"You're right. All our sacrifices were in vain!" A hoarse voice sounded from directly beneath Robin's feet in time with her thoughts, forcing the girl to leap aside in terror.
Splash, splash, splash, splash! Water that had appeared from nowhere sloshed beneath her feet, but when Robin lowered her gaze, she saw... that she stood ankle-deep in blood! Before the girl could comprehend the turn events had taken, she heard the same voice again.
"We gave our lives for you, but you turned out to be completely useless!"
Whirling around, Robin froze like stone, unable to tear her gaze from the body rising out of the blood. Remnants of clothing had melted into charred flesh. Hair and beard were burned away. Yellowed teeth showed through cheeks that had been burned completely through, and blood slowly trickled from empty eye sockets. The worst part was that Robin recognized the mutilated body as Professor Clover, the scholar who had died on Ohara twenty years earlier. Unable to look away from the disfigured, moving corpse covered from head to toe in fresh blood, the stunned girl began slowly backing away. Robin had not taken more than a few steps, however, when a burned woman's hand seized her shin.
"Do you remember me, Robin?" a new voice asked.
Following the hand, another body slowly rose out of the blood. Standing on all fours and refusing to release the girl's leg, the woman's burned head—with only a few scraps of once-white hair remaining—slowly turned through one hundred and eighty degrees to the sound of snapping vertebrae. Another pair of empty eye sockets, rapidly filling to the brim with blood, stared directly into the girl's face. By this point Robin was shaking violently with fear. If Professor Clover's burned corpse had driven her into a stupor, the moving corpse of her own mother filled her with a horror stronger than anything she had ever experienced. Even on that fateful day on Ohara.
"You disappointed me, Robin," Olvia's charred lips moved.
"Where is your laughter, Robin?" a third voice thundered deafeningly.
Tears ran down the cheeks of the girl, half-dead with terror. Knowing in advance whom she would see, Robin did not want to turn toward the new voice, but her trembling body refused to obey. Ve-e-e-ery slowly, the girl turned and saw Saul's enormous head half-submerged in the blood. Unlike Professor Clover and her mother, Saul's head was not burned. Instead, most of it was covered by a thick layer of ice.
"Why aren't you laughing, Robin?" the giant's head asked. "Remember how I taught you? Dereshi-shi-shi-shi, Robin! Dereshi-shi-shi-shi!"
The girl could no longer withstand such a blow to her mind. Releasing a sound somewhere between a sob and a shriek, her eyes rolled back and she collapsed unconscious to the ground. Standing nearby, Luffy had watched with undisguised interest the entire time as Robin recoiled in different directions from things visible only to her before finally fainting. He nodded in satisfaction. Then, scratching his neck, he went to fish the mega-turtle's corpse out of the water. Luffy had not been joking about turtle soup.
It had to be acknowledged that the young man was exceptionally good at carrying out the tasks he set himself. The only flaw was that almost every task he set was idiotic. That did not make them any easier or more achievable; if anything, it only increased the difficulty. Take the aforementioned turtle soup. He could simply have caught some small turtles and made the appropriate soup. Or sailed to a densely populated island and bought some. But no! If Luffy said he intended to eat Banchi, then Banchi was precisely what he would eat, and no other turtle would do! As a result, the young man spent an entire hour stubbornly hauling nearly ten tons of meat over piles of rocks, trees, and graves. Along the way, Luffy loudly, verbally, and profanely wondered why he had killed the damned turtle in the first place. He could easily have frightened it into crawling back on its own while carrying both him and the unconscious idiot on its back! Only afterward, with a clear conscience, should he have turned it into soup! As the saying went, 'The best ideas arrive afterward.' By the time Luffy returned to their improvised camp, nothing remained of the two Unluckies but bones, and several dozen empty bottles lay scattered around the couches. At some point the number of couches had grown to three, while Law, Ikkaku, Shachi, and Clione had joined the company already present.
"Guys, it turns out we're complete amateurs!" Luffy announced joyfully before anyone could ask about the unconscious Robin lying like a sack of potatoes on the dead Banchi's head, or about the enormous turtle's corpse itself. "What do you think those cactuses really are?!" The young man pointed over his shoulder toward the nearest mountain.
The peculiar shape of the local mountains had been mentioned when they first arrived on the island, but no one had attached much importance to it. The tall, rounded mountains truly did resemble enormous cactuses. The countless stone spikes covering every mountain around Whisky Peak only strengthened that resemblance. For those very reasons, every map labeled the place 'Cactus Island.' Yet, as Luffy had discovered through practical experience, the mountains were not covered in stone spines at all!
"...I didn't understand a damn thing about your question," Johnny complained, and judging by everyone else's eloquent silence, it could safely be said he was not alone.
"The cactus mountains!" Luffy began pointing at them again. "They aren't cactuses at all! I mean, the spines aren't stone spikes—they're actual gravestones! Can you imagine? There are millions of graves here! All of us put together haven't killed even a hundred thousand people in our entire lives, while several million dead men are buried here! Cross-dresser" Igaram's severed head appeared in the young man's hands "of all people, I never expected such productive efficiency from you! This island is like one gigantic hecatomb! You have my respect and admiration! I admit I was completely wrong to consider you an ordinary loser all this time! Now I understand that we became proud of our accomplishments far too early! We need more sacrifices! We need more blood! Our next target will be one million slain enemies! Otherwise no one in the New World will respect us! If people on one of the Grand Line's first seven islands slaughter pirates by the millions, then pirates in the New World must be slaughtered by tens and hundreds of millions! I'm already looking forward to all those bloody carnivals!"
