[EotB] 050. Escape (Patreon)

15 years before Romance Dawn (1524.05.06)

Once the wind carried off the dust raised by his rough landing, the squad of Marines gradually stood up from where they’d fallen, most of them groaning, a few shaking off impacts against the nearby buildings. None of them had been truly injured.

Garp had made sure to direct most of the shockwave in the other direction. The men had just gotten a bit of splashback.

“Vice Admiral?” an ensign asked, rubbing his head as he approached Garp’s towering form. “You’re here? Thank you for coming, sir!” His eyes swept the rest of the street. “Where’s...? Where is the girl? The escaped slave who attacked the city?”

That a Marine would so casually accept that they were fighting against an escaped slave didn’t sit right with Garp, but this was no time for him to address this problem.

Garp wasn’t sure it even could be addressed, not by a single man, no matter how respected he was by the rank and file. He might be able to wield more influence as an admiral – how many times had Kong made the offer, by now? – but that came with its own set of problems.

It was amazing how powerless a man of his considerable power could feel, sometimes.

Garp awkwardly rubbed his scalp. “Ah, I guess the kid must have been thrown away by the force of my landing.” He let out a loud bellow of laughter. “Hahaha! Sorry about that! I just wanted to make a cool entrance!”

The boy looked like he didn’t quite know what to say. “Sir...”

Garp waved a dismissive hand. “Haaa, don’t worry about it. She mustn’t have gone far. I’ll just go catch her real quick and that’ll be that.”

“N–Not far?! I thought I saw her tumble through the sky, though?”

“I said don’t worry about it.”

“I... I see. If you say so, sir. Um, what should we do with the Knight of God? Is there a way to, I don’t know, turn her back?”

“Huh?” Garp threw a glance at the petrified woman. The force of his arrival had pushed her onto her side, but she hadn’t shattered into pieces. Lucky her. “Oh, her? Nah, if she hasn’t healed from it already, then... I guess she’s stuck like that, for now?” He stuck a finger up his nose, then flicked a booger toward the statue, for good measure. “Whatever. Just... put her in a cupboard or something while we deal with the rest of this mess. And try not to drop her, I guess.”

Though, honestly, Garp wouldn’t mind too terribly if her statue suffered an unfortunate accident. He wasn’t blind. He could see, plain as day, one of the men lying dead on the floor, his throat slit by one of those piddly little knives of hers. Probably for no good reason, either.

He knew her kind.

“V–Very well, sir.”

“Good man. Once you’ve secured the place,” he continued, growing a fair bit more serious, “gather the men’s bodies, send the injured to the medics, and then continue your firefighting efforts. That’s the most important thing, right now.”

“Yes, sir!”

Garp gave the ensign a last nod, then stepped away, so the wind of his departure wouldn’t send anyone else flying again. With a mighty leap, he cleared the top of the nearby buildings, Marie-Joie zooming by rapidly below him.

He may have underplayed how far the shockwave had tossed the girl, just a tad...

The landing might be a bit rough, but she’d be fine. Like he’d told Calderon at the time – though he sure hadn’t expected that the kid he’d met at that annoying party would cause such a ruckus only a few days later – she had potential.

...A shame, really. She would have made a great Marine.

It wasn’t exactly Garp’s preference to deceive his comrades like this – to deliberately prevent the arrest of someone who’d killed so many of their numbers, even – but then neither was it his preference to watch from a distance as a kid got herself slashed to ribbons by a crazy woman with way too high an opinion of herself.

Unfortunately, the world didn’t need to make accommodations for his preferences.

Nothing about tonight had gone how he would have wished.

But if none of the choices available to him were at all palatable, then Garp could at least put a stop to it all. Reset the board, and they could resolve all of this later, hopefully with clearer heads and fewer moral dilemmas.

It was high time this idiotic, meaningless night came to an end.

Too many had died already.

Enough.

♦♦♦

Hancock was flying.

A human achieving unsupported flight wasn’t out of the question, in this world. Hancock had expected to achieve some measure of it herself, as some point, though she’d thought it would have to wait until she mastered Moon Step.

And yet, here she was.

How far had Garp even thrown her? This was ridiculous.

It actually took maybe a couple of minutes for her to drop back down to earth.

