Chapter 276: Pinch Hitter
Lami was struggling.
The feeling was of being a small boat in a storm — tossed and turned and battered by a sea that didn't particularly care whether it sank her or not, every wave another chance for the hull to give.
What she didn't know, and what would have surprised her considerably if she had, was that the man doing the battering was frightened.
Not of losing. Hound was winning, clearly and demonstrably, and he knew it.
He was frightened of her.
She was fifteen, sixteen, maybe seventeen. Young. And she was already this. If he had been her age, she would have ended him in the first exchange — the genjutsu alone would have done it, and that was before accounting for the rest. He had beaten her in this fight because of experience and developed ability, not because he was inherently more capable. And she was still growing.
What did she look like in five years? In ten?
The thought crystallized into a decision: she could not leave this field today.
He dropped the measured approach he had been using.
Thick fur rolled across his skin in a wave. His face bent and compressed and rearranged itself, the human structure giving way to something longer-jawed and sharp-eared, until he stood before her as a man-shaped hound — the full expression of the Dog-Dog Fruit, Model: Hound.
Lami stared.
For all the stories she had heard about Devil Fruits and what they could do, she had never actually seen one used. Hound was the first Devil Fruit user she had ever encountered in person, and the transformation was not something she could treat as entirely expected simply because she had been told it was possible.
He moved.
The Soru made him faster than before by a substantial margin — the transformation had taken what had already been difficult to follow and made it worse. Her eyes caught the motion; her brain was still processing it when her body should have already been responding. The gap between what she could see and what she could do had widened.
She watched his claws descend toward her shoulder and could not close the distance in time to stop them.
He wasn't trying to kill her.
A sigh. Not hers.
Her body stopped being hers.
The transition was not violent — it was more like suddenly finding herself in a different room of the same house, still fully present but no longer in the driver's seat. She felt her muscles rearrange themselves, the defensive tension she had been holding replaced by something looser and more dangerous, the kind of ease that came from having done this a great many times before.
Her torso pivoted sideways, slipping the descending claws with a movement that looked almost casual. Her right hand came up simultaneously, chakra already dense and spinning in the palm before she had consciously registered the change.
Rasengan.
It hit Hound's arm at point-blank range.
The impact stripped fur and opened flesh with equal efficiency. Hound hit the Soru and put six meters between them in the same instant, landing in a defensive posture, staring.
From inside, Lami was practically vibrating.
⌈Teacher! Teacher, that was incredible, what was that technique, can you teach me, what's it called?⌋
The borrowed body's expression did not reflect this. Ritsu, currently in temporary residence behind Lami's eyes, looked at the dog-man's face and took stock.
Hound examined his right arm. The wound was bad — jagged, raw, the flesh torn in the rotating pattern characteristic of the technique. He had activated Iron Body at the moment of impact. Without it, the arm would have given at the joint.
His eyes hadn't left the girl standing across from him.
"Who are you?"
It wasn't accusation. It was a genuine question. His Observation Haki had been too recently developed to do everything he needed it to do, but he had been in enough fights to read what was in front of him with his eyes alone, and what was in front of him now was not the girl who had been struggling to keep pace with him thirty seconds ago. The killing aura that moved through this person's stillness was not something a teenager in the middle of her first real fight produced. It was the settled weight of someone who had accumulated harm across a long span of time.
Even he didn't have it quite like this.
"You don't need to know," said the person wearing Lami's face, and met his eyes.
The blow hit him behind the eyes like a hammer. His legs wobbled. He bit through his tongue before he'd consciously decided to, using the sharp immediate pain to cut through the pressure, and held his ground.
A pause.
"Tough," the person wearing Lami's face said, and there was something in the delivery that was almost appreciative.
Sage Art: One Thousand Hair Needles.
The hairs launched in the same moment the technique was named, thousands of fine strands moving faster than vision could track, each one carrying the hardness of refined steel rather than the flexibility of hair. Hound had no interval to respond. The needles found him across every exposed surface and drove through.
He fell backward.
The snow caught him. Blood came in thin threads from the points of entry, gathering slowly in the cold.
Lami felt the borrowed control released back to her, and she swayed with the sudden return of full occupancy.
"Huh? Teacher, already?"
She looked down at her hands, then at the man lying in the snow.
"..."
Ritsu spent two full seconds finding words.
"What do you mean, already? Your main obstacle is handled. You can go now."
Lami's eyes drifted back to Hound's unmoving shape. "Is he going to die?"
"Why do you care?"
"Because he wasn't trying to kill me. He could have, I think. That means something." She frowned. "I don't want to be responsible for good people dying."
"He won't die. Zoan types are built to endure, and he has a full company of soldiers who are going to be here in about forty seconds. I strongly suggest you use those forty seconds."
Lami snapped back to alertness. She scanned the perimeter and saw the figures moving through the dark toward them.
She formed the seals without wasting more time.
Earth Style: Earth Dragon Concealment Technique.
The earth received her, and she was gone.
By the time the first soldiers reached the spot, a thin layer of new snow had already begun settling over the ground. They found their Rear Admiral on his back in the bloody snow and formed a tight circle around him, calling for the ship's medical officer, not thinking about pursuing a trail that was already cold.
The wind over Lubni'er picked up.
The castle fire was eventually brought under control.
The Count and his household staff had all died. The servants and slaves had lived. What the North Blue's nobility found most galling — more than the deaths, more than the property damage — was that the Navy had failed to catch the killer, and the man they had sent to do the catching had ended up being carried off the field on a stretcher.
The effect on the regional nobility was immediate and comprehensive. Estates that had previously maintained an aggressive social calendar went dark. Nobles who had been extracting labor from their territories under threat of violence found reasons not to leave their fortified homes. People who had been living under the constant pressure of that extraction discovered they could breathe.
This was not the intended consequence of any of it.
