The boy leaned against the weathered railing of the ship, his thin fingers gripping the salt-crusted wood until his knuckles turned white. The wood was rough beneath his palms, splintered and worn from years of abuse by the sea and the careless hands of men who cared nothing for maintenance. He could feel every groove, every crack, every imperfection digging into his skin. The ship itself was a rotting hulk, a three-masted brigantine that had seen better days decades ago. The sails were patched with mismatched canvas, some sections so thin that sunlight filtered through them in sickly yellow patterns. The deck was stained with substances he tried not to think about: old blood, vomit, spilled rum, and worse. The smell was overwhelming, a mixture of unwashed bodies, rotting fish, gunpowder, and human waste that seemed to have soaked into the very grain of the wood.
His red hair hung limp around his face, matted with sweat and salt spray. He was painfully thin, his ribs visible beneath his pale, freckled skin. The scar on his upper lip pulled slightly when he grimaced, a white line that stood out against his otherwise youthful face. He was fourteen years old. Fourteen. The thought made him want to laugh, or scream, or both. Two weeks ago, he had woken up in this body, in this world, with memories that didn't belong here. Memories of a place with different rules, different morals, different everything. He didn't understand why or how. He only knew that every day since had been a waking nightmare.
The sea around them was unnaturally calm. The water stretched out like a sheet of dark glass, barely rippling in the faint breeze. The sky above was a pale, washed-out blue, cloudless and empty. It felt wrong. Everything felt wrong. His heart twisted in his chest, a physical sensation of dread that made it hard to breathe. He knew what was coming. He had known since they set course for this island three days ago.
Toroa.
The island rose from the sea ahead of them, a small, green jewel in the West Blue. From this distance, it looked peaceful. He could see the white sand beaches, the cluster of simple wooden buildings that made up the village, the fishing boats pulled up on the shore. Smoke rose from chimneys. People were going about their lives, unaware of what was bearing down on them. The boy felt his stomach clench. He wanted to scream a warning, to do something, anything. But he was trapped. Trapped in this body, on this ship, with these men.
The crew moved around him with practiced efficiency, preparing for the raid. There were about eighty of them, a motley collection of the worst humanity had to offer. Most were scarred, missing teeth, eyes that held nothing but cruelty and greed. They checked their weapons: rusted cutlasses, flintlock pistols that looked like they might explode in their users' hands, clubs studded with nails, knives of every description. Some of them were already drunk, passing bottles back and forth and laughing at jokes that made the boy's skin crawl.
Captain Dylan Mcgold stood at the helm, a grotesque figure silhouetted against the pale sky. He was old, perhaps sixty, with a face like weathered leather and eyes that burned with a fanatical intensity that made the boy think of rabid animals. His beard was long and filthy, braided with bits of bone and metal. He wore a long coat that had once been fine but was now stained and torn, and a hat with a broken feather jutting from it at an awkward angle. His bounty was fifty thousand berries, a pittance in the grand scheme of the world but enough to make him dangerous to small, unprotected villages like Toroa.
The captain's voice suddenly rang out across the deck, a harsh bellow that made everyone snap to attention.
"Listen up, you worthless sacks of shit!" he roared, spittle flying from his cracked lips. His eyes were wild, pupils dilated with whatever combination of alcohol and stimulants he had consumed that morning.
"That island there is ours for the taking! No marines, no protection, nothing but sheep waiting for the slaughter! I want every berry, every scrap of food, every piece of anything worth taking! And I want them to remember what happens when Dylan Mcgold comes calling!"
A cheer went up from the crew, a sound like animals howling. The boy felt bile rise in his throat.
"Any man who holds back gets keelhauled!" the captain continued, his voice rising to a shriek.
"Any man who shows mercy gets the same! We are pirates! We take what we want! We do what we want! And God help anyone who gets in our way!"
Another cheer, louder this time. The boy's hands trembled on the railing. He wanted to jump overboard, to swim away, to do anything but what he knew was coming. But he couldn't. He had tried to refuse once, in the first few days. The captain had beaten him unconscious and then made him watch as they tortured one of the other slaves to death, slowly, over the course of hours. The message was clear: obey or cause suffering for others. It was a trap with no escape.
