Outside the Great Tree Library in the Kingdom of Torino, Ace stood at the foot of the Eclipse's massive boarding ramp, looking down at Chopper and Indigo.
"I'm not going to sit around here idling while you parse through the vellum," Ace said, his boots resting flat against the steel as he looked out toward the horizon. "I have a personal ledger to balance across the water. Keep your heads down; I'll return to clear the port once the research is mapped."
"No problem, Ace! You can clear the bay without any worries!" Chopper called back, balancing a massive leather-bound botanical text that stood significantly taller than his own small frame.
Ace shifted his gaze to Indigo. Seeing the scientist let out a silent, ragged sigh of relief at the prospect of temporary freedom from his captain's presence, Ace's eyes turned instantly cold. "Old man. Don't let your fingers get lazy simply because my eye isn't on the workstation. If I return to this clearing and find the serum development has stalled, you can pack your bags and move into the upper canopy to see how long you survive as feed for the raptors."
"Waaah! Absolute efficiency! I will drive the equations until my cells collapse!" Indigo scrambled to straighten his spine, delivering a panicked, erratic salute.
"Chopper." Ace turned his head back, his voice dropping into a quieter register. "If any of the native hunters or the giant birds develop a raw infection or fall to the winter plagues, step in. Treat them as our logistics account. Consider it our currency for using their shelves and occupying their timber."
"Leave it to the medical team, Ace! I'll keep the relations perfectly stable!" Chopper waved his small hooves, shouting his assurance into the wind.
"Good."
Ace nodded, turning his back to the branch to stride onto the main deck.
"Little Eclipse. Secure the boarding ramp. Engage the anti-gravity levitation matrix."
"Command registered, Captain Ace. Adjusting buoyancy parameters. Please input the primary navigation target."
"South Blue. Baterilla Island."
Boom!
With a deep, thunderous drone from its ventral thrusters, the massive, jet-black hull lifted from the branches, kicking up a sudden gale through the leaves. The giant avians nesting in the high canopy let out low, respectful trills, splitting their formation to clear the flight path. Like an unyielding iron shadow, the Eclipse sheared through the low-hanging mists, accelerating toward the vast heart of the South Blue under the awed, silent gazes of the native tribes.
South Blue, Baterilla Island.
The island was modest in dimension, blessed with a temperate, perpetual spring climate that had once made its shores a tranquil resort for travelers across the blue. Yet, within the opening year of the Great Pirate Era, this land had been chosen as the site of a systematic horror.
Following the voluntary surrender of the Pirate King, the cipher agents of the Marines received a local tip: Gol D. Roger had spent his final free months walking the sands of Baterilla, living under the ordinary, quiet profile of a common father.
To ensure the bloodline of the King was thoroughly extinguished before it could draw breath, the World Government issued an absolute, merciless mandate to the cipher blocks: Better to slaughter a thousand innocents than let one spark of the legacy escape. Within that dark winter, every pregnant woman and newborn infant across Baterilla was systematically isolated, subjected to brutal interrogations, or quietly executed in the dark. That era remained an indelible, bloody scar within the memory of the island's older generation.
At this moment, along a secluded, cliffside path overlooking the southern shoals, the coastal breeze rustled the wild clover growing along the rock face, bringing with it the sharp, briny tang of the surf.
A single, tall silhouette stood motionless at the edge of the drop.
Ace wore a heavy black trench coat stripped of any identifying insignia, the shadow of his deep hood completely concealing the features of a face that carried a 1.5 billion berry bounty. His massive, imposing frame radiated a dense, suffocating physical pressure that seemed to lock the air within the immediate clearing, disrupting the peaceful rhythm of the grass.
"Twenty winters..." Ace murmured, tracking the white foam as the swell fractured against the jagged stones far below. His gaze was flat, dark, and bottomless.
As a transmigrator, his initial familiarity with this coordinate had been limited to a few lighthearted, stylized sequences viewed through a glowing screen in a past life. But during the long, dark twenty months his soul had spent bound within the womb of a woman named Portgas D. Rouge, his awareness had been fully awake to the crushing weight of an absolute love.
He could still feel the phantom memory of his mother's body shaking behind the ribs—the terrifying adrenaline of a woman forcing her own lungs to remain silent while the Marine patrols marched past her window. He had shared the agony of a human body deliberately defying the biological laws of gestation, suppressing the growth of the child through sheer, agonizing will to outlast the cipher hunts. He had been there on that storm-lashed night when that frail, broken woman expended the final drop of her life force to drag him into the light, her lips curving into a final smile before her eyes went dark.
That wasn't a storyboard sequence; it was a real, bloody ledger etched into the very marrow of his soul.
"Roger bought his legendary exit at the execution block, triggering an era with a single shout," Ace whispered, pulling a bottle of high-proof South Blue rum from his coat and biting through the cork to spit it into the grass. He tilted his chin back, taking a long, burning draught. "And he left the entire weight of the World Government's malice to fall upon an unarmed woman."
The heat of the alcohol seared his throat, yet it did nothing to quench the freezing, violent rage gathering in his eyes.
"The King's lineage means nothing to my ambition. But my life was paid for with her blood."
Ace tucked the bottle away, turning his boots toward the highest, most isolated protrusion of the cliff face. His Observation Haki had already unrolled across the geography of Baterilla like a fine wire net; the Marines maintained no active garrison here, and the civilian settlements were concentrated on the northern shore.
At the absolute peak of the rock face, a faint, razor-sharp presence lingered—a density that had withstood twenty years of salt air and wind without losing its edge.
There was no marble monument marking the spot, nor any carved epitaph. There was only a simple, weathered mound of earth, shielded by a single slab of raw bluestone.
Here, the highest point of the island leaned directly over the sea, offering an unbroken view where one could track the rise and fall of the entire South Blue basin. It was clearly a nameless marker secretly established by Garp—a final, righteous gesture from an old Marine hero to ensure Rouge's resting place wouldn't be reduced to ash by the World Government's clean-up crews.
Ace stopped before the lonely mound.
He didn't drop to his knees. He didn't offer a single tear, nor did he allow his posture to crack with sentimentality. He simply inverted the bottle, pouring the remaining liquor across the smooth face of the bluestone slab. The heavy, volatile scent of the rum rose instantly, caught within the coastal wind.
I've crossed the water to see you. Though this is the first time our paths have aligned in this fashion.
Ace's voice was low, carrying a quiet reverence he had never granted to any living power on the sea.
"I didn't take the coat Garp designed for me, nor do I have any interest in chasing the gold Roger left behind at the end of the line."
Ace straightened his spine, pulling back his hood until his dark hair caught the draft. His eyes locked onto the long, dark hilt of the cutlass driven deep into the soil directly behind the stone slab—the blade buried nearly to its guard, its ancient cross-hilt and crimson wrap untouched by twenty winters of rain.
"I set sail for a single purpose."
Ace extended his right hand—the hand that had shattered Kizaru's internal organs, the hand that had crushed the old lion's ambition—and let his fingers close around the hilt of the Supreme Grade blade, Ace.
"I am going to pull those high and mighty masters down from their thrones," he whispered, his grip tightening until the steel hummed. "Every single piece of World Government scum that forced you to hide your breath..."
His eyes narrowed into slits of absolute, freezing intent.
"I'm going to butcher them all."
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