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Chapter 10: Setup

"Yahoo!" Luffy cheered, Ace riding his father's shoulders as the two stood on the head of a floating eel. Specifically, said eel was the same fish the princes of Fishman Island had been riding on when Brook put them to sleep with his music, but Luffy had quickly awoken the beast and forced it into submission with his Conqueror's Haki. Now he and most of his crew along with Camie and Pappagu were on the way to the water tunnel connecting Fishman Island to the Ryugu Palace. Down below, dozens of fishmen roamed the streets, combing every alley for the pirates hiding in plane sight above them.

"Luffy-chin likes being in the front, doesn't he?" Camie asked with a voice far too nonchalant for the situation happening in her home nation. the mermaid and her friends watched Luffy and his son as they rocked back and forth on the eel's head, the pair singing a certain old pirate shanty. Brook quietly strummed along, keeping his music's volume under that of the conversation. Camie already knew everyone save for a certain former spy, though Kaku wasn't able to introduce himself since having his voice stolen.

"It's a habit of his," Nami confirmed, one eye making sure nothing happened to Ace due to his precarious position. It wasn't nearly as dangerous as Nami believed it to be -she knew Luffy wouldn't let anything happen- but Ace being so close to a potential fall still set her motherly worries aflame. Ace had had plenty of dangerous falls Nami had to save him from in his own childish attempts to copy the stories she had told of their adventures before him. "Sitting in his 'Captain's Seat' has dropped Luffy into the ocean more than once."

"Good times," Merry sighed, remembering how relaxing the captain's weight felt on her figurehead back when she was still a ship. "Once, Captain Luffy managed to grab my horn with an arm as he fell, but we were going against the current and he was dragged all to way to the stern and Sanji hit him with the rudder. A lot."

"I don't think it was an accident, either," Robin chuckled, half a dozen eyes and hands thumbing through the royal documents that had been scattered with the eel's fall. "Hadn't you ordered some sort of romantic dinner for just the two of you that day, Nami?"

"Sanji wouldn't do something for such a pretty reason!" Chopper cried.

"Yes he would," Gin, Usopp, Coby, Grace, Amy, Merry, and Nami countered.

"Yohoho!" Brook laughed, Kaku silently chuckling beside him. "I wish I had been there to see such a thing."

"How can you all be so calm!?" Pappagu demanded, jumping up from his plush sheet. He turned an appendage on the pirates, his mouth in a scowl. "Not only have you attacked the princes, but you stole the royal gondola, too! After all this, there's no way you'll be welcome on the island!"

"We and the island have been given an ultimatum," Coby responded, taking the time to polish and maintain his Sabaku no Kiba. He did not turn to look at the echinoderm, as if certain that his words were simply the obvious. "At this point, it's desperate times and desperate measures. Either we'll win and then can apologize or we'll lose and our crimes won't matter. Either way, panicking will only cause us to make mistakes."

"But the princes could have wanted to help!" Pappagu argued.

"Or they could have wanted to capture us," Grace countered, her shoulder coming off of Coby's as she turned to face the starfish. "They probably know more about Hody Jones than about us and think we'd be the easiest targets of the two. We're just humans, right? We can't risk getting into a fight with them. At least this way we can get though this only fighting Hody. We can restore our reps later."

Kaku nodded, signing to her that she had an impressive analysis of the situation.

"An apt description," Robin agreed, turning a page. "Better the devil you know than the devil you don't. The princes have knowledge about Hody and his motives, but we are a mystery. An enigma. They may not desire to gamble the fate of their country to outsiders. Better for us to take the chance from them."

"I'm not sure I like the way she phrased it, but Robin's right," Merry nodded. "Hody is our enemy here, not the kingdom, but that doesn't mean the Royal Army sees it that way. As far as they are concerned, this is a fight between pirates on their turf. Their land, their way of life, is the collateral to be damaged in our fight and they can't fight both of us at once."