Luffy was practically choking on his own saliva with delight. The young man had always considered himself an experienced killer and made no attempt to hide it. Luffy's victims had long numbered in the thousands, if not tens of thousands, and now he had unexpectedly learned that by Grand Line standards he barely deserved the title of novice murderer. Absolute delight! It was as though his horizons had expanded. Remarkably, after wandering all over the island in search of bounty hunters and Zoro, Luffy noticed the countless crosses only when he dragged the turtle's corpse across the entire island. The power of incredible coincidence in action.
"...You're saying all those little stone bumps on the mountains around us are actually gravestones?" Nami asked somewhat skeptically after processing all the enthusiasm Luffy had dumped on them. "Every single one?"
"Yep! Awesome, right?! Our cross-dresser has talent!" The young man dropped Igaram's head back onto the crate serving as a table.
"Well, I'll be damned!" Johnny whistled, beginning to look at the surrounding mountains with entirely different eyes.
And once again, he was not alone. After such a revelation, absolutely everyone present began looking around, including Zoro and Law. The 'bomb' Luffy had dropped on them was a substantial one. The longer everyone looked, and the more they estimated exactly how many 'little bumps' they could see on the mountains, the more stunned they became. For once, when Luffy spoke of millions of graves, he had not transformed another fly into a gigantic elephant. This time he was not exaggerating in the least—he was underestimating! The enormous mountains were covered completely in gravestones, so it was entirely possible that they were not looking at a mere couple of million but a good ten million graves. Or somewhere in that range. So much for weak bounty hunters.
"How old is this town?" Law asked Igaram after considering every possible explanation.
The young man did not believe such a collection of weaklings could have killed so many people.
"Baroque Works occupied Whisky Peak only four years ago, but for many decades before that, the town served as a haven for bounty hunters," Igaram answered obediently. "I cannot say with certainty how old Whisky Peak is, but the dates of death on some gravestones go back to the century before last."
"That's more reasonable," Yosaku nodded. He too had little faith in the supposed prowess of the local cutthroats. "I suppose it's entirely possible to rack up ten million frags over two hundred years."
"Frags?" Ikkaku did not understand.
"I take it you haven't crossed paths with Marines very often?" Johnny asked.
"It's a play on words," Nami explained to the puzzled woman. "Originally the term sounded a little different and referred to being killed by fragments from grenades and bombs, but later some Marines began using it for enemies they'd killed. My mother was a former Marine, and she called every fly and cockroach she swatted a frag."
"Your mother was a Marine?!" The eyes of Law's three subordinates widened noticeably.
Their reaction was understandable. The woman's present company hardly matched someone raised in a family where at least one parent had served in the Marines. Any Marine soldier would confidently state that pirates caused them their most serious problems, so praise for pirates was difficult to hear from them. And few children who sought to resemble their parents in every respect would become pirates after spending their entire lives hearing—in both censored and uncensored language—how terrible pirates all were.
"Mom left the Marines after adopting my sister and me, and ten years ago she was killed by pirates who came to our island," Nami added with a smile despite the topic, fully aware herself of how unpredictable her path through life had proven.
Only a year earlier, the girl had hated pirates to the depths of her soul, literally spending every hour of every day dreaming that they would all die especially painful deaths. And now, only a year later, Nami had herself become one of the pirates she hated so much. Quite a turn of events! Life before meeting Luffy had long since begun to feel like an extended dream that had almost nothing in common with reality.
"And after that, you became a pirate yourself?" Nami's revelation surprised not only Law's three subordinates but the 'Surgeon of Death' himself.
The girl did not answer. She merely gave the seated Heart Pirates a mysterious smile that brought a faint blush even to Law's cheeks. After Arlong's death, Nami had become far more comfortable with the subject. Though perhaps it would be more accurate to say that her attitude toward her mother's death had changed after prolonged acquaintance with Luffy, while the slaughter of Arlong's gang had merely reinforced the effect. The four sitting across from her, however, were not yet ready for revelations quite that detailed. As Nami involuntarily noted, judging by Law's tense state whenever he answered Luffy's questions about the princess, the young man had already begun to realize how badly trapped he was. While speaking to Luffy, Law looked as though he expected a blow from his conversational partner at any moment and was therefore doing everything in his power to anticipate it. The characteristic signs were all present. Nami was far from the only one who noticed Law's strange behavior. Johnny and Yosaku stretched their lips into vile grins, Zoro sighed nostalgically, and Sanji looked at Law as though he had no more than a few days left to live. The captain of the Heart Pirates did not lack attention to detail, nor was he an idiot, so he missed none of the glances directed his way. He would have far preferred one of the Hats to aim a gun at his head—with that sort of threat to his life, he knew exactly what to do. How to solve his current problem, however, he could not even imagine. No, that was not entirely true. Law knew exactly how his problem could be solved! The difficulty was that if he had originally possessed enough strength to kill every Hat, he would not be here now.
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