Author's Notes: This chapter. This chapter took ridiculously longer than I intended it to take. The amount of writer's blocks I suffered writing this chapter are ridiculous. But, at long last, it's here now, and I hope it was worth the wait. You'll see my final decisions on the Kamikaze Pirates' collective epithets soon, and I do hope you'll enjoy them!

Chapter 33: Scarred Lion vs. Young Tiger! Part 2!

If there was any chamber in his palace that Shiki considered his absolute favorite, it would have to be his throne room. Painstakingly modeled on memories he'd had of his sadly all-too-brief visit to Wano over twenty years ago, the long hall was just large enough to house the many pirates - captains in their own right, before - now sitting before small ceremonial tables, each adorned with a small, almost saucer-like cup that would soon be filled with strong rice wine for the ceremony of brotherhood.

It's anyone's guess how the assembled cutthroats, killers and seadogs would have reacted if they had been privileged to hear the thought running through Shiki's head as he stalked out of a doorway at the furthest end of the room, the sword points he used as feet clinking metallically as he marched across the dias and sat down on his throne, set against the magnificent Wano-inspired backdrop of dragon and wolf beneath an ascendant sun.

'Honestly, I've always wondered why the brotherhood ceremony uses sake. I know that Wano made an impact, and there are other nations with broadly similar cultures to Wano, but wouldn't rum be more appropriate and universal for pirates? Or just strong liquor in general?'

Pushing the idle thought aside, Shiki looked out regally over the assembled pirate captains before spreading his hands in a broad gesture of greeting, every inch the regal monarch he knew he was (in his own mind, of course).

"Brothers and sisters, I welcome you all to Merveille! You do me great honor by accepting my invitation! Soon, we shall drink ceremonial sake together and be united not merely as brothers and sisters of the Jolly Roger, but as family of the truest kind - the new incarnation of the Golden Lion Pirates! But first... I am sure you are wondering why it is that I have invited you all here...?"

The question was rhetorical, and most probably made the gesture more out of a sense of politeness (however limited) rather than genuine interest, but a wave of nods and soft, nondescript murmurs greeted Shiki's words, giving him all the justification to proceed (not that he wouldn't have done so anyway).

"For too long, the fools of the so-called World Government have imposed their wills on the six seas. They claim dominion over all that is touched by the endless waters, and even within the Grand Line itself! And yet, that is the basest of lies and slander - for the six seas belong to only one people! We, the pirates! Even before the so-called Great Pirate Era began, it is we who had the strength and the courage to forge out into the wilderness and challenge the seas in all their terror and beauty! Gol. D. Roger was many things, and a fool was certainly one of them, but he understood the fundamental truth - that we are better than the soft, simpering weaklings who cling to the comfort of the land and lack the will to challenge the glorious seas!"

Shiki basked in the feel of triumph as his future lieutenants nodded sagely, muttering to each other in approval of his words - some even so bold as to call out in approval of his words. With the flair of a preacher, he continued, gesturing with his hands in half-conscious emphasis of his words.

"I ask you, brothers and sisters, is it right that dominion of the world is claimed by the so-called Celestial Dragons? By a bunch of bloated, soft-fingered fools not fit to lick the mud from a true pirate's boot?! Imbeciles too weak to fight for what they want, but who greedily demand the world as something they are owed by the blood in their veins?!"

"NO!" Roared every captain at once, and Shiki's smile grew teeth as he drank in the genuine outrage in their voices.

"No indeed, brothers and sisters! A pirate knows the truth - that blood finds its worth only in the stains on your fists and your boots! The Celestial Dragons have no right to this world - but we do! And we will take it from them!"

There were cheers to this statement, but not as emphatic or as widespread as the agreement before.

"But, of course, though we represent amongst ourselves the greatest of the pirates to be found this side of the Grand Line, I do not expect us alone to reshape the pillars of this world! No... But I have prepared powerful allies for us. Twenty years of experimentation with Dr. Indigo's brilliant invention, SIQ, has created an archipelago teeming with monsters more deadly than anything seen outside of the Grand Line! As proof... well, allow me to demonstrate, jihahahahahaaa..."

At that very moment...

"I was certainly not missing these abominations," Penelope grumbled, the complaint muffled by the fact she had her nose pinched shut as tightly as possible even as Harumi carried her through the air.

"Hang on, Lady Penelope - we're almost to the ship!" Harumi encouraged her, even as he used his more advanced Moonwalk skills to carry them both through the air, out of the reach of the toxic particles. Each cloud-hopping step allowed him to soar across the distance in a fraction of the time it would have taken him on foot to go from the poisonous trees surrounding the village to the lake at its heart - where the Stormbringer, wounded but intact, sat defiantly in its shallows.

Within moments, he was landing at the village's docks, absently letting Penelope down to the ground as he cast his gaze around frantically, barely even noticing the shocked women and children of the village at his arrival in his single-minded focus.

"Miriam! Miriam, where are you?!" He cried out, spinning around in desperate search for the lover he had last seen plunging through empty air upon their wounded ship.

There was an almighty splash, and the thunder of huge feet slamming carelessly into the shallows of the lake as something burst from where it had been submerged in the deeper reaches and surged forward like a small hill of muscle and bone sprung to life. Harumi whirled to face the apparent assailant, swords seeming to leap into his hands of their own accord, only for them to then fall to the ground as he had the barest instant to take in his assailant...

"Harumi!"

The crossdressing young swordsman didn't resist, letting himself be swept up like a doll and crushed face-first into the wotan's bosom. Sandwiched between soft, giving flesh to the front and strong, powerful protective muscle at his back, the distinctive aroma of dried sea-salt, sawdust, blood and gunpowder filling his nose, Harumi had but a single thought.

'I may be a pervert, but oh, how I love this...'

Even as that thought flashed in the back of his mind, he reached out and eagerly hugged as much of his lover as he possibly could, given the size disparity.

"You had me so worried - I was so scared that something happened to you!" Miriam sobbed in relief, her tail flicking back and forth in agitated emphasis of her words.

"You were worried? You're the one who rode the Stormbringer as it fell! Do you have any idea how scared I was?!" Harumi asked incredulously, looking up at her with wide eyes, his usually ever-present smile gone for the first time that Miriam could ever recall seeing.

To an outside observer, it would have been quite comical to see the towering shark-girl flinch and meekly cower before the wrath of her far smaller beau, genuine sorrow in her eyes as she replied, "I'm sorry, Harumi... but the ship... I couldn't just let it go without a fight..."

Harumi looked at her sternly for a few moments... and then smiled and resumed cuddling her. "I understand... the ship is your baby, after all. Still, if I thought I'd lost you..."

"Trust me, you're never going to lose me," Miriam chuckled warmly, perking up at Harumi's unspoken forgiveness.

She leaned forward, he craned upward, and the two mismatched lovers shared a tender kiss as best they could, given the size disparity. Neither of them noticed the uncertain, almost hurt, look that flashed across Penelope's face, before the mink pointedly looked away from the two of them, tail curling protectively around herself.

Harumi broke away from his lover, finally glancing about in a calmer manner. "What happened to Lady Lilith, my love? Is she alright?"

Miriam opened her mouth to reply, but was cut off by a sudden interjection from behind.

"Snehahahaha! I'd be insulted that it took you so long to ask about me, but I can't - if I were in your place, I wouldn't be thinking about anything else, you lucky bastard!"

Man, wotan and mink rolled their eyes as one, but not entirely without affection, before they turned to the grinning cobra zoan, who had emerged from one of the huts closest to the lake. Miriam absently lowered her boyfriend back to earth.

"It's good to see you're safe, Lady Lilith. I take it we're the only ones here so far? The Captain and the others having headed to confront Shiki?" Harumi asked politely.

"Got it in one, cutie. Honestly, we weren't sure if we shouldn't head upwards ourselves, but Miriam insisted we stay here and check the Stormbringer over. Only people we've seen until you guys was the return of half the locals - Shiki's been keeping all the young men and women as slaves in another settlement higher up the archipelago, but he just turned them all loose and ordered them back home," The Skylander explained, gesturing towards the center of the village.

Harumi blinked in surprise. "Another settlement? Whatever purpose would that serve? When we were here last, Shiki's staff and crew all lived in that oversized palace of his on the topmost island..."

"It is unimportant. Ze question we should be asking is this; should we stay here, or go?" Penelope interjected.

"Well, we should probably ask those three first, snehahaha," Lilith giggled. She smiled innocently at the confused looks her three crewmates turned her way, and then daintily pointed straight upwards.

Miriam's eyes went wide, and she scooped up Harumi and Penelope in a single swift motion before leaping backwards as Dyna dropped from the sky like a brass-clad meteorite. A jet dial concealed somewhere in the gynoid's interior surged to life, high-pressurized air rushing from suddenly-flared openings in her mechanical waist to bleed off the momentum, slowing her down to a surprisingly gentle landing.

"Destination achieved," Dyna dryly declared, even as she swung a pale-looking Ryoga down to the ground.

"Why did we do this?!" The Kamikaze's first mate groaned, shaking his head.

"You wanted to get here as quickly as possible," Dyna calmly reminded him.

Ryoga opened his mouth, clearly about to ask for a reminder why he had been in such a hurry, when a monstrous roar suddenly split the air, echoing for a good two minutes after the original thunderous bellow.

That was bad... The sudden answering chorus of bestial battle cries - bellows and growls, screeches and screams, chitters and hisses and shrieks and trumpets and a dozen other sounds that made it clear that the monsters of Merveille were more restless than usual.

"...For once, I'm actually glad of those stupid Daft Greens," Miriam confessed, her words eliciting a nod from all of the Kamikaze Pirates present - even Dyna.

But Lilith looked uncertain. She shifted into her hybrid form, her long tongue peeking tentatively past her scaly lip, then brazenly thrusting itself salaciously into the air. "You might want to rethink that - the smell's gone! Somebody's torn down the Daft Greens!"

"What?!" Yelped her companions, turning to the cobra zoan in shock. As if to punctuate her words, screams of panic and confusion suddenly began echoing all over town, mixed with increasing bursts of gunfire.

"You don't need to rub it in!" Ryoga barked angrily to Umok, who had been lazily hovering over their collective heads.

"I didn't say a word!" The imp protested, but Ryoga was already turning to the other Kamikaze Pirates.

"C'mon, let's go! We gotta protect the villagers!" He roared, already turning and sprinting for where the screams were loudest.

It said much about the kind of people that his crewmates were that they immediately fell in, sprinting (or slithering, or floating, as the case might be) as fast as they could behind him. They were met almost instantly by a flood of panicked villagers running the other way, screaming and crying, the most courageous amongst them trying to direct their kin to the dubious safety of apparent shelters. The pirates not unkindly wove their way between the villagers, intent on their own goal, the frantic crack-crack-crack of massed rifle fire filling the air.

To give the marines their credit, despite their own injuries, they had rallied to defend the innocent from the monsters now pouring into the village. But against the spawn of Merveille, they might have been trying to hold back a flood with a mud wall.

A hissing bellow filled the air as a creature that looked like some depraved madman had tried to crossbreed a crocodile with an elephant stamped into the village, trampling anything that lay in its way. A long trunk armored with spiky scales lashed out and caught a screaming marine before stuffing him headfirst into a gnashing, fang-filled maw. Simultaneously, another half a dozen marines were scythed apart upon tusks that had been sharpened to a razor's edge.

From another angle came a snorting, writhing horror; a bull the size of an elephant, whose hindquarters trailed off into a writhing serpent's tail. Despite its awkward construction, it moved with deceptive speed, half-lurching, half-charging and half-slithering in an attempt to trample and gore and crush.

Feline snarls split the air as an angry puma the size of a prize bull leapt forward, spinning as it landed to swing a long, muscular tail that ended in a knot of bone as big as a powderkeg. It smashed this biological wrecking ball into a squad of marines and scattered them like tenpins.

"Wakwak! Wakwak! Wakwakwak!" Screeched a flock of man-sized birds as they raced along the ground, flapping flightless wings and snapping beaks that looked like they could split a horse's spine in one blow. Even as bullets riddled their bodies, they charged on, oblivious to pain in their desperate need to kill.

Even the skies weren't free of terrors; a great flock of swans whose steely-gray feathers chimed like dozens of knives ringing together flew overhead in mass formation, spewing down flames on whatever they saw. A two-headed vulture big enough to carry off an elephant squalled its hunting cry as it came flapping down amidst the building smoke and flame.

And these were just the tip of the iceberg; everywhere they looked, some new freak of nature was swarming in, hungry for blood and flesh and sheer carnage.

"Query: plan of attack?" Dyna blurted briefly, looking at Ryoga.

"The plan's simple - attack!" Their first mate roared, taking his trusty umbrella and pitching it like a javelin. It struck a chitinous horror - a solifugid the size of a small bus - with a blow like a thunderbolt from heaven, smashing its small, vile face into a ruin of pulped flesh and broken chitin.

"Sounds good to me!" Miriam cried, already swinging the first of her anchors overhead into a razor-edged flail.

Outnumbered, surrounded, and undaunted, on they came, charging into the nightmare in a gesture that any reasonable person would declare should be as effective as spitting defiantly into the heart of a driving gale.

Reasonable people had no place on the Grand Line...