"Fine," Pappagu grunted. "Assuming you are right, what's your plan from here? It can't be as simple as 'get there and win', right?"

The pirates did not answer, an awkward silence falling over the group. Gazes made contact with each other, but no one looked Pappagu's way.

"Oh Goda, it is," the starfish gaped, flopping onto his back. "We're doomed."

"To be fair," Amy piped up, "simple plans are often the most effective. That one has served us well through the years."

"Kuro," Coby began, counting on his fingers all the times their plan had boiled down to 'get there and win' as Pappagu put it, "Arlong, Alabasta, Eneru, CP9, Moria, Shiki. We didn't really have plans for any of those. They'd done something or took something and we wanted to stop them. The rest of the time, they came to us."

"An' in this case, they took th' island hostage," Gin nodded. "Don't know why they wanna kill us, but we ain't gonna just roll over an' die. This Hody Jones is goin' down."

"Woah!" Luffy and Ace ooh'd, getting the pirates' attentions. Ahead hung the tunnel that would take them to the palace, the destination little more than a smudge in the distance through all the water distortion.

"Luffy, Ace, come back in!" Nami called, using a bubble coral to form a safe space under the gondola's roof in preparation of the water tunnel. The two returned to the their of their nuclear family, matching grins stretched over their faces.

"Alright, let's go!" Luffy laughed, Ace echoing him.

"Le's go, le's go! Giihihihi!"

Namur led Sanji through the back alleys, both keeping to the shadows and checking to make sure people were ignorant of their passage. Sanji's human appearance alone could be enough to start a full-on chase and neither knew how the populace would respond to Namur when he's been so vocal about finding and helping the Straw Hats when they arrived. He was still a pirate, after all, not a citizen of the kingdom. He hadn't been since he joined Whitebeard years ago.

They were making their way toward the shopping district, though a poorer, less crowded section of the area. The buildings were a little older and more run-down, the alleys with piles of garbage heaped in the corners. Rats and crabs scurried away as the two moved through their paths. Sanji eyed the buildings, the creatures, and his companion with various levels of suspicion, ready to run at a moment's notice should anything come up, but he stayed anyway.

The idea of leaving Namur and going out to search for his Nakama had crossed Sanji's mind, but he decided against it. They were big boys and girls and could handle themselves. He was on a much more important journey, anyway. A journey that could lead him to rescuing the Mermaid Princess!

"Duck," Namur hissed, him and his companion slipping into a particularly dark shadow as the distinct form of the royal gondola eel passed overhead. "That eel carries the king and princes whenever they come down to the island. With the king captured, that means the princes are here. Looking for you probably. That must be why they didn't take my call."

"Wouldn't be the first time a local government has been looking for us," Sanji muttered. "I thought you were friends with the princes, since you have their number."

"You could say that, but it's closer to simply being associates. I was never in the royal army and I've only met the royal family twice, so I don't know where their loyalties would lie in this situation. As far as I know, they've never truly been friends with any pirate, even Pops and Captain Moby. That they ignored my call might mean they think I'm a danger to the kingdom. If they are scared of what would happen if they don't play Hody's game, they could be trying to capture you all."

"Where are we going?"

"That eel's giving me second thoughts, but we're too close to stop here. Come on. It's just another street over."

Glancing out into the road and taking a second to focus through the rest of his senses, Namur confirmed there was no one around before darting across the road so quickly he seemed to vanish. Sanji followed a moment later, though nowhere nearly as fast as his older companion. Glancing back to confirm they were not seen, Namur gestured for Sanji to stand as a lookout by the road and tapped on a door, the wood only one entrance of many in the stone around them. He waited about a minute before tapping another tune, this one more intricate than a simple knock.

"You ring?" a voice questioned from the other side as soon as Namur finished.

"And the call echoes through the void," the fishman responded simply. A slide in the door opened, a pair of beady eyes studying the fishman outside.

