Passing through lung and heart, the tip of a katana cut through the man's gray shirt and emerged from his chest. Instead of words, blood poured heavily from the newly minted Main Character's mouth. A second later, Tashigi pulled her katana from his body, causing him to collapse to his knees and then fall face-first to the ground, dead. Johnny remained standing with his finger still pointed forward. Now, however, his fiery eyes had become comically round, his face stretched in surprise, and his mouth hung open in shock. Despite his dragon-demon appearance, the young man suddenly resembled a mentally deficient idiot. A demonic mentally deficient idiot. It looked extremely funny.
"What the hell?!!" several voices exclaimed at once.
"Who the hell is she?!!"
"Bitch, how could you do that to Kenny?!!"
"She killed Kenny!"
"Bastard!"
The people around them had reason to be angry: Kenny had been killed. No, absolutely nobody cared about Kenny himself, but every person present cared very much about his newly discovered ability to cut Johnny's fire. He had been their ticket out of the trap. If not for the flames blazing everywhere, who in their right mind would have continued trying to fight this invulnerable monster? Without the fire, they would all have escaped long ago. Kenny had been their ticket to salvation, and now some unknown girl had killed him. How could they not be angry?
They had not yet understood that their problems had just doubled.
Instead of answering, Tashigi simply began killing the other agents. One attack, one new corpse. If not for the unmistakable signs that she was deliberately suppressing her emotions, she could easily have been compared with Zoro. Yet the green-haired young man had never committed genocide wearing an expression that looked more like a rubber mask than a genuine human face. Unlike Tashigi, he never suppressed his emotions. If complete indifference appeared on his face during battle, it simply meant he genuinely felt nothing at that moment. Tashigi could not do that yet, making her expression look extremely unnatural. It would take time and a great deal of practice before killing her opponents became ordinary habit.
"Tashigi, for fuck's sake!!!" Johnny finally roared after recovering from his brief stupor. "Why did you kill my Main Character?!!" He stomped his feet loudly like a small child whose favorite toy had been taken away. "I only just found somebody intere-e-e-AAAAAAAH!!!"
Unlike a small child, the young man's transformed body weighed a fucking enormous number of kilograms, and his strength far exceeded ordinary humans. And before being crushed, Miss Merry Christmas had managed to dig a substantial number of tunnels. In short, Johnny should not have been so careless. Especially since this was already the fifth time he had fallen underground. Exactly four times more than his patience allowed.
"I'M GOING TO KILL THAT FUCKING MOLE-RAT!!!"
At that moment the young man had clearly forgotten that he had already killed Miss Merry Christmas. The degree of his rage, however, could easily be imagined thanks to the enormous pillar of fire that shot high into the sky and connected earth and heavens for several seconds. In the end, the most unfortunate people were once again the Baroque Works agents. The instant Johnny crawled out of the pit—yet again—he unleashed all his rage upon them. This time, however, proved the last. Working together, Tashigi and Johnny slaughtered every remaining opponent without difficulty in only half an hour. Johnny was understandable: a lightning-fast, invulnerable killing machine that continuously spat fire and profanity. Aside from the numbered agents, none of the others represented even the slightest threat to him. Far more surprising was that Tashigi, who constantly lost to everyone—members of the Straw Hat family, naturally—escaped with only a few scratches. And she could have avoided even those if she had possessed a little more experience. During the past half hour, however, the girl killed more people than the total number of opponents she had faced throughout her entire previous life. Today could be considered yet another milestone in her transformation.
"You're pretty good. Handled yourself well," Johnny praised Tashigi when it was over, returning to human form while covered in blood. As had already become traditional, only his heavily battered trousers remained of all his clothes. "Didn't think you'd already grown this much... hey, hey, hey! Careful, damn it! Next time watch where you're puking! You almost splashed me!"
Suppressing emotions always carried one major disadvantage: eventually they not only returned, they all returned at once. Dropping her sword and collapsing to her knees, Tashigi began emptying the contents of her stomach again and again. From someone who had never killed coldly in her life, she had jumped in a single moment to the level of mass killer. Too abrupt a leap. An ordinary person could lose their mind from something like that. And though the girl could no longer be considered an ordinary person, the psychological blow was still too severe. The situation was exactly like Vivi's, only on a larger scale.
