[EotB] 048. Counter Ambush (Patreon)

15 years before Romance Dawn (1524.05.06)

Before he left, Fisher Tiger threw Hancock the tattered rag that served as his shirt, along with a parting grumble exhorting her to cover herself up.

He looked more annoyed at the glances some of the slaves gave Hancock than she herself was.

Hancock was... grateful for the consideration, especially since Tiger looked uncomfortable at baring the hoof mark branded on his chest, but that shirt of his was sized for a top-heavy, five-meter-tall muscle monster. If Hancock actually tried to put it on, she’d be swimming in fabric. Potentially good to blur the motions of her limbs during combat to surprise her opponents, sure, but more likely, it would just hamper her own movements and provide her enemies with plenty of dangling spots to grab.

In the end, it served her better as bandages to wrap around her various injuries.

Once that was done, she was off once again, heading in the opposite direction Fisher Tiger led his ragtag army of freed slaves, to make a nuisance of herself for anyone she happened to encounter.

Hancock didn’t anticipate the following battles to be as easy as the previous ones. As she’d told Tiger, her stamina was beginning to flag, and the wound in her side was still distractingly painful. She would have to be conservative with her Haki and, most of all, be ready to just flee the city, if things really got too dangerous.

After crossing a few deserted streets, everyone else having long since evacuated this part of the city, Hancock took a minute to climb to the roof of the tallest building around, a stately bell tower that had so far resisted the flames.

From up there, she could better orientate herself, and find a target.

It didn’t take her long to find a promising one: a party of Marines working at the edge of the fire line. It was a bit hard to see through all the smoke and dust, but they seemed to be actively knocking down buildings, creating a buffer zone between the burning sections of the city and the still-intact districts behind them. Several piles of rubble already lay in a line, showing the trajectory their work had taken. The owners of those destroyed buildings undoubtedly complained at the necessity, but their strategy actually appeared to be working.

At least, from Hancock’s view, the fire had stopped spreading in that direction.

She would have to see if that remained true if someone interrupted them.

The Marine sapper group wasn’t the only thing Hancock saw from her bird’s eye view.

Not too far away, in the middle of a small plaza, stood what looked to be a fountain – either that, or a statue with a particularly large base plate.

In case it really was a fountain, it wouldn’t hurt to check it out. With all the ash and dust floating in the sky, the water was unlikely to be clean, but it would still be an improvement on her current condition.

Hancock made her way back down to street level, then set off at a jog. The trip was quick, though she had to double back once, when she stumbled into an alley blocked by an impassable wall of flaming debris, which she had somehow missed from the top of the bell tower.

Fortunately, her efforts weren’t in vain; the structure she had spotted proved to indeed be a fountain, for which Hancock was quite thankful.

The sigh of relief she breathed out proved a bit premature, however, when she dipped her hand into the fountain’s basin and felt it start to sap the strength from her body. Hancock snatched her hand back like she’d touched a hot stove, and stared blankly at the water.

Ah. She’d forgotten about that.

Wasn’t it supposed to be seawater only, which disabled Devil Fruit users?

The effect hadn’t been as strong as when Hancock had touched seastone – that had been absolutely, instantly devastating – but even this little contact had already been quite uncomfortable, and if she was attacked in the meantime, she would be in deep trouble.

...Well, good to discover this in such a harmless manner, Hancock supposed, rather than in the middle of a high-paced fight.

A quick pulse of Observation confirmed that she was alone – either that, or she was being stalked by someone on Rayleigh’s level, in which case she was screwed anyway – so Hancock started scooping water from the basin to splash over herself, and quickly rubbed as much of the filth off her skin and hair as she could.

She had to suppress a wince every time her hands plunged into the water, but her touch never lingered long enough for the effect to accumulate, and after a few minutes, she was – relatively – clean.

The water was uncomfortably warm, and with the fires still raging everywhere, it didn’t take long for it to evaporate off her skin, yet Hancock still felt immensely refreshed at ridding herself of all that dried blood.

And with that done, it was time for her to resume killing people.

Not the people she truly wanted to kill, unfortunately, but their underlings would have to do.

♦♦♦

When she got close enough to give them a closer look, the group of Marines proved to be rather sizeable – maybe thirty people working in unison. Quite a number, but a flicker of Observation tentatively confirmed that none of them were particularly strong, so it should be manageable.

After a certain point, the number of combatants stopped to matter as much – at least in the immediate short term. Only so many people could attack a single target simultaneously, especially if the target in question allowed herself to lean on her Observation Haki, before they lost all coordination and just started stepping into each other’s attacks.

It wasn’t like Hancock actually needed to slaughter all of them, either. She should keep in mind that her objective was first and foremost to convince them to call for reinforcements. Pull some men away from the rest of the city and alleviate the burden on Fisher Tiger and his crowd of vulnerable civilians.

Once they did, if things got too dicey, she would have to trust that her speed could leave most of her enemies in the dust.

Hancock announced her presence by leaping down from a nearby rooftop onto a couple of Marines on the periphery of the group, who were struggling to move a cart piled high with what looked like sandbags.

She landed on the shoulders of the first. Her weight brought him down with a startled yelp, but Hancock kept his head trapped between her thighs. Only after a violent twist of her hips broke his neck did she allow him to fall all the way to the ground.