The ship drew closer to the island. The boy could see details now: children playing on the beach, women hanging laundry, men mending nets. Normal people living normal lives. His chest felt like it was being crushed in a vice.
"Drop anchor!" the captain screamed. "Prepare the boats! Move, you bastards, move!"
The crew swarmed into action. The anchor splashed into the calm water with a sound like thunder. Smaller boats were lowered over the side, crude rowboats that could hold ten men each. The boy was shoved toward one of them, his feet moving automatically even as his mind screamed at him to stop, to resist, to do something.
He climbed down into the boat, his thin arms shaking. Around him, the other pirates were laughing, making crude jokes about what they would do to the women, how much loot they would take. The boy stared at the bottom of the boat, at the inch of foul water that sloshed around his feet, and tried to disappear into himself.
The boats pushed off from the ship, oars dipping into the glassy water. The sound of wood creaking and water splashing seemed impossibly loud in the unnatural calm. The boy looked up and saw that people on the beach had noticed them now. He could see them pointing, gathering, confusion turning to alarm.
They hit the beach with a grinding crunch of wood on sand. The pirates poured out of the boats like a plague, weapons drawn, screaming battle cries that were more animal than human. The boy stumbled onto the sand, a rusty cutlass thrust into his hand by someone behind him.
The villagers of Toroa were not completely unprepared. As the pirates charged up the beach, men emerged from the buildings carrying whatever weapons they could find. The boy saw flintlock pistols, old and poorly maintained. He saw farming implements turned into weapons: scythes with their curved blades glinting in the sunlight, machetes used for clearing brush, axes meant for chopping wood. Some men carried nothing but clubs or their bare fists.
They were brave. The boy had to give them that. They formed a ragged line at the edge of the beach where the sand met the grass, and they stood their ground even as eighty screaming pirates bore down on them.
The first shots rang out. The villagers' flintlocks barked, sending up puffs of white smoke. A pirate to the boy's left went down, the top of his head blown off in a spray of red and gray. Another took a ball in the chest and fell backward into the surf, blood spreading around him in the water. But there were too few guns and too many pirates.
Then the two groups collided, and the beach became hell.
The boy had never seen violence like this before. Not in his old life, not in the two weeks since he had woken up here. The sound was overwhelming: screams of rage and pain, the clash of metal on metal, the wet thud of blades hitting flesh, the crack of breaking bones. The smell hit him like a physical blow: blood, shit, vomit, gunpowder, sweat.
A villager came at him, a middle-aged man with terror in his eyes and a machete in his hands. The man swung wildly, and the boy's body moved on instinct, muscle memory from this body's previous owner taking over. He ducked under the swing and drove his cutlass up into the man's stomach. The blade went in with a resistance that felt like cutting through tough meat. The man's eyes went wide, his mouth opening in a soundless scream. Hot blood poured over the boy's hand, shockingly warm. The man fell, and the boy had to plant his foot on the corpse to pull his blade free. The sucking sound it made would haunt him forever.
Around him, the slaughter continued. The pirates were experienced fighters, brutal and efficient. The villagers were farmers and fishermen playing at being soldiers. It was a massacre.
The boy saw a pirate named Garesh, a huge man with a bald head covered in scars, grab a villager by the throat and lift him off the ground. The villager kicked and struggled, his face turning purple. Gresh laughed and squeezed harder. There was a wet cracking sound, and the villager went limp. Garesh threw the body aside like garbage and moved on to his next victim.
A young villager, barely older than the boy himself, tried to run. A pirate caught him and drove a knife into his back, then again, then again. The young man fell face-first into the sand, his body twitching. The pirate wiped his blade on the corpse's shirt and kept moving.
The villagers' line broke. They scattered, some trying to run back to the village, others fighting in small desperate groups. The pirates pursued them like wolves after sheep.
The boy saw a villager with a scythe manage to hook the blade around a pirate's neck and pull. The curved blade bit deep, and blood fountained out in a pulsing arc. The pirate fell, clutching at his ruined throat, drowning in his own blood. But three more pirates fell on the villager with the scythe, hacking at him with their blades. The man went down under a rain of cuts, his screams cutting off abruptly as someone drove a cutlass through his face.
