent so much time close to him between their spars and their naps that she's become able to slip past his guard when he's not actively expecting an attack from her.

Nami chases the smile and the thought away with a shake of her head and rushes towards where a geyser is splashing water everywhere since Chopper tore the bathtub out of the floor and damaged the water pipes in the process.

That damn Soru thing makes Kalifa much faster than her, though, and the following kick sends her crashing into a pile of rubble, gravel scraping her skin raw and bigger pieces of rock digging into her until it feels as if they've left an imprint in her bones.

The resulting pain leaves her grip shaking as she tries to defend herself against the rush of bubbles heading her way, the Clima Tact slipping from her still too-smooth hands.

(And the woman keeps going on about how she's really being nice by giving her such a smooth skin, but as far as Nami is concerned—

It's not smooth.

It's slimy.

It's slimy, and disgusting, and it feels just like the hands of one of the Fish-Men Arlong usually put in charge of punishing her when she disobeyed too much or drew maps too slowly, too badly—

It makes her feel weak just like in those days, but instead of fear crawling through her veins like chloroform creeping in numbly,

it only feeds the anger in her that rages at all the people on this island who think that Robin deserves to die—

the anger at this woman who thinks she knows better how Nami should look,

who thinks she's more beautiful and stronger and that she's right and Nami is wrong, about everything and especially about Robin and even more about their fight—

Well, fuck that.

She doesn't need to compare herself to anyone in the first place, and she might not be part of the Monster Trio, but she's plenty strong enough to show that woman how wrong she is.)

Luckily, she manages to grab it again before the woman's finger shoots like a bullet into the meat of her shoudler, sending her flying again but ridding her of the bubbles that sap her strength in the process.

Small mercies, she thinks through the coughing fit that rakes through her and makes her back throb even more after all those shocks —not to mention the hole in her shoulder.

Still, she finds her coughs turning into chuckles as she slowly hauls herself back onto her feet, and the frown of the woman who is clearly doubting her sanity just makes her smile wider.

"What is so amusing? Do you want me to keep throwing you around?"

She doesn't seem to realise the innuendo hiding under her words.

Or maybe Lynna just rubbed off on her after all this time.

This reminds her of something, though.

Something that was written on her First Mate's note, about this woman.

"Throw me around? No, thanks. That's not really my kink. And I prefer to go on a few dates first."

There's a pause, and then the woman gapes at her, flushing even worse than when she realised she mistakenly took Chopper for Nami.

"Wha—" She starts, stopping to clear her throat when she notices how high-pitched her voice is. "What are you on about?!"

Nami offers her the most innocent face she can, which is pretty damn good considering how many pirates fell for it in the past.

"Me? But you're the one who offered! I was pretty confused at first, though. I mean, we are in the middle of a fight —unless that's the kind of foreplay you're into—"

"No!" The woman yells vehemently. "That's not what I meant, you degenerate!"

"No need to be so rude. You look awfully red, though." Nami comments lightly with a smile that is, this time, anything but innocent. "Need a hand? A bit of rain should do the trick to cool you down."

It's only then that her enemy notices the pale gray stream of clouds that is bubbling up from one end of the Clima Tact and towards the roof.

"You—"

Nami blocks the incoming kick with her staff easily despite the fact that the woman disappears from her view.

Her target was obvious, after all.

Plus, she hasn't been living and fighting against increasingly stronger attackers for the last year for nothing.

Her speed might not be a match, but her reflexes are far from being completely shoddy either.

With the volume of rain falling down, it takes only a few seconds before her grip finally tightens completely around her weapon and her smile is able to slip into an actual smirk.

"And here I worked so hard to give you such a nice, smooth skin. I can't say that you're quite so cute anymore."

Nami bares her teeth, but turns it into a smile and keeps the threat bright and pretty.

"If by 'cute' you mean 'letting people walk all over me', then your efforts were for nothing from the beginning, because that's really not my style. Besides, I don't need your help to be as cute as I want!"

Pushing her off, she swipes her Clima Tact between the two of them while releasing a Cool Charge.

She tries hard not to laugh as she watches Kalifa's eyes widen at the sight of the five different Nami who appear from thin air.

"Nice trick, don't you think? I think I'll call it Fata Morgana. It sounds pretty good. Plus, now we can both show off our techniques for the first time." She laughs impishly with a twirl of her staff that is imitated by the four other versions of herself as the CP9 agent falters with a flustered flush and a grit of her teeth at the emphasis. "Besides, you should be glad! You're the first person to be graced with five versions of me! Some people would kill for that, you know!"

The female agent doesn't seem to agree, judging by her scoff.

"Those other you are hardly cute, even compared to your real—"

"Wrong! They're still me, and I'm always sexy!"

"Besides," Kalifa goes on with a glare, "this isn't the point. The attacks from your illusions won't have any effect. This little magic trick won't be of any help against me."

Nami just smiles.

It's true that against someone as fast and as strong as the woman in front of her, the usefulness of her technique is more limited, and she'll have to see if she can increase the number of illusions she can create.

But for now, this will be enough.

"That's all true! In that case, I guess you won't have any problem dodging this!" She says cheerfully as all versions of her start launching Thunder Charges at her enemy.

Between the sheer number of them and the way their light blinds the opponent, even a CP9 agent is bound to have trouble dodging them all. After all, it's not like there's any way to tell which is real in those conditions.

She stops when the woman's scream is fried into the silence of unconsciousness and her knees give way to hit the ground, muscles twitching and spasming with the damage she took.

The smell of singed cloth and skin reaches her, making her scrunch her nose and swipe a Cool Charge through the air to direct the smell away and blanket herself out of view at the same time.

She'll have to thank Usopp later.

This new Clima Tact is a gem.

When she moves to step forward and take the key the woman is hiding on her, though, she finds herself stepping back instead as her enemy slowly stands up.

Figures a CP9 agent wouldn't go down this easily.

She looks roughed up, but Nami decides to keep her distance anyway.

She's not about to die from a Shigan to a vital spot because she got a big head.

"The next big attack will be the last." She says idly as she releases a new wave of mirages to replace the ones who were erased by the sudden release of so many Thunder Charges, dispelling her earlier layer of protection in the process.

"What… kind… of stupid prophecy… is that?"

"Not a prophecy." Nami grins. "A forecast. I'm the one who makes it rain in here, after all."

The woman attacks the mirage that actually looks like her, which is exactly why it's not the one Nami hid behind.

She takes advantage of the confusion that follows to get away and create five new mirages, who all start to summon a thundercloud as the blonde agent finishes off the last mirage.

This time though, Kalifa changes strategy and straight up summons a wave of soapy water tall enough to brush the ceiling —something Nami has no choice but to avoid.

Except, she's the only one to make it.

The mirages don't, and she doesn't manage to block the attack this time.

Kalifa's finger sinks into her other shoulder like a knife in hot butter.

The impact throws her off balance in the same way an actual bullet would, and when she tries to use her arms to regain some stability she finds that the one whose shoulder first got wounded doesn't move nearly as well as it should between the blood loss and the fading adrenaline.

Her knees hit the floor before she realises it, and she glares up at the woman who smiles down at her condescendingly.

"You're done for, I'm afraid. And you certainly won't be cute once I'm done turning you into a sieve."

Nami winces at the mental image.

As if she's going to give up now.

(As if she's going to give up before she's had the time to learn Robin's real smile by heart,

the way she's learned her own all over again in the mirrors of the Going Merry.)

The thunder cloud just needs to accumulate a bit more lightning, but feeding it herself with the Clima Tact would draw attention to it when she got lucky enough to get her enemy in a spot where she has her back turned on Nami's next attack.

Diversion it is.

"I know you're into the dominatrix kind of stuff, but I doubt anyone is going to be turned on by words like those, you know."

"Not this again!"

Nami looks on in interest at the level of red her enemy's face is reaching, the woman appearing close to choking on her own embarrassment.

"First that debauched street rat and now you?! Garp's tastes in recruits clearly leaves something to be desired if that girl is as bad as pirates!"

Nami blinks, and then smirks even wider.

That's another way to use Lynna for inspiration, she guesses.

"Well, that would be logical, since she is a pirate."

The older woman actually chokes at that, fair skin turning suddenly ashen with a tint of green, and the finger that was about to pierce Nami's skin falls limply back to her side.

And then Kalifa growls.

Which isn't exactly considered cute by the usual standards, but Nami is too busy trying not to gleefully cackle in her face to remind her of that.

"Stop trying to lie, you idiotic little girl! I was there when she called her superior to prove she was a Marine, and his identity was confirmed!"

Now that just makes Nami even more curious to know what her First Mate has been up to with that plan of hers, because as far as she knows her best friend hasn't been wearing the Marine uniform she keeps in her closet since said closet has been filled enough for her not to need to wear it while the rest of her clothes are being washed.

Then again, if she kept it in her closet in the first place, there's a good chance it has been used.

And Elynna does often go off on her own whenever they make a pit stop at an island…

Well, either way, as much as she wants to know how her First Mate pulled off her make-the-CP9-believe-she's-on-their-side plan…

She doesn't actually need to know.

"Sorry to disappoint you, but I think you've been played. Don't worry, though!" She goes on brightly with just enough sweetness to make it sickening —and really, the woman looks like she might actually be sick as she realises that she spent all this time with a pirate right at her side without ever suspecting the truth even for one second. "I mean, the last one who got tricked this badly by our First Mate was a god, so you shouldn't be too hard on yourself!"

"Your… Your what?!" Kalifa repeats, looking just a tiny additional shock away from fainting, elite combat training be damned.

"Well, yeah! Don't tell me you also thought it was Zoro?! Honestly, I don't know what goes on in people's heads sometimes."

Sure, their resident swordsman is more level-headed than their Captain, and he's aware enough of the hierarchy they usually don't bother to follow for him to rein everyone in.

But really, he's often just as much of a meathead as Luffy is, and most of the time he's not exactly flexible enough to understand that their Captain is about to do something stupid until he's already doing it, or to rein Luffy in.

Nami is pretty sure he would have stopped everyone from intervening and left Luffy to handle something as important as giving up the Merry on his own.

Which usually would probably be fine, because Luffy is a very good Captain when he actually bothers to behave like one, but in this particular instance he was way too torn up about the decision to actually make use of his frankly impressive emotional intelligence like he usually does.

If Zoro was their First Mate, it might have been a disaster.

He would do a pretty good job overall—

But there's a reason why no one has ever suggested putting him in Elynna's place, even when she was at her worst or her weakest.

"I'm going to kill that… strumpet!"

Nami's grin widens again, until it's more a show of teeth than anything else.

(Still pretty, though, of course.

She's the one who specialises in looking both scary and gorgeous on this crew, after all.

…

Alright, with Sanji-kun too.)

"As if I'm going to let you."

If she couldn't already sink her teeth in the taste of victory and feel the adrenaline rush of it in her veins, Nami would be chilled by the look she finds herself on the receiving end of.

"Then, I suppose I'll just have to start with you, won't I?"

"Sorry, but you won't get the chance to."

The Thunder Lance shoots straight through the older woman before she can even turn around, and she collapses in front of Nami, eyes rolled back and a mess of torn clothes and burned skin and muscles that are still cramped tight even in her state of unconsciousness.

Looks like the news shocked her, Nami thinks with a snicker.

And then she promptly scowls.

"Oh hell no. Lynna rubbing off on me with her jokes is fine, but not Usopp and his horrible puns!"

Forget thanking him.

She's going to clock him in the face as soon as she sees him again.

…

Unless there are people to shoot down.

〪〪〪〜〜⏆〜〜〭〭〭

"Where the … she?"

"She can't … too far."

One downside of using music?

Elynna can't hear everything the agents tell each other, even if they have to almost scream to hear themselves over the music.

She frowns as she watches the three men stand back to back at the corner where two hallways connect to look for her in both branches.

She managed to shake them off, but one of these guys seems to be a Soru specialist.

Her last Smoke Star barely allowed her the time to jump off the wall and kick her way through the fenced opening of the vents in the ceiling before they rounded the corner.

But now that they know she uses the network of vents to move around, it won't be long before they start to check that, and she'll be pretty much trapped. They're wide enough for her to not get stuck, but not much more.

As it is, she'll count herself damn lucky if none of the agents think to use the vents to make their way into the control room —or if they don't see it in the low lights after she tore a thin sheet of metal from the serving hatch and put it behind the fenced opening so as to make it look almost like the rest of the ceiling.

Cataloguing rapidly all the things she's carrying with her, she shifts, and reaches under the front of her shirt for the pistol she stole from one of the men she killed and slipped under the leather straps of her kukri's holster.

She would only land lucky shots at best with that thing, anyway.

She throws it where the vent branches to the left, and even over the music the metallic screech when the weapon bounces and clatters through the pipe is loud.

"Over there!" One of the CP9 trainees yells as the three of them knock down the door leading to the room from where the sound seems to come.

"I don't see her!"

"It's the pipes!"

They start firing at the ceiling with abandon as Elynna slips out of the conduit, careful but protected by the music that thickens the air in the entire bunker and wraps her out of the three men's hearing range.

For a moment, she considers her options, and remembers that all three dodged when she tried to attack.

So, more than likely, they either can't use Tekkai, or not well enough to rely on it.

She fishes one of the two Exploding Star Usopp gave her after finishing her make-up, making a note to herself to keep the other for the door of the elevator room in case she can't force it open on her own.

The sniper couldn't give her a lot of munitions because he didn't have the time to refill his stock before shit hit the fan, but still.

Bless this boy and his miniature munitions that don't look suspicious as fuck in her pockets.

And bless the fact that some Marine engineer didn't snatch him up before he could join the Straw Hats.

She passes by the open door and the sound of bullets tearing through plaster and thin metal like reversed rain, throws the Exploding Star inside and closes the door without stopping.

In her ears, the destruction still sounds loud, but the volume of the song pouring in from the speakers muffles away anything that might catch the attention of someone else in the bunker.

The only sound the three men can produce when it's done is whimpering.

She picks up the panel of the door that was blown off, and settles it back in its original place.

It muffles the sound almost entirely.

She leaves.

Thirteen.

〪〪〪〜〜⏆〜〜〭〭〭

Marine bases.

Control room at the top. It's the brain. It must be the most difficult to access for invaders.

The leading officer's office. It's the heart. The commander is often the strongest fighter of the base, or one of the strongest. It mustn't be on the frontlines in case of attack, but not completely hidden away either. Some kind of middle.

In this bunker, there's only one elevator that leads to the exit, but—

She stands in front of the elevator doors she got a glimpse of from one of the Surveillance Den Den Mushis.

Bingo.

Elevators might be a pretty rare technology in this world, but she's not surprised that someone like Spandam asked for a private elevator in his last-defense, top-security bunker.

The doors open, and she steps in, peering down at her options.

The elevator apparently connects the office to the control room, the storage room and the armoury, as well as the back exit made for submarines —except the screens of the control room showed no submarine ready to go, so that option is out.

She presses the button that will bring her to the office.

It's not the entrance-and-exit floor, but it gets her a lot closer, and a lot faster than if she had to get through the hallways with all the agents.

They'll be expecting to see her come from the upper floors, so coming from the opposite direction should give her the element of surprise at least on the first group.

But since it's the closest room to the elevator that will get her out, it also makes it her most obvious option, unfortunately.

There's a good chance some of them are keeping an eye on this elevator, too.

She looks up, and thinks of all the movies where the characters demounts the ceiling of an elevator to hide on top of it.

Except she doesn't have the skills for that.

Well.

She smirks.

Lucky for her, in a fight between a thin sheet of metal and her kicks, the former is a lot more likely to lose in this world.

