One month later.
The boy leaned against the ship's railing, his thin frame silhouetted against the gray morning sky. The cutlass hung across his back, the leather strap digging into his shoulder. The blade was rusted now, not from neglect but from use. Blood had a way of eating into metal, corroding it from the inside out. He had tried to clean it after the first few raids, scrubbing at the dark stains with seawater and sand. But the blood kept coming. More raids. More villages. More people cut down like wheat before a scythe. Eventually, he stopped trying to clean it. The rust became a testament, a record written in oxidized iron of every life he had taken.
Toroa had been a month ago. Four weeks. Twenty-eight days. Six hundred and seventy-two hours, though he had stopped counting after the first week.
Time had a strange quality now, stretching and compressing in ways that made no sense. Some moments lasted forever: the sound of children screaming in that burning church, the sight of Candy Cheeks shuffling back to the ship with fresh bruises, the weight of his blade cutting through flesh and bone. Other moments disappeared entirely, whole days vanishing into a gray fog of violence and horror that his mind refused to process.
Three more islands since Toroa. Three more villages burned. Three more beaches stained pink with blood. He had killed so many people he had lost count. Twenty? Thirty? Fifty? The faces blurred together in his memory, a parade of terrified eyes and open mouths, of desperate last stands and futile pleas for mercy. Men with families. Women with children. Young people with their whole lives ahead of them. All dead by his hand.
The ship had grown. What had been eighty men at Toroa was now one hundred and four. New recruits joined after every raid, drawn by the promise of easy plunder and the captain's growing reputation. McGold's bounty had increased to seventy-five thousand berries after the third island. The Marines had finally taken notice, though not enough to actually do anything about it. The boy had seen the new wanted posters when they docked at a small port to sell their stolen goods. His own bounty had increased too. Fifteen thousand berries now. The poster showed his face, young and hard, with dead eyes that looked decades older than his fourteen years.
His poster had no name. Only his picture and bounty.
The ship creaked beneath his feet, the wood groaning with the weight of too many bodies and too much stolen cargo. The deck was filthy, covered in a layer of grime that never seemed to wash away no matter how much seawater sloshed across it. Blood, vomit, spilled alcohol, and worse had soaked into the planks, creating a permanent stench that made the boy's eyes water. Rats scurried openly in broad daylight, fat and fearless, gorging themselves on the scraps the pirates left behind.
But the worst smell came from below deck.
The boy's hands tightened on the railing until his knuckles went white. His jaw clenched so hard his teeth ached. The rage that lived in his chest, that constant burning presence, flared hotter. It was always there now, a second heartbeat, a fire that never went out. Sometimes it was a dull ember, manageable, something he could push down and ignore. Other times, like now, it roared into an inferno that threatened to consume him entirely.
He forced himself to breathe. In through his nose, out through his mouth. Slow and controlled. If he let the rage take over, if he let it show on his face, someone would notice. And if someone noticed, they would tell the captain. And if the captain found out that the boy was anything less than a loyal crew member, people would suffer. Not him. Never him. The captain had figured out early on that physical punishment didn't work on the boy. He had too much tolerance for pain, too much ability to disconnect from his body. So the captain punished others instead. The slaves. The new recruits. Anyone weak enough to hurt and disposable enough to break.
So the boy breathed, and he pushed the rage down, and he kept his face carefully blank.
The hatch to the lower deck was twenty feet away. It was a square opening in the deck, maybe four feet on each side, with a heavy wooden cover that was currently propped open. The smell that rose from that opening was indescribable. It was the smell of human suffering distilled into its purest, most concentrated form. Sweat and excrement and rotting flesh and disease and despair, all mixed together into a miasma so thick it was almost visible.
The boy had been down there. He went down there every night when the rest of the crew was too drunk to notice. He had to. It was the only thing that kept him sane, the only action he could take that felt like resistance, like he was still human despite everything.
The slave hold was located in the lowest part of the ship, below the crew quarters, below the cargo hold, in a space that had originally been designed for ballast. It was a long, narrow room with a ceiling so low that even the boy had to hunch over to move through it. The walls were bare wood, slick with condensation and other fluids he tried not to think about. There were no portholes, no ventilation, no light except for what filtered down through the gaps in the deck above.
The slaves were kept in cages. Not individual cages, but long communal ones that ran the length of the hold, three on each side. Each cage was maybe six feet deep and thirty feet long, with iron bars on the front and solid wood on the other three sides. The ceilings of the cages were four feet high. No one could stand. They could only sit or lie down, packed so tightly that there was no room to stretch out.