"Bad timing, Namur," the man behind the door commented. "We aren't open."

"We don't have much of a choice, Mitsushi," the pirate responded, the pair of eyes narrowing at the use of the name. "The New Fishman Pirates are on the move. We need to get to the palace. Fast."

"There isn't a single fishman on the island that doesn't know that," the man behind the door scoffed. "I hope you have a real good reason for coming here now. The New Fishmen are good customers and we can't afford to be seen moving against them."

"I know you don't agree with them," Namur rebuffed, his voice impatient. "Challenger Deep might be underground, but you're still citizens of this kingdom. I know you don't want to see the royal family fall."

The eyes behind the slot didn't move, not even a flicker of emotion shining.

"Fine, I'm cashing in that favor you owe me," Namur grunted after a tense moment. The eyes widened. "Get me transport to the palace and there will be another 50,000 Beris afterward, unless you want me to rat out your little hidey-hole to the princes when this is over. I know about your tax evasion scheme."

Sanji's eyebrow rose, surprised by the overall underhandedness of the criminal section of Fishman Island. Smuggling, bribery, blackmail, and treats; it was a game the Straw Hats weren't use to playing as a group, but clearly Namur knew his way around the board. Idly, he wondered if Namur's proficiency was new or if Whitebeard and his children weren't the shining beacons so many thought they were.

The man on the other side of the door said nothing, his eyes hardening at the threat. It was a very crude whip-and-carrot offer, but not one he wanted test. Mitsushi sighed heavily.

"Damn it, yeah, I've got something," he frowned. "Doesn't seem your style and a merchant is gonna be disappointed, but it looks like you aren't giving me much of a choice. Third door down on the right, there's a thing from the surface one of the merchants wanted to study to recreate. It will take you up if you can figure out how it works. Goda knows I don't."

"Pleasure doing business."

The man behind the door grunted, shutting the sliding panel with a thump as their conversation came to a close.

"Did you get what you needed?" Sanji asked as Namur stepped away from the door.

"Let's hope so," the fishman replied, counting out three doors on his right and walking over toward the one the underground merchant had told him about. The door wasn't locked, though it had a padlock closed just enough to suggest such, and its hinges protested as the pirate forced it open. Feeling around for a moment, his fingers touched a rope hanging from the ceiling. He pulled on it, opening several small panels set round the walls. Inside the nooks revealed were large swathes of bioluminecent algae, enough the light up the room and its contents.

The room was a sort of warehouse, metal shelves lining the walls between the now-open hatches. The center of the floor was open for larger merchandise that could not be kept on a shelf, Namur instantly recognizing a half-dozen different types of weapons on various racks and a surface tiger in a cage, a whip and a broadsword hanging on the cage's exterior. It watched Namur and Sanji with intelligent eyes as they entered. Another cage held a pair of penguins and a third had three winged, gargoyle-esk creatures called dragicks from an island in the New World. How Challenger Deep managed to get such things 10,000 meters below the sea floor and onto the island without anyone knowing, Namur was sure he would never learn. What drew his eyes, however, was an item tucked near the front, leftmost corner, a large basket connected to a giant ball of wadded cloth.

"You have got to be kidding me," the Whitebeard Pirate muttered. "A hot air balloon? Seriously?"

"A what?" Sanji asked, suppressed memories of giant, pink, floating hearts being squashed by his subconscious. "It looks like a giant wicker basket to me. How is this supposed to help?"

"It's not going to help us lie low, that's for sure," the fishman muttered, rubbing his forehead. "Alright, whatever. We'll make it work. First, we need to get it outside."

The pair stepped deeper into the warehouse, the tiger growled while the dragicks hissed, but Namur ignored them. He circled around the balloon, a frown on his lips.

"Challenger Deep must have a Devil Fruit user," he said, talking to himself. "One with some manner of teleportation. There's no other way they could have gotten these here without someone seeing. We ended up killing the guy with the Swap-Swap Fruit years ago around here, so that might be it... Black Leg, go find us something with wheels so we can move this outside."