When the elevator stops at the storage room floor, she steps onto the metal framing affixed to the wall that outlines the door so as to not make the ceiling creak under her weight, and presses herself against the wall.

"... not here!"

"What?!"

"I said she's not here!" The first agent repeats louder. "This music is going to drive me fucking crazy…"

"But we saw it stop at the control room floor!"

"Well I don't know! Maybe it's a diversion?"

She tilts her head, but there doesn't seem to be more than two people.

She tried to leave as little trace of her actions as she could, but there's still a clear mark of impact on the metal sheet ejected out of its place.

If they do check, though, she should be able to handle two people.

But they don't.

They clearly haven't seen the same movies she did.

Then again, people don't usually think to check above their heads.

One of the two men still stays in the elevator to go deliver a message to another group near the office, though, and it makes her frown.

The doors close.

As soon as the elevator starts to move down the metal sheet flies off with nothing to keep it in place.

She steps off the ledge.

Falling straight through the opening, she misses the skull of the agent by barely an inch as he flattens himself out of the way like a piece of paper in the wind, and then surges forward with a finger ready.

But even though she's nowhere close to knowing how to use Kami-e, her last-second evasion skills are still top-notch.

They manage to dance out of each other's attack three times in a row before the man trips on something and falls.

He still manages to roll out of the way of the kick she aims at his stomach —and that leads him straight into putting himself just right where she needs him to as she spins on herself and stomps her foot down, fracturing his ribs right before the hilt of one of her kukris hits his skull and knocks him out.

She breaks his ankles for good measure and gets out at the armoury floor, leaving him to be discovered by the guys near the office.

Twelve.

〪〪〪〜〜⏆〜〜〭〭〭

Elynna runs.

It's only the fact that the man she's running from can only use Soru for short bursts of speed (and that the basis of her fighting style is to make herself unpredictable) that has kept her alive this far.

But at some point he'll get her, and he can use all branches of the Rokushiki, even if not perfectly.

It wouldn't be the end.

She has her chances.

But he's not alone, and she has too much to do outside of this bunker.

She can't afford to take too much damage so soon.

She rounds another corner and—

Dead end.

A door.

Two agents.

She falters in her race, just for a moment, the loudness of the music filling the space between her stuttering heartbeats with something like a scream.

Realises what this door leads to.

Notices the card one of the men is still holding after swiping against something in the wall.

The superior officer's room.

She dives.

Blades fly through the air from one wall to the other above her, the edge of one slicing a surface wound into her calf, high enough that the tendon is spared.

She rolls, the movement masking where her hands reach.

When she springs back to her feet there's already two kukris singing through the air in time with the music that shoots adrenaline through her veins.

One agent dodges with Kami-e.

The second blade ricochets off the Tekkai armour of the other man.

It's enough time for her to cover the distance, the end of a war fan fitting comfortably between her calluses as it falls into the cup of her palm.

The second agent meets her with an attempted Shigan.

She dodges at the last moment, grabbing a wrist already made rock-like as the man prepares to block her attack with his reinforced skin.

From what she understood, a perfect Tekkai is like trying to attack a thick wall of steel.

Maybe this man's Tekkai defense is perfect.

Maybe it's perfect, and that's why she doesn't hold back.

Maybe it's perfect, but her tessen slices clean through his neck all the same, and stabs dully into the wall.

Blood gushes out, drenching her arm.

The dead weight she's still holding onto suddenly turns heavier.

She lets go.

The headless body hits the ground, head still resting on the horizontal line of her fan.

The other agent screams and screams and screams—

She gives a harsh pull to dislodge her tessen and flicks it in his direction.

The head thumps wetly against his chest.

His mouth clicks shut and silent.

The song goes on.

His eyes roll back, and he collapses.

Good enough.

"REN!" A voice screams, the name elongated with all the air the horror consumes.

She turns.

The man from before is at the end of the hallway.

She tilts her head.

That's—

The smart one's voice.

"Looks like I might be the cat, after all." She says.

His entire face twists with the scream that comes out.

This one has no words —just pure, undiluted rage.

He doesn't think as he simply—

Rushes towards her.

It's what she wants, so she doesn't move.

He's too fast for her to see.

He's too fast for himself, too.

Rushes straight into the almost invisible threads the trap's blades are attached to, and lands on the other side in sliced pieces at her feet.

… Maybe she should have taken a few steps back.

Disgust sneers at the corner of her mouth as she slowly reaches up to wipe away the blood that splashes into her eyes, shaking off the viscera that landed on her shoe at the same time.

Fuck, she needs a shower.

She glances at the door of the internal elevator next to the office's door.

No one is coming.

She gathers her weapons, puts them back in their holsters, and carefully makes her way between the threads to disappear down the hallway and propel herself into the first air vent she finds to shake off the trail of bloody footprints she leaves behind.

Eight.

〪〪〪〜〜⏆〜〜〭〭〭

Elynna is walking through another hallway.

It's the only one that leads to the room where the elevator doors leading to the exit can be found, and she's hoping to find other agents here, because they've probably caught onto the fact that she's skipped a few floors by now.

She knows there'll be traps, perhaps someone waiting to ambush her, and her reaction time won't be good enough while running.

So she walks.

In the end, it doesn't save her.

She's analysing the spots where she saw some of the agents prepare traps before leaving the control room when something slams into her, knocking her right into the opened doorway to an empty room she already checked.

She rolls on the floor and gets right back to her feet just in time to receive another blow to her ribs.

The cracking of her bones tells her the fist was reinforced by Tekkai.

She falls into the momentum of the blow and backs up further until her back hits a wall, slouching slightly to better protect her torso and all the vital points there.

At least one person.

Using at least one of the Rokushiki.

And maybe a Devil Fruit user, something about invisibility or camouflage that is only enhanced by the low lighting.

This is bad.

Whoever is in the room with her seems to agree, because there's no space for doubt when they speak.

"You should count yourself lucky, Schwarz. Most of my colleagues are quite tempted to kill you, but I agree with Isao-san to say that we should have a talk with you beforehand to better... understand the level of threat we are facing."

"Sounds like a nice chat. Hope there'll be tea to go with it." She comments blandly, hearing straining to determine his position but falling short, especially with the volume of the music.

"I'm afraid not."

Then there's someone right in front of her.

She knows it, even if she can't see him.

She ducks anyway, and gets punched in the face instead of the upper ribs for it, sending her flying until her back smacks against another wall.

She scrambles to get back on her feet through the coughing feet wracking through her, and the man helps by slamming a foot into her gut.

She responds by grabbing the foot in question and stabbing into the calf with a kukri.

There's a grunt, and then the man rams her against the wall again to propel himself back.

She still can't see him, but the blood dripping onto the floor tells her where to look, and a vague outline ripples in her line of sight.

More like a chameleon, then.

Her vision swims, swarmed with black spots, but at least she now has a slightly higher chance to know where he is.

Unless he can also use Soru or—

The burst of air pressure that is characteristic of Geppō catches her eyes.

Fuck.

She dives into a roll and springs to her feet, racing for the door and then out into the hallway, ducking and rolling and twirling out of the way with a slash of her weapons as soon as she feels a presence near her to keep him at bay.

But without knowing his exact position and where his limbs are precisely, she's bound to run out of luck.

Her feet are swept out from under her, and before her face can smash against the floor a hand grips her wrist and wrenches her whole weight up to throw her into another room.

She doesn't have the time to get back up before the hand is gripping the back of her neck to haul her up and smash her face against the glass covering a framed picture on the wall, proceeding to drag her skin raw against the stone of the wall afterwards.

She lets out a loud curse that almost costs her a few teeth when the opening of her mouth brings them into brutal contact with the wall, and she blindly stabs behind her in a last-ditch attempt to get the man to let go—

He does.

She crumples to the ground, legs wobbly and mind cloudy and face on fire, but—

"Don't make this more difficult than it has to be, Schwarz. I'll bring you to our meeting point whether you like it or not."

That sounds like the rest of them are all gathered in one place.

She assesses the man carefully through the low lights and the flaring pain of the rapidly swelling skin on the left side of her face, which leaves her sight quickly blurring and diminishing.

This man looks calm.

Tense, but calm.

She knows from previous encounters that most of the ones waiting for her at that meeting point probably aren't.

Arguably, they'll be on edge, ready to snap with anger or fear —maybe both.

If she goes with him, she knows what's likely to happen.

But she's not sure she can beat this man with the cards she has now, let alone be well enough to move when she's done.

And it will be harder for him to use his power in a room full of people, especially if those people are fighting, mostly his friends, and the lighting is bad.

She knows these men might see her like an insane bitch who looks at everything like at a game of chess, and she might be an insane bitch, but the last part isn't true.

First, because she's shit at chess, never had it in her to sacrifice any knight because horses are cool and cute as long as they're not throwing you off their back and never liked that she had to protect the King at all cost like this because this makes no sense, a King without its people is nothing, and besides the Queen is way more badass and can always serve as regent, so this really isn't historically accurate.

She hasn't played since one of her aunts tried to teach her in middle school, and is much better with puzzles, jigsaw or otherwise.

Second, because spending time with Ignis or her crewmates isn't something she does in terms of strategy, unless she's acting as a First Mate instead of their nakama.

Third, because an eight-by-eight board of black and white cases is a much too restrictive way to think about life for her.

Same for knights somehow representing a category of things or people that are horse-faced and have L-shaped abilities.

Her imagination might accommodate dimensional travel, but it doesn't go that far.

Of course, she thinks in terms of strategy in situations that can be summed up with winning and losing for her crew —and herself by extension.

In that sense, it might be a game.

A game where anything and everything can be useful, not just the people involved like the agent she talked to on the Den Den Mushi seemed to think.

The design and location of a room can be useful.

So can the lighting.

The music and the silence.

The words she says and doesn't say.

Whether she lies or not, and how much.

The strengths and weaknesses of everyone present.

Any personal information she might know about anyone present.

Her flesh, her bones and her pain.

Her blood, and how much of it she loses.

Anything and everything can be useful for her to have as complete a view of the situation as possible, for her to decide which role to give to whom or who to target first and how to win as quickly as she can.

For her to adapt to what others decide, too, because she's not a puppet master, and the other people involved aren't cards or pawns or whatever else.

(A game where she has to take risks and gamble with the elements at her disposal,

including the lives of those she loves when she gives them orders that put them at risk.

That's what it means to be the First Mate of a pirate crew, for her.

It's the part of her job that feels like duty,

that weighs heavy like it should instead of resting easy on her shoulders as if there's no difference between crewmates and nakama.)

But what she thinks and what these men think she thinks is different, and that is also useful.

Because it means they don't know what her end goal is and even less the options she can use to get there.

(And it means they don't know the kind of risks

—the kind of sacrifices—

she deems to be useful and acceptable.)

"I give." She says.

"Good."

The tip of a boot nudges her hard in the skull.

"Hurry up, then."

She chuckles, even as her blinks become more and more sluggish.

As if.

She could force herself, probably, but there's multiple advantages to be found in letting him carry her, including saving her strength, getting him to underestimate her, straining his injury further, and fucking with him.

She doesn't even notice when her eyes simply don't open up again.

〪〪〪〜〜⏆〜〜〭〭〭

"Robin is my little sister, but I failed to save her, and in the current situation… I can't do anything. So please. Take the key, and save Robin. I entrust her to you."

Sanji stares down at the key in question, and sighs.

"You don't need to tell me. I was already planning to do that."

He stops right in front of the one object that might still be standing between his crewmate and her freedom to fight for her own life herself, and bends down to snatch it up.

The shift in the air comes, just as he expected.

He straightens up to lean backward again, fast enough that Jabura has no time to block the kick that Sanji delivers to his chin, sending him face first through the ceiling where he stays stuck, the rest of his body hanging pitifully in front of the cook.

"Robin-chan, your little sister? I should cook you for suggesting something like that, even to bluff. And find better lies, you idiot."

Honestly, as if he would fall for such a shitty lie after having been lucky enough to be able to admire his First Mate in action.

And even if Usopp's lies aren't always good, at least he's one hell of a storyteller —which also means that when he really tries, he can actually make someone doubt themselves with the biggest lies ever.

Really, this wolf guy is no match.

The heavy thump of the CP9 agent's weight falling back down on the floor draws his attention to where the man-wolf is shaking pieces of stone and dust off his fur.

"Now you've done it. I'm really going to murder y—"

He pauses.

Sanji raises an eyebrow, flipping the key through the air and catching it again.

"You fucker, you took my key!"

He couldn't stop the grin from taking over his face even if he tried.

"Oh, that? But you're the one who gave it to me!"

The man-wolf snarls, a sound that shouldn't belong in a human's body.

Then again, Devil Fruit users could arguably be said not to be human anymore.

"You scum—"

"Hah? Didn't get kicked enough yet?"

Jabura glares, sliding into a fighting stance.

Sanji glares right back—

And grins.

"Bye!"

He runs, leaving his opponent sputtering behind him.

It probably looks like he's running, and really, he could.

He has the key, after all.

But Jabura is fast, and there's no telling what a fighter like him could do to any of his crewmates if he's not put out of commission now.

Most importantly—

With a click of his tongue, Sanji stops running as abruptly as he started, jumping back to avoid the CP9 agent's attacks and keeping low to the ground as he flips himself upside down to kick him right in the nose.

Snout?

Those half-and-half forms are honestly confusing.

It goes well until he finds himself surrounded by Jabura and his flying blade-kicks bounding around at high speeds.

Not because he can't avoid those, but because they were a distraction that leaves him right open to take a Tekkai-reinforced fist right in the ribs.

He hears them crack, and his lungs clench painfully around the space where all the air he just lost should have been even before his body smashes straight through the wall on the opposite side of the Tower.

Coughing through the cloud of dust still flying around him, he sits up with a wince, taking advantage of the flimsy cover provided to gingerly assess any possible damage to his lungs the way Chopper taught him.

He'll finish this fight no matter what, but if he's fighting on borrowed time, he'd rather know it sooner rather than later.

The fact that he isn't fighting on borrowed time barely has the time to settle in his mind before he has to roll over, dodging most of the next attack except where the flying, cutting light shreds through his shoulder.

He stands up immediately after regardless of it, unwilling to be seen on his knees even momentarily by a man so willing to play with his opponents —and so eager to stain Robin's name with his voice and his lies.

"Still alive, uh? Well, no matter." Jabura says from where he's perched on the railing, mouth twisted into something that would probably be a smile on his human face. "I'm still not done getting back at you for thinking you can just take my key and run away, so I guess I'll enjoy myself a bit longer."

Eyes narrowed, Sanji snorts as his hand falls away from his shoulder, blood trickling down his fingers to drip onto the rubble at his feet.

"Don't worry about that. I have no intention to run or let myself be killed here, let alone to forgive you."

Most importantly, there's no way he's walking away from this man and his intention to tear Robin apart until it kills her without burning said man and said plans into ashes first.

Jabura blinks at him.

"Forgive me?"

He throws his head back and laughs, the sound strangely close to the howling of a wolf.

(But the cruelty in it is all him.)

"Are you talking about Nico Robin?! You might be young, but you should know that anything that distracts you during a fight isn't worth it. Instead of feeling sorry for that worthless criminal, you might want to try and figure out a way to survive —not that you'll manage, but it'll make the game more fun for me."

Sanji is a criminal.

He knows it, has no problem owning up to it because he's as proud of being a part of the Straw Hat Pirates as he was of being a cook at the Baratie.

But Jabura says criminal like Sanji thinks all kinds of people have used the word monster to speak about Robin and Chopper for years, and it makes him straighten fully, bolted into movement by the sparks of heat flickering up his spine.

(Anger like this is slow to come, in him.

