Monkey D. Luffy hit the seafloor running.
Not metaphorically. He literally hit the seafloor—feet first, coating bubble intact, the impact cratering the sandy bottom in a circular depression that sent clouds of sediment billowing outward like smoke from an explosion—and he was running before the dust settled, legs pumping, arms swinging, straw hat streaming behind him, heading in a direction that was almost certainly wrong because his sense of direction was catastrophic under the best of circumstances and "the bottom of the ocean" did not qualify as the best of circumstances.
"VANDER DECKEN!" he screamed into the water. "WHERE ARE YOU?! COME OUT AND FIGHT ME!"
The ocean did not respond. The ocean was busy being an ocean and had no opinion on the matter.
Luffy ran for approximately forty-five seconds before stopping, looking around, realizing he had no idea where he was going, and making the executive decision that the correct direction was "whichever direction felt right," which was a navigation methodology that had never once produced a correct result but which Luffy employed with unwavering confidence regardless.
He turned left.
This was, by pure dumb luck—the kind of luck that Luffy possessed in quantities so absurd that it bordered on a superpower in its own right—the correct direction.
The Flying Dutchman materialized from the murky depths like a ghost ship rising from a nightmare. It was massive—a dark, barnacle-encrusted vessel that looked less like a ship and more like a floating monument to obsession, its hull scarred and pitted by years of deep-sea travel, its sails tattered and stained, its figurehead a grotesque carving that might have been beautiful once but had been worn by time and madness into something that was simply wrong.
On the deck of the Flying Dutchman, surrounded by his crew of loyal (or at least adequately terrified) fishman followers, stood Vander Decken IX.
He was—by any reasonable standard of assessment—not impressive. A four-legged fishman of the Japanese bullhead shark variety, he had the manic energy and wild eyes of a person whose relationship with sanity had been adversarial for quite some time. He wore a captain's coat that had seen considerably better days and a hat that had seen considerably better decades. His four arms were in constant motion—gesturing, twitching, reaching for objects to throw—and his mouth was fixed in a permanent grin that was less "happy" and more "has stopped bothering to check whether the things he's doing are acceptable."
He was, in short, exactly the kind of person that Luffy despised most: someone who hurt others and smiled about it.
"OI!" Luffy shouted, his voice carrying across the water with the penetrating clarity of someone who had never in his life considered that there might be a situation where shouting was inappropriate. "ARE YOU VANDER DECKEN?!"
Vander Decken turned.
Four eyes fixed on the approaching figure—a small human in a straw hat, running across the seafloor inside a coating bubble, radiating an energy that was equal parts "extremely angry" and "having a great time."
"Bahohoho! A human?" Vander Decken laughed, his four arms spreading wide in a gesture of theatrical disbelief. "Down here? On the bottom of the ocean? How interesting! And who might you be, little surface dweller?"
"I'M MONKEY D. LUFFY! AND I'M THE MAN WHO'S GONNA BE KING OF THE PIRATES! AND I'M HERE TO KICK YOUR ASS BECAUSE YOU'RE MEAN TO SHIRAHOSHI AND SHE CAN'T GO OUTSIDE BECAUSE OF YOU AND THAT'S REALLY MESSED UP!"
This was, by Luffy's standards, an unusually detailed and coherent declaration of intent. Most of his pre-fight speeches consisted of approximately three words, the most common being some variation of "I'll kick your ass." The fact that he had included a specific reason—Shirahoshi's suffering, her imprisonment, the injustice of a girl trapped in a tower because a madman wouldn't leave her alone—spoke to how deeply the princess's situation had affected him.
Vander Decken stared for a moment. Then he laughed again—that wet, ugly, wrong laugh that sounded like it had been dredged from the bottom of a swamp.
"Bahohoho! You're here about my darling Shirahoshi? My beloved princess? My future BRIDE? Bahohoho! How touching! A human knight coming to rescue the princess! But you see, little human—Shirahoshi belongs to ME. She has ALWAYS belonged to me. She will ALWAYS belong to me. And if she won't come to me willingly—"
He reached behind him with one of his four arms and produced an axe—massive, cruel-looking, the kind of weapon that was designed not for combat but for impact, for the satisfaction of throwing something destructive at something beautiful.
"—then I'll keep sending her PRESENTS until she understands!"
Luffy's grin vanished.
It didn't fade. It didn't gradually diminish. It vanished—one frame smiling, next frame not, like a light being switched off. And what replaced it was—
Nothing.
Luffy's face went blank. Completely, totally, terrifyingly blank. Not angry. Not sad. Not determined. Just... empty. A void where expression should have been, a silence where emotion should have been, and in that void, in that silence, something was building.
Something big.
"She doesn't belong to you," Luffy said, and his voice was the voice from the plaza—the flat, quiet, loaded voice that preceded catastrophic violence. "She doesn't belong to ANYONE. She's a PERSON. And you locked her in a ROOM. For YEARS. Because you WANTED her. And you think that's LOVE?"
Vander Decken's grin faltered. Just for a moment. Just long enough for something—some ancient, primal, survival-oriented subroutine buried deep in his fishman brain—to recognize that the small human standing before him was not, in fact, small.
Not in any way that mattered.
"People don't BELONG to people," Luffy said. "That's not how it WORKS. You don't get to keep someone in a cage because you WANT them. You don't get to throw AXES at someone because they won't MARRY you. You don't get to make someone AFRAID to go OUTSIDE because you think they're YOURS."
Each emphasized word hit the air like a physical force—not Haki, not yet, but something that preceded Haki, the emotional pressure that built in Luffy's body before it was channeled into will and will was channeled into power. The water around him rippled. The sand beneath his feet compressed. The coating bubble vibrated.
