Dragon's pupils reflected Kael's easygoing face. His Adam's apple bobbed once.
The Haki sharp enough to pierce steel had already receded, yet a pressure lingered around him, like a field of invisible gravity.
The man in front of him stood there as if bored, and still he felt like the center of the sea and sky.
"Former Marine…" Dragon's voice came out dry. He cleared his throat, trying not to sound rattled. "Please don't tease me, Mr. Kael."
Kael flashed a grin, all white teeth, a little wicked amusement threaded through it.
"Good memory, little Dragon." He stepped up as if they were old friends, brushing a palm over the wind-starched green cloak. "How's old man Garp these days? And you, what is it, finally decided to bring this vicious pirate to justice all by your lonesome?"
Dragon's body tightened. He looked a touch embarrassed.
He had once chased the Roger Pirates alongside Garp. By chance he had been drawn in by Kael's conversation and learning, and the two had become familiar in their own way.
Kael, for his part, had liked this sunny hot-blooded kid and had even coached his training in private.
At first Dragon resisted. His father's sacred regimen of smashing warships was already unbeatable.
Two lessons later he was thunderstruck.
Mr. Kael adds fuel to the fire of training.
In Dragon's eyes Kael lacked the usual pirate's cruelty and greed.
He was more like an eremite who had seen through the world, bored by most of it, who only bared his fangs now and then to remind everyone he could stand shoulder to shoulder with Roger and Rayleigh.
Dragon did not answer the teasing.
His gaze slipped past Kael's shoulder to the heaving sea, eyes a knot of feelings.
Kael watched that look and more or less understood.
He remembered God Valley, years ago, when the young man in a crisp Marine uniform had seen Celestial Dragons revel in the slaughter of slaves. Anger and confusion had twisted his face.
The fire in his eyes was not Garp's, the fire that burned for "Justice."
Dragon's flame wanted to burn rot to ash.
Perhaps God Valley had been the first spark.
"Tch." Kael clicked his tongue and slung an arm around Dragon's neck, brotherly and unceremonious. "Spit it out. You tailed me all the way here just to sulk behind a hood?"
Dragon's cheek twitched, a sheen of sweat rising as he ground out, "I did not."
He tried to pry himself free. Kael's arm felt like an iron hoop, draped lightly, strength coiled inside it. He could not budge it.
His estimation of this man's power climbed another rung.
"Like hell you didn't." Kael laughed and tugged him back toward town. "Then who is that funeral face for? I read the news. You quit the Marines, your thoughts are dangerous, your whereabouts unknown. Quite the write-up. Next you will raise a banner and give Garp a stroke?"
Dragon's step hitched. His head snapped up, eyes suddenly sharp. "How do you know…"
"Know what, that you have already chosen?" Kael slanted him a look, smile unchanged. "Kid, the moment your eyes stopped holding the Marines' justice and started asking what justice is, your path was set. Your face might as well have 'I am going to topple this crappy world' inked on it. Hard to miss."
Dragon had no words.
Standing before Kael felt like standing naked. Every thought, every pose, stripped away at a glance. He hated the feeling.
"What do you want to say to me?" he finally asked, giving up on struggling as Kael half-dragged him along.
"Me? You followed me." Kael snorted, then sighed at the conflicted weight on the young man's face.
The bright kid who had trailed behind Garp with clear eyes and a chest full of fire had turned into a prince of sweat and worry.
Look what the world did to the child.
"All right, enough." Kael waved off the gloom and steered him into a lane toward the town center. "Come drink. My treat."
"I…"
"What, you broke already? Yesterday's rising Marine star, today's wanted subversive, and you cannot afford a cup?" Kael gave him a sidelong look.
Dragon fell silent, then followed him into the noisiest tavern in town.
Voices crashed like surf. The air was thick with alcohol, sweat, and roasted meat.
Rough pirates and townsfolk leaned on each other, boasting, playing hand games, wooden mugs thudding the tables.
Kael slipped into a corner, set his naginata against the wall, and snapped his fingers toward the counter.
"Boss, two barrels of your best rum. Ten jin of roast, make it sizzle."
He had not raised his voice, yet it cut clean through the din, straight to the owner's ear.
A moment later two squat barrels and a platter of meat glistening with fat arrived.
Kael hoisted a barrel and filled two huge mugs. Amber burned under the lights.
"Drink," he said, nothing more.
Dragon hesitated, then tipped it back. The liquor scorched a line down his throat. Color crept into his taut face.
Kael did not fuss. He tore into the meat, grease shining on his lips.
Neither spoke. The tavern's clamor became the only backdrop. A barrel ran dry.
Dragon could hold his liquor, but his eyes kept clouding.
He did not know why he sat here, drinking with a pirate.
He had questions, a thousand of them, about Roger, about the Will of D, about the truth of the world.
They piled in his mouth and would not form a start.
Kael ate and drank his fill, belched softly, and dabbed his mouth with a napkin.
He leaned back, studying the man who was drowning his worries in silence, and finally spoke.
"So," Kael said idly, "that justice you have been chasing, do you have your answer now?"
Dragon's mug halted mid-air. Casual words, true aim.
The tavern's noise seemed to pull far away.
Pirate brags, serving girls' scolds, the thud of cups. The sound remained yet could not pierce his ears.
He looked up, and everything blurred except Kael's face, three parts mockery, seven parts knowing.
"You…"
He tried to answer and found no voice. No, his voice existed, only confined to a bubble so small that sound dissolved the instant it left his throat.
