The power was a storm trapped in his bones. Travis stood on the cliff's edge, the taste of ashes and oblivion still thick on his tongue, feeling the wild, grey energy churn inside him. It was chaos given form—a stark, violent contrast to the steady, golden anchor of the king's legacy and Avalon's blessing. They warred within him, order and annihilation, a king and a destroyer sharing one skin.
Lin's cry, sharp with terror, cut through the internal tumult.
Mission. Subordinates. Justice.
The code reasserted itself, a cold lens focusing the storm. The philosophical stand in the yard, the patient grinding—it all led to this moment. He had been given a command, however poisoned the intent. He had accepted it. Equal Justice meant responsibility for the men under him, even the unwilling ones. Even the cowardly ones. He had led them into this trap. He would lead them out.
He turned from the cliff, his senses heightened. The Insight into Oblivion's Edge was gone, consumed in that first, desperate activation. But the principle remained, etched into his new understanding of the world. The power of the Destruction-Destruction Fruit was a raw, screaming potential. He could feel it wanting to burst out, to unmake everything it touched. Controlling it would be like trying to steer a tidal wave with a teaspoon.
He moved, not with the clumsy haste of before, but with a new, predatory silence. The enhanced durability from Avalon's fragment let him ignore the scrapes and bruises. The kingly instincts mapped the terrain, finding the most efficient path toward the sounds of struggle.
He found them in a small clearing. Lin was backed against a gnarled pine, holding his issued knife in a shaking hand. Before him were three pirates, laughing, their weapons held loosely. They were toying with him.
"C'mon, little mouse," one sneered, a man with a missing front tooth. "Drop the toothpick. We'll make it quick."
"Or don't!" another cackled. "More fun for us!"
Travis didn't announce himself. He stepped into the clearing, his footsteps silent on the damp pine needles. The pirates' laughter died as they sensed the change in the air. They turned.
He looked different. It wasn't just the grim set of his jaw. A faint, almost imperceptible grey haze seemed to cling to him, a heat-shimmer of contained annihilation. His eyes, in the gloom, held no fear, only a terrible, calculating calm.
"Another one!" the gap-toothed pirate grinned, though it didn't reach his eyes. "The puppy came back for his friend. How sweet."
"Let him go," Travis said, his voice low. It carried. It wasn't a request.
The lead pirate spat. "Or what? You gonna give us a lecture, too?"
Travis's hand twitched. The storm within him surged, eager. He focused, not on unleashing it, but on shaping it. The Insight had shown him a point of negation. He needed something less… absolute. Something tactical.
He raised his hand, palm out, toward a thick branch overhanging the pirates. He didn't understand the mechanics, only the intent. He willed the destructive energy not to erase, but to shatter.
A pulse of invisible force, tinged with grey, shot from his palm. It wasn't a beam or a blast; it was a wave of concentrated entropy that traveled through the air.
It struck the branch.
There was no explosion. The branch didn't catch fire or turn to dust. Instead, it simply disintegrated. Not into splinters, but into a fine, grey powder that rained down on the pirates like morbid snow. The structural integrity of the wood was utterly and silently annihilated along a perfect, clean line.
The pirates stared, open-mouthed, at the unnatural snowfall, then at the perfectly smooth, sheared-off stump where a thick branch had been. The cackling one made a small, wet sound of terror.
"Devil Fruit user…" the gap-toothed pirate whispered, his bravado dissolving. He'd heard tales. This wasn't fire or ice or stretching rubber. This was something that simply made things… stop being.
"Last chance," Travis said, taking a step forward. The grey haze around his hand intensified. "Leave. Now."
They broke. They didn't run toward their camp or their ship; they simply fled into the deeper woods, away from the thing that unmade the world.
Travis lowered his hand, a wave of dizziness hitting him. The single, controlled use had drained him, mentally more than physically. The power was a ravenous beast, and his will was the only cage. He turned to Lin.
The boy was staring at him, his knife hanging limp. His face was pale, tears cutting clean tracks through the dirt. He wasn't looking at Travis with gratitude. He was looking at him with awe and raw, primal fear.
"P-Pendragon… your hand…"
"It's a Devil Fruit power," Travis said simply, his voice returning to its normal timbre, though laced with fatigue. "We need to find the others and get off this island. Can you move?"
Lin nodded shakily, swallowing hard. The fear in his eyes slowly mixed with a dawning, desperate loyalty. Travis had come back. He had wielded a terrifying power not to conquer, but to protect him. In the economy of Lin's world, that was an unpayable debt.
"Groff ran that way," Lin pointed a trembling finger. "Pell… I don't know."
"We find Groff first. He's the most likely to get himself killed or captured."