When she did, she found her fall cushioned – for a generous definition of the word – by the canopy of a thick forest. The last thing Hancock needed was to skewer herself on a sharp branch, so she mustered her flagging willpower and coated her body in a layer of Armament. The expense burned through the last drops of her Haki with unfortunate speed, but better that than to die by accident right before the finish line.

Leaves swallowed Hancock’s vision. Branches whipped and struck at her body from every direction, sending her tumbling and bouncing from one to the next on her way to the ground, until finally, she bounced off a thick tree trunk and rolled to a final stop across a bed of fallen leaves.

Her maimed hand did not appreciate the rough treatment, white starbursts of light flashing in the back of her eyes – both of them, even the missing one, somehow – to accompany the renewed pain. It was perhaps fortunate that she didn’t have enough breath left in her lungs to scream.

The world spinning dangerously around her, Hancock lay on her back and tried to hang on to the fraying threads of her consciousness, allowing the last dregs of her Haki to seep out of her flesh.

She... wasn’t feeling so good.

Damn, but Garp had almost killed her without even throwing a punch.

There was something vaguely funny about that.

But Hancock didn’t have time to laugh. When the world stopped rolling and pitching like a ship in a storm, she pushed herself upright, her injured hand cradled against her chest.

Her gaze swept across her surroundings.

As she’d surmised in the moments of her fall, she was in a forest. Peering through the curtain of trees around her, she could see Marie-Joie in the distance, glowing red, fires still raging and smoke rising from skyline.

At least a couple of kilometers away.

That... didn’t make any sense. A blow strong enough to fling her several kilometers across the sky, taken without even the protection of any Haki reinforcement, should have killed her on the spot.

Instead, well... It had been violent, sure, and utterly irresistible, but that was all. None of Hancock’s ribs were even broken. The landing had been harder on her than the shockwave that tossed her away like a broken ragdoll.

It had to have been deliberate.

Had Garp been helping her escape?

Hancock did feel a flicker of relief at the thought that she wouldn’t have to fight him, but mostly... Well, her gratitude was in short supply, at the moment.

Was it churlish of her to expect more?

They were complete strangers, and he didn’t owe her anything – hell, they were enemies – but still.

With a groan between clenched teeth, Hancock made her way to her feet. Standing up caused another wave of dizziness to wash over her, and it was all she could do to stay upright. She closed her eyes and leaned against the closest tree, waiting for it to pass.

This was not the time for an adrenaline crash.

When it felt like she was no longer about to simply collapse, Hancock forced her eyes – or, well, her eye, singular – open and examined her hand. It looked weird, eerie, unbalanced, with half of its fingers missing, but Hancock wasn’t too concerned.

She knew Life Return, and she still had an intact hand on the other side to use as a template. As long as she didn’t bleed out, and with enough time to meditate, she could heal pretty much any wound. Regrowing her lost fingers might take a little bit of time, but it shouldn’t be too difficult. She wouldn’t even have any scars to show for it.

Her eye, though, might be more of a problem. The strange, alien, multi-dimensional structures her Devil Fruit had seen it fit to shove into her eye sockets were stupendously, unthinkably complex. Hancock could hardly wrap her head around them. The associated changes to her brain and nerves were still intact, thankfully, but the eyeball itself...

Regrowing all of that mess would undoubtedly be a long-term project.

That Knight of God had certainly done a number on her.

Hancock clumsily unwrapped one of the bandages she had made of Fisher Tiger’s shirt from one of her more minor injuries, then carefully draped it around her wounded hand. The fabric was already streaked with blood and dirt, but it should still be better than nothing.

She finished by tying it in a noose around her wrist, which she tightened with her teeth. A rather miserable attempt at a tourniquet, but it would at least slow the flow of blood.

All of that was very much uncomfortable, and took more time than Hancock would have hoped. She may or may not have squeezed out a few pathetic little mewls, once or twice, when she incautiously bumped and prodded at the stumps of her fingers, and by the time she finished, her limbs shook like leaves, and cold sweat coated her whole body, stinging at her wounds. She felt faintly – or not so faintly – nauseous.

Everything hurt, everywhere.

Hancock took a few deep, bracing breaths, then straightened up.

After a moment to orientate herself, she set off toward the edge of the Red Line.