There were sixty-three slaves in those six cages. Men, women, and children, ranging in age from maybe eight years old to sixty. They had been collected from the four islands the crew had raided, taken from their homes and families and thrown into this floating hell.
The captain kept them packed like sardines in a can. That was the phrase that kept running through the boy's head every time he went down there. Sardines in a can. Bodies pressed against bodies, no room to move, no room to breathe. The heat was suffocating, the air so thick and humid it felt like drowning. In the summer months, the temperature in the hold regularly exceeded one hundred degrees. People passed out from heat exhaustion. Some of them never woke up.
The slaves were chained. Each one wore iron shackles on their wrists and ankles, connected by short lengths of chain that allowed minimal movement. The chains were attached to long bars that ran through the cages, preventing anyone from moving more than a few feet in any direction. The iron had rubbed their skin raw, creating open sores that wept pus and blood. The boy had seen infections set in, watched as the flesh around the shackles turned red, then purple, then black. He had watched people lose hands and feet to gangrene, the dead tissue falling away to reveal bone.
The captain refused to remove the dead bodies.
That was the worst part. When someone died in the cages, and people died regularly, the captain's orders were to leave them where they fell. He claimed it was too much trouble to unlock the cages and drag the corpses out. He claimed it taught the living slaves a lesson about obedience. But the boy knew the real reason: the captain enjoyed it. He enjoyed the psychological torture of forcing people to live alongside rotting corpses. He enjoyed the way it broke them, the way it turned human beings into hollow shells who stared at nothing and responded to nothing.
There were currently seven dead bodies in the cages. The boy had counted them last night. Three in the front left cage, two in the back right, one each in the middle cages on both sides. They had been dead for varying lengths of time. The most recent had died yesterday, a young woman who had simply stopped breathing in the middle of the night. The oldest had been dead for almost two weeks, a man whose body had bloated and then collapsed in on itself, leaking fluids that pooled on the floor of the cage.
The living slaves had no choice but to lie next to the dead ones. To press their bodies against corpses in the cramped space. To smell the rot, to feel the cold flesh, to watch the maggots and flies do their work. Some of them had gone mad from it. The boy had heard them at night, laughing or crying or screaming, their voices echoing up through the deck.
And then there was the hunger.
The captain fed the slaves once a day, if you could call it feeding. A bucket of slop was lowered into each cage, a mixture of spoiled food scraps, weevil-infested hardtack, and seawater. There was never enough. Sixty-three people sharing six buckets of slop, fighting over every scrap, licking the buckets clean and then licking their fingers, desperate for any calorie, any nutrition.
People were starving to death. The boy could see it in their faces, in the way their cheekbones jutted out and their eyes sank into their skulls. He could see it in their bodies, skin stretched tight over bones, ribs and vertebrae clearly visible. Children who should have been growing were wasting away instead, their bellies distended from malnutrition, their limbs like sticks.
And in their desperation, in their starvation, some of them had started eating the dead.
The boy had discovered it three nights ago. He had climbed down into the hold with his usual offering, a few pieces of salted beef stolen from the crew's supplies, and he had seen it. A woman in the back left cage, her face smeared with something dark, gnawing on what looked like a piece of meat. It had taken him a moment to understand what he was seeing. Then he had looked at the corpse next to her, at the way chunks of flesh had been torn from the arms and legs, and his stomach had lurched.
She had looked up at him with wild, desperate eyes. Not ashamed. Not guilty. Just desperate. Hungry enough to do the unthinkable.
The boy had vomited. He had turned away and emptied his stomach onto the floor, his whole body shaking. When he looked back, the woman was still eating, tearing at the flesh with her teeth because she had nothing else to cut with.
He had asked around carefully the next day, trying to understand. One of the older pirates, a man named Cutter who had been with McGold for years, had laughed when the boy brought it up.
"Oh yeah, they always do that eventually," Cutter had said, picking at his teeth with a splinter of wood. "Seen it a dozen times. You keep people hungry enough, they'll eat anything. Each other, the dead, their own shit if they're desperate enough. Captain knows it too. That's why he leaves the bodies down there. Figures if they're eating corpses, they're too weak and sick to cause trouble."
The boy had walked away before he did something he would regret. The rage had been so strong in that moment that his vision had gone red at the edges. He had wanted to grab Cutter's head and smash it against the deck until there was nothing left but pulp and bone fragments.