They moved through the woods, Travis leading now with a quiet authority that Lin followed without question. They found Groff ten minutes later, not far from the original beach. He'd tripped over a root and twisted his ankle, and was currently trying to hide behind a rotten log, his face a mask of sweaty panic.
He flinched violently when Travis and Lin emerged from the brush. "Don't kill me!" he blubbered, not even registering it was them at first.
"Get up, Groff," Travis said, his tone leaving no room for argument. "We're leaving."
Groff stared, his eyes widening as he took in Travis's calm demeanor and Lin, alive and mostly unharmed. The story didn't compute with the chaos he'd fled from. "The pirates…"
"Are distracted. We're getting to the rowboat. Now. Can you walk?"
Groff tested his ankle, wincing. "I… I can hobble."
"Then hobble. Lin, support him on his other side."
It was a pathetic procession: the cynic limping and wincing, the coward trembling but determined, led by the calm destroyer. They reached the shingle beach where they'd left Pell and the rowboat.
Pell was gone. The rowboat was gone. Only deep gouges in the shingle showed where it had been hastily dragged back into the water.
"That… that coward!" Groff hissed, his fear momentarily swamped by betrayal. "He stole our way out!"
Travis felt a spike of cold anger, but it was short-lived. It was the predictable outcome. Pell had panicked and run, sealing their fate to save his own skin. The calculation was simple: with the Sea Sparrow still anchored a mile away, they were now stranded on an island with alerted pirates.
"Options?" Lin whispered, his voice small.
Travis looked out at the dark water, then back at the treeline where the glow of the pirate campfire was visible. His mind, honed by strategy games and sharpened by legacy, worked through the scenarios.
"We have one," he said, his gaze settling on the bulky shape of the pirate brigantine, the Sea Vulture, still anchored in the cove. It was now lit by lanterns, figures moving on deck—alert, but not yet coming ashore in force. They probably thought the remaining Marines were scattered and harmless.
"We're taking their ship."
Groff barked a hysterical laugh. "You're insane! There's at least ten of them left on board!"
"There were fifteen total," Travis corrected calmly. "Two fled from me. Three fled from Lin and me. We can assume a few stayed at the campfire. That leaves maybe eight on the ship, likely overconfident and waiting for their crewmates to bring back trophies. It's the only asset here that can get us home."
"And how do we get to it? Swim?" Groff spat.
Travis looked at the dark, churning water between them and the ship, over a hundred yards away. A Devil Fruit user's graveyard. He felt the sea's silent, profound rejection in his bones, a new and horrible vulnerability.
"We don't swim," he said. "We make them come to us. And we take their boat."
The plan was audacious, reliant on the pirates' greed and predictability. Using flint from their survival kits, Travis and Lin set a small, controlled fire well down the beach from their position, using damp wood to create a thick, conspicuous plume of smoke. To any watch on the Sea Vulture, it would look like survivors trying to signal or keep warm.
As predicted, a few minutes later, they heard the splash of oars. A single, longboat with four pirates was dispatched from the ship to investigate.
"Groff, Lin," Travis whispered as they hid behind a large driftwood log. "When they land and move toward the fire, you take the longboat. Get it ready to shove off. Don't wait for me."
"What are you going to do?" Lin asked, his eyes wide.
"I'm going to make sure they don't follow you."
He moved like a shadow as the pirates landed, grumbling and joking, and trudged up the beach toward the decoy fire. The moment their backs were turned, Groff and Lin scrambled for the longboat. Groff's hobble became a frantic, loping run.
A pirate heard the noise of shingle shifting and turned. "Hey! Over—"
Travis was already there. He didn't use the destructive power directly. He was too drained, and its use was still a wild gamble. Instead, he used the enhanced strength and reflexes granted by his fused physiologies. He moved with a knight's economy of motion, closing the distance before the pirate could finish his shout. His standard-issue knife flashed in the moonlight, not to kill, but to disarm, slashing across the pirate's wrist. The man screamed, his cutlass falling.
The other three pirates whirled, drawing weapons. They saw one young Marine, alone.
"Get him!"
They charged. Travis retreated, drawing them away from the water, toward the treeline. He parried a clumsy cutlass swing with his knife, the impact jarring his arm. He dodged another, feeling the wind of a third. He was outnumbered and outmatched in conventional skill. The legacy knowledge was there, but his body couldn't execute it at speed.
A cutlass tip grazed his ribs, slicing through his tunic and drawing a line of fire. He grunted, stumbling back.
On the beach, he heard the longboat scrape as Groff and Lin shoved it into the water.
The pirates heard it too. One glanced back. "They're stealing the boat!"
They tried to disengage, to run back to the water. Travis couldn't let them. If they reached the water, they'd raise the alarm on the Sea Vulture or shoot Groff and Lin in the water.
He planted his feet. The storm within him, agitated by the fight and his desperation, surged. He couldn't control a fine point. He could only unleash.
