After utterly annihilating Shakky's back like a man on a mission with no regard for decency or mercy, she finally cracked. Somewhere between post-coital fog and nicotine-stained fingers, she spilled where the shipwrights were hiding. Not bad for a night's work. I tracked them down faster than a Buster Call on a deadline and showed them my specs—25 feet of glorious, unstoppable bulk that needed a ship as beastly and unapologetically huge as I was. Something worthy of a king, or at least an ambitious narcissist with ego problems. They were in. I was promised five days, give or take. The kind of "give or take" that usually meant seven days and a missing hull, but I had nothing but time.
So I made the rounds of an ancient tradition among men with too much time to kill and too little conscience: I stopped by the pub. One stakeout, one therapy session, all booze. It smelled of rum, smoke, and quiet desperation—my type of crowd. Townies always talked, even when they did not know they were saying something worth hearing. And if you stirred the pot the right way, gold would float to the surface.
Spoiler: they didn't say a word.
The same wet-brained nonsense of pirates coming by, marines sniffing around for their weekly ego boost, and the occasional anecdotal "Did you hear what Big Mom did last week?" No, Gerald, I didn't, but short of death or dieting, I don't care. No one mentioned the shipwrights or gave me cause for worry. And the Yonkos or the World Government? Tighter than a nun's lip in confession. Not that I should have expected anything else. Around these parts, mentioning the wrong name out loud was like inviting death in for a nice cup of tea.
But then—then—I heard something that was worth more than all the rum in the tavern.
"A man in a white suit. Top hat. Mask."
The words spilled out of the barkeep's lips as if he did not want anyone to listen. Naturally, that only made me listen all the more intently. I leaned forward, like a shark whiffs blood in the water. The barkeep was grizzled, elderly, and a son of a gun—peg leg, one eye, face like a parched map of past battles—but there was something about the way he spoke… it was not rumor.
"The man in the white suit, you say?" I repeated, voice detached but professional.
He leaned in farther, and I caught a blast of forty years of rotgut and regret on his breath. "He's been in town for a few days, now. Stays in the shadows, keeps to himself, but word gets around. Some go on and on about how he's World Government. Some say he's a high-end bounty hunter. What I do know is, you don't want to stand in his way."
That was when I realized. That white son of a bitch wasn't any roving freakshow.
It was Rob Lucci.
The same fellow who, after the timeskip, went blow-for-blow with Monkey D. Luffy in his cartoon-bent demigod state. Gear 5. Toonforce shenanigans. And now here he was. Not even the bartender knew what he was sitting on—in terms of information, at least—but I surely did.
Now that raised some questions. What was CP0's poster boy doing on this iisland? If he was following Luffy, then it made sense. Timeline-wise, Luffy had probably just wrapped up at Fish-Man Island. Already making his way to Punk Hazard. People forget the arcs take that long because Oda takes his sweet time. In-universe? Two days, tops. Quick. Bloody. Done. So if Lucci was following him, then he had good reason to stick around here. My island. My shipwrights. My schemes.
That indicated risk. That implied that decisions had to be balanced.
I leapt up, my chair scraping the floor with a screech that cut through the hum like a wail. People glanced up. I didn't notice.
"Appreciate the intel," I said, leaving a few silver coins on the counter. Enough to pay for the drink, his time, and whatever dental care he was overdue for.
He grabbed the coins hastily, as if in fear I'd change my mind, eyes shining with a greedy gleam that was almost beautiful if you're the kind of person who's into that sort of thing. I wasn't.
Since I was wearing a damn good fit—streamlined, tailored, stitched together by hands that probably billed by the heartbeat—I hadn't switched into my hulking, worldbreaker form. Kept it small. Human. Chewable. You don't show up at a dinner party in full war form unless you're hungry for blood as an appetizer. And I wasn't hungry to scare Lucci or any of the CP0 phantoms he brought behind him like bad plastic surgery. Not yet, anyway.
