[EotB] 045. Liberation (Patreon)

15 years before Romance Dawn (1524.05.06)

Hancock and Fisher Tiger didn’t encounter any Marine patrols on the way there, but the barracks themselves were predictably guarded.

Only lightly so, though, with a couple of Marine grunts bracketing the building’s front gate. There might be a few more waiting inside, but so far, this looked promising. No doubt, the rest of the guards were better used out in the city, dealing with the fires or looking for the dastardly criminal responsible for all this chaos.

“All right,” Fisher Tiger said, watching their target with a considering gaze from where they hid in an alley down the street. “I figure we simply walk up to them and deal with them, then one of us goes inside to free the slaves while the other keeps an eye out outside.”

Hancock gave him a sideway glance. “Do you have Observation Haki?”

Tiger grunted and shook his head. “No. Never took the time to learn it. I was always an adventurer, not a pirate or a fighter. My natural strength was always enough to get me out of any scraps I got into. Though... I guess I’ll have to consider a career change, after tonight.”

“Then it’s best if I stand guard. I’ll have more advance warning than you would.”

Fisher Tiger nodded. “Fine with me.”

With that, the two of them stepped out of the alley and openly walked toward the front of the barracks. It was a blocky building, still built in the same elegant white stone as the rest of the city, so it didn’t quite stick out like a sort thumb, but it was still significantly less ornamented than most of its neighbors, and its narrow windows – shaped kind of like a medieval castle’s arrow slits – contrasted with the more civilian buildings standing around it.

The two Marines on guard duty at the front didn’t miss their approach. With Tiger’s slave rags and Hancock’s own damaged uniform – covered in soot and blood, sliced by a katana, and even tattered and scorched by flying embers when she’d strayed too close to the fires all around – it didn’t take a genius to realize that neither of them were supposed to be wandering around freely.

The rifles came up.

“Halt! State your business!”

...Did they actually expect them to have business they could admit to?

Either way, without Haki, Hancock didn’t know if Fisher Tiger had any way to dodge bullets, so she Shaved up to one of the guards. Rather than land in front of him and attack from there, she instead twisted in mid-air and arrived feet-first to drop-kick him in the face.

The sickening crunch of his skull against the stone wall behind him suggested he wouldn’t be getting back up anytime soon – if ever – and provided enough of a backstop for Hancock to launch herself into another spinning kick without ever touching the ground.

The second Marine was still facing the front, aiming his rifle at Fisher Tiger, when Hancock’s heel slammed into his temple and sent him flying across the sidewalk. He didn’t get up again.

“Not bad,” Tiger conceded when he caught up with her and leaned down to relieve the Marine collapsed against the wall of his sword and rifle. They both looked comically small in the fishman’s hands, but he didn’t seem to mind. “Guess there was a reason you had the confidence to assault Marie-Joie.”

Now armed, he tried the door, only to find it locked. That didn’t seem to bother him, either. He simply took a step back, then sent a front kick where the double doors met in the center. With a deafening shriek, the solid steel bent and warped, and the gates swung open, slamming into the walls on either side with enough force to embed them in the stone.

Beyond them stretched a single long room, filled with rows upon rows upon rows of four-level bunk beds, each of them occupied by a veritable army of slaves. They certainly looked surprised to see a massive fishman suddenly burst into the building, but all of them had clearly been awake already, only now turning to stare at them.

There really were many of them, all crammed together like sardines. Tiger hadn’t exaggerated when he’d claimed they could free hundreds at once if they hit the place. Men and women. Frail old greybeards. Tiny little kids. None of them looked particularly strong, nor particularly beautiful.

The dregs, as the fishman had called them.

Some among them may very well have been pirates or criminals, deserving of punishment. Some of them were undoubtedly scum. In a crowd that large, that was inevitable.

But there were also plenty of innocent people among them.

Children, some of them younger than even Marigold.

And those two Marines had been standing in front of the door, like they were guarding a goods warehouse, just going through their boring shift like nothing was wrong... They had to have known what was behind that door, yet they simply didn’t give a shit.

The very thought burned in Hancock’s gut, and it was all she could do to clench her teeth, lest she start audibly seething with renewed fury.

Yes, the slavers themselves were a problem, but the Marines – even the supposedly good ones, like Garp – either did nothing to actually fix that problem, or even actively helped. How the fuck did these hypocrites have to gall to waltz around with “Justice” written on the back of their coats? Hancock was a mass murderer, and she still held the moral high ground!

A biggest joke she had never heard, nor one less funny.

She took a deep breath and pulled her gaze away. “I’ll... let you deal with this,” she told her fishman companion as she stepped back outside the building. “I’ll pound on the door if Marines are approaching, once if I can deal with it on my own, twice if I think I’ll need some backup.”