Across the sea, on a summer island that never knew winter.
Marineford.
The light here was always brilliant. The Grand Line operated on its own rules, and one of those rules was that each island existed in its own fixed climate, locked in place by whatever force had arranged the world. Marineford was a summer island, and it had been a summer island for the eight hundred years since the building at its center had first been raised.
At the building's top floor, in the Fleet Admiral's office, the conversation was quiet.
"Did you read Hound's report?" Vice Admiral Tsuru asked.
Sengoku set down his pen and leaned back. "I read it. I'll admit, if it had come from anyone else I'd have questioned whether to take it seriously." He let out a breath. "What have you found?"
"The connection between the four dead nobles." Tsuru's voice was level. "They were all Flevance."
The word landed in the room and stayed there.
Sengoku was quiet for a moment. As Fleet Admiral, there were very few secrets the world kept from him. He knew the truth of what had happened to Flevance. He knew the mechanics of it — the lie, the cover story, the systematic elimination of the population that had been deemed an acceptable cost. He knew it and had carried it the way he carried several other things he could not change and could not stop carrying.
He also knew that a young man he had thought of as a son had died in proximity to that event. The one his people had taken to calling Corazon. Little Rosi. Donquixote Rosinante.
"The boy Rosinante saved," he said finally. "This isn't connected to him?"
"Can't be the same person. The boy was a boy. This Noble Killer is a girl." Tsuru paused. "Whether there's a connection between them — I can't say. Flevance's records were destroyed. There's no way to trace other survivors."
"So there was another one. Besides the boy."
"There must have been. The four targets don't share anything except Flevance, and they settled in four different countries after leaving. Someone who knew who they were had to have tracked them deliberately. As of about two months after the Lubni'er incident, there have been no further attacks in the North Blue. My conclusion is that she's already left."
"And gone where?"
"The Grand Line. The Flevance royal family and the remaining senior nobility didn't stay in the North Blue when they relocated. They settled in Sabaody Archipelago."
A long pause.
"She's not finished."
"No."
Sengoku rubbed the side of his head with one hand. The political geometry of this was exactly as unpleasant as it looked. The right thing — the thing his conscience pushed toward — was to let the remaining targets live with whatever fear they had earned. The thing his position required was different.
"We have to report it," he said. "I don't like it. But Sabaody has people who have nothing to do with any of this. If she arrives there and the situation escalates into open combat, those people are in the middle of it." He paused. "And if she runs into a Celestial Dragon by accident—"
"I know," Tsuru said.
He didn't need to finish that sentence. Both of them knew what happened when someone with a grudge and real fighting ability encountered the Celestial Dragons in a location where those Dragons felt untouchable. The outcome was always a catastrophe that reached far beyond the two parties involved.
"I'll have the report filed," Tsuru said.
Sengoku nodded. Then, after a moment: "What Devil Fruit is she using? I've been going through every classification I know and nothing fits."
Tsuru paused at the door. "Stop trying to solve the things you can't solve. This world is full of them. We still haven't identified where those enormous creatures came from, and we've had longer to think about that." She glanced back. "We'll encounter her eventually. You can observe directly when we do."
The door closed.
Sengoku sat alone under the relentless summer light and found it offered him no warmth at all.
Far to the other side of the world, in the East Blue.
A small village called Windmill sat at the edge of the sea, the kind of place that existed in every part of the world without anyone far away ever thinking about it. On the dock, a seventeen-year-old boy in a battered cowboy hat and no shirt pushed off from the shore in a small boat and raised his hand to the people watching him go.
His freckled face was bright with a grin that held no doubts.
On the dock, a younger boy with a straw hat was shouting something — his voice carrying out over the water until the gap became too wide and the wind took the words. He kept shouting anyway.
The boy in the boat stopped being able to hear him. It didn't change the expression on his face.
He had a week's worth of food and water and a dagger at his hip, and he sailed into the sea that would give him everything he wanted and take everything it decided to take, and he did it without looking back.
That same day, in the North Blue.
A black flag snapped in the harbor wind. The skull on it had two hand-painted crimson eyes, slightly uneven, clearly drawn by someone who had given it a great deal of enthusiastic effort and a moderate amount of talent.
Lami was holding the pole with both hands, carrying the flag like a trophy.
The maid from the castle stood beside her on the small dock, shivering in the coastal cold, watching this development with the expression of someone whose life had taken a turn she hadn't anticipated.
"From today," Lami announced, "we're pirates."
The maid looked at the flag and then at Lami and then at the flag again. Being a pirate was not a future she had ever imagined for herself.
On the other hand, it was difficult to see how it could be materially worse than her previous situation, in which she had spent every day performing the heaviest labor in the household while being genuinely uncertain whether a bad week might end with her being beaten to death or fed to the dogs.
At least pirates, from what she understood, generally chose their own risks.
She supposed that was something.
*******************
Chapter 277: The Hawkins Pirates Get Robbed
Lami hadn't left Lubni'er alone.
She had brought Annie with her, for two reasons. The first was practical: Annie had been on the receiving end of Sharingan genjutsu, and anyone who had seen what Lami could do was a potential loose end in the eyes of the people who would eventually come looking. Leaving her behind was leaving her to someone else's mercy.
The second reason was simpler. She had finished every target in the North Blue. If she was going to continue, she needed to go to the Grand Line — and the Grand Line was not North Blue. The four seas had something like a civilian infrastructure: passenger ships, regular routes, islands connected to each other by commerce. The Grand Line had none of that predictability. She couldn't navigate it alone the way she had navigated the North Blue alone.
She needed people to travel with.
Annie had zero combat value. This was fine. Lami wasn't looking for someone to fight beside her — revenge was her own affair and she would handle it herself. She was looking for a companion, for someone to share the road.
Also, Annie was already there.
