The Vasshiri Principality's royal navy had always prided itself on elegance and precision. Their flagship, The Opaline Fang, was no exception—an obsidian-hulled warship with intricate silverwork etched along the rails, glinting under the New World sun like a blade drawn in warning.
It was flanked by twenty other ships, arranged in a perfect semi-circle across the shallows of the western bay, sails raised and cannons loaded. A formation as neat and deliberate as a nobleman's signature.
Inside the captain's quarters, Commander Aurello Maran—Lord Admiral of Vasshiri's naval fleet and one of the last remaining members of the old noble houses who actually earned his title—was pouring himself a small glass of citrus liqueur. Something to remind him that not everything in life was smooth sailing.
He took a sip and glanced down at the map of the archipelago on his table. Red pins dotted the coasts where pirates had tried to land over the past two weeks.
Too many damn pins.
Ever since the Marines had packed up and shipped out to go clean up some other mess halfway across the world, every halfwit with a boat and a flag had come sniffing around for treasure.
Not that Vasshiri had made it easy.
Their navy was among the finest in this quadrant of the New World—refined, battle-tested, and armed to the teeth with custom-built sea mines and ballistae that could punch a hole through a sea king.
Most pirates either fled at the sight of the fleet or, if they had enough ships to pose a threat, negotiated a modest bribe and scuttled off before getting sunk.
It was exhausting. Aurello hadn't slept through the night in a fortnight.
He took another sip and muttered, "If one more idiot brigand with a fruit-themed jolly roger asks me for our 'silk tax' again..."
Commander Maran didn't like it one bit, offering bribes to these pirates like they owned the sea as if the greed of those damned world nobles wasn't enough.
Still, it had to be done. Their fleet was strong, and more than capable of sending any wannabe pirate crying home to their mothers, but they weren't dealing with just one or two of these wannabes, and Aurelio didn't have an endless supply of ships and trained sailors.
Luckily the principality was rich and more than capable of buying its way out of the conflict until the Marines stopped catering to the whims of the world nobles and resumed doing their damned job.
He shook his head and raised his glass to take another sip.
That's when the door slammed open.
A sailor stumbled in, soaked with sweat and panting like he'd just run a marathon.
"Commander!—sir! New contact! Ten ships on the horizon!"
Aurello raised a brow. "Ten? Hm. Getting ambitious, aren't they? Lemme guess—one galleon and a bunch of leaky sloops again?"
The sailor shook his head, still catching his breath. "Two galleons, sir. Three brigs. Five sloops. They're flying black sails, no insignia. No signal flares. Just... bearing down."
"No insignia?" Aurello repeated.
The sailor nodded. "And they're not slowing down."
Aurello finally set down his glass, the citrus liqueur left forgotten on the polished table. He adjusted the collar of his coat with a sharp tug—just enough flair to keep up appearances—and strode out of the captain's quarters with the gravitas of a man who still firmly believed in posture and discipline, even in the face of imminent cannon fire.
The sea breeze hit him like a slap, sharp and salty. From the main deck of the Opaline Fang, the view was clear: the horizon, now undeniably crowded with ships, was drawing closer with unnerving calm.
He pulled out his spyglass, a fine brass piece etched with the sigil of House Maran, and raised it to his eye.
There they were.
Ten ships. Bigger than expected. Cleaner than expected, too. Not the usual cobbled-together mess of planks and ropes most pirate fleets were made of. These hulls were reinforced. Oiled. Shining.
Like they were ready for this.
A junior officer—a sharp-eyed girl with a clipboard and a frown—approached him.
"Sir. Should we prepare a parley?"
Aurello didn't look away from the spyglass.
"Mmm. Yes. Have a chest of gold loaded onto one of the launches," he said. "Nothing too generous, just enough to buy their pride. And make sure the chest looks heavier than it is."
She gave a hasty salute and turned to bark orders at the crew. Aurello exhaled. That was always Plan A: let them feel like they'd gotten away with something, and live to defend another day.
But then—movement.
The enemy ships were raising flags.
Not black, not skulls.
Red.
Bright crimson banners snapped in the wind—slashed across with jagged white Xs. The meaning was universal.
No quarter.
Aurello flinched—but only internally. On the outside, his face was stone. Inside, however, he was saying words that would've made a sea king blush.
"Of course," he muttered. "Too well-dressed for haggling."
So this was it.
This was what he'd been saving their strength for. All those uneasy truces. All the bribes. All the ugly compromises with thugs who barely knew which end of a sword to hold.
