A Systematic Tale: The Pirate! 24 (Patreon)

Chapter 24: 

The doors to Rain Dinners exploded inward off their hinges, splintered wood and gilded trim cartwheeling across the polished marble floor. Lucy stood in the wreckage of the entryway with her sandal still raised mid-kick, a thin trail of smoke curling from her heel where she'd put a touch too much storm into the impact. 

Behind her, the desert wind hissed across the sand and tugged at the brim of her straw hat.

She glanced over her shoulder.

The street was empty.

"...Huh." She frowned, scanning the dunes and the cobbled approach back toward where she'd left the others. 

No little/big reindeer. No frantic hoof-falls. No Chopper.

"Aw, crap." She pulled the brim of her hat down and scratched at the back of her neck, a small fluffy storm cloud popping into existence above her head and immediately raining a single embarrassed drop onto her cheek. "I lost him already."

She'd gotten excited. The clouds had been so easy to ride as always, and Crocodile had been right there, and she'd just sort of... taken off. She vaguely remembered hearing Chopper shout something brave behind her about being a big scary monster, but somewhere between the third rooftop and the fourth storm-cloud bounce she'd left him in her dust.

Lucy chewed on her lower lip, weighing it.

Chopper was the second cutest little guy in the whole world. All fluff and big eyes and a tiny blue nose she wanted to boop every time she looked at him. But he was also a doctor, and doctors were smart, and he could turn into a giant version of himself that punched through walls. And Nami and William and the others were back there somewhere, and they'd find him, and they were all really tough too.

He'd be fine.

Probably.

She'd apologize with extra meat later.

"Okay," she muttered, rolling her shoulders. The little embarrassed cloud above her head dissolved with a tiny pop. "Focus, Lucy. Crocodile first. Apologies later."

She turned back toward the casino interior and took it in properly for the first time.

It was fancy.

Crystal chandeliers the size of carriages hung from a ceiling painted with desert sunsets. Long green-felted tables stretched in neat rows under brass lamps, scattered with cards and chips and abandoned glasses of something amber and sweet-smelling. A massive curving bar ran along the far wall, mirrored and stocked with so many bottles Lucy figured Nami would have a heart attack just calculating what they cost. Marble pillars veined with gold supported balconies above, and from somewhere deeper in the building she could hear the lazy plink of a piano that someone had abandoned halfway through a song.

Dozens of well-dressed gamblers were frozen at their tables, drinks halfway to mouths, cards still fanned in trembling hands. A roulette wheel was still spinning, the little white ball clattering and clattering with nobody watching it.

Every face was turned toward her.

Lucy grinned and threw both arms out wide.

"WHERE'S CROCODILE!" she bellowed, her voice ringing off the marble and bouncing back to her three times before fading. "MY NAME IS MONKEY D. LUCY, FUTURE QUEEN OF THE PIRATES, AND I'M HERE TO KICK HIS UGLY LIZARD ASS!"

For one long second, nothing moved.

The roulette ball clattered into a slot. Black twenty-six. Nobody collected.

Then the screaming started.

It was a beautiful kind of chaos. 

Lucy had seen panicked crowds before, back in Loguetown, back in Whiskey Peak, back in Drum, but there was something particularly satisfying about watching rich people lose their composure. 

A woman in a green silk dress shrieked and tried to scoop up an armful of chips before her husband yanked her toward the side exits. An old man at the high-stakes table dove behind the dealer's stool with surprising agility. Someone knocked over an entire stack of betting markers, sending them clattering and bouncing across the marble like a hailstorm. Glasses shattered. Chairs scraped. A small dog under one of the tables started barking furiously and was promptly scooped up by a sobbing woman who fled with it tucked under one arm.

Lucy watched it all with her hands on her hips and a delighted grin spreading across her face. This was exactly the kind of entrance Shanks would have made. Maybe a little louder than Shanks would have done it, but Shanks had told her once that pirates were supposed to be loud and obvious, that the whole point was to make people feel you walk into a room.

She was definitely making them feel it.

"GET HER!" The shout came from the back of the casino. 

They moved too fast and too together. Men in dealer uniforms reached under tables and came up with pistols. Cocktail waiters pulled knives from trays. Security men ripped away jackets to reveal Baroque Works tattoos, hidden holsters, and curved swords. A woman behind the cashier cage slammed a button and iron shutters dropped over the money windows.

Lucy grinned. “Found the fake casino people,” she said. These were Baroque Works. Had to be.

Lucy cracked her knuckles, slow and deliberate, the way she'd seen Garp do it a thousand times when he was about to teach her a lesson she didn't want.

"Okay," she said, mostly to herself, mostly to the room. Static danced briefly along the rim of her straw hat. "Let's see how many of Crocodile's guys I have to beat up before he comes out to face me."

She took one step forward across the splintered wreckage of the doorway.

High above the chaos, on the flat sun-baked roof of Rain Dinners, Vice Admiral Monkey D. Garp was laughing so hard he had to brace one massive hand against the parapet to keep from doubling over.

The other hand was clutching his stomach.

Anyone in the city who happened to look up at that moment might have mistaken the laughter for one of the explosions coming from the streets below.