While the second uniformed mook still reeled from the sudden attack, dropping the sandbag he’d been holding, Hancock kicked the back of his leg. He fell to a knee. His arms windmilled desperately to save his balance, but they didn’t help him block the roundhouse kick Hancock snapped into his face before he could recover.

The impact flung him backward, his unconscious body rolling toward his comrades.

That certainly grabbed everyone’s attention, the rest of the squad turning to see Hancock walking toward them at a slow, deliberately ominous pace.

There was lust, as they noticed and processed the fact that she was naked, but more than that, there was fear, less obvious without a convenient Devil Fruit tuned to that particular emotion whispering in her ear, but very much obvious on their faces.

Reports of her activities had apparently spread enough by now that she was recognized on sight.

“Shit, it’s her!” one of the Marines shouted. “Open fire!”

All of them lunged for their guns.

Hancock was trying to conserve her reserves of Haki, her Observation kept at nothing but a low simmer in the back of her mind, so she couldn’t let herself be drawn into something as intensive as dodging a hail of bullets. She dashed toward the nearest cluster of Marines to force their comrades into risking friendly fire with every shot.

The next few moments showed that dodging bullets wasn’t the only task that got harder without the benefit of limited precognition. Fortunately, Hancock had never neglected her martial arts training, and she’d never fallen into the trap of using her Observation as a crutch, so she still demolished all four soldiers in her immediate vicinity within the next few seconds.

The last, a young man with a polka-dot bandana tied under his Marine cap, was quick enough on the draw to whip out a blade, and he was actually pretty good with it – nothing like the swordswoman from earlier, but still enough that Hancock dearly felt the absence of her arm- and leg-guards. She couldn’t block slashes without infusing her bare skin with Armament, which she would rather avoid at the moment, so she had to dodge or redirect his sword by carefully tapping at the flat of its blade.

It was a delicate enough operation that Hancock found herself retreating a couple of steps before she got the timing down.

Her enemy’s face momentarily brightened with hope at her loss of momentum, but the next time he ventured a thrust of his sword, she spun right past it and into his guard, pressing her back against his chest. His arm was still stretched out in front of them both when she slammed an elbow into his kidney.

“Guh!”

He bent forward with a sharp gasp of pain, and Hancock reached up for his head above her, grabbing the tufts of hair poking out of his bandana on either side. With those convenient handles, she yanked him down toward her, and brought her knee up at the same time.

The blow crushed cartilage and bone, and the young man was thrown back, his face broken and bloody. He didn’t get back up.

After that, the rest seemed to finally understand that they wouldn’t be defeating her on their own.

“Call for backup, quick!” one of the nearby Marines yelled, clutching at his rifle and stepping courageously forward to at least slow Hancock down.

And Hancock did slow down, though not thanks to his efforts.

A Shave would have brought her within reach of the man reaching for his portable transponder snail. She could have dealt with him before he could raise the alarm.

It was hard to deliberately restrain herself in battle, when her blood ran hot, but Hancock needed to give them the time to actually summon those reinforcements. It would be pointless otherwise.

Fortunately, it didn’t take long for the snail operator to make the call, and Hancock was even helpful enough to shatter a man’s elbow with a palm strike while he reported her sudden assault. Hopefully, the snail on the other side would faithfully reproduce the high-pitched shriek her victim let out, and underline the importance of sending enough personnel to stop her rampage.

With reinforcements on their way, it was now only a question of dealing enough damage here to convince them to pursue once she made her esca–

A flicker of motion in the corner of Hancock’s eye made her heart jump into her throat, and she frantically bent backward in a textbook-perfect Matrix dodge. Rather than straighten back up, she tucked herself into a ball and rolled back to create some distance from the Marines she’d been about to engage, lest they attack her while she assessed this new threat.

When she sprung back to her feet, her heart beating rabbit-quick in her chest, a line of painful heat stung across her cheek despite her dodge, and blood slowly dripped down the line of her jaw.

It took every bit of dynamic vision Hancock possessed to catch the blur that had almost pierced through her skull as it curved gracefully through the air back to where it had come from – where it fell into a waiting hand.

Only then did its shape become recognizable as a small knife with an inward-curving blade, some of Hancock’s blood coloring its edge. Its hilt was just long enough to accommodate a line of finger grooves and ended in a ring, to which a chain was attached, tethering it to the wrist of its wielder.

“Oooh, nice dodge! Still got nicked a little, but not bad. For a lower life form, anyway.”

The drawling voice sounded nothing but amused, entirely at odds with Hancock’s silent, merciless violence or the Marines’ grim determination to hold her off until their reinforcements arrived.

The woman to whom that voice belonged sat indolently, her legs crossed at the knee, on the edge of a nearby rooftop. She was twirling her knife around a finger she’d poked through the ring at the end of the hilt.

She wore a fancy black and gold uniform, clearly military, with tassels around the shoulders, but far too fine and garish to belong to a mere grunt. Her double-breasted coat was embroidered with designs in gold thread – actual gold, judging by the way it shone in the light of the nearby fires – and gleaming rubies decorated its buttons, hem, and collar.

...Well.

Hancock had planned to conserve her Haki, but it looked like she wouldn’t have the leisure to do so, after all. Already, it was only luck – along with a healthy dose of sheer speedy reflexes – that had allowed her to survive that first surprise attack.

She unleashed her Observation, and let Armament slowly seep into her limbs.