Johnny now intended to take Mr. Four's head off, but someone interfered yet again—this time not little Marianne, but a recovered Mr. Two. Bentham's leg struck Johnny's arm literally an instant before he could knock Babe's head from his shoulders. The full force of Johnny's blow went into the jungle behind Mr. Four, missing the dull-witted giant entirely but leaving a huge flaming clearing through the trees.
"Why the hell can't any of you wait your turn?!!"
Mr. Two managed only to postpone the inevitable and paid dearly for it. Johnny did not bother showing off; he simply kicked Bentham with all his strength. In doing so, he once again demonstrated that when the difference in raw power grew large enough, every other factor stopped mattering. Mr. Two was skilled enough to block the kick with his own leg, but against such a gap in strength, it helped him almost not at all. Bones cracked, and Bentham was simply launched backward through the air. At the same moment, Babe tried to repay Johnny by taking his head off with the bat, but the weapon merely bent against the arm Johnny raised in time.
"Not a bad hit!" the young man grinned approvingly, feeling strong pain in his arm. "But now it's my turn!"
This time Johnny finally managed to justify the epithet he had been given.
"And now let's clean up the small trash," Johnny announced, turning away from Babe's headless body and staring at the terrified members of Baroque Works, much to their horror. Not one of the people facing him had the slightest doubt about who exactly he considered 'small trash' or what he meant by 'cleaning up'.
"M-m-monster!!!" someone screamed the instant Johnny started walking toward the Baroque Works members.
The scream acted like a trigger, and all the rank-and-file members scattered in every direction. One had to understand that despite the forces being split up, despite all Johnny's fire attacks and the collateral damage inflicted on ordinary agents during his battle with the Officer Agents, their numbers still exceeded several thousand. Comparing them to cockroaches scattering across a kitchen would have been rather fitting, except there were too many even for that. The most surprised person in the situation was Johnny himself.
"What the—?!" He stared open-mouthed at the people fleeing in terror. His surprise, however, almost immediately gave way to another surge of fury. "Get back here, you bastards!!!" With exactly that shout, the young man charged after his terrified victims.
The rank-and-file Baroque Works members could be understood, though. One thing was that Johnny had killed every Officer Agent who opposed him; another entirely was his complete immunity to their own attacks. How were they supposed to fight someone they could not even injure? And was he even human? He looked exactly like a genuine monster. Still, people should never be underestimated. While the overwhelming majority of agents were occupied with moving their legs as fast as possible and had no thought of fighting, there were some who actually stopped to think. Pure madness, one might assume. Yet they decided they still had a chance if they acted together. There was at least some logic behind the idea. They reasoned that if bullets could not hurt Johnny, that did not necessarily mean he was completely invulnerable. Weak points like the eyes, ears, and mouth still existed. They only needed to attack those vulnerable places with blades, and the monster would fall. A perfectly reasonable theory. Reality, however, was another matter entirely. In practice, all the agents who stood against Johnny accomplished was dying among the very first.
The young man crashed into their ranks and began cutting people apart left and right with his claws. When a little space opened around him, he spun sharply, sweeping everyone nearby away with his tail. Then Johnny spun once more and used the attack he had already demonstrated during the destruction of Whisky Peak. An air wave burst from him in every direction, powerful enough to slice an entire house in half, and gave several hundred agents no chance whatsoever. They were simply cut in two. Nor did that fate befall only the lunatics who tried to stand against Johnny; anyone who had failed to run far enough away was caught as well. Yet Johnny had no intention of stopping there.
No witnesses!
After dealing with the clinical idiots—as Johnny himself regarded them—who had seriously decided to fight him, he rushed after everyone else. The young man intended to kill everyone he could reach. That was why they had sailed to this island in the first place! Naturally, that was his 'official version'. The version he intended to insist upon if anyone ever bothered to ask why he was showing such enthusiasm. As though that would somehow improve his fate. Johnny could not eliminate the 'most important witnesses', so what was even the point of trying? Was he clinging to the futile hope that the 'main witnesses' had been distracted and failed to notice his humiliating little moment? In that case, plain naivety would be a better description. The 'most important witnesses' had missed nothing. And although their individual reactions differed noticeably, they all reached exactly the same final conclusion. One that promised Johnny nothing good. Nor only Johnny, for that matter; collective responsibility had not disappeared from the world.
"Nami, how are we supposed to live now?!" Luffy exclaimed indignantly the moment he returned to his most beloved navigator in the entire world. Who cared that the list contained only one name? "How are we supposed to live when we can't even trust the people closest to us?!" The young man took the trouble to arrange his face into a dramatic expression and raise his arms theatrically toward the ceiling.
While Luffy had been away, Nami had moved onto another ship, considerably larger than the previous one but also noticeably poorer in what it contained.
"I don't know anything. Robin doesn't count," she replied without even hesitating, continuing to rummage through an enormous chest whose flattened lock lay near her feet. In the past the girl had used lockpicks; now she could simply break down a door, tear out the hinges, or, as with this chest, squeeze a padlock hard enough in one hand. "And we've already talked about this. Also, I hope you kept your word and didn't bully her too badly?" Pulling a couple of incomprehensible gold-plated trinkets from the chest, Nami gave Luffy a suspicious look. "And don't even think about lying to me! I'll ask her afterward."