It wasn't cowardice—it was calculus. You don't waste your powder on scavengers. You save it for the wolf with real teeth.
He lowered the spyglass.
"Signal the fleet," he said. "Man the cannons. Prepare for battle."
There was a pause. One of the helmsmen blinked at him. "Sir, you mean—"
"Yes," Aurello said, louder now. "They want war, they'll get war. We outnumber them two to one and have the better guns. We may lose a ship or two, but such is life at sea."
His subordinates leapt into action. Orders were relayed with practiced rhythm, signal flags went up, and drums rolled across the deck. From ship to ship, the Vasshiri navy came alive—decks thundering as cannons were loaded and firing crews took their positions. No panic, no scrambling. Just elegant efficiency.
They didn't need to move. They were already where they needed to be. The pirates would have to come to them.
And then… the mist rolled in.
It started slow—a crawling tendril of fog slinking across the waves like a curious cat. Then another. Then dozens, converging like they were being poured from some invisible vat.
In seconds, the entire battlefield was swallowed in a thick, soupy whiteness.
Aurello's lips pressed into a line.
"Well, that's new."
From beside him, his first mate squinted into the blankness. "Do you think it's a natural formation, sir?"
"No," Aurello said flatly. "Natural fog doesn't wait until we're locked and loaded before staging a grand entrance."
This was mist. Not just fog. Too thick. Too fast. And it smelled wrong—like wet gunpowder and rot. It clung to the skin, heavy and moist, like a damp curtain pulled over the world.
Still, Aurello reminded himself, this wasn't necessarily a problem.
"We hold position," he ordered. "This works to our advantage. We already know where our ships are. They don't. They move—we don't. We've got the bigger guns and the tighter formation. We just need to wait for them to sail into our teeth."
"Understood," the first mate nodded. "Should we issue blind-fire orders if they get close?"
"Only if we hear them sneezing on our rigging," Aurello said. "Otherwise, we conserve powder. No panic. Let them come to us."
He leaned on the railing, trying to peer through the fog. All he could see now were vague shapes—barely the outlines of his nearest allied ships, glowing like ghosts in the whiteout.
The calm before the storm.
But something in his gut twisted.
Because mist like this didn't just obscure vision.
It dampened sound too.
No creaking of ships. No gulls. No waves.
Just… silence.
And a sudden sense that whatever was coming… wasn't going to play fair.
...
One full hour passed.
Sixty crawling, torturous minutes that scraped at Aurello's nerves like rusted nails on glass. The mist remained thick—too thick. The kind that made time feel elastic, stretched thin between every heartbeat.
His men whispered like the fog could hear them. The Opaline Fang sat ready, its broadside loaded, aimed, and still. But no enemy ships had yet dared cross the veil.
Until now.
A dark shadow finally loomed ahead. Then another. The fog parted just enough to reveal the hull of a pirate sloop, cutting toward them through the haze like a knife, sails full and arrogant.
Aurello's composure shattered like cheap porcelain.
"There! Dead ahead!" he barked, his voice slicing through the silence. "Open fire! Send the bastards to hell!"
The gunners didn't hesitate. They leapt into action with practiced ease—aiming, locking, lighting fuses—
But nothing happened.
Nothing.
Not a single cannon roared. No smoke, no thunder. Just a sharp silence, followed by a sudden, panicked cry:
"The powder's damp!"
For a second, Aurello just stood there, stunned. His mind leapt into instinct—Who messed up?—and his mouth opened, half a breath away from demanding someone bring him the idiot in charge of the armory so he could personally beat him to death.
But then he noticed something far worse.
It wasn't just his ship.
All twenty vessels in the Vasshiri fleet… not a single cannon had fired.
No flash. No boom. No retaliation.
And then—
BOOM.
A thunderous explosion ripped through the silence, and it didn't come from the Opaline Fang.
Aurello barely flinched before a cannonball screamed past him and slammed into the main mast behind. The wood cracked with a hideous groan and split clean in two.
The mast toppled in slow motion, tearing ropes and rigging as it crashed down with a thunder that shook the bones of the ship.
"They're firing! They're firing!" someone screamed.
More shots followed—cannonballs tore through the hull, punched holes in the decks, shredded the sails. The once-orderly formation of the Vasshiri fleet dissolved into chaos.
'This isn't a mere distraction,' Aurello realized. 'It's a death shroud.'
"Signal the fleet! Fall back!" he shouted. "We've been compromised! All ships retreat—NOW!"
One of the officers, pale and trembling, saluted. "Right away, sir!" He turned, reaching for the signal flags—
And then he lifted into the air.