An older villager, gray-haired and desperate, fired a flintlock pistol point-blank into a pirate's chest. The pirate staggered but didn't fall. He looked down at the smoking hole in his chest, then back up at the villager, and smiled. He had eaten a Devil Fruit, the boy realized with horror. Some kind of defensive power. The pirate grabbed the old man's head in both hands and twisted. The crack of the breaking neck was audible even over the chaos. The old man's body dropped, his head at an unnatural angle.
The boy moved through the carnage in a daze, his body fighting on autopilot while his mind recoiled in horror. He killed three more men. He didn't want to. He had to. If he didn't fight, the captain would know. And then someone else would suffer for his weakness.
The first man he killed with a slash across the throat. The man dropped his weapon and clutched at the wound, blood pouring between his fingers. He fell to his knees, making a horrible gurgling sound, his eyes locked on the boy's face. It took him almost a minute to die, drowning in his own blood.
The second man he killed with a thrust through the chest. The blade scraped against ribs going in. The man coughed blood and fell backward, his legs kicking weakly in the sand.
The third man he killed with a cut that opened his belly. The man's intestines spilled out, gray and glistening. The man looked down at them in disbelief, trying to push them back in with his hands. He was still trying when he died.
The boy vomited between the second and third kill, his stomach heaving up nothing but bile. No one noticed or cared.
The battle, if it could be called that, lasted perhaps twenty minutes. When it was over, the beach was carpeted with bodies. The boy stood in the surf, breathing hard, his cutlass hanging from his hand. The water around his feet was pink, then red, then pink again as the waves washed in and out. Bodies floated in the shallows, rolling gently with the tide.
The pirates had lost men. The boy counted as he looked around. Sixty-three bodies in pirate clothing lay scattered across the beach. The villagers had fought harder than expected. But it hadn't been enough. It was never enough.
The surviving pirates, about seventeen fewer than had started, regrouped and began moving toward the village proper. The boy followed, his legs moving mechanically. His shoulder burned. At some point during the fighting, someone had cut him. It wasn't deep, but blood ran down his arm in a thin stream.
The village of Toroa was small, perhaps two hundred people in total. Most of the fighting-age men had died on the beach. What remained were women, children, and the elderly.
What happened next was worse than the battle.
The pirates spread through the village like a disease. The boy heard screaming start almost immediately. He walked down the main street, past simple wooden houses with flower boxes in the windows, and tried not to see what was happening around him.
A woman was dragged out of a house by her hair. She was young, maybe twenty, wearing a simple dress. Three pirates surrounded her. One of them punched her in the face, and she fell. They were on her immediately, tearing at her clothes. The boy turned away, but he couldn't block out the sounds. Her screams. Their laughter. The wet sounds of flesh on flesh. When he looked back, unable to help himself, her dress was torn away. One pirate held her arms while another forced her legs apart. The third was unbuckling his belt. The woman was sobbing, begging them to stop. They didn't stop. They never stopped.
The boy saw it happen again and again as he walked through the village. Women pulled from their homes, thrown to the ground, violated in the street while their children watched and screamed. An older woman, someone's grandmother, was bent over a fence by two pirates who took turns with her while she wept silently, her face pressed against the wood. A young girl, no more than sixteen, was dragged into an alley by four men. The boy heard her screaming for her mother. The screaming went on for a long time, then stopped abruptly.
The boy's hands clenched into fists so tight that his nails drew blood from his palms. His whole body shook with rage and helplessness. He wanted to intervene. Every fiber of his being, every value from his old life, screamed at him to do something. But he couldn't. He was one boy with a rusty cutlass against eighty brutal men. If he tried to stop them, they would kill him and then continue anyway. Or worse, they would make him watch as they did something even more horrible to punish his defiance.
So he walked, and he watched, and he hated himself.
The children were gathered in the village square. The boy saw them being herded by a group of pirates, maybe thirty or forty kids ranging from toddlers to teenagers. They were crying, calling for their parents. Some of the parents were already dead. Others were being brutalized within earshot of their children's cries.
Captain McGold stood in the square, directing operations with the air of a man conducting an orchestra. His eyes gleamed with manic energy.
"Get them all in the church!" he bellowed, pointing at a small wooden building at the edge of the square. "Every last one of the little bastards!"
"Captain, some of them could be sold," one of the pirates ventured. "Slaves fetch good money."
McGold's face twisted with rage. He drew his pistol and shot the man in the face. The pirate's head snapped back, and he fell dead.