Simultaneously...

Ranma wasn't exactly dressed for the perpetual arctic climate of Shiki's private island, but he shrugged off the cold through a combination of martial artist's fortitude, sheer macho pride that refused to let him look weak in front of his subordinates cum girlfriends, and a particularly welcome distraction.

"Ucchan! Dacchi! Man, am I glad to see you!" He cried, beaming as the other two members of his...complicated little love triangle emerged amidst the drifting snowflakes.

He was nearly knocked flying as Ukyo flung herself into his arms, twining her own limbs around his neck and causing him to inadvertently twirl her around in order to keep from falling over.

"Likewise, Ranchan!" Ukyo chirped in delight, nuzzling her cheek against Ranma's and completely blithe about what just happened.

"Oooh, she's stealing your bit now," Nabiki teasingly whispered to Shampoo, nudging the Chinese Amazon for emphasis.

"She come long way; Shampoo give her an 8," The cabbit zoan proudly declared in the same quiet voice.

"Hey, what about the others? You seen any of them?" Ranma asked, looking past the still-snuggling Ukyo to Kodachi.

His helmsgirl simply shook her head in response. "No, my darling, We've seen nobody else on our way up here... It's possible we simply missed them, but the archipelago's a lot smaller when you're traveling through the air the way we did."

Ranma simply nodded as he absorbed Kodachi's words, but his attention was distracted as he realized something had changed about her appearance. "Hey, Dacchi, what's with the new fur stole?"

Kodachi beamed brightly as she immediately answered, "This is my new pet, Alice! Alice, say hello to daddy Ranma!"

"Callooh!" Honked the weasel-thing as it lifted its head and shot out a long, purple tongue that snaked across the meter-and-a-half between Kodachi and Ranma to lick Ranma on the cheek before he could intercept it. Despite the jawlessness of its tubular snout, it somehow seemed to smile happily at him.

"Oh, flour weevils and spoilage, she's named it?!" Ukyo grumpily muttered, even as she reluctantly released Ranma and let him go.

Ranma simply blinked, before asking the obvious question. "...Why Alice?"

"Twas brillig and the slithy toves did gyre and gimble in the wabe, all mimsy were the borogoves, and the mome raths outgrabe!" Kodachi cheerfully declared, smiling brightly as she spouted her gibberish.

All four of them stared silently at Kodachi, because, really, what else were they supposed to do? It was Nabiki who drew them back to reality.

"So, are we going after that asshole who tried to blow us out of the sky or not? I'm freezing my tits off here," She grumbled, hugging herself with her wing-arms and shivering with only slightly exaggerated displeasure.

"You have gotten a lot more foul-mouthed since we took up piracy," Ukyo observed conversationally.

"I blame it on all of you," Came the immediate dry rejoinder.

Ranma's brow furrowed in thought for a few moments, before he shook his head. "Nah, there's five of us and only one of Shiki, and he's the only one in the palace that's actually any good at fighting, right? Okay, maybe the gorilla, too, but with us workin' as a team, I'd say we can handle him no sweat. So let's get inside and kick his ass - we can worry about finding the others after we're done."

Nods of agreement greeted his words, before Kodachi interjected, "Might I suggest, Ranma darling, that we sneak in first? Better to get the drop on Shiki than expend our precious time and energy on meaningless minions with a frontal assault..."

"Sounds good to me... alright, ladies; let's go pay him a visit!"

Five forms blurred skywards, and immediately began winging their way through the snow-choked skies of Shiki's personal paradise, all but invisible in the dimming gloom of their environment. Within moments they had crossed past the protective ring of Daft Green trees and were hurtling towards the enormous palace, the tiny dots of patrolling guards just barely visible against the grayish-white expanse of the palace grounds below.

"Now, let's see... where was that throne room...?"

Inside Shiki's throneroom...

"You see? Those Marines cannot hope to stand against Merveille's monsters!" Shiki laughed uproariously, gesturing to the screens he had set up around his throne room. Thanks to the self-propelled surveillance snails in the village, his new recruits had a perfect seat to watch the carnage unfolding at the other end of the archipelago.

On one screen, a creature resembling an elephantine chameleon with five heads on long, serpentine necks shot out five long, sticky tongues and dragged five marines screaming to their deaths in its many chomping maws. On another, a frog the size of a bull leapt straight into a cluster of marines, discharging bolts of lightning from sparking milky crystals that reduced men by the dozens to smoldering, still-twitching corpses. Creatures that looked like moray eels that'd sprouted legs leapt from cover to drag marines down and savage them on a third, whilst yet another revealed as a creature resembling an enormous crocodile seemed to appear from nowhere, thanks to its color-changing scales, and snatched up half a dozen men in its terrible jaws, reducing them to a spray of blood and torn flesh and broken bones.

Shiki's audience being who they were, they whooped and cheered, laughed and jeered, bloodlust swirling around the room like smoke around a funeral pyre. He permitted them the indulgence for a few moments more, before his voice rang out above the cacophony.

"Now drink, brothers and sisters! Drink to our coming glory, and the bloody new age we shall usher forth! Drink - to the Golden Lion Pirates!"

"To the Golden Lion Pirates!" Cried over a hundred captains as one, lifting the sake cups that Indigo had filled during Shiki's little demonstration and draining them.

"And, for a little after-drink entertainment..!" Shiki clapped his hands, and Scarlet entered the room, chains liberated from the stockpile of spare anchors wrapped around the ape's wrist as he dragged three protesting figures into the center of the hall.

"These three are the commanders of our little demonstration! We'll let them have a front row seat before we feed them to the beasts, and then we'll be on our way to the Sea of Schemes - the East Blue! Jihahahahahaha!"

Commodore Sukumvit fought desperately against his chains, which merely clinked and rattled defiantly from his efforts. "You won't get away with this!"

Shiki ignored him and continued with his speech. "Not that I need to remind you...But the East Blue is the most defenseless and strategically expendable of the six seas. It'll be mourned, but there's nothing that'll be missed. So, be as thorough with your carnage as you like!"

More cruel laughter and mocking cheers from his new lieutenants greeted this announcement, before they were drowned out by a savage roar of defiance.

"Like hell you will! I hate the East Blue myself, but I'll be damned if I let a monster like you run rampant over it!" Kiyoshi screamed defiantly, pulling with all her might. Blood began to run from her wrists and arms where the chain links cruelly bit into the skin, but through sheer rage and will, she achieved what even her superior officer had failed to do and shattered her bindings into a storm of flying links and metal fragments.

"I won't let you slaughter those innocent people!" She cried, propelling herself straight at Shiki in a picture-perfect usage of the Shave technique, putting every ounce of her strength into the single most devastating haymaker of her life.

Pirates nearly halfway down the hall had to shield their faces as the shockwave of Sukumvit's punch stirred up a blast of wind that tore at their coat-capes and yanked at their hats. And yet... when the winds died down, they could see Shiki had caught Kiyoshi's fist squarely in his own massive palm, idly holding the marine captain at bay with only the slightest of trembles suggesting any effort on his part. The pirate captain hadn't even bothered to get up from his throne.

Shiki looked at her hand, face blank and expressionless, before he turned to her and grinned toothily. If a man-eating rogue lion could smile, it would have smiled like Shiki; madness burning in his eye, and cruelty writ large in the curve of his lips.

"Words are worthless unless you have will!" Shiki sneered, voice projected so that it was loud enough to be heard all the way to the end of the hall.

Pure survival instinct screamed in Kiyoshi's mind and she Shaved backwards with all her might - and it just barely kept her from being eviscerated as one of Shiki's sword-legs snapped upwards so fast the air screamed, further forcing fancy footwork flurries from Kiyoshi to evade the resultant blade of razor-sharp wind that scythed its way down the hall and chopped clear through the doors into the interior garden before it dissipated.

Shiki lazily leaned over to rest his cheek against an upright arm propped on his throne and then crossed his legs, the blades clinking almost musically as they tapped against each other.

"Hmm... not bad, girlie, not bad... but not good enough. Are you really going to throw your life away over a bunch of weaklings and cowards?" The pirate captain asked, false pity dripping from his words like treacle.

"I put on this coat for one reason, pirate; to protect the innocent people of this world from murdering scum like you! I'll die before I let you carry out this atrocity!" Kiyoshi spat, thrusting a finger at him in a dramatic pose that would have fit perfectly into any of the official pro-Navy comics that the Marines sponsored.

"You said it, sis!" Akasuki cried, wrestling desperately with her own binding chains.

"Well spoken, captain!" Sukumvit proudly declared, only slightly distracted by the fact he currently had Scarlet the gorilla in a chinlock and was fighting with all he had to pin the struggling primate to the floor.

"Jihahaha! What do you think this is, one of those awful comics your bosses put out? News flash, girlie; there'll be no last-second entrances by a brave hero here!" Shiki guffawed, prompting an answering chorus of cackles and jeers at the thought.

CRAAAASSSSHHH!

Sawdust and pulverized brick and regular dust suddenly spewed from the ceiling in a reverse fountain, blanketing the assembled pirates in a choking, blinding cloud of aerosolized debris. It filled the hall like a sudden fogbank on the Grand Line, then dissipated, revealing five new additions to the hall, posed defiantly between Shiki and the startled Kiyoshi. Even Scarlet stopped trying to fight his way free of Sukumvit's grappling arms, eyes so wide his sunglasses fell off.

"Shiki! You're gonna pay for shooting down my ship!" Ranma spat, flinging a crude gesture of defiance at the elder pirate.

"Eh? You're still alive?! You're harder to kill than those buffalo-sized cockroaches from the southern islands! I'll admit, kid, I'm almost impressed... But all the guts in the world are no use to a foolish young pup play-acting at pirate with his harem! You're not even worth dirtying my claws on... kill them!"

Shiki gestured grandiosely, and the assembled pirate captains sprang to their feet, grabbing for swords and pistols.

"Hah! You think twenty-ta-one odds scare us?! We've fought worse!" Ranma mockingly jeered, not even turning to face Shiki's lieutenants, but instead jabbing his thumb at them disdainfully.

Shiki simply smirked and snapped his finger. On both sides of the hall, the wall panels suddenly burst asunder, revealing rooms beyond where dozens upon dozens of subordinate pirates had been hiding, armed to the teeth and ready for a fight.

Ranma simply grinned darkly, an expression that his female companions shared. "Okay, this looks interestin'..."

And then there was chaos...

Now, one might think that such a disparity in numbers would lead to a swift, brutal, unspeakably violent end for the Kamikaze Pirates. But that would be ignoring two things. Firstly; though Shiki's new recruits had numbers, they lacked discipline - they had all officially been members of entirely separate crews until literally a few minutes ago. As a result, they were constantly getting in each other's way, and otherwise as far from forming a coherent threat as it was possible to get without actually fighting amongst themselves.

And secondly... the skill of the Kamikaze Pirates themselves...

Jeering, cackling and slavering, men by the dozens surged towards Kodachi, who simply stared calmly at them, her thoughts a million miles away...

'Remember what your darling told you... reach inwards. Feel for the power that lies within. You know who you are. Use it!'

She drew her trusty pistol, the weapon that had served her well all these weeks at sea, and trained it on the lumbering mass of bodies flowing towards her like a tidal wave of flesh.

'Let your training guide you... my weapon is one with my mind, one with my body, one with my soul...!'

"You stupid bimbo! Ya really think yer gonna stop all of us with one little peashooter?!" Called one nameless grunt, eliciting a chorus of mockery with his acknowledgement.

"You dare to question me?! I am Kodachi, the Black Rose of the Grand Line! I am the helmswoman of the Stormbringer, the queen of Ranma's heart! And you? You are nothings, unworthy to speak my name. Begone from my sight, thou chaff! For I have better things to do with my time!"

As she spoke, she followed her beloved Ranma's instructions, letting her words reinforce her emotions and drawing deep into that wellspring of power. Crackling lines of black and crimson energy arced from her wrist and sizzled across the surface of her pistol, twining together into a spherical mass of writhing power at the tip of her muzzle.

"Ultimate technique! Gehenna Rosa Nigra!"

She squeezed the trigger.

And from her pistol roared forth an incandescent beam of power; Kodachi's pride and confidence and wrath made manifest. It roared like a dragon, almost but not quite drowning at the screams of its victims as it slammed into them like the fist of an angry demon. Even Shiki and Doctor Indigo covered their faces against the blinding light pouring from Kodachi's weapon.

When the light finally ended, where the better part of several hundred men had been, was an empty space and charred flooring that stretched all the way to the wall... and to a gaping hole straight through the wall. And the next one. And the one after that. And... Well, that might possibly be a gap in the Daft Green ring, but the wind was kicking up the snow so it was hard to tell.

"What the devil kind of gunpowder you using?!" Somebody shouted. It was hard to pinpoint who amidst the general reaction of staring with bugged-out eyes and gaping jaws. Even Kodachi's crewmates were giving her the side-eye, visibly reappraising her in the wake of this feat.

Kodachi smiled proudly, doing her best to disguise the heaving of her bosom as she sucked deep breaths, her whole body aching with the sudden fatigue of expending so much power... until she noticed that her pistol had not fared particularly well in her new technique. The barrel had split apart, peeling backwards like some perverse parody of a flower in bloom, and the metal still glowed red hot, the wood slowly charring from the residual heat and transmitting it into her palm.