I staggered out of the tavern on a combination of inebriation and elation running under my skin. Lucci would arrive. He had to. I was the only madman foolish enough to command a vessel capable of outrunning sea kings and diving so deep that it would touch the ocean floor. That kind of hubris gets a man attention. Attention from people. People like him. And even in my repressed state, I was cognizant that he could sense it—that awkward, smothering cloud of power that I wore like a second skin.
The quays were quiet, save for the factory lulaby of hammering and flame. My vessel was being constructed—wooden skeletons coming together like the frame of a god. I kept scanning, not because I would see Lucci, but because I wouldn't. He was the kind of son-of-a-bitch who didn't walk—he materialized.
If he was looking for Straw Hat, I was a speed bump… or a shortcut. Maybe both. Thing about guys like Lucci is that every encounter's a transaction to them. Blood, information, bargaining chips—it's all coin. The way I thought about it was that we were already negotiating the instant he heard my name.
He just showed up. No sound, no warning, not even the decency of a wind. Just... existence. Anyone who didn't have Haki would've just stood there staring at the water like a dumbass. But my Kenbunshoku was alert. His arrival was as shocking as a gunshot in church. I turned around, and there he was—moonlight spilling off that spotless white suit like it was made of ghost tales. Not a wrinkle on him. Like he was going to serve tea and slit throats with the same hand.
I didn't respond immediately. Primarily because I was thumbing through my mental Rolodex of one-liners and couldn't come up with one that wouldn't further enflame the situation immediately. But he didn't wait.
"Cassian," he said, as if enjoying the name. "Your shipwrights have a great deal to say regarding your... unusual specifications. I was expecting someone taller."
His voice was ice upon marble—smooth, but ready to crack skulls.
"Rob Lucci," I let the name fall like a burning match. I saw the shake in his neck, so small that it confirmed to me that I'd passed a boundary I wasn't even supposed to glimpse.
Nobody was supposed to know his name. That's the Cipher Pol play. Be no one. Be nowhere. Leave no one remaining to tell the story. But he didn't so much as blink. Not really. He just looked at me like I'd just given him a clue tied in red yarn and cigarette smoke. Curiosity in those eyes, like maybe I wasn't the diversion. Maybe I was the trailhead.
"I think there is no need for the mask, then," he whispered. His smile could cut glass. He extended a hand, slow and deliberate, dropped the mask of propriety like a snake molts. His eyes were surgeon's eyes—cold, calculating, without doubt. They were the eyes of a man who's killed more people than he's breathed life into.
"Mind explaining to me how you happen to know my name?" he asked, all suave and peaceable, beneath which however, was the weight of a cocked gun.
I brushed it aside like it meant nothing. "Let's just say. I know people. People who talk to other people. And those people? They talk too damn much."
His smirk faltered, as if it would prefer to be a scowl. "Right," he answered flatly. "Small world."
It grew quiet then—that kind of quiet. The kind that curls around your lungs like a wire and dares you to breathe wrong. He was measuring me up, you can bet on it. Most likely digging through his internal CIA-issued rolodex like an irritable cat batting at its next victim. A pirate with a grudge in his head? Mercenary enforcer with a dream? Or something a little more deadly—a wild card with a tongue too oily for its own good?
He said nothing. But I knew. He was not accepting what I was giving.
"I have to ask you something, Lucci," I said to him, my tone as silky as premium bourbon. I looked him in the eyes, not in challenge, but in assurance. The waves piled up on the beach behind us like a background of drums—low-level, pulsating, and just menacingly enough to permit tension to prance around a bit.
"Why do you visit this island? I know it's not for the atmosphere."
He didn't even blink. "I'm looking for a pirate. Monkey D. Luffy. He leaves a trail of destruction wherever he goes." A pause. A calculated one. A measured one. "You wouldn't happen to know where he is by any chance, would you?"
The notion persisted. I considered revealing the truth. Nostalgia tried to kick in for half a second—Luffy, the rubber-headed boy with the large eyes, careening from arc to arc like a cannonball driven by freedom. But I wasn't sitting in the bleachers anymore. I was in the ring. And I had a ship to build—a great grand bastard of a ship still looking vaguely like someone's giant IKEA project half built.
Luffy was a memory. I was a problem.
