"Don't make that face, Nojiko."
Nami wore a flawless smile, the kind of mask she had perfected over eight long years at sea while dealing with every sort of pirate and merchant.
She freed one hand to pat her sister's stiff shoulder, her tone light, almost casual, as though she were only going out to settle some minor matter.
"It's just a contract that was agreed on beforehand. The one hundred million Berries are all here. A greedy man like Arlong has no reason to refuse."
"But..." Nojiko opened her mouth, looking into those crescent-shaped eyes of hers, and in the end all the worry that had risen to her lips became nothing more than a sigh.
She reached out, gripped Nami's cold fingers, and squeezed them tightly.
"You have to be careful. If anything feels wrong, forget the money and run."
"Relax, relax. You know how good I am at running away, don't you?"
Nami gave her a playful wink, pulled her hand back, and turned toward the building by the shore.
The moment she turned around, the smile vanished from her face.
She had walked this dirt road to Arlong Park countless times before.
Sometimes she went there in humiliation. Sometimes she came back with bloodstained money.
Only this time, every step felt strangely heavy.
Nami lifted her head, her eyes passing through the sparse trees and settling on that jagged tower in the distance.
'Once I get past this.'
'Once I throw this bag in front of that fish-man, it'll all be over.'
She had already imagined the scene in her mind.
She would slam the money down on the table, point straight at Arlong's nose, and tell him to get out of Cocoyashi Village.
From then on, this place would be hers again!
The thought alone filled her with strength, and even the backpack digging painfully into her shoulder no longer seemed unbearable.
...
The half-hour walk felt far too long.
When the massive wooden gate painted with a sawtooth pattern finally came into view, Nami still stopped in place.
It was close now.
The smell of fish mixed with the damp sea wind rushed straight into her face, sharp enough to sting her nose.
Thump, thump, thump.
Her heart pounded hard against her chest, so loudly it nearly drowned out the shrill cries of the cicadas around her.
Nami drew in a deep breath and tried to calm herself, but the cold sweat on her palms would not dry.
'Huff... calm down, Nami. You're an excellent navigator, and you're not bad at stealing either.'
Silently encouraging herself, she raised a trembling hand and pressed it against the heavy wooden gate.
She did not push it open right away.
Instead, just as she always had, she leaned in and cautiously peeked through a damaged crack in the panel.
She only wanted to make sure Arlong was inside, so she could end this eight-year nightmare in one stroke.
Through the narrow gap, sunlight slanted across the courtyard pool of Arlong Park.
Several fish-men were lounging lazily in deck chairs.
One of the officers, Chew, with those thick lips of his, was idly turning a gold wine cup in his hand, something he had probably stolen from somewhere.
The fingers Nami had placed on the door suddenly froze.
Because on the sea breeze, broken and drifting, she heard that strange, drawn-out voice of his.
"...Chew, Arlong-san is too kind. He actually played along with that lowly human woman's little game for this long... chew..."
Nami's fingers curled stiffly against the wood.
A chill rose from the soles of her feet, and the light in her eyes began to go out.
Something was wrong.
That tone, that careless mockery, was nothing like the atmosphere of a transaction about to be completed that she had imagined all the way here.
"But then again... chew..." Chew kept talking, tilting the wine cup in his hand, the dead fish look in his eyes carrying a mockery that made Nami's skin crawl.
"A hundred million Berries isn't some small number, even for us... chew. How could we really hand territory belonging to fish-men over to a human... chew..."
Every word stabbed into Nami's ears.
Her pupils shrank to pinpoints.
Her breathing stopped completely in that instant, and the heavy backpack on her shoulders suddenly felt as though it were crushing the life out of her.
Outside the crack, the world remained bright and sunlit.
But in Nami's eyes, all of that light was being swallowed up by a darkness spreading from somewhere much deeper.
"...Chew, that damned Captain Nezumi should already be on his way by now, right? Once that woman brings the money over, he'll just swallow it back up for us... chew-hahaha!"
That laugh, with its grotesque trailing tone, shattered Nami completely.
The sunlight outside the gate was still dazzling, but she felt nothing except an icy coldness spreading through her whole body.
The thing that had been holding her upright all this time—the contract, the promise that one hundred million Berries would buy back the village—crumbled into dust in that instant.
