"Vivi-sama! Vivi-sama! Vivi-sama!"
Igaram had been wailing for an entire minute and clearly had no intention of stopping anytime soon.
"You've already torn your voice apart, so where's your favorite ma-ma-ma-ma now, huh?" Having failed to find a new target, Luffy returned to harassing the hysterical Mr. Eight. "Does the dead princess keep you from singing? Don't worry. How many princesses are there in the world? You'll find another one!"
The sobbing Igaram did not react to the provocation, but Luffy did not appear especially upset. As the family had long since determined, he enjoyed listening to his own voice no less than he enjoyed rinsing everyone else's brains with it.
"Vivi-sama! Vivi-sama! Vivi-sama!"
"Hey, Traffy, have you ever wanted to become a necromancer?" Luffy abruptly changed the subject and called loudly to the Surgeon of Death, who had seated himself beside Zoro.
After making sure that his people faced nothing worse than a severe hangover and wounded pride, Law had relaxed considerably. He could, of course, have warned his crew about the trap in advance, but instead he had decided to give them a practical lesson so they would not let their guard down again. As Law himself understood, he would never have taken such a risk before. The past month had undeniably changed him.
"…If you want me to try saving the princess, you should have acted immediately." Law had heard Luffy's conversation over the Den Den Mushi, so without wasting time he answered the real question rather than the one spoken aloud. "More than two minutes have passed since her death, and the brain barely lasts four. I simply won't reach her in time. At best, we'll get a 'living vegetable.' Besides, if what they said is accurate, she urgently needs a blood transfusion and replacement internal organs. Let's say your people and mine can serve as blood donors. What do we do about her damaged organs?"
Law answered Luffy's question, but his mind was occupied by something entirely different. He was thinking about his past and future. Thoughts and ideas that had never belonged to him before had flooded his mind. Most importantly, his view of the world had begun to change.
Law was cautious, hardly lacking in intelligence, and perhaps understood the danger posed by the insane family better than anyone else in the world. Yet he could not understand how they had managed to climb inside his head. Not very deeply yet, but the seeds they had planted were already producing their first shoots. Even separating from the Straw Hats immediately would affect only the speed of the changes taking place inside him.
He understood all of it perfectly, yet could do absolutely nothing. Law had never encountered anything like it in his life. He felt as though, after touching the churning aura of madness surrounding every single Straw Hat, he had become infected by it. Like poison, it had begun slowly spreading through his body, devouring and altering his former personality.
Law had not yet encountered the term 'Luffification,' but he had already experienced the process in full.
"Traffy, did no one ever teach you to solve problems as they arise? What's the point of worrying about her organs and blood when you haven't even seen the body yet? Maybe there's nothing left to save!"
"Did no one ever teach you to prepare for possible problems in advance?" Law countered automatically, his thoughts still elsewhere.
"I taught myself," Luffy replied. "But I also know perfectly well that everything has its proper time and place," added the boy hypocritically, despite almost always acting in direct contradiction to the words he had just spoken. "What good will blood and donor organs do if worms have already started eating her corpse?"
"I similarly fail to see any point in discussing this." Law frowned despite himself. "It has already been three minutes since her death. By the time we reach her, her brain will definitely be dead… Or do you truly need a vegetable?"
"Traffy, I'm the one at the head of my family." For no obvious reason, Luffy stretched his lips into a broad smile, and the statement itself seemed somewhat unrelated. "I personally selected, trained, and practically raised every member of my family. Do you really think that after all that, I can't predict their behavior?"
"Vivi-sama! Vivi-sama! Vivi-sama!"
Igaram's hysterics had begun to resemble a ritual demon summoning more than actual hysterics. The surroundings certainly helped: fire, corpses, and a talking severed head.
And strangest of all, it worked.
The demon summoning, that was. Or rather, the summoning of 'demons.' The fire between two burning houses suddenly recoiled to either side, opening a passage from which a spectacularly ugly creature with a tail leaped. In daily life, the creature went by the name Johnny, but answered only to Ryu. Yosaku and Nami jumped out directly behind him, after which the passage in the flames snapped shut again.
"They weren't in any hurry at all," Luffy commented on their arrival.
While the approaching tail-bearing monstrosity slowly transformed back into Johnny, Yosaku and Nami had already run up to Law. A bloodied body was unceremoniously dropped at his feet. Why bother with ceremony over the corpse of some stranger? Beautiful or not, Yosaku did not care about her in the slightest. Nor did he care about the billion berries they were supposed to receive for her.
He was neither Luffy nor Nami. Only those two in the family could lose their minds completely over money, while everyone else did not particularly need it. How many billions did they already have? One more or one less—what difference did it make?
Of course, saying such things to Luffy and Nami would have been unwise.
"VIVI-SAMA!!!"
Igaram needed none of his irritating ma-ma-ma to recover his voice in an instant. The bloodied corpse of Vivi, with her head conveniently turned toward him and her eyes glazed over, proved far more effective.
"VIVI-SAMA!!! VIVI-SAMA!!!" he wailed with three times his previous force.
"Save her," Nami told Law. Her voice held little emotion, but the tone was unyielding.
Neither the men nor the girl possessed advanced medical training, so they had relied on ordinary logic. First they pulled the piece of wood that had killed Vivi out of her body. Then they pushed the internal organs that fell out after it back inside. Finally, Johnny cauterized the through-and-through wound from both sides.
