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----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Kenji Tanaka was, by all accounts, a master.
Not of martial arts, nor of academics, and certainly not of basic financial responsibility. No, Kenji was a master of the sacred art of doing absolutely nothing. At twenty-two, he had elevated laziness to a philosophy, a way of life. His bedroom was his temple, a chaotic shrine dedicated to empty chip bags, stacks of well-worn manga, and the faint, sweet scent of spilled soda. His futon was his throne, from which he ruled over his glorious, unproductive kingdom.
His personality was a peculiar cocktail of deadpan sarcasm and profound laziness, as if he were a wandering ronin from some gag manga who had decided the world's problems could wait until after his next nap. He was a walking, talking embodiment of that energy, fueled by a diet that consisted of 90% sugar and 10% whatever his long-suffering mother left on a plate outside his door.
"Kenji! Are you going to apply for that job today?" his mother's voice called from the other side of his paper-thin door.
Kenji, currently trying to balance a pocky stick on his nose while lying perfectly still, didn't even flinch. "I'm communing with the employment gods, Mom," he called back, his voice muffled by the futon. "It's a delicate spiritual process. One wrong move and I could end up with a career. Can't risk it."
He heard a long, weary sigh that spoke of two decades of this nonsense.
The truth was, Kenji wasn't entirely useless. He possessed a single, profound, and utterly impractical talent: magic. He was a wizard of incredible latent potential, capable of bending reality to his will. The problem was, his magic had the same work ethic he did. It would only perform complex tasks under the most specific and inconvenient conditions, usually for his own benefit, and almost always with a disastrously comedic twist.
For instance, the pocky stick on his nose was beginning to tilt. Getting up to grab the box was an act of herculean effort he was simply not prepared to undertake. He closed his eyes, concentrating.
"By the sacred pact of the laziest donut, by the vow of the forgotten homework," he whispered a nonsensical incantation, "Oh, divine confectionary, I summon thee! Accio Pocky!"
For a moment, nothing happened. Then, the box of pocky on his desk began to rattle. It lifted into the air, hovering for a moment like a holy relic before shooting towards him with the speed of a bullet.
"Ah, perfect," Kenji thought, opening his mouth to catch it.
This was, of course, a mistake. The box did not gently float into his waiting grasp. It slammed into his forehead with a loud thwack, bounced off, hit the ceiling, and rained down a shower of chocolate-covered biscuit sticks all over his room. One of them landed perfectly in his open mouth.
"See? Success," he mumbled around his prize, ignoring the new bruise forming on his brow. The magic had worked, technically. He had gotten a pocky stick. The collateral damage was just a feature, not a bug.
His friends had long since learned to fear his "help." Once, his best friend Tatsuya had forgotten his keys. Kenji, with a grand flourish, had performed a complex unlocking charm that not only opened Tatsuya's front door, but also every other door, window, car, and locked diary on the entire street. The resulting chaos had earned them a stern lecture from the local police and a permanent ban from the neighborhood watch.
Today, however, Kenji had no time for friends or family. He was engaged in the most sacred of rituals: reading fanfiction. He was completely absorbed, his phone held inches from his face, his eyes glued to the screen. The story was a masterpiece of the genre, a grimdark epic by a legendary author known only as 'kapa69'. The title: Harry Potter: Let the World Burn.
"Oh man, he's actually going to feed Voldemort to a Hungarian Horntail," Kenji muttered, scrolling furiously. "This kapa69 is a genius of ultraviolence. A true artist."
He reached for the glass of strawberry milk on the floor next to his futon without looking. His hand knocked it over, creating a milky pink puddle on the hardwood floor.
"Ah, crap," he sighed, the impending chore of cleaning it up weighing on him like a physical burden. But the fanfic was too good. The climax was approaching. "I'll get it later."
He swung his legs off the futon to get a more comfortable reading angle. His bare foot came down directly in the puddle of strawberry milk.
What happened next was a symphony of pathetic failure.
His foot shot out from under him. In a desperate, split-second panic, his only thought was not for his own safety, but for the integrity of his phone. "Not the fanfic!" he cried, twisting his body in mid-air to protect the precious device.
