Far ahead, something floated on the sea. Black. Hunched like a reef jutting from the water.
"Why do I feel like… it's moving?"
"I feel it too. It's actually coming this way…"
"Hey, hey—yeah, it's moving! What is that?"
Jin raised his telescope and peered across the waves.
"Ma… ma…"
The answer came as a deep, throat-shaking call. Not the devil carrier's engines—an honest-to-goodness whale's song.
A black wall of flesh drifted across the entrance to the channel.
"It's that whale."
Jin recognized it in an instant—Laboon, the island whale cared for by Crocus, ship's doctor of Roger's crew and keeper of the Twin Capes lighthouse.
He hadn't met the whale on the way in. But now, on the return—here it was.
That big fellow had power to spare. If it swallowed them, they'd be stuck in its gut until someone pulled them out. Jin had no intention of becoming bait to be "reeled" back.
He guided the devil carrier to skirt wide of Laboon.
They drew nearer. The sea heaved like mountains as the island whale's rising head rolled up great hills of water, tossing the Devil Carrier far off course.
"A-aaah! It's huge!"
"What is that thing?!"
"A monster of the Grand Line!"
Law and the crew were all struck speechless. Even Robin's eyes widened. She'd entered the Grand Line before, but she hadn't met this one—Laboon didn't linger here at all hours.
"So big…"
Jin was impressed despite himself. Images and recordings didn't compare to standing before it. The island whale's colossal head surfaced, lifting like a cliff. Water slid down its scarred brow in curtains, as if the sea itself were falling from the sky. A towering, black fortress wall stood in the ocean.
Then—
"Mooo—oo…"
A deep, hollow bellow rolled from some abyssal place. Everyone clapped hands to ears as the sound swelled through bone.
Boom.
The whale slammed its head against the Red Line. Waves surged out in thundering rings. Its brow, crisscrossed with old wounds, began to bleed anew.
Even ten nautical miles away, the impact rattled the ribs.
"What is it doing?"
"Is it trying to break the Red Line?!"
"What a terrifying creature…"
Softly, Maya said, "It's grieving. Calling out to its companions."
"Huh?" All eyes went to her.
Law blinked. The king's little secretary seemed to have a knack for communion with living things, a natural affinity for the world itself.
She stepped to the rail and watched Laboon batter the wall. "I can hear it in the sound. The shape of sorrow."
"Companions?" Robin murmured. "You mean whales like it?"
Maya closed her eyes and listened. In Laboon's voice she saw flickers of memory: when it was still a "small" island whale.
"Laboon! Wait for us. When we finish our journey around the world, we'll be back!"
But waiting turned into fifty years.
Seasons wore down mountains. Time slipped past like water. Laboon never saw its friends return—only the news of their deaths.
It refused to believe it.
So it searched in the only way it could: ramming its head into the Red Line again and again, into a wall no head could ever break, until its body ached and bled.
Maya's shrine-maiden gift and her Observation Haki picked up the whale's grief, and before she could stop herself, she began to sing.
Hands folded at her chest, she sang in the posture of prayer. The song was strange to the ear yet gentle—like a mother-sea soothing a child. The wind lifted the notes and carried them, thread by thread, like little rays of light.
Law, Robin, Reiju… one by one they fell quiet.
Laboon, poised to slam the Red Line again, paused.
Its great eye rolled, searching.
It found the tiny ship far away.
It had heard her.
Someone was speaking to it—easing the ache.
Inside Laboon's belly, where stomach acids churned like an inner sea and a tiny island of rock had long been braced with timber, Crocus tugged a line and reached for a sedative—then froze.
"It stopped?"
"What happened?"
Crocus was the Twin Capes lighthouse keeper—and one of the finest doctors alive. He had tended Laboon for years and knew its habits well. Once the whale started ramming, it would not stop until it collapsed from exhaustion. To keep it alive, he had once used his unmatched surgical skill to reinforce Laboon's body and devised sedatives to force rest when needed.
"Hmm?"
He felt it: the brush of Observation Haki, and a voice that smoothed the heart's rough waters.
"Mooo… oooh…"
Laboon bellowed again, but did not crash into the wall.
Reiju shaded her eyes. "Hey—it's coming toward us!"
Penguin squawked, "It's really coming! If it hits us, we're done for!"
Jin kept his gaze steady.
A giant. A god among anglers' tales.
At least… you'd need a gantry crane for that catch.
Maya shook her head. "Don't worry. It means no harm. It's coming to say thank you."
"Thank… you?" Robin echoed, surprised.
The tension bled out of the crew. They wanted to believe—and did.
Laboon floated on the surface and glided closer. The emotion in its eye softened. It blinked at Maya, made a gentle, mellow sound, and even bobbed its head up and down like a person nodding.
Reiju stared. "It really is saying thank you."
For all that Jin sometimes took his liberties, there was one advantage here: Reiju didn't have to hide her feelings. Not her anger, not her pity.
Bepo breathed out in awe. "Amazing, Miss Maya. You can talk to it?"
Maya nodded. Her ancestors had once sealed the awakened Demon-Demon Fruit; their lineage was no weak branch. And Maya's Observation Haki was strong—far stronger than most.
Law narrowed his eyes. "Hey—look at its head. Someone's up there."
Jin looked too. "Crocus?"
Crocus had spotted them as well. "Pirates?" he called down, harpoon in hand, standing atop the whale's back. The image was like a picture from a storybook—an old man with a steel spear rising from the sea on a living island.
He soon learned it was Maya who had calmed Laboon and could speak to it. At that, his expression gentled, and he waved them over, inviting Jin and the others to come inside for tea.
"The king of Drum Kingdom?" Crocus blinked when he heard Jin's title. "You know of it?"
"Of course. Drum is famous for medicine. I studied with doctors there back in the day."
"Dr. Kureha?" Crocus asked.
"Huh? She's still alive?!"
Crocus scratched his head. "She must be, what, a hundred and thirty-six by now? Tough old lady."
"Tough…?"
"Mmm. When I visited Drum, I was about seventeen—that's fifty-two years ago. She was already an eighty-year-old storm back then."
Law did the math and whistled. When Crocus was a teen, Dr. Kureha had already been older than Crocus is now. Terrifying longevity—terrifying skill.
And that's how it should be. Doctors never stop studying. The older they grow, the sharper their craft.
"A patient vanishes from before her eyes for only two reasons," Crocus said wryly. "Cured—or dead."
"She chases difficult cases for sport, masters every art she can, and folks call her the Master of Monsters among doctors."
They walked within Laboon, through timbered corridors that braced the whale's living walls. Law's pupils tightened. To take a creature of flesh and bone and reinforce it like this—Crocus's surgery bordered on the unbelievable.
Jin found himself thinking: is medicine in this world even medicine? Or something stranger—bio-craft and steel grafted onto life? Flesh reborn as machine?
After a quiet pot of tea, Jin invited Crocus to return to Drum to join Bonney in a joint consultation. The old man waved it off with a laugh.
"With Dr. Kureha there, what would I do—stand around and get scolded?"
He shook his head. That old lady's temper could cow thunder. A man pushing seventy, turned into a grandson for a tongue-lashing? No thank you.
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