None of them knew how correct those actions were, but even compassionate Nami, who had initiated the rescue, was not especially worried. They were already dealing with a corpse. What was the point of worrying whether they were doing things properly? Dead Vivi could not become any deader. Not to mention that they could simply have done nothing at all.
Upon hearing Nami's words, Igaram instantly changed his refrain.
"PLEASE!!! PLEASE!!! PLEASE, SAVE VIVI-SAMA!!! SAVE VIVI-SAMA!!! SAVE VIVI-SAMA!!!"
"Save her?" Law repeated, whether in response to Nami's request or order, and examined the corpse provided to him with considerable doubt.
A genuine corpse, with no 'or,' 'if,' or 'but.' Massive blood loss, severe burns, and—as he learned after briefly using his ability—a literal slurry where half her internal organs should have been. With a wound and injuries like those, an ordinary person would have died within a minute, with negative odds of rescue. Any attempt at treatment would only kill them faster.
Law would not have wagered money on her survival even if she had still been alive and he had perfect operating conditions: sober assistants, dozens of liters of donor blood, and every organ necessary to replace the damaged ones.
Now? A necromancer truly would have been useful.
"You can't do it?" Nami asked upon seeing the doubt on his face. "At least try. If it doesn't work, then it wasn't meant to be."
Under Luffy's influence, the entire family had ultimately begun paying far more attention to such an ethereal thing as fate. They knew fate could be altered, but far too many nuances were involved, and only Luffy himself was guaranteed to understand them.
For that reason, Nami understood that expecting Law to alter Vivi's fate was pointless. All they could do was rely on the girl's original destiny. If Vivi had always been fated to die at Whisky Peak, or if her life was too insignificant to the world, every effort Law made would prove useless. At the same time, if Vivi was meant to live, and her life mattered to the world, fate would make its move and she would certainly survive.
It was one of the few rules governing higher matters that Nami had already fully grasped, understood, and accepted.
Igaram could not leave the girl's request without his own "commentary."
"IT WILL WORK, IT WILL WORK, IT WILL WORK!!! SAVE VIVI-SAMA!!!"
"Either you shut up right now, or she stays dead," Luffy snapped irritably at the severed head, thoroughly tired of Igaram's endless screaming.
The man's teeth clacked loudly in response—he closed his mouth that quickly.
"Traffy, start saving her already, or at this rate we won't even get a vegetable out of her." After making sure his threat had worked, Luffy turned back to the frowning Surgeon of Death. "And don't listen to Nami's nonsense! What does she mean, 'not meant to be'? Did you hear what the transvestite's head promised us? Tens of billions are at stake! So do your best."
Without a word, Law activated his power. An enormous transparent sphere covered everything within a hundred-meter radius. Why he needed such a large Room became clear in the next moment. After an almost imperceptible movement of his fingers, a stone beside Vivi's head exchanged places with a breathing mask that had previously lain somewhere deep inside the submarine.
Law knelt beside the girl, placed her body in a perfectly horizontal position, tilted Vivi's head back, and swiftly, professionally cleared the accumulated blood and saliva from her mouth.
"Help me," Law ordered Johnny.
The request caught the man by surprise and left him confused for a moment, but he quickly pulled himself together. Following Law's instructions, Johnny used the newly arrived mask to begin rhythmically pumping air into Vivi's lungs.
He had no idea how many thousands of people he had killed since joining the family. Before meeting Luffy, he had known that he had killed exactly three. But Johnny could say with certainty that he had never resuscitated anyone in his life.
He liked it.
Especially since Law could hardly be called an ordinary doctor. After making sure oxygen was entering the girl's lungs, the Surgeon of Death—at that moment fully living up to his epithet—simply pulled Vivi's heart out of her body.
Tearing open the girl's clothes, Law pressed a hand to her bare chest, hooked his fingers into her skin, and pulled. Following the movement, a smooth transparent cube emerged from the girl's chest with her heart inside it, while a hole corresponding to the cube's size remained straight through Vivi's torso. Had everyone present not witnessed Law's actions with their own eyes, they might have assumed that some unknown person had cut out a human heart and placed it inside a glass cube.
"Cool!" Luffy offered his opinion, which, for once, matched that of everyone around him completely.
Contrary to expectations, Law did not perform direct cardiac massage—though it could hardly have been more direct. Instead, an electrical discharge shot from his palm into the cube. The heart contracted sharply, but did not begin beating.
A discharge. Nothing.
Another. Nothing.
Again. And again.
The power of the shocks gradually increased, but the girl's heart stubbornly refused to start. Except for the sweetly sleeping Usopp, every Straw Hat, including Luffy, watched Law's actions as though spellbound.
Most likely, it was the contrast. Killing was so easy, while saving someone was so difficult. They could kill tens of thousands, yet could not return even one person to life.
Law could.
Not effortlessly, but he could. This time was no exception, despite all the stubbornness Vivi's heart displayed.
Sweat had already appeared across Law's forehead, and the electrical discharge had reached the upper limit of more or less safe power, when the girl's heart, still held in his hand, twitched slightly.
Once.
Twice.
The cardiac muscles contracted and released sharply. Then again. And again. Like an engine warming up, Vivi's heart began beating faster and faster.
Finally, the bare chest of the girl lying on the ground rose and fell slightly. Johnny hurriedly removed the mask from her face, allowing Vivi to breathe on her own.
Despite Luffy's warning, Igaram could not keep his emotions under control. His next cry rang across the area.
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