It's the kind of anger he will never direct at his most annoying crewmate, because it only comes to him when faced with people who think others only exist to be bled dry of everything they have and then some more.

That, or anyone who expresses even just a hint of real hostility towards one of his crewmates or one of the cooks back home.

It's the kind of anger that burns hot and fast through his veins with each heartbeat, and he's learned to harness fire for his own uses a long time ago.)

"Watch your mouth. I tend to get fired up when someone pisses me off."

"Hah! Lose your cool, lose your fight, pretty boy."

Sanji glares harder, mouth falling into a sneer even as he widens his stance in preparation for the next attack.

He's certainly not in the mood to hear that kind of argument from a man who promised to kill him at least thrice and has been showing off his own ego since the beginning of the fight.

In fact, he's not in the mood to hear that kind of argument from anyone but Robin, his First Mate or that stupid swordsman, because they're the only ones who won't use the idea as an argument.

(They already know that he has learned to fight with his heart just like he's learned to cook with his gut, even before he mastered the technique of either.

They might not fight that way, but they trust him and his skill all the same.)

He lets the next attack connect against the leg he holds up to redirect the shock away from his ribs, flipping in the air over the sound of the laughter from his opponent that is thrumming through it when he's pushed back to land on his feet in the next room.

He taps the tip of his shoe on the floor to shake off the remnants of the tingling feeling left by the blow, now better aware of how Jabura's muscle strength measures against his own.

Aware, most of all, that he needs more of that same strength.

Right now.

And coincidentally, he also really needs an outlet for the sparks of anger in his veins that are ready to catch on fire with every memory of Robin's tears and Spandam's laughter and his agents' callousness.

"Laugh it up while you still can, wolf pup. It won't last."

There's a few things about fire that are among the first lessons learned, for a cook.

One, friction makes fire.

Two, how fast and how well the meat cooks depends on a lot more factors than just how hot the fire is.

Three, they say God gives the ingredients like he gives the laws, but it's the Devil who adds the spices. It's the fancy version of any cook's fifth commandment, which the old geezer prefers to read as following the recipe will get you a good meal, but following what your heart says about it will get you a great and unique meal.

The first one is what makes him launch himself into a tight, fast spin.

Logically, there's no reason why it should work.

But he can spin much, much faster than most people.

(Above all, he knows how to fight with his heart much better than he knows how to fight with logic.)

When he comes to a stop, it's like every spark of anger and every tear Robin shed and all the happiness he wants her to show in her smiles once they leave this place are searing through his right leg.

It's more comfortable than painful.

Jabura is frowning at his leg, now, not seeming to understand what happened.

It's fine, though.

He'll learn.

It's just a bit of a shame that he can't handle this level of spice.

Sanji hates it when ingredients go to waste.

〪〪〪〜〜⏆〜〜〭〭〭

It doesn't even take him as much time to finish as it would to make an omelet.

Then again, he doesn't particularly try to be careful with the heat output either.

The end of the fight leaves him with one foot hissing against the stones of the floor as the flames flicker out, the anger seeping out of him at the same time as a smell of seared hair and grilled meat fills the air.

(Too familiar to make him gag.

The memory of I want to die too fresh for him to feel shame, or guilt, or regret.

He doesn't think he will, ever.

It's not his fault that most people can't handle the heat like he can, and he doesn't see what makes burning someone's flesh to melting point worse than breaking bones or hearts.

This is a fight, this is a war, and Sanji and his crewmates will win it.

That's all there is to it.)

When he looks up, he spots Usopp running up the stairs two floors above with straight shoulders and a sure grip on his Kabuto.

It makes him smile.

The sniper deserves to look like this, as much as he didn't deserve to look so defeated right before Jabura attempted to strike him down.

(In that moment, he looked as if he could only feel the weight of all the wounds under his bandages as a hundred pieces of evidence of his weakness

—couldn't remember the bravery and the loyalty that caused these wounds, or how he showed the defiance of their crew better than any of them could have when he shot down that flag—

Just like when Sanji stood in front of the doors from behind which he could hear the heels of the female agent clacking against the floor and couldn't find in himself the courage to do anything but flee to find Nami-chan, the weight of his memories a proof that half his blood comes from one of the worst monsters of this world.

—as if the other half didn't come from one of the most beautiful human beings of this world—

It makes him wonder if he looks the same as Usopp, now.

If he looks like he remembers the only part of him he wants to matter.)

It seems like his crewmate has found a way to help that will exploit his strengths rather than underline his weaknesses.

And Sanji hopes that the same can be said for him, now that he doesn't have to choose between letting down a woman who's been let down by the world for twenty long years and fighting an enemy who looks so much like his dead mother.

(Whose eyes look so much like the brothers and father he ran away from.)

〪〪〪〜〜⏆〜〜〭〭〭

At first, Elynna doesn't so much wakes up as she regains consciousness, but for a stretch of time that she can't quite define, she's floating somewhere just shy of actually waking up, half-aware of her body being dragged against the floor, of the collar of her shirt digging into her throat, of the voices buzzing around her.

Then there's the impact of a fist against her face, and her head lurches to the right.

Her head rings and her mind blows up —or perhaps it's the other way around.

Either way, her mind wobbles between waking up for real and falling right back into the black.

Then her head lurches to the left under the force of another fist, and—

It doesn't really help.

But it makes her head hurt too much to go back to sleep, so she opens her eyes.

"Hi." Amadeus greets her, inches away from her face and wearing a smile that tells her he has no intention of letting her out of this bunker. "How're you feeling, Schwarz? Had your fun, huh?"

Oh.

Oh, he's pissed.

Looked Sophia and Franky in the eyes knowing at least some of what was going on and was cool as a cucumber, talked about killing off anyone who got in the way of the World Government like there was zero problem with it, but now he's upset, huh?

She wants to laugh for the first time since she landed in this place.

Well, news flash for him, Sophia has people who care about her too.

She's one of them, and he might not have hurt Sophia himself, but he didn't have the decency to look bothered by what was said and done in Spandam's office or anything else, and right now it's good enough for her.

(She has no desire to start and torture people for days on end, and she has better things to do with her time anyway

—better people to give her time to—

but she's still plenty furious enough to rampage through what's left of these men,

and it doesn't feel like there's enough people in charge to drain all the rage in her even if she used it to fucking bury them.)

So what if he wants to pay her back with interest, now that she's dragged him somewhere closer to her level?

Let him fucking try.

She tilts her head for a better angle, and spits the blood that gathered in her mouth on his face.

"Fuck—"

"Don't know if anyone would find it fun, Amadeus. You seem pretty angry, and when the blood of your little friends got all over my face just like this, I didn't feel… Actually, I didn't feel anything. Might be because they were nothing."

The fist comes faster than she can see and harder than flesh should be.

"Shut up, you fucking monster!"

It hits her stomach, feels like it's almost close enough to grasp at her spine and like her stomach does touch her vertebrae.

She lurches forward with the impact, painfully held back by the hands gripping her arms, retching and spitting out bile and saliva because there's nothing in her stomach to empty out.

She makes sure to aim for his shoes, and uses the momentum to get closer.

(—almost close enough to kiss and whisper the words right into his mouth and bite his goddamn tongue off.)

"If you listened, Amadeus, you wouldn't ask stupid questions like this. I told you, didn't I? It. Was. Fucking. Boring. At least there was some good music to spice things up."

He yells as he lunges for her throat, only to immediately be dragged back by a colleague, the indistinct screams fading into variations of I'll end her!

She does laugh, then.

(It's a little bit cruel and a little bit mad and she doesn't care.

She probably is more than a little bit mad

after losing everyone and everything as easy as sinking

—knowing how much worse things can go in this world and this life, how much more likely it is that they will go worse

for everyone she's found to build her heart back up and then some—

probably can be more than a little cruel, too

—as cruel as things can get worse for the people who own what's left of her heart, perhaps—

because Hawk and Hebi aren't there.

There's just her and the knowledge that Sophia has spent more years than Elynna has been alive feeling too hunted to think that she can want to live,

and all these men who work for someone like Spandam and still think that the justice they work for is worth anything.)

"Calm down! All of you!" The man who ambushed her barks, the volume enough to make her entire head throb as if he's thrown a stone at it.

Her body convulses reflexively, but the hands holding her tighten their hold rather than loosening it.

"And you," Chameleon Guy goes on as he turns to her and reaches out to squeeze her lower face tightly, craning her neck uncomfortably, "I want to know your real motive. Because there's no way Garp The Fist sent someone who starts killing their colleagues at the drop of a hat to retrieve the Devil Child like Amadeus told me you're supposed to have been —or even that he recruited you in the first place."

"Ah. So you're the real boss, huh?" She replies conversationally, if a bit strained and slurred due to her position. "Well, the only one now, since I offed the other one. You're welcome, by the way."

His face contracts brutally, and the nail of his thumb digs just as brutally into one of the cuts that litter the left side of her face since he dragged her across that wall.

Her breath hitches, and she muffles the whimper that wants to come out to something barely heard.

"I suggest that you tell me what I want to know now, Miss Schwarz. We will get this information out of you. How much it hurts for you is all up to you."

(Anything that might happen now is your fault.)

She didn't expect someone to see through the whole thing.

Emotions are a powerful thing, and she made sure to mess with theirs plenty.

But it's not entirely unexpected, either.

Probably.

Things are pretty fuzzy.

She might have a concussion.

Regardless, this is probably as good as things are going to get for her.

If no one guessed, they might have gone straight to the 'killing her or making her regret what she did and then killing her' part.

Interrogating her is probably supposed to have the same result, but it'll go slower, which will give her the time to remember what the fuck the plan was supposed to be in the case that she did get caught.

Maybe.

If she can remain conscious.

… The concussion might be severe.

She looks straight into the man's eyes, and smiles.

"Do your worst, Mister Elite-in-training. Show me the kind of monsters you all are."

〜〜⏆〜〜

His face contracts again.

Then he shoves her face away, stands up, and kicks her in the face.

And then it starts.

Fists.

Boots.

Laughter.

Nails.

Elbows.

Serves you right!

That's for Seb!

One Shigan.

Four.

Seven.

Insults, too, probably, but they all blur into something unintelligible under the sound of skin splitting under skin and the beat of the music.

She puts all the focus she has on one thing only.

Remember the plan.

She doesn't beg.

She cries, though.

She fucking sobs, even.

She screams.

But all the sounds she makes don't seem to filter past their anger and fear, either.

A few minutes in the pain starts to blur together, too.

It's not puncture wounds on her thighs and cuts on her face and ribs cracking under a foot stomping down anymore.

Just… pain.

Everywhere.

All the time.

In some ways, it makes it easier to ignore, and she does.

(She sinks.

Floats away along the words of a song she's the only one here to understand.

The last dose of Chopper's medication that she took is barely half effective as it usually is, at this level of pain.

It's disgusting, how quickly she got used to it.

How quickly she forgot how to keep going through the pains of injuries that were sometimes worse, in a time when painkillers and pride were the only things she had to help.

She doesn't think she's learned how to be braver in the meantime.

But she's learned to allow herself to be as petty as she wants to be, so that's what she does.)

The question comes back again.

What is your goal?

She mutters nonsense under her panting, tear-choked breath, and bites the ear that comes closer hard enough to make the pain flare through her jaw and feel something else than her own blood dripping down her skin and into her mouth.

Then fingers dig into the hole made by a Shigan, and she screams again as she lurches away.

Two of the men cringe and look away.

Vaguely, through the blood that's been dripping in her eyes and her memories of the last few minutes, she remembers flashes of their faces.

Wincing.

Recoiling.

The discomfort.

The hesitation to hit her the longer this went on.

The horror, when they looked at the people they've been working with all these years.

Ah.

That's right.

The plan.

"Alright, if this isn't working…"

A hand grabs at her hair and pulls, taking all her weight along as she scrambles to follow the movement and lighten the burn that feels like every hair might snap away from her skull.

Then she's shoved forward until her hips hit the edges of a table, and the hand lets go of her hair to grab the back of her neck and slam her face first onto the surface.

This time the scream stays trapped in her mouth, her lungs unable to expand against the surface of wood for the amount of air needed to get it out, leaving her gasping and coughing to make breathing right again.

Another hand grabs her wrist and splays her fingers against the wood right next to her face.

And then there's the flash of a knife.

"—then we'll do it another way. You tell us what we want to know, or I'll tear off your fingernails with this."

"Dazai!"

"Calm the fuck down, man. I didn't say fingers, I said fingernails."

There's more words, but the blood beats hard in her ears and the music is loud, and everything is fuzzy in her head, still floating a bit too far or sunken a bit too deep.

Her thoughts and senses feel piecemeal, scattered around the room like she left pieces behind when she was kicked around and then dragged to the table.

The new angles are dizzying as she struggles to make sense of things around her, of how many people there are and where they're standing and how they're standing and fuck, there's doubles of them—

The blade is cold as it slices beneath the fingernail of her middle finger.

Not cold enough to numb the pain, and she shrieks with it.

The blood warms the blade until the only way to tell it apart from her flesh is when it starts to twist this way and that to peel the nail away.

She writhes, and it just makes the pain worse, her cries louder as the blade scrapes over her flayed skin.

(it feels as if the sound has turned into something physical that scrapes at the wall of her throat and leaves a taste of blood, or maybe it's just the smell—)

The man asks the question again as if the first nail was just a demonstration, and when she can't clear her throat fast enough to breathe, let alone talk, the knife wriggles under the nail of her ring finger, twisting and slicing through the skin for the necessary leverage to start tearing it off.

When it's done she's still choking on how fast her breaths are ripping through her, and it feels like three hours have gone by when really it's barely three minutes, because the song filtering through the white noise between her ears is the same as when it started.

She blinks away the tears and the sweat, gaze flickering to the two from before.

They look ill.

The plan.

〜〜⏆〜〜

"If you think this is the worst thing I can do, you're hella wrong, Schwarz. Come on, what's your goal?"

She coughs out the words, voice warped and scratchy with overuse.

"What was that?" Dazai asks as he leans in closer, but not too close.

She coughs again.

"I was sent…", she pauses, coughs out a mix of tears and bloody saliva and snot, and keeps going, "to kill Spandam and his closest subordinates."

The hands holding her down on the table slacken with shock, a shock that ripples in the sounds and faces around her.

"… What?" Dazai says just before the rage swiftly burns away the blankness that fell over his face. "Don't fucking lie to us, you—"

"Wait."

"What the fuck, Tetsuo—"

"I said wait." Chameleon Guy repeats forcefully without looking away from Elynna. "… I hope you know that there's no use in lying to us, Schwarz. It will get you the same punishment as not answering at all."

Yeah.

Except that if he could actually tell her lies from her truths, she would already be down another nail.

"Are you kidding me?! Of course she's lying! This doesn't make any sense—"

The laugh she lets out sounds like she's been chainsmoking for fifty years —or like someone just tried to choke the life out of her.

"What doesn't make sense… is that you seriously believe the Elders trusted Spandam over Garp The Fist for a mission as— as important as retrieving a criminal we've been trying to catch for twenty years." She heaves a breath, fresh tears stinging her eyes. "Of fucking course they didn't, you halfwits. It was just— It was just bait to make it easier for me to get into Enies Lobby without raising suspicion."

She grins, then, grins through the flaming burst of pain that twists it into something much less charming than a smile.

"Two birds, one stone and all that."

"But… But why?" Someone else asks.

Someone she didn't remember noticing, and she slowly turns her head to look.

Her neck aches.

Her heartbeat is almost back to normal.

The pain where her nails used to be has melded into the background of every other pain.

Just a bit more time.