"Tch. Evidently, I need superior workmanship... A pity, I had carried that particular pistol since we first took to the seas," she groused as she tossed the ruined weapon to the floor. Even as it clattered across the ground, she drew her sword and converted it into its bladed whip-form with a metallic snap.

"Well then! Who amongst you wishes to prick their fingers 'pon the Black Rose's thorns?! Come now, my briar-blade thirsts to embrace you!" She cried, refusing to show weakness, no matter the cost.

"She's insane!" Akasuki declared to herself, staring wide-eyed at the pirate who had just fired an honest-to-gods Admiral Kizaru-style giant laser out of a pistol!

She almost regretted the lapse of judgment when a pirate sword swung for her face, but she hadn't made the ranks of the youngest captains of the year by slacking off! She dodged at the last moment and with a deft flick of her wrists brought the chain her arms were still bound with curling through the air to wrap itself around her assailant's own arm. A deft shift of her weight, a tug with all her might, and her attacker went flying through the air like a human lawn dart to smash skull-first into a gaggle of pirates coming at her from the other way.

"I may be young, but I'm not easy!" She spat, the closest portions of her chain gripped firmly in both hands as she began to twirl the doubled links like a flail.

Pirates surged towards her in a tide of bodies, and she met them with the defiance of the rocky shore. Some fell back screaming in agony through broken noses or shattered teeth, others were swept from their feet as her makeshift flail. She shattered fingers and cracked ribs and scrambled brains, but for every pirate she took down, more of them pressed in on her, and she found herself falling back, her blows growing increasingly desperate...

And then came a sound that still haunted her nightmares; the ear-piercing screech-yowl on an angry cat on the warpath!

The deceitful zoan of the Kamikaze Pirates suddenly descended from on-high like a she-devil on the hunt, talons gleaming like sword-blades as she pounced right into the thick of the crush of bodies. Blood flew in glistening arcs that soared high into the sky as Shampoo spun like a dervish of destruction, clawing and biting, kicking and stamping. Bodies flew like projectiles, a single attack sending multiple grown men scattering like leaves before a storm. Within seconds, the crowd that had threatened to overwhelm Akasuki was nothing but unconscious bodies or smears of blood on the floor, leaving her face to face with her arch-enemy.

Akasuki clutched her chain until her knuckles went white, twirling it defiantly over her head. "Alright, bunny-girl! I won't go down without a fight!"

To her indignation, the zoan simply rolled her eyes. "Shampoo little busy now, girl. We fight some other time. Or you that eager throw life away?"

Akasuki scowled, even as she reluctantly lowered her chain towards the floor in a peaceful gesture. "Why?"

Shampoo simply shrugged. "Why not? Now, hold still..."

Akasuki felt her hackles rise. "Wait, what are you doing?!"

SCHING!

Akasuki blinked, but wrack her brain as she might, she couldn't recall seeing the blue-haired bunny-girl move. She nearly leapt out of her skin as her makeshift weapon suddenly disintegrated, shredded links almost musical as they clinked onto the floorboards. Though this technically robbed her of a weapon, it also fully restored her mobility, so it was a worthy trade-off. She snatched up a fallen sword, dropped by one of the pirates that had so recently been crushed by either herself or the zoan in front of her, and brandished it defensively, steeling herself against a follow-up attack.

Her arch-enemy simply stared at her silently, as if challenging her to dare to launch the first attack. Akasuki squeezed the hilt of her purloined weapon... but before she could muster the resolve, their stand-off was interrupted.

A pirate with the appearance of a short, older man, bald save for a topknot of white hair that had been grown and styled into a long braid, roared like an animal as he went from tiny and scrawny human to a towering half-man, half-panda whose every inch rippled with flowing muscles.

"Give me your panties!" Howled the furry man-beast as he charged towards them, clawed fingers reaching hungrily towards them.

Akasuki watched as a look of amazement blossomed on Shampoo's face, only to be near-instantly replaced by one of abject disgust. She spun to face the onrushing rival zoan, one bestial leg drawn up in a manner that put Akasuki in mind of a coiled spring, a strange, barely visible crimson light seeming to flicker along the tensed length of tendons and sinews.

"Only one man worthy see Shampoo panties! 108 Stars Kick!"

The cabbit zoan kicked out, again and again, muscles extending and contracting at supersonic speeds, each attack launching a shimmering fireball that screamed through the air and struck the charging panda-man like a bullet. A cascade of sizzling fiery projectiles rained on the rival zone, stopping him dead in his tracks, whole body rippling with waves of both force and flame before, at the 108th blow, he was knocked clean off of his feet and sent flying down the hall, knocking several dozen others flying as his charred, smoking bulk slammed into them with the force of a runaway bull.

As Shampoo lowered a glowing, smoking paw gingerly back to the floor, Akasuki stared at her, eyes wide in shock, unable to stop the words that slipped from her treacherous lips...

"Best bunny ever!"

She slapped a hand over her mouth, blushing beet red, the twitching of Shampoo's ears and the smirk on her face making it clear the cabbit zoan had heard exactly what Akasuki had said. But, before they could respond to it, another fireball was lobbed at them - this one a strange melding of purple and green flames that detonated in a blast of green smoke when it struck the floor. The pirate and the marine landed side-by-side, claws and sword raised in defense as the smoke and the flames cleared.

"Piropiropiro! It seems the student seeks to challenge the master, no? Or are you going to deny you stole the basics for that maneuver from my own Chemical Juggling technique, hmm?" Dr. Indigo laughed as he strutted towards them, the act of which would have been menacing if only he weren't still wearing the whoopie-cushion shoes...

"Shampoo surpass your little trick," She purred, brandishing her claws with slow, deliberate menace. "Let Shampoo show you..."

Bodies flew left and right as Ranma hammered his way through the crush of pirates facing him like a mining machine confronted with a particularly stubborn vein of ore.

"Get outta my way! I gotta better things ta do then wrangle you small fry, not when yer boss is sitting right there!" An annoyed Ranma snapped, his mood not improved by the mocking grin he could see Shiki throwing his way from where he still lounged idly atop his throne, watching the carnage with the smug satisfaction of a Roman senator at the Colosseum.

"Insolent brat! Muscle-Muscle Hundredfold!"

Ranma skidded to a halt as the previously unremarkable pirate he'd been instinctively preparing to punch in the face suddenly began to balloon up like somebody had turned on a hidden tank of gas inserted into an inflatable mascot. A previously slim, unremarkable older man distended into a hulking mass of obscenely swollen flesh. His upper torso soared towards the ceiling, dwarfing his comparatively miniscule legs, his head sitting atop his exaggerated shoulders like a lemon atop a boulder. Hands that looked big enough to palm Miriam's face like a basketball flexed fingers swollen like overstuffed sausages, curling into fists that probably weighed more than Ranma did.

The teenage martial artist turned pirate captain simply rolled his neck and cracked his knuckles. "Neat trick. But a hundred times a wimp-"

And then he blurred into motion, bringing forth not the rain of steel-smashing fists he would normally use on a true opponent, but instead a short, simple sequence of strikes. Not a movement was wasted, every step as elegantly precise as a symphony. Solar plexus, kidney, throat, temple, Achilles heel; five blows was all it took, his target trying to stop him, but so weighed down with his own bloated musculature he might as well have been immersed in half-set amber.

Then time resumed its normal flow and Ranma was standing on the other side of his would-be attacker. There was a briefest instance, and then the hulking Devil Fruit user collapsed face-first onto the floor hard enough to leave a small crater. Even as he dwindled back into his original form, Ranma finished his sentence.

"-Is still a wimp."

If only for a moment, the whole battlefield seemed to stop and stare at the brash youth, reassessing who he might be. And then the chaos resumed as indiscriminately as before.

'...One of these days, Ranchan, truce or no truce, I am gonna rip off all yer clothes and do the most naughty things ta you... Ooooh, but where ta start?! Mmm... maybe the whipped cream and golden syrup? Yummm-hey!'

Ukyo snarled viciously as a rough hand on her shoulder unceremoniously wrenched her back from her reverie and into the reality of the brawl still raging around her.

"Paws off! Ya got some nerve, interruptin' a lady while she's thinkin'!" She spat, disarticulating the offensive limb and launching its screaming owner into a band of men, knocking them into an unconscious heap that smashed straight through the (admittedly flimsy) wall of the throne room.

She snatched up her trusty battle spatula and began eagerly emphasizing her point, smashing skulls, limbs, ribs, and whatever else presented itself as a target of opportunity amidst the scrum. Swords shattered under the strength of her blows and men went flying as she slammed into their ranks like a human tidal wave, swiftly and mercilessly clearing a space around herself.

Defensive instincts suddenly screamed at her, and guided by fighter's instinct, Ukyo turned her spatula from weapon to shield, interposing it against a projectile that came rocketing through the air straight at her. It took all her strength to keep from being knocked off of her feet, and even as it was, she found herself sliding backwards across the floor before she managed to fight off the momentum and arrest the movement. Luckily for Sukumvit, she spotted who exactly she'd caught before instinct further guided her to launch him back the way he came like a human ping-pong ball.

"Oh, it's you! What kinda crazy technique was that?" Ukyo asked the marine commodore as he fell on the floor at her feet and then sat up, rubbing the back of his head.

"Crazy ape is stronger than he looks," The nobleman turned pirate hunter observed, sounding remarkably impressed as he looked back at Scarlet, who was triumphantly beating his chest to emphasize his victory.

"Y'mean that really is a gorilla? An' here I was thinking it was just a really ugly guy - with really tacky dress sense," Ukyo added.

Scarlet hooted sharply in apparent shock, even as Sukumvit stood up and looked back at the giant ape, quizzically tilting his head as he did.

"Well... now that you say that, I'm actually less certain than I was before," The commodore conceded.

A roar of primal fury echoed through the throne room, the thinning ranks of pirates actually freezing, those who had the misfortune to be close by scrambling to get out of the way as Scarlet launched himself into a knuckle-walking version of a charge. The huge ape thundered across the floor, unceremoniously trampling or crushing anybody unfortunate enough to be in his way. With bestial grace he transferred that forward momentum into a single-hand overarm swat, his leathery palm slapping into the marble tiling of the floor and pulverizing a crater deep enough to take a bath in.

Unfortunately for Scarlet, Ukyo and Sukumvit were made of sterner stuff, and were already in motion even as the ape smashed the floor where they'd been standing.

"Keep yer stinkin' paws ta yerself, ya damn dirty ape!" Ukyo spat angrily at her assailant.

Scarlet roared and swiped at her with his free hand, Ukyo twisting in a fashion that made other pirates watching the fight wince and protectively clutch at their backs so the gorilla's attack went past her.

"I ain't no meal for the likes of you! If yer hungry, then eat this! Kuonji School Winter Wake-Up Special!" Ukyo defiantly shouted, even as her hand dipped into a handy pocket and flung forth a billowing cloud of her experimental mixture of dried flakes of Grand Line-sourced chili and ground peppercorns mixed with iron filings and gunpowder. An ominous shifting mass of blacks, grays and reds engulfed the giant ape's face, and Scarlet recoiled with an agonized bellow as the coarse grains and spices attacked his sensitive eyes and sinuses.

"Oh, sorry, you wanted the Extra Hot version? Here ya go!"

One swipe of her now-glowing spatula through the trailing edge of the cloud of particulates, and the gunpowder went off in a massive fireball that blasted Scarlet off of his feet, flailing madly at the flames now engulfing his upper torso.

'Wow, I am gettin' good at this heat ki thing! I gotta start working on my projection training next...!' Ukyo grinned to herself, enjoying the warm glow of pride in her stomach.

'Don't lose control, don't lose control! But there's so much blood... so, so much... I WANT IT!'

Even as her stomach snarled like a vicious beast, Nabiki channeled her frustration into her efforts. Her vampire form was a blur of motion as she wove through the crowd. She stayed away from the captains as best she could, instead focusing on their massed underlings - those who were, by and large, too weak and slow to have a hope of defending themselves from her. Her clawed fingers raked through flesh in indiscriminately savage blows, ripping and tearing with an eye towards maximum pain and despair. Blood sprayed in her wake, painting the ceiling, walls and floor in abstract art of gore, the thick coppery smell washing over her and singing its siren call as the vampire zoan's lips curled so tight she felt her cheeks might burst, face frozen in a fang-laden rictus grin of denial.

"Freeze-Freeze Ray!"

'Why do Paramecias always shout when they use it?' Nabiki mused to herself, even as she reversed direction with a sudden flying leap.

Unfortunately, it wasn't enough; a scintillating aura of blue-and-white energy rushed through the air from just behind her and caught her legs from the knees down, stripping away all feeling and leaving them totally numb. So, when Nabiki instinctively flipped around in what even Ranma would admit should have been a functional backflip, she wound up flat on her butt instead of poised like a badass like any of her fellow crew members.

"What the hell is this?!" She demanded instinctively, trying to lift first one foot and then the other, neither of them responding to her commands.

The Devil Fruit user responsible, a tall, rail-thin, older man in ragged clothes that made him look like a runaway scarecrow and a large, balding head, laughed at her efforts, fingers still trained on Nabiki.

