After parting from Gaban, Kael bought a peculiar little boat in the town's harbor.
It was long and narrow, painted pitch black, with a single dark sail planted at the stern. The only seat was a high-backed throne.
Kael sprawled on it like a lord at leisure and let the skiff drift with the swell.
Hah. Hawkeye Mihawk's future ride looked a lot like this.
On the art-of-looking-cool front, I, Kael, gladly call you the strongest.
The style suited his mood, a man newly "unemployed," a lone spirit on open water.
The sea is an endless blue prison and also the freest frontier.
Trading the uproar of the Oro Jackson for a one-man skiff did not jar him in the least. If anything, the absolute quiet pressed the sediment from his thoughts. The noise of parting settled.
He leaned back in the throne, ankles crossed, naginata laid across his knees.
Kael closed his eyes and let his plans unroll.
He had always moved only after the map was drawn. Time to count his assets and chart the road ahead.
Years with Roger had carried him from a wildling on deserted isles to what he was now. Commodore, rear admiral, first mate to emperors, close to an emperor himself. His strength was not what it had been.
First, his body.
Unlike Nozdon and the other muscle-fiends, Kael had not gone mad on iron and protein until he turned into a walking boulder.
His training was subtler. Finer.
Using his Wave-Wave Fruit, he kept a whisper of bioelectric current teasing every cell, every muscle fiber, every nerve ending, day after day.
That inside-out forging had pushed his body to a bottleneck.
Further gains would take breaking the limiter like a certain bald demon king and stepping into flesh-made divinity, which was easier said than done.
He was not counting on shouting Night Guy and punting a Five Elder's head like a ball.
"Bodywork can stay as is. It is enough," he muttered.
Next, the fruit.
That was his treasure hoard and the well of future growth.
"To command every kind of wave," Kael said under his breath, fingers gliding along the cold back of the naginata. "Sound waves. Light waves. Electromagnetic waves. Shock waves. Maybe even gravitational waves."
A thousand techniques sketched themselves in his mind.
"What will awakening look like?" The corner of his mouth tugged up.
If everything around him became a medium for waves, if the earth swelled like surf and the air thrummed like a string, that would be the privilege of a god.
Then, Haki.
As one of the Roger crew's old hands, all three colors were standard issue.
Years beside Roger and Rayleigh, two of the world's finest, had honed his Haki until it sang. High-level forms, from Oden's ryuo to Roger's flowing conqueror's coating, he had learned them to the hilt.
Study this part well.
Use every spare moment to learn. Nicotine Makoto said so.
Haki is great. You have to learn Haki.
As Mucha liked to say, only Haki sits above all else.
Kidd might love building mecha, and you have to admit the man can hit hard.
An awakened railgun can maim an Emperor. One shot and the screen is clear.
But if your Haki lags, the windup is too long and Shanks will treat you like roadside décor.
Truth is, life aboard the Roger Pirates had been too comfortable.
That crew of battle lunatics were monsters one and all.
Roger shouting about keeping his crew safe while hurling divine avoids at the vanguard, Gaban chopping like a human buzzsaw, then Kozuki Oden arrived and poked holes in the sky for fun.
Kael played the fixer, patching gaps, tossing the occasional wide-area cleanup. Rarely did he have to go all out.
Most days he basked on deck, sipping orange juice and artfully slacking, or tinkered with new applications of his fruit.
His thoughts wandered to the folded sheet he fished from his pack, a creased wanted poster.
[DEAD OR ALIVE]
[Kael Grylls "Iron Kael"]
[Bounty: 2,100,000,000 Berries]
In the photo he was slouched against the Oro Jackson's rail mid-yawn, looking half asleep.
"Two point one billion," Kael said, lips quirking. "The World Government really does underestimate me. Then again, given my slacking rate and today's inflation, the price is almost fair."
He let the poster go. The wind took it, the blue swallowed it.
He drifted without aim for days.
A news coo cut a white line across the sky.
Kael flicked a coin. A single beli pinged into the pouch around its neck. He received the latest paper in exchange.
The headline was the disbanding of the Roger Pirates.
Grand adjectives painted the "demons'" disappearance and whispered of darker schemes, the whole piece steeped in fear and schadenfreude.
Wire-service filter, right on cue.
Kael snorted, flipped past it, and his eye snagged on a smaller item.
"Hero of the Marines, Vice Admiral Garp, again refuses promotion to admiral. Sources say his son, Monkey D. Dragon, has left the Marines. Dangerous ideology. Whereabouts unknown."
"Dragon, huh," Kael murmured, a light sparking behind his gaze.
He remembered the young man he had seen once at God Valley, eyes burning like coals.
It seemed the revolutionary flame was already finding tinder.
He read on. Pirate raids and slaughters stained column after column. The world stayed crooked.
"What a troublesome era," he sighed, crushing the paper. A flick of his fingers sent it arcing into the air and, just before it kissed the sea, a pulse of force shredded it to powder and gave it to the wind.
He stretched, rose from the throne, and walked to the bow.
"Roger's sickness," he said to the empty water. "Slim odds or not, I have to try."
This was not only for Roger. It gave his drifting voyage a heading.
For Kael Grylls, the real sailing had only just begun.
"Do not bore me, era."
His soft laugh vanished into the limitless wind.
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