"Right," Sanji nodded, hurrying past the warehouse's shelves in his search. While he did that, Namur studied the device set above the basket. It was rather simple, a Heat Dial facing upward while surrounded by six Breath Dials, all connected to a pulley that would activate all six at the same time. He had seen this type of contraption before on a Sky Island in the New World and a wave of nostalgia for crewmates long lost passed through him.

"I think I've got something," Sanji announced, breaking Namur from his reverie. The chef held out a pair of boards, each with four wheels attached to one side. "Will these work?"

"Perfect." Working together, the pair of pirates set the basket on the rolling boards before bundling the canvas balloon in their arms. They dragged the whole thing outside, steering clear of the tiger and dragicks. The basket just barely fit in the alley, but that was enough.

"Alright, we're getting somewhere," Namur nodded, grabbing the canvas. "Black Leg, get in the basket. When I say so, pull on the cord." Orders given, the fishman jumped from one wall to the other, bounding his way up to the top of the warehouse with the canvas in tow. It hung down over the side, connected to the basket as it was. Now that it was stretched out, Namur could see that it was stylized to look like an orange fish. "Pull!"

Sanji pulled on the cord, a rush of heat almost punching him in the face. Nothing happened at first save a wavy distortion in the air above the Dials. Slowly, however, the cloth balloon started to expand, stretching up and outward as hot air filled it. Soon, Namur did not need to hold it up as the cloth reached its full capacity.

"Woah!" Sanji gasped as he felt the basket shift below him, the wood scraping along the floor of the alley. He released the cord, an act that made the basket settle again, though the balloon stayed full.

"Keep going!" Namur yelled. "The hotter it gets, the more it will rise! That's what we need!"

Not quite sure how he felt about trusting his safety to a basket and a bunch of warm air, Sanji still did as bid, pulling on the cord once more. The basket stirred again, this time lifting all the way off the ground. The balloon scraped against the walls on either side as it rose slowly. Then, with a jolt, the balloon cleared the alley.

Namur jumped into the basket when he made eye contact with his fellow pirate, taking the cord from his hand. The fishman gave the cord a good yank and the balloon rose higher, clearing the buildings around them. Citizens down below, looking almost like insects at that height, pointed toward them.

"So what's the plan?" Sanji asked, using the Heat Dial to light a cigarette. "Can this thing go any faster?"

"No, it can't," Namur grunted, eyeing a platoon of soldiers below. Hot air balloons themselves aren't illegal on the island since they aren't produced or widely known of, but they do fall into a category of surface devices that must be registered for use. They are rare and registered based on the balloon's image. Hopefully this one is, but he doubted it. "And they're hard to steer. We need to get into that water tunnel up there. I hope you can swim."

He finished his comments by pointing above them, a blue tunnel of water leading up to a bubble suspended over the double bubble holding the island. They could still see faintest blob of the gondola eel as it made its way toward the palace. At least, if they were going to fight the princes, it would be in an area away from the populace.

A spear nicked the side of their basket, turning the pair's attention from the tunnel to the soldiers below. A crowd of citizens watched them from the streets, trying to get a clear view of who they were, but the soldiers had taken to rooftops and were actively preparing to shoot them down.

Clearly this balloon was not registered and the soldiers wanted to take no chances. Great.

"Get a hang of this thing fast!" Namur yelled, a layer of Armament Haki coating his hand as he knocked away a trident heading for them. The balloon jolted and Sanji yanked on its cord, sending them higher into the sky. As if in response, soldiers appeared with pressurized blow darts, the ranged weapons specifically used for dealing with vulnerable, airborne targets. Namur backhanded three darts as two stuck into the basket, just puncturing the wicker.

"We're off course!" Sanji shouted. "We need to get further... south? I'm gonna say that's south!"