"Siiiiheeheehee! Foolish zoan, taste the power of Captain Hieronymous Klokkenstopper and his Freeze-Freeze Fruit! Now, men, ready! Aim!"

Accepting that her legs weren't going to be moving any time soon, Nabiki drew herself up as tall as she could in her seated position, folded her arms across her chest, and stared icily at the pirates now pointing their rifles and pistols at her. "You're going to regret this."

'Okay, remember what you did on Hestavar! Reach inwards... feel the blood in your veins, coursing through your being. Blood is life and life is blood, and you are the blood. You cannot be killed, not if you refuse to die!'

"Fire!"

Even above the clatter of clashing steel and breaking bones, the sound of several dozen pistols and rifles firing in a single massed volley was deafening. All eyes were drawn as one to the Ticktock Pirates as they fired, then fired again, and then a third time; a veritable hundred-and-twenty-one gun salute. Gunsmoke blanketed Captain Klokkenstopper and his crew, swirling around them in an obscuring veil of pungent gray mist before the breeze blowing through the hole created by that crazy chick with the laser dissipated it.

All of the Ticktock Pirates knew that the result of their attack wouldn't be pretty. A hundred and twenty one shots in the span of a few seconds left a body pretty torn to pieces, and they were all hardened raiders; it was a familiar display of carnage to them, and they took it as a poignant reminder of just how powerful and ruthless they were. One arm was dangling by just threads of sinew, the other was gone entirely, the torso was so full of holes it was amazing it hadn't just collapsed in on itself, and a good chunk of the head was gone.

What they were not prepared for, however, was for the mutilated corpse to sit back up. And then the single eye rolled in its socket to focus on them, and the half-a mouth twisted into a grin that would in all honesty probably have been terrifying even if it wasn't filled with fangs that seemed to glitter like diamonds as blood seeped slowly between them.

"Shooting me isn't going to do you any good," Nabiki crooned, doing her best to imitate Kasumi's most innocent (and blissfully airheaded, if she was honest with herself) tone of voice, even giggling in her best bimbo impression as she stared at her would-be executioners. All the while, she pulled at her own blood, drawing it back into her body and feeling it suffuse her with fresh strength, washing away the dim sensation of pain as her body restored itself within seconds.

'Holy shit, I can't believe it worked! I thought I was a dead woman! Damn, I'm going to have to admit; there's something to be said for Ranma and his crazy never-say-die teachings after all... Man, that feels so weird - I can literally feel my organs reknitting, my bones gluing themselves back together or growing into the right shape, skin and muscle recohering... is this how a Logia feels? Questions for later. Right now, my legs are moving again... which means it's payback time!'

"Re-Reload, damn you! Reload!" Captain Klokkenstopper howled in panic, fumbling for his own pistol and trying to train it on Nabiki despite the way his hands shook like a leaf caught in a gale.

But it was too late. Nabiki was fully restored, only her mangled clothing and the slick crimson streaks of blood painted across her perfectly immaculate skin proving that she had been attacked in the first place. In a single movement, sleek as a jungle panther, she sprang to her now-responsive feet and lunged towards the Ticktock Pirates.

The gore drenching her body ran in defiance of gravity, forming into a spiraling tongue of sanguine fluid that spun around and around her right forearm like a liquid drill; a contemptuous stab of her hand and it exploded through the air, expanding its arc as it did and slamming into the assembled pirates like a tightly focused tidal wave. Even as they went flying through the air, bruised and broken, Nabik came to grips with their captain; Klokkenstopper desperately tried to shoot her in the face, but she swatted his pistol aside with her left hand before grabbing him and burying her fangs in his throat.

'And to think... I used to like my meat well-done...' Nabiki absently marveled to herself, even as bestial instincts sang in triumph at the sensation of hot, sweet, coppery nectar sluicing down her gullet. She drank deeply, greedily guzzling her victim's life-essence, until she sensed his heartbeat slowing. Then she tore her face away from the sanguine siren still singing sweetly and thrust the unconscious pirate captain away with all her might, launching him across the room and straight through one of the walls.

"Delicious... now, who's next?" Nabiki wondered aloud, making a show of scanning the seething yet rapidly diminishing scrum before pointing at random with all the aplomb of a Shakespearean stage actor.

"You. You're next."

Coincidently Corresponding Carnage...

Seaman First Class Nathaniel Boone clutched his rifle so tightly he thought his fingers were gonna break, stock pressed against his shoulder as he aimed it at the unholy abomination lumbering towards him, scaly trunk already questing in his direction and bloody gobbets of meat that had once been his fellow marines dribbling from its toothy maw.

"C'mon, you fucker! You wanna piece of me?! I won't go down easy!" He screamed defiantly, firing as fast as he could pull the trigger. He aimed for the eyes, but the huge, awkwardly shaped head with its pronounced bones and broad, flat forehead made them impossible to hit for somebody who wasn't a trained sniper. He fired and he fired until the hammer of his rifle clicked the ominous click of an empty magazine, and that hideous trunk was reaching for his face...

Then there was a sound like rolling thunder, as the hulking form of Miriam came charging through the chaos and slammed into the side of the crocophant, roaring as she did, "Pick on someone your own size!"

The creature trumpeted in fury as it was bodily shoved backwards, its huge round feet dragging trails through the dirt as the giant shark-girl seized the initiative and shoved with all her might. By luck or design, she had caught the creature close to the shores of the lake, and by the time the hybrid monstrosity was able to start trying to properly fight back, it was already standing in the slippery mud of the shallows.

Its scaly trunk, studded with osteoderms so overgrown it bristled with flesh-ripping spikes, whipped around and slammed into Miriam's back with a sickening slap of flesh-on-flesh. The wotan staggered and choked, the blow jarring the breath from her lungs, before she grit her teeth and thrust forward again, tail slapping at the ground for an instinctual extra surge of motive force. Her powerful arms wrapped around the crocophant's torso, fingers digging in as she leveraged all her might and muscle and mass to lift the mutant clean off of its feet and slam it into the mud with a startled cry.

As it lay stunned there in the mud, Miriam gave in to instinct and dropped on the creature, cruelly yanking its head around to expose a now-vulnerable throat before sinking her teeth into the comparatively soft flesh. Her prey squealed and thrashed wildly, kicking and bucking and flailing its trunk, but Miriam hung on with all her might, twisting and thrashing, putting the deadly saw-like edges of her fangs to work. Skin and bone, gristle, muscle and fat parted and hot blood sluiced down her throat, the heady coppery stink of it filling her nostrils, awakening the savagery that was bred in her bones.

Blood filled the water, churning into froth as the two leviathans tussled - the desperate struggles of the dying prey matched with the ravenous excitement of a predator in a feeding frenzy. Even as the kill finally fell still, the only remaining motions the last twitches of still-firing nerves, Miriam gnawed at the shredded mass of gristle and gore that had been its throat.

Then, a spark of sanity stabbed into her brain and Miriam leapt to her feet, throwing back her head and roaring triumphantly, crimson gore slathered on her face and down her throat, fangs glistening in the dying sunlight. Still half-drunk on bloodlust, she turned and stomped through the surf, nostrils twitching as she sniffed out her next victim.

Harumi did his best to tune out the staccato pulsing of intermittent gunfire, interspersed with metallic plinks and profuse profanity, as he studied his latest opponent, flicking his blades to shake them clean of blood.

"You're an odd one, aren't you?" He observed absently, taking in the details of the creature that he was planning to confront.

It resembled a giant scorpion, for the most part - not the biggest of such creatures he had seen since the village had come under assault, maybe three meters or so in length, but certainly big enough. The truly unusual features were twofold. Firstly, though it had the iconic scorpion's tail, it lacked a visible stinger - instead, the typical bulb that normally housed the famous curved sting was swollen at least two or three times larger than normal, and visibly shimmering with arcs of static electricity. Secondly, the creature was wearing armor - an impromptu coat of metallic objects ranging from swords and tools to pots and pans that had been seemingly welded to its exoskeleton. Despite its makeshift nature, it was self-evidently very sturdy, given the way marine bullets kept bouncing ineffectually off of it. Hence the profusion of profanity.

The two oddities proved themselves connected when the creature's tail suddenly lit up like a miniature thundercloud and a strange energy rippled through the air. Swords, knives, nails and other various sharp bits of metal suddenly rose into the air - some detaching from the creature's makeshift coat, others pulled from buildings and backyards all around them - before orientating themselves directly at Harumi.

There was no sound or visual cue; the hovering cloud of death simply just exploded forward in a glittering rain of razored edges. Harumi's hands sprang up and out, blades tracing silver crescents as he frantically struck at the barrage, batting away implements of murder with perversely musical chimes of steel on steel, feet blurring as he wove and danced through the storm.

'Thank you, lady Lilith, for teaching me these steps!' Prayed the tiny part of the swordsman's mind that wasn't focused on preserving his own skin. And even with all of his not-inconsiderable talents bent to that particular goal, he wasn't a hundred percent successful. His clothes tore in a hundred places as metal breached his defenses, flickers of pain and wet warmth pulsing in his mind as scrapes and scratches just deep enough to bleed blossomed all over his arms, torso and legs.

But still, when the last of the shrapnel plunged into the soft earth, Harumi was still alive and perfectly capable of continuing to battle. Strong, supple legs curled as he sank into a crouch and then exploded forwards, little more than a blur of gleaming steel and blood-stained silk charging towards the magnetic scorpion. A sizzling bolt of vibrant bluish-white screamed through the air, but Harumi sidestepped it, feeling his side burn from the heat of its passage as it struck the earth behind him and threw up slivers of fulgurite.

'Remember what lady Kodachi and Shampoo taught you! To cut... to not cut... it is all a matter of desire. If your will is strong enough, then you shall slice through whatever stands in your way!'

The creature voiced a chittering roar of defiance, one massive claw snapping out to try and seize Harumi around its middle, the curved prongs of chitin gaping wide in anticipation of crushing and rending, but its efforts met only disappointment as the blur that was Harumi sidestepped the clumsy grab.

There was a sound; a drawn-out metallic screech, underlaid by syllables wet and juicy. Then Harumi came to a stop a good meter past the scorpion, his faithful long-blade Shirohebi dripping with a bilious fluid the yellowish-green of infected pus. He looked at it and his usual serene smile faded into a flat look of disgust, and he tore off a half-severed sleeve and used it to begin wiping the blade clean.

Behind him, the magnetic scorpion split cleanly in half horizontally, its top half sliding wetly forward as it collapsed into a puddle of stinking ichor.

Being surrounded by miniature pigs was not normally a thing that most people would consider alarming. Many might even consider it rather cute. When those miniature pigs had mouthfuls of razor-sharp fangs and were drooling like waterfalls, that might raise alarm bells. And yet the voluptuous redhead they had surrounded simply giggled in delight as she looked at the porcine predators surrounding her.

"Sneeehahaha! Oh, goody; I skipped breakfast! Never had bacon sandwiches deliver themselves before!"

She grinned savagely in delight, even as her body warped and shifted, dark skin morphing into shimmering scales, neck stretching, legs running together into a long, powerful tail, mouth stretching to expose fangs dribbling acrid venom. What had seemed like helpless prey now stood revealed as an apex predator in her own right, Lilith's eyes gleaming with an all-too-literal hunger as she stared down at her would-be consumers.

On any other island, they would have turned and fled, survival instincts demanding nothing less. But this was Merveille. With Shiki's widespread usage of SIQ, survival instincts had mutated until, in questions of fight or flight, there was only one possible answer.

With shrill squeals of bloodlust, the carnivorous pigs launched themselves at Lilith. The sounder's alpha boar, first into the fray, was casually slapped away with a flick of the cobra zoan's tail. The rest of its piggy companions were dispatched swiftly and brutally; punched backed by zoan strength and honed through recent yet brutally efficient martial arts training staved in skulls, whilst a volley of rapid-fire yet sniper-precise spitting saw pigs drop like flies as corrosive venom boiled through their eyes and cooked their brains inside their skulls.

Within seconds, seemingly the entire sounder lay dead or dying, scattered in heaps around Lilith's position. The cobra zoan put her hands on her hips and smirked to herself as she triumphantly took in the results of the carnage.

'Okay, I'll admit it; those martial arts lessons may have sucked, but I can't argue with the results!'

"SQUEEEEEE!"

According to many biological students, pigs were actually quite clever creatures, all things considered. But few scholars would have considered it worthwhile to ponder the question of if a mutant carnivorous boar might have been intelligent enough to regret its decision in making a flying leap straight towards the head of a rival predator with jaws far larger than its own body, in the few brief moments before its life ended in a monstrously vulgar belch.

"Ahh... normally, I prefer my pork cooked well done, but I suppose beggars can't be choosers. Now, let's see if there's any more of these tasty little treats running around..." Lilith absently declared to herself, picking at her teeth with one sharpened fingernail.

Most people, faced with not one ungodly hybrid of a Clydesdale horse and a wolf charging towards them, but an entire herd of the creatures, would have turned and run.

Penelope laFloo was not most people, by any stretch of the definition. The mink actually sighed in dismay, even as she turned her back on the charging beasts, seemingly indifferent to the sight of fangs glittering amidst the froth of saliva and claw-like hooves tearing at the ground. Instead, she hiked up her tail and bent over, cheeks visibly bright red as she took aim over her shoulder.