Garp didn't care. He couldn't have stopped laughing if Sengoku himself had appeared and ordered him to.

Below his vantage point, three stories down through the broken stained-glass skylight of the casino's grand atrium, his granddaughter was demolishing Baroque Works.

It was beautiful.

Lucy was a blur of motion at the center of a slowly rotating cyclone of her own making, a tight, controlled storm system maybe twenty feet across, with her at its eye. Wind ripped chips and cards and tablecloths up into a spiraling cloud of debris around her. Lightning forked from her fists in short white-blue arcs that struck one agent, then jumped to the next, then the next, dropping three of them in a chained crack of thunder that rattled the chandelier crystals like a tambourine. Her straw hat was pulled tight against her back by its cord, her short dark hair lifted by the static charge filling the room.

She was grinning.

A Baroque Works grunt swung a saber at her head. The blade passed cleanly through her shoulder in a hiss of cloud and sparks, and Lucy's fist met his jaw on the follow-through with a crack that sent him cartwheeling backward over a roulette table.

"HAH!" Garp slapped the parapet hard enough to crack the stone. "That's my granddaughter! Did you see that, Koby? Did you see that?"

A few feet behind him, Koby was nodding so fast his head was in danger of coming off.

The young Marine had finally stopped trembling about ten minutes earlier. He'd spent the entire climb up to the rooftop convinced he was about to die, either from Garp dragging him too fast, or from the height, or from being spotted by enemy snipers, or from any of the dozen other catastrophic scenarios his anxious brain had helpfully provided. 

But somewhere between the moment Lucy had kicked the doors off Rain Dinners and the moment she'd casually dropped a man-shaped thunderbolt into the cocktail lounge, all of Koby's fear had been replaced by something else entirely.

Awe. Pure, complete, uncomplicated awe.

His glasses had slipped halfway down his nose. He hadn't noticed. His mouth was hanging slightly open. He hadn't noticed that either. The little notebook he usually carried everywhere was still down on the street where Garp had knocked it off the roof earlier, and Koby had completely forgotten it existed.

"She's, she's incredible," he breathed, gripping the edge of the parapet with both hands and leaning further out than was strictly safe. "Vice Admiral, sir, she's, look at her form, look at her footwork, she's not even using her legs to dodge, she's just letting them pass through her, and the way she's chaining the lightning, she's prioritizing crowd control before single-target damage, that's, that's advanced, sir, that's textbook—"

"Hah! She wouldn't know a textbook if you hit her with one!" Garp wiped a tear from the corner of his eye with one massive thumb. "That girl's never read anything in her life. That's pure instinct, boy. That's Monkey blood."

"It's amazing, sir," Koby whispered. And then, quieter, with a tiny embarrassed crack in his voice: "She's amazing."

Garp's eyes slid sideways toward his protégé.

The boy was leaning so far over the parapet now that a stiff breeze would have taken him over. His cheeks had gone faintly pink. He was tracking Lucy's every movement with the kind of focused, breathless attention that was definitely not standard Marine combat analysis.

Garp's grin widened until it nearly split his face in half. He filed that little observation away for future teasing.

For now, though, he turned back to the spectacle below and let the laughter come again, deep and proud and just a little bit wet at the edges. 

Lucy had grown so much. 

The last time he'd seen her she'd been a scrawny rubber-bodied brat eating the dinner of every man in the village while announcing she was going to be Pirate King, and now look at her. Logia. 

Storm Logia, of all the damn things. Throwing lightning around like it was nothing. Cracking Baroque Works enforcers across the room with single punches. The wind she was generating in there was probably enough to flatten a small house, and she was keeping it contained, keeping it focused around herself instead of letting it tear the building apart.

That was the part Garp had really not expected. 

Control. Lucy had never had control. Lucy's entire combat doctrine, for her whole life, had been hit it as hard as possible and see what happens. The fact that she was actively not destroying the building she was standing in, the fact that she was holding her storm in a tight radius and only letting the lightning hit the targets she chose, meant somebody, somewhere, had taught her how to aim.

Or she'd taught herself, which was somehow even more terrifying.

Garp's smile softened by a fraction as he watched another two agents go down to a single arcing whip of lightning that didn't so much as scorch the bar behind them.

Good, he thought. That's real good, kiddo.

And then, more privately, in a place where even his own face wouldn't betray it:

Real good that you don't have the old one anymore, too. He didn't let himself dwell on that thought often. 

He'd never told anyone, not Sengoku, not Dragon, not even Lucy herself, what fruit she'd actually eaten as a child. Garp knew about the fruit that had been hunted across centuries by every Celestial Dragon who ever drew breath.

Joy Boy.

Nika.

The drums of liberation.

And now she doesn't have it anymore.

She had something else. Something powerful, something flashy, something the World Government would absolutely want to study, but something that wasn't that. Something that wouldn't make the Five Elders go pale and quiet the way they would have gone pale and quiet if they'd ever figured out what his little Lucy had actually been carrying around in her bloodstream since she was six years old.

Garp let out a long, slow breath through his nose.

Then he laughed again, because watching Lucy elbow a grown man through a marble pillar was funny no matter how many other thoughts were rattling around in his head.