This heroic, if deeply misguided, act of literary preservation sent him flying backward at an awkward angle. His head, moving with the full momentum of his flailing body, was on a collision course with the corner of his low-lying coffee table.
There was a sickening, hollow CRACK.
The world didn't fade to black. It just... stopped. His last coherent thought wasn't of his family, his friends, or any profound regrets. It was, "Damn it. I'll never know if he uses the basilisk to poison the Ministry's water supply."
And then, darkness. A deep, silent, all-encompassing void. It was a sensation of being pulled, stretched, and squeezed through the pinhole of reality. It was not painful, merely... absolute.
When sensation returned, it was not gradual. It was an explosion.
Sun. A blistering, relentless sun beating down on him. The roar of a crowd, a sound like the ocean in a storm, filled his ears. The heavy, chafing weight of something cold and dense on his wrists. And pain. A deep, throbbing ache that seemed to emanate from his very soul.
Kenji's eyes snapped open.
The sky was a perfect, cloudless blue. He was kneeling, his arms wrenched behind him, locked in thick, dark cuffs that felt unnervingly heavy and seemed to drain the very strength from his bones. He was on a massive wooden platform, an execution stand. Before him stretched a vast, stone-paved plaza, filled with tens of thousands of uniformed soldiers, all standing at perfect attention, their white and blue uniforms a stark sea of order.
He looked down at his own body. His chest was bare, revealing lean, powerful muscles and a tattoo on his left arm that he definitely didn't have before—a skull with a magnificent, crescent-shaped white mustache.
His mind, which was still half-stuck on a fanfiction about a wizard boy, struggled to process the data.
Tattoo... white mustache... execution stand... thousands of Marines...
The pieces clicked into place with the force of a physical blow.
"No. Freaking. Way."
At that exact moment, a new sensation flooded his being. It was a torrent of memories, emotions, and power that were not his own. The burning loyalty to a man he called 'Pops'. The fierce, protective love for a younger brother with a straw hat. The rage, the pride, the regret, the unyielding will of the man whose body he now inhabited. It was the soul of Portgas D. Ace, and it was fusing with his own.
With that fusion came a new, terrifying power. A wave of energy erupted from the core of his new soul, a force so immense and commanding it felt like the will of a king. It was Haki. All three forms of it, roaring to life at a level that could make the heavens themselves tremble. Conqueror's Haki, a power born of a king's disposition, now amplified to an impossible degree by the merging of two fiercely independent souls.
He could feel it, a weapon of god-like potential. And he couldn't use a single drop of it. The Sea-Prism Stone cuffs were a perfect, absolute nullifier. He was a god in a cage.
From the grand dais at the front of the platform, a man with a seagull on his hat spoke into a Den Den Mushi, his voice booming across the plaza. "The preparations are complete! The execution of the Second Division Commander of the Whitebeard Pirates, 'Fire Fist' Ace, will be carried out as scheduled!"
Kenji—no, Ace—no, whatever the hell he was now—looked out at the silent, waiting sea. The sheer, hopeless absurdity of his situation washed over him. He had died slipping on strawberry milk to be reborn as one of the most beloved characters in his favorite manga, only to arrive just in time for his own execution at the start of the biggest war the world had ever seen.
His new, combined personality—Ace's fiery resolve filtered through Kenji's perpetually unbothered, deadpan lens—could only summon a single, profound thought.
"Well, this sucks."
His immediate goals formed with a clarity born of pure, abject terror: 1. Find a way to survive this. 2. Make sure the old man with the mustache doesn't die. 3. Make sure the idiot rubber brother doesn't die.
It was an impossible list. He was chained, powerless, and the main event was about to begin.
Suddenly, a frantic voice from a watchtower screamed over the loudspeakers, a sound of pure panic.
"REPORTING! THE GATES OF JUSTICE! THEY'RE OPENING ON THEIR OWN! A SINGLE SHIP IS IN VIEW... NO, IT'S... IT'S THE MOBY DICK! WHITEBEARD IS HERE!"
Kenji/Ace lifted his head. On the horizon, emerging from the mist like a phantom from the depths, he saw it. The flagship of the Whitebeard Pirates, flanked by a fleet of allied ships, appearing inside the bay as if by magic.
The war for the fate of the world had just begun. And he was the prize.