"Why?" She repeats, coughing as her mind races through the slowness of shock to map out her next steps. "Just ask Amadeus right here. You boss is a fucking megalomaniac, that's why."

"Amadeus. What does she mean?"

"Don't look at me like that! You know how the chief is! He started rambling about being the most powerful man in the world as soon as we brought the prisoners in, but he does that all the time! How was I supposed to know the Elders saw him as a threat this time around?!"

"What the fuck?! That's pretty much high treason material right there, you idiot! And you're telling me he does it all the time?! Of course they're going to be suspicious!"

"Yeah? Well what the hell are you doing here, then?!"

"Guys." Chameleon Guy tries, but the voices only get louder, until the song pouring in from the speakers can barely be heard.

"I've barely seen him until I entered the program, asshole! And Isao-san was a good guy, so how was I supposed to know he would work for someone like that?!"

"Hey, don't say that like we should be ashamed of working for him longer and not knowing! The chief does his job, and he does it well! Besides, it's not like he's the only higher-up who's ambitious and does what he can to reach his goal—"

"Guys!"

"That's not the same thing as doing whatever he can!"

"Well if you hated him so much you should have said something earlier, instead of just playing nice to be spared!"

"Stop!" One of the two men she keeps her eyes on suddenly screams, too shaken or not good enough yet to pull out a better weapon than the rifle he fumbles with to aim at one of his colleagues.

The others react immediately, taking out their own weapons or triggering one of the Rokushiki.

Including the man who was holding her against the table.

Her lungs expand just a bit farther.

She stays very, very still.

"What the hell are you doing?" Chameleon Guy says tightly, his nerves clearly starting to fray as well.

"Don't look at me like that! I have a family to feed, I can't die here! Let her go! If not her, someone will kill the chief anyway, and I'm not dying for him!"

"Listen, we can't just trust what she says like this—"

"I'm not taking any chances when my son has just learned how to walk and my wife is sick! And what the hell are we doing this for if we can't even trust her answers?! This… This is torture! We're torturing her!"

"So?" Dazai snorts. "You thought being an agent for the World Government was all about saving people and getting medals? Sorry to tell you, but that's for the higher-ups. We're here to do the dirty work, dude. So stop being a fucking baby, and man up!"

"Don't talk to him like that!" The second man finally joins his colleague in pointing his own weapon at his colleagues with a grit of his teeth. "There's nothing manly about beating a defenceless woman—"

"Defenceless?! Don't you fucking dare saying that about that… that bitch! Twenty-one, you fucker! She killed twenty-one of us when she could have just explained! I say we kill her, and then we kill the chief ourselves!"

He slams his hands down on the desk to emphasise his words, forgetting entirely about the hand he was holding down or the knife that slipped from his fingers.

Her hand snaps through the inches separating it from the knife before she stabs it into the closest hand.

Her foot flies under the table, breaking one of his knees.

By then her hand is already wrenching his face down onto the handle of the knife.

Seven.

She doesn't care to see if he's unconscious or dead when she drags his weight along the edge of the table to intercept the blow of another agent, her other hand already reaching behind her with the knife to gut the one who tries to press her back down into the table.

Six.

Then she pushes both bodies away and slips under the table, rolling to emerge again and crawl towards where her weapons were thrown off.

She can almost hear her left shoulder blade fracture under the foot that tries to pin her down.

She forces her arm to move anyway, aiming an elbow at the back of a calf.

The man avoids it, but not the knee that she follows up with as she rolls away.

The bullet aimed at his shoulder shoots through his skull instead as he falls.

Five.

She finally reaches her weapons.

The second man who rebelled against the others goes down.

Four.

The first is wrestling with another agent, leaving the other two to turn to her, Chameleon Guy already fading into his surroundings.

One of them disappears with Soru, and she falls straight into a split.

The Shigan aimed for her heart pierces through a wall.

A slash of an open tessen, and blood gushes out of the severed veins in the man's wrist.

Three.

The first bullet hits him in the thigh, and he falls, leaving Elynna unprotected except for the arm and leg she folds in front of herself to protect her vital points.

But not before noticing the bloody footprints attached to thin air.

There's no second bullet.

Just Tetsuo's body, hitting the floor.

Well, most of it.

She doesn't bother looking for the second half of his face.

Two.

The music, too loud now against the drumming of pain everywhere inside her to the point of nausea, is the only thing left, except for slight whimpers on the other side of the table that blocks her view.

It takes her three attempts to make it to her feet.

She waits for thirty more heartbeats to make sure she doesn't sway too much on her feet before she moves.

The man the first rebel was fighting is unconscious, wounded enough that he won't be a problem.

One.

His opponent is sitting against the wall.

The whimpers come from him and his clearly broken leg.

That's enough for her to know.

She turns to walk out.

"Get me out. Please—"

She keeps going.

"Schwarz! Fucking— I beg you! My family— I can't— I don't want to die here!"

The door is already closing behind her when the bullet ricochets against it.

There's a buzzing in her ears like a voice, but it doesn't reach her brain that is reeling to process even the most essential thoughts.

Hurts. Fuck. Hell, it hurts. Hurtshurtshurtshurts—

She's almost blind with pain, and when the wall she leaned against as soon as there were no eyes on her disappears under her hand she crashes down.

hurtshurtshurtshurtshurts—

Sophia.

Her fingers bump clumsily along her leg in search of a specific pocket.

〪〪〪〜〜⏆〜〜〭〭〭

"I know that you take your medicine, but in battle you might get… more hurt than what the treatment can compensate for." Chopper explained as he gave her the pill bottle, the night after Elynna told them she had a plan and would follow it alone. "So I made those. It's basically a concentrated version —it'll numb your nerves and the pain so you can keep fighting and defending yourself for as long as you need."

To come back to us, his eyes said.

"But Elynna… Remember this, okay? No more than three pills a day, and you can't use this for more than two days in a row. Any more, and the side-effects could be— I will know. It could become addicting very quickly, too. And it doesn't mean that you can forget about treating your wounds, alright?"

"... You put me in charge of Fang so my carefulness can rub off on him, not to make me dumb. It'll be fine."

"... More like dumber?"

Only Chopper could look both sorry and awed at his own ability to be sassy.

Like a kid swearing in front of an adult for the first time.

"You spend too much time with Hawk, it's official."

〪〪〪〜〜⏆〜〜〭〭〭

Two pills crunch under her teeth.

She bandages the injuries she can bandage and tightens other strips of fabric around her fractured and broken bones to keep them in place as much as she can while she waits to be as functional as possible, then picks herself off the floor.

When she finally makes it back to the control room, she steals a less torn but just as bloodied shirt from one of the cooling bodies outside of it.

Then she washes the worst of the blood and grime covering her face, allows herself a moment to cry and lose her breath under the stream of water before she retrieves the two Dials she left in the room, and activates the distress signal that is supposed to be sent automatically to any ship in the vicinity equipped with a Den Den Mushi.

If nothing else, it might make for a good diversion.

While walking as quickly as she can to the elevator that will bring her back into the tunnel, she takes out the Dial she placed next to the communication system of the control room that is linked to the speakers spread through the entire island, in case there's a need to keep people in the bunker informed of what might be communicated on the surface.

She presses the button that allows her to find a particular recording, speaks the name she gave to what the Dial recorded before she left the control room, and starts running through it in search for any relevant news on what was happening while she was fighting the CP9 trainees, cursing the absence of a speed-up button all the while.

For most of the recording there's only silence and the loud hum of her music in the background, until a voice covers it.

She can't quite muster up a smile in that moment, but—

Good to know.

She'll be sure to exploit the hell out of it if they all get out alive, too.

She allows herself a last break as the doors of the elevators close behind her, before she has to start running to make up for the distance Spandam had the time to create.

(The silence of the bunker as she made her way to this point was strange, after what felt like hours of music beating as loud in her head as adrenaline did in her veins.

It felt dead.

She breathes easier for it.)

〪〪〪〜〜⏆〜〜〭〭〭

At this point, Luffy feels surprised every time he gets thrown into a new crate or a new box.

He didn't think there were any left to be thrown into.

Won't keep him from getting up again, though, and that's exactly what he does, launching himself right back towards the pigeon guy.

This time, he manages to follow his rhythm for almost thirty seconds before he gets thrown into a new box.

Or maybe it's a crate.

Either way, now it's just a pile of wood.

This guy is definitely faster than the weird buffalo guy, but Luffy is starting to catch him more often.

He's pretty sure pigeon guy is going easy on him, though.

It's annoying.

It's even more annoying that he's playing around when Luffy has a nakama to save.

Stupid pigeon guy.

What does Nami like to say about that kind of stupid again?

Oh yeah.

Can't read the room.

"That little rat that joined us on the train was actually with you, wasn't she?"

Luffy looks up with a frown as he jumps to his feet once again.

"What?"

"Her last words were spoken in one of the dialects. Nico Robin is the only one who can understand them. It wasn't hard to guess what was going on."

Luffy blinks at him.

"Well if it was so easy, why did you let her follow you all this time?"

The pigeon guy's annoying smile slips for the first time as he rushes at him.

Luffy dodges the blow, hits him in the stomach, wraps an arm several times around his waist to throw him into a pile of boxes for once, and then leaps to follow up with another punch.

Except pigeon guy comes leaping out of the resulting cloud of dust and meets him fist for fist, exchanging blow for blow until he suddenly disappears to reappear just next to him.

Luffy gets thrown into a wall.

It's actually better.

Less scrapes than with pieces of wood.

(Not that it really hurts.

He's rubber.

He could get thrown into stuff all day if he was just here to keep pigeon guy busy and not beat the crap out of him.

But lots of scrapes means lots of that stuff Chopper and Ann insist on using whenever he or one of the others bleeds, and it stings —more than the scrapes do, actually.

Yeah, less scrapes is good.)

"You should pay more attention to what people say. Those were her last words, you know."

This time Luffy frowns as he slides into a fighting stance.

"Hah? What are you on about?!"

As if he would fall for something that stupid.

His First Mate can't be dead.

He would feel it.

Besides, she promised them she would be fine.

Well, she promised she would try her best, but Ann's best will always be enough.

"She's trapped with all the CP9 trainees right now. Those weaklings don't even reach the level of the weakest of us, but they're certainly stronger than your little spy," the pigeon guy spits through a smile as thin as it is violent "and there's more than twenty of them. I reckon that she probably died before our fight even started."

Luffy tilts his head, staring at him owlishly.

"Are you dumb? Did I hit your head too hard?"

The smile immediately shifts into a scowl as dangerous as the softness of the CP9 agent's voice when he speaks up.

"What?"

"If these guys are working for your dumb boss, then they're even dumber. And Ann is smart. So, she's gonna win. You should really think before speaking. You're saying stuff that doesn't make any sense."

Then again, this guy works for the idiot too, right?

He probably is dumb, then.

It's fun, but sometimes he still gets kind of annoyed by the fact that people can't seem to see what made him choose his First Mate as his First Mate.

Until they get their ass kicked or see it happen to someone else —which is the fun part.

The pigeon guy smirks.

"Really… That doesn't seem to be a good omen for you, then."

"It's fine." Luffy grins right back. "I'll just hit you until you don't get back up."

He grabs the nearest box and throws it at the man before sending a flying punch at it to break it into pieces and clouds of dust, giving him the time to catch another box and throw it right behind the first one.

Then he stretches both hands to grab it and slingshots himself into the air, sending the box crashing backward into the spot he was standing in and catching Lucci's attention just long enough to give Luffy the time to get in one good punch.

And then he's falling and the pigeon guy is right there to kick him in the stomach.

Luffy lets him, and stretches all four of his limbs as fast as he can to wrap them securely around the agent's whole body, because he would recognise the steps rushing towards them through the hallway anywhere.

A blur of dark and red bursts through the doors, barely slowing down enough for Luffy to see all the blood his First Mate is covered in before she seems to put together everything she needs to know about the situation for her to sprint towards the door Luffy has been trying to reach all this time.

Ah.

Probably not her blood, then.

His smile bursts even wider on his face.

"Take care of Robin!" He shouts, and thinks that she's probably angry enough that he doesn't need to add to make that Spanda guy regret ever laying his hands on one of their nakama.

"Kick his ass and make it hurt!" His First Mate shouts back over her shoulder.

Luffy laughs, and promptly headbutts Lucci when he tries to slam him in a wall to loosen the hold on him.

"Your fight is with me!"

The door bangs close.

〪〪〪〜〜⏆〜〜〭〭〭

"Finally!" Spandam grumbles loudly as he hauls Robin inside a room with a harsh enough tug on her hair to send her tumbling onto her knees, slamming the door close behind her. "I can't believe you can make yourself into even more of a nuisance than you already are just by breathing!"

He bends down to rest his free hand on one of his knees as he pants, clearly not used to exerting himself as much as he did dragging her weight up the stairs for the last ten minutes.

The new position helps to somewhat relieve the sharpest edge of the burn in her scalp from the pull of her hair, and Robin manages to pay some attention to her new surroundings.

They're in a large, circular room similar to the one where Lucci stayed in at the base of the stairs, although there are much less crates and boxes stored inside as of now.

And there's another door on the other side of the room.

Spandam suddenly crouches down fully, and shoves her face hard against the stone of the floor.

"That's for being so uncooperative, you worthless woman!" He spits.

And perhaps Robin has spent too much time worrying about Elynna's recklessness since the day began, because even through the scraping of her skin against the stone the only thing she can think is that really, she would like it if these people could decide whether they want her to stay alive some more because they absolutely need her knowledge, or if they want her to die right now because she's the scum of the earth and can only serve the greater good as a corpse.

But she just closes her eyes tightly to protect them and keeps her mouth shut.

(Because her back is still cold with the lack of people to surround her.

Her throat still knotted tight with the fear that she made a gamble,

that she might lose

—that this might end like it did on Ohara—

that they might lose.

Still.

She's spent her whole life running, and it has never done her any good.

At least now she knows she'll have tried everything.

And if she has to go,

she'll go like she thinks that most of the Straw Hats will go.)

"See that door? Just one flight of stairs behind it, and we'll be on the Bridge of Hesitation! Besides, Lucci is down here, so none of your little friends are ever going to make it in time —or make it at all!" Spandam laughs as he straightens up and starts to drag her across the ground, taking out a Den Den Mushi with his free hand. "So you better stop that stupid tantrum and give up already! Honestly, you really have no shame, making a hero like me carry you!"

He starts berating the Marine on the other end of his call about good manners, you imbecile and how you better give me the greeting I deserve when I reach that damn bridge! and maybe his hold on her lessens a bit with his distraction.

Or maybe not, her head has been hurting too long for her to know for sure.

Even if it didn't, it doesn't matter.

Robin throws her weight in the opposite direction, and barely feels the hair that is probably torn off her scalp as she runs back towards the first door.

She won't be able to open it in time or even bash her way through it, not when he's already running after her.

She knows that.

But she's not leaving this room.

She's not reaching the Bridge of Hesitation.

She's not getting on that ship.

Not without the friends she knows are fighting for her, are coming to save her.

She can't.

She doesn't want to.

(She doesn't want to die.

Can't fathom how she ever wanted it or how Elynna can have ever stepped so close to it and looked so calm.

Because now that she's so close to it, now that she remembers every other time she came a bit too close to it—

Death is terrifying.)

Spandam's whole weight bumps into her back and shoves her forward.

The shock of her knees against the floor makes her sight go black.

And still, as her face falls towards the door, she doesn't forget.

She opens her mouth wide, and bites down on the one thing she might be able to hold.

Her teeth clamp tight around the handle.

The edge where the wood becomes metal cuts into the corner of her mouth, swallowing suddenly so difficult a task it feels like she might die choking, and the weight of her fall makes her teeth rattle and her jaw crack as Spandam starts pulling at her hair again to get her off.