But he hadn't. He had walked away, and he had pushed the rage down, and he had waited.
Because eating the corpses was making them sick. The boy didn't need medical training to understand that. Rotting human flesh was full of bacteria and disease. People who ate it developed fevers, vomiting, diarrhea. They grew weaker instead of stronger. Some of them died from the sickness, adding more corpses to the cages, perpetuating the cycle.
So the boy had started bringing food. Real food. Not much, just what he could steal without being noticed. Hardtack that wasn't completely infested. Salted beef from the barrels in the cargo hold. Dried fish. Anything with actual nutritional value.
He went down at night, when most of the crew was passed out drunk. He moved quietly, his feet barely making a sound on the wooden stairs. The hold was pitch black except for the faint light from his small lantern. The smell hit him like a wall every time, making his eyes water and his throat close up. But he forced himself to keep moving.
The slaves would hear him coming. He could see their eyes reflecting the lantern light, dozens of pairs of eyes watching him from the darkness of the cages. Some of them reached out through the bars, their hands skeletal and trembling. Others just stared, too weak or too broken to react.
The boy would move from cage to cage, passing small pieces of food through the bars. Never enough to be obvious. Never enough that the captain would notice the missing supplies. Just enough to keep some of them alive a little longer.
Last night, he had given a piece of salted beef to a man in the front right cage. The man was maybe forty, though it was hard to tell. His hair had gone gray, and his face was gaunt, his lips cracked and bleeding.
The man had taken the beef with shaking hands. He had stared at it for a long moment, as if he couldn't believe it was real. Then he had put it in his mouth, and the boy had watched his face transform. His eyes had filled with tears. His whole body had started to shake. He had chewed slowly, savoring every second, and when he swallowed, he had let out a sound that was half sob, half moan.
Then the man had dropped to his knees, or as close to kneeling as he could get in the cramped cage. He had reached through the bars and grabbed the boy's feet, pressing his cracked lips to the dirty leather of the boy's boots. He had kissed them, over and over, his tears falling onto the boy's feet.
"Thank you," the man had whispered, his voice hoarse and broken. "Thank you, thank you, thank you."
The boy had stood there, frozen, feeling the man's lips on his feet, feeling the wetness of his tears. And the rage had come roaring back, so strong and so hot that he thought he might spontaneously combust.
This man was thanking him. Kissing his feet. Treating him like a savior. But the boy wasn't a savior. He was one of the people who had put this man in this cage. And all he could offer them was a few scraps of stolen food.
The inadequacy of it, the sheer pathetic insufficiency of his actions, had made him want to scream. He had wanted to rip the cage doors off their hinges. He had wanted to break every chain, to free every slave, to burn this ship to the waterline and watch it sink.
But he couldn't. Not yet. He wasn't strong enough. He wasn't fast enough. He would fail, and then the captain would punish the slaves for his failure, and everything would be worse.
So he had gently pulled his feet away from the man's grasp. He had moved on to the next cage, distributing the rest of his stolen food, and then he had climbed back up to the deck and stood in the fresh air, breathing deeply, trying to wash the smell of the hold out of his lungs.
That had been last night.
Now, standing at the railing in the gray morning light, the boy heard sounds from below. The hatch was open, and voices were echoing up from the lower decks. Footsteps on the stairs. The sound of something heavy being dragged.
The boy turned, his hand instinctively moving to the hilt of his cutlass. Two pirates emerged from the hatch, breathing hard from exertion. Between them, they carried a body.
The boy's heart stopped.
The body was limp, arms and legs dangling loosely. Long black hair hung down like a curtain, obscuring the face. But the boy didn't need to see the face. He knew that hair. He knew the shape of that body, the way the thin arms hung at that particular angle.
Candy Cheeks.
No. Not Candy Cheeks. That was the name the captain had given her, a cruel joke about the bruises that always marked her face. Her real name was Mary. She had told him that in one of their conversations, whispered it like a secret, like she was afraid the captain would take even that away from her if he knew she still remembered it.
Mary.
The two pirates carrying her body were laughing about something, making jokes the boy couldn't hear over the rushing sound in his ears. They walked past him without a glance, heading toward the railing on the far side of the ship.
The boy's feet moved without conscious thought. He followed them, his eyes locked on Mary's face. Her head lolled to the side as they walked, and he could see her features now.
She looked peaceful.