She had dealt with the other problem — the Navy — by the straightforward method of deciding she was a pirate now. She had already injured a Rear Admiral in the course of an operation that the World Government considered criminal. The label of enemy was going to follow her regardless. She might as well carry it openly.
She had drawn a skull on a black cloth. The skull had two hand-painted crimson eyes in its sockets, which she felt was a suitable signature — unmistakably hers, distinctive enough to stand apart from the enormous population of pirate flags that currently flew over every body of water on the planet.
"Annie," she announced, "you're my first mate."
Annie stared at her.
She had grown up in a fishing village where the family couldn't make the tax payment one year, and the system's response to that had been to take her as payment instead. Since arriving at the castle, she had spent her time doing the work nobody else wanted to do, accepting whatever treatment came with the job, and surviving. She was sixteen years old and she had not, until approximately forty-eight hours ago, imagined a future that looked like anything other than more of the same.
She didn't know what a first mate was. She did know that people who used words like that in an important tone of voice were usually people worth paying attention to.
She nodded.
"Yes, Miss Lami."
Lami wrinkled her nose. "Don't call me Miss. It sounds weird. Just Lami."
Annie's face went through a complicated series of expressions. "I can't just — you can't just call someone by their name like that — that's not how it—"
"Captain, then. Call me Captain."
Annie thought about this. She had heard about captains. Captains were people of consequence.
"Yes, Captain Lami."
Lami tilted her head. Something about the combination still sounded slightly off. She decided not to care.
The more immediate problem was the ship.
She had a flag. She had a first mate. What she did not have was a vessel on which to display the flag or transport the first mate.
She would not steal from ordinary people. This was a firm position that she held without internal conflict. Even the Navy officer who had been trying to capture her got to survive because she judged him not guilty of anything worth dying for. Innocent civilians did not factor into her plans as targets under any interpretation.
The problem was that all the ships in the harbor belonged to either the port authority, legitimate merchants, or the occasional passenger line, and none of those were people she was going to rob.
She was still thinking through this when Annie raised one arm and pointed at the harbor.
"Captain. A ship."
"Ships are normal near a harbor," Lami said, still working through the problem.
"That ship has a flag that looks like ours."
A cannon went off.
Lami looked up.
The harbor that had been orderly five minutes ago was not orderly now. A pirate vessel was making its entrance with what could charitably be called confidence and less charitably be called aggressive indifference to the harbor regulations, its guns announcing its presence in the way that generally persuaded people to clear the way.
The two escort warships stationed in the harbor stayed exactly as still and silent as objects that had never been intended to fire on anyone.
"Annie," Lami said, very much on board with how this day was going, "we have excellent timing."
She was already moving.
Annie, newly appointed to the rank of first mate and in possession of exactly enough stubbornness to carry her through situations her sense recommended she avoid, pulled the skull flag out of the ground, hoisted it onto her shoulder, and ran after her captain.
From the earring, Ritsu watched.
There was something genuinely pleasing about this. He couldn't have said exactly what it was — the momentum of it, perhaps, or the way this girl who had been left to die in a burning hospital ten years ago was now running toward whatever came next with a pirate flag on her shoulder and no particular plan. He turned a thought over briefly, reached a decision, and let a small seed of chakra drop into Annie's body as she passed beneath where his awareness hovered.
This was, at this point, trivially easy for him. The past six years had given him complete mastery over how he distributed the chakra available to him. This drop was genuinely nothing — an expenditure so small as to be effectively free.
What came from it would not be predictable. He had not predicted the Sharingan in Lami. He was curious what surprise Annie would produce, when and if it came.
The pirate ship had docked by the time Lami reached the harbor. The flag on its mast was black, and the design on it was a scarecrow's skull, long-necked and slightly unsettling, with two crossed nails where the crossed bones or swords of most pirate flags would have been.
Recognition arrived.
"The Magician. Hawkins."
She knew the name. She had spent years in the North Blue gathering information, and the top-ranked rookies were the kind of information that circulated even without deliberate effort. Basil Hawkins — the Magician — held a bounty of seventy-five million Berries and was, by general consensus among the people who tracked these things, the most dangerous new pirate the North Blue had produced in years.
She believed the second spot belonged to someone called Drake, though she hadn't retained the full name.
She looked at the ship. It was distinctive — the scarecrow figurehead with a nail driven through its skull gave it a personality that most vessels lacked, and the whole ensemble had the feel of something that had been designed to put people off approaching.
"Good ship," she said to nobody in particular. "A little grim, but it has character."
The pirates coming down the gangway found her standing directly in their path.
"Move along, girl. Before this gets unpleasant for you."
The crew member with the cleaver was doing his best to look threatening, which was reasonably successful given that he had a cleaver.
"I'm looking at my ship," Lami said.
He processed this for a second and visibly decided that whatever she meant, it wasn't his problem. He opened his mouth for a second attempt at intimidation.
A figure emerged from the ship above them on the gangway, and the crew member's attention immediately shifted.
Lami had seen many things in the past ten years.
She had not seen anything quite like Faust.
He walked upright, which was the first remarkable thing. His build was that of a large person rather than an animal, though everything else about him was unambiguously cat — black fur, a thick cloak draped across his shoulders, and a pair of golden eyes with the particular quality of attention that cats brought to things they were evaluating from a position of supreme confidence. He was the Hawkins Pirates' second-in-command, and he moved like someone who had never had reason to doubt that assessment.
He was the most magnificent cat she had ever seen.
"KITTY!"
Lami waved at him with both arms.
The assembled pirates went completely still.
Every one of them had sailed with Faust. Not one of them had ever heard him called that.
The kind-faced middle-aged pirate with the scarred jaw — the one whose expression was permanently fixed at fierce but whose actual personality trended toward gentle — stepped between Lami and the object of her enthusiasm.
"Lord Faust, she doesn't mean anything by it, please don't take it personally—"
Faust had already passed him.