"I said all of them!" McGold screamed. "I want this island to remember! I want the next place we hit to hear what happened here and piss themselves in fear! No survivors! No mercy! Now move!"
The pirates dragged and carried the children toward the church. The boy watched, frozen in place. His mind couldn't process what was happening. It couldn't be real. This couldn't be happening.
But it was.
The children were shoved into the church, packed in so tightly that some of them were crushed against the walls. Their screaming was a sound the boy knew would echo in his nightmares forever. Then the pirates barred the doors from the outside.
"Burn it," McGold said calmly.
The boy's heart stopped.
Pirates brought torches. They touched them to the dry wood of the church walls. The fire caught immediately, spreading with horrifying speed. Within seconds, the entire building was engulfed.
The screaming from inside intensified. The boy could hear small fists pounding on the doors, on the walls. He could hear children calling for their mothers, for God, for anyone to help them. The smell of burning wood was quickly joined by another smell, one that made the boy's stomach heave. Burning flesh.
The screaming went on for five minutes. Then ten. Some of the voices cut off abruptly. Others faded to whimpers. By fifteen minutes, there was silence except for the roar of the flames.
The boy stood and stared at the burning church. His whole body shook. He had never felt rage like this. It was a physical thing, a fire in his chest that threatened to consume him. He wanted to kill them all. Every single pirate on this island. He wanted to make them suffer the way they had made these people suffer. He wanted to burn them alive and listen to them scream.
But he couldn't. He was powerless. And that made the rage even worse.
The pirates continued their work. They looted every building, taking anything of value. Food, money, tools, weapons, anything that could be sold or used. What they couldn't take, they destroyed. Furniture was smashed. Walls were torn down. The boy saw one pirate pissing on a family portrait, laughing as the urine ran down the painted faces.
The raping continued for hours. The boy lost count of how many women he saw violated. Some of them stopped screaming after a while, their eyes going blank and empty. Others never stopped. One woman managed to grab a knife and stab one of her attackers in the neck before the others beat her to death. The boy hoped she had found some satisfaction in that, at least.
By the time the sun began to sink toward the horizon, Toroa was a ruin. Every building had been looted or burned. Every person was dead or dying. The beach was still littered with corpses, now bloating in the heat. Flies swarmed in black clouds. The smell was indescribable.
The boy sat on a low stone wall at the edge of the village, staring at nothing. His shirt was gone, torn off at some point during the day. The cut on his shoulder had stopped bleeding but throbbed with a dull, persistent pain. He was covered in blood, most of it not his own. His hands wouldn't stop shaking.
A shadow fell over him. He looked up to see one of the slaves from the ship. She was a woman, maybe thirty, though it was hard to tell. Life as a slave had aged her. The captain called her Candy Cheeks, a name he had given her for reasons the boy didn't want to think about. Her real name was lost, probably forever.
She was trembling, her whole body shaking like a leaf in a storm. Her arms were covered in bruises, purple and yellow and black. Her neck was worse, ringed with marks that looked like fingers. Someone had tried to strangle her, probably more than once. She wore a ragged dress that barely covered her, and chains connected her wrists and ankles, allowing her to walk but not run.
She wouldn't look at him. Her eyes stayed fixed on the ground as she knelt beside him. In her hands, she held a cloth and a bottle of something that smelled like alcohol.
"Your shoulder," she whispered, her voice hoarse and broken. "I should clean it."
The boy wanted to tell her to leave, that he didn't deserve her help, that she shouldn't have to serve the people who had enslaved her. But he said nothing. He just sat there as she dabbed at the cut with the cloth. The alcohol burned, but he barely felt it. Physical pain was nothing compared to what was happening inside his head.
She worked in silence, her hands shaking so badly that she could barely hold the cloth. When she was done, she sat back on her heels, still not looking at him.
The boy reached down and picked up a bottle of wine he had taken from the village bar. The bar was empty now. Everyone who had been in it was dead. He had stepped over three bodies to get to the wine. He pulled the cork with his teeth and took a long drink. The wine was cheap and sour, but he didn't care. He wanted to be drunk. He wanted to be unconscious. He wanted to be anywhere but here.
From the beach, he could hear the pirates starting to sing. Their voices were rough and off-key, slurred with alcohol. The boy took another drink and listened.