That was the first thought that cut through the shock and the grief and the rage. She looked peaceful. For the first time since he had met her, her face was relaxed. Her eyebrows, which had always been furrowed in fear or pain, were smooth. Her lips, which had always been pressed into a thin line or quivering with suppressed sobs, were slightly parted and still. There were bruises on her face, old ones fading to yellow and green, but no new ones. Her eyes were closed.
She looked like she was sleeping. Like she was finally, after months of torture and abuse, getting some rest.
The boy felt something hot and wet on his cheeks. He reached up and touched his face, surprised to find tears there. He hadn't cried since Toroa. He had thought he was beyond tears, that he had seen too much horror for his body to produce that kind of response anymore.
But apparently not. Apparently, Mary's death was the thing that broke through the numbness.
He ducked his head quickly, letting his red hair fall forward to hide his face. He couldn't let anyone see. Crying was weakness, and weakness was punished. He blinked rapidly, trying to clear his vision, and bit down hard on the inside of his cheek until he tasted blood. The pain helped. It gave him something to focus on besides the grief.
The two pirates reached the railing. Without ceremony, without any acknowledgment that they were disposing of a human being, they swung Mary's body back and forth twice to build momentum, then heaved her over the side.
The boy watched her fall. She seemed to hang in the air for a moment, suspended, her black hair spreading out around her like wings. Then gravity took hold, and she dropped. She hit the water with a splash that seemed too small, too insignificant for what it represented.
The boy rushed to the railing and looked down. Mary's body floated for a moment on the surface, face up, her hair spreading out around her in the dark water. The morning light caught her face, and the boy could see that peaceful expression one more time.
Then she began to sink. Slowly at first, then faster. The water closed over her face, and she disappeared into the depths. The boy stared at the spot where she had vanished, watching the ripples spread out and fade, until there was nothing left but the endless expanse of the sea.
She was gone.
The two pirates were already walking away, still laughing, already forgetting. To them, she had been nothing. Just another slave, just another body, as disposable as garbage.
But to the boy, she had been something more.
He remembered the first time she had tried to talk to him. It had been maybe a week after Toroa. He had been sitting alone on the deck, trying to clean his cutlass, and she had approached him hesitantly. Her face had been covered in fresh bruises, and she had been limping badly. But she had sat down next to him anyway, carefully, like she was afraid he would hit her.
"You're different from the others," she had said quietly.
The boy had said nothing. He had learned early on that engaging with the slaves was dangerous. It made them real. It made what was happening to them harder to ignore.
But Mary had persisted. Over the following days and weeks, she had sought him out whenever she could. She would sit near him and talk, even when he didn't respond. She would tell him about her life before, about the small fishing village where she had grown up, about her family. She had a daughter, she told him. Seven years old. The pirates had killed her during the raid on her village. Mary had watched it happen.
The boy had tried to ignore her. He had tried to maintain his distance, to keep her at arm's length. But it was impossible. Her kindness, her determination to remain human despite everything, had worn down his defenses.
She had shown him her most prized possession about two weeks ago. They had been sitting on the deck at night, and she had pulled something from the folds of her ragged dress. A book. Small and battered, with a cracked leather cover and pages yellowed with age.
"I've had this since I was a girl," she had whispered, holding it like it was made of gold. "It's the only thing they didn't take from me. I hid it."
The boy had looked at the cover. The title was embossed in faded gold letters: "Noland the Liar: A Tale of Adventure and Deception."
"Do you know the story?" Mary had asked, her eyes lighting up with something that might have been joy. It was the first time the boy had seen any positive emotion on her face.
He had shaken his head. In his old world, in his old life, he had known about Noland. The story was part of the One Piece lore, a tale about an explorer who claimed to have found a city of gold but was executed as a liar when he couldn't prove it. But he couldn't tell Mary that. He couldn't explain how he knew things about this world that he shouldn't know.
So he had just said, "No."
Mary's face had transformed. Despite the bruises, despite the pain she must have been in, she had smiled. A real smile, genuine and warm.
"It's a wonderful story," she had said. "About a man who told the truth but no one believed him. About adventure and friendship and never giving up, even when the whole world thinks you're wrong." She had paused, her fingers tracing the letters on the cover. "My father used to read it to me when I was little. Then I read it to my daughter."
Her voice had broken on the last word. The smile had faded. But she had taken a deep breath and continued.
"Would you like to read it?"
The boy had hesitated. Then, quietly, he had admitted something he had never told anyone in this world.
"I can't read."