He stopped in front of Lami, looked down at her from his full height, and took his time completing the evaluation.
"Can I touch your paws?" Lami asked.
"No."
His voice was low and unhurried. Unquestionably male.
Lami's expression fell in a way that was entirely sincere. The rejection hit her harder than being shot at.
"What's going on out there?"
The voice came from above them, calm in a way that suggested calm was this person's natural operating condition rather than something they had to work at.
A young man came down the gangway. His hair was gold and fell past his shoulders with the kind of effortless elegance that annoyed people who had to work to look half as good. He was tall and lean. Six short black vertical marks were tattooed across his forehead, and a black cross sat at the hollow of his throat. He looked at the situation on the dock with the expression of someone who had seen stranger things and filed them under tolerable.
Someone filled him in quickly. He looked at Lami.
Basil Hawkins. Captain of the Hawkins Pirates, the Magician, seventy-five million Berries and the unchallenged top rank among the North Blue's rising generation. He was twenty years old, give or take, and he had arrived in the world's estimation by being quietly and efficiently better at what he did than almost everyone he encountered.
In the moment he looked at Lami, something shifted behind his expression.
The premonition hit him like cold water — sudden, total, arresting. It was the sensation of standing at the edge of something without being able to see the bottom, of a threat that did not have a visible shape but was present and significant and getting closer. He had never felt it quite this intensely about anyone he had met at a harbor.
He processed this and let none of it show on his face.
"You're the Magician," Lami said, in the tone of someone confirming information rather than asking a question. "Hello. My name is Trafalgar Lami. I'm going to need you to join my crew — you and your people and your ship."
The dock was quiet.
Every pirate present was in the middle of a thought they couldn't quite complete.
"I especially like the big cat," Lami added helpfully. "So I think you should all come work for me."
She said it with the complete sincerity of someone who had thought this through and found it obvious.
Hawkins regarded her for approximately three seconds. Then the thing that might have been surprise retreated behind his composure and he spoke in the same unhurried tone he used for everything.
"Lami, was it? I don't know what's wrong with you, but I'm going to tell you this once: I have no interest in serving anyone. You should leave. Right now. Before this day becomes significantly worse for you."
He meant it as a reasonable exit.
Lami formed the seals.
Fire Style: Fireball Jutsu.
The fireball crossed the distance between them in approximately the time it took for everyone watching to realize it had been launched, struck Hawkins square in the chest, and bloomed into a sphere of fire that washed over him completely.
The watching pirates flinched.
The fire cleared.
Hawkins stood in it without a mark on him.
To his left, a crew member sat down very suddenly, then lay down, then did not get up again. His body was scorched in a pattern that corresponded precisely to where the fire had traveled, and the breath had already left him by the time the last of the flames died out.
Nobody screamed. That was perhaps the most unsettling part — the pirates around him had seen this before, which meant they knew what had just happened, and that knowledge sat in the dock's cold air like a third presence.
*******************
Chapter 278: Hawkins Falls in an Instant
"He transfers damage to others."
Lami frowned.
That was inconvenient. If every member of the crew was serving as a potential substitute for Hawkins, then killing Hawkins would require working through all of them first. The math on that was straightforward and unpleasant.
She had no particular moral objection to killing pirates. But the middle-aged man who had tried to get her to leave three separate times, and who had then turned around and apologized to Faust on her behalf — that one she had no interest in sacrificing for someone else's sins.
"What are you, exactly?"
Hawkins studied her with a gaze that had gone very still and very careful. The Fruit's ability had worked — the transfer had happened — but the fire that should have been outside him had not stayed outside him. The sensation of being burned had remained, seared into him without the wound to account for it. That pain had his full attention.
He had never encountered anything that felt quite like this.
Whatever this girl was, she had not appeared in any of the intelligence he collected, which meant she had either been invisible until recently or had come from somewhere the usual networks didn't cover.
"Trafalgar Lami," she said.
Something flickered at the edge of recognition and then didn't resolve. He had heard that name somewhere. He pushed at the memory and found it wouldn't come loose on demand. He let it go.
"What do you actually want, Lami?"
He didn't believe the recruitment pitch had been literal. People who showed up at harbors demanding entire pirate crews pledge themselves were either deranged or using the demand as cover for something else. Either way, the real objective was somewhere underneath it.
"Originally I was going to take all of you," Lami said, with the frankness of someone reporting a change in logistics rather than issuing a threat. "But you're willing to let your own crew members die for you, and I don't want to work with someone like that." She paused. "I also don't want to kill people who don't deserve it."
Her gaze moved.
It didn't go to the black cat.
It went to the middle-aged pirate who had spent the last several minutes quietly trying to help her while ostensibly threatening her.
"So. New plan. You take the rest of your people and leave. He and the ship are mine."
"You think I'm going to simply accept that?"
Whatever patience Hawkins had extended through the exchange had reached its limit. The contempt in her tone — not even contempt, really, just the complete absence of any concern about his reaction — had found a nerve in him that patience could only cover for so long. His chakra — or whatever this world called the power that ran through him — moved.
Demon Aspect.
His body shed its human shape. The height came first, then the texture, the human contours of face and limb giving way to something else — straw packed into a man-shaped form, long fingers ending in points like nails, the whole structure looming over the surrounding crowd like exactly what his flag advertised. It was a devil of a scarecrow, looking down at everything below it.
This was the Straw-Straw Fruit, Paramecia class: Basil Hawkins, remade into something that could take any damage and pass it on.
Lami's eyes shifted.
The Sharingan was already taking it in — seeing the flow of power through him the way it saw everything, the force woven through him in the way that only she and Ritsu could observe from the outside. She had seen something like it in Hound, less clear then, only a glimpse of something running beneath the surface of his ability. This was more exposed.
In the earring, Ritsu watched.