So there had never been any agreement at all.
So the eight years she had spent enduring humiliation and surviving like a stray dog meant nothing more than a joke to those monsters.
Nami's eyes turned red at once, blazing with the fury of someone who had been deceived to the bitter end.
The hand she had pressed against the gate began to shake violently. Her nails dug into the wood so hard they nearly split.
"ARLONG!"
With a furious shout, Nami kicked the heavy gate wide open.
The loud crash startled every pirate in the courtyard.
Their movements froze, and all eyes turned toward the slender girl standing there.
The heavy backpack was ripped from her shoulder and slammed hard onto the ground, the Berries inside giving off a heavy, muffled thud that sounded like mockery itself.
"Oh? Isn't this the navigator we keep around for drawing charts?"
Arlong sat on the stone chair that symbolized his rule, his eyes narrowing slightly as a careless smirk hung beneath that serrated nose of his.
"What? You're in such a hurry to hand over the money that you want us to leave already?"
"Stop pretending!"
Nami ripped the long staff from her waist and gripped it with both hands, her knuckles white from how hard she was holding it.
At that moment, there was only one thought left in her head.
'Kill him.'
"Give the village... back to me!"
She rushed straight at Arlong with the staff raised.
Against overwhelming strength, that kind of resistance was pitifully useless.
The swinging staff was caught with ease in Arlong's large, scaled hand.
He did not even bother standing up.
He only leaned forward a little, and his mouth full of fangs spread into a cruel grin.
"Even if you are a rare talented woman, if you still can't learn your place..." Arlong's fingers tightened slightly, and the staff in his hand let out a strained creak.
"...then you can die, Nami."
The pressure pouring from him and the bloody scent around him snapped Nami back to reality in an instant.
"Kuroobi."
Arlong casually flung her away, sending Nami staggering backward together with her staff.
"Teach our dear little cat what the rules of fish-men are."
"As you command, Arlong-san."
Kuroobi, dressed in that strange karate outfit with his braided hair, rose to his feet and began advancing one step at a time, flexing his wrists as he came.
Nami's anger was instantly drowned by the instinct to survive. Under the shadow of death, her face went white as paper.
As she watched the Fish-Man Karate master closing in, her body reacted faster than her mind.
'Run.'
She had to run.
As long as she stayed alive, there was still hope!
Nami turn around and bolted for the gate with everything she had.
"Trying to run? Too late." Kuroobi snorted coldly.
The floor tiles beneath his feet exploded as he launched himself forward like a cannonball, his speed so fast it was horrifying.
The wind at his back carried the pressure of death and sealed off every path of escape.
Nami threw herself desperately toward the open gate, but just as she was about to cross it, a tall shadow dropped from above and cut off the last road left to her.
Kuroobi's expressionless face appeared right in front of her.
His raised right palm had already gathered enough force to split stone and smash monuments apart.
"It's over, human."
'It's over.'
Nami shut her eyes.
At that moment, all she felt was helplessness.
No matter how much she struggled, could a mouse ever really defeat a cat?
Whoosh—
Then, all at once, a sharp whistling sound tore through the air and drowned out even the roaring sea breeze.
It was followed by a heavy impact!
The pain she had braced herself for never came.
And in that one second, the noisy Arlong Park fell into absolute silence.
Nami trembled, her eyelashes shaking, and slowly opened her eyes a crack.
What she saw made her pupils contract violently.
Kuroobi had been blown sideways, his body smashing hard into a wall more than ten meters away.
Broken stone and dust burst outward, and the fish-man officer's head lolled to one side, his condition impossible to read.
And less than two meters in front of Nami, a plain sword had stabbed diagonally into the hard stone floor, the blade still trembling from the force that had driven it there.
'That was...'
Blankly, Nami turned her head and followed the direction from which the sword had flown.
At the entrance, standing in the backlight, a young man in a black trench coat slowly withdrew the hand he had used to throw it.
"This is a Fish-Man?"
The young man lowered his arm bit by bit, his tone calm enough to sound as though he were commenting on tonight's dinner, and yet every word carried clearly through the silent courtyard.
"Far more fragile than I imagined."
Nami's mouth fell open.
Her dry throat struggled to force out that name, and her voice shook in a way she did not even notice herself.
"Za... Zaraki?"
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