"That's right, you brats!" he bellowed down through the broken skylight, in a voice none of the combatants below could possibly have heard over the roaring of the wind. "That's a Monkey you're messing with! You picked the wrong granddaughter!"

Down on the floor, Lucy had stopped moving.

She stood at the center of her shrinking cyclone with her chest rising and falling, surveying the wreckage. 

The casino floor looked like a tornado had passed through it, which, in fairness, was approximately accurate. Tables on their sides. Chairs in splinters. Roulette wheels embedded in walls. 

Lucy stood in the middle of the casino floor with one hand holding her straw hat in place and the other crackling with lightning. Her sandals were planted amid shattered glass, broken chips, spilled drinks, and unconscious Baroque Works agents. Her shirt was scuffed. Her knees were dusty. Her grin was huge. 

Lucy rolled her neck. Static popped along her shoulders. Then she cupped both hands around her mouth.

"CROCODILE!" she bellowed at the ceiling, loud enough that Garp could hear her perfectly clearly three stories up. "GET OUT HERE! I KNOW YOU'RE HERE! STOP HIDING AND COME FIGHT ME LIKE A PIRATE!"

Garp lost it again. He slapped Koby on the back hard enough to nearly send the boy off the roof entirely, caught him by the collar without looking, and dragged him upright as he wheezed.

"You hear that, kid? That's how you challenge a Warlord! You just yell at the ceiling until he comes out!"

"CROCODILE!"

The voice carried even through three floors of stone and steel.

"GET OUT HERE! I KNOW YOU'RE HERE! STOP HIDING AND COME FIGHT ME LIKE A PIRATE!"

Far beneath the polished floors of Rain Dinners, behind locked doors, hidden passages, false walls, and enough private guards to make a lesser criminal feel untouchable, Sir Crocodile sat in his underground office and listened to his empire crack above his head.

At first, he tried to ignore it. 

The first crash had earned only a narrowing of his eyes. The second had made the ash at the end of his cigar crumble onto the surface of his desk. By the fifth, the Den Den Mushi reports had started coming in all at once.

“SIR! STRAW HAT LUCY HAS BREACHED THE FRONT ENTRANCE!”

“CASINO FLOOR COMPROMISED!”

“CIVILIAN EVACUATION UNCONTROLLED!”

“MULTIPLE BAROQUE WORKS SECURITY TEAMS DOWN!”

Then another voice had cut in, shriller, panicked, and much less useful.

“MARINES! MARINES OUTSIDE THE CITY! CAPTAIN SMOKER IS ATTACKING THE OUTER UNITS! MR. THREE’S FORMATION IS COLLAPSING! WE NEED ORDERS!”

Crocodile closed his eyes. The cigar between his teeth bent slightly under the pressure of his bite.

Some rookie pirate captain. Some loud little nobody with a new bounty and too much confidence. That was all she was supposed to be. A nuisance. A minor complication Robin had dragged into Alabasta because the woman could not resist making his life harder on her way to betrayal.

Crocodile had accounted for her. He had accounted for all of them.

The storm at Erumalu would exhaust them. Rainbase would swallow what was left. If they somehow survived long enough to reach him, then he would break them personally and teach Nico Robin exactly what happened to tools that forgot their place.

That had been the plan.

Now a girl in a straw hat was wrecking his casino, screaming his name like a drunk in a harbor tavern, while Marines tangled with Baroque Works outside his city and his carefully arranged pieces started sliding off the board.

The edge of Crocodile’s hook scraped once across the desk. He rose from his chair.

Fine! If his subordinates could not kill her, if the Marines wanted to complicate his timetable, if Robin and Vivi had decided to march into his city holding hands, then Crocodile would handle it himself.

He wanted blood.

He wanted Straw Hat Lucy broken across his casino floor so thoroughly that every person in Rainbase would remember why heroes were useful only as long as they knew who truly owned the story.

Sand spilled from his shoulders. His body unraveled. The cigar dropped from between his teeth and turned to ash before it hit the floor. His coat dissolved into a rushing column of golden grit. His hook vanished into the storm of himself. In the space where Crocodile had stood, there was only sand—dry, hungry, and furious.

Then the sand shot upward.

He passed through the secret architecture of Rain Dinners like a desert wind through bone.

Up through private lifts no customer had ever seen. Up through service shafts, hidden stairwells, false walls, and locked floors where men counted money stolen from desperate hands. Up through the guts of his casino, past armored vaults, bribery records, Baroque Works ledgers, and rooms built for conversations no one was supposed to survive.

He heard her before he saw her.

“CROCODILE!” Lucy’s voice roared through the building. “GET OUT HERE! I KNOW YOU’RE HERE! STOP HIDING AND COME FIGHT ME LIKE A PIRATE!”

Hiding? She thought he was hiding?

The sand accelerated.

On the casino floor, Lucy stood amid absolute wreckage.

Lucy had one foot planted on the back of a fallen security captain, her straw hat hanging against her back, her hair lifted by static. Black cloud curled around one arm. Lightning crawled over her knuckles. Her grin was bright, furious, and hungry.

She looked like trouble given human form.

Crocodile materialized in front of her in a cyclone of sand.