The thunder of hooves filled the air as the mutant horses descended upon their seemingly helpless victim, eyes blazing red as they champed hungrily in anticipation of sweet, succulent flesh and hot blood sluicing down their throats.

And then Penelope let fly with her musk. Given proper space to aerosolize, the fetid ichor was a fine mist by the time it slammed mercilessly into the faces of the foremost wolf-horses leading the herd's charge. The result was instant pandemonium, shrill screams of pain and disgust filling the air as the creatures tried to recoil in mid-charge, knocking into each other, tripping each other over, even clawing and biting at each other with indiscriminate fury as they desperately tried to get away from the unholy stench burning across their brains like white hot fire.

Then Penelope launched herself into the fray, face still red as a beet, and clearly intent on working out some of her frustrations on an abundance of viable targets...

'How did it come to this?! I am a legitimate professional! I have degrees from the Great Royal Academy of Frauce! So why am I constantly using this stinking musk to put down my foes?!'

The herd's stallion went down first, head cleanly severed with one two-handed chop from Penelope's machete. A simple hop neatly allowed her to drive a subtly-armored boot squarely into the thinnest part of a second horse-wolf's skull, reducing its brainpan to something resembling porridge mixed with shards of broken pottery. The instant she touched the ground, she lashed out in what her ballet instructor would have called a picture perfect grand battement... save for the fact that when the tip of her foot brushed the ribcage of an equine mutant currently mauling one of its smaller, weaker counterparts to death, that ribcage practically imploded with the soft wet crunching of breaking bones. An equally impeccable pirouette, and she chopped a fourth mutant's legs out from under it.

'It isn't even the fighting I mind, I was expecting that when I began, but to rely on something so base as a natural bodily function? Whatever must they think of me?'

Her machete momentarily became stuck in the skull of her latest kill, wrenching her back to reality and forcing her to kick the creature free with a wet, gristly /ssschuck/ sound. A bloodthirsty neigh from right behind her brought her elbow shooting back, crunching with brutalizing force into a would-be assailant's throat, giving her the opportunity to smash in its skull with a brutally well-aimed punch.

Within moments, Penelope stood surrounded by the dead and dying, the survivors fleeing in blind panic. She wiped off her machete on the nearest patch of clean fur on one of her kills, then heaved a long-suffering sigh.

'Well, no point in standing around and moping. There are lives in danger, and I must help them!'

'Priority task designation: complete retrofit of projectile armaments for new manipulators.'

That observation flashed through what passed for the synthezoid's subconsciousness, and it was easy to see why. Dyna was surrounded by half a dozen large, angry swans, each covered in metallic feathers the color of rusty iron that would swoop in, angrily beat at her with their wings or peck at her or spew a torrent of flames over her, and then retreat before she could cleave them in half with a blow from her whirring chainsaw, or crush them in her massive mechanical fists. Not always perfectly, as the small pile of corpses at her feet attested, but enough that the fight was dragging on, neither side able to truly harm the other.

'Protocol established per captain's directives; when the situation is suboptimal, attempt unorthodox tactics!'

Hidden vents sprang open around her waist as Dyna's jet dial roared to life, the high-pressure stream of air thrusting her forcefully off of the ground and right into the thick of the startled flock. Even as they flapped desperately in an attempt to get out of her way, she lunged for the closest one and discharged her volt dial. Arcs of high-voltage electricity surged through her metallic fingers, into her unlucky victim, and then exploded outwards from the flash-frying corpse, electrostatic discharge scything through the flock and proving that mere metallic feathers were not the best insulation.

So it was that as even as Dyna hit the ground with a mighty thud, she was followed by a rain of smoking avian corpses, the stink of charred meat and exploding entrails filling the air around her. The rotors of her shoulder servos whirred softly as she readjusted her stance, already looking for the next target.

She got her wish when a spray of boiling venom washed over her back, drenching her in scalding hot toxins. Unfortunately for her assailant, being made of iron and... what had the captain called it? Plastic? Meant that hot liquids weren't really threatening to her, and neither was anything toxic to living creatures. She turned with a slow whir of rotating joints to face her attacker; something that resembled the bastard love child of a diplodocus and a porcupine, with a squat, hippo-like body on four tree-trunk legs covered in thick, shaggy fur and bristling spines, contrasting long, serpentine neck and tail. It roared in Dyna's face, but the gynoid's expression never so much as wavered as she revved up her chainsaw and charged...

Ryoga's arm rose and fell like a threshing machine as he finished bludgeoning the club-tailed cat-thing senseless at his feet.

"Stupid Ranma sure is lucky he wasn't here to see this... he'd have gone running off crying for his mom," Ryoga declared, once he was satisfied the twitching brute was completely subdued. Then he stopped and thought about what he'd just unthinkingly said.

"Okay, maybe that one was a little too much," He begrudgingly conceded to himself, absently looking out through the chaos as he spoke. Then his blood suddenly froze as he saw a little girl running through the streets, tears running down her cheeks as she screamed in terror, being pursued by... a toad. A big toad, with throbbing boil-like growths that glowed bright red.

It would have seemed comical... but Ryoga had seen just what those toads were capable of in the first few minutes of the attack, and that knowledge made him react on pure instinct.

"Run for it, kid!" He cried, even as he took off sprinting, racing for the girl and her assailant as fast as he possibly could go. Unfortunately, and he sooner would have eaten the toad than admitted it where Ranma could hear it, he definitely wasn't as fleet-footed as Ranma, and so plan A - that being to snatch up the girl and carry her safely away from the living explosive sadistically hopping along behind her - was a bust.

That just left plan B.

With an inarticulate roar of defiance, Ryoga threw himself bodily through the air and landed squarely atop the exploding toad, crushing it firmly under his body. He had the briefest of instants to be thankful that it did not, contrary to his expectations, pop like the football overstuffed with rancid azuki jelly that it vaguely resembled. And then that gratitude was swept away by a sensation of sharp, intense heat on his stomach, combined with the feeling of being kicked by Ranma during one of their spars, as a pillar of flame blasted him clean off the ground and over a dozen meters into the air, where he found gravity flipping him like one of Ukyo's okonomiyaki and dropping down to land unceremoniously on a haystack. Much to the surprise of the marine squad that had been taking shelter close by.

They were even more surprised when the Kamikaze Pirates' first mate coughed slightly, then stood up and took stock of the damage to himself, oblivious to his audience.

"Damn it, I liked this shirt! It was one of my best ones!" He grumbled, poking at the hole scorched clean through his shirt and exposing his bellybutton for the whole world to see.

A weirdly sinister chorus of croaking drew his ruminations from his ruined attire. When Ryoga looked up, he swallowed as he realized he was surrounded by dozens of the toads, all eying him with an eerily human malice in their eyes.

'Oh, screw you! I'm not running from a buncha toads, even if they do explode! I have my pride, dammit!'

Ryoga puffed up his chest, flexing his muscles to look as intimidating as possible, jabbing a thumb at himself for emphasis as he defiantly roared, "Well, what are you waiting for? You want a piece of me? Then come and get some!"

The toads went silent, and Ryoga would swear later that they grinned at him. Then, as one unstoppable amphibian wave, they leapt forward, swarming towards him and latching on for dear life, covering him from head to foot in squirming bodies before they detonated.

The marines stared at the fireball with mixed reactions, though a certain cocktail of awe and horror had to be frontmost.

"And that is what macho idiocy gets you!" Scoffed their petty officer.

"What the hell was that young idiot thinking?" Wondered one of the seamen.

"Nobody could survive that!" Opined a third.

And that was when the towering inferno snuffed itself out like a candle in the wind, to reveal, at the epicenter of the crater of molten sand it had left behind, Ryoga Hibiki. He was still standing, even though his shirt had been burned away completely, his pants were in tatters, and his skin was black with soot and ash. He swayed unsteadily for a moment, face blank, before he furiously shook his head and visibly regained control of himself. He glared furiously up at the sky and punched a defiant fist upward as he screamed, "Is that all you got, you bastard?!"

Back at the palace...

'Damn, I'm awesome.'

Ranma subconsciously bathed in the warm, comforting glow of that thought, feeling it fill his core with fresh vitality and lighten his step even as he channeled it through his arms and out into what was a pretty decent Kamehame Ha knock-off if he did say so himself, smashing through a desperate attempt by some pirate crew or other - Ranma didn't remember their name or care to ask - to rally and launch a counter-attack against him.

'Look at 'em; they outnumber us a thousand or more to one, and we kicked their asses! We're all awesome!'

A fresh upwelling of pride infused him as he swept his gaze out over the hall, taking in the sheer carnage that he and his girlfriends (and the three marines officers, let's be fair) had inflicted upon the New Golden Lion Pirates. Nine out of every ten men who had swarmed into the hall seeking to help their captains were down in varying degrees of bloodied, bruised, battered and broken, and the captains were hardly much better off.

"Mass Chemical Juggling!"

"Red Moon Scythe!"

Ranma absentmindedly snapped a fist back into the face of a pirate that tried to charge him from behind, sending his assailant stumbling backwards in a micro-explosion of blood, snot and spittle before he collapsed backwards with all the grace of a dying tree. Ranma never even looked that way, his attention entirely fixed on the sight of Shampoo's duel with Dr. Indigo meeting its explosive climax. The clown-doctor hurled an enormous fireball of purple-and-green flames at the Chinese Amazon, who countered with a spin-kick that launched a flaming crescent-shaped wind blade. The two fiery projectiles met in mid-air, but Shampoo's attack proved the victor; it split Indigo's fireball in half, the semi-liquid collapsing into two burning puddles on either side of the projectile's path as it slammed into the startled doctor, who went flying backwards and crashed into the ground in a smoking heap.

Shampoo took up a tiger style pose, claws extended from her fingers, only to retract them and smile smugly as her opponent failed to rise.

"That one go to Shampoo!" She proudly declared to any who might be listening.

"Don't get cocky, bunny-girl; we're not exactly kneading dough here either," Ukyo called to her in playful challenge. She emphasized her point by casually flinging out a bundle of yakisoba noodles that caught three unlucky pirates by the legs and tied them together, leaving them defenseless in the face of Ukyo's battle spatula as it cracked over their skulls and sent them face-first into dream-land.

"Ohhh-hohohohohoho! I hardly think she could be found guilty of such a charge as that," Kodachi guffawed proudly, in the same hysterical laugh that still, after all these... weeks... sent a certain shiver down Ranma's spine. Her whip-blade wove intricate patterns of razor-edged steel and chain through the air, carving merciless reminders of their foolishness into the flesh of any pirates witless enough to challenge her.

One particularly large pirate tried to attack Kodachi from behind, only for her new pet to take offense. The tiny six-legged weasel-thing lashed out with a tongue many times longer than its body, the previously gentle appendage now ripping away flesh in a spray of gore as it scythed across the pirate's face. The man howled in agony, instinctively clasping his bleeding face, and Alice the... whatever the hell she was... seized the opportunity. Her tongue stabbed out, punching into his shoulder like a spear, before the mutant mustelid shot through the air like a ballistic missile, slamming into him and proceeding to rip and tear with all six little paws, now sporting not so little claws.

'Figures. Well, after Mr. Green Turtle, I suppose it's not so bad,' Ranma absently observed.

"Crimson Rain!"

The sound of Nabiki's voice, raised in the once-unthinkable excitement of a battle cry, drew Ranma back to reality, and he watched in admiration as the vampire zoan shaped tiny beads of blood into a barrage of improvised bullets that raked across one last knot of would-be resistance with all the merciless efficacy of a professional machine-gunner. Those still standing then found themselves confronted by the whirling dervish of fang and claw that was Nabiki, and even if she may not have the skills of, say, Shampoo, she did her best to compensate with sheer bloodlust.

Ranma turned his attention away from his quartermaster, and fixed his gaze firmly on Shiki, the elderly pirate still seated atop his throne. When Ranma and his crewmates had first broken through, Shiki had simply smiled, setting his newly sworn crew upon the far smaller band of Kamikaze Pirates as if it were all some great amusement for his own personal delight.

Well, he wasn't smiling anymore.

"So much for the New Golden Lion Pirates! And you thought you were gonna conquer the world with this lot?" Ranma scoffed, gesturing mockingly at the heaped masses of unconscious and semi-conscious bodies to emphasize his contempt.

Shiki shrugged. "Well, clearly the standards of piracy have gone down somewhat in the last twenty years. It can be worked on. But you, boy... now you have my attention..."

A smarter martial artist might have noticed Shiki's tone, or the way that his throne's armrests began to crack under his fingers, or simply the wave of raw killing intent that rolled off of him. Ranma, being high on his own triumph, noticed all of those factors and promptly chose to ignore them.

"Pffeh! If these assholes couldn't stop us, what's one old fossil -"

And then Shiki was right in front of Ranma. The younger captain's eyes widened and he managed to get his arms into a block just in time as Shiki's fist caught Ranma in an uppercut that launched him clean off the floor as if he were jet propelled, the ballistic Saotome hitting the roof and punching clean through it in a shower of sawdust and splinters.