He choked mid-step, feet dangling a good three feet off the ground, flailing like a hooked fish. His mouth opened in a silent scream as his limbs began to twist—bone and tendon contorting with sickening pops and snaps.
Then he crumpled like a doll with the stuffing pulled out, flung sideways into a cannon.
All around Aurello, men were screaming.
Sailors were being pulled into the air by invisible hands, their bodies bending backwards, heads lolling, arms breaking at angles human anatomy had no business exploring.
The mist wasn't just obscuring sight—it was playing with them.
And then, in the distance, Aurello saw it.
A face in the mist.
Or rather, a grin. Wide. Wicked. Too many teeth.
Eyes like wet ink, unblinking, watching him like a cat watches a mouse with one leg.
It didn't speak. It didn't need to.
Aurello's knees buckled as the realization hit.
This wasn't a raid.
This was a massacre.
And then the grin vanished.
So did Aurello, and the entire fleet.
...
Fleet Admiral Sengoku had been through a lot in his long, storied career—wars, coups, mutinies, the rise and fall of legends, the paperwork alone was enough to warrant a therapy snail—but this… this might just be the moment that finally broke him.
He slouched forward over his desk at Marineford, forehead resting heavily in one palm, the other clutching a report so tightly that the corner was starting to curl and tear. His temples throbbed in perfect sync with every sentence his eyes passed over.
His glasses, perched lopsided on his nose, were fogged from a sigh that had lasted a full ten seconds.
"Out of all the pirates," he muttered to no one in particular, "it had to be him."
The seal on the report was still fresh. The ink hadn't even dried fully when it was rushed to his office. He didn't need to read the whole thing—he'd already gotten the basic idea when the words Vasshiri Principality,entire fleet wiped, and no survivors were mentioned in the first paragraph.
But then he kept reading anyway. Like a man watching his own house burn down through a telescope—horrified but unable to look away.
What made it worse wasn't the attack itself. He expected piracy to spike.
The second he diverted 90% of Marine manpower to hunt down Revolutionary scum after that stunt at the Reverie, he knew the pirates would react like wolves let loose on a herd of sheep.
He was even ready to let a few kingdoms twist in the wind if that's what it took.
But this?
This was a special kind of disaster.
Not because of the country.
But because of the pirate.
A former Marine officer.
A very former one.
Highly decorated. Ruthless. Talented. And now, apparently, mist-powered and hellbent on using all his naval training to remind the world what a real marine fleet looks like when it turns against you.
Sengoku dropped the report and rubbed his eyes, muttering curses under his breath.
"I can't just tell a world government-affiliated countryto hang in there while one of our own is ransacking it... That's a funeral procession for the reputation of the navy...."
He leaned back and stared at the ceiling, hoping an answer would be carved into the plaster.
The ceiling said nothing.
As if that wasn't enough, the Celestial Dragons were already breathing fire down his neck.
Orders had come straight from the top: All high-ranking officers were to focus exclusively on rooting out Revolutionary agents.
Of course, the message was written in fancy, vague bureaucrat-speak—"Reinforce critical strategic operations concerning internal threats during the current window of high-risk volatility"—but Sengoku had been around long enough to translate it into plain language:
"Don't you dare send a single high-ranking marine anywhere that's not infested with revolutionaries..."
That meant no admirals. No vice admirals. Hell, even commanders were getting snatched up and packed off like groceries in a war-zone picnic basket.
He was about to start drafting a speech titled "Please Die Quietly, Vasshiri," when a name popped into his head.
Two names, actually.
Harlow Gale. And that weird monk kid, Poqin.
Sengoku blinked slowly.
Not high-ranking. Technically, not even Marines yet. No one to complain if they're sent on a suicide mission.
And judging from the reports, Gale had gone toe-to-toe with the Revolutionary who attacked the Celestial Dragon—and held his own. The monk, too, seemed unreasonably competent for someone who dressed like the wandering mascot of a booze factory.
"Hmm…" Sengoku said aloud, leaning back and stroking his beard like a man who had just remembered he owned two crickets he could send into the kitchen fire.
"They're technically still in training," he said with a sly, tired smile, "and if someone objects, I can just file the paperwork as 'training excursion.'"
He reached for a den-den mushi.
If he had to send someone to stall Admiral Blight, better it be two lunatics who didn't know when to quit.
After all, they were dumb enough to steal booze from the warehouses of Marine HQ.
That meant they just might be dumb enough to pull it off and keep the Vasshiri Principality from burning until the celestial dragons finally got bored with the revolutionary hunt at least...
...
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