In the end, the old man followed the Hats and Law's crew aboard his island-ship, after which everyone experienced a mind-bending journey through an enormous artificial channel inside the whale. Mind-bending not in the sense of an adrenaline rush, but because contemplating it could genuinely overwhelm the mind. Every member of Trafalgar Law's crew experienced exactly those feelings. Law himself possessed far more experience and treated everything with nearly the same calm as Luffy and Zoro. More than that, as a doctor, he began considering what he would have done in Crocus's place if required to treat someone equally enormous.
"This whale is even larger than I thought!" Yosaku exclaimed once all three vessels returned to fresh air, passing through another pair of enormous doors installed directly in the whale's side.
Unexpectedly, Usopp decided to share his feelings.
"You know, people, I've only been with you for a few months, but I've already seen so many unusual things that if I returned to my island and began describing everything, they'd consider me an even greater liar than before. Seriously, who in his right mind would believe I sailed inside a whale aboard a ship, through artificial channels made by some insane doctor?" The long-nosed young man's voice truly sounded disbelieving, as though even he could not believe himself.
"And we sailed over a mountain!" Yosaku smirked.
"And you saw a talking severed head!" Johnny immediately added.
"All in one day," Sanji smiled.
"And I told you that after living on your island all your life, you couldn't even imagine how vast the world is." A charming smile illuminated Nami's face.
"All of that is nothing!" Luffy suddenly declared, plainly dissatisfied with something.
"Captain?" Zoro asked.
"I want more!" the young man exclaimed, throwing up his hands. "I want more of everything, and better! A mountain—cool. A submarine—cool. Traffy—cool. A whale—one-use entertainment. But I want more, and something more interesting! Something completely mind-blowing!"
"For example?" Zoro did not so much as raise an eyebrow.
"How should I know? I simply want it!"
"Then what do you want from us?"
"From you? Nothing! But this whale is really irritating me!"
"What does it have to do with anything?" Zoro did not understand, nor was he alone.
"You just called it entertaining," Usopp added.
"One-use entertainment!" Luffy raised a finger. "And that one time has already passed, so now this whale irritates me!"
"And how exactly is it irritating you?" Nami involuntarily rolled her eyes.
Only a pathetic fifteen or twenty minutes earlier, the girl had been absolutely certain she would not forgive the young man for his latest 'joke' anytime soon. Now she could no longer find the strength for anger. It was all the fault of the damned joy that nothing had actually happened to Luffy and he remained alive and well—and of the young man himself. In the end, Luffy was Luffy. Nothing could be done about it. He had become this way long before meeting them and had no intention of changing—or improving. Naturally, a small resentment remained, and Nami intended to demand compulsory compensation from the young man one way or another.
"How is it irritating me?!" Luffy became so sincerely indignant that it seemed truth really stood on his side. "It ate me without permission! Not just anyone, but me personally! That cannot go unpunished!"
"Everything is clear with you." Nami sighed.
It truly was. Everyone in the family immediately understood that Luffy's displeasure had no basis at all. Another idea had simply 'shot into his head,' leaving them no choice except to accept it and wait. And supervise him. Definitely supervise him. Ordinary Luffy was enough for mass destruction and panic. When displeased, he could arrange something entirely outside the ordinary—even by his own standards. That was almost what happened. And as everyone later realized too late, they should have taken Luffy's words concerning his grievance against the whale far more seriously.
The instant the ships dropped anchor beside one of the two lighthouses at Twin Cape—one lighthouse for each cape—Luffy immediately headed directly toward the whale. By then the creature had calmed completely. Raising its gigantic, deeply scarred head from the water, it watched the activity upon the cape through sad eyes, each the size of a small mountain. One pupil alone was several times larger than the entire Going Merry. The first thing Luffy did upon meeting the whale personally was strike it directly across its scarred head. And not merely as a joke. He apparently used all his strength, because the fist coated in Armament Haki sent the whale directly to the seabed. At first, when Luffy shouted, "How dare you eat me?!" and jumped from shore toward the whale, his actions looked both comical and insane—at least to the Heart Pirates. After the blow swept the half-kilometer mass away like a feather, no one felt like laughing. It was like witnessing an ant knock an elephant from its feet. Old Crocus nearly died on the spot, as did the Heart Pirates in their entirety. Even half the Hats' eyes threatened to leave their sockets. Luffy had never demonstrated such strength to them.