"Then figure something out!" the fishman snapped, another pair of blow darts hitting their basket.

"This is gonna suck," the chef muttered, jumping out of the basket on the opposite side from the tunnel. Before Namur could so much as gasp, Sanji kicked off the air, pushing the basket a few inches to the... south? The blond grit his teeth as he kicked again and again, forcing the balloon toward their destination. "Sky Walk!"

"It's working!" Namur grinned, surprised at Sanji's ability but finding it normal only a second later. "Keep it up, Black Leg!"

Sanji flinched, almost missing a step as a blow dart stabbed into his hip. Blood oozed from the wound, droplets plummeting down on the populace as Sanji pushed himself, paying no heed to how close they may be.

Unaware of his companion's injury, Namur watched the tunnel, mentally calculating their trajectory as Sanji shifted their course. When he had deemed their course changed enough, he reached over the side and grabbed the Straw Hat by the collar, pulling him in.

"Excellent job," he nodded, only to double take at the blood. Sanji's skin was pale and his breathing labored. The fishman immediately ripped away part of his shirt, making a makeshift bandage as best he could. "You moron! Why didn't you say anything?!"

"No time," Sanji grunted. The sides of his lips squirming upwards. His eye seemed to light aflame. "This is nothing, for my goal... is to gaze upon the beauty of the mermaid princess! Nothing, not even death itself, would stop me!"

"Oh," Namur blinked slowly. "Maybe they're all morons, not just Luffy." Shaking his head, the Whitebeard activated the Dials once more, sending the hot air balloon higher and higher. They neared the tunnel, Namur pulling a bubble coral from his pocket as he knelt by Sanji. With a push of a button, he formed a protective bubble around the human, protecting his lungs and injury from the water pressure they were about to experience.

"Alright, this might hurt," the fishman warned. A moment later, they hit the tunnel. Swirling water engulfed them, the balloon ceasing to function as the pressure began to rip the cloth apart and dispel the air. Great bubbles were sucked into the connection, never to be seen again. Namur grabbed Sanji by the arm and started swimming, praying they weren't moving into a hopeless trap.

"Awesome!" Luffy grinned, the stonework of the Ryugu Palace coming into focus as the gondola eel exited the connection. Luffy and the rest of the group were positioned in the gondola's seats, a protective bubble keeping them safe. The captain was not the only one marveling at the grandeur of the palace, even Pappagu unable to hide his awe at the sight. Light, bending and distorted by the moving water, shone down on the white stone, schools of fish casting majestic shadows over the surface of the palace. It almost looked like something out of a fairytale.

Almost, because one of the front doors was broken in half, a few bloated corpses almost unrecognizable as humans resting on the ground outside.

"I don' like this, Don Luffy," Gin muttered. "I think we're walkin' inta an ambush."

"That is a logical conclusion," Robin agreed. "Have we anyone who could scout the area without being compromised?"

"What about Long-" Amy began.

"Nope!" Usopp denied, his hands in an X. "I've got... uh... AppendicitisWaterPressure-babitis! If I try to subject myself to any water pressure at all, even a bath, I'll explode and die!"

"Usopp, why didn't you tell me about that?!" Chopper gasped, waving his arms.

"I was going to say Long Neck, you morons," Amy sighed. "It's not like he could say anything to give us away and he has plenty of stealth training."

"Oh, I'll go!" Luffy offered, raising a hand.

"Me too! Me too!" Ace added from his father's arms.

"No!" the rest of the crew denied.

"But I'm like a ninja!" Luffy insisted. "I can sneak! I've done it before!"

"You are the exact opposite of sneaky," Nami told him, taking Ace from her husband. "The Marines didn't know we were on Sabaody for a week -Coby was there for two years- and the day you arrive there is chaos. Sorry Honey, but you aren't quiet enough for this. Besides, it's just about time for Ace's nap."