Gold grit whipped across the marble, hissing over broken glass and spilled chips. The air dried instantly. The last decorative fountain nearby cracked as the moisture was ripped from its surface. Water shrank away from him, beading and vanishing into thirsty dust.

The casino seemed to hold its breath.

Even the wounded Baroque Works agents went still.

Crocodile’s boots touched down first. Then his coat reformed around him in a dark sweep. Then his shoulders, his hook, his cigar, his scarred face, and finally his eyes—cold, contemptuous, and murderous.

He towered over Lucy. For one moment, he let the silence sit. Then he spoke. “How dare you cause me all of this trouble—”

Lucy punched him in the face…

Her fist came up from her hip wrapped in a dense knot of black storm cloud and blue-white lightning. At the last instant, something else shimmered over her knuckles too. Faint, uneven, barely formed, a dark pressure that looked less like armor and more like willpower forcing itself into the world through sheer stubbornness.

Armament Haki. Not mastered. But enough.

Crocodile’s eyes widened a fraction.

Then Lucy’s fist connected with his jaw. Lightning burst across Crocodile’s face. Wind detonated outward from the impact. His cigar exploded into ash between his teeth. Blood snapped from his mouth in a bright arc as his head whipped violently to the side.

For the first time in a very long time, Sir Crocodile was hit. Hard. 

His body lifted off the floor.

The force launched him backward across his own casino, coat snapping behind him, boots skidding briefly over marble before he lost all contact with the ground. He crashed through a line of baccarat tables, shattered a brass railing, and slammed into the base of the grand staircase hard enough to crack the stone.

The staircase groaned. Dust rolled down from the upper balcony.

Lucy lowered her smoking fist, the last wisps of storm cloud curling away from her knuckles. The black sheen flickered, dimmed, and faded, too thin to hold for long, too new to maintain. She blinked at her own hand like it had done something she hadn't quite told it to do.

Then she looked at the man-shaped dent in the wreckage behind the bar.

Then she grinned. "HA!" she shouted, throwing both fists into the air. The casino's intact chandelier crystals rang faintly in response. "DID YOU SEE THAT, WILLIAM? I DID THE THING! I DID THE HAKI THING!"

William was, of course, many streets away and busy. He did not, in fact, see it.

The rubble shifted. Sand began to pour upward.

Slowly, Crocodile rose. The side of his face was already bruising. A thin line of blood ran from the corner of his mouth. His expression had changed. 

The girl had Haki. Untrained, sloppy, ridiculous Haki, but Haki all the same. And a Logia. And a crew powerful enough to turn his outer defenses, his agents, and the Marines into a citywide disaster before even reaching him.

Crocodile wiped the blood from his mouth with his thumb. He stared at the red smear on his skin. Then he looked at Lucy. The temperature in the room seemed to climb as every drop of moisture in the air recoiled. “You,” Crocodile said, voice low and venomous, “are going to regret that. I’ll give you the fight of your life little girl!”

Lucy cracked her knuckles again. This time, black cloud gathered around both fists. Lightning snapped between her fingers. Outside Rain Dinners, the sky darkened over Rainbase. Lucy smiled at him like she had been waiting all day. 

“Good,” she said. “Then this won’t be boring!”

Back in the streets of Rainbase…

The silence after Kuina’s declaration lasted less than three seconds. It was the kind of silence that happened when a battlefield collectively forgot what it had been doing because reality had just walked in carrying a sword that should have belonged to a dead girl.

Daz Bones lay collapsed in the broken street behind her, blood soaking through the front of his shirt where Kuina’s blade had cut through steel like it was no more impressive than cheap tin. The air still rang faintly from the strike. 

William stared. His System screen flickered in the corner of his vision, red warning letters jittering like dying fireflies.

TEMPORAL ANOMALY DETECTED.

Kuina Shimotsuki stood in the middle of Rainbase with Wado Ichimonji in her hand, blue hair shifting in the desert wind.

Smoker was the first person to move. He saw only a familiar face, a stolen face, and a sword in the hands of someone who looked too much like his subordinate. “You damn imposter,” Smoker snarled. White smoke erupted from his shoulders. “Did you steal her face or something! What did you do to Tashigi!?" 

“Hey! That’s supposed to be MY thing!” Mr 2 protested! “No one is stealing faces around here except for me!”

He was ignored. 

Tashigi, several streets away, was not there to defend her own face. If she had been, the next several seconds would have become even more embarrassing for everyone involved.

Kuina’s eyes flicked toward Smoker. “I already said I’m not Tashigi!”

“WHAT DID YOU DO TO MY SUBORDINATE?” Smoker shouted. He did not wait for an answer. His lower body dissolved into a roaring column of smoke, and he blasted forward across the street with his his free fist cocked back. 

Kuina’s grip tightened on Wado Ichimonji. “I DIDN’T DO ANYTHING TO HER!”

Smoker did not listen. Of course he did not listen. He was a Marine captain chasing pirates through a city, fighting a criminal organization, watching a black-winged angel throw burning spears through wax fortresses, and now facing a woman who looked exactly like his subordinate while claiming to be a dead person from a world he did not know existed.

Listening had lost the fight several disasters ago. “White Blow!” A massive fist of compressed smoke surged toward Kuina.

She drew Wado Ichimonji fully.