"He's headed for Punk Hazard," I said to him, looking at his face the way a gambler looks at weighted dice. There it was—surprise, interest, maybe even a little hunger. It smoldered behind his killer-eyes like a storm gathering itself just off the shore. The man arrived here for leftovers and discovered a banquet. From the likes of me, no less.
"I see," he said at last. "You're a man who deals in information."
He said it like a reprimand, as though being present had been an affront to him. "Let us dispense with formalities. What do you require in return?"
I almost laughed. Almost. He saw myself as some sort of small-time intelligence peddler hiding behind tavern bravado and pretending boisterousness. Adorable. Not entirely false, but adorable. Really, I didn't want anything… except for him to take off and not leave a bloodbath on my doorstep until I was long gone.
But then again… why give up one of your pieces when you can shift the board?
"Seriously?" I said, tone level-ing barely enough to suggest that I wasn't talking trash, "how do you feel about joining me… to take out the Celestial Dragons?"
Yes. I did. Like an idiot. Or a genius. The line gets fuzzy when you're trying to become gods.
Rob Lucci didn't know if he should laugh, snap my neck, or report some rogue madman loose with too much charisma and not enough self-preservation skills as he should have. He had nothing to do but glare, the kind of glare that made most men reconsider speaking—or at least remaining silent. Not me, however. I was not most men. I was the kind of fool who got the World Government's bloodhound to turn against its masters like a friendly poker game favor.
Maybe I was crazy. Maybe I was bored. But I was definitely a little drunk and in the mood for something different from the normal One Piece fare.
"Why in the world would I do that?" Lucci eventually said, slow and measured like a cocked pistol. Skeptical and curious and the slightest trace of that try me attitude. Good old-fashioned predator action.
I didn't blink. Didn't even flinch. Just rested against the old wood post like I had all eternity and no intention on using any of it wisely. The ocean breeze blew through my hair, and for a moment, let the silence do the heavy lifting.
"Because maybe you've already figured out that the world's not going to fix itself while a bunch of inbred space aristocrats play God from their ivory tower. You and me—we've bled in the trenches. They've never even gotten their boots wet."
Lucci's face did not change, but his eyes sparkled. A crack, maybe. Or gas. Hard to tell with a man like that.
"Gods don't have to make sense," he replied calmly. "If that's the way they are, then so be it."
I laughed rudely. "You're full of shit."
That caught him. A flash only—one eyelid twitch, one brief frown. A slip. A tell. Like poker with a sociopath.
"There's no way you think that," I told him emphatically. "You're many things, but you're not that kind of idiot."
"You're right, I don't." He curled his lips into a snarky smirk—half-funny, half-I-can-kill-you. "But that doesn't make me stupid enough to betray my chain of command."
"Come on," I told him, facing away from the post. "Just pretend, for fun, that you weren't chained to your leash. That deep down, maybe under all that government dogma and pigeon-shit bureaucracy, you still had a heart. You're telling me you don't want to see ambulatory tumors wiped off the surface of the planet?"
"You mean Mariejois," he stated, as if informing me of the color of the sky. "It's an ocean fortress. Protected by admirals, CP0, and more firepower than the entire world combined. This fantasy of yours? A suicide with a flourish."
I grinned. "Yes, well, fortresses do fall. All it takes is a crack—and you know how to make cracks, don't you?"
He simply remained quiet, and in effect, that was his yes, I certainly do know how to make cracks.
"I'm not asking you to stage full mutiny," I continued. "I'm just saying... there is corruption in the system. You can smell it. I know you can. Even a zealot like Akainu retches at the smell of it. It would not take much. A nudge here. A suggestion there. The right individuals facing the wrong direction."
"And you'd do the rest," he went on. "Let the dog open the door, and the wolf comes in."
"No blood on your hands," I said to him, extending mine in a televangelist gesture. "Plausible deniability and a cleaner world, that's all."
He didn't answer. Just stood, gears whirring on behind the piercing eyes, weighing the cost, the risk, the lives lost.
"Call it what you will," I continued, my voice low now, "but deep down, even you must know: this isn't a coup. It's pest control."
Finally, he replied, and said the words I yearned to hear. "Tell me more."