"No wanna nap!" Ace whined, though he did not fight against Nami's hold. She sat back down, humming a soft tune she remembered from her own childhood, Ace slowly closing his eyes as the familiar ritual caused him to tire. Brook picked up on the tune quickly, helping Ace fall asleep that much faster with his accompaniment.

"If it's stealth we need, then I'm a better suggestion," Grace put in, keeping her voice low. "Both Kaku and I are weak to the water, but I'm smaller and I could use my Devil Fruit to create a distraction to get away. That is, if I'm caught, which is unlikely. I've snuck into a dozen Noble houses across the four Blues and they never knew what I looked like."

"Nope, too dangerous," Amy denied. "I won't have my little sister-"

"For Goda's sake, I'm 18," Grace shot back. "You might always be older than me, but I'm not a kid anymore, Amy. You don't need to shield me from the world."

"But... But Grace-" Amy stopped, a hand coming down to rest on her shoulder. She turned to see Robin at her side, a look in her eye that the blonde could not quite place but still understood the meaning of. Her little sister wasn't so little anymore.

"It's hard," Coby muttered, turning attention on him. "I think all of us, to some degree, wanted to come back to the same crew we left like nothing changed. Like we haven't changed. But we did. We lost a whole two years of being a crew and all of us are different. I mean, just look at Franky when we meet back up. Now, we have to accept that and find our new normal."

"Yohoho," Brook chuckled, a single tear impossibly leaking from an eye socket. "That was profound, Coby."

"So we're different," Luffy cut in, sitting next to Nami with Ace's body in his lap, said boy using his mother's legs as a pillow. "What does that matter? We're still the same people. We still have the same goals and we're still a crew. We lost some time, so we just have to have some absolutely crazy adventures to make up for it."

"I would like to keep the crazy to a minimum, thank you very much," Nami countered, though her eyes shill showed affection as she turned to Luffy. "With you, crazy tends to mean dangerous. Anyway, we've gotten off topic. Grace is best suited for infiltration, so we'll wait here while she scouts the area."

"Finally," the artist-turned-thief grunted. "Pass me the bubble coral."

Accepting the natural(?) machine, Grace surrounded herself in a personal Flutter Kick Coating and stepped up to the edge of the big bubble around them. She stared at it for a long moment, suddenly unsure. She knew she could trust ship coatings, but her emotions weren't sure if she could think the same when it was just her, especially now that the had a Devil Fruit. The others, watching her, picked up on her hesitation.

"It's safe," Coby said, stepping up beside her. He wasn't quite sure what they were now, but there was no time for a discussion like that, so he focused on the situation at hand. "I've used Flutter Ks several times before when Shakky had me collecting plants that grew on the roots of the groves. The coatings can flatten against walls and even take a hit from a Sea King. Just... watch out for sharp corners."

"...Thanks." The young woman turned, smiling at the roset. The Zoan smiled back, both of them looking into each others' eyes. Seeming to forget the bubble between them, both started to lean in.

"Ahem!" Amy subtlety coughed just before Coby's nose could touch the bubble. The young man jumped at the sound, a crimson blush dusting his cheeks as Grace glared at her sister behind him. Amy played innocent. Their shared gaze, one angry and the other smug, held for only a moment before Grace dropped it.

"Fine," the thief sighed. "I guess that's my cue."

"That's my line," Coby grumbled. He didn't need his IQ gummies for his additional transformations anymore, but he still held on to some just in case.

Taking a breath to calm her nerves, Grace stepped away from the bubble around the gondola. She kept her eyes shut as she felt the pressure change, waited for the water to steal her ability to move and breathe, but no such sensation came. Slowly, she opened her eyes to see that everything was the same. Encouraged, she hopped away from the giant eel. For the first time in two years, Grace swam, old, rusty muscle memory propelling her through the water toward the Ryugu Palace.

"I didn't know Coby-chin and Grace-chin were like that," Camie commented as the multicolored girl grew farther away.