The sword left its sheath with a clean, bright note that cut through the battlefield’s chaos. Kuina stepped into the attack instead of away from it, hips turning, shoulders relaxed, eyes focused on the heart of the incoming smoke.

Her slash was perfect. But the blade passed through Smoker’s smoke fist. Harmlessly.

Kuina’s eyes widened by the smallest fraction.

The smoke swallowed the cut, reformed, and kept coming.

She twisted aside at the last second. The blow clipped her shoulder instead of taking her full in the chest, but even a glancing impact from Smoker’s compressed smoke hit like a cannon made of fog. Kuina skidded backward across the street, boots carving twin lines through dust and broken stone.

Her teeth clenched. “Devil Fruits,” she snapped, voice tight with irritation. “Still bullshit.”

Smoker reformed in front of her.

Kuina lifted Wado again. She hated this. A swordsman should have been able to cut what stood before them. Her fingers tightened around the hilt until her knuckles went pale. She could cut Daz Bones. She could cut steel. She could cut men who thought being born male made them stronger than her. But how in the hell was she supposed to cut someone who turned into smoke every time her sword touched him?

Smoker’s eyes narrowed. “Drop the sword.”

Kuina’s answer was a cold glare.

Smoker lunged.

Then something red and black dropped between them. 

William landed hard enough to crack the cobblestones. 

One moment the space in front of Kuina was empty. The next, a young man stood there with red hair, red cat ears pinned forward, and two long red tails lashing behind him like angry flames given fur. Purple fire wrapped around both of his hands, dark and supernatural, casting violet light across his face.

Kuina’s breath caught despite herself.

He was—absurd. That was the first word her stunned brain supplied. Absurdly pretty, maybe. Or absurdly impossible. Or absurdly distracting for someone who had just been about to get hit by a smoke-powered Marine captain.

His cat ears twitched independently. One tail curled protectively backward, almost as if placing itself between her and danger without asking permission from the rest of him. His eyes were fixed on Smoker, blue pupils narrowed to feline slits.

Smoker’s fist came down.

William met him head-on.

Purple fire roared up his forearms as he crossed both hands against the incoming strike. Smoke burst around them. Fire flared. The impact shoved William back half a step, then one more.

Then he dug in. His tails snapped outward for balance. His heels cracked the street. Purple flame surged brighter around his fingers.

The Marine captain’s eyes widened. Smoker broke contact and flowed backward in a swirl of white, reforming several paces away.

William stayed between him and Kuina. “Are you alright?” he asked, without taking his eyes off Smoker.

Kuina blinked. Part of her bristled instantly. She was a swordswoman. She did not need rescuing. She had cut down Daz Bones—twice? She had survived things this world had not yet explained. She had no intention of standing behind some pretty boy with cat ears while he played hero in front of her.

Another part of her, smaller and traitorous and embarrassingly human, noticed the way his red hair caught the desert light. The way his ears angled back toward her as if listening for her breathing. The way his stance left just enough room for her to move, not trapping her behind him, not treating her like cargo, but still protecting her.

That part of her made her cheeks warm. She hated that part immediately. “I’m fine,” Kuina said, colder than necessary.

William’s left ear flicked. A smile tugged at the corner of his mouth, quick and distracted. “Good.”

Kuina stared at his back for half a second too long.

Then pride reasserted itself with both hands around her throat. “And I had that handled.”

“I figured,” William said. There was no sarcasm in it.

That annoyed her more. She was ready for a man to be smug about saving her. She knew what to do with smug. Smug could be cut down, dismissed, stepped over, or humiliated in sparring until it learned manners.

Sincerity was harder.

Smoker’s smoke thickened around him, rolling across the street in low white banks. “Panther Prince,” Smoker growled.

William winced. “Please don’t call me that.”

Kuina’s head tilted slightly. “Panther Prince?” Kuina repeated. There was a dangerous flatness in her voice that suggested she had not yet decided whether she found the name ridiculous, insulting, or hilarious.

William’s ears folded halfway back. “I didn’t pick it!”

“He absolutely didn’t,” Nami shouted from across the street. “The Marines did it to him!”

William pointed at her without looking away from Smoker. “Thank you!”

“And it’s adorable!” Robin called out.

“It is not adorable!”

“It is a little adorable,” Vivi added as well.

“I find it amusing,” Pearl said.  

William’s tail lashed once in mortification. Traitors all of them!

Kuina stared at the battlefield around her with the expression of someone who had woken up in the middle of a play where everyone else had memorized the script while she had been handed a sword and an emotional crisis.

Then Nami reached them. She moved fast, sea stone staff collapsed in one hand, orange hair whipping behind her, eyes bright with fury. She slid to a stop a few paces from William and Kuina, gaze cutting between them like a blade.

“William!” Nami snapped.

William’s shoulders stiffened. That tone was bad. That was not battle-command Nami. That was not teasing Nami. That was girlfriend-has-questions Nami, which, in William’s experience, was often more terrifying than men made of smoke, steel, or sand.

“Why,” Nami demanded, “are you protecting some crazy lying woman who just showed up claiming she’s part of our crew?”

Kuina blinked. The words landed harder than Smoker’s smoke had. “Crazy lying woman?” she repeated.