"I can't believe it, you're holding onto it with your teeth?! Give up already! What are you, a savage?! Get… off!"

Tears fall from her eyes, blood dribbles from her mouth, and Robin holds on.

She holds on until her own blood betrays her, makes her hold too weak.

Spandam rips her face off the handle and throws her onto the ground.

And then he kicks her once, then twice for good measure.

"I can't believe you made me waste so much time!" He raves on as he ties a rope around her and starts dragging her across the room.

"Wanna know something fun, Nico Robin? Once we pass that door, I'll activate the landmine that is hidden right next to it, and the next person who tries to pass that door will be blown off! Pretty good, huh? But don't worry, it won't happen to your friends, since they're all going to die at the hands of the killing machines who work for me!"

He laughs, and starts walking again.

She's dragged along, skin burning as it scrapes against every irregularity in the stone, joints aching where her arms have been yanked too far back when he tied her up.

There's nothing left.

She's powerless.

She can't even move.

The only thing she can do—

Is talk.

Anger him.

(Anger him so much he'll hit her and twist every knife in every wound with his words.

Because it's the only thing that will slow him down,

that will make him stop.)

"I'm not leaving this room."

"... Hah?"

"I'm not passing that door," she pants. "And I'm not crossing that bridge with you either. My nakama promised… They're going to save me—"

"Are you freaking deaf?! I told you already! They're going to burn with the Buster Call, you dumb woman! Just like the giant from Ohara and your mother!"

She would rather be hit until even the blows of a man this weak break her bones rather than hear those words from his mouth.

It must show on her face when he crouches down to hover over her, because he laughs.

Again.

"You thought I didn't know?! Well I do! I know everything—"

If he wasn't holding onto her hair this tightly, she would snap forward and bite off that tongue of his.

(Everything?

Him?

This man—

This man knows nothing.

Nothing of what it was like, to breathe in the grease of burning flesh knowing it was the skin of people she touched just that morning, just that week.

Nothing of how loud it was, when the Great Tree burned and a boatful of people who knew nothing burst into red lava and black smoke and the screams died as the ships kept firing and firing and firing—

Nothing of how hot it was, so hot it felt like she was burning along with her island and her people like she wished she could even as she drifted away between two paths of ice.

Nothing of what it was like, to see her mother smile at her for the first time knowing that it was the last.

Nothing of what it was like, to have nothing on her mind but all this and more until she reached the next island, whether she was awake or asleep —until there was no difference between the two.)

"—know why?! It's because the man who did all that, well it was my old man, Spandine!" Spandam reveals loudly as he bursts out laughing, and even though Robin knows, has heard that laugh enough to never forget it, knows that he would speak the words like this, she finds her throat hurting with silent sobs, because what kind of monster stands there and looks proud of having a father like that?

She hasn't made a sound ever since he first hit her, but this time when he tugs harder on her hair to hoist her up higher in the air, she whimpers.

"How was it, by the way? I can't even imagine how terrible of an ordeal your life was for the last twenty years, you know. No place safe to sleep, nothing to eat. Adults all over trying their hardest to have your head for money."

The tears come again, and for the first time in twenty years she can't stop them.

Can do nothing at all to hold back the pain despite wanting to hide all of it from this man.

This man who makes her pain feel like shame.

This man who looks at her, at her pain and her tears, and smiles.

"Well, you know what? That bounty, it was my old man who put it on your head. And now here I am, his son, with your life in my hand! Ohara has lost!"

You can be proud, Robin! Saul told her when he raced between cannonballs to get her to safety. Your mother is a great person, and the scholars too! One day, it will be your role to tell the story of this island! Tell the world that Ohara fought until the end, Robin!

"Not yet!" She screams right in his face, sight blurry with tears and voice wobbly with sobs but she says it anyway, because she has to, can't let the world's last memory of Ohara be this. "I'm still alive!"

"Precisely! You're gonna die!" He yells right back at her as his fist slams against her face.

Once.

Twice.

And again.

And again.

"Is it getting through your head yet?! You're gonna die, you and all those stupid pirates who had the gall to sully our honour when they burned that flag! You hear me?! No one is going to come for you! No one is going to save you! No. One—"

The door behind her slams open.

Spandam lets go of her with a surprised yelp.

When Robin turns around, there's a woman in the doorway.

The hair dye is still here, but the makeup is gone.

If anything, her First Mate is disguised in blood more than in anything else.

Strands of her hair are matted with it, some parts of her clothes almost dyed red, and it's splattered all over her face and throat.

There's a pause as they all look at each other.

Robin sees Elynna's eyes travel slowly over her, then to the hand still fisted in her hair.

Her features have never been very defined, her face unremarkable if not for how pale her skin is, but right then they contract so brutally, into something made so savage with the fury that darkens her eyes black—

It makes the dried blood on her face crack along the twisting lines of her face.

Her First Mate's mouth slits open in a snarl that reveals teeth still stained with blood in some places, and—

(She looks like murder.

She looks like death, and Robin has never felt safer outside of the Merry.)

"You. Who the hell," she spits, "do you think your fucking hands are touching?"

〪〪〪〜〜⏆〜〜〭〭〭

Franky doesn't know what to expect when he bursts through the doors, so he stops.

The Captain of the Straw Hats comes crashing into the wall right next to him with a force that makes him wince.

The boy barely even flinches, immediately back on his feet.

Maybe he should incorporate rubber in his defense mechanisms.

Although, honestly, Franky is pretty sure that the kid's guts are doing half the job.

"Need some help, Straw Hat?"

"No. This guy is mine." The pirate says firmly.

"... Fine. Where's Nico Robin, then? I've got two keys for her."

"Behind that door."

Franky follows the finger that points at said door, and finds himself staring straight at where Rob Lucci is standing, looking almost untouched in the middle of the destroyed room.

"I'm afraid I can't let another person get out of this room, and certainly not you, Cutty Flam." The CP9 agent says with a thin smile. "Not alive, at least."

When Franky glances down at the boy next to him, he doesn't seem upset by the threat —or the fact that he's clearly been kept away from his crewmate for some time now.

In fact, he's smiling.

"... 'another person'?"

Lucci's smile twitches.

The kid just smiles wider.

"Hey, Franky?"

"Yeah?"

"Can I ask you for a favour? I don't think Ann had any keys when she came through, so can you bring yours to Robin? I didn't like seeing her chained —that seastone stuff is annoying. Plus, she's super strong!"

That makes him scoff in amusement.

He probably knows it even better than the woman's Captain if half of the stories he heard are true.

Still, this is getting a bit annoying.

Elynna, and now this Ann?

Just how many of the Straw Hats are running around without him having seen them?

And here he was thinking that the whole crew standing on those crenels to declare war against the world looked super cool.

At least the others were probably doing something equally cool and important at that moment.

(Or maybe something completely stupid.

He hasn't known the Straw Hats for long, but it wouldn't surprise him.)

"Super leave it to me!"

Well, he says that, and really, he gets why the pirates' Captain is so hellbent on fighting Lucci alone.

It might be Spandam who gave the orders, but in the end it's this guy who took Nico Robin away from her crew and brought her here.

Still—

He has to hand it to the other man.

When it comes to fighting, Rob Lucci is a monster of strength in every sense of the word.

Franky keeps trying to cross the room, and even tries a few attacks of his own when the agent inevitably gets in his way, but even the fully charged punch that put Fukurou out of commission for a little while doesn't do anything to him.

In fact, Franky can't say for sure that he would have made it out of this room at all —until the Straw Hat kid does something that makes him pink, quite clearly in pain and feverish enough to create steam.

Then it's Lucci who starts to get kicked around, even after he shifts into a half-leopard form.

As Franky finally manages to push his way through the door, he thinks that really, some of the new generation pirates seem to be cut from the same cloth as Gold Roger and all the others who started the Age of Piracy.

〪〪〪〜〜⏆〜〜〭〭〭

Spandam doesn't even have the time to answer before Elynna seems to grab her rage by the throat and wrench it back inside herself.

Funkfreed bursts from his sword form into his elephant form almost at the same time, grabbing his master with his trunk to set him down further back so as to place himself between Spandam and Elynna, leaving Robin to stare up at the large leg the elephant raises without seeming aware that she's right under it.

Then an arm wraps around her waist and she's sailing through the air, the warmth of another body wrapping around her just in time to protect her bruised self from the harsh landing on the floor as both her and Elynna roll over a few feet to end up behind the relative protection of one of the few stacks of boxes stored in the room.

Her First Mate breathes out harshly against the top of her head, her hand still cradling Robin's head under her chin.

"You good?"

Robin allows her weight to sag further into the younger girl for just a moment before she blinks away the tears.

"Yes." She whispers, knowing that Elynna is really asking about any serious injury that needs to be attended to immediately.

The way her hands hold her and her eyes look at her as she helps her sit up tells Robin that even if she tried to lie, it probably wouldn't work.

"Schwarz! What was so hard to understand when I told you I didn't want you with us?!"

The snarl rips through the brittle veneer of calm again.

"Elynna?"

"And where are the stupid subordinates who were supposed to keep you away from me?!"

Her First Mate's eyes narrow.

"I'll be back in a sec, Sophia."

"What—"

But the hand she holds out is stopped by the handcuffs that bind her wrists as Elynna races straight towards the elephant, whose trunk swiftly turns into a sword ready to cut her in two.

Robin doesn't even have the time to scream.

Elynna ducks under the slash and then slides under the elephant, cutting a long line along his stomach as she goes and then rolls to a stand, grabbing the back of a fleeing Spandam's neck to bash his face against the nearest wall.

A scream bursts through the room.

"Argh! My nose, you—"

Before she can do anything else, Funkfreed wraps his tail around her waist and lifts her up, harshly squeezing all the air out of her in a single, short scream of utter rage as she's forced to let go of the CP9's chief, and then her weight is sent careening through the air.

She's quick to flick a tessen out of its holster and flip it open just in time to drive the circular edge of its leaves into the wall right before crashing into it, and from there redistributes her weight and momentum to flip herself off the wall instead of slamming into it.

She lands on her feet barely a foot away from Robin.

(But she feels so much farther,

with how murderous the baring of her teeth looks as her eyes track the screams of anger coming from the man she just hurt, as if the huge elephant isn't even standing between the two of them.

She looks as if she would tear him apart alive on the spot

—bones snapping in her fists and flesh tearing under her nails—

if given the opportunity.)

Then her gaze meets Robin's, and the rage uncoils from her with her sigh like the hunt uncoils from a predator giving up on its game.

"Sorry. I'm back."

"I will have your head, Schwarz!"

Her fingers twitch, but she stays still, and Robin allows herself to believe her.

(Because Sanji, or Luffy?

They fight like this all the time, with their heart cradled in their throat and clenched tight in their fists.

But Zoro and Elynna?

At most, they let their heart drive them from behind their ribs and under their lungs.

Seeing her First Mate like this isn't just unusual.

It's dangerous, if she doesn't remember to be careful.)

Elynna stands back up and moves in front of her.

From where Robin sits on the floor, her back looks so wide, and yet so small, in this room where Spandam's sword-elephant takes so much place.

(It makes her feel even smaller for hiding behind that back.

Protection makes her feel like the child she used to be when she still had enough hope to wish for this.

But she doesn't know how to be that child anymore.)

"Do you have the key? I can take care of them while you prepare our escape."

"... The key?" Elynna repeats without looking at her as she stops. "The others are taking care of that."

"I can be bait!" She hastens to say as the younger girl moves to take another step. "It will make it easier for you to—"

Elynna freezes, and Robin's voice dies in her mouth as she watches her fists tighten so hard and so suddenly that blood seeps through the white of her knuckles to drip down on the stone.

But when her First Mate speaks, her voice is perfectly level.

"You know, in the end, the things you all said about me being a good First Mate had less to do with me as a First Mate and more with me as a person."

"... What are you—"

Abruptly, Elynna turns around and starts walking back towards her.

"Stop hiding already, Schwarz! I'm not going to let you ruin or delay this moment for me!"

"Elynna—"

The gunshot is thunderous in the near-empty, closed space of this room.

Elynna sidesteps, and keeps going until she's kneeling on the floor right in front of Robin, hidden by the relative cover granted by the pile of wooden boxes.

"So tell me." She demands before Robin can say anything. "What makes you think that we only or even primarily came here because you're useful? You are, but I came because I love you, Sophia."

There's more gunshots, and the shaking floor of an elephant charging at them, prompting Elynna to lurch forward and hoist Robin up over her shoulder.

(But she's already breathless.

She wonders if this is how Elynna felt, staring down at a list that holds no defaults and only qualities.

Usefulness is real, concrete.

As objective as humans can reach.

You can trust it, hone it.

But love?

It depends on others as much as on you.

You can't control it, and you can lose it so fast—

And love spoken like this, proven the way the Straw Hats have proven it, still, despite every layer of herself she's peeled away today—

It feels almost as real and concrete as usefulness, is all the more breathtaking and terrifying for it

—feels like a dream destined to always be out of reach, ready to crumble under her fingertips—

and it's strange how hard it feels,

to take that last leap of faith, when she's already free-falling without any control over how things are going and how they will end even though she's the one who asked for this war.)

Her hands are bound, but Elynna's forearm across the back of her thighs clings enough to her weight for the both of them as she races towards the wall, steps up the height of it and catches the war fan she left embedded there to haul the both of them further up in the air right before the blade of the elephant's trunk leaves a deep gouge in the wall where they just were.

Robin understands what is about to happen and curls herself closer around the girl carrying her just as Elynna tightens her grip on her and throws her weapon, using the momentum to spring away from the wall and over the elephant just as the tessen slices into the animal's back and embeds itself there.

The sword-elephant bellows in pain, retreating back towards his master with staggering, earth-shaking steps.

"Stop crying, you worthless thing —and go get Nico Robin back!" Spandam screams in the face of the animal's tears while pointing at the other pile of bags and crates Elynna has hurried behind.

"I know." Robin lets out before the younger woman is even done setting her down gently against the wall so she can more easily stand up on her own if needed.

(She knows,

but she doesn't know it down in her bones, which are still the bed of twenty years of cynicism.)

Elynna stares back.

Robin thinks she knows, too.

"Good." She says simply. "Then you understand that there's very little I wouldn't do for you."

Robin is the one who looks away first.

Her eyes fall on where a nick is still bleeding sluggishly down her First Mate's throat, some of the blood threading its way through the thin chain looped around her neck to follow the trail of it that has already dried in the engravings of the oval locket resting at the end of that chain, swinging lightly in the air.

She thinks of the time she got to see what was in that locket, and swallows.

Of course.

She might not know that down to her bones, either, but oh, she understands.

She understands that beyond the importance she gives to love, to them, Elynna is terrified to lose any of them or their love to the point of obsession.

(To the point of self-sacrifice and self-destruction,

as if she doesn't own enough of herself to exist in the world on her own.)

She understands that short of asking her to hurt another member of the Straw Hats, or perhaps Luffy's brother, there is almost nothing that she cannot ask of this girl and get, as much as it is within her power to give.

(She thinks that this is what it feels like to have the life of someone rest in her hands much more than all the times she has snapped the necks of Marines and World Government agents and civilians.

For her who has only ever killed so she can keep running away, being loved this entirely feels so much closer to breaching into the domain of divinity than she ever could when she makes herself judge and executioner of someone's existence for a fraction of second.)

"Yes."

"Ask me, then."

Start with me.

Start easy.

Robin has said what she wants, already.

But saying what she wants doesn't mean getting it.

She said that she wanted to live, that she wanted to keep living with the Straw Hats, knowing that in the end, they might lose.