"Oh, we'll sail the seas so wild and free,
With Hancock's tits to keep us company!
We'll fuck that snake princess till she screams,
And make her serve our filthy dreams!"
The boy closed his eyes. The song continued:
"Her ass so fine, her lips so sweet,
We'll make that bitch our fuckin' meat!
She thinks she's high, she thinks she's grand,
But we'll have her beggin' on the sand!"
More voices joined in, creating a discordant chorus.
"And when we're done with her tight cunt,
We'll go and start our dragon hunt!
Those Celestial bastards in their tower,
We'll gut them in their final hour!"
The song devolved into a chant, the pirates stamping their feet in rhythm.
"Fuck the dragons! Kill them all!
Watch those holy bastards fall!
Rape their women! Burn their gold!
That's the tale that will be told!"
The boy took another long drink from the bottle. He was halfway through it now, and the world was starting to blur at the edges. Good. He wanted it to blur. He wanted everything to disappear.
Candy Cheeks was still kneeling beside him. She shifted slightly, and he heard the clink of her chains. When she spoke, her voice was so quiet he almost didn't hear it.
"Do you want to be taken care of?"
The boy's eyes snapped open. He looked at her, really looked at her for the first time. She was still staring at the ground, her body rigid with tension. She was offering herself to him. Not because she wanted to. Because she thought she had to. Because that was what the men on this ship expected from her.
The disgust that rose in the boy's throat was so strong he thought he might vomit again. His hands clenched around the bottle hard enough that he was surprised it didn't shatter.
"No," he said, his voice harsh. "You can go."
She looked up at him for the first time, confusion and something that might have been relief flickering across her face. Then she stood, her chains rattling, and began to shuffle away toward the ship.
She had barely made it ten feet before the boy heard shouts. Three pirates were running toward her, their intentions clear in their eyes and their grins. Candy Cheeks saw them coming and tried to move faster, but the chains made it impossible. They caught her easily.
The boy watched as they dragged her behind a building. He heard her start to scream. The screaming went on and on.
The rage that filled him was like nothing he had ever experienced. It was a living thing, a beast clawing at the inside of his chest, demanding to be let out. His vision went red at the edges. His hands shook so badly that wine sloshed out of the bottle. He wanted to kill them. He wanted to kill all of them. Every single pirate on this island. He wanted to make them suffer. He wanted to hear them beg for mercy and then deny it to them the way they had denied it to everyone here.
But he couldn't. He was fourteen years old, barely trained, with a ten-thousand-berry bounty he didn't understand and didn't want. If he tried to fight them, they would kill him. And then nothing would change. The pirates would continue. More villages would burn. More people would die.
The boy took another drink and tried to drown the rage in alcohol. It didn't work.
He thought about the Marines. In his old life, in his old world, he had known about them. He had knowledge of this world that he shouldn't have, memories of a story where the Marines were often portrayed as corrupt, as tools of an unjust system. But sitting here, covered in blood, listening to a woman scream as she was raped, he couldn't bring himself to care about that corruption. The Marines fought pirates. That was enough. If he could join them, if he could get away from this ship and this crew, he would do it in a heartbeat. He would enlist without a second thought.
But he couldn't. He was wanted. The bounty poster had his face on it, this body's face. He didn't know why. He had woken up in this body two weeks ago with no memory of what the previous owner had done to earn that bounty. But it was there, and it meant the Marines would arrest him on sight.
He was trapped. Trapped on this ship with these monsters, forced to participate in their atrocities or cause suffering for others. There was no escape. No hope. Nothing but an endless cycle of violence and horror.
The sky was darkening now, the sun sinking below the horizon and painting the clouds in shades of red and orange. It looked like the sky was bleeding. The boy thought that was appropriate.
Captain McGold's voice suddenly rang out across the beach, loud and slurred with drink.
"Oi! Shut your fucking mouths for a minute!"
The singing and laughter died down. The boy looked up to see the captain standing on a piece of driftwood, swaying slightly, a bottle in one hand and his pistol in the other.
"I want to talk about our newest crew member!" McGold shouted, his words running together.
He pointed at the boy with his pistol. "Look at him! Sitting there all quiet and shit! You know how old that boy is?"