Nami planted one hand on her hip. The other tightened around her staff. “Yes. CRAZY. LYING. WOMAN.”

Kuina’s confusion turned into offense. “What are you talking about?”

“I’m talking about you showing up out of nowhere, cutting down one of Crocodile’s top assassins, looking exactly like that Marine sword girl, and then announcing you’re one of us!”

Kuina stared at her. Then, slowly, as if dealing with someone who had lost their mind, she said, “It’s me.”

Nami’s eyes narrowed. “That clears up absolutely nothing.”

“Kuina,” she said, voice rising. “Kuina Shimotsuki. First mate of the Straw Hat Pirates.”

For half a heartbeat, the entire street seemed to hold its breath again.

Then Nami’s expression went from angry to incandescent. Nami extended her staff with a  metallic snap. “I AM THE FIRST MATE OF THE STRAW HATS.”

Kuina’s brows drew together. “No,” Kuina said slowly. “You’re the navigator.”

William made a very small sound. “Nami,” he began, because some instinct told him he should intervene before two extremely dangerous women started fighting over an organizational chart that might not exist in this timeline.

Nami pointed the sea stone staff at Kuina’s face. “I don’t know who the fuck you think you are! But this is not the time for messing with OUR crew!” The tip of the staff hovered inches from Kuina’s nose.

Kuina stared at her. “I don’t understand,” Kuina said. For the first time since she had appeared, her voice lost some of its edge.

William swallowed. He knew who Kuina was. That was the problem. He knew exactly who Kuina was, or who she was supposed to be. He knew she was the dead girl from Zoro’s past, the rival whose sword he carried, the dream that had shaped him, the ghost behind every step he had taken toward becoming the world’s greatest swordsman. Except she was standing in front of him, alive, blue-haired, breathing, irritated, and apparently claiming a role in the Straw Hats that belonged to a timeline William had never seen.

He wanted to say something. He wanted to say, I know you. But where the hell did he even start with that?

Hi, I’m from another world where you died falling down stairs as a child and your sword became Zoro’s emotional damage?

His System still flickered in the corner of his vision, the red letters glitching and stuttering.

TEMPORAL ANOMALY DETECTED.

No kidding! You can go away now, I GET IT!

William opened his mouth to at least say something.

Smoker ruined it. “I don’t care which one of you pirates thinks they outrank the other,” the Marine captain growled. Smoke rolled off him in thick white waves, spreading across the street and curling around ankles, rubble, broken wax, and fallen bodies. His patience had finally died completely, which was impressive considering it had not looked particularly healthy to begin with. “You’re all under arrest,” Smoker said. “You, the cat, the imposter, the princess, Nico Robin, the black-winged woman, and every last piece of Baroque Works scum in this city.”

Nami snapped her glare toward him. “We are having an argument! Stop interrupting!”

“DO IT IN PRISON.”

Kuina’s eyes narrowed. “I’m not an imposter.”

William raised one hand in annoyance at Smoker just calling him ‘cat’. “Also, I have a name…”

“PANTHER PRINCE!”

“NOT THAT ONE!”

Then Robin’s voice cut across the street, dry as desert wind. “While this has all been very emotionally illuminating, I feel obligated to mention that the Baroque Works agents are running away.”

Everyone blinked.

William turned. “Huh?”

William followed Robin’s line of sight.

And there they were.

Mr. Three was fleeing first, dragging Miss Goldenweek by the wrist while she stumbled after him with the tired, offended look of someone who had not agreed to cardio. 

Farther down another street, Mr. Two was sprinting on long dancer’s legs, swan coat flapping behind him. “I shall remember you forever, beautiful cat boy!” Bon Clay wailed over his shoulder. “BUT I CHOOSE LIFE!”

Nami’s eyes turned murderous. “Keep running!”

Miss Doublefinger had vanished up the side of a building. She did not look back. Daz Bones lay unconscious in the street, and with him down, whatever loyalty his partner possessed had apparently developed urgent scheduling conflicts.

William watched them scatter in three different directions. Then he looked at Daz. Then back at the fleeing agents. “Wow,” he muttered. “That’s some loyalty right there.” He was being sarcastic. 

Robin’s mouth curved faintly. “Baroque Works was not built on affection.”

“No kidding.”

Pearl, hovering ten feet up with her wings beating slow, tilted her head sideways like a curious bird and made a small considering sound. "Ought I retrieve them?"

"Yes," Smoker snarled.

"No," said William, Nami, and Robin in flat unison.

Vivi’s hands tightened around her rifle until her knuckles whitened. Her face had gone cold watching the officers flee. Those people had helped burn her country from the inside out. They had spread lies, armed rebels, murdered witnesses, stolen food, poisoned trust, and done it all under fake names while Crocodile smiled for the newspapers. Now that the fight had turned against them, they ran.

Vivi’s jaw clenched. “Cowards,” she whispered. 

Kuina hadn't moved. Her sword was still up. But she was looking at Nami, now, with a different expression than she'd had thirty seconds ago. Less angry. More—lost. "...You really don't know me?" 

Nami's staff didn't lower. But the white-knuckle grip eased, fractionally. "No," she said. "I really don't."