Kael lifted a finger to his lips. Shh. A ring of ripples, barely visible, curled around his fingertip.
"Sound barrier. Parlor trick," Kael said lightly. "What comes next is not for the foot-on-table hero over there."
He jerked his chin at a pirate nearby who was bragging about kicking an admiral and punching a general before escaping Impel Down, one foot indeed on the table.
The neat silence took the last brace out from under Dragon's chest.
He set down his cup. The fire in his eyes showed, for the first time, a deep confusion and weariness.
"I don't know."
His voice was low, rough without his noticing.
"After I left the Marines I crossed the South Blue, the West Blue, even slipped into non-member nations. I saw too much, things that shouldn't exist in this world."
His hands clenched under the table, knuckles white.
"Endless wars, blood and brutality, slaves and nobles. The world should not be like this."
Kael coughed once.
Kid, those lines will get you in trouble.
"I fought back. I gathered others who were angry. We toppled tyrant after tyrant. We sent pampered nobles to the scaffold. They called us 'fighters for freedom,' called me their hope."
There was no pride in him, only pain.
"It changed nothing." He shook his head like he could fling out the memories. "We drove out a king, the World Government propped up a new puppet, sometimes worse. We freed an island, CP agents swarmed like sharks scenting blood and stamped every spark flat."
"I feel like a child piling sandcastles. No matter how fast I build, one wave and it all melts. The bodies behind me grow, the followers behind me grow, but the world does not get better, not even a little."
He lifted his eyes and met Kael's, confusion and need compressed to a single point.
"Mr. Kael, you were one of the Roger Pirates' inner voices. You reached the world's end and saw the truth of history. You must know what is wrong with this world. Why is it like this?"
Kael listened without cutting in.
Only when Dragon finished did he tear a strip of meat, chew slowly, and swallow.
"Good question," Kael said, wiping his fingers. "Your direction has been wrong from the start."
"Wrong?"
"You think you are fighting kings, nobles, Marines." Kael snorted, slouched deeper, legs crossed, relaxed as a cat. "You do not even know your enemy. You are brawling with puppets. Win, and what then? The hand on the strings laughs where you cannot see."
He dipped a fingertip in spilled rum on the tabletop.
"Here is a Celestial Dragon." He drew a circle at the top. "They do nothing and feed off the world."
"Here are the World Government and royal families." He dotted a cluster below. "They are the butlers. They strip the people and send tribute upward, keeping the scraps."
"Here are the Marines and CP." He sketched a line between. "The hired muscle. They beat the tenants who refuse to pay and guard the manor."
Last he swept his palm across the broadest space at the bottom.
"And here is everyone else. Ninety-nine percent of the human race." His eyes sharpened. "They farm, fish, build, mine. They feed everyone above and get the least."
"What you do now is lead a handful of tenants to stab a guard or drive off a greedy steward. Then what? The master hires meaner guards and replaces the steward with someone worse. You are lancing boils."
Dragon's breath hitched.
The blunt picture cracked his fog like a lightning strike.
He had seen faces, cruel faces, but not the engine behind them, cold and layered and humming.
"It is structural," he murmured. He could feel his worldview lurch and reassemble.
"Ten points," Kael said with a snap. "Your revolution cannot stay a string of armed riots. You are not overthrowing a few men. You are going up against an order that has run for centuries. Your enemy is not blades and bullets. It is the thought lodged in everyone's skull that says this is how the world must be."
"Thought…?"
"Thought," Kael said, a slow, meaningful smile curving his mouth. "Tell the tenants they were not born to be tenants. Show them it is not that they cannot feed themselves. Their grain gets stolen by the steward and the master."
"Do not only hand them weapons. Give them a why. Do not just lead a charge. Wake them up. Help them stand and take back what is theirs."
"Your enemy is not the World Government. It is servility. Your weapon is not the gale. It is ideas. What you need is not only a war, it is an awakening, a liberation of minds that sweeps the world."
Kael did not raise his voice. Each word still landed like a hammer.
He did not see himself as noble; he would happily admit to selfishness. It did not stop him from passing along a spark from giants' shoulders. He had glimpsed a better world. They had brushed the future once.
Dragon stared, sweat beading his brow.
So that is it.
So that is it.
He had walked blind in the dark, throwing punches at nothing. Kael's words rose like a lighthouse and lit the channel in a single flare.
Topple tyrants, that is the first step and the lowest.
The true revolution is of thought. It is the oppressed of the world recognizing their class, recognizing the root of their chains, then rising together to refuse a crooked order.
What he had done was the work of a lone avenger. Kael had pointed to the path of a revolutionary.
Understanding flooded him and set every cell trembling, the shock of clouds parting to sudden sun.
The haze was gone from his eyes. In its place burned a fire that could set the world alight.
He looked at the man lounging across from him and felt something like reverence, like gratitude.
With a handful of sentences and a single drink, this man had untangled the knot strangling him for years and set a broad road to a real justice at his feet.
"I…" Dragon opened his mouth. A thousand words jammed behind his teeth and collapsed into two. "I understand. Kael… thank you."
Kael waved it off and let the sound barrier fall.
The tavern's roar surged back in, as if the conversation that might overturn the world had never happened.
"Good. Now act." Kael topped off his mug again. "Soon you will be the World Government's most wanted. When your bounty spikes, do not forget this round."
He lifted his cup toward Dragon.
"To a world about to get interesting. Cheers, future… revolutionary."
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