The crew shouted various numbers. McGold fired his pistol into the air.
"Fourteen!" he screamed. "Fourteen fucking years old! And you know what? That boy has a body count! A real body count! I saw him today, cutting down grown men like they were nothing! And he's got a bounty! Ten thousand berries! At fourteen!"
A round of applause and wolf whistles erupted from the crew. The boy felt his stomach turn. He didn't want their approval. He didn't want their recognition. He wanted to be anywhere but here.
McGold wasn't done. He took a long drink from his bottle and continued, his voice rising to a fever pitch.
"What kind of fucked up boy can cut off a grown man's head at fourteen, eh? What kind of boy can look at death and not even flinch? I'll tell you what kind! The kind of boy who's going to make us all rich! The kind of boy who's more useful than half you sacks of shit!"
Laughter rippled through the crew. Some of them were looking at the boy with new respect. Others with suspicion. A few with something that might have been fear.
"That boy there," McGold said, pointing again with his pistol, "is going to be a legend someday! Mark my words! And we're going to ride his coattails all the way to the Grand Line!"
More cheering. The captain raised his bottle high.
"To our new comrade!" he bellowed. "And to many more bloody conquests! To gold and glory and all the pussy we can handle! To the pirate life!"
"Hear, hear!" the crew roared back, raising their own bottles and weapons.
The boy didn't move. He didn't raise his bottle. He didn't join in the cheer. He just sat there, staring at the captain with eyes that burned with barely suppressed hatred.
McGold noticed. He stumbled down from his perch and weaved his way over to the boy. Up close, he smelled like rum and sweat and something rotten. His eyes were bloodshot, the pupils dilated to pinpricks. He clapped a hand on the boy's injured shoulder, making him wince.
"What's wrong, boy?" McGold asked, his breath hot and foul in the boy's face. "Not celebrating? You should be proud! You did good work today! Real good work!"
The boy said nothing. He couldn't trust himself to speak. If he opened his mouth, he might scream. Or he might try to kill the captain, which would be suicide.
McGold squeezed his shoulder harder, his fingers digging into the wound. The boy's vision went white with pain, but he didn't make a sound.
"You're a cold one, aren't you?" McGold said, his voice dropping to something almost conversational. "I like that. Shows you've got control. That's good. That's real good. Just remember who's in charge here, boy. Remember who gave you a place on this ship when you had nowhere else to go. Remember who keeps you fed and armed and alive."
The captain leaned in closer, his lips almost touching the boy's ear.
"And remember what happens to people who forget," he whispered.
Then he straightened up, his jovial demeanor returning as quickly as it had vanished. He clapped the boy on the shoulder one more time and stumbled back toward the main group of pirates.
The boy sat there, his shoulder throbbing, his hands shaking, his mind screaming. He took another drink from the bottle. Then another. He wanted to drink until he passed out. He wanted to drink until he forgot everything he had seen today.
But he knew he wouldn't forget. He would never forget.
The pirates continued their celebration as the night grew darker. They built fires on the beach, using wood from the destroyed village. They roasted meat they had stolen and drank themselves into a stupor. Some of them passed out where they sat. Others continued to sing their songs.
The boy watched them from his perch on the stone wall. He studied their faces, memorizing them. He counted them. Seventeen dead from the battle. Sixty-three remaining. He noted who was armed with what, who was drunk, who was alert. He didn't know why he was doing it. Some instinct from this body, perhaps. Or maybe just a desperate need to feel like he had some control, some power, even if it was just the power of observation.
Candy Cheeks eventually emerged from behind the building where the three pirates had taken her. She was limping badly, her dress torn even more than before. Fresh bruises were forming on her face and arms. She didn't look at anyone as she made her way back to the ship, her chains dragging in the sand.
The boy watched her go and felt the rage surge again. It was always there now, a constant presence in his chest. A fire that never went out. He imagined killing the pirates who had hurt her. He imagined it in vivid detail: the surprise on their faces, the fear in their eyes, the blood pouring from their wounds. He imagined making them beg for mercy and then denying it.
But imagination was all he had. In reality, he was powerless.
He looked down at his hands. They were covered in dried blood, brown and flaking. Some of it was his. Most of it wasn't. He had killed four men today. Four men who had probably been good people, who had probably had families, who had probably just been trying to defend their homes. He had killed them because he had no choice. Because the alternative was worse.