(That in the end, she might get none of that.)

But asking for something?

That's like letting herself fall and trusting the other to catch her.

It's extending a hand to receive rather than to give, and taking the risk that it might be slapped away.

(She doesn't remember asking for anything of consequence for more than a decade.

In restaurants and hotels, what sounds like a request is really only a polite order.

During jobs, asking for additional supplies or anything else was only a way to inform her colleagues of what she needed to get them the result they wanted.

She hasn't asked for work or food or anything of importance since she was a child and still hoping that her face wasn't known yet.

Food, she steals or pays for.

Work, she gets by coming up to the person who is greedy or uncaring enough of the law to hire her and proving to them how useful she can be.

—even this crew, she forcefully inserted herself in without asking—

Love, she forces herself to not think about.)

She looks back in the eyes just a few inches away from hers, framed by the wrong shade of hair and more bruised than unblemished skin and all this blood.

(All for her.)

"I want to end it all."

And after all, if she has already gambled away her own life and that of these people, what is one more gamble?

What is there left to be scared of?

What is the risk, in the face of one of the people who already extended their own hand when they refused the easy way out her sacrifice offered to chase after her instead?

"... Elynna?"

"Yeah."

"Will you help me?"

Elynna smiles a smile twisted by the swollen, bleeding skin of her face, and it feels just like the smile Robin can see any day on the Merry.

"'Course I will." She answers easily as her weight tilts forward until Robin can feel that smile against her forehead and the bloody half-print of her mouth from the blood smeared across Elynna's face.

(She doesn't know where the blood comes from.

She knows only that it was shed for her.)

"Attack, Funkfreed!"

〪〪〪〜〜⏆〜〜〭〭〭

Franky doesn't take the time to be civilised when he hears the sounds coming from the other side of the door.

So he crashes right through it instead.

The room he finds himself in is almost identical to the one where the rubber kid was fighting.

But here, he finds Spandam on one side, Nico Robin and another woman whose uniform is clearly that of a Marine on the other, and a rushing elephant between the two.

His fellow prisoner quickly pushes herself to her feet and, seeming to spot him when she turns, hurries over to him and away from the elephant's reach.

It leaves him with an unobstructed window to shoot down the three others, and he moves to do just that when Nico Robin's voice stops him.

"Don't! She's with us!"

At the same time, the woman in the Marine uniform who just jumped over the stacks of stored goods lands behind the elephant's head and probably wounds him, because the animal lets out a howl of pain and promptly charges right at the wall, turning at the last moment to slam its side against the wall hard enough to send the girl tumbling down his other flank.

She tucks herself into a roll upon landing, springs away from the huge leg attempting to squash her into a pulp, and runs back towards them.

Nico Robin's intervention made him think that the girl might be a Marine who finally realised the kind of megalomaniacs and psychopaths she was working for and decided to help the pirates instead.

But then he sees her face as she comes closer, recognises the features through the bruised swell of skin and the cuts and the blood, and—

Yeah, no.

No way.

He turns to the woman next to him, who is still staring down at the two keys he tried to open her handcuffs with —unsuccessfully.

"Yo, Nico Robin, why are you alone? I thought those Elynna and Ann girls were supposed to be with you already!"

"What am I, chopped liver?" Heidi Schwarz deadpans as she comes to a stop next to them.

"You don't count."

"Tell that to the bruise on my face."

Franky inspects said face silently, and smirks.

"Which one?"

The girl gives a confused sort of blink, as if she forgot how messed up her face is with the adrenaline of the fight, and for a moment she looks as young as the girl he met in the seedy streets of Water Seven and who made him want to take her in right away.

"… All of them, actually."

"That just proves how annoying you are."

"Yeah, exactly what I'm saying."

He rolls his eyes.

Of course.

If she's the kind of batshit crazy who gets off on making people cry, he shouldn't be surprised that she measures her self-worth by the number of people who want to punch her in the face.

"Schwarz!" Spandam's voice reaches them as he points his gun at them.

The first shot is wildly off, threatening the integrity of Franky's hairstyle much more than the Marine soldier's life.

The second is probably a lucky shot considering how close it comes before it ricochets off the fan Schwarz unfolds over her shoulder with a metallic sound, prompting Franky to observe the weapon more closely.

Even from up close, however, it's almost impossible to tell that the leaves are made of metal and sharp enough to kill, under the coat of silver-brushed black paint.

It's an unusual kind of weapon, and one he certainly didn't expect from a Marine specialised in undercover work, whose combat abilities are usually either very basic or oriented towards assassination.

"First Nico Robin and now Cutty Flam?! You think I'm going to let you and Garp take credit for both of them?! Don't make me laugh, you little bitch! I don't know how you got away from them, but just you wait until my men find you again—"

Schwarz slowly turns in his direction and tilts her head on the side, looking almost curious.

"I didn't think you were actually that stupid."

A quiet breath of laughter drags Franky's attention back to where Nico Robin is standing, looking very amused in such a fond way it makes him wonder how long the Marine spent trying to seduce her in Water Seven for her to look as if she knows exactly what's about to happen.

"Why you—"

"Get real, Spanda. Your men are all dead."

"It's Spandam! And don't think you'll get away with this! Even Garp won't be able to save your head once the higher-ups will know about your crime!"

"Crime? What crime? There won't even be any bodies. That's what you were planning for me, wasn't it? An unfortunate, accidental death in the middle of a pirate attack and a Buster Call."

"What's the need for bodies when they'll have the testimony of the world's hero?! Didn't think about that, did you, you stupid little airhead?!"

Schwarz just sighs, as if she's speaking to the most idiotic person in the world.

Franky can agree with her on that, if nothing else.

"Alright, let me make this clear for you. That mission of bringing Nico Robin here with Cutty Flam? None of it is true. The only one here who really has a mission is me. More like two, actually. Bring these two back to my boss," she starts as she raises one finger, and then another, "and get rid of you."

Spandam falters.

For all of the man's inability to protect himself through all the times Franky attacked him, he thinks that this is perhaps the first time that the World Government dog shows real, actual fear.

Perhaps because even a man as delusional as he is cannot ignore the fact that it's the backing of the World Government that makes him powerful.

That without it, he's nothing.

That without it, he will be at the mercy of people like Franky and Robin and all the others he trampled on —or at least the ones who deem him worth their time for a bit of revenge.

(Water Seven isn't that big or that seedy of a city.

He's made his way up in the criminal world using physical violence and has never had the need for anything else.

He made sure to steer clear of the more dangerous syndicates and the riskiest businesses.

That doesn't mean he hasn't heard stories, doesn't know all the ways a person can be broken beyond their bones.

But blackmail, torture, manipulation…

For him, it's always been too close to what took away his mentor.

Too close to what the man on the other side of this room can do without batting an eyelash.

He has no problem roughing up people who know what they signed up for, and for most of them bruises and burns and broken bones are enough to get them to back down.

Still, in that moment, he thinks that the kid in front of him dealt a harsher blow to the man he's hated all these years than he himself would manage even if he spent ten minutes pounding into him with his fists.)

" … Me?"

Franky moves slowly to try and not catch the attention of the two others when he touches Robin's shoulder.

She turns to him with curious eyes, and he motions at her to follow him.

"Did you really think that the Elders who give you such an important mission rather than to Garp The Fist? Don't be delusional. It's not like we don't know about all the candidates for the positions you wanted that you threatened away, or all the decisions you tried to sway for your personal gain. You've been identified as a liability, Spanda, and the World Government has no need for liabilities."

"What—"

"It was just icing on the cake that Nico Robin gave me the opportunity to get in here. I even got to catch you in the act when you started making all these statements that clearly prove you don't have the World Government's best interests at heart."

"Franky?" Robin whispers as they inch their way towards the door that leads to the bridge.

"Time to make our way out while they're fighting each other."

It takes him a few steps to realise that she's not following him anymore.

"I have to stay here." She says before he's even fully turned around.

"What? Look, lady, I know you want to get your revenge. Trust me, I feel the same, but—"

"Get in line, then." Schwarz says as she reaches them and stops right next to the woman the Straw Hat kid told him to take care of.

"Franky, stop." The woman in question says when he readies himself to lunge at her.

He groans in exasperation.

"Listen, Nico Robin. I don't know what makes you like this girl so much after everything she's done, but your Captain told me to watch out for you, and she's bad news. You heard what she said, right? She's still trying to get you for her own superiors."

"Oh, that?" Schwarz says nonchalantly. "It was a lie. I was just messing with him. Call it payback for having such an unbearable voice and not having the decency to use it minimally. Comes as a bonus with the payback for trying to kill me, and the payback for being… well, himself. I don't know how else to say it."

Franky can't help the way his mouth twitches, and almost lets out the laugh in his mouth.

He can't tell.

Is it the girl he met and just got a glimpse of? The one who looked at him so carefully, who seemed pretty smart and a whole lot snarky and a bit unhinged and definitely a killer, but certainly not indiscriminate or sadistic in her violence?

Or the girl he met on the Sea Train? The one who looked at him with the same look one gives to empty air, the one he punched in the face and who smiled like she won, the one who seemed to enjoy nothing more than gleefully poking at everyone's weaknesses until they looked ready to either murder her or themselves, careless not like she didn't notice the danger she put herself in, but like she didn't care?

He can't tell which one is the real one.

(This is why he's been careful to never end up having to deal with people like this.

The kind of people who keep you guessing on whether they're your ally or your enemy right up until they stab you in the heart with a smile on their face.

Betrayal is common in his line of work, but just like with everything else, some people are particularly good at it.

He's smart enough to be a pupil of the best shipwright and lead a gang, but he won't fool himself into thinking that he can keep up with that kind of mind games.)

"Miss Schwarz used to work as a mercenary of sorts to survive in the streets before she was taken into the Marines." Nico Robin jumps in with her own explanation. "I've offered her a good enough reward for a contract on Spandam's head that she has accepted to… come out of retirement, shall we say."

He raises an incredulous eyebrow.

The Marine-and-apparently-hitwoman-in-her-spare-time shrugs.

"Shitty pay. And we have no retirement plan, can you believe that?"

"… Fine." He eventually gives in. "You're a big girl, and much smarter than me, so I'll follow you on this one, Nico Robin —but don't think I won't take her down if I think she's too suspicious."

"Of course." His co-prisoner smiles.

Fucking rude, the girl's face says.

He grins.

"Alright. Let's take care of this quickly."

"Woah, woah, woah. Nope. We're staying here, and you're going to that bridge to take care of the soldiers who are guarding the ship waiting for Spanda." Schwarz stops him, pointing successively at her and Nico Robin and then at him. "The warships for the Buster Call are going to arrive soon, and we'll definitely need an escape from that. Besides, she's my client right now. She might as well stay so that I don't have to lug his head around when I'm done to prove I've fulfilled the contract. He's already ugly enough, death won't make things any better for him."

Franky glares, swearing silently as Nico Robin just smiles and makes no move to rebuke the brat's argument or reject her touch when the girl wraps one hand around one of her arms, fingers twitching possessively as she shoots him a look that Franky interprets as don't you dare going anywhere with my exit ticket.

It makes sense.

She makes sense, and the fact that he can't find a better way to do this is such a pain in the ass.

Since when can low-ranked soldiers speak with enough authority to make crime lords want to go along with their strategy, anyway?

It's a good thing none of his men are with him and that this place is going to be bombed to hell, possibly hidden Visual Den Den Mushi included.

He'd never hear the end of it otherwise.

"Alright." He spits. "But I've been waiting eight years to give him payback for what he did to my mentor —and for almost killing me. I'm not leaving without taking care of that."

Funkfreed trumpets loudly behind them, seemingly done comforting his master and now set on avenging him, and for the first time since he met her Heidi Schwarz grins at him.

It looks like he's passed some kind of test and the girl has decided she likes him enough to allow his presence during her let's bond over violence even if I was working with the guy who tried to kill you both and that we're about to sacrifice on the altar of our bonding moment.

(It looks like he's fallen in a trap he didn't know about and will never be able to escape from.

He tells himself it's just the blood in her smile.)

"That can be arranged."

Then she lets go of Nico Robin, pushing her firmly in Franky's direction.

He secures an arm around the woman's waist, quickly jumping out of the way and behind crates that will protect them from Spandam's shitty aim so he can still look out for the window of opportunity that the kid better give him if she wants to get out of this room.

The kid in question spins around right as Funkfreed and the giant sword his trunk has turned into reach her, one hand at her back and slipping under the shirt of her uniform.

She sidesteps, the trunk-blade running past her as the tip of the long, strangely curved knife she flips into her hand screeches along the other weapon in a shower of spark.

And then the shower of sparks turns into a shower of blood that splatters onto the faces of both Schwarz and Funkfreed as the elephant howls, and Franky gapes as he watches the knife sink into what should still be a blade, still looks like one —something of metal rather than of flesh and blood.

(Her face is set.

Calm.

Focused.

Calculating, maybe, but with none of the sadistic delight, nothing of the smile he expected to see on the face of a woman who claims to get off on being the cause of others' pain.)

The elephant abruptly slows down, but his momentum carries him forward still, and by the time his body does stop Schwarz' knife has sliced almost to the base of the sword that makes up his trunk.

Franky doesn't know what happens next.

Or he does.

(Sees the entire, huge body of the elephant goes stock still.

Feel how Nico Robin's body does the same in his arms, hears the way her breath hitches.

But when he looks down her face is the same —a little bit tense, a little bit worried, pupils blown a little bit wide.

Spanda's pet?

His whole body suddenly reeks of absolute, unadulterated terror.)

But he doesn't know why.

He doesn't think much about it either.

Just sets Robin down gently and rushes to the elephant to grasp at the trunk that has turned back into flesh and blood rather than sword, something much easier now that he's not moving and that there's no momentum that risks damaging even his reinforced body.

He barely stops, just starts running straight for Spandam and drags the weight behind him.

That's when the elephant starts to struggle, with perhaps even more energy than he's seen the animal exert up till now, blaring out his pain loud enough to feel like a physical blow.

But Franky just keeps running, until he digs one foot into the ground and heaves Funkfreed over his shoulder, slamming all of his weight down on the man whose indistinct yelling he doesn't bother to listen to.

Both master and animal shut up instantly.

In fact, it's a miracle the floor doesn't cave in entirely under the impact that rocks the whole room.

It feels like he's thrown some of the eight years-old weight on his shoulders along with it, and he doesn't think staying here any longer will bring him much more relief.

(He'll always regret being so careless with the weapons he made, or the words he didn't say.)

So he huffs, and turns around to walk back towards the door that leads to the bridge.

Schwarz holds out a hand for a high-five as he nears her.

The shit-eating look on her face is half the reason why he completely ignores her as he walks past her.

"Be careful, Nico Robin." He says with a pointed look as he reaches for the handle.

Given the smile he gets in return, it feels like the woman has perfectly understood his warning about their new (and very, very tentative in his case) ally —and has somehow chosen to disregard it entirely despite how careful she must have learned to be to survive all this time.

"We'll see you later, Franky. Good luck."

"Super count on me! I'll clean up that ship before you're even done here!"

〪〪〪〜〜⏆〜〜〭〭〭

Elynna's hand falls down limply.

"Is this what it feels like to get turned down through sheer indifference?"

"It never happened to me."

The Straw Hats' First Mate rolls her eyes.

"Beautiful people."

"… Was that really necessary?"

"Yes." She answers very seriously. "It was just too funny."

"You're impossible."

"Hey, I wasn't planning to, but I mean, did you hear him? 'Those Elynna and Ann girls'. He set himself up for that one. I couldn't not do it."

Robin's eyes glint with laughter.