"BAHOHOHO! What are you going to DO about it, little human?! I have the Mark-Mark Fruit! Anything I throw will FIND HER! You can't protect her! NO ONE can protect her! She is MINE and she will ALWAYS be—"
"Gear Fourth."
Two words.
Spoken quietly.
The transformation began.
Luffy bit into his forearm—the motion practiced, automatic, the muscle memory of a technique refined through two years of relentless training under the guidance of Silvers Rayleigh, the Dark King, the right hand of the Pirate King himself. Air flooded into the rubber body through the puncture points, inflating muscle and bone and sinew with a pressure that distorted the very air, and simultaneously, Armament Haki flooded outward from Luffy's core, coating his body in the glossy, impenetrable black of hardened will.
The transformation was—
Magnificent.
Luffy's body expanded. Not the crude, balloon-like inflation of a simple rubber stretch, but a controlled, purposeful expansion that redistributed his mass into a configuration of raw, devastating power. His torso swelled, muscles inflating to enormous proportions, his arms thickening to tree-trunk dimensions, his legs—already coiled, already compressed, already storing the kinetic energy that would be unleashed in movements so fast they would blur—expanding to support a body that had become a weapon.
Boundman.
The strongest form Luffy possessed. The apex of his Gear Fourth technique. The combination of rubber elasticity, compressed air, and Armament Haki that transformed a boy in a straw hat into something that sat at the intersection of "human" and "force of nature" and leaned heavily toward the latter.
Steam erupted from his body. The coating bubble expanded to accommodate his new size. The Haki that covered him—black and glossy and absolutely immovable—caught the golden light of the Sunlight Tree Eve and reflected it in patterns that made him look like he was made of living obsidian.
He bounced.
Boundman didn't stand still. Boundman couldn't stand still—the compressed air in his legs maintained a constant, rhythmic bounce that kept him in perpetual motion, rising and falling with the steady cadence of a heartbeat, each bounce generating enough force to crater the ground and each landing absorbing enough shock to register on seismographs.
Vander Decken stared.
For the first time in his obsessive, single-minded, love-poisoned life, Vander Decken experienced a moment of genuine, unfiltered, absolute clarity about the nature of the situation he was in.
The situation was: he was going to die.
Not literally—Luffy didn't kill. This was one of the many things about Luffy that distinguished him from the common run of pirates, from the murderers and the marauders and the monsters who used the Jolly Roger as an excuse for cruelty. Luffy didn't kill because killing was final, and Luffy believed—with the same bone-deep conviction that he brought to everything—that even the worst people deserved the chance to live with the consequences of their choices.
But the sensation that Vander Decken was experiencing—the cold, liquid, bowel-loosening sensation that started in his stomach and spread outward to every extremity, the sensation that said everything you are is about to be destroyed—was indistinguishable from the certainty of death.
"W-wait—" Vander Decken stammered, all four arms raised in a gesture that was half-defense, half-surrender, and entirely too late. "We can—we can talk about—I'm sure we can come to some kind of—"
"Gomu Gomu no..."
Luffy's arm compressed. Retracted. Drew back into his inflated body like a piston being cocked, the rubber flesh compressing against the Haki-hardened surface with a sound like a cannon being loaded—a deep, resonant, threatening sound that carried across the water and reached the ears of every fishman on the Flying Dutchman's deck, each of whom was experiencing their own personal moment of existential clarity.
The arm was black. The fist was black. The will behind them was absolute.
And then the arm released.
"KONG GUN!"
The fist exploded forward.
Not "moved forward." Not "extended forward." Exploded—the compressed rubber unleashing its stored energy in a single, devastating instant, the Haki-hardened fist accelerating from zero to impossible in the space between heartbeats, the air itself screaming as it was displaced by the sheer velocity of the attack, the shockwave preceding the fist visible as a cone of compressed atmosphere that hit Vander Decken a full half-second before the fist did.
The shockwave alone was enough to shatter every window on the Flying Dutchman. The shockwave alone was enough to send every fishman on the deck staggering backward, clutching their ears against the sonic assault. The shockwave alone was enough to crack the ship's mainmast from base to tip, a fracture that would have taken a battering ram hours of sustained effort to produce.
The fist was worse.
The fist was so much worse.
It connected with Vander Decken's midsection—the center of mass, the optimal target for transferring the maximum amount of force into the maximum amount of body—and the transfer was total. Every joule of energy stored in the compressed rubber, every newton of force generated by the explosive release, every ounce of Armament Haki hardening the striking surface, every atom of rage and resolve and righteous, burning fury that Luffy felt on behalf of a girl who had been locked in a tower by this creature—all of it, ALL of it, transferred into Vander Decken's body in the space of a single, terrible, beautiful instant.
Vander Decken folded.
Not folded like paper—folded like a person whose structural integrity had been instantaneously and comprehensively exceeded, whose body simply could not maintain its shape against the forces being applied to it, whose bones and muscles and connective tissues collectively said "we did not sign up for this" and yielded.
He went backward. Not flew—launched, accelerated from standing-still to faster-than-the-eye-could-follow in zero seconds, his body a projectile now rather than a person, carving a tunnel through the water behind the Flying Dutchman that was visible as a perfect cylinder of displaced ocean extending backward into the darkness.
The Flying Dutchman itself—a ship built to withstand the pressures of the deep ocean, a vessel that had survived decades of undersea travel—rocked backward from the transmitted force, the hull groaning, the remaining masts swaying, the deck buckling in the center where the shockwave had hit hardest.
Luffy landed on the deck.
