"Keh keh keh, I am the Brain-Brain Fruit user. Hand over your brain and do it nicely."
His awareness snapped into razor focus on the cold flank of the hundred-ton truck barreling straight at him.
Prosperity. My people, who even gets this?
He could swear he heard that signature Cybertronian EDM, and the voice was a cutesy loli.
"I thought that was just a speed bump."
"Tell my insurance company."
"We are all just trying to live."
Damn it, not like this. My USB still has five hundred and twelve gigabytes of very serious study materials that I have not yet reviewed.
Then came darkness without edges and a ripping pain that went down to the bone.
When he opened his eyes again, it was a world he had never seen.
Salted sea wind shoved into his nose, thick with the wild breath of a primeval jungle.
Colossal trees he could not name blotted the sky. Strange birds shrieked. Beasts roared and answered each other.
Coarse gravel bit into his skin.
"What the heck, where did you dump me? Is this even my country anymore?"
The voice that left his mouth was high and thin. Startled, Kael sat up and patted himself down.
All right, little arms, little legs, little kidneys, little buddy, all present and accounted for.
What is there to celebrate, you idiot. A three-year-old stranded on a desert island is not anyone's idea of good news.
Memories from his previous life were shards of glass that refused to fit. The body's original memories were messy too. He could only vaguely recall a shipwreck.
Hunger struck first, a hard knock against the ribs.
Cold followed. Sea wind sliced through his thin, tattered whatever-it-was for clothing.
The sounds from the forest made the back of his neck crawl.
Kael shivered. Instinct for survival pushed aside panic and resentment.
He crawled until he found a shallow hollow in the rocks, half-scooped by waves. It would at least block the wind and rain.
The little cave smelled like damp rot, sharp enough to sting, but Kael could not care less.
He curled into the deepest shadow and listened to the sea batter the rocks, and to the distant, wet chewing that drifted from the jungle.
"System?"
"Call Grandpa?"
"…"
The surf smothered his probing whispers. Kael finally went still.
Good news: he had transmigrated.
Bad news: what an awful start.
"I am Kael Grylls, not really, and I am going to show you how to survive in the most extreme, most dangerous places on earth."
Dun dun dunnn.
As a shut-in from peacetime, the boldest he had ever been was typing under a survival video, I could do that too. Now only his mouth was bold.
Using a puddle in the cave as a mirror, he examined himself. Black hair. Gold eyes. A small face, thin and young, yet already hinting at looks that would one day make readers grumble about unfair genetics.
If he wanted to avoid an early death, there was only one objective now. Stay alive.
…
Three years.
Do you have any idea how I survived those three years?
His body grew at a frightening pace, stronger and faster by the month.
He was already far beyond what a child should be capable of. That was when Kael admitted this world was not ordinary.
Running, climbing, fighting every day had made his muscles sleek and tight, built for burst and speed.
"Hey, brothers, I brought food again."
He spoke to no one while he dressed a rabbit with practiced hands, occasionally letting out odd little chuckles just to hear a voice.
"Lunch is roast rabbit, mystery mini fruit, and the Q-squad. Brothers, dig in."
After the cute rabbit, he flopped on a rock and reached for one of the fruit he had foraged.
The fruit was pure white, its skin etched with ring upon ring of concentric spirals.
"Hiss, I have seen this somewhere, right? What is this thing? Forget it. Good or bad, your brother Kael will know once he takes a bite."
The instant he bit down, his face went green, then white. His stomach turned like a storm surge. It felt like ten thousand imps were holding a rave in his gut.
"Ugh."
For all his camp-cooking experience, he had never tasted anything that vile. He spat several times and fought the despairing wave of flavor that clung like grease.
"It is like a sock that simmered in July for a month, fermented, blended with a rat that has been dead three months, then stewed over high heat for forty-nine days until the stink liquefied."
Kael grimaced. His taste buds felt assaulted.
He shook his head hard, trying to banish the devilish taste and the fruit's bizarre look from his mind.
There were more important things to do. The sun was still high, and he had not finished his daily coursework.
For three years he had lived like this. Now six years old, Kael carried a strength and agility that did not fit a child's frame.
A beautiful day began with a beach sprint in the nude.
His bare feet pressed into the damp sand, each step sinking deep before springing back out with startling power. Tiny footprints strung behind him until the tide erased them.
Next came strength work. He had mapped this jungle long ago and found a perfect outdoor gym where rocks of all sizes lay waiting to be tamed.