"...I don't remember promising anything at all."
"You mean you bullied her?!" The girl's eyes practically flashed.
"No wonder Yosaku keeps calling you a chicken. You really are like a mother hen."
"Don't try to change the subject. Answer my question!"
"That useless girl is fine."
"Don't call her useless!" Nami snorted indignantly. "She's just clumsy, inexperienced, and shy!"
"In other words, completely useless!" Luffy nodded in agreement. "And weren't you the one calling her useless yourself?"
"I never called her useless!" the girl protested. "I only said she's a useless coward and completely useless in real life!" she offered as her 'extremely convincing' argument.
Luffy did not immediately find a response to such an idiotic statement.
"...I can't decide whether you have a problem with semantics, sophistry, or whether you just decided to troll me shamelessly."
"Wait!" The realization hit the girl abruptly. "You dodged the question again!" she narrowed her eyes, while likewise dodging his. "Just because my Robin is fine now doesn't mean you didn't bully her! Admit it. Did you bully her? How badly?"
Nami deserved credit: she had come a ve-e-ery long way since first meeting Luffy. Now, when she wanted to, she could almost effortlessly trip him up metaphorically before he built momentum. In the past he had talked circles around her without any trouble.
"I'm beginning to understand that I chose the wrong person to talk to about trusting the people close to us," Luffy visibly deflated.
"And why is that?" Nami raised an eyebrow challengingly. "You've been the person closest to me for a long time now, even surpassing my sister, but that doesn't stop me from believing absolutely none of what you say. And look at me—I'm alive and well and perfectly happy. I'm sure you'll manage too. You get used to anything with time. Speaking from personal experience."
That was a clean knockout.
"...Ryu almost died," Luffy said, swallowing his defeat in silence and immediately getting to the point.
"What?!!" Nami's eyes widened, and the trinkets fell from her hands. "How?!!"
Despite her loud declaration only moments earlier, the girl believed him instantly. Almost mockingly, without the slightest concern for the contradiction. Irony in its purest form.
"Just like that," Luffy sighed, walking over and picking up the fallen gold-covered figurines of some unknown animals. "The idiot underestimated his opponents too badly, and they nearly finished him off."
"And what were Sanji, Yosaku, and Usopp doing at the time?" Nami demanded.
"Handling their own opponents. They didn't see anything."
"How could that happen?" the girl asked, clearly upset.
She could hardly imagine that someone as strong as Johnny might genuinely have died today. That did not mean she considered him invincible, but she trusted Luffy and Zoro far too much. Nami believed, with good reason, that as long as those two monsters were somewhere nearby, nothing and no one could threaten members of their family.
"This is the Grand Line, Nami." Luffy reached out and soothingly ran his palm over the girl's hair. "It's an entirely different league from the waters of East Blue. And today's incident is clear proof that all of you are still too weak for these waters. Starting tomorrow, Zoro is taking over your training again." And there was the collective responsibility mentioned earlier. Though training itself had never stopped, its intensity now promised to increase severalfold. "We can protect you from many threats, but in the end, we can't be everywhere at once. Only the strong are protected from most accidents. If our Ryu were truly strong, he wouldn't have ended up in a situation today that nearly cost him his life."
Taking hold of Luffy's hand, Nami pressed his palm against her cheek and closed her eyes for several seconds. Luffy's words about Johnny were an extremely unpleasant reminder that what all of them did was far from the safest occupation in the world. The girl had no doubt that nightmares would torment her tonight. That happened from time to time. Dozens of times less often than when she had been a thief, but they had never disappeared entirely. They simply featured far more familiar faces now.
"...I don't mind the training," Nami said decisively, opening her eyes and releasing Luffy's hand. "But Robin has to train with everyone else. She's already far too weak."
That was undeniably true. In a genuine fight to the death where everyone fought at full strength, the black-haired woman had a one-hundred-percent chance of losing to any member of the family. No exceptions. She was simply too weak to defeat any of them. The only complication was that Usopp would not be able to kill her, while Sanji would not be able to fight her at all.
"You're talking nonsense. All she has left to do is prove her right to be part of our family, so where exactly is she supposed to escape from the group training?"
Ironically, Robin had already found a way to escape that very group training, though everyone else had yet to discover it.
"Good." Nami finally smiled. "She'll prove it. She's capable, and I believe in her. She was simply less lucky than me, so she had to wait twenty whole years to meet you instead of my ten." As she spoke, the girl never looked away from Luffy's eyes, causing the atmosphere inside the cabin to change abruptly and become syrupy sweet in a single instant. "By the way, you still haven't answered my question," Nami reminded him softly.
"What question?" Luffy genuinely failed to understand.
"How badly did you bully my Robin?"
The girl's expression did not change in the slightest, yet it suddenly felt as though someone had opened a door directly into a winter blizzard, causing the previously syrupy-sweet atmosphere to vanish in an instant. The cabin around them practically frosted over. What could one say? Luffy had raised Nami himself; now he had to deal with the resulting monster. And the entire family along with her, Robin included. But at this particular moment, trouble threatened Luffy alone. There could be no doubt that the instant he described exactly how he had brought Robin back to the Going Merry, he would have to deal with an extremely displeased Nami. And lately, that had become a very serious consideration. Far, far more serious than it had once been.
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