He saw more than she did. He saw the power's movement through Hawkins with the precision of someone reading a text, and underneath the mechanics of the ability he caught something else — a quality to the energy itself, a shimmer like light through glass, colors shifting and overlapping in a way that had nothing to do with any system he had ever studied before. It was beautiful in the way that strange things sometimes were, and it told him something about the fundamental nature of what this world contained.
He wanted a complete specimen to study. An intact Devil Fruit, before it had been consumed. That observation could wait.
The fight in front of him didn't require his involvement.
Hawkins had raised his transformed hand and was bringing it down toward Lami's head, nail-like fingers aimed at something he intended to be a decisive strike.
He was also, without thinking about it, looking directly at her.
The crimson caught him.
Demonic Illusion: Shackling Stakes.
The hand came down and stopped. Thirty centimeters from the top of Lami's head, the straw fingers locked in place. Hawkins stood with his arm extended and his bulk bent forward and did not move again, frozen in the posture of a scarecrow that had been left in a field and forgotten.
The entire dock went very quiet.
Every member of the Hawkins Pirates stared at the tableau in front of them. The speed of it was the most disorienting part — their captain had transformed, had attacked, and had lost without any visible exchange. The whole sequence had taken less time than it took to process.
The relief that moved through them was real, even if they didn't voice it. Hawkins captured meant they were not being called upon to die in his place. That was the one positive reading of the situation available to them.
Faust's hand rested on his sword hilt. It stayed there. He looked at the girl who had just frozen his captain mid-strike and ran his own assessment — his instincts, which were good and well-maintained, told him that all available options led to outcomes worse than the current one. He stood still.
The middle-aged pirate stepped forward.
"Lord Faust is decent," he said. "Captain Hawkins isn't great with people but he doesn't target ordinary civilians — we go after corrupt money, rich people who've done wrong. And yeah, everybody here knows what they are to the Captain." He spread his hands, nothing aggressive in the gesture. "But a lot of us wouldn't have made it this far without him finding us when he did. That counts for something."
Lami looked at him.
"What's your name?"
"Borick." He blinked, apparently not having expected the question. Then the words came freely, the way they do for people who haven't been asked about themselves in a while. "Thirty-five. Used to be a shipwright. Built a good ship, noble took it, left me and everyone who worked for me with debt we couldn't clear. Hawkins found us before the buyers showed up. I've been keeping the Malice Wolf running since."
"A shipwright." Lami nodded with the satisfaction of someone checking an unexpected item off a list. "Good. Come with me. If you do, I'll let the rest of them go."
Borick was quiet for exactly one second. Then: "Alright."
He had made the calculation already and was comfortable with the result. Hawkins had given him a future when he had been about to run out of future, and he had spent that gift as one did — gratefully, and without expecting it to last forever. His connection to the Hawkins Pirates had always had a ceiling on it, and the ceiling was now visible from where he stood. You could fear dying for someone and still be honest about the limits of your loyalty.
Faust said nothing as Borick stepped away. He didn't have to. His silence was its own answer, and his gesture to the crew members still aboard the ship to come down to the dock was a concession to what had just been made clear. He watched Lami and Borick and Annie board the Malice Wolf.
Annie had arrived at the dock in the condition of someone who had recently run a distance her body was not prepared for, but the chakra seed Ritsu had dropped into her was doing something quiet and persistent that kept her on her feet.
Lami paused at the gangway.
"Teacher. Can you sever the connection between Borick and Hawkins?"
"You don't need to." Ritsu's voice came through the earring without urgency. "It has a range limit. Create enough distance and whatever Hawkins left on him will dissipate on its own. The ability requires the original source to maintain it."
From the vantage of the earring he could see exactly how Hawkins' ability worked on the people it touched — a ghost of his influence threaded through their bodies, parasitic but not permanent, drawing on him to sustain itself. Distance would starve it.
Annie absorbed this exchange with the equanimity she had been developing toward unusual things.
Borick knew ships. He knew which of the remaining crew were worth taking — the ones with useful skills, people who had ended up on the Malice Wolf the same way he had and would not mourn a change of employer. Eleven more came aboard: a doctor, a cook, a helmsman, a lookout, and several others who between them covered the practical requirements of keeping a mid-sized vessel moving.
The lookout pulled the Hawkins Pirates' flag down from the mast with the unhurried dexterity of someone who had done it hundreds of times, and handed it down to Faust on the dock below.
Lami's flag went up.
The black cloth caught the wind and snapped taut, and the skull's two painted crimson eyes looked out over the harbor toward the open sea.
The Malice Wolf left port.
The flag shrank with the distance. The people watching from the dock watched it go.
Some time after the ship had passed beyond comfortable visibility, Hawkins' consciousness broke back into the world.
His hand completed its downward sweep and met nothing.
He straightened, looked around, took stock. Lami was not present. The Malice Wolf was not present. What was present was the harbor, his crew, and Faust standing in front of him with an expression that contained a great deal of information.
"The fight is over," Faust said.
Hawkins released the Demon Aspect. His body settled back into its usual shape.
Faust told him what had happened after the genjutsu landed. Hawkins listened without interruption and then was quiet for a while.
The damage was bounded. Losing the ship was a logistical problem rather than a structural one — their fighting capacity was largely intact, the majority of the crew was present, and acquiring a vessel was the kind of task that presented some difficulty but not insurmountable difficulty. The Hawkins Pirates would be operational again within a reasonable timeframe.
This was the practical reading.
The other reading — that he had been defeated in approximately three seconds by a teenager at a harbor in a kingdom he had not planned to stay in long — sat less comfortably.
"Trafalgar Lami." He said the name aloud, and the second time he said it, the recognition that had been hovering at the edge before finally landed.
"The surname," he said.
Faust looked at him. "What about it?"