He lifted, carried, heaved and hurled, the same simple motions repeating day after day. His muscles were far more developed than other children's, firm and clean, already at home in that ache and burn.
When he trained he sometimes muttered classics from his past life that would make a grandmother blush. Sometimes, when a mood hit, he hummed pop choruses dredged from forgotten corners of memory.
"That day the squid, the squid came up."
He growled, veins rising on his forearms, and raised a stone twice his height as if it were nothing, then flung it. It hammered the sand with a dull boom.
Agility training belonged to the forest. The deadly green tangle made the best obstacle course.
Kael vaulted fallen trunks, swung through curtains of vines, and slipped aside when small predators lunged from the shadows.
His senses had honed to a blade. A whisper of leaves, a scuff of wind, and his mind already held the shape of what moved.
As for fighting, there were no elegant forms, only kill-or-be-killed tricks burnished by necessity. Simple, direct, lethal.
He drilled with a spear he had made himself, driving thrusts, chops and sweeps into a thick trunk, chasing speed, accuracy and cruelty in every motion.
"Take my Monkey Steals the Peach. Pooh, pooh, what am I even practicing. Get serious, Kael. You are going to outpunch Bear Grylls and outkick Ed Stafford."
He would pause, pant hard, wipe the sweat from his brow, a sly glint flashing in eyes too old for his face, then square up and go back to the grind.
When the sun slanted low and set a skein of light across the waves, Kael climbed to his personal lookout on a high cliff and stared at the endless blue.
Fatigue settled in, heavy and satisfied. It meant he had outlasted another day and shoved his limits a little further.
He bent an arm without thinking. The solid swell of his biceps looked out of place on his slender frame. This was real work, real muscle. Not just something a pointy-haired uncle could talk about.
"Locals? No, no, I do not eat beef." Kael muttered. "Breaking news from the gym scene. Six-year-old Superman, power of nine dragons, lifts live on the beach."
These dumb little jokes were medicine against loneliness. You needed some fun when survival was this monotonous.
The jokes could not hide his confusion though. His growth, his strength, his recovery were all wrong for a human child.
Even on an island with unique food and an eat-or-be-eaten ecology, he should not have turned into this so fast.
The last ribbon of sunlight slid under the horizon. A few cold stars pricked the sky.
Kael stretched and headed for his crude but safe cave.
Night deepened. The surf breathed a steady hush against the sand. Insects he could not name chimed in now and then.
He lay in the deepest part of the cave on a mattress of layered dry leaves.
Usually the day's grind dropped him straight into sleep. Tonight was different.
Thoughts washed in like the tide going out, leaving behind a litter of images.
Jungle shadows. The ocean's immensity. Creatures that were strange yet too real. And that damned white fruit with a taste that could duel with dog droppings.
Just thinking of it made him shiver. His stomach twinged again.
It was not only the taste that gnawed at him. It was the skin. Ring upon ring, like ripples widening on a still pond.
Spirals.
He had seen that pattern somewhere.
It was a jigsaw with one missing piece, the key tile hiding behind fog. He could almost make it out. It made his heart itch and a nameless irritation rise.
Wait.
Spirals. Taste from the pit.
A lightning bolt cracked silently through his skull and burned the fog away.
A memory burst its dam, bright and whole.
A world from his previous life. Wild and impossible. Adventure that ran hot, battles that never cooled, pirates with a hundred faces, Marines who swore to protect justice, and fruit that granted power at a terrible price.
Those fruit bore distinctive spiral patterns and gave eaters abilities that defied reason. The price was the sea's hatred. You became a sinker. And the taste was infamous, like every awful thing on earth blended together and condensed eighty-one times.
Devil Fruit.
Kael jerked upright. His eyes were wide and white in the dark.
Spiral skin. Monstrous taste. A body that had been too strong and too quick to heal even before he ate that suspicious fruit. In the light of Devil Fruit, all of it lined up. It was outrageous, yet it made perfect sense.
Clues he had been ignoring clicked together like pearls on a string.
The huge, odd beasts on this island. The endless ocean and the islands scattered like bread crumbs. The way everything felt off, as if the rules were not the rules he knew.
He remembered the first day he arrived, the sudden shipwreck, the blurry scraps of memory that came with this body. A world of endless seas and numberless islands.
"Damn it. It really was a Devil Fruit." The words squeezed through his teeth, shaking. There was a thrill under the fear that he did not recognize as his own.
"It is here." His voice was a mosquito's hum, and it sounded like fate playing a joke.
"This is the world of One Piece."