Bounced. Rose. Bounced again. The rhythmic, heartbeat bounce of Boundman continued, each impact leaving a crater in the deck planking, each rise carrying him higher, each moment of the transformation radiating a pressure—a presence—that made the very water around the ship seem to cower.
He wasn't done.
Because this wasn't about winning. Winning had been accomplished with the Kong Gun. Vander Decken was already defeated—unconscious or nearly so, embedded in the seafloor somewhere behind the ship, his body broken, his power neutralized, his threat ended.
But Luffy wasn't fighting the threat anymore.
Luffy was fighting the principle.
The principle that a person could lock another person in a cage and call it love. The principle that wanting someone gave you the right to own them. The principle that the world was a place where a girl—a kind, gentle, beautiful girl who cried too much and smiled too little and had done nothing wrong except exist in the proximity of someone who couldn't tell the difference between affection and obsession—could spend years in a tower because a man with a Devil Fruit and a delusion thought she belonged to him.
Luffy was fighting that principle.
And he was winning.
But the principle had friends.
They came from the ship and from the surrounding waters—fishmen, dozens of them, Vander Decken's crew, loyal followers who had pledged themselves to the madman's cause for reasons ranging from genuine belief to simple fear. They were armed with tridents and swords and the natural weapons that fishmen possessed by birth—claws, teeth, the incredible physical strength that came from being born in an environment where survival required the ability to withstand pressures that would crush a surface dweller flat.
They swarmed toward Luffy.
They made it approximately fifteen feet.
Roronoa Zoro appeared between Luffy and the charging fishmen the way a sword appeared between a sheath and a target: instantly, inevitably, with a sense of purpose that transformed the act of being in a place from a physical event into a philosophical statement.
This space belongs to me now. Everything on the other side of me from my captain does not get past me. This is not a request. This is not a negotiation. This is a statement of fact as fundamental as the existence of gravity, and I will enforce it with the same impersonal, absolute authority.
Three swords. One eye. Curves that defied structural engineering.
Zoro drew.
All three—Wado Ichimonji in the mouth, Sandai Kitetsu in the right hand, Shusui in the left—emerged from their scabbards with the whisper-quiet shing of blades that were so sharp they cut the concept of silence as they passed through it. The green-haired swordswoman stood in the three-sword stance that was her signature, her birthright, the culmination of a lifetime of training that had begun with a promise to a dead friend and had been refined through years of combat and two years of instruction under the greatest swordsman in the world.
The fishmen charged.
The first wave—eight of them, armed with tridents and spears—reached Zoro's perimeter.
"Santoryu..."
The swords moved. Not individually—Zoro's three-sword style was not three separate attacks but a single attack expressed through three blades, a unified act of destruction that covered 360 degrees of arc and every plane of intersection within that arc. The motion was too fast to see—a blur of steel and Haki-hardened edge that existed more as a concept than a visible event.
"...Tatsumaki."
Dragon Tornado.
The three blades generated a vortex—a spinning column of cutting force that rose from the deck of the Flying Dutchman like a waterspout, catching the eight charging fishmen in its rotation and hurling them outward in a spiral pattern that scattered them across the seafloor like leaves in a hurricane. They hit the ground at varying distances—some nearby, some far, all unconscious, all bearing the precise, surgical cuts that characterized Zoro's swordsmanship, cuts that incapacitated without killing, that disabled without destroying, that said you are beaten without saying you are dead.
More came.
Zoro cut them down.
It was not a fair fight. It was never going to be a fair fight. These were common fishmen—strong by surface world standards, certainly, perhaps ten times stronger than an average human, as fishman physiology dictated. But Zoro had spent two years training under Dracule Mihawk, the greatest swordsman alive, a man whose casual demonstrations of power could split icebergs and whose training regimen made ordinary concepts of "difficult" and "impossible" seem quaint.
Zoro was not fighting fishmen.
Zoro was gardening. Clearing weeds. Removing obstacles between herself and the singular purpose that defined her existence: protecting her captain.
Each swing was precise. Each cut was measured. Each fishman who fell was a fishman who would not—could not—threaten Luffy, and that fact, that simple, binary, absolute fact, was the fuel that drove Zoro's blade with a speed and ferocity that transcended mere combat and entered the realm of art.
"Three-Sword Style: Black Rope: Dragon Twister!"
The enhanced version—Haki-coated, blackened blades trailing wisps of dark energy—carved through a group of twelve fishmen who had made the strategic error of attacking simultaneously from three directions, as if surrounding a woman with three swords and one eye was an advantage rather than a geometrically optimal arrangement of targets.
They fell. All twelve. In the time it took to blink.
Zoro's body moved through the battle with the fluid, devastating grace of a natural disaster wearing a human shape—pivoting on wide hips that shifted the center of gravity through complex combat maneuvers with a smoothness that suggested the new anatomy had been designed for swordfighting rather than adapted to it. Each spin sent green hair cascading. Each lunge drove powerful thighs into the deck with enough force to crater the wood. Each recovery from a strike involved a complex redistribution of weight through curves that would have unbalanced a lesser fighter but which Zoro handled with the casual mastery of someone who had been born to fight and would die fighting and considered everything in between to be practice.
The chest bounced with each motion—enormous, heavy, moving with its own independent momentum—and Zoro did not notice, because Zoro was watching the fight and the fight was watching Luffy and Luffy was bouncing on the far side of the ship in Boundman form, methodically dismantling the remaining officers of Vander Decken's crew with punches that left craters in the hull.
He's fine, Zoro's eye confirmed.
He's always fine, Zoro's heart added.
But I'll be here anyway, Zoro's soul concluded, and the swords sang their agreement.