"It's new?" Coby answered, uncertain himself if it could truly be called such.

"This stage is," Nami grinned, "but the two of them have been making gaga eyes at each other since they met."

"Nami," Coby whined like a child, his embarrassment exposed by the red of his cheeks.

"The Donna's got a point," Gin agreed, Kaku signing beside him. Without Grace here, however, the spy was left without a fluent translator. Nami and Merry barely knew enough to understand that Kaku was poking fun at his fellow Zoan.

"I don't think you want in this discussion, Gin," Merry teased, turning to the monk. "There's a whole can of worms I hear you're doing you best to-"

"Anyway," Gin interrupted, a literal shock making Merry jump and cut off her sentence. "Sanji, Franky, an' Zoro 're off by their lonesome, so I think we need ta make some plan fer when they get back. Sanji, specifically."

"Why?" Luffy blinked. "They're all strong and Franky's with Sunny on top of that, but why should we worry about Sanji?"

"He might still be weak from blood loss," Chopper began. "We know how excited he was to get here. This is a dangerous place for him."

"He's still alive, by the way," Merry offered. "I'd know the instant one of you died because my connection to you would be severed. He's not dying, at least not nearly to the degree of those nosebleeds he had on the way down. At this point, however, he's too far away for my to pinpoint his location."

"I believe I've deduced Gin's meaning," Robin announced. "Currently, Sanji is still unaware of Ace's birth. As if by serendipity, all times when Ace was shown to the crew, Sanji was elsewhere or indisposed. We do not know how he will react, and if such a shock comes to him in a dangerous situation, our chef may become more of a liability than an asset."

Luffy nodded along as Robin spoke before, with a smile on his face, asked, "Nami, what's that mean?"

"You know how Sanji gets mad at you because we're together?" the navigator began.

"Yeah?"

"Ace is like a permanent sign of that, but he's also a baby. Sanji won't know how to react, so he might not react to anything, even if he's attacked."

"Oh!" Luffy nodded. "His mystery feelings will make him freeze. Why didn't you just say that, Robin?"

"She did," most everyone else muttered.

"Ne, I wonder how Franky and Zoro are doing," Luffy wondered, still as he's ever been with his son sleeping on his and Nami's laps.

Just a short way away, Grace was reaching the outside of the palace. She glanced back, noting that the gondola was little more than a speck of shadow at its current placement. Trusting her friends to be safe, the redhead studied the building, her trained eyes taking in structural details most may miss.

"Let's see," she muttered to herself. "Assuming standard floor height, it's seven stories tall, though at least one larger room based on the door height. Unknown era, but an Uzumaki-style framework. Possibly the original of the design, built to stand up against water pressure and Sea Kings. Based on the damage, we do not want to go up against whoever did that, but..." The thief's eyes followed the cracks from the broken door, her gaze settling on a hole several meters above. "Possible entry confirmed."

Casing one last look around in case there were guards, the young woman swam upward toward the break in the castle. She reached it a moment later, just barely poking her head up to peer inside.

Through the hold, she saw a scene she wasn't ready for. Scattered around a throne room were fishmen of various species, all dressed in rugged clothing and most wielding swords. They were watching something at the back of the room, a shark fishman holding a merman by the throat. Said captive was dressed in armor of what appeared to be Sea King bones. Behind him were two massive merpeople -one with a bushy red beard and a crown lying on his side and the other with long pink hair just out of his reach- and a small company of other soldiers in the same bone armor. Beside the large mermaid stood two humans and a four-legged fishman in a bubble, the largest human holding the end of a chain connected to a pair of cuffs around the princess' -for that must be the princess- wrists.

All of that was expected. What she did not expect was the presence of a human in green by a doorway on the ground level, three swords at his hip, a bubble around him, and a confused look on his face.

"Alright," Zoro sighed, studying the room around him. "Where the Hell am I now?"

End of Chapter 10

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-SwordOfTheGods