He thrust both palms forward, not at the pirates, but at the ground between them and the beach.
"Erase."
It was less a command and more a plea to the ravenous power inside.
A fan of grey energy, wide and crude, erupted from his hands. It didn't shoot forth; it simply manifested in the air and sank into the earth.
Where it touched, the world didn't explode. It vanished. A swath of sand, shingle, and bedrock, fifteen feet wide and three feet deep, simply ceased to exist, leaving a smooth, bowl-shaped depression of nothingness. The very air above it hummed with a deafening silence, a vacuum that sucked in sound and light for a terrifying second before nature rushed to fill the void with a gust of wind and a spray of seawater.
The pirates skidded to a halt, staring at the impossible trench that had just instantaneously appeared, cutting off their path to the beach. It wasn't fire or lightning. It was a hole where the world used to be.
They looked at Travis, who stood panting, his hands smoking with faint grey wisps, his eyes burning with exhausted will. He was a demon, a hole in reality shaped like a man.
They dropped their weapons and ran, not toward their ship, but into the woods, screaming.
Travis's knees buckled. The double use of his power, especially the last, crude blast, had emptied him. He felt hollowed out, his mind buzzing with static. He stumbled toward the new-made trench. On the other side, the longboat was in the water, Groff and Lin staring at him, their faces pale moons in the darkness.
Groff's expression was no longer cynical or fearful. It was the look of a man who has seen a god of endings and survived. Lin's was pure, unadulterated awe.
"The… the ship…" Travis managed, pointing a shaking finger toward the Sea Vulture. Its deck was in commotion, lanterns swinging. They'd seen or heard something. They were preparing to weigh anchor or fire cannons.
Groff, for the first time, moved with decisive efficiency. He and Lin hauled Travis into the longboat. Groff took the oars, rowing with a strength born of terror, not toward the distant Sea Sparrow, but straight for the Sea Vulture.
"What are you doing?!" Lin cried.
"They'll blow us out of the water if we run for ours!" Groff grunted between strokes. "Our only chance is to get on board before they're ready! Pendragon… can you do it again? Just once?"
Travis, slumped in the boat, felt the grey power stirring deep within, a slumbering volcano. It wasn't gone. It was replenishing, slowly. He nodded, a sharp, painful movement. "Once."
They reached the hull of the brigantine as shouts rained down from above. A face appeared over the rail, aiming a musket.
Travis stood up in the rocking boat, ignoring the vertigo. He looked up at the ship, this symbol of the chaos he was sworn to fight. He raised a single finger, pointing at the main anchor chain where it entered the hawsehole.
He didn't have the energy for a word. He simply focused every ounce of his will, every shred of the Insight's lingering echo, into a single, needle-thin concept: Sever.
A hair-thin line of grey light, silent and precise, lanced from his fingertip. It crossed the distance and touched the thick, tarred anchor chain.
A three-inch segment of the chain turned to inert, grey dust.
The chain, under the immense tension of holding the ship, exploded outward at the point of weakness. Links shattered with a deafening metallic scream. The entire anchor chain whiplashed through the hawsehole with the sound of a cannon shot, disappearing into the depths.
The Sea Vulture lurched violently, freed from its mooring, beginning to drift sideways with the current. Chaos erupted on deck as pirates scrambled, their attention ripped from the small boat below to the crisis of their drifting ship.
"Now!" Travis croaked, collapsing back into the longboat.
Groff didn't need telling. He pulled hard on the oars, driving them away from the chaotic brigantine, out into the open cove, toward the hidden crevice where the Sea Sparrow waited.
No pursuit came. The Sea Vulture was too busy trying to avoid crashing onto the rocks.
An hour later, under a cloud-shrouded moon, the Sea Sparrow slid out of Coffin Cove and into the open sea. Travis lay on the deck, utterly spent, staring at the stars. Groff manned the tiller, his hands steady, his gaze constantly flicking to Travis with newfound, wary respect. Lin tended to Travis's shallow cut and kept watch.
They had no pirate heads as proof. But they had something better: a story. Of a drifting, damaged pirate ship they could report. Of a mission technically accomplished through enemy neutralization.
And Travis had something more: a crew. Not a willing one, not a loyal one yet. But a crew that had seen his power and followed his command through hell. Groff, the cynic, had obeyed when it mattered. Lin, the coward, had held his ground.
He had faced his first true test, wielded destruction, and brought his men home. The first, bloody line of his legend was written not in philosophy, but in action. The Fleet Admiral's code had been tested in fire, and had held.
As Shells Town's lights appeared on the horizon, Travis knew everything had changed. Hackett and Captain Rourke had sent a philosopher to die. They would be getting a destroyer back. And his long, patient game had just acquired its first, terrifying piece.