It was true. The body he inhabited had never learned. The previous owner of this body, whoever he had been, had been illiterate. The boy had his memories from his old world, his old life, where he had been able to read just fine. But those memories didn't translate to this world's written language. The letters looked similar to English, but they were different enough that he couldn't make sense of them.
Mary's face had lit up again. That smile had returned, even brighter than before.
"I'll teach you," she had said, her voice filled with an enthusiasm that seemed impossible given her circumstances. "I taught my daughter. I can teach you too."
And she had. Over the past two weeks, whenever they had a few minutes alone, Mary had taught him. She had started with the alphabet, pointing to letters in the book and making him repeat their sounds. Then simple words. Then short sentences. The boy had been a quick learner, his adult mind from his previous life making connections that a child would have struggled with.
Mary had been a good teacher. Patient and encouraging, never frustrated when he made mistakes. She had seemed to come alive during those lessons, her face losing some of its haunted quality, her voice growing stronger. Teaching him had given her purpose, something to focus on besides her own suffering.
The boy had treasured those moments. Not just because he was learning to read, though that was valuable. But because they were moments of humanity in an ocean of cruelty. They were proof that kindness could still exist, even here, even in the worst circumstances imaginable.
And now she was gone.
The boy's hands gripped the railing so hard that the wood creaked. His whole body was shaking, trembling with an emotion so powerful it felt like it might tear him apart from the inside.
It wasn't just grief, though that was part of it. It wasn't just rage, though that was there too, burning hotter than ever. It was something more complex, something that combined loss and fury and guilt and determination into a single overwhelming feeling that had no name.
Mary had been kind. She had been good. She had suffered more than anyone should ever have to suffer, and she had remained human through it all. She had cared about others even when she was barely surviving herself. She had tried to teach a boy to read even though she was a slave on a pirate ship with no hope of escape.
And they had killed her. Or worked her to death. Or she had simply given up, her body and mind finally reaching their limit. The boy didn't know the details, and in a way, it didn't matter. The result was the same.
She was dead. And the men who had killed her, directly or indirectly, were still alive. Still laughing. Still singing their crude songs and drinking their stolen rum and raping their slaves.
They wouldn't get away with it.
The thought crystallized in the boy's mind with perfect clarity. It wasn't a new thought. He had been thinking about killing the crew since Toroa, since that first atrocity. But it had always been vague, a distant fantasy, something he would do someday when he was strong enough.
Not anymore.
Now it was a promise. A vow. As certain and solid as the deck beneath his feet.
They wouldn't get away with it. Not as long as he breathed. Not as long as he had strength in his body and rage in his heart.
He would kill them all.
But he couldn't do it yet. He knew that. As much as he wanted to draw his cutlass right now and start cutting throats, he knew it would be suicide. There were too many of them, and some of them were too strong.
Three main problems. Three obstacles that stood between him and his revenge.
The first was Garesh.
The boy turned away from the railing and scanned the deck until he found the man. Garesh was sitting near the mainmast, sharpening a knife that was more like a small sword. He was huge, easily six and a half feet tall and built like a bull. His arms were as thick as the boy's torso, corded with muscle that rippled beneath his scarred skin. His head was completely bald, the scalp covered in a network of scars that looked like someone had tried to scalp him and failed.
Garesh had inhuman strength. The boy had seen it demonstrated multiple times, but the most memorable had been during the second raid after Toroa.
They had attacked a slightly larger village, one that had put up more resistance. A group of villagers had managed to corner Garesh in a narrow alley, thinking they had him trapped. There had been five of them, all armed with spears and axes.
The boy had been on a nearby rooftop and had watched the whole thing.
Garesh had laughed. A deep, booming sound that had echoed off the alley walls. Then he had grabbed the first villager, a large man who must have weighed two hundred pounds, and lifted him off the ground with one hand. The villager had struggled, his feet kicking in the air, his hands clawing at Garesh's grip.
Garesh had grabbed the man's other arm with his free hand. Then he had pulled.
The sound had been horrible. A wet tearing, like fabric ripping, but deeper and wetter. The villager's screams had cut off abruptly as his arm separated from his body, tendons and muscles tearing, blood spraying in a wide arc. Garesh had tossed the arm aside like garbage and then grabbed the man's remaining arm.
He had torn that one off too.
The villager had fallen to the ground, armless, blood pumping from the ragged stumps of his shoulders. He had lived for almost a minute, his mouth opening and closing soundlessly, his body twitching. Garesh had ignored him and moved on to the next villager.