Sanji arrived via sky.
Specifically, Sanji arrived via Sky Walk—the technique developed during two years of training that allowed the chef to kick the air itself with enough force to generate solid footholds, effectively enabling flight through a rapid series of aerial kicks. From above, descending through the water inside a personal coating bubble with the elegant precision of a raptor diving toward prey, Sanji's silhouette cut through the bioluminescent murk like a comet.
A very curvaceous comet.
A comet with legs that could shatter titanium.
"Collier Shoot!"
The first kick connected with a fishman officer who had been attempting to flank Luffy from above—a large, heavily armored specimen with a sword in each hand and murder in his eyes. Sanji's heel—Haki-hardened, carrying the full force of a descent from two hundred feet, driven by legs that were the chef's primary (and only) weapons—caught the officer at the junction of neck and shoulder with a sound like a thunderclap.
The officer went down. Through the deck. Through the hull. Through the keel. And into the seafloor beneath the ship, where he came to rest in a crater that was roughly officer-shaped and approximately six feet deep.
One kick.
Sanji landed on the deck with the poise of a ballet dancer completing a grand jeté—one foot touching down first, the body settling with fluid grace, blonde hair swirling in the water current that penetrated the ship's damaged coating bubble, and immediately launched into the next attack without pausing, without hesitating, without any of the breaks in momentum that would have characterized a lesser fighter's combat style.
"Diable Jambe."
The leg ignited.
Not metaphorically. The friction generated by Sanji's spinning technique—a rapid rotation on one foot that accelerated the other leg to velocities that generated actual fire through pure kinetic energy—produced flames that engulfed the striking leg from hip to toe, a column of orange-red fire that burned so hot it boiled the water that seeped through the damaged coating bubble, creating clouds of steam that wreathed the chef's figure in a shroud of mist and fury.
"Poêle à Frire: Spectre!"
The flaming leg became a blur—a series of kicks so rapid that each individual strike was invisible, the cumulative effect a wall of fire and force that swept across the deck of the Flying Dutchman like a burning wind, catching fishmen and hurling them into the air (or water, or each other) with the casual, devastating efficiency of a chef clearing a cluttered countertop.
Sanji did not use hands. Sanji never used hands. The hands were sacred—instruments of creation, tools of art, the means by which Sanji transformed raw ingredients into dishes that could bring tears to the eyes and joy to the soul. The hands did not fight. The hands fed. This was a principle so fundamental to Sanji's identity that it had survived the transformation intact, an axiom of existence that transcended gender and geometry and the fact that the body executing the kicks now possessed hips so wide that each spinning motion generated a visible centrifugal displacement in the surrounding atmosphere.
Kick. Kick. Kick-kick-kick.
Fishmen fell like dominoes—arranged in increasingly improbable configurations by the precision of Sanji's strikes, each one placed exactly where the chef intended, each unconscious body positioned with the same attention to arrangement that Sanji applied to plating a fine meal.
"Don't—" kick "—you—" kick "—DARE—" kick-kick-kick "—get in—" KICK "—my Captain's—" KICK "—WAY!"
The last kick—a Diable Jambe-enhanced roundhouse that caught three fishmen simultaneously and sent them spiraling into the dark water like flaming pinwheels—was accompanied by a shout that carried across the entire battlefield with the penetrating clarity of someone who was very, very angry and very, very devoted and very, very done with people who threatened the person she loved.
Sanji landed. The flames dissipated. Steam curled from the striking leg in lazy spirals.
Across the deck, through the chaos and the fallen bodies and the splintered wood, Sanji's eyes found Luffy.
Bouncing. Grinning. Covered in Haki. Absolutely, magnificently, invincibly fine.
Sanji's heart did the thing.
The thing where it stopped beating for approximately one second and then resumed at triple speed, flooding the chef's face with blood and heat and the specific shade of red that appeared exclusively when Luffy did something that reminded Sanji why the chef had left the Baratie and joined this insane crew and followed this insane captain and cooked for this insane rubber boy every single day for years and would continue to do so for the rest of time because—
Because he's worth it. He's worth everything. He's worth every fight and every injury and every moment of this ridiculous, beautiful, impossible life.
"...More of them coming from starboard!" Sanji snapped, redirecting the emotional surge into combat awareness with the practiced efficiency of someone who had been managing overwhelming feelings for Luffy since approximately five minutes after meeting him. "Zoro! Your right!"
"I KNOW!" Zoro shouted back from the other side of the deck, where the swordswoman was currently bisecting a fishing net that had been thrown at her by three enterprising fishmen who had correctly identified her as a threat and incorrectly identified "net" as an appropriate countermeasure. "I can SEE them! I have an EYE!"
"ONE eye!"
"It's a PERFECTLY GOOD eye!"
"JUST COVER THE STARBOARD—"
"DON'T TELL ME WHAT TO DO, CURLY-BROW—"
"DON'T CALL ME CURLY-BROW, MOSS-HEAD—"
They argued. They fought. They covered each other's blind spots with the unconscious synchronization of two people who had been fighting side by side for so long that their combat instincts had merged into a single, shared system—each one knowing exactly where the other would be, exactly when the other would strike, exactly how much space the other needed to execute their technique, without ever acknowledging this coordination or admitting that it existed.
The fishmen continued to fall.
On the port side of the Flying Dutchman, where a contingent of Vander Decken's crew had attempted to establish a defensive perimeter, Brook was having the time of her life.
Her second life.
Her third life?