By the time the world stopped spinning, Ranma realized he was in the air high above Shiki's palace - maybe a hundred meters or more straight up from the roof.

'Me an' my big mouth... whoops, incoming!'

A deft combination of a flip and a Moonwalk jetted Ranma out of the way, just before Shiki shot through the space where Ranma had been, floating upside-down with his sword peg-legs angled to turn him into a human spear that would have reduced Ranma to a shish-kebab if he'd been even an instant slower.

But Shiki proved his mastery over the Float-Float Fruit; rather than wasting time to reorient himself or using a curving flight pattern to bring himself back towards Ranma, something that would have given the young martial artist a vital opening to make his own counter-attack, Shiki simply stopped dead in an instant and then flew straight at Ranma. Despite the fact he was upside down, he launched a vicious barrage of kicks at blinding speeds, each precisely aimed at vulnerable spots on Ranma's body.

Ranma twisted and jinked, all of his training in acrobatics and Moonwalk being put to the limit as he dodged Shiki's assault. Again and again Shiki's blades came at him, and each time Ranma evaded death - sometimes by only a hair's breadth.

'Shit! Not good!'

"Jihahaha! Well, boy, what's wrong? Run out of clever things to say? Oh, you're good, for a rookie, but you need to learn your place!"

Shiki lashed out with a punch that caught Ranma right in the solar plexus as he was already dodging one of Shiki's bladed kicks, the impact launching Ranma horizontally across the sky like a human cannonball.

Ranma rolled with the impact, tumbling like a Taoist sorcerer performing the cloud-vaulting somersault technique as he desperately bled off the momentum so he could finally cancel it with a Moonwalk kick. Instinctively, he fired a Moko Takabisha back at Shiki, already speeding towards him, but of course the rattling of his emotions robbed the technique of its prior fury, and so instead of a glorious death ray, there came only a glowing fireball. Still, it was enough to shake-up Shiki, who sharply zigged out of the line of fire.

"I don't know when you found yourself that Devil Fruit, but you clearly need more practice, jihahaha! See how a master does it!" Shiki jeered, stopping his headlong flight and instead gesturing dramatically with his hands.

Far below them, the ground buckled and heaved, streamers of earth and rock spewing skyward like water shot from a geyser. In mid-air the near-liquid stone twisted and spiraled, fashioning itself into a barrage of arm-length stone spikes aiming themselves straight for Ranma. Fast as bullets they came at him, forcing him to twist and twirl like a streamer on the wind as they shot past him.

'What the fuck?! Wait... oh, you son of a bitch - that Devil Fruit ain't levitation! It's telekinesis! Agh!'

Ranma's train of thought was rudely derailed as Shiki zipped in and caught him with a second punch. This time, Ranma managed to block, but the impact still sent him shooting back down to earth, slamming into the snowy ground so far below like a human meteorite. The coppery tang of blood washed over his mouth, stars filling his vision for an instant as blackness clutched at him, but Ranma shook off the damage with the skill of somebody who'd been trained under Genma Saotome.

He recovered in the nick of time, barely managing to roll out of the way as a diving Shiki fell from the sky like a celestial spear set to impale Ranma right through the heart. Ranma tumbled across the snowy ground, spine twisting like it was made of rubber to send him into a reverse tumble-roll and then into a hand-standing leap just barely ahead of the wind blade that Shiki contemptuously kicked his way.

Ranma knew the basics on wind blade techniques. He'd seen them in action more than once, even if making one with his bare hands like he'd seen Harumi's crazy bitch of a mother do as yet escaped him.

...He'd never seen anybody use one to cut a gouge in the earth deep enough to fit his arm to the elbow and a kilometer long before, though...

Shiki grinned cruelly, walking towards Ranma with leisurely steps, the points of his sword-legs clinking musically against the stone beneath the snow. "Tell you what, boy; you surrender now, and I'll make it quick, what do you say? Can't get fairer than that, jihahaha!"

'Arrogant piece of shit... but this one vs. one thing isn't going to cut it. Normally, I hate doin' this, but against a mass murdering loonie like this, no sense me playin' fair! Gotta get back ta th' girls, team up on the son of a bitch! One sure way ta do that...'

Taking a defiant posture, Ranma deliberately flared his battle aura, shouting as he did, "I ain't just droppin' dead for nobody, especially not an asshole like you! I didn't do this, but you left me no choice! Saotome School Final Attack! Ready! Set!"

Shiki grinned savagely, hunkering down in a classic wrestler's bracing posture. "Bring it on, you cocky young punk! I can take anything you can throw at me!"

Ranma flared his battle aura as fiercely as he could muster, blazing it brightly until hair-thin cracks started to creep out from where he shifted his weight on his heels. He held the pose as long as he dared, hoping to see at least a flicker of insecurity on Shiki's face, before he roared the fateful final phrase:

"RUN AWAY!"

And with that he pulled his aura back, turning that energy towards fueling an explosive, Moonwalk-powered leap that sent him streaking across the sky back towards Shiki's palace.

Despite everything, Ranma couldn't resist a half-crazed smile and a snicker when it took nearly ten seconds for Shiki's furious bellow of rage to erupt behind him. He still did his best to push himself even faster than before - some people might call him a suicidal idiot, but that didn't make him a moron!

Stone spikes suddenly launched themselves from the ground like a barrage of anti-aircraft missiles, forcing Ranma to jink and juke desperately to avoid both them and a barrage of wind blades that came screaming from behind him. Not a single projectile scored a hit, but they slowed and distracted him just enough that he didn't realize Shiki was hot on his tail until Shiki's fingers fastened themselves around his ankle.

"Stupid cheap tricks!" Shiki roared, swinging Ranma around and around like a cheap doll before hurling him contemptuously back down to earth.

Ranma hit the ground hard, the shock of striking stone and packed snow hard enough to leave a crater in it causing him to momentarily black out. Only his father's training saved him, pure muscle memory causing him to throw himself out of harm's way as Shiki once again tried to end Ranma's life by the simple expedient of dropping out of the sky and skewering him like a fish for roasting. But that still left Ranma on his back and exposed, scrabbling desperately backwards through the snow as he tried to come up with a scheme to get away.

"Jihahaha! That's it, crawl! Not that it'll do you any good!" Shiki guffawed as he drifted ominously after Ranma, raising a sword-leg with deliberate menace in anticipation of pinning him like a butterfly in a collection.

"Lance of Longinus!"

Shiki's head snapped up as something that could only be described as the bastard love-child of a spear and a pressurized stream of blood came rocketing out of the sky at a speed that made the air scream with its passage, the other end emerging from the foot of a flapping Nabiki, her werebat form a patch of darkness against the night sky. The elderly pirate simply frowned and raised a hand... that suddenly went black as ink. The bizarre missile slammed into his now-dark palm and broke apart into half a dozen smaller streamers of liquid that arced almost gracefully away from Shiki's personage, their seeming delicacy belied by the way they punched bathtub-sized craters into the solid earth around him.

"108 Stars Kick!"

"Hot Plate Special!"

Nabiki's attack cut off as sharply as it had been launched as a scatter-shot barrage of miniature fireballs from Shampoo and another, larger one from Ukyo came roaring out of the sky towards Shiki. Shiki's other arm went as black as its companion and he threw them up in a bodily guard, but the impact of high-velocity wind and fire still blasted him a good two feet backwards, giving Ranma a chance to scramble to his feet at last.

"Man, thanks, girls!" He gasped out, even as the four of them dropped to the ground next to him in a protective semi-circle.

"As if I would leave you to face such a ruffian as this alone, my darling!" Kodachi passionately proclaimed, even as she scowled and lashed out with her whip-sword at Shiki, already recovered from his momentary stunning.

"What kind of pirate are you, hiding behind your women?" Shiki contemptuously asked, reaching out and snatching the disarticulated blade from mid-air.

He hissed sharply, visibly grimacing in discomfort, but his fingers relentlessly clutched the shard of metal that Ranma had seen carve through solid steel like it was warm butter without any greater issue than that. A sudden, vicious jerk of his arm, and Kodachi was yanked bodily off her feet with a startled shriek, whereupon he began to spin her around his head so fast that she was a blur.

Ranma instinctively leapt to his Kodachi's defense, but Shiki turned the spinning girl into a weapon, smashing her into Ranma so hard that the ground cratered where the two of them hit it in a sprawl of limbs. A flick of Shiki's fingers launched many-spined spurs of rock at Nabiki, forcing the mythic zoan to jink desperately to avoid being impaled or swatted from the sky like a bug. The elderly pirate spun a hundred-eighty degrees in an instant, lashing out in a kick that chopped the head clean off of Ukyo's battle spatula, only the intervention of Shampoo saving the horrified chef from being disemboweled by a follow-up high kick.

"You're all pathetic! But then, what else should I expect of East Blue scum?" Shiki spat in contempt, spittle disappearing into the churned snow around him.

Fear and rage warred in five sets of hearts, and in all five, rage won, the Kamikaze Pirates turning to attack with renewed vigor.

Kodachi leapt from Ranma's arms and sent her whip-blade scything towards Shiki's waist, only for the pirate to simply zip straight upwards with his Devil Fruit powers, allowing him to parry the razor-edged length of chain with a deft flick of his artificial leg. At the same time, Shampoo attacked from the other direction, her claws eliciting a metallic shriek as they scraped along his other leg, Shiki having moved with perverse alacrity to parry her strike as well.

"Just like a woman wanting to trim her nails at a time like this, jihahaha!" Shiki cackled mockingly.

"You laugh out of other side of face if Shampoo know Bakusai Tenketsu!" The Chinese Amazon spat, ears flattened backwards against her scalp and fangs bared in rage.

"Then let me serve him up some humble pie! Eat this!" Ukyo shouted defiantly, flinging a sweep of throwing spatulas at Shiki, each of them glowing white-hot with the fiery ki she'd poured into them.

Shiki simply scoffed in disgust and swept out his own hand in turn, swiping his fingertips across Ukyo's spatulas and causing them to stop dead in mid-flight. Even as he moved, he mocked her.

"Stupid girl, anything you throw at me - Ouch, that's hot! Oww-whhooohhh!"

The pirate yelped in pained surprise, instinctively sticking burned fingertips in his mouth and sucking on them in an effort to soothe the literally searing pain. Whilst he was distracted, Nabiki wheeled out of the darkening sky and plunged for his neck teeth-first, only for Shiki to lash out with his free hand and grab her by the neck without even looking. He gave his burnt fingertips one last suck before turning a mocking sneer in her direction.

"Poor little girl... you might heal like a logia, but I'll tell you this for free; logias die like anybody else with a haki-coated blade in their guts! Remember that as you enter Davy Jones' Locker!"

Nabiki clawed desperately at Shiki's wrist, having instinctively switched from her werebat "beast" form to her vampire "hybrid" form, but even with her Mythic Zoan strength, she couldn't budge him. As Shiki's muscles tensed, preparing to throw her to the ground so he could impale her on his bladed legs, the panic-stricken Nabiki gave in to instincts and screamed.

All around Shiki, Nabiki's crewmates stopped dead in their blind charge to try and assist her, hands flying to their ears in agony as the sound slammed into them with all the subtlety of a half-brick in a sock to the groin. A crater deep enough to take a bath in and wide enough that two people could have fit into it if they were friendly opened up in the earth beneath Shiki's... feet, for lack of a better term. And, of course, being right at ground zero for this unholy auditory assault meant that Shiki got the worst of it. Shiki's mouth flew open, his eyes temporarily going white and his cigar falling from his slack jaw - it's possible he screamed as well, but the sound was drowned out by the sheer wall of noise pouring out of Nabiki's mouth.

Despite her terror, or perhaps because of it, Nabiki's survival instincts remained razor sharp. She snapped back into her beast form, slapped Shiki's weakened hand from her throat, then pulled a Shampoo; drawing her legs up to her chest before kicking Shiki in the gut as hard as she possibly could, the super-powered rabbit-kick turning the pirate into a blur vanishing rapidly on the horizon. A flap of her wings and she soared back over to Ranma, finger-print bruises visibly mottling her throat and tear-stains dampening her cheeks.

"This isn't working!" She cried in dismay.

Ranma nodded, a dark expression on his face. "No kiddin' - I hate ta say this, but we need the others! C'mon, let's get outta here before he -"

He was cut off mid-sentence as Shiki seemed to simply appear in front of him, a backhand smashing Ranma to the ground. Hovering inches above the snow, Shiki scowled at all of them before he cracked his knuckles.

"You had my attention. Now you have my irritation..."

Minutes later...

"Okay... my shirt is wrecked, half the village burned down, and we lost maybe a fifth of the marines... but all the monsters are either dead or driven off and we're all still alive, so all in all, I think we can chalk this up in the win column," Ryoga announced, grinding his heel into the back of a snake-tailed bird-thing's head to be sure it wouldn't get any bright ideas about making him out to be a liar.

"Error; victory definition overlaps with pyrrhic definition," Dyna observed, wrenching an enormous crystal from the spine of a giant lightning-throwing toad with a sickening crack and a spray of gore.

"Non, non, I concur with Ryoga. We are being alive, relatively uninjured, and our ship, she is being intact. It was most certainly a fearsome battle, but we have triumphed against ze odds!" Penelope proudly asserted, gesturing grandiosely towards the Stormbringer where she sat on the lake for emphasis.