By the time Garesh was done, all five villagers were dead. One had been torn limb from limb, literally. Another had his head twisted completely around, the neck bones shattered. A third had been picked up and thrown with such force that he had crashed through a wooden wall and broken his spine on the stones beyond. The last two had tried to run, but Garesh had caught them. He had grabbed them both by their heads, one in each hand, and smashed their skulls together. The sound had been like two melons colliding. Both men had dropped, their heads caved in, brain matter leaking from their ears.
Garesh hadn't even been breathing hard afterward.
The boy had no illusions about his chances against Garesh in a straight fight. The man could literally tear him apart. Any plan to kill the crew would have to account for Garesh's strength. The boy would need to be smart, to use surprise and speed and maybe poison or fire or something else that didn't require matching Garesh's raw power.
The second problem was Rick.
The boy's eyes found him on the other side of the deck. Rick was leaning against the railing, talking to a group of younger pirates. He was average height, maybe five foot nine, with a lean build that didn't look particularly impressive. His most distinctive features were his ginger hair, which he wore long and tied back in a ponytail, and his teeth. Two of his front teeth had been plated in gold, and they glinted when he smiled, which he did often. He had a vicious temper, the boy had learned. He could go from laughing to murderous in seconds, and he had killed more than one crew member for perceived slights.
But the real problem was his Devil Fruit.
Rick had eaten the Momentum-Momentum Fruit, a Paramecia-type that gave him the ability to store and release kinetic momentum from anything he touched. The boy had seen him use it in combat, and it was terrifying.
During the third raid, Rick had been surrounded by a group of villagers. Maybe ten of them, all armed, all attacking at once. They had hit him with everything they had: swords, axes, clubs, even a few bullets from flintlock pistols. Every attack had landed. The boy had seen the blades cut into Rick's flesh, had seen the bullets punch through his body.
But Rick hadn't fallen. He had just stood there, smiling, his gold teeth glinting, as the attacks piled up. Then he had touched the ground with one hand.
The release had been instantaneous. All the kinetic energy from all those attacks, stored in his body, had been transferred into the ground. The earth had exploded outward in a shockwave that had sent all ten villagers flying. They had crashed into buildings, into each other, into the ground. Most of them had died on impact, their bodies broken by the force. The few who survived had been too injured to fight.
Rick's bounty was three hundred thousand berries, the highest on the ship. Higher even than Captain McGold's. The Marines considered him a serious threat, and for good reason.
But the boy had been watching Rick carefully. He had been studying the man's powers, looking for weaknesses. And he had found one.
During that same raid, after Rick had used his power to devastating effect, he had been attacked again. This time by seven villagers who had seen what happened to their friends and were desperate to bring him down. They had swarmed him, attacking from all sides at once.
Rick had tried to use his power again. But something had gone wrong. After taking maybe a dozen hits, his body had seemed to give out. His legs had buckled. Blood had started pouring from his nose and ears. He had collapsed to one knee, his face twisted in pain.
The villagers had pressed their advantage, raining down blows. Rick had been seconds away from death when Garesh had arrived and saved him, tearing through the villagers like they were made of paper.
The boy had thought about that moment a lot over the past few weeks. He had replayed it in his mind, analyzing every detail. And he had come to a conclusion: there was a limit to how much kinetic momentum Rick could store.
It made sense. Devil Fruits were powerful, but they all had limitations. Rick's body could only handle so much energy before it started to break down. If the boy could hit him enough times, fast enough, he could overload Rick's ability and leave him vulnerable.
It wouldn't be easy. Rick was experienced and skilled, and he would be expecting attacks. But it was possible. The boy just needed to be fast and relentless, to keep hitting until Rick's body gave out.
The third problem was the simplest and the most difficult: numbers.
One hundred and four pirates. The crew had grown significantly since Toroa, swelled by new recruits and survivors from other crews that McGold had absorbed. Most of them were weak, the boy knew. Unskilled fighters who relied on numbers and brutality rather than technique. In a one-on-one fight, the boy was confident he could kill most of them.
But it wouldn't be one-on-one. It would be one against a hundred and four. Even if he killed ten of them, twenty, thirty, the rest would overwhelm him eventually. He would tire. He would make a mistake. And they would bring him down.
So he couldn't fight them all at once. He would need to be strategic. Divide them. Isolate them. Pick them off in small groups or one at a time. Use the environment, use surprise, use every advantage he could find.