(It's strange how not-strange it still feels, even here,

the way the Straw Hats' antics make her breathe like she's out of her cage and tasting fresh air.)

"It's rather rude towards our ally."

"Don't tell me you weren't tempted."

"… I didn't say that."

A noticeable increase in the volume of Spandam's screams draws their attention.

"Well… Guess I should still take care of that."

Robin eyes the reluctance that tightens the corners of Elynna's eyes as she watches Funkfreed shake himself out of the remnants of his own fear.

"Can't you use that power again?"

"Nah. Pumps my energy like crazy, and in his case it seems to trigger the fight part of his fight or flight instinct. Not exactly what I'm aiming for."

"Wearing him down seems like the best way to go, then."

"Yeah. It's hard to hit any vital point on an animal this big —not sure even my kukris would cut deep enough. Although to be honest, I'd rather leave him alive at the end of the fight."

"Animals are your worst opponents, I take it?"

"More like the cuteness, actually."

"Hurry up, Funkfreed! I want the corpse of this girl at my feet, even if you lose a limb to get it!"

"… I'm gonna break his jaw. I can break his jaw, right? It'll be your official welcome-to-the-crew gift."

"I would be very touched to receive such a heartfelt gift."

"Cool. So how did you know I told Lucci and the others about coming from the streets?"

"I was worried about you, and they hadn't put these handcuffs on me yet. When it comes to those who use the Hana Hana no Mi, having eyes and ears everywhere can become quite literal."

"… Always knew you were a stalker."

The elephant charges.

Robin laughs.

〪〪〪〜〜⏆〜〜〭〭〭

This isn't enough.

Zoro is starting to be able to read through his opponent's movements.

Enough to land a hit even through the techniques Kaku used to dodge his attacks at first.

But this still isn't enough.

Because judging from the speed and the sheer amount of attacks he's trying to shield himself from right now, the CP9 agent wasn't fighting seriously this whole time.

He honestly can't tell if the man is the least annoying of the bunch for being —most of the time— more reasonable than the rest, or the most annoying for underestimating him all the time.

And if he has to hear one more word about the 'primal might of giraffes', he seriously can't promise to leave the damn tower standing by the time he's done.

Another Rankyaku blade pierces straight through his defences, cutting a line across his right collarbone and up the slope of his shoulder and making him grunt.

"See? I'm much too strong for you! You wouldn't be reduced to scrambling and parrying like this if the gap between us was small enough to leave you a chance!"

Zoro deflects away one of Kaku's katana, but not well enough to spare him another deep gash into the muscles of his left arm.

At this point, his arms are aching so much with the blows he took and the strain of his own weapons' weight that it shouldn't even hurt, but he flinches all the same, and barely avoids a new volley of Rankyaku.

"You made a grave mistake when you dared to challenge the World Government like you did, and you're going to pay it in blood for the sake of Absolute Justice! Just like that woman!"

Zoro grits his teeth around the hilt of his katana, hard enough that he thinks he might leave imprints there, and remembers meeting Robin after cutting down several dozens of Baroque Works' members, when she was still Miss All-Sunday —remembers thinking that the organisation might still be worth fighting if a woman like her stood at the top of it.

He remembers what Luffy told him about how when he saved her in Alabasta, she wanted to die so she wouldn't have to live knowing her dream would never be within her reach.

Most of all, he remembers the woman who spent all those months with them and who, in the end, refused to want death even as she stood right next to the people who thought it was natural for her to want her own end when they were the ones who did all they could to make that happen, and yet still failed.

(It doesn't matter how bearable the man in front of him is, really.

Because Robin is crew,

and he doesn't think there's anyone he respects more than her when it comes to strength of will.

That gives him at least two reasons to destroy this goddamn tower, along with everyone who works in it and is stupid enough to think they're making the world better with that Absolute Justice bullshit—)

A push of his arms allows him to jump away and put some distance between him and Kaku, who immediately jumps to follow—

and freezes inches away from the tip of the one blade Zoro raises in his direction.

He exhales a long breath around the hilt of Wado Ichimonji.

"Don't get so carried away. Scum like you always talk too much."

"... Tch. If you want to finish this fight so badly, then you might as well give up now, because this time I will cut you in two just like the Tower!"

Kaku starts to spin, but Zoro isn't paying attention anymore.

Moulding his killing intent in the shape of animals is something he is fond of.

It powers the aggressiveness and focus of his attacks better than if he just lets it run wild, and it's as good a way as any other to pay his respects to the animals who inspired his techniques.

(It reminds him that while he created the Three Sword Style, he did not create it from nothing, nor did he create it alone.

Just like how, in this moment, he's the one who is shaping his killing intent into a shape resembling something human for the first time, but the form it eventually takes comes from the illustrations of a book on deities of war that Robin showed him after she noticed his interest in the conversation she was having with Elynna.)

When the circular blade of Kaku's Rankyaku expands towards him, he cuts through it and then through Kaku himself like through all the other obstacles that will stand in their way until they get their crewmate back.

(They will leave this place with Robin or not at all, and he doesn't need his Captain's orders to settle on that.)

Panting in exertion as he releases his hold on his killing intent, he reaches up to take off his bandana, and turns around to find that his opponent has already collapsed.

"One last thing. I have a message from one of Galley-La's foremen." He starts, waiting for the hitch in Kaku's breathing that tells him he has his attention. "You're all fired."

"... Pauly, huh? I see. Talk about a hard blow. It's not easy to retrain when you're a professional assassin."

"You've still got the zoo."

The sound that comes out of Kaku's mouth is half a cough and half a laugh.

"That's a good one. Looks like we're well on our way to losing, huh?"

Zoro shoots him a glance as he ties his bandana back around his arm, wincing when the movement tugs at his probably broken ribs.

"Don't misunderstand. I just wanted to settle the score between you and me. Your stupid group lost against us even before Usopp burned that flag. Our First Mate has been watching over Robin since Water Seven, and I'm not talking about the stupid cook."

He watches the realisation come slowly like the pool of blood growing under him, watches as it washes over the other man's face, blank with the shock that the betrayal somehow hits hard enough to matter.

(He wonders how much of herself his First Mate showed them,

for this guy to have appreciated her enough that he trusted her to be sincere —to be on his side.)

"... Oh. Heidi-chan, is it?"

He scowls at how wrong the name sounds and even more at how wrong the familiarity in the assassin's voice is, but nods anyway.

"Looks like she got you too, then. That girl's a Marine, you know?"

Zoro sighs, wondering idly what his First Mate did to make the man conclude that she's a Marine posing as a pirate instead of the other way around.

"That's the Marines' problem, not ours."

"Heh. Guess we'll see. You might want to be more careful, though. She's as unstable as Lucci, that girl."

Now Zoro finds himself frowning in exasperation at where the Tower slid off its own base to reveal a large stretch of sky.

The comparison makes his hands itch for his katana.

As unstable as Lucci?

As if.

That being said, the CP9 did do the one thing that will never fail to anger Elynna like he's seen her get angry barely a handful of times —and to make her act on it, which he's only seen once.

(In Cocoyashi.

When she inflicted a potentially fatal injury on an experienced Fish-Man pirate and left him to bleed out or be saved, having just a few weeks of combat training under her belt herself.

Maybe it was partly a fluke.

But the one who thinks that the difference between masters and beginners is that the former have no need for luck will never meet any master, because luck always plays a role.

And if it was all luck and no skill, she would be dead.

More than that, and no matter how angry Lynn was that time—

she was nowhere near as dangerous then as she is now.)

"Now that," he smirks, "is definitely your problem."

〪〪〪〜〜⏆〜〜〭〭〭

The fight doesn't last long.

It still lasts long enough to leave Robin's heart thudding almost through her ribs several times.

(There's something about seeing someone risk their life to help you when you don't have to worry about your own survival that is as terrifying as it is awe-inspiring.

She doesn't know which emotion is most responsible for the tears she feels pressing against the back of her eyes.)

The sword-elephant attacks and defends with a kind of adrenaline-fuelled desperation that Robin suspects has been triggered by Elynna's aura.

(The aura that washed over like liquid walls caging her in to compress her lungs into nothing.

She wonders if this is what the Foxy Pirates felt, when Elynna poured all the stress and anger their game inspired her in a dance that felt like a death threat.

She wonders if this is what the rest of the Straw Hats felt, when they forgot.

She doesn't need to wonder why her heartbeat stays steady and her mind clear even as her skin tightens, under the chills and around the folding of her bones inside the hitched cramping of her muscles.)

Regardless, there comes a point where Elynna simply wears the elephant down too much, and when he takes a step forward to launch his next attack he just—

collapses.

The room shakes around them, almost covering Spandam's screeching screams for his living weapon to get back up and protect me, you useless thing!

But Funkfreed doesn't, blood oozing out of the deep gouges Elynna has been cutting into his skin, flank rising and falling rapidly alongside his frazzled breathing.

(For a moment, Elynna stares down at the animal with something just a bit pinched in her expression,

—her heart often a bit more open, a bit more tender when it comes to animals other than humans.)

When Elynna turns away from the prone sword-elephant to walk towards the chief of the CP9, she finds herself with a golden gun pointed at her.

It doesn't make her pause in the least.

"Stop!"

She simply takes a step forward, without a word and without looking away from him.

"I said stop, you brainless woman!"

Another step.

Spandam's hand shakes so much when he pulls the trigger that the air moved by the bullet doesn't even ruffle her hair.

Elynna just keeps walking, and Robin keeps watching.

(Doesn't blink.

Barely breathes.

Because this feels like standing on the edge of a cliff,

like being on the verge of something tall and deep and final.

Tall and deep and final enough to further mark the fracture in her life between a Before and an After that this day is turning out to be.)

He fires again, and again and again.

Her First Mate only bothers to dodge when she's close enough for him to fire at her almost point blank.

She deflects his shot by slapping his hand away with the back of her own, and then turns her hand to grip his wrist as she steps closer to swipe his feet from under him, breaking his wrist in the same move she uses to shove him to the floor.

Spandam hits the cold stones with a shrill scream, and Robin feels her heart beat in her throat with a kind of laugh made shaky with tears as she watches him writhe right there at her First Mate's feet, in the grime that covers the floor, shrieking out insults and threats as he cradles the broken bone in his other hand.

Is this really all?

Is this really the son of the man who laughed as he pulled the trigger of the gun that set her world on fire and left her nights tasting like smoke for twenty years?

And that man too, did he ever amount to more than this?

"You worthless trash! Don't think Garp will save you from me when I get out of he— Fuck, this hurts! There's no way the Elders will let you kill me as long as I have Cutty Flam and Nico Robin to offer them! I'm a hero, you hear?! So don't just stand there, go get a nurse from the ship to heal me, you brainless—"

Elynna raises one foot slowly.

When Spandam comes rolling back towards her, she slams it down.

Hard.

Judging from the crack that rings through the room and the fact that the man somehow screams even louder right before fainting, Robin thinks that she probably broke his shoulder.

Or his collarbone.

Or his shoulder blade, maybe.

Possibly a combination of all three.

"Be quiet." Elynna snaps in a hiss without even glancing at him, not seeming to realise that Spandam's consciousness has bailed out on her entirely.

Or perhaps she broke another bone precisely because she suspected that he wouldn't stay conscious through the pain, Robin finds herself musing.

Her First Mate remains still, staring at the wall in front of her for a few more moments.

Then she turns, and looks straight at her.

Robin stares back, heart going still in her throat as she tries to swallow it back down.

Eventually, Elynna seems to come to a decision, because she looks away and nods to herself.

Then she raises one hand to push her dislocated shoulder from the last time Funkfreed managed to throw her into a wall back into its normal alignment, rolls said shoulder once to make sure everything is back in order, and bends down towards the chief of the CP9.

At that moment, Robin wonders faintly, in the back of her mind, if her First Mate has been thinking about what she saw when she came in all this time, or if she's just so angry that she wants to make everything as painful and humiliating as she can, or if it's both—

But in the end, it doesn't really matter.

What matters is that instead of dragging him after her by the collar of his shirt or even by tugging on the appendage that she already broke, Elynna's fingers close around a fistful of Spandam's hair instead, and she pulls.

It has the unfortunate effect of immediately waking the man up —along with his voice.

Screaming gesticulations soon fill the room, getting somehow louder as Elynna gets closer and closer and closer.

"You think I'm gonna let you take that criminal and all the credit for catching her for yourself?! Or Garp?! As if! I'll get out of this… This trap before the week even ends, and then it's your word against mine, you shitty girl! Just you wait until I get my hands on your filthy, lowly, stupid face—"

When she stops, she's just out of Robin's reach (or perhaps Robin is just out of Spandam's reach—) and stares straight into her eyes as she heaves him higher up by his hair to coerce him into moving right in front of her, where she sets him on his knees and facing Robin.

It feels like an opportunity, wrapped up to look like an offering.

(An opportunity to turn things around, for once.

Because right now Robin is the one standing and looking down on a man who represents all the people who have looked down on her as if she were a criminal kneeling before them and waiting for their verdict

—all the people who have judged her guilty and condemned her when she was just a child whose only crime was to survive on the dead bodies and still-warm ashes of everyone she loved and everything she knew—

And right now she's shackled, still, but she's the one with the power to judge and condemn,

because no matter what this man might think, the girl who keeps him pinned on his knees will only execute Robin's demands.

Will hurt him as much as Robin asks.)

"—as if I would ever believe one of Garp's soldiers telling me that I'm a liability! The Elders won't get rid of a hero like me! But you, I'll have you hanged as soon as we reach the Headquarters! And then I'll add Garp along with all the stupid pirates who dared to sully the ground of my domain to that! The old war hero hanged for treason —it's what he deserves for keeping the spotlight away from me for so long—"

Elynna only breaks eye contact with her so she can roll her eyes.

"You just don't get it, do you?"

Then her foot shoves at the back of Spandam's head, stomping his face into the ground.

Another bone breaks.

His voice remains just as loud, but becomes entirely unintelligible.

I can break his jaw, right? It'll be your official welcome-to-the-crew gift.

Robin waits, but her First Mate says nothing more.

Instead, she simply looks at her again.

(An offering.)

Robin swallows, throat tight and dry with the realisation that it's the first time she's offered and not forced to do this.

That it's the first time she wants to do this.

Since she stepped into his office and all the way to this room, this man has hurt her.

He has hit her, manhandled her roughly enough to squeeze bruises into her skin and leave her scalp burning.

When it comes down to it, though, Spandam is a weak man.

She has come out of some fights faring far worse.

She doesn't even need her powers to deal with a man like this, as long as her hands are free from the seastone shackles that breathe weakness in her veins.

If anything, it's knowing that she can do nothing but take it that has hurt her the most when it comes to his physical blows.

But much more than with his physical blows, this man has hurt her with the words he spat at her, with his insults and his complete disregard of her humanity and everything she's gone through, with his laughter—

She knows how to ruin someone like this, too.

Has watched her fair share of victims go pale and weak and fall apart at her words and the way they are coated in her smiles.

(And maybe everyone back home would hate it,

how she wants to make this man's face do the same.

But everyone back home is dead

and she might still be a scholar at heart,

but life has never let her be only that.

She's learned to use violence, even if she has never learned to like it for its own sake.

There were a few times, though.

A few times where she got to use violence against people bad enough to shake loose echoes of things long buried in her heart,

—buried and dead and gone—

and those times she has found herself willing to use violence, even if not quite pleased.

Because she has been carrying the ball and chain of her grief for twenty years, but anger has helped her carry that grief as she ran for most of those years.