William drew in a long slow breath. His tails curled in toward his calves, the way they did when he was bracing himself for something. "Okay," he said, quietly, mostly to himself, and then a little louder, mostly to the street at large. "Okay. Everybody—everybody—just hold on. One second. Nobody stab anybody, nobody arrest anybody, nobody fire any lightspears." A small pause. "...Pearl, that one was specifically for you."

Pearl's wings hitched. She turned her head away and pouted. 

He turned toward Kuina. "I think I know who you are. I think I know, some of it. Not all of it. Probably not the part you most want answered. But I—I know enough that I can promise you we're not going to hurt you. And I'd really like to talk, when this is over." His ears flicked. "Somewhere with snacks. And probably a lot of patience from everyone."

Kuina looked at him. For a long moment she didn't say anything. Then, slowly, her sword lowered. "...Okay," she said. 

Behind William, Nami exhaled in the slow, carefully controlled way that meant she had not stopped being furious so much as she had agreed to postpone being furious, which was a meaningfully different thing.

The sea stone staff lowered.

Smoker's smoke did not. "I said," he repeated, low, "you are all under arrest."

William sighed, turned, and let the purple fire climb back up his forearms. "Yeah," he said tiredly. "I figured that part wasn't going to keep."

Nami stared at Smoker for one long, disbelieving second. "I am so tired of you, you stubborn Marine asshole." 

Then she launched herself at him.

William’s eyes went wide. For half a second, even he almost forgot Nami could move like that.

Unlike canon nami, this nami didn't skip her physical training when sailing between islands, especially after almost seeing her best friend, Lucy, ‘die’ and being forced to step into the role of first mate.  She remembered standing below an execution platform with Lucy’s blood soaking into her clothes and Lucy’s head in her hands. She remembered Zoro leaving. Sanji leaving. Usopp running. So Nami had not skipped the physical work. She had practiced with the staff until her palms blistered. She had sparred with William until she learned how to read the twitch of his ears before he moved. She had forced her body to keep up with Lucy’s disaster radius. She had drilled footwork on the Pearl’s deck during rough seas, because if she could fight on a pitching ship, she could fight anywhere.

And she had gotten fast.

Smoker did not know any of that. Smoker saw a pretty pirate navigator with orange hair and a stick. He did not bother to dodge.

That was his mistake.

Nami crossed the distance between them in a blur of sun-tanned skin, whipping orange hair, and pure concentrated irritation. Her staff snapped up in both hands. She twisted her hips, planted her lead foot, and swung for the side of his head with every ounce of pent-up fury she had been carrying since Loguetown.

Smoker let the blow come. His expression said it all. A normal weapon would pass through him. A normal staff would hit smoke. A normal woman would realize too late that Logias did not care about courage, anger, or good form.

Robin smiled from nearby. It was a deeply malicious smile. She knew exactly what getting hit with that staff felt like. The memory of waking up tied to the medical bay table after Nami had cracked her over the head remained vivid enough that Robin could appreciate the artistry about to unfold.

Smoker realized too late. The sea stone struck his temple with a flat, brutal crack. His smoke body collapsed into flesh all at once. His eyes bulged. The cigars between his teeth shot out of his mouth and spun end over end across the street.

Nami followed through completely, pivoting on her heel and driving the other end of the staff into his ribs before he could even fall properly.

Smoker made a sound that was not dignified.

William winced.

Pearl tilted her head with fascinated approval.

Vivi’s mouth fell open.

Nami did not stop. She stepped inside Smoker’s reach and brought the staff down across his shoulder. The sea stone robbed him of smoke, strength, and arrogance in one merciless line. His knees buckled. He tried to raise his arm, tried to grab her wrist, tried to turn into smoke, tried to do anything except accept the fact that Nami had apparently decided to beat a Marine captain into the street with a stick.

Nothing worked.

Nami cracked him across the forearm.Then the thigh. Then the side. “Do you know,” she snapped, punctuating each phrase with another strike, “how many problems we currently have?”

Smoker grunted and dropped to one knee.

Nami hit him in the back. “We have Crocodile!” Another hit. “Baroque Works!” Another. “A REBELLION!” Another. “SOME WEIRD IMPOSTER!”

Kuina’s head jerked up. “I AM NOT AN IMPOSTER!”

Nami did not look away from Smoker. “NOT NOW!” She slammed the staff into Smoker’s shoulder again, knocking him flat onto the cobblestones.

William raised one hand halfway. “Nami, maybe—”

She pointed at him without looking!

William shut his mouth… Yeah, I’ll just let her finish first. I haven’t had a girlfriend that long, but still long enough to know not to get between her and whoever she wants to smack with her stick.

Smoker tried to push himself up. Smoke sputtered weakly off his back, only to collapse the instant the staff touched him again. Nami planted one foot on his coat and jabbed the sea stone tip between his shoulder blades.

He went rigid.

“Stay,” she ordered.

Smoker’s face pressed against the street. “I—” he ground out, “I am a Marine captain!”

“And I—” Nami said, leaning harder on the staff, “DONT. GIVE. A. SHIT!”