She'd lost count. It didn't matter. What mattered was that she was alive, in the fullest, most complete, most literal sense of the word, and she was fighting, and the fighting was incredible because she could feel it—feel the grip of the cane sword in her hand, feel the vibrations of impact traveling up her arm when blade met weapon, feel the strain of muscles and the stretch of tendons and the exhilarating, intoxicating sensation of a heart pumping blood through a body that worked.
"Yohohoho!" Brook laughed, and the laugh came from a chest that had lungs, resonated through a throat that had vocal cords, emerged from a mouth that had lips and tongue and teeth that were not merely decorative bones but actual, functional dental structures embedded in actual, functional gums. "What a wonderful day to be alive! And I mean that LITERALLY! Yohohoho!"
The Soul King's power—the true power of the Yomi Yomi no Mi, the power that Brook had spent two years learning to harness during training on Namakura Island—manifested in the air around her like a symphony made visible.
Soul Solid.
The blade of Brook's sword frosted over with the cold of the underworld—the chill of the space between life and death, the temperature of a soul separated from its body, the fundamental absence of warmth that existed in the place where Brook had spent fifty years waiting to return. The frost was not merely cold; it was the cold of death itself, a metaphysical phenomenon that bypassed physical defenses entirely and struck directly at the life force—the soul—of anyone it touched.
"Kasuriuta: Fubuki Giri!"
The slash was invisible. Not "very fast"—invisible. Brook's sword technique had always been based on speed—the iaijutsu style of drawing, cutting, and resheathing in a single, unbroken motion so fast that the cut was delivered before the target could perceive the attack. Two years of training had refined this speed to a level that transcended "fast" and entered the realm of "conceptual," where the question was not "how quickly did the sword move" but "did the sword move at all, or did the cut simply happen, materializing in the space between moments like a fact that had always been true but was only now being noticed."
Twelve fishmen froze.
Literally. Ice crystals formed on their skin, spreading outward from invisible cut lines that traced their bodies from shoulder to hip, and their eyes went wide, and their muscles locked, and their souls—the invisible, intangible, fundamental essence of their being—shuddered from the contact with Brook's underworld-cold blade.
They fell.
Not from injury. From soul shock—the metaphysical equivalent of having the foundation of your existence briefly touched by something from the other side, a sensation so profound and so disturbing that the body's only response was to shut down, to collapse, to nope out of consciousness entirely rather than continue processing an experience that the human (or fishman) mind was not designed to process.
"Yohohoho! My apologies! But you see, I made a promise to my captain that I would protect him, and a musician ALWAYS keeps their promises! Much like keeping tempo! Yohohoho!"
Brook spun—a graceful, dancer's spin that sent the long formal coat swirling, that set dark hair cascading beneath the magnificent afro, that caused the body beneath the suit to shift and sway with a fluidity that spoke of both combat training and the simple, physical joy of having a body that could spin—and faced the next wave.
But instead of drawing the sword again, Brook raised the violin.
"Let me play you a song," Brook said, and the smile—dark lips curved over white teeth, eyes sparkling with the mischievous warmth of a musician about to perform a piece that was going to ruin someone's day—was the smile of the Soul King.
The bow touched the strings.
The music began.
It was not a fighting song. It was not a war song. It was not any kind of song that a person would associate with combat or violence or the systematic incapacitation of hostile fishmen.
It was a lullaby.
A lullaby played with the mastery of someone who had spent a lifetime studying music and another lifetime (spent as a skeleton on a ghost ship, alone in the dark, playing for an audience of no one because the music was the only thing that kept the soul anchored to the empty bones) refining that mastery until it transcended technique and became art.
The notes drifted through the air—through the damaged coating bubble, through the water, through the very fabric of the underwater atmosphere—and they carried with them the power of the Yomi Yomi no Mi. The power of the soul. The power to reach past the physical, past the conscious, past all the defenses that a person could build between themselves and the world, and touch the thing that lay beneath.
Fishmen stopped fighting.
Not because they chose to. Not because they decided that discretion was the better part of valor, that the battle was lost, that continuing to fight was futile. They stopped because their souls told them to stop—because the music reached the deepest, most fundamental part of their being and whispered sleep and the soul listened because the music was beautiful and the soul was tired and fighting seemed so much less important than closing your eyes and letting the melody carry you down, down, down into the warm dark of unconsciousness.
They fell like autumn leaves—gently, slowly, drifting to the deck in postures that were more "napping" than "defeated," their weapons clattering beside them, their faces relaxing into expressions of peaceful slumber.
Twenty fishmen. Thirty. Forty.
Brook played.
The lullaby continued.
The battle, in this sector of the Flying Dutchman, simply stopped.
Not through violence. Not through force. Through music.
Through the purest expression of Brook's soul—a soul that had endured fifty years of solitude and emerged not bitter but grateful, not hardened but tender, not diminished but expanded, a soul so full of love for the world and the people in it that it could be channeled through a violin and used to gently, kindly, lovingly put an army to sleep.
"Yohohoho," Brook whispered over the sleeping fishmen, bow still moving, music still playing, tears streaming down dark cheeks. "Sweet dreams."
Below the deck, in the hold of the Flying Dutchman where a contingent of Vander Decken's crew had retreated to regroup and prepare a counterattack, something was happening that was making the fishmen very, very afraid.
The hold was dark. The lighting—provided by bioluminescent fixtures that were standard on deep-sea vessels—had been extinguished by the shockwaves from Luffy's attacks, leaving the space in near-total darkness. The fishmen—approximately twenty of them, armed, scared, huddled together in the way that scared creatures huddle when the world above them has become hostile—could see nothing.
But they could hear.
Footsteps.
Heavy footsteps.
Slow, deliberate, patient footsteps that echoed through the hold with a resonance that suggested the person making them was large. Very large. And getting closer.
