The sea had a different voice that afternoon. It wasn't the playful, indifferent hum Ryo had grown used to; it carried panic — a ragged, desperate cadence that sliced through the quiet like a flare. He had been drifting with a small merchant brig tied at the stern of his own borrowed skiff, trading water and a few hours of his company for a warm meal. The crew had been polite, cautious — folk more interested in reaching port than in myths about swordsmen.
Then the lookout screamed.
Ryo's head snapped up. A black shape moved across the horizon, a ragged sail blotting the sun. A pirate ship. Not one of the clumsy raiders he'd cut down on a dock; this one rode the waves with a hunger that felt old and practiced.
By the time the brig hauled close, chaos had started. The pirates crashed into the merchant vessel with grapples and poles, swinging aboard like wolves over a carcass. Men shouted, a mast cracked, and a woman — small, white-haired, with a face of someone who'd learned to survive — tried to shove a chest toward the stern.
Ryo didn't hesitate. He leapt from his skiff onto a roped ladder and hauled himself onto the merchant deck as sailors struggled with ropes and smoke. A man with a blunderbuss turned and fired, the shot missing Ryo by a ragged inch. It tore a plank behind him in a geyser of splinters.
"To the hold!" someone screamed, hauling the woman away. A pirate with a bandana raised a cutlass, his mouth wide in giddy triumph.
Ryo moved like a knife. His blade cleared an arc that split the pirate's cutlass with a ringing sound. The man stared at the ruined weapon as if it were the first thing he'd ever mourned, then he bled and fell.
It was when the pirate captain himself stepped forward that the air changed in a way Ryo had felt once before: the pressing slide of something wrong, like a throat closing. The captain was lean, his coat stained dark red, his jaw inked with a crown of tattoos. His grin wasn't meant for friends.
"Well now," he said, voice smooth as tar. "What have we here? A guest?"
Ryo didn't reply. He watched the captain pull a small black fruit shard from his palm and swallow it. A faint sheen crawled across his skin like spilled ink. The crew stepped back. The captain chuckled.
"You should've stayed home," he said softly. "This ocean isn't for saints."
The thing he'd swallowed was a Devil Fruit. Ryo's pulse tightened.
"Vargo the Crimson Wave," the captain announced. Black oily beads oozed from his knuckles, sliding into streams of tar. He flicked his fingers, and thin tendrils snapped out, snagging a sailor by the sleeve and yanking him like a puppet.
The man screamed. The tar wrapped his throat. He gagged, eyes bulged, then went limp.
Ryo slashed his blade through the black mass, cutting the tendril — but too late to save the man. The tar steamed, smelling of smoke and rot.
"Stand back!" Ryo ordered the sailors. "Get to the lifeboats!"
They stumbled toward the rail, while Vargo laughed. "You think you'll save them all? This deck is mine."
The fight began.
Vargo's tar lashed and spread, sticking sailors to planks and turning the deck into a trap. Ryo darted between the patches, his sword carving arcs that split and flung tar away. He learned fast: wet tar slid more easily, brittle tar shattered under pressure. He used water and salt from the ship itself to tilt the fight.
At the mast they clashed directly — Vargo's whip of tar met Ryo's blade with a weight like the sea itself. The swordsman's ribs burned from the force, but he shifted, drawing on the rhythm Genzu had drilled into him. His blade opened a cut along Vargo's side, a shallow but real wound.
The crew gasped.
Vargo's smile widened. "Kill me," he dared. "If you have the right."
Ryo didn't hesitate. He stepped in, hand on Vargo's shoulder as if steadying him for a bow, and drew his sword in a swift, clean arc. No flourish. No cruelty. A cut meant only to end.
Vargo blinked, surprised at the quietness of his death. His body fell forward, tar pooling black and steaming into the sea.
The pirates faltered without their captain. Ryo cut down two who tried to slaughter fleeing sailors, but spared the rest once they broke and scattered.
When the last of the fighting ended, the deck was a ruin of black stains and splinters. Survivors wept and patched sails. Ryo stood silently, sword at his side, looking down at the body of the man he had just killed.
"Sometimes," he murmured, almost to himself, "to protect life, you end a life."
That night, as the merchant ship limped toward a small cove, Ryo sat beneath the stars with his sword wrapped in cloth. He didn't feel triumphant. He felt the heavy steadiness of a man who had acted because it was required. A vow, quiet and unshaken, took root inside him: to carry the weight of those who died, and to make sure his blade always answered to the living.
When dawn came, he sheathed his sword and walked into town, the tide carrying him forward to whatever storm lay next.