But that didn't make it right. Nothing could make it right.
The boy thought about his old life, his old world. He tried to remember what it had been like to live in a place with laws, with police, with some semblance of order and justice. It felt like a dream now, distant and unreal. This was his reality now. This world of violence and cruelty, where the strong did whatever they wanted and the weak suffered and died.
He hated it. He hated every second of it. He hated the pirates. He hated the captain. He hated this body and this bounty and this situation. But most of all, he hated himself. For being too weak to stop it. For participating in it. For surviving when so many others had died.
The rage mixed with self-loathing, creating a toxic cocktail that made him want to scream until his throat bled. But he didn't scream. He just sat there, drinking his stolen wine, watching the pirates celebrate their atrocity.
The fires on the beach cast dancing shadows across the sand. The boy could see the bodies still lying there, dark shapes in the flickering light. Tomorrow, they would leave. The ship would sail away, and Toroa would be left behind, a dead island with no one left to mourn it. Eventually, someone would come. Maybe other pirates. Maybe Marines. Maybe just scavengers. They would find the bodies and the burned buildings and the church full of children's bones. And they would know what had happened here.
The boy hoped they would. He hoped the story of Toroa would spread. He hoped people would hear about it and be horrified. He hoped someone, somewhere, would care.
But he knew they probably wouldn't. This was the world of pirates. Atrocities like this happened every day. Toroa was just one more village, one more tragedy, one more footnote in a history written in blood.
The bottle was empty now. The boy tossed it aside and heard it clink against the stone. His head was spinning, but he wasn't drunk enough. He would never be drunk enough to forget this.
He looked up at the sky. The stars were coming out, bright and cold and indifferent. They had watched this happen. They had watched every atrocity in history happen. And they would continue to watch, unchanging and uncaring, long after everyone on this island was dust.
The boy felt very small suddenly. Small and powerless and utterly alone. He was a stranger in this world, trapped in a body that wasn't his, forced to commit acts that made him want to die. He had no allies, no friends, no one who would help him. He was surrounded by monsters, and he had to pretend to be one of them to survive.
How long could he keep doing this? How many more villages would he have to watch burn? How many more people would he have to kill? How long before the horror and the rage and the self-loathing consumed him completely?
He didn't know. He only knew that he couldn't stop. Not yet. Not while stopping meant causing more suffering. He was trapped in a nightmare with no end in sight.
The boy stood up, his legs unsteady beneath him. He looked one last time at the burning ruins of Toroa, at the bodies on the beach, at the pirates celebrating their victory. Then he turned and walked toward the ship.
Behind him, the pirates continued their song:
"Oh, we'll sail the seas so wild and free,
With blood and gold and misery!
We'll take what's ours and burn the rest,
For pirate life is fucking best!"
The boy climbed aboard the ship and went below deck to the cramped, filthy space where the crew slept. He found an empty hammock and collapsed into it, still covered in blood, still shaking with rage.
He closed his eyes and tried to sleep. But all he could see was the burning church. All he could hear were the screams of the children. All he could feel was the rage, burning in his chest like a second heart.
Somewhere in the darkness, Candy Cheeks was crying. The boy could hear her, soft sobs that she was trying to muffle. He wanted to say something to her, to offer some comfort. But what could he say? What comfort was there in a world like this?
So he said nothing. He just lay there in the darkness, listening to her cry, feeling the rage burn, and hating himself for his powerlessness.
Tomorrow, they would sail to another island. And it would happen again. And again. And again.
Unless he found a way to stop it.
The boy's hands clenched into fists. The rage crystallized into something harder, something colder. A resolve. He didn't know how yet. He didn't know when. But someday, somehow, he would make them pay. All of them. Every pirate on this ship. Every monster who had participated in this atrocity.
He would make them pay.
That thought was the only thing that let him finally drift off into a fitful, nightmare-plagued sleep. The rage would sustain him. The rage would keep him going. The rage would be his fuel until the day he was strong enough to act on it.
And on that day, there would be a reckoning.
The ship rocked gently in the calm water. Above deck, the pirates continued their celebration, their voices carrying across the water to the dead island beyond.
In his hammock, the boy with red hair and a scar on his lip dreamed of fire and blood and revenge.