"I've heard it. The Death Surgeon — North Blue, new this year. His name is Trafalgar Law, if I remember correctly."
Faust's ears shifted slightly. The name was familiar from a passing conversation at a tavern somewhere — not memorable enough to have stuck with clarity, but present. "Trafalgar Law and Trafalgar Lami," he said. "That's a family connection."
"Almost certainly."
Hawkins' eyes had gone the way eyes went when the person behind them was working through something they didn't like the shape of.
Faust watched his captain's expression with the particular attention of someone who had seen it lead to poor decisions before.
"You're thinking about finding the Death Surgeon," Faust said.
"Is there a problem with that?"
"Yes." Faust scratched the side of his face with one claw. "I think the problem is that the Death Surgeon is probably not significantly weaker than his sister. We might have just seen a preview of the entire family."
The bluntness was characteristic. It was also, Hawkins privately acknowledged, accurate. He had nothing to base an argument on — the evidence available was not encouraging.
He closed his fist and said nothing.
The question of how to defend against an ability that operated through eye contact, without warning and without visible preparation, occupied his thoughts for some time after that.
Within a few days, the story of the Hawkins Pirates losing their ship to a girl named Trafalgar Lami had begun to circulate through the drinking establishments and information networks of the North Blue.
*******************
Chapter 279: An Encounter at Reverse Mountain — A Meeting of D
Hawkins had issued a silence order quickly, and Lami had no interest in advertising the incident herself, but enough people had been standing on that dock to ensure the story traveled. It was through the Den Den Mushi network within hours.
The North Blue reacted with considerable energy.
Everyone wanted to know who had beaten the Magician.
The Navy, for their part, saw an opportunity and took it. They released a wanted poster for Trafalgar Lami, timed to ride the wave of public attention. The stated charge was not the noble killings — that story couldn't be publicized without raising questions the noble families had strongly requested never be raised — and it was not the theft of the Malice Wolf. What they settled on was a fabricated count of town-sacking and civilian robbery, the standard all-purpose accusation for someone they needed on a poster.
The epithet they chose was Demon Eye.
The bounty was set at ninety-five million Berries.
There was an argument for going straight to a hundred million, but the people who set these numbers understood their audience: a first-time bounty that crossed that particular threshold sent a certain kind of message to a certain kind of pirate, and the message was not fear. They settled on ninety-five as the number that communicated serious threat without becoming a trophy. The distinction was finer than it sounded.
The poster circulated through the North Blue's networks with the speed of anything that gave people something to talk about. Among the pirate community, a bounty that size from a first-time posting was remarkable enough to generate genuine speculation about what this girl had actually done to earn it, and more than a few people with smaller bounties spent time wondering what path led from wherever they were to wherever she was.
In a North Blue town, a submarine broke the surface.
The crew emerged loud and immediately argumentative about who was going to eat and drink first and in what quantity. Most of them wore matching white coveralls with the same logo at various positions. The young man at the center of the group wore a spotted fur hat and a black coat and carried a long blade under one arm, and he walked with the silence of someone who had decided long ago that most conversations didn't require his participation.
His name was Trafalgar Law. Heart Pirates captain. The Surgeon of Death. Forty-eight million Berries.
He moved through the town without speaking until one of his crew stopped in front of a public board.
"Hey hey hey — look at this bounty. Ninety-five million, that's almost twice the Captain's — and this name — Trafalgar Lami — that's kind of like the Captain's, right?"
The crew member with the white mask that covered everything except his eyes and mouth stood with his head tilted at the board, mildly delighted by the coincidence.
The words reached Law on a completely different level than the ambient noise of his crew.
"White Swan. What did you say?"
Law turned and crossed the distance in three fast strides. White Swan stepped aside and waved at the board without fanfare.
Law's eyes found the poster.
The face was different from how he remembered her. The eyes were crimson where they used to be dark, and there was a quality in the set of her expression that had not been there when she was six. But the structure of her face was their mother's, and there was nothing any amount of time or change could do to that.
He knew her immediately. Without question. With absolute certainty.
Everything he had been holding in for ten years found the one crack it needed.
He made no effort to stop it.
His crew had approximately half a second of stunned silence before they understood what was happening, and then they moved — quietly, without being told — and formed a loose circle around their captain, blocking the view from the street with their bodies while he stood at the board and wept in a way that had nothing careful in it.
Nobody spoke.
About five minutes passed.
Law got himself back together by degrees. He wiped his face with the back of one hand. He turned and looked at the circle his crew had made around him, and they looked back at him.
"I need to know where she is."
"Captain. Is she—"
"My sister."
The crew absorbed this.
"I knew it," someone said. "That surname is too rare to be a coincidence."
They divided up immediately and went in different directions, gathering what information they could from the town. Two hours later they were back at the board.
Law consolidated what they had brought him.
It wasn't much. Nobody knew where the Demon Eye had gone after taking the Malice Wolf. There was no trail.
He stood with this information for a moment and found that the urgency he had felt an hour ago had settled into something he could work with. The poster told him what he needed to know most: she was alive. She was healthy enough to defeat people worth ninety-five million Berries. The Amber Lead hadn't killed her, which meant she had found a solution to a problem that was supposed to be unsolvable.
Whatever had happened to her, the outcome was not bad. He could be patient.
"Captain." The pink-haired crew member in the hunting cap — Shachi — kept her eyes down. "I'm sorry. We couldn't find anything useful."
Penguin, beside her, had the hat that said PENGUIN on it and the expression of someone who felt personally responsible for news that wasn't his fault.
"Shachi. Look at me."
Law waited until she did. "I wasn't thinking clearly before. Lami is a pirate now. You don't find pirates by asking around. We need people whose job is finding them."
"Specialists?" Penguin looked puzzled.
"Exactly."
The look in Law's eyes was the kind that arrived when he had decided something and was done examining whether it was a good idea.