It would take planning. Patience. Perfect timing.
But it was possible. The boy could feel it. He could feel himself getting stronger with every raid, every battle. It was a strange sensation, almost like a video game from his old world. Like he was gaining experience points, leveling up. His body was faster now than it had been a month ago. Stronger. More durable. His reflexes were sharper. His instincts in combat were better.
There were different rules governing this world, the boy had realized. Not the rules of physics and biology from his old world, but something else. Something that allowed people to grow stronger through combat, to develop abilities that defied normal human limitations. He didn't fully understand it yet. But he was learning.
Every fight taught him something new. Every kill made him a little bit stronger, a little bit faster. He could feel it happening, a gradual but steady progression. At this rate, in another month or two, he might be strong enough to take on Garesh. Maybe even Rick.
And then he would kill them all.
The boy's thoughts were interrupted by the sound of music. He looked up to see Richard, one of the crew's musicians, pulling out his accordion. Richard was a thin man with a patchy beard and missing fingers on his left hand, lost to frostbite years ago. But he could still play, and he did so now, the accordion wheezing to life with a jaunty tune.
The pirates began to gather, drawn by the music like flies to rotting meat. They formed a loose circle around Richard, bottles in hand, already swaying to the rhythm. Someone started clapping. Someone else started stomping their feet.
Then they started to sing.
"Oh, we'll find the One Piece, boys, we'll find it sure as shit!
We'll have more gold than we can hold, we'll be richer than the rich!
We'll buy a thousand whores, boys, the finest in the land!
We'll fuck them till they can't walk straight, we'll fuck them till they can't stand!"
"We'll have castles made of gold, boys, and servants by the score!
We'll drink the finest wine and rum, and then we'll drink some more!
We'll be kings of all the seas, boys, with crowns upon our heads!
We'll have silk sheets and feather pillows on our giant fucking beds!"
More voices joined in, the song growing louder and more raucous. The pirates were grinning, their faces flushed with alcohol and excitement.
"The One Piece waits for us, boys, in the Grand Line far away!
We'll sail through storm and battle, boys, we'll make the whole world pay!
And when we find that treasure, boys, when we hold it in our hands,
We'll be the richest bastards, boys, in all the fucking lands!"
They dissolved into cheering and laughter, raising their bottles high. Richard played a flourish on his accordion, and the pirates stomped and clapped.
The boy watched them with dead eyes. They were singing about the One Piece, about becoming kings, about wealth and power. But they were nothing. They were scum. They were rapists and murderers and slavers who would never make it to the Grand Line, who would never find the One Piece, who would die forgotten and unmourned.
He would make sure of it.
The song ended, and there was a brief pause as Richard adjusted his accordion and took a drink from a bottle someone passed him. Then he started playing again, a different tune this time.
"Oh, the Celestial Dragons think they're gods, sitting in their towers high,
But we'll drag them down and fuck them raw and watch the bastards cry!
We'll rape their wives and daughters, boys, we'll make them scream and bleed,
We'll show those holy fuckers what it means to truly plead!"
"The Admirals think they're tough, boys, with their fancy coats and pride,
But we'll gut them like the pigs they are and hang them by their hide!
We'll piss on all their justice, boys, we'll shit on all their laws,
We'll show the world that pirates rule with blood and steel and claws!"
The song continued, getting cruder and more violent with each verse. The pirates were laughing, acting out the lyrics, making obscene gestures. Some of them were already so drunk they could barely stand.
The boy walked to the bow of the ship and stood there, staring out at the horizon. The sea stretched out endlessly in all directions, dark and cold and indifferent. Somewhere out there was the kingdom they were sailing toward. A place to resupply, to restock weapons and food. The captain had announced it yesterday, and the crew had cheered.
But the boy had different plans.
The moment they left that kingdom, the moment they got back on this ship and set sail again, it would be over. He would kill them all. Every single one. He would start with the weakest, the ones who were too drunk or too stupid to see it coming. He would work his way up, getting stronger with each kill, until he was ready to face Garesh and Rick.
And then he would free the slaves. He would break their chains and give them weapons and let them have their revenge too, if they wanted it. Or he would put them ashore somewhere safe, somewhere they could start over.
But first, the pirates had to die.
All of them.
The boy's hands went to his cutlass, fingers wrapping around the hilt. The metal was warm from his body heat, the leather grip worn smooth from use. He drew the blade slowly, the rust-covered steel whispering against the scabbard.