"Yeah, tin lady, why are you so down? We kicked all kinds of ass today!" Miriam interjected, grinning a slightly gap-toothed grin, completely indifferent to the various teeth that had been knocked out in assorted struggles.

"Yes, and if we did so well, then surely the captain will return in triumph in any moment!" Harumi added from where he was sitting comfortably atop Miriam's shoulder.

And that was when the first body hit the ground like a meteorite, kicking up a spray of dirt and dust that rained down on the startled pirates, barely settled before four more bodies fell in rapid-fire sequence.

Down from the heavens Shiki floated, arms crossed and face dark, with the kind of leisurely, deceptively slow grace that in an anime or video game would have elicited sinister organ-based background music, maybe even an ominous Latin choir to boot. He swept a cool, level gaze across the now-collected Kamikaze Pirates... right until he registered the broken and bloody forms of the creatures that had been assailing the village and his jaw dropped in shock.

"My monsters! First my crew, now this? What?! How?! This is impossible!" He roared in his rage, gesturing madly with his hands and causing the earth to ripple and shake as his powers stirred wildly in his fury.

Ranma groaned in pain as he pushed himself upright from the crater where he'd landed, spitting blood off to the side, but managed to still smile triumphantly up at Shiki. "Heh... so much for your big plans, huh? If one little crew like us can stop 'em..."

"No, NO, NO! This is not how it ends! You are all insects to me!" Shiki growled like his bestial namesake, gesturing with his hands. Once again, the earth stirred to life, but this time with purpose and will, rather than simply wild trembling.

A literal wave of soil suddenly rose up from nowhere and hurled itself at Miriam, the giant sharkgirl instinctively tucking Harumi against her waist and curling to shield him as it crashed down on her, burying her beneath a spontaneous hill.

A house ripped itself from the earth, arcing through the air like a giant toad to land squarely onto Dyna, burying her in rubble.

An enormous "bubble" of water suddenly lifted from the surface of the lake and soared through the air to land with pinpoint precision on top of a startled Lilith, swallowing the cobra zoan and defying gravity to remain in its spherical shape rather than simply pouring onto the battered rock.

A fence tore itself apart, its individual planks shooting through the air and plunging themselves into the earth, entrapping a shocked Penelope in a ready-made barrel-like wooden cell.

Stones spewed into the air; a veritable cloud of rocks swirling around Umok before every single boulder simultaneously hurled itself inwards, compacting into a single great mass of stone that then dropped back down to earth.

Other stones formed themselves into a makeshift pseudopod that seized the startled Ryoga around the waist, as well as a rain of rocky stakes that shot at Nabiki, Kodachi, Shampoo and Ukyo - and from their screams of pain, through them, pinned in place like a cruel child's butterfly collection.

Finally, a massive pillar of rock shot into the air - easily a dozen meters long and half as wide across, it drifted on the wind like a feather, orienting itself so its base - jagged with short, sharp spines like the striking face of a meat tenderizer - was pointed squarely at Ranma.

Shiki grinned savagely as he hissed, "And insects. Get. Squashed!"

He crooked his finger, and the pillar began to descend with deceptive slowness, plunging towards Ranma with the inevitability of the tides, Shiki clearly intent on watching Ranma squirm before he went squish.

'Fuck-fuck-fuck what do I do what do I do?!' Ranma's mind raced madly as he stared his approaching death in the face. And then, from the dark recesses of his mind, a memory surfaced; a snowy mountainside, another impossibly strong old jerk, objects that moved in defiance of gravity...

Without thinking, Ranma reached deep into himself and flung all his will at the approaching mass of stone, pouring his ki blindly in its direction and pitting his mind against Shiki's Devil Fruit-granted magic.

And somehow... impossibly... Ranma's desperate gamble paid off. Every muscle in his body burned with effort, and he could feel the veins in his forehead bulging fit to burst, as if he was trying to lift a weight that was beyond even his limits. But through the pain, the fatigue, the sheer effort that made sweat pour from him like he was a sponge being wrung dry... Ranma saw that the pillar of stone had stopped in its descent.

"Jihahaha-huh? What?!" Shiki's sadistic laughter was cut off just as it started, the elderly pirates blinking in surprise. He looked at his murder weapon, then past it at Ranma, brow furrowing as he put two and two together.

"...You're just full of surprises, aren't you, boy? But don't try to teach grandpa to suck eggs!"

He grinned cruelly, waving his finger and increasing the metaphysical pressure of his powers ever so slightly. His grin widened as Ranma trembled as if palsied, blood starting to seep from the corners of his eyes as he vainly fought to hold Shiki back. And so Shiki slowly, ever so slowly, increased his push, watching Ranma struggle to hold back his impending death.

Shiki was so occupied with his cruel game that he failed to notice the small form of Umok, hiding behind one of the short, square chimneys that capped the village's various huts. The imp's three eyes burned through a thick veil of smoke as he watched the elderly pirate tormenting his younger counterpart, fingers starting to burn with ochre ball-lightning .

"Sometimes destiny needs a little nudge... Blink!"

He snapped his fingers, causing the sparks wreathing his hand to surge into life.

'I...I can't-I can't!-' Ranma fell backwards as his strength deserted him, the pillar of stone hurtling forward like a great piston to mash him flat...

"Bakusai Tenketsu Revised: Twin Jackhammer Fist!"

Ranma's eyes flew open, and he stared upward in wonder at the sight of Ryoga Hibiki, now interposing himself between Ranma and the falling pillar of stone, both arms blurring into motion as his fists hammered into the solid rock in an unflinching barrage, the thunder of his strikes a single rolling roar of audible defiance.

"Jihahaha! Give it up, boy! You can't - what?!"

Shiki's cackle and mad grin were wiped in an instant as Ryoga's combination of Amaguriken-fast punches and Bakusai Tenketsu strikes accumulated the stress-fracture points and reduced the entire pillar into dust, the mass of stone disintegrating from the base up in the span of a second into a cloud of fine sand that was blown away by the wind. Down below, Ryoga glowered up at Shiki, slowly rolling his neck from side to side and cracking his knuckles.

"Okay, asshole. Ranma is my captain. Nobody is killing him except me!" Ryoga declared fervently, thrusting a defiant finger at the gobsmacked pirate.

The newly born hill quaked and then tore apart as Miriam burst forth with a roar of defiance, clearing the distance to the drowning Lilith in two massive steps and then pulling the cobra zoan free with one hand, the other protectively cradling Harumi to her bosom. Lilith coughed, spat water, and then snarled up at her would-be killer.

Rubble flew like leaves as Dyna surged from beneath the demolished house, eyes glowing like orbs of hellfire as she leveled a cold mechanical glare on Shiki.

Penelope's makeshift prison flew apart in slivers as the livid mink lashed out with her strongest kick, contempt radiating off of her like heat from a furnace.

Shiki was visibly trembling in rage by this point, the cracking of his knuckles ringing out like gunshots, his teeth clenched so tightly they looked on the verge of shattering like glass.

"This is ridiculous!" He roared. "You're all nothings! Weak, worthless, pathetic, like all the other refuse from the East Blue! So how are you standing in my way?!"

"You came after us, first, asshole! Besides, if you're so tough, then why don't you come down here and fight us like a man?" Ryoga defiantly roared right back at Shiki.

Shiki's eyes burned with hate, and he fell from the sky in a streak of flapping golden locks and silken clothes, appearing before Ryoga in a veritable instant. The elder pirate's hand shot out like a thunderbolt as he grabbed Ryoga by the throat, effortlessly hoisting the smaller youth up to his level.

"You got a bold tongue, kid! Any last words before I tear it out?!" He snarled at the choking Ryoga.

"Sh-Shishi Hokodan!" Ryoga spat in response, blasting a fireball of sickly green depression ki right into Shiki's solar plexus.

Shiki let out a bellow of equal parts pain and shock as the ki blast slammed into him with the force of a point-blank cannonball, breaking his grip and launching the levitating pirate across the impromptu battlefield. It took him only a matter of seconds to regain control and halt himself in mid-flight with a thought, but that was all the remaining half of the Kamikaze Pirates needed.

"Dogpile him!" Thundered Miriam at the top of her lungs, already dropping Harumi gracefully to the ground and charging towards Shiki, her anchors seeming to leap into her hands as she brought them arcing around in a mighty overhead swing.

Shiki didn't even bother to look her way, his hand snapping upwards and lightly brushing the sharpened tips that seemed ready to skewer him like a worm on a fishhook. Miriam screamed in shock as Shiki's Devil Fruit powers took hold and her anchors suddenly shot off into the sky as if they were jet-propelled, dragging the wotan along for the ride.

Even as Miriam went soaring off like a particularly strange-looking parade float, Shiki contemptuously raised himself higher in the air so he could more readily parry Harumi's swinging blades. Harumi swung with the speed born of desperation, weaving contrails of glimmering silver as his blades flowed in the most intricate combinations he could manage, but Shiki's smug grin made the truth painfully obvious: for all the good he was doing, Harumi might as well have been a child flailing with a toy.

"Come on, boy, is that the best you can do? I'd say I'm disappointed, but what else should I expect of somebody who runs around wearing a /dress!?/" Shiki punctuated his final mocking observation with a savage punch that hit Harumi and launched him away as if he were a round shot launched from a cannon, sending him plowing through a hut and bringing it crashing down upon himself.

Dyna's chainsaw screamed, as if in counterpoint to the total blankness of her face as she charged Shiki from what was seemingly his blind side. This assumption was proven erroneous when Shiki's powers kicked in, yanking him bodily out of the way of her strike at the last possible moment. With the kind of maneuver only a creature of gears and pistons could perform, Dyna arrested her blow in mid-swing and lashed out again, but this time Shiki intercepted her roaring blade with an inky-black hand. Sparks visibly flew as the chain tried and failed to bite into his palm for the brief moments he held it at bay before a single deft kick severed her arm neatly past the elbow.

"Toy pirates, whatever next?" Mocked Shiki, even as he held Dyna's severed arm by the still-extended blade and used it like a club to bludgeon Dyna, sending her sailing backwards with a single blow.

"Spatial Slash!"

The shimmering crescent of Umok's attack spell hurtled through the air, perfectly aimed to part Shiki's head from his shoulders, but Shiki calmly intercepted the attack with his blackened palm, causing it to shatter into iridescent shards of light.

"You're twenty years too late to get the drop on me with wind blades! Let me show you how it's done - Slicing Wave!" Shiki cackled, twisting a hundred-eighty degrees in a spin-kick that launched a huge wind blade straight at Umok, the backlash of its passage ripping off the straw roofs of the huts as it screamed towards the imp, who promptly vanished in a surge of ochre lightning.

'...He's going to kill them...'

That thought settled itself in Ranma's brain as he watched his crewmates - his friends - fighting Shiki with all they had, and being brutally thrown back.

Miriam abandoned her anchors and fell out of the sky, trying to squash the elderly pirate captain in a diving stomp, but Shiki's levitation abilities allowed him to nimbly dodge aside at the last moment.

'It can't end like this! I gotta do something!'

Dyna came charging forward, lashing out with her remaining arm. Shiki dodged - then bellowed in pain as her electrified hand managed to just barely brush his leg, sending high voltage surging into him. But that pain was all she achieved, and Shiki made her pay for it with a flurry of lightning-fast stabbing kicks that left a hundred tiny holes in her torso and sent her staggering backwards - if she hadn't been a machine, she would have been disemboweled.

'But what?! What can I do!?'

"Shishi Hokodan! Shishi Hokodan! Shishi Hokodan! Stand still, damn you!"

"Learn to aim better! Lion: Scattering Valley!"

Several dozen wind blades rained down on Ryoga, who cried out in pain as they cut even his hardened skin, tracing a network of shallow, bleeding gashes over his arms and torso. Not enough to take him down, but definitely enough to distract him long enough for Shiki to descend like a comet with a haymaker punch that smashed Ryoga into the ground hard enough to create a crater.

'He's too strong! Wait... Strength. One chance left... it's all or nothing...'

Somehow, that thought seemed to help Ranma's mind settle in the cold, collected persona he needed to embrace to project icy ki, the frigid spiritual energies numbing his laundry list of injuries as it suffused his body, helping him to slowly drag his battered, bruised, but as-yet unbroken body upright.

Slowly, defiantly, he pushed himself to his feet; a vulnerable target that Shiki would have pounced upon and torn apart in an instant, if he hadn't been distracted as Nabiki tore herself free of the stone spikes skewering her with an unholy shriek of equal parts pain and raged before launching herself at her tormentor. The mythic zoan struck the Float-Float user like a thunderbolt, raking wildly with her claws and trying to sink her teeth into Shiki's neck.

Sadly, Nabiki's desperate gambit failed to pay off, and Shiki slammed her into the unforgiving ground like an old washerwoman beating her laundry on the river rocks.

"Getting real sick of you, babycakes! Hold still, while I put you out of my misery!" Jeered Shiki, even as he raised a suddenly pitch-black sword-leg high, about to drive it into the stunned zoan's heart.

"Shiki!" Ranma cried at the top of his lungs, body enveloped in flickering blue-black flames, wisps of otherworldly steam flowing gently about him as the moisture in the air flash-froze from brushing past.