Several days later, a North Blue Navy branch was having a very bad afternoon.
The training yard was occupied by several hundred Navy personnel. They were all alive. None of them could move — their limbs had been rearranged with the cheerful efficiency of someone who considered this a straightforward task, and the most any of them could manage was lying on the ground and looking at the sky.
Shachi and Penguin stood near the edge of the yard, watching things happen.
"Shachi," Penguin said. "Is the Captain maybe a little—"
"What you should have said that was before he started. Which you didn't."
"I know, but—"
"Because if you had said it then, we would have known in advance whether the Captain was going to care." She paused. "He wasn't going to care. He still won't care. He wants to find Lami and everything else is a detail."
Penguin looked at the several hundred people on the ground and decided this was an accurate summary.
Across the yard, Law was holding a head.
The head belonged to the branch colonel, who was still attached to his body via his neck. Law had separated them temporarily and was conducting a conversation at eye level with the relevant part.
"Tell me where Trafalgar Lami is. Give me that, and your people live. Otherwise—" He let the alternative remain undefined, which was often more effective than defining it.
The colonel cycled through fury, cursing, more fury, and eventually the particular silence of someone who has run the numbers.
"We don't have her exact location," he said finally. "After she took the Hawkins Pirates' ship, she was tracked heading toward Reverse Mountain. She's going to the Grand Line."
"Why the Grand Line?"
"You really don't know?"
"Know what."
The colonel hesitated for two seconds, then decided there was no reason to protect information from the person currently holding his head. "From what I've gathered, it's about Flevance. She killed four former Flevance nobles in the North Blue. The remaining ones — royals, senior nobility — they're all in the Grand Line somewhere. I'm a branch colonel. I know what I know because a classmate of mine works at headquarters. The details I don't have."
Law was very still for a moment.
His sister. Carrying the same rage he carried, directed at the same people. Alone, apparently, or whatever was close to it. Already working through it.
He put the colonel's head back where it belonged and stood up.
"Bepo, Shachi, Penguin — move quickly. Take everything useful from this base and get it on the sub. Ammunition, food, water — anything that fits. We're going to the Grand Line."
The Heart Pirates moved with the energy of a crew that had been waiting for a destination to commit to, and they emptied the base's supply rooms with the thoroughness of people who did not expect to come back this way soon.
At Reverse Mountain.
The Malice Wolf had been through considerable cosmetic changes since leaving Lubni'er — repainted, some structural modifications, the figurehead altered enough to reduce recognizability while preserving the ship's basic character. It was climbing now, carried upward on one of the four great currents that converged here.
Reverse Mountain's actual name was Mount Reverse, and the legend attached to it was real: four rivers from four seas gathered at its base at certain times and ran upward against their natural inclination, carrying ships from the four Blues through to the Grand Line on the other side. It was one of the few entry points that didn't require navigating the Calm Belt and whatever waited in it, and the price was the mountain itself — turbulent, narrow, unforgiving of poor ship handling.
It also, inevitably, produced collisions.
Lami was on the East Blue current when the East Blue ship came at her from the East Blue channel.
There was no time to do anything meaningful, and the one meaningful option available to her — calling for help — felt disproportionate for a problem that could theoretically be solved by good seamanship. The seamanship problem was that the current removed most of the variables that good seamanship usually addressed.
The ships met with considerable enthusiasm.
The other vessel absorbed most of the structural consequences. The Malice Wolf gave up its bow, which was significant but survivable. The East Blue ship lost the ability to float, which was more significant.
What came immediately after was the interesting part.
A young man in an orange cowboy hat was standing on the surface of the turbulent water, which was not something the water seemed to have opinions about. He moved through the chaos with the ease of someone who had agreed with his body long ago that impossible things were just things that hadn't been tried yet, catching falling crew members one by one and tossing them up onto the Malice Wolf's deck with the accuracy and frequency of someone sorting cargo.
"Captain, should we—" Annie was holding a knife in a grip that had improved considerably over the past weeks. The question was asked with genuine willingness.
"No." Ritsu's voice from the earring was easy and unhurried.
"Yes, Lord Ritsu."
The crew had worked out the arrangement early on. There was someone of considerable power living in the white crystal teardrop on Lami's left ear. His name was Ritsu. They called him Lord Ritsu, which he hadn't objected to, and they treated his voice on operational matters with the same weight they gave Lami's.
Lami's eyes were on the young man still in the water. The Sharingan was seeing something she hadn't expected to find in a person.
"Teacher. There's something inside him."
"Your perception has grown. Yes. That young man is carrying something of mine that I lost. I genuinely didn't expect to encounter my lost possessions like this."
"You lost something?"
"Nine things, total. I assumed they had found comfortable existences somewhere. I didn't think they would voluntarily take up the kind of life they always hated."
The observation held an undercurrent of genuine wonder, the kind that came from finding the universe had arranged a surprise more interesting than anything you would have designed yourself.
The young man made a final leap from the water to the deck, landing with his last rescued crew member over one shoulder, straightening easily, and looking around at the unfamiliar faces with the smile of someone who considered the current situation to be fine.
"Hey everyone! I'm Portgas D. Ace."
Lami blinked.
Something shifted in her memory — a piece of information she had been holding without immediate relevance to anything, now suddenly oriented.
"Trafalgar D. Water Lami," she said, and heard herself say the middle part of her name for perhaps the first time in years.
Ace's expression went from cheerful to genuinely surprised in under a second. "You're a D too?"
"Yes." She crossed her arms and moved on. "Nice to meet you, Ace. Now — your people are on my ship. What exactly are you planning to do about that?"
*******************
Chapter 280: Epilogue
"As you can see," Ace said, "our ship is wrecked."
"I can see that."
"We don't really have anywhere to go at the moment."
"What does that have to do with me?"
"Hey — you do understand how our ship got wrecked, right?"