"Who—who's there?!" one of the fishmen shouted into the darkness, his voice cracking on the second word.
The footsteps stopped.
Silence.
Then—a voice. Soft. Gentle. Almost sweet, in the way that certain venomous flowers were sweet, in the way that the calm before a hurricane was sweet, in the way that the last thing you heard before something terrible happened was always, somehow, sweet.
"Excuse me," the voice said, and it was a female voice, and it was a nice voice, and it carried an undercurrent of emotion that the fishmen could not immediately identify but which made the scales on the backs of their necks stand on end. "I'm looking for someone."
"L-looking for—"
"My captain. Monkey D. Luffy. Small. Wears a straw hat. Rubber. Have you seen him?"
"Your—your captain? We don't know where—"
"That's unfortunate." The voice paused. "Because some of your friends. Up on the deck. They tried to hurt him."
The temperature in the hold dropped by several degrees. Not physically—the air was the same temperature it had been moments ago. The emotional temperature dropped. The ambient feeling of the space shifted from "dark and scary" to "dark and oh god something is in here with us."
"They tried to hurt my captain," the voice repeated, and now the undercurrent was identifiable. It was the sound of someone who was very calm and very focused and very, very angry, and whose anger was not the explosive, hot, screaming kind that burned bright and burned out, but the deep, cold, patient kind that burned forever.
"And I don't like it when people try to hurt my captain."
The footsteps resumed.
Closer.
Closer.
Closer.
And then the darkness was filled with something large.
Chopper stepped into the faint glow of a single remaining bioluminescent fixture, and the fishmen saw her, and twenty hearts stopped simultaneously.
She was—
She was not the cute little reindeer they might have expected from the Straw Hat crew's bounty posters (which still featured Chopper's old form, the tiny, adorable, 50-berry-bounty mascot that the Marines had never bothered to update because they had never considered the crew's pet to be a serious threat).
She was nine feet tall.
Nine. Feet. Tall.
The growth had accelerated during the battle—fueled by adrenaline, by fear, by the overwhelming, consuming need to protect the person who mattered most, the growth had surged with a violence that matched the violence around her, adding inches with each passing minute, adding curves with each passing second. She had entered the battle at eight foot four. She had grown a full eight inches in the time it had taken to descend from the deck to the hold, and every inch had been accompanied by a proportional increase in everything else.
The chest was colossal. Two vast, heavy, impossible masses of fur-covered flesh that strained against a makeshift chest wrap (rope, actually, wound around her torso by Franky in a moment of shipwright practicality) with a force that made the rope creak and groan like rigging in a storm. Each one was larger than a fishman's torso. Each one moved with each breath—a slow, heavy, tidal rise and fall that suggested incredible mass and incredible softness coexisting in the same impossible space.
The hips were wider than the corridor. Literally—they brushed against both walls as she walked, soft flesh compressing slightly against the wooden surfaces and springing back as she passed, each step accompanied by the gentle thud-thud of hip meeting wall on alternating sides. The thighs below them were pillars—great, round, fur-covered columns of muscle and softness that pressed together with each step, the flesh between them compressing and releasing in a rhythm that was almost mechanical in its regularity.
And the eyes.
The eyes were the worst part.
They were Chopper's eyes—still round, still dark, still possessing the fundamental sweetness and innocence that had always been Chopper's most endearing trait. But the sweetness was buried. Hidden beneath a layer of something that was not quite rage, not quite madness, but something adjacent to both—a focused, absolute, overwhelming protectiveness that had consumed every other emotion and left nothing behind except the single, burning, all-consuming imperative:
Protect Luffy. Protect Luffy. Protect Luffy. PROTECT LUFFY.
"My captain is up there," Chopper said, pointing upward with one massive hand. "Fighting. He doesn't need my help. He never needs help. He's the strongest, bravest, most amazing person in the entire world and he can beat ANYONE."
The fishmen nodded frantically. They would have agreed that the sky was green and the ocean was made of chocolate if it meant the nine-foot-tall furry goddess of vengeance would stop looking at them like that.
"But just in case," Chopper continued, and the voice dropped another register, into a range that was felt in the chest rather than heard with the ears, "I'm going to make sure that none of you. Get in his way."
She hadn't used a Rumble Ball.
This was important. This was, from a medical and pharmacological standpoint, impossible. Chopper's transformation points—the various forms that the Hito Hito no Mi allowed her to access—had always required either conscious effort (for the standard three forms) or a Rumble Ball (for the additional forms). The form she was in now—this towering, curvaceous, terrifying hybrid of her various points that combined the height and power of Monster Point with the intelligence and dexterity of her humanoid forms—was not in the catalog. It was not in the manual. It was not in any medical text or pharmacological reference that Chopper had ever read or written.
It was new.
It was her.
It was what happened when a doctor who had devoted her entire existence to healing and helping and caring for the people she loved was confronted with a threat to the person she loved most, and the love was so vast and so deep and so absolute that it reached into the very core of her Devil Fruit and said I need more and the Devil Fruit responded here.
No Rumble Ball.
No limit.
Just love, transmuted into power, transmuted into nine feet of fury.
The fishmen ran.
They made it approximately four feet before Chopper was among them.
On the main deck, Nami was fighting.
Not running. Not hiding. Not calculating escape routes or optimal retreat vectors or the precise monetary value of her own survival. Fighting.
This was—by the standards of the navigator's historical behavior in combat situations—unusual enough to warrant its own paragraph of contextualization.