"Eh? Oh, it's you. Wait your turn, boy; I'll kill you last," Shiki dismissively grunted, glancing over at Ranma before turning his attention back to his impending kill.

"Shiki! I challenge you! Captain vs. Captain! Or are you too chicken to fight me?"

Silence fell upon the battlefield, as Shiki slowly but purposefully turned to face Ranma. A murderous smile clung to his lips, even as his eyes blazed with hatred as he took in the battered, bloody form of his opponent. He let out a short bark of laughter. "Jihaha, you don't got much brains, kid, but you certainly got plenty of guts!"

Then he grinned savagely. "Let's see the color of them!"

He exploded into action, streaking towards Ranma "feet"-first like a human missile, but with surprising agility for somebody as bruised as he was, Ranma shot skywards at the last moment, Moonwalk propelling him high into the air, even as Shiki rocketed towards him once more.

Around and around they danced, twisting and turning through the skies, weaving a crazy cradle as they rose and fell, darting here and there. In their passage, the wind began to move; slowly at first, then faster and faster, an unseasonable chill filling the air as Ranma led Shiki through his complex spiraling path.

Down below, Penelope looked up from Shampoo, where she had been carefully assessing her crewmate's injuries, watching the sky-borne captains in their 'duel' with dumbfounded amazement.

"What in ze world is ze capitan doing?" She wondered aloud.

Shampoo groaned in pain, only her Chinese Amazon discipline keeping her from whimpering at being pinned to the ground be a stone spike clear through one thigh, but managed to chuckle darkly. "Airen -gak! - use secret technique... Shiki not know what hit him..."

"Being still, now! My doctorate, it is in ze archaeology, not ze medicine! I am knowing ze field medicine, but please, hold still, let me cut you free - Nabiki! Nabiki, assist me, please!"

Unaware of the medical drama unfolding below, Shiki chased Ranma through the sky, rage building with every missed attack and every dodged wind blade. In his fury, he missed the way the wind had picked up and was tugging at his clothing, his rage anesthetizing him to the chill in the air.

"You challenged me to a duel, boy, not a game of tag! Is running away the only trick you have left?!" Shiki roared, lunging for Ranma yet again, only for Ranma to evade him by suddenly shooting straight up.

"One last trick, Shiki! All or nothing!" Ranma declared, so deep in the mindset of the Soul of Ice that he had come out the other side into an eerily tranquil fury. He reached for the contrails of frigid aura-saturated wind and clumsily pulled them around his arm like a sleeve of barbed wire, indifferent to the feeling of super-chilled air burning him like flames.

"Hiryu Shoten Ha Revised! Yomi Yari!" Ranma screamed defiantly as he punched down at Shiki, simultaneously stirring the hot and cold air into violent agitation and launching the amassed battle aura in a manner similar to his Moko Takabisha. The result was a wind vortex roaring into life, squeezed so tight it was barely a foot across and so cold that icy mists sprang into life in its interior as it screamed towards Shiki.

"Haven't you learned yet?! You can't penetrate my Armament Haki!" Shiki roared defiantly back, a hand turning jet black as he once again flung an open palm to intercept the glowing tip of Ranma's projectile.

Super-chilled, ki-infused wind met Haki-hardened flesh with a thunderclap of pressure, the fury of Ranma's improvised technique so high that Shiki actually was blown downwards a good two or three meters before he reasserted control of his Devil Fruit and defiantly hung unmoving in mid-air. The vortex spun like a drill, Shiki's whole body visibly shaking as the Yomi Yari attack pitted its fury against Shiki's unrelenting resilience.

"Why? Won't? You? Just? DIE?!" Ranma screamed, reaching deep inside of himself and pouring ki down the makeshift wind-tunnel he had created, as if literally pitting his will against Shiki's. The elderly pirate simply glared madly up at him, teeth gritted stoically as he endured the ongoing barrage, refusing to so much as let his elbow bend in the face of the attack, even as the shockwave continued to batter him relentlessly.

Despite everything, despite his defiance, Ranma felt himself beginning to falter. He was just... running out of ki to spend. Through eyes starting to blur with fatigue and pain, he watched as Shiki continued to hold defiant in the face of the pressure, and deep down, a part of him knew that in this test, he would fail...

'Girls... Ryoga...Guys... I'm sorry...'

But even as that thought crossed Ranma's mind, fate intervened. Though Shiki and Doctor Indigo had done their best to treat and buffer the chunk of ship's steering wheel embedded in Shiki's brain, the reality was that it was still wood. For all the special oils and unguents that Indigo had carefully applied to its exterior and to the scar tissue surrounding it, for twenty years, that wood had been immersed in the hot, wet environment that was Shiki's living brain. Some form of wet rot was inevitable. And as it rotted, it grew weaker...

There was no dramatic moment. No sudden, shockingly visible reaction as Shiki's body betrayed him. One moment, Shiki was letting the fury of Ranma's makeshift storm wash over him, confident he would see it through and bring a painful death to the upstart who had interfered with all his dreams... and then, the vibrations ricocheting through his bones caused the wood embedded in his skull to violently shatter, shards and splinters tearing open Shiki's brain from the inside out. Armament Haki and sheer willpower could get people through a lot of things... but some injuries were just impossible to shrug off.

Blood suddenly gushed from Shiki's eyes, ears and nose as his brain was reduced to something with the consistency of minced meat. Shiki's arm fell slack, and Ranma's Yomi Yari technique, no longer being held at bay by Shiki's willpower, punched into the already-dead pirate's chest and sent him spearing from the sky and into the ground, drilling a hole the size of a cannonball straight through Shiki's torso and freezing his organs solid, stony shrapnel sucked back through the wound and tearing him messily in half.

From high above, Ranma watched Shiki's remains being desecrated by the Yomi Yari's dying fury, and felt nothing. Instead, he dumbly mumbled, "You... shouldn' oughta... picked a fight..."

And then he dropped like a stone as exhaustion and pain finally demanded their butcher's bill. Ranma was out cold even as he plummeted towards the uncaring ground so far before, probably to meet a messy death...

If it weren't for Ryoga, who leapt up and caught Ranma before carrying him safely back to the ground below.

"Damn showoff, Saotome... Making us do all the work," Ryoga grumbled, but his heart wasn't in it.

"Ranma darling! Ow-ohhh!" Kodachi's anguished cry was cut off sharply by a moan of pain as she clutched at her side, where a stone spike still impaled her from left to right, just below her ribcage.

"You keep still! We get back to ship, let Shampoo heal you - and that go for you too, Ukyo!" Shampoo barked, despite the fact she was still leaning on Penelope and hobbling along, obviously in tremendous pain herself.

Before anybody could say anything else, the island suddenly shook violently, huge tremors nearly throwing the battered survivors of the Stormbringer to their feet.

"What's happening?!" Ryoga shouted in enraged confusion.

"The islands! With Shiki dead, his powers went with him - we're falling!" Harumi shrieked in horror, gasps of panicked realization echoing from the crossdressing swordsman's companions.

Ryoga's eyes nearly bulged out of their sockets, before he desperately turned to Umok, barking a simple order. "Get us out of here!"

"I can't! I don't have that kind of power in me yet!" Umok protested.

"Then we're finished!" Ryoga cried in dismay.

"No we're not! Back to the ship! I have a plan!" Lilith interjected loudly and proudly.

The other Kamikaze Pirates didn't waste time arguing; instead, they scrambled madly for the Stormbringer, helping their unconscious captain and their three walking wounded as much as possible. Those not capable of flight sped across the water on Miriam's broad back or were ferried over by their airborne counterparts, and within what seemed like seconds, they were all scrambling aboard as huge waves began to rear from the previously calm and level lake's surface.

Without hesitation, Lilith sprinted across the floor and reached into an open barrel, drawing forth... a live octopus!?

"How's that supposed to help us?!" Ryoga roared at her.

Lilith simply grinned wickedly. "Watch! Okay, buddy, do your stuff!"

She whistled sharply, and flung the cephalopod high into the air. Those eerily intelligent eyes gleamed with understanding, and before their dumbfounded eyes, the creature suddenly swelled and swelled and swelled, like a balloon hooked to a high-pressure air-tank. In an instant, a once-normal octopus was now a giant that effortlessly reached out with its mighty tentacles and gently but firmly embraced the still-sail-less Stormbringer. A sudden jolt ran through the ship, and they realized its head was still swelling, and that beneath them, the island was rapidly falling away.

"Say hello to a balloonapus! They're one of the main ways that we can safely drop cargo and visiting ships from the sky-seas to the Blue Sea world," Lilith proudly explained to her stunned companions.

Ryoga opened and closed his mouth several times, shook his head, and then quietly said, "I...I'm sorry, Lilith. You really did know what you were doing."

"Snehahaha, it's alright, Ryoga! We certainly were cutting it close!" She giggled.

"That all well and good... but can we please go start treating injuries? Shampoo no like this new piercing!" The annoyed Chinese Amazon interjected.

Lilith and Ryoga both looked at her, and both of them went sickly pale.

"Oh-Oh, shit! Doctor! We need a doctor!" Ryoga bellowed desperately.

"Shampoo is doctor!"

Marineford, Some Time Later...

The World Government in general, and the Navy in particular, had many secrets - the Cipher Pols wouldn't exist if that weren't the case. However, there was one particular secret that many people, civilians and pirates alike, were genuinely curious about: how did the Navy assign bounty values and epithets to pirates who earned their attention?

They probably would have felt rather underwhelmed to discover that, whilst the higher-ups did directly assign bounty values and epithets in some exceptional cases, most bounties and pirate nicknames were the result of rather bored clerks pushing papers somewhere in the depths of Marineford and derived from a mixture of distinctive crimes or traits and random inspiration.

Such was the case with Maximillion P. Quatermain IV, who had found himself working overtime when the orders to assign bounties to an entire pirate crew that had only just been deemed worthy of such an honor. The first two were easy; they actually came with instructions.

Wanted, Dead or Alive: Ranma "Bitter Wind" Saotome, Bounty: 241,500,000 Beries

Wanted, Dead or Alive: "Doom Rabbit" Shampoo, Bounty: 80,000,000 Beries

After that, he had to start actually looking at the reports. He was in luck; even just by scanning through the reports he got ideas for some functional epithets.

Wanted, Dead or Alive: Ryoga "Adamant" Hibiki, Bounty: 96,000,000 Beries

Wanted, Dead or Alive: Kodachi "The Black Rose" Kuno, Bounty: 36,660,000 Beries

Wanted, Dead or Alive: Ukyo "Hellcook" Kuonji, Bounty:45,000,000 Beries

Wanted, Dead or Alive: Miram "Saltmaw" Ransdottir, Bounty: 43,000,000 Beries

Wanted, Dead or Alive: Harumi "Quicksilver" Tsukuyomi, Bounty: 30,330,000 Beries

Wanted, Dead or Alive: "War Machine" Dyna, Bounty: 70,000,000 Beries

Wanted, Dead or Alive: Penelope "Miasma" LaFloo, Bounty: 40,000,000 Beries

Wanted, Dead or Alive:"Kiss of Death" Lilith, Bounty: 61,600,000 Beries

But then there was just one bounty left to assign... and here, Maximilian couldn't help but be inspired as much by his illicit copy of the latest issue of Busty Bloodsucking Bimbo Barbarian Babes' Bodacious Beach Battles, an illustrated pulp serial as legendary for its shameless sensuality and gory action scenes as it was for its purple prose and oft-pretentious attitudes, as by the reports. With the final master template prepared, he put them in a stack in his outbox, ready to begin printing for distribution in the next issue of the Weekly World News, sighing in relief as he could finally pack up to leave for the night.

As he turned out the light, the rising moon through the window illustrated his last work of the evening.

Wanted, Dead or Alive: Nabiki "No-Life Queen" Tendo, Bounty:44,440,000 Beries

Chapter End & Closing Notes

At last, it's finally over! When I started the Sky-Seas Saga, it wasn't expected to take anywhere near this long... But, at long last, our heroes are returning to the Grand Line. What'll happen there? Well, I'm sure it'll be a surprise to us both...

Now, I'll caution you all to not try and figure out a timeline vs. the canon One Piece story for this fic; I've honestly lost track of how it's supposed to properly fit together myself. But our heroes are roughly halfway to Sabaody, if that's any help.

This chapter underwent so many revisions. I actually commissioned some art to go with it ages ago, but I never posted it because I wanted to wait until the chapter proper was out. Then my beta-reader suggested "what if Shiki is way more of a threat here than in the movie? What if Ranma narrowly escapes by the skin of his teeth?" And, well, you can argue that the piece may not actually fit anymore...

In other news... I've come to the realization that it might help me progressing if I were to pick stories and focus on them, at least in specific bursts. Between this, my Ranma/D&D crossover story "Love Opens Many Doors", my Ranma/Teen Titans story "Teen Titans Tokyo", my Ranma/Konosuba story "Konosuba 1/2", and even my pure Ranma stories like "Heavenly Delinquent Kasumi-chan" and "Heated Storm Yields a Wild Horse's Heart", well, it's a lot of demands for my attention. The problem is figuring out some way that the readers can have a fair chance to push me towards my focus story - to let me decide which story should get updated next...