Fisher Tiger nodded. “Good idea.” His eyes, deeply recessed under a harsh frown, swept over the room. “There are even more slaves here than I thought. It’s going to take me a while to free everyone here.”

Indeed. And so, without further ado, he strode deeper into the room and set upon his task.

Hancock, for her part, pried the damaged doors out of the walls, then closed them behind her – as much as they could be closed anymore, at least. For a moment, she stood alone outside in relative silence, listening to the background roar of the fires and the ringing of distant alarm bells.

Then, she looked down at the collapsed form of the Marine grunt at her feet.

‘Just doing their jobs’, huh? Pfeh.

The unconscious man’s skull was probably broken already, but Hancock stomped on the back of his head and finished the job.

Then, she went and did the same to the second Marine, for good measure.

She left the corpses lying there in plain view on the cobblestones, then leaped up to the roof of the barracks. If anyone came around and stopped to examine the bodies, she might be able to descend upon them and take them by surprise.

In the meantime, Hancock lay down out of sight, behind a set of decorative crenelations lining the edge of the roof, and unfolded her Observation Haki.

Nothing on the radar, quite yet, but the repeated and continued waves of elation, relief, and gratitude radiating from the barracks, following the moving signature of Fisher Tiger, were distressingly obvious to anyone with any empathic sense.

Someone was bound to notice them.

Hancock closed her eyes and gently pressed a hand against her flank again, testing the state of her stab wound, the fabric of her uniform still wet with blood under her palm.

...Shit, that still hurt a lot.

Hancock wished she could afford a Life Return trance, but she needed to stay alert.

Still, she appreciated the momentary rest, for however long it lasted.

♦♦♦

Not long at all, as it turned out.

Hancock’s misgivings were given shape only a few minutes later when a lone signature, a few streets away, pulsed with curiosity and concern on her Observation.

Those emotions weren’t directed at Hancock herself, but her eyes snapped open anyway. She rolled to her feet and peeked over the edge of the crenelations, preparing herself to receive her uninvited guest.

A man, alone. Marine uniform with a fancy cape, so an officer. Tall, easily over two meters tall. Bulky, with shoulders wide enough to land a plane on. A long reptilian tail swung behind him as he ran to check on the fallen form of one of his comrades Hancock had killed just earlier – the one lying right next to the barracks door.

Either this guy wasn’t human, which, in this world, wasn’t entirely out of the question, or the extra appendage came from a Devil Fruit. A Zoan, most likely. Hancock couldn’t remember any dinosaur Zoans from the manga, but she could only imagine they existed, somewhere out there. In fact, with the sheer variety of dinosaur species, there might be many of them.

Or, rather more concerning, this might be a dragon Zoan.

Probably not, because someone with a Fruit like that would undoubtedly be famous, and Hancock didn’t recognize whoever this was. For lack of a better term – and for lack of a less meta reasoning – this man didn’t look important enough to have eaten a Fruit that powerful.

Still, despite Hancock’s last encounter with a Zoan ending in a contemptuously easy victory, there wasn’t any convenient body of water around in which she could drown her opponent, this time.

...Not to mention that, with a Fruit of her own now, she might be the one to drown, next time she fought near the sea.

Still, that wasn’t to say that she was out of options.

For now, though, a quick greeting to assess the opposition.

Just as she’d hoped, the tailed Marine stopped to kneel beside the corpse of his comrade. There, he recoiled for a moment at the sight of the man’s shattered skull. He hung his head for a moment, perhaps giving some sort of subdued farewell to the fallen, or bemoaning a young man’s untimely death.

Either way, it gave Hancock the opportunity to vault over the edge of the roof and attack him by surprise. She spun in mid-air on the descent, her foot coming down on top of the man’s head like a falling guillotine blade.

Or at least, that was the plan.

“Wha–!”

The Marine noticed Hancock’s attack at the very last moment. In spite of his surprise ringing clearly in her Haki’s perception, he managed to dive to the side just in time to avoid the blow, his tail actually pushing off the ground to propel him further and faster than his legs could.

He rolled across the street before springing back to his feet facing Hancock, while her legs passed harmlessly where he’d just been standing.

Hancock didn’t bother pulling back the strike. She allowed it to land on the Marine grunt’s corpse with full force, breaking several of its ribs and caving in its chest.

The officer’s eyes narrowed with wrath and his tail lashed back and forth behind him at this ugly desecration of the corpse he’d just been grieving. “You... You dare?! He’s already dead!”

Hancock didn’t answer, but she was pleased. An angry enemy was a vulnerable enemy, was an enemy who’d find it more difficult to hide their intentions from her Observation Haki.

She straightened up, her eyes on her enemy. Without looking away, she slammed her fist in the crooked gate standing just behind her.

The impact rang like a bell, once.

No need to pull Tiger away from his task just yet.

Hancock could deal with this on her own.