"Next time you'll know better than to eat the Pirate King without permission!" the instantly cheerful Luffy said smugly, returning to shore through several rapid jumps. The already shaken Heart Pirates received another dose of shock, because the young man jumped by pushing directly against the air.
The whale needed less than a minute to recover from the strike and return to the surface. It immediately demonstrated its displeasure with a deafening roar—and deafening in the most literal sense. The whale's roar made earth and water tremble, bones vibrate, and created the impression that brains would soon begin flowing from ears.
"One more sound and I'll cut his throat!" Though Luffy's voice did not shake land and water, absolutely everyone heard him, including the whale. While it filled the surroundings with its roar, the young man wasted no time and immediately took old Crocus hostage. At that moment the family understood why, a little earlier, he had suddenly decided to put on his shoulder holster and revolvers. He promised to 'cut the throat' using one of those revolvers.
Luffy's thought process in choosing the hostage was not difficult to follow. Since the whale allowed the old man to install iron doors within its body and build water channels, it trusted him unconditionally. They were not casual acquaintances. Honestly, it was difficult to calculate immediately how many years Crocus had needed to accomplish everything described. For those reasons, the old man looked like a reasonable hostage. Once again, however, one could not rule out the possibility that Luffy had pressed one revolver's muzzle directly against Crocus's throat merely because he found it entertaining. He did not actually need a hostage at all. To those who knew the young man personally, that explanation appeared the most plausible. Any one of them could say with certainty that he did not fear the whale, meaning the hostage existed only for amusement.
"What are you do—" Crocus began, but Luffy immediately covered his mouth with one hand and prevented him from finishing.
Putting his most vile smile upon his face, the young man addressed the whale again.
"Cutting a throat with a pistol barrel is extremely difficult, so it will hurt him terribly, guaranteed!" In reality, cutting anyone's throat with a pistol barrel was fundamentally impossible, but Luffy always began despising logic when it stood in the way of his entertainment. "I guarantee his life only if you start fulfilling every one of our conditions! Understand?!" In response, a deafening roar shook the world again. An entire sea of hatred churned in the whale's eyes, yet remarkably, it remained motionless, unquestionably fearing for old Crocus's life. "I knew we'd reach an agreement!" the young man's satisfied voice rang out again. "Then listen to my conditions! We'll paint our flag on your head, after which you'll sink every ship that enters the Grand Line! All the seas must learn of the enormous killer whale serving the Straw Hat Pirates and guarding the entrance to the Grand Line! The whole world must know ab—oh, come on, Nami!" His final words sounded entirely normal, though slightly irritated. "It's only a small joke! Why do you always take everything so personally?"
The girl's walk was unhurried, but her expression was uncharacteristically cold and detached. Observation Haki had warned Luffy in advance of what was about to happen, which was why he immediately began making excuses. Trafalgar Law and his crew, on the other hand, literally forgot how to breathe—a typical reaction upon meeting Nami personally. Even old Crocus somehow immediately forgot that he was a hostage. Experience remained experience, however. Unlike most people, their stupor lasted only seconds. Old Crocus recovered almost immediately, Trafalgar Law directly after him, while the remaining Heart Pirates required fifteen or twenty seconds.
"If you dodge now, I'll become so offended that I'll cry until evening." The girl's threat immediately rose to the top of every nearby outsider's list of 'the strangest threats I have ever heard.' Admittedly, even among the Hats it easily entered the top ten.
'Nami, you need to take things like this more lightly!' Luffy said instructively, releasing Crocus and stepping backward while returning his revolver to the shoulder holster. 'Why can't you overlook such minor matters?'