As a swordswoman and Marine lieutenant, Tashigi had cut people dozens of times, but only a few incidents ended in death, and every person she killed had been a criminal resisting arrest and trying to kill her in return. Those experiences had given her a certain degree of psychological resistance to death and killing, but as already stated, today had been too abrupt a jump. In other words, once again everything came down to lack of experience. If a battle like this happened half a year later, such a violent reaction would no longer follow. But as the saying went, you had what you had.
"Come on, don't beat yourself up so badly," Johnny said, crouching beside the heaving Tashigi and soothingly rubbing her back. "They were all complete bastards anyway, planning to throw an entire country into chaos," he declared with complete insincerity, perfectly aware that life was much more complicated and that a substantial portion of Baroque Works agents almost certainly had done nothing deserving death at all. "Maybe today you saved dozens, maybe even hundreds of thousands of lives! Isn't that great? You're a former Mari—you're a real Marine! This is what you're supposed to do! Save princesses and countries!"
Apparently, the young man had a very poor idea of what Marine soldiers were actually supposed to do... or, more likely, he had simply started rambling. Especially since he had no intention of shutting up and immediately began dragging the subject in a completely different direction.
"And anyway, have you never thought you chose the wrong path? Maybe you shouldn't have joined the Marines in the first place? In my opinion, women don't belong in war. Just look at Nami. She shouldn't be a navigator in our family, she should be sitting on a real throne. Of course she'd need to learn some manners so she'd stop flashing her bare ass to the whole world, but she'd definitely look better as a queen than as a navigator. And personally, I think staying home with children would suit you much better than swinging a katana among enemies."
Johnny's tongue was every bit as much his enemy as his limitless curiosity.
"...Ryu?" Tashigi rasped.
"Yeah?"
"Shut the fuck up."
"...Okay."
"And get your fucking hand off me."
"...Okay."
"And I never want to hear that shit again."
"...Okay."
Seeing the girl reach for her katana, the stunned Johnny involuntarily jumped backward. Pressing his hands to his chest as though afraid Tashigi might attack and bite him, the young man held his breath and watched. Contrary to his fears, however, the girl simply rose to her feet. Wiping her mouth with the back of her hand, she then cleaned the katana's blade using the stretched bottom of her shirt, returned the sword to its sheath, and silently headed toward the Going Merry. She paid no attention to the numerous corpses in her path or the solid wall of fire ahead.
"...Wait for me!" Realizing he was in no danger, Johnny immediately hurried after Tashigi. "How are you planning to get through the burning jungle without my help?"
"I wasn't," the girl snapped.
Finding the long-withered shoots of common sense somewhere within himself, the young man wisely decided to bite his tongue. One would have to be a complete idiot not to notice the girl's condition. Johnny had known Tashigi for months, but today was the first time he had ever heard her swear. He had not even thought she knew how. Always restrained and cultured, the girl now resembled Nami far more than her usual self. And not so much because of her tone or words as because of the way she carried herself. Once Johnny's initial shock passed, he found the changes not only strange but rather amusing. She killed like Zoro and behaved like Nami. Wasn't that cool?
Cool or not, while he watched the gloomy girl they reached the wall of fire itself. Yet just as Johnny began using his ability to manipulate the flames and create a passage through the sea of fire, a human torch unexpectedly came running toward them.
"MR. THREE!!! WHERE ARE YOU, MR. THREE?!!"
Johnny needed several moments to connect the human torch with Yosaku's familiar voice.
"Why the hell are you running around screaming like a lunatic?!" he demanded, staring wide-eyed at his friend.
Such behavior truly was very uncharacteristic of the normally restrained young man. Naturally, except for those occasions when pain drove him insane and made him even more unstable than Johnny himself under the influence of his Devil Fruit transformation. But nothing like that had happened to Yosaku for a good half year. By now, his reaction to pain had fallen so low that it threatened to become complete immunity. Temporary madness from pain could therefore be ruled out immediately.
"..."
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