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Vivre Card XVIII
Name:
Tsutsumi Kaina
Codename:
Lady Nagant
Epithet:
The World's Greatest Shot (used when a marine)
Age:
38
Affiliation:
Marines (defected/expelled), Rifle Pirates (current)
Rank:
Vice Admiral (marines, stripped upon conviction), Captain (Rifle Pirates)
Home Island:
Gunma, East Blue
Devil Fruit:
Rifle-Rifle Fruit
Devil Fruit Type:
Paramecia
Bounty:
Never Issued
Brief History:
Born on Gunma Island in the East Blue, little is known about Kaina's childhood as most of the records surrounding her past have either been classified as Top Secret, heavily redacted, destroyed, or lost in the wake of her crime. What is known is that sometime in her early to mid-teens she was found on Gunma Island by an agent of the World Government who realized that she was a natural shot with any ranged weapon be it a pistol, rifle, slingshot, bow, or anything else that could be used for ranged combat and was smaller than a mortar. It was this skill that got her recruited by the World Government.
It is still unclear who the agent that recruited her was but the prevailing theory, at least to those who are aware of her full set of skills, is that it was a member of CP9, possibly even the then Chief Spandine himself. Regardless of who it was, Kaina's talent was evident and as such she was offered the chance to get off Gunma and put her skills to use in the pursuit of justice.
Those who knew Kaina in those days and during her early marine career have since attested that she was a happy and optimistic girl who honestly believed this and desired to bring justice to the world back then. It was due to her early convictions, skills, and ability to end conflicts from long range before they escalated, or even began, that Kaina would develop a personal code of Precise Justice while she was in the Navy.
Anyway, Kaina enlisted on the spot and quickly showed her potential. As a result she became an officer candidate within 6 months of enlisting and ultimately graduated top of her class. What really stood out, though, was that her shooting score was the highest ever recorded and to this day is still the only score to exceed the threshold set by the Admiralty for the gifting of the Rifle-Rifle Fruit.
CP9 had found that Devil Fruit before Kaina was recruited and when Dr. Vegapunk confirmed what it was it was locked away until someone with the skill worthy of maximizing its potential was found. To ensure this, the score to win the Devil Fruit was set almost impossibly high to reflect that only a truly exceptional shot should eat it, not that the score was advertised of course.
However, Kaina not only achieved the threshold score, but she exceeded it beyond what anyone thought possible and to this day not even notable marine snipers like Commodore Snipe and former Vice Admiral Najenda have even come close to the threshold score let alone Kaina's. As such, upon graduation as an officer, a Lieutenant as she was top of the class, Kaina was offered the Rifle-Rifle Fruit as well as a spot under Vice Admiral Tsuru. She accepted both and her considerable sniping skills were further enhanced by her Devil Fruit. As a result she was fast tracked to high rank.
By all accounts, Kaina served with distinction under Tsuru and rose quickly through the ranks. She showed no mercy to pirates and criminals, often killing them from up to 3 kilometers out so that no civilian casualties happened as in many situations death was the only way to end the threat at hand, while showing great compassion to the innocents of the world. Alas, this was just a façade, one that not even Tsuru was aware of as it was classified at the Admiral level because Kaina was also the black ops assassin of the Navy known by the codename Lady Nagant.
When she became the Navy's long range assassin is still not known but it is believed that it began before she even entered officer training as some of her non marksman skills were already well honed before then but due to the nature of her work and how it ended all records of her wetwork have been at best classified at Admiral level. As such, short of her getting out of Impel Down, the full extent of Kaina's history may never be known.
What is known is that when she was 22 she was promoted to Vice Admiral, the youngest to ever reach that rank until it was surpassed by Esdeath several years later, and from that point Kaina was truly unleashed on the world. As a Vice Admiral, which had clearly been the end goal for her as Admiral was too bureaucratic a rank for her to work with, she had considerable freedom of movement and cover throughout the world and used this to full advantage to take out threats to the world that people didn't even know about.
For context these were the kind of threats that if they manifested would have ended up in Level 6 of Impel Down, if they were caught that is. Thankfully, they never got to that point as Kaina killed them before that was an issue.
This was Kaina's life for over a decade and in that time she began to lose more and more of herself as her assignments turned from actually protecting the world to taking out Navy disgraces and embarrassments that the Navy didn't want the world to know about, especially as their bodies were never recovered to finally to just settling personal grudges for the World Nobles. Those were orders which she couldn't refuse.
The only thing Kaina could refuse was to take out targets assigned by the World Government that weren't affiliated with the Navy nor criminals though these missions were rare at best. A notable example is when she refused Admiral Ironwood's orders to kill the politician Hill Robyn and her Happy Huntresses on Mantle because they didn't fit the requirements of her office at the time. However, Kaina couldn't say no to a World Noble.
Like much about Kaina's off the books work, it is unclear how it devolved to the point that she became an assassin for the World Nobles. What is apparent is that at least one World Noble, likely envious of his fellow World Nobles who ran slave assassin rings like the Elite 7 and Group of Terror, or had contacts with independent outfits like Trinity Raven, learned of her work and requested her as his personal assassin. As it was that or be his slave wife number 16, Kaina accepted and started doing his dirty work.
As such she became nothing more than a tool for that World Noble and used to kill whoever he wanted. In the end it would be that, in addition to the broadening of her mandate by the Admiralty, that would be her final straw.
Only Kaina herself can say what it was that broke her in the end, and she's never said what it was, but for someone who'd joined the marines so happy and optimistic to do good and bring justice to the world, her descent into a tool of murder took its toll and in the end she snapped. No one saw it coming, Kaina had seemingly kept it together until then, but in the end she was given an assignment that was too much and in response she shot the Celestial Dragon, who by that point had become her handler, in the head and damn near blew it off in the heart of Marie Jois itself.
After that she simply sat down on his body and waited for an Admiral to show up and arrest her. All indications are that she surrendered peacefully and without a fight which given her skills was a good thing.
The records of her interrogation after this unforgivable crime are sealed, if they exist at all, but it's believed that the full extent of what she'd done was revealed to the Admiral who arrested her. When that became clear, and out of sympathy for what she'd been through, Fleet Admiral Sengoku made the decision to send her to Level 6 of Impel Down and be forgotten about rather than having her executed on the spot.
Officially Vice Admiral Kaina was declared killed in the line of duty, the Navy even staged it by sinking her battleship in a fake pirate attack, and her death was pinned on a pirate crew that she had recently engaged in conflict with. They were subsequently wiped out. However, in reality she was sent to live out her days in the lowest level of Impel Down with only the Admirals, Fleet Admiral, and Warden Magellan knowing the truth of what happened, her actual service record, or that she was even in Impel Down as she was booked under her codename; Nagant.
This small mercy to Kaina would turn out to backfire when, 5 years after her arrest and incarceration, Straw Hat Luffy would break into Impel Down to try and free his brother Fire Fist Ace. He'd fail to achieve that but in the aftermath of his breakout, Kaina would be one of the Level 6 inmates freed and would in the process form the Rifle Pirates now going solely by her codename Lady Nagant. That said, given the impending attack by Whitebeard, the Navy is currently unaware that one of their greatest traitors has broken out of Impel Down and now has them in her sights.