Chapter 105: To the Next Level!
A team of guards.
Five of them.
One serving food, one holding the bowl, two pushing a cart, and one holding a gun, looking around vigilantly.
Pirate Ren Arakawa instantly analyzed that among the five guards, the strongest was the one with the gun. His Hypnotic Eye activated!
"Clang!"
The gun in the guard's hand fell to the ground. The guard serving food turned his head to look.
"Pfft!"
A thick tail shot through the gap in the bars, stabbing the food-serving guard in the shoulder!
After piercing his shoulder, the hooked tip of the tail pointed at the guard's temple.
"Don't move!" Pirate Ren Arakawa roared. "Open the cell door for me! Or this guy dies here!"
This all happened so fast that the two big-shot pirates in the cell, both with bounties in the tens of millions, were dumbfounded.
He said he was breaking out, and he meant it. No hesitation at all?
"Don't do anything rash! Don't you do anything rash!"
"I said, open the door! Or he dies!"
Several guards looked toward the strongest among them, the gunslinger guard.
When they saw the gun-wielding guard rolling his eyes back with a dazed expression, everyone was stunned!
"Three!"
"Two!"
"Wait, wait!"
A guard hurriedly took out a large bunch of keys. "Here, take them!"
"Don't play tricks," Pirate Ren Arakawa glared. "You open it!"
"This..." The guard holding the keys hesitated.
Impel Down's cell door designs are very complex. If the wrong key is used twice in a row, the lock will seize up. Without a spare key with higher clearance, it will be impossible to open the door.
The guard thought that since Ren Arakawa looked so young, he wouldn't know these things.
But how could he know that the person before him was an old veteran of Impel Down!
His seven years of prison experience were longer than the service time of most of the guards!
Trick him? Not a chance!
Just as the guard with the keys hesitated...
"Ah!"
A heart-wrenching scream echoed through the Starvation Hell.
Ren Arakawa bit down on the neck of the guard he was holding hostage, viciously sucking the man's "life force." He glared fiercely at the other guards and ground out through his teeth, "He'll be dead in ten seconds."
Ten seconds isn't long, but it isn't short either. The hostage guard quickly rolled his eyes back, showing symptoms of anemia.
Seeing this, the guard with the keys glanced back at his groggy superior. Seeing the man was still in a daze, he could only make up his mind, step forward, and insert a key into the cell door.
"Click-clack~"
The cell door swung wide open.
Except for the guard captain hypnotized by the Sharingan and the anemic guard collapsed on the ground, the remaining guards all stared at Ren Arakawa as if facing a great enemy.
Their strength was very ordinary.
Don't be fooled by the mixed bag of people in Impel Down, especially the prisoners on the third level, each with a bounty over thirty million Berries, which might make you think these guards should be quite strong.
But in reality, many of the guards are marginal figures who were weeded out of the Marines.
Their strengths are uneven, far inferior to the stationed Marines at Marineford.
The World Government isn't stupid. If they assigned overwhelmingly strong people to guard Impel Down and sent weaker ones out to catch pirates, it would be completely backward.
The reason Impel Down is so hard to escape from relies on the Poison Man, Seastone, the Calm Belt, warships, and the Sea Kings.
For someone with Ren Arakawa's strength, he could practically walk all over ordinary guards.
Just as the guards thought they were about to be killed, Ren Arakawa simply walked out of his cell and pushed the wooden tub, which required three guards to move, into the cell.
The two skeletons sniffed the "sour smell" from the tub, gulped, their eyes full of anticipation.
"You two gentlemen, go ahead and eat. It's on me."
After doing this, he turned back from inside the cell and smiled at the guards. "What are you standing around for? Lock the door."
The guard with the keys finally reacted, wiped away his sweat, and muttered, "Damn! It's just for the gruel! I thought he was escaping. Gave me a scare."
At this moment, the gun-wielding guard captain finally snapped out of the illusion. He looked around in a daze and hurriedly picked up his gun.
"Wh-wh-what happened?"
"We were attacked! That guy snatched the gruel!"
"It's... it's alright." The guard captain wiped the sweat from his forehead with his sleeve. "Let's go, we need to report this."
"Kid! You just wait! Attacking a guard! You'll get what's coming to you soon enough!"
Meanwhile, Ren Arakawa, back in the cell, seemed to be in a daze, hugging the tub of gruel, completely motionless.
When a group of furious guards, armed with steel whips, poison needles, and branding irons, arrived at the cell door, they were all dumbfounded.
Inside the cell, apart from two useless prisoners with bellies bloated and round, that black-haired kid was nowhere to be seen!
Where did he go?
How did he, wearing Seastone handcuffs, disappear under everyone's watchful eyes?
"*Burp*~" Carlson let out a full burp. "I... I really don't know."
Belt, clutching his stomach that was about to burst, said, "We didn't... didn't eat it. It was... it was all him! That kid ate it all!"
Half an hour later.
Sadi, Saldeath, Hannyabal, Magellan, Domino, and the others watched the recording, their eyes filled with shock.
"Seastone has no effect on him?"
"That can't be a Devil Fruit ability. It's more like the blinding techniques used by the ninja of Wano Country, but I don't know the specifics of how he did it."
The Poison Man, Magellan, slammed his hand on the table. "Damn it! That kid managed to escape again!"
Everyone dodged the now pitch-black table as a discordant voice spoke up.
"The Starvation Hell is one of the areas under Chief Warden Magellan's responsibility. If he gets demoted, I can become the Vice Warden! Hehehe! Ah! How did I say what I was thinking out loud..."
Everyone was already used to Hannyabal's personality. Magellan suddenly seemed to think of something. "What about that guy, Shiryu?"
Saldeath reminded him, "He headed for the Starvation Hell early this morning."
Magellan slapped his thigh. "Crap! Shiryu is definitely going to kill someone! I have to go stop him!"
Just as he finished speaking and reached the door, a foul fart exploded amidst the crowd!
Everyone covered their noses, their faces flushed red from holding their breath, but some residual poison gas was still inevitably inhaled into their lungs.
"Terrible... this is terrible," Hannyabal fell, unwilling to give up. "So... so cunning. Is this the cunning of a Chief Warden? I... I can't compete with him for merits at all..."
However, Magellan was clutching his stomach. "Someone! Give them the antidote injections! I... I have to go take a dump..."
The sound of hurried footsteps echoed in the dry corridor.
The sheer size of Impel Down was beyond Pirate Ren Arakawa's imagination. He suspected it might be a space created by some unknown Devil Fruit ability. The place was unbelievably large; every few steps, the new scenery that appeared shattered his previous assumptions.
Fortunately, with the help of Observation Haki, he was no longer running around the Starvation Hell like a headless fly.
After turning into an inconspicuous fork in the path, Ren Arakawa saw a staircase leading to an unknown area.
Feeling a faint hot wind blowing up from the bottomless staircase, Pirate Ren Arakawa took a deep breath and jumped down.
(end of chapter)