Nami had always been the crew's support fighter. The strategist. The person who hung back, who assessed the situation, who deployed her Clima-Tact from a safe distance to create weather phenomena that tipped the scales in her crewmates' favor while she herself remained firmly, safely, pragmatically outside the range of whatever was trying to kill them. This was not cowardice—Nami had proven her courage a hundred times over, in situations that would have broken lesser people. It was intelligence. It was the rational recognition that her value to the crew was in her mind, her skills, her navigation, and that risking those assets in direct combat was strategically unsound.
But today, on the deck of the Flying Dutchman, with Luffy bouncing in Boundman form somewhere in the chaos ahead and fishmen swarming from every direction and the air filled with the sounds of combat—today, Nami was not hanging back.
Today, Nami was standing in the fight.
"Thunderbolt Tempo!"
The Clima-Tact—upgraded during two years of training on Weatheria, the sky island of weather science, transformed from a simple weather-manipulation tool into a device of terrifying atmospheric authority—hummed in her hands. The thundercloud that formed above the deck was not the weak, localized phenomenon she had been capable of producing before the timeskip. This was a storm—a genuine, self-sustaining meteorological event compressed into a space the size of a living room, dark and roiling and crackling with enough electrical energy to power a small city.
Lightning struck.
Not one bolt. Not two. A barrage—a cascading series of electrical discharges that rained down from the miniature storm system with the precision of targeted strikes, each bolt finding a fishman, each fishman going down with a full-body spasm and the acrid smell of ozone. The bolts were accurate—impossibly accurate, guided by Nami's understanding of atmospheric physics and her mastery of the Clima-Tact's targeting systems—and they did not miss.
"Gust Sword!"
A concentrated blast of wind erupted from the Clima-Tact, catching a group of five fishmen who had been charging toward Nami from the starboard side and hurling them off the ship entirely, their bodies disappearing into the dark water beyond the damaged coating bubble.
"Milky Ball!"
A cloud of sea clouds materialized at deck level, engulfing another group of fishmen in a disorienting fog that reduced visibility to zero and left them stumbling, blind, easy targets for the follow-up:
"Thunder Lance Tempo!"
A single, concentrated bolt—thicker and brighter than the barrage bolts, carrying enough voltage to melt steel—lanced through the fog and struck the group simultaneously, the electrical discharge conducting through the sea cloud medium with devastating efficiency.
They fell. All of them. Smoking. Twitching. Very, very unconscious.
Nami stood in the aftermath—orange hair whipping in the wind generated by her own weather systems, Clima-Tact held at the ready, brown eyes sharp and focused and fierce—and she was not running.
She was not running because Luffy was out there.
She was not running because the man she loved was fighting, and every fishman she took down was a fishman that wouldn't threaten him, and every bolt of lightning she called down was a bolt of lightning in his defense, and the strategic calculus that had always told her to hang back and stay safe had been overwritten by a newer, stronger, more urgent calculation:
He protects everyone. Who protects him?
I do.
Right now.
Right here.
"Come on!" Nami shouted at the remaining fishmen, and her voice carried the snap of thunder, and her eyes carried the flash of lightning, and she was terrifying. "Who's next?!"
Beside Nami—close beside her, close enough to provide covering fire, close enough to protect the navigator's flanks, close enough to be part of the fight rather than watching it from a distance—Usopp was fighting.
Usopp was fighting.
The sniper who had called herself a coward for years—who had run from battles, who had hidden behind crewmates, who had trembled and cried and desperately, desperately wished to be anywhere other than wherever the danger was—Usopp was standing on the deck of an enemy ship, surrounded by hostile fishmen, in the middle of a battle that any sane person would have fled from, and she was fighting.
Kabuto sang in her hands.
"Midori Boshi: Devil!"
A pop green—one of the weaponized plants that Usopp had developed during two years of training on the Boin Archipelago—erupted from Kabuto's sling with the accuracy that only the world's greatest sniper could achieve. The seed flew in a perfect parabolic arc, trailing a thin green line of botanical potential, and impacted in the center of a group of fishmen who had been attempting to outflank Zoro.
The seed germinated.
In approximately 0.4 seconds, a massive carnivorous plant—ten feet tall, covered in thorns, possessed of a jaw lined with teeth that were technically leaves but which functioned, for all practical purposes, as very effective teeth—erupted from the point of impact and began enthusiastically consuming the fishmen around it. Not eating eating—the plant was designed to capture and restrain, not to digest—but the distinction was academic to the fishmen who were currently being wrapped in vines and stuffed into the plant's maw like produce being shelved at a very aggressive grocery store.
"Midori Boshi: Impact Wolf!"
Another seed. Another perfect shot. A wolf-shaped mass of compressed plant matter materialized in mid-air, howling with a sound that was somehow both botanical and canine, and slammed into a cluster of fishmen with the force of a battering ram wrapped in ivy.
"Hissatsu: Firebird Star!"
A flaming projectile—the Pop Green ignited by Usopp's specialized ammunition—streaked across the deck and detonated against the chest of a particularly large fishman officer who had been raising a trident above his head in preparation for a throw. The explosion was contained—Usopp's ammunition was designed for precision, not collateral damage—but the force was sufficient to launch the officer backward through a wall and into the ocean beyond.
Usopp fired. Reloaded. Fired again. Each shot was perfect—each trajectory calculated in the fraction of a second between identifying a target and pulling the sling, each impact precisely where Usopp intended it, each fallen fishman a small, measured contribution to the safety of the captain she adored.
She was scared.
Of course she was scared. The knees were shaking. The hands were trembling (between shots—during shots, the hands were rock-steady, because the fear that lived in Usopp's body stopped at the wrists, stopped at the interface between trembling human and precise sniper, stopped at the point where "I am afraid" became "but my aim is true"). The long nose was running. The eyes were wide.