He held it up, examining it in the gray morning light. The rust was thick in places, the blade pitted and corroded. But it was still sharp. Still deadly. He had made sure of that, honing the edge every night until it could split hairs.
This blade had killed so many people. Innocent people. People who had done nothing wrong except be in the wrong place at the wrong time.
But soon, it would kill the guilty.
The boy imagined it. He let himself fantasize about it in vivid detail, because the fantasy was all that kept him sane.
He imagined creeping through the ship at night, moving from hammock to hammock, cutting throats while the pirates slept. He imagined the hot spray of blood, the gurgling sounds they would make, the way their eyes would open in confusion and fear as they realized they were dying.
He imagined cornering them in small groups, using the narrow corridors of the ship to his advantage so they couldn't surround him. He imagined his blade flashing in the lamplight, cutting through flesh and bone, painting the walls red.
He imagined facing Garesh. The big man would be dangerous, but he was also slow. The boy was fast. He could dodge, could weave, could strike at vulnerable points. Eyes. Throat. Groin. Achilles tendons. He would cut Garesh down piece by piece, would make him bleed, would watch that inhuman strength fade as the blood poured out.
He imagined facing Rick. That would be harder. He would need to be relentless, to attack without stopping, to push through the pain and exhaustion until Rick's body gave out. And when Rick fell, when his Devil Fruit power failed him, the boy would drive his blade through the man's heart and watch those gold teeth stop glinting.
He imagined Captain McGold. The old man would be last. The boy would save him for last. He would make McGold watch as his crew died around him. He would make him beg. And then, when McGold was on his knees, when he was crying and pleading for mercy, the boy would remind him of Toroa. Of Mary. Of all the slaves rotting in the hold. Of every atrocity the captain had ordered or allowed.
And then he would kill him. Slowly.
The fantasy was so vivid, so detailed, that the boy could almost taste it. The rage in his chest burned hotter, fed by the images in his mind. His grip on the cutlass tightened until his knuckles were white.
Behind him, the pirates were still singing. Their voices carried across the deck, crude and off-key and full of false bravado.
The boy sheathed his cutlass and turned to look at them. He studied their faces, memorizing them. One hundred and four men. One hundred and four targets. One hundred and four lives that would end by his hand.
They were laughing now, passing bottles back and forth, groping the slaves who had been brought up from the hold to serve them. The boy saw a young girl, maybe twelve years old, being pulled onto a pirate's lap. She was crying, trying to pull away, but the pirate just laughed and held her tighter.
The rage flared so hot that the boy's vision went white for a moment. His hand went to his cutlass again, fingers wrapping around the hilt, ready to draw.
Not yet, he told himself. Not yet. Soon. Very soon. But not yet.
He forced his hand away from the weapon. Forced himself to breathe. Forced the rage back down into the burning core in his chest where it lived.
The kingdom was three days away, according to the navigator. Three more days of this. Three more days of watching them abuse the slaves, of listening to their songs, of being complicit in their evil.
The boy could endure three more days. He had endured a month already. He had endured Toroa and three more raids and Mary's death. He could endure three more days.
And then it would be over.
The boy turned back to the sea, his back to the celebrating pirates. The wind picked up, blowing his red hair back from his face. The scar on his lip pulled tight as his jaw clenched.
Three more days.
Then blood. Then screaming. Then justice, or something close to it.
Then freedom for the slaves, and death for everyone else.
The boy closed his eyes and let the rage burn. He fed it with memories of Mary's peaceful face as she sank into the sea. He fed it with the image of that man kissing his feet in gratitude for a scrap of food. He fed it with every scream he had heard from the hold, every atrocity he had witnessed, every moment of helpless fury.
The rage was his fuel. The rage was his strength. The rage was what would keep him going when his body wanted to give up, when his mind wanted to break, when the sheer horror of what he was planning threatened to overwhelm him.
He was fourteen years old. He had killed dozens of people. He had a bounty on his head. He was trapped on a ship full of monsters, forced to pretend to be one of them.
But in three days, that would change.
The boy opened his eyes and stared out at the horizon, at the endless expanse of sea and sky. Somewhere out there was the kingdom. Somewhere out there was the future, whatever it held.
But first, there would be blood.
So much blood.
The thought should have horrified him. In his old life, in his old world, the idea of killing over a hundred people would have been unthinkable. He had been a normal person, with normal morals, living a normal life.
But that person was gone. That life was gone.