Ace stared at her with the expression of someone who had expected basic cause and effect to be more universally acknowledged than it apparently was.
Lami looked at him for a moment. He was about her age, she thought. His face had the quality of someone who had never seriously entertained the possibility of a bad outcome. She found this more reassuring than irritating.
"You can stay on the ship," she said. "In exchange, you follow my orders."
"No problem. As long as it doesn't go against my principles, I'll do any work you need."
He agreed with the ease of someone for whom this was a straightforward exchange.
The ship was already descending — the current carrying them down the steep channel on the far side of Reverse Mountain, shooting them forward into the Grand Line with the confidence of a cannon. They didn't see the lighthouse keeper's island. They didn't encounter the whale that watched over the Twin Capes. The crew was busy holding onto things.
In the earring, Ritsu saw both — the enormous shape moving deep under the water and the strong and unusual presence living inside it. He said nothing. Some encounters needed to happen at their own time. He let the ship carry them forward.
The lighthouse keeper felt the ship pass overhead and registered that several of the people aboard had unusual energy about them. He decided he didn't need to go up and look.
The Grand Line announced itself over the following three days with six separate natural disasters — two blizzards, two violent storms, a waterspout, and a tsunami — and the tsunami at the end was what finally reduced the Malice Wolf to components.
They washed up in the territory of the King of Lizards, Hanafuda — a Warlord of the Sea who had held that title for some years and intended to hold it for several more. The encounter was not peaceful.
Ace released a portion of the power sealed inside him — the Four-Tails, one of Ritsu's nine lost things, its heat manifesting in Ace's hands as fire with enough force behind it to reshape geography. Together with Lami, he was sufficient.
Lami's eyes changed mid-fight.
The Mangekyo Sharingan had been approaching for some time, but it took the right kind of pressure to open it all the way. What emerged in those eyes was the technique she would come to know as Kamui — the warping of space, the ability to send anything she chose into an unreachable dimension, to pull it back or leave it there forever.
Hanafuda did not survive the engagement.
In the aftermath, watching the wreckage settle, Ritsu understood something about the force he had been observing in Devil Fruit users. The power was not arbitrary. It was the crystallization of something aspirational — human longing for forms and abilities nature had not provided, given physical expression through a mechanism that operated against the grain of the natural world. The nine lost things had understood this intuitively and chosen accordingly.
Ace, who had arrived at the Grand Line without a particularly clear sense of what he intended to do once he got there, decided he would help Lami with what she was here for.
They sailed to Sabaody Archipelago.
The former nobles of Flevance had settled there — royals and senior aristocracy who had walked away from a kingdom they had destroyed and found comfortable positions on the archipelago's upper levels. Lami and Ace worked through them systematically and completely. Several Celestial Dragons who happened to be present at the wrong moment were included in the accounting, which was two deaths the World Government could not allow to go unanswered.
The Admirals came. Kizaru was occupied elsewhere, so the response that arrived was Akainu and Aokiji — two people who between them had enough power to reshape any battlefield they chose to stand on.
Lami brought her Susanoo. Ace brought the Four-Tails at full release. It wasn't enough. The gap between what they could produce and what two peak-level Admirals could produce was real and substantial, and it asserted itself.
Ritsu stepped in. Not to win the fight — to buy time. He did what was needed, held what needed to be held long enough for Law's ship to arrive and extract them both. Lami used Kamui for the escape.
The revenge was complete.
Lami found that completing it had not emptied the purpose from her life. She wanted to see the thing that had permitted all of this — the World Government's structure, the system that protected nobles who had killed her family and hundreds of thousands of ordinary people — taken apart. That required more strength than she currently had. It required Ritsu to continue recovering. It gave both of them a direction to move in.
Lami, Ace, and Law went to the New World together.
They fought through it. Big Mom was the largest obstacle, and they brought her down — Ritsu involved himself directly, which was not something he did casually, and the result was Big Mom's defeat. From her, Ritsu recovered the Two-Tails and passed it to Lami to add to her strength.
From Big Mom's Soul-Soul Fruit, Ritsu extracted the ability to draw life force from living things. This combined with the Tokoyo Insect in a way that amplified both — the two techniques feeding each other, the sum considerably larger than either part. The wounds in the deepest layers of his spirit, which had been healing imperceptibly since the universe crossing, accelerated toward closure. When enough had healed, the Physical Regeneration at Level 6 did the rest, and Ritsu built himself a new body.
He began working alone.
The Tokoyo Insect, at sufficient development, could strip Devil Fruit power from a person the way the Dark-Dark Fruit stripped it — the mechanism was different but the outcome was comparable. He used this ability systematically, gathering the extracted powers and sealing them into his own body, one per bone. Human beings have two hundred and six bones. Each one became a repository. The final count was two hundred and six Devil Fruits fused into a single body that still looked, in its outward shape, exactly like a person.
Which it technically wasn't, in any meaningful sense. But the shape hadn't changed.
He came to Mary Geoise.
The God Knights fell. The Five Elders fell. Im — the figure at the World Government's unreachable center, who had survived uncountable years through the Immortality Operation that only one Fruit in the world could perform — yielded up that immortality.
Ritsu's existence moved up another level.
With his own power, without effort or strain, he opened Yomotsu Hirasaka.
The door appeared, and he stepped through it.
The ninja world was different from how he had left it.
Konoha was peaceful. The Seventh Hokage was Hyuga Ryuchi — his son, who had been five years old the last time Ritsu had seen him, and who had grown into someone capable of carrying what his father had left behind. The ANBU's head was Uchiha Sasuke. The security forces were led by Namikaze Naruto. Three young people holding up the village's sky.
Ritsu took his son and descended into the underworld.
They found Uchiha Aika's soul.
They brought her back.
The story ends here.
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yea a shitty ending.....check out my other fics