But the feet were planted.
The feet were not moving. The feet were not retreating. The feet were on the deck, in the fight, in the line of fire, and they were staying there because Luffy was somewhere ahead and Usopp was not going to leave.
Not today.
Not ever again.
"I am Usopp!" the sniper shouted, and the voice cracked and wavered but it did not stop. "Sniper of the Straw Hat Pirates! Crew of the future King of the Pirates! And you are NOT getting past me! Because my captain is up there! And I BELIEVE in him! And anyone who tries to hurt him has to go through ME! And I have EIGHT THOUSAND FOLLOWERS!"
She did not have eight thousand followers.
She had one captain.
That was enough.
"SPECIAL ATTACK: GREEN STAR—SARGASSO!"
A tangle of seaweed-like vines erupted from the seed, spreading across a thirty-foot section of deck with the speed and enthusiasm of a very motivated ground cover, entangling every fishman in the area in a web of green that tightened as they struggled, binding wrists and ankles and weapons with botanical efficiency.
Usopp grinned—a shaky, teary, magnificent grin—and loaded the next shot.
On the far end of the ship, Franky was doing what Franky did best: being SUUUUPER.
"FRANKY RADICAL BEAM!"
The laser—a genuine, actual, this-is-not-a-metaphor laser, fired from a cavity in Franky's mechanical palm that drew its power from the cola-fueled reactor in the shipwright's chest—cut a line across the deck that bisected the remaining fishman formation with geometric precision. The beam did not injure—Franky had calibrated the output to "incapacitate" rather than "vaporize," because the shipwright's violence, like all Straw Hat violence, was measured and purposeful and stopped short of killing—but the flash and the heat and the sheer spectacle of a blue-white energy beam cutting through the air was enough to scatter the fishmen like startled fish.
Which they were.
Scattered, startled fish.
"SUUUUPER FIGHT!" Franky bellowed, striking the pose—forearms together, hips cocked, every non-mechanical body part bouncing with the enthusiasm of the gesture. "Nobody messes with our captain! NOBODY! He is the most SUUUUPER man in the entire ocean and anyone who disagrees can take it up with my RADICAL BEAM!"
The remaining fishmen, surveying the battlefield—the craters left by Luffy's Boundman attacks, the surgical cuts of Zoro's swords, the boot-shaped dents of Sanji's kicks, the sleeping piles left by Brook's lullaby, the vine-wrapped clusters left by Usopp's Pop Greens, the lightning-scorched patches left by Nami's storms, the mysterious sounds coming from the hold where something very large and very angry was methodically destroying their last line of defense—made a collective, silent, deeply rational decision.
They surrendered.
Luffy dropped out of Gear Fourth.
The transformation reversed itself—the inflated body deflating, the Haki receding, the compressed air releasing in a slow, controlled exhale that sounded like a balloon being let down by someone who was very tired but very satisfied. Luffy landed on the deck—normal-sized, normal-shaped, covered in sweat and steam and the particular kind of exhaustion that came from using Gear Fourth, which consumed enormous amounts of Haki and stamina.
He sat down.
Hard.
"Hah... hah... hah..."
Breathing. Heavy breathing. The kind of breathing that said "I just did something very physically demanding and my body would like a moment to recover and also some meat please."
But he was grinning.
Of course he was grinning.
He was grinning because the fight was over, because Vander Decken was beaten, because the promise was kept, because somewhere in a tower on Fishman Island a girl with pink hair and enormous blue eyes was waiting to hear that she could go outside and the answer was yes, the answer was yes she could, the answer was yes she could go outside because the person who kept her inside was lying in a crater on the ocean floor wondering what had happened to him and the answer to THAT question was "Monkey D. Luffy happened to him."
"Shishishi," Luffy laughed, weak and breathless but genuine, always genuine. "I kept my promise."
Around him, the crew gathered.
They gathered the way they always gathered—naturally, instinctively, drawn to his position by the same irresistible gravity that had drawn them into his orbit in the first place. Zoro appeared at his left, swords sheathed, single eye soft. Sanji appeared at his right, no cigarette, blonde hair disheveled, eyes shining. Robin materialized behind him, serene and omnipresent. Nami dropped to her knees beside him, Clima-Tact still in hand. Usopp stood nearby, sniffling, grinning, shaking. Franky struck a subdued pose, tears streaming. Brook played a soft, gentle melody—a victory song, or perhaps a love song. It was hard to tell the difference.
And from the hold, ascending through the damaged stairway, ducking under doorframes that were far too small, came Chopper—nine feet two inches of furry, curvaceous, tear-streaked devotion, the pink hat clutched in one massive hand, the other hand wiping eyes that were no longer cold and focused but warm and wet and overflowing.
They surrounded him.
Eight women. Eight impossible figures. Eight hearts beating in synchronization with one.
And Luffy looked up at them—at his crew, his nakama, his family, the people he had chosen and who had chosen him—and he smiled.
Not the grin. Not the big, face-splitting, trademark Monkey D. Luffy grin that launched a thousand adventures.
A smile.
Small. Quiet. Tired. Real.
"Thanks, guys," he said. "For having my back."
Eight hearts broke and reformed simultaneously, stronger than before, shaped around the contours of this moment, carrying the memory of this smile like a treasure more precious than anything the One Piece could offer.
"Always, Captain," Zoro said, and spoke for all of them.
The Thousand Sunny waited in the harbor.
Fishman Island stretched out around them, golden and beautiful and free.
And somewhere in a tower, a princess was about to learn that she could go outside.
To be continued...