Instead of answering, the girl punched him directly in the face. It was a perfectly executed strike, the result of months of training under Luffy and Zoro themselves. A staff might be her primary weapon, but even Nami's ordinary punch had been trained correctly. Mass, speed, motion, and applied force—everything reached the absolute limit. The girl could not have delivered a stronger blow even if she desperately wanted to. It must be understood that Nami appeared physically weak only against the other 'boys' aboard, excluding Usopp. In reality, the force of her punch exceeded ten tons. Ten. Damned. Tons. For comparison, a well-trained heavyweight fighter struck with roughly five hundred kilograms of force, while the best of the best could raise that figure to seven or eight hundred. Such force was entirely sufficient to kill an ordinary person on the spot. At her current level, Nami could knock heads from shoulders only somewhat less effectively than Johnny, whose strikes were measured in tens of tons. Accordingly, the strength of Zoro and Luffy's blows defied comprehension. Once one remembered that even stronger people walked the world, the thought could overwhelm the mind completely.
Nami's fist caught Luffy squarely beneath the chin—exactly as she had been taught—and sent him flying as though a fly had been struck by a swatter. After several complete rotations through the air, Luffy crashed deep into the rock with a tremendous boom, and cracks immediately spread across its surface in every direction. Nami did not limit herself to a single powerful blow. Walking toward the rock at the same unhurried pace, she pulled Luffy out by the throat, threw him onto the ground, and then demonstrated to everyone that the strength of her legs was not merely equal to that of her arms but, quite predictably, considerably greater. This time, the Heart Pirates' shock showed no sign of fading even several minutes later. Only old Crocus and Trafalgar remained calm; that level of strength could not truly astonish them. No, that was not entirely correct. They certainly felt surprise—Nami looked breathtakingly beautiful, but not remotely powerful—yet both Crocus and Law had seen far stronger people during their lives. Even so, Nami's strength was impressive for a delicate-looking girl who had only just sailed out of the weakest sea in the world. And her bounty was a 'miserable' twenty million berries, while Zoro's was a full hundred million. That gave them something to think about.
"So, do you feel better now?" Luffy asked first when Nami finally stopped creating a localized earthquake with his body at its epicenter.
By then, the girl was only just emerging from the slowly settling cloud of dust, brushing off her hands, when the question sounded behind her.
"Much better!" she replied without bothering to turn around.
Taking advantage of the opportunity, Nami had not only repaid Luffy for his stunt with the whale but also released the last of her irritation over his 'joke' involving his dismembered body.
"See? Exactly like I said!" Luffy declared, throwing an arm around the girl's shoulders as though he had teleported out of the dust cloud. "Violence is the perfect way to build relationships!"
Judging by the young man's appearance and behavior, one might have assumed the previous five minutes had been nothing more than a shared hallucination. There was not a scratch on his face, not a speck of dust on his clothes, and not a trace of anger or resentment in his voice. Only the still-settling dust and the cracked ground proved that anything had actually happened. To old Crocus, the Heart Pirates, and the whale peering from the water, this looked, if not outright savage, then extremely strange. Especially to the whale and the Heart Pirates. Crocus was more hardened in that respect; he had lived an eventful life. None of the Hats even twitched. Compared with Zoro's earlier serious attempts to kill Luffy—sometimes twenty times a day—Nami's actions barely qualified as an offended slap on the back of the head. Besides, anyone in the family could tell that Luffy was pleased even by this reaction. Ever since Zoro's internal 'anger button' had broken—the Three Plungers had struck it far too hard—Luffy had clearly suffered from being unable to drive anyone into a rage. The only thing that did not fit the overall picture was Usopp's strange calmness. Logically, his reaction should have been only slightly weaker than that of the Heart Pirates, since the long-nosed young man had not witnessed the 'old days,' yet in reality his expression had not changed at all. Another oddity that went unnoticed for several reasons at once.
******************************************************************************************************
The new chapter (start of Whiskey Peak) is available in patre0n.com/moctopus
******************************************************************************************************