William stared at his girlfriend with wide eyes, a flush creeping up his neck for reasons that were really not appropriate for the battlefield. She was terrifying. She was incredible. She was so much stronger than most people gave her credit for. And apparently she could put Captain Smoker face-down in the street through the sheer power of training, sea stone, and being absolutely fed up. Smoker made the mistake of trying to move again.

Nami noticed. Her eye twitched. “Oh no,” she said. “Absolutely not.”

Smoker managed to turn his head just enough to glare up at her. “You—”

Nami cracked him over the head one last time. The sea stone staff hit with a clean, final thunk.

Smoker’s eyes rolled back. His face hit the street. The smoke around him vanished completely.

For one long second, no one said anything.

Then William winced. His tails swayed softly behind him. “That was… probably necessary?” 

“It was extremely necessary,” Nami said with a smile. It made her feel a lot better if nothing else. Beating a marine Captain into the dirt was very stress relieving. 

Robin’s lips curved. “Therapeutic, even…” Robin knew this from experience, she’d taken down more marines than everyone else on the crew combined over her career.

Vivi stared at the unconscious Marine captain lying in the middle of the street. “Should we move him out of the road?”

Nami folded the staff back down with a metallic click. “He’s fine.”

“He’s unconscious.”

“He can be unconscious there.”

Kuina’s eyes moved from Smoker, then to Nami. The orange-haired woman had just beaten a Logia Marine captain unconscious. Since when was Nami so strong!? 

Kuina did not understand what was happening and why everything was so different all of a sudden.

Nami stepped off Smoker’s coat and started back toward the others. She sashayed. She moved across the broken street with her hips rolling, staff resting lightly against one shoulder, orange hair swinging behind her, every line of her body radiating the kind of smug satisfaction that came from beating an infuriating man unconscious and being right about it.

William watched her approach. He knew that walk. That was Nami making a point.

The problem was he did not know whether the point was aimed at Smoker, Kuina, him, the entire street, or the universe. Probably all of them.

Nami stopped directly in front of Kuina.

The two women stared at each other.

Kuina stood with Wado in hand, shoulders squared, chin lifted. Nami stood with one hand on her hip, staff in the other.

“I am the first mate!” Nami declared. Her expression dared Kuina to challenge her!

Kuina’s expression tightened. Not anger, exactly. Not this time. Confusion. Hurt. Pride trying to armor both before anyone else noticed. “I don’t know what happened here,” Kuina said slowly. “But I know who I am.”

“Great,” Nami said. “Then you can explain it later.”

William took half a step forward. “Nami—”

She turned on him. Nami grabbed the front of his shirt in one fist. William had just enough time for both cat ears to shoot straight up. Then she yanked him down and kissed him.

Her mouth crashed against his, hot and possessive, one hand fisted in his shirt while the other slid briefly up the side of his neck to angle him exactly where she wanted him. William made a startled sound that disappeared instantly into her mouth. Nami deepened the kiss without hesitation, lips parting, tongue sliding against his with practiced confidence and very deliberate intent.

William melted. There was really no other word for it. His entire body went loose for half a second, then wired tight. His hands hovered uselessly before one found Nami’s waist and the other braced against her shoulder. His ears twitched violently. Both tails went absolutely wild behind him, lashing, curling, uncurling, then wrapping halfway around Nami’s hips as if they had decided his human brain was no longer qualified to make decisions.

A deep, helpless purr rolled out of his chest and vibrated directly into Nami’s lips.

Nami smiled into the kiss. That was also a point.

William, tragically, was not in a state to appreciate the rhetorical structure of the moment.

Vivi turned bright red and looked away. Then looked back. Then looked away again, less successfully.

Robin covered her mouth with the back of one hand, eyes glittering with wicked amusement. 

Pearl tilted her head. “Is this also part of the first mate dispute?”

“Yes,” Robin said serenely.

“No!” Vivi squeaked at the same time.

Pearl considered this. “Humans are delightfully inconsistent.”

On the ground, Smoker remained unconscious and therefore escaped having an opinion.

Kuina’s mind went completely blank. Every thought she had possessed vanished. Why is everything suddenly so weird? Why is Nami kissing this, admittedly cute, guy out of nowhere? And looking so smug about it!

That made Kuina more annoyed for some reason…

Nami finally broke the kiss.

William made a small dazed sound and swayed slightly. His tails stayed looped around Nami’s hips for another second before he realized what they were doing and yanked them back with a strangled cough. His face had gone scarlet. His ears remained upright and trembling.

Nami looked extremely satisfied. She wiped the corner of her mouth with her thumb, eyes still fixed on Kuina.

Kuina stared at her. Then at William, who looked like his soul had briefly left his body and returned with fewer useful words. Then back at Nami. “I…” Kuina began. Nothing else came out.

William swallowed hard. “Nami…” he managed.

“Yes, baby?”

He made a tiny noise.

Kuina’s eyebrows shot up.

Nami’s smile sharpened in victory.

Another explosion rolled across Rainbase from the direction of the Casino. The street trembled. The storm over Rain Dinners pulsed black and gold, lightning tearing through sand clouds above the casino tower.

The laughter and embarrassment died quickly. William’s ears snapped toward the casino. “...We should probably just go and check on Lucy, and back her up if she needs it.”

XXX