Anger at Saul and her mother and all the other scholars for leaving her,

for telling her to fight when they themselves gave up without any hesitation,

most of all, anger at all the agents and soldiers who fired and killed and watched it all burn down on that day

—for doing all of this and more without thinking,

for doing all of this and more after thinking and finding nothing wrong with it—

at them and at this great, terrible thing that calls itself Government but only knows how to punish, that makes no difference between governing and ordering with the only two options of obeying or dying—)

Elynna's hand clamps down on Spandam's splintered shoulder, cutting his screams off into whimpers.

She's still looking at her, and Robin—

looks down to meet Spandam's eyes, and smiles.

"Don't you get it? It was all a lie."

The apoplectic rage that mars what is visible of his face diminishes only just enough to let some incomprehension seep through.

Robin watches it, and cocks her head in a way that says don't you understand? Even though it's so simple… without her having to open her mouth.

Spandam flushes even harder.

This time, it has more to do with humiliation than rage.

At least at first, but even then it doesn't matter, because as soon as he tries to lunge forward Elynna pulls him right back down with a harsh tug on the arm that isn't wounded.

It could be seen as mercy, if only it didn't leave him pretty much defenceless.

(If only she didn't pull hard enough to dislocate his shoulder entirely.)

Still, Robin kneels on the floor to lean forward obligingly, and smiles wider so that he can still see it through the tears that are probably blurring his vision.

"There is one fact that is true, however. Me included, the Straw Hat Pirates count eight members."

Slowly, things click.

The Marine behind him who has yet to make any hostile move towards a renowned criminal she was supposedly tracking down.

It was all a lie.

The Marine behind him who claimed to be here for her mission, and yet who took the time and the risk to not just save Nico Robin from Funkfreed's every attack, but make sure she got out of the fight without any further injury.

Me included, the Straw Hat Pirates count eight members.

The Marine behind him who has been shadowing the Devil Child pretty much since she was captured from start to finish, who seems to care even less for the hierarchy they live in than Garp does, who has been spouting nonsense about the Elders wanting to eliminate him when he's heard nothing hinting at it—

The pirate he's let into Enies Lobby willingly, into his office.

The pirate who has slaughtered his security detail and his living weapon and who is now holding him on his knees like a criminal in front of the actual criminal whose capture should have made him a hero—

Things click, and Robin watches it all.

How his skin pales, and then ashens.

The way his throat swallows, and how the motion suddenly seems… difficult.

How his breathing turns louder, quicker in an erratic sort of way.

How his features contort with something very, very different from rage.

How his mouth falls opens, falls finally silent as he realises that he's going to die.

He's going to die, because he's alone in a room with two useless arms and a mouth that can barely scream and two pirates, one of whom has not only already killed but that he has hurt himself, the other still reeking of the blood shed by the men who are supposed to protect him.

He's going to die, because he is petty and obsessed with continuing his father's legacy, because he's powerful in the influence he can get without deserving it if nothing else —because he would be dangerous to Robin and all her crewmates by proxy if left alive.

He's going to die, because when his laughter will ring in her ears during bad nights, Robin wants to wake up knowing that the nightmare will only ever be that —a bad dream, and a bad memory, but not a bad omen.

(And he's going to die right now, because there might be something like pleased satisfaction tugging at Elynna's lips even as her eyes don't leave Robin's, and she might look somewhat entertained by the man kneeling at her feet—

But she has an escape to prepare and a crew that will always come first.

He's going to die right now because Robin isn't entertained.

This is a man who has hurt her too much, whose shadow is too big in the tragedies of her life for her to be entertained.

She thinks that the most positive, the most powerful thing she can feel where he is concerned is relief at the immediate end of his continued existence.

At most, she is... content.

Content to know that when the nightmares will come, she will be able, the way she so rarely can, to remember seeing the man causing them being made into someone no one can fear.

To remember that he has so little of the means necessary to match his own cruelty, once he is stripped of all the people who make him untouchable.)

He's going to die, but Robin can't be the one doing it, and it has nothing to do with the seastone circling her wrists and chafing at her skin.

If she were to ask, she knows that her First Mate will drag him along with them until Robin is free of her physical shackles so she can kill him herself —unless they meet an enemy along the way and have to finish him off on the spot.

No.

It has nothing to do with that, and everything to do with the fact that she can't.

(She can't kill the man whose father killed her mother and walk away feeling as if she's repeating a cycle rather than ending it.

She can't kill this man with her own two hands and walk away, knowing that in her nightmares Professor Clover and her mother's disappointment will visit her,

will haunt her for her inability to let herself die rather than use the hands made for turning pages and write words be tainted with violence to end the story of what used to be called the Scholars' Island.)

Spandam tries vainly to shake off Elynna's grip, and then starts screaming again, pain and rage and half-formed words all jumbled together.

But Robin can't kill him, so instead she looks back up and into her First Mate's eyes.

And Elynna must understand, because she doesn't blink, doesn't look away from Robin even as her hands shift towards Spandam's jaw and throat.

(Robin doesn't look away either, drowning in that gaze that feels like an anchor

until she can't hear the bullet that shot through Professor Clover and the sound of his body hitting the ground, until she can't hear the flames crackle towards the Tree and the ice crawling over Saul's flesh and her mother screaming at her to survive, Robin!

until the delusional arrogance sticking to the anger in Spandam's screams blurs into white noise even as the rage of it is slowly overtaken by something more like fear.

Even then, the arrogance is still there, still enough to make the sounds seem like orders.

Even then, Robin doesn't look away.

There's no need to listen to a dead man's words.

She only wants to know that he is dead, has no need to watch it happen.

More than that, she hopes that dying alone, without even the acknowledgement of the two enemies who bring about his death—

She hopes that it will make things just a tiny bit worse for this man.)

Slurred attempts at words tumble out faster from Spandam's mouth, something along the lines of what are you doing and I can give you anything you want and what can be better than saving me—

Elynna doesn't even glance at him.

Her grip tightens.

Her hands twist.

The crack of bones snapping seems all the louder with how abruptly it cuts off Spandam's voice.

In the periphery of her vision, Robin feels more than sees Elynna let go of the dead weight in her hands.

There's the dull slump of a body hitting the ground at her feet.

After that, there is only the silence and Elynna's eyes.

Robin blinks, slow and confused like waking up from a dream that was just close enough to feel like reality.

The death of important people in her life has always been so… loud.

(Like a bomb going off,

wrecking the world and her life to leave only rubble behind for her to build survival out of—

To build something still miserable but fundamentally different.)

The death of this man, no matter the fact that he is the furthest thing from loved in her heart, it's…

Quiet.

The death of a shadow, rather than of a man.

Compared to the weight it takes away, to how vast the air she has to breathe is now that he's gone, Spandam's death is—

His death seems so small.

It's only when Elynna shrugs that Robin realises she has said those words aloud.

"Like his worth." Her First Mate says as she nonchalantly kicks the corpse aside to step closer to her.

Robin's gaze falls, unbidden, and comes to rest on where the body of the CP9's chief is now lying.

Limp, arms spread and bent all wrong, skin torn and bleeding like a slit throat where his neck was so violently twisted.

Eyes and mouth still open, still frozen in a moment where he was the one who lost and she was the one who won, a moment where he would never have been able to catch her again.

The tears that come out are few and slow, like her piecemeal thoughts coming together into a single realisation.

Slowly, she bends down until her forehead meets the floor, her breath shaky as it passes her lips, the weight of it as if she has been holding it for years.

The Buster Call is still coming.

Her hands are still bound in her back, weak with the power of the seastone, and the floor is rough and cold and bruising under her knees, just like it was through the carpet of Spandam's office as she knelt there waiting for Elynna's blade to slide inside her flesh because it seemed like the only way out—

And yet.

And yet, she feels—

… Like she can breathe.

Even here, in this place.

There's a faint echo of something loud down below, and Robin wonders if she's really hearing her Captain or if she wants to see him and all the others so bad that she's imagining him.

The sound of Elynna's steps stopping right in front of her is definitely real, though, and Robin straightens up just in time to see her First Mate sit down on the floor and then let herself fall on her side, sprawling wide right there on the floor, her hip bumping against Robin's knees before she finally settles on her back.

"You okay?" She says eventually, still looking at her even if more idly than she has been since she barged into the room.

Robin blinks down at her.

When she breathes in, she finds herself going through the checklist Chopper made them learn when teaching how to assess their own physical well-being.

She's surprised to find little damage despite the beatings she took.

Then again, Spandam was weak, and she was used enough to beatings from her first years on the run to know how to protect herself from too much damage.

(The fact that her body fell back on those habits without her realising it is, perhaps, just one more sign that she never really wanted to die.)

"Yes." She says, and she has perhaps never answered this question so genuinely. "At most, he cracked a few ribs, but nothing too severe."

Elynna hums as her eyes flit over her in her own checking procedure.

When she raises a hand, she does so slowly, and the way the back of her fingers brush against the trail of dried blood staining Robin's jaw is so light it barely feels like contact at all.

"Does that mean that you're the one who cracked your jaw like this?"

Robin smiles as she tilts her head in amusement, the movement bringing her skin just a bit further into the touch.

(Just a bit further into the hands that stained themselves with the violence she couldn't bear to shoulder.)

"I couldn't very well let him take me away without a fight anymore."

Elynna's eyes shift from her jaw to her smile for a moment.

Her fingers uncurl, turning so her fingertips can trail along her jaw and the skin beneath which lay her aching teeth as if she can see the hurt there, before her hand falls back down.

"Good job being stubborn and reckless like the rest of us, then. Feels strange at first, huh?"

Robin smiles wider even through the shooting throb of pain it pulls out of her lower face.

"Quite."

Her own fingers twitch, eager to reach out and follow her own gaze, to lay against the left side of her First Mate's face where the large bruise she somehow gained during the train ride is now matched by a myriad of others, all of it covered by scratches and cuts that come dangerously close to her eye.

This close, Robin can see that a lot of the blood that first scared her is probably not hers.

But she can see all the wounds some of it did come from, and—

There's a lot of them.

"Are you okay?"

Blinking out of her idle staring at the ceiling, Elynna winces slightly.

"Could do better. Feels like I've been trampled on by an elephant."

"… You have."

That earns her a dry look.

Robin watches with a sort of fascination as Elynna carefully lays her cheek against the stone and closes her eyes, features relaxing as if the contact isn't bound to make it hurt more.

(She wonders if this same girl would react like this, too, under her touch.)

"… I'm sorry I made you kill him. I know that you don't like to kill."

The sound that doesn't quite make it out of Elynna's mouth seems more amused than anything else.

"You didn't make me do it, you allowed me to do it. And I usually try not to kill people because there's nothing personal for me about the fights we get into most of the time. This one was definitely fucking personal."

She sighs, then.

Her eyes flutter open, one of them not quite fully with how swollen the skin around it is.

"Goddamnit. Now I want to kill him again."

The words come so abruptly that Robin can't quite stop the chuckle that slips out, even if she wanted to.

"I'm afraid that even him won't be able to be annoying enough for any possible afterlife entity to bring him back here."

The corners of Elynna's mouth quirk up.

"Fortunately. I don't have any time left to waste on him."

"Very true." Robin agrees, eyes drifting away from her First Mate's face to run along the chain around her neck.

Elynna helpfully reaches up to click open the necklace's pendant when Robin stares at it for several heartbeats without blinking.

"... We should take a new picture."

Her First Mate glances at her for a moment before her eyes drift back to the ceiling.

"Yeah?"

Robin hums.

Elynna closes her eyes again, one side of her mouth quirking up just a bit higher.

"Alright, then."

Robin smiles, and rises to her feet.

"I'm sure Franky is waiting for us. Besides, it's high time for him to meet Elynna. I don't think he likes Heidi much."

〪〪〪〜〜⏆〜〜〭〭〭

Understatement of the century.

Elynna watches Robin turn away to walk towards the door that will take them to the bridge, and sits up.

She barely has to make any effort to bite back the curse that wants to slip out, because the movement is enough to punch the air out of her chest.

The pain surges back up, hot and dizzy in a way that makes her want to lay back down immediately.

She can't even tell where it hurts worse, let alone where it doesn't hurt.

She twists her neck to look over her shoulder, squinting through the pain to check that Robin is still facing away from her as her fingers slip into the pocket of her uniform where the little box of pills is hidden, fumbling slightly as she tries to open it silently.

She barely has the time to pop the last pill of her quota into her mouth before her crewmate turns around, smile slipping just a bit as she realises Elynna is still sitting.

"Everything alright?"

"Peachy. I'm admiring the view."

(It's true.

The line of Sophia's shoulders is something to be admired, when compared to the one she has memorised.

The ease with which all the bones of her crewmate's upper body shift in time with her breathing is, without a doubt, one of the greatest things she has ever done in her life.

Although—

The view will be so much better, once the shackles are gone.)

The smile widens again on Robin's face, made gentler with the indulgent amusement she often directs at this particular brand of Elynna's humour.

"Well, you can admire it all you want later, since I'm here to stay." She chuckles warmly as she turns around again in a silent invitation for Elynna to follow.

The Straw Hats' First Mate swallows the pill, focuses on stumbling as little as possible, and does just that.

"Definitely taking you up on that offer, so you better not back out."

"I have no intention of doing that."

〪〪〪〜〜⏆〜〜〭〭〭

I won't blame anyone who got a bit confused by all the bullshit theories all the POVs launch at each other. I'll be honest, I got a bit lost a few times myself.

I hope I didn't do too bad of a job of conveying how cool (violent, but cool) the Straw Hats are in this arc, considering that there is an anime for this and fights tend to look better in images rather than just words.

(Also Franky talks so much during his fight like what the hell lol.)

Listen, I do not give a single flying fuck about whether or not Spandam is gonna be relevant for the plot in Wano or not. I will pull another incredibly hateable character out of my ass if I need to, but like hell this fucker will stay alive in MY fic.

No, sir.

Not even on my dead fucking body.

… Did I mention that I hate him like I hate very, very few characters in all the anime/movies/series/books/whatever I've ever read/watched in my life?

Because I do.

Just to make one thing clear, though: I'm not trying to bash Robin's mother. I just think that their relationship is a bit more complicated than just 'I had a mother who loved me and whom I loved very much and she died because of the World Government'. I mean, Olvia basically decided twice to dedicate herself to her job/passion rather than her daughter (when she left the island and when she stayed to deal with the fire). I'm not a passionate advocate of the 'women should take care of the kids first and foremost' spiel by any means, and it's true that the cause she was fighting for was very important. But even with that, and even if Robin is a genius and super mature and whatever else, she was still a kid who got overlooked for the greater good twice (which led in both cases to a lot of miserable stuff she had to deal with alone), and I feel that it's legitimate to think that she probably felt some degree of anger towards her mother and her other friends from Ohara (and then probably felt super guilty about it because she has years of trauma and zero minute of therapy under her belt).

Songs used in this chapter (the list isn't necessarily exhaustive, but it's the kind of songs I had in mind or that inspired me while writing):

Terrence and Wang - Gloria Regali by Tommee Profit and Fleurie

Between Terrence and Jim - Everybody Knows by Sigrid and Paint it, Black by Ciara

Jim and Seb - I Ran by Hidden Citizens

The snapshots - Conviction by JESSIA and Out of Time by Hidden Citizens

The last part - The Devil in Disguise by Charlotte Matthews and Christopher James Dececio, Survivor by 2wei and Warriors by 2wei

(by the way, there's some very good OP AMVs with the Warriors song, including some specifically about Enies Lobby if you want to look them up!)

And although it doesn't actually appear in the chapter, I personally think that Strange Young World by Ranya and Hidden Citizens is also pretty good for the Robin & Elynna scenes (and their respective backstory)

Thanks as always to everyone who reads/kudos/reviews/comments, and I wish you the best!

(Also good luck for anyone getting back to work/studying!)