He spent the points that same night.
500,250. He'd been staring at that Observation threshold for three months and now it was just a matter of willing it. He sat on deck in the dark and did exactly that.
Observation.
[ KARMA SYSTEM ]
[ KP: 250 ]
[ LIFE FORCE Lv.3 — Next: 120,000 KP ]
[ WEAPON ARTS Lv.3 — Next: 80,000 KP ]
[ OBSERVATION Lv.1 — Next: 500,000 KP ]
[ ARMAMENT Lv.0 — Next: 500,000 KP ]
[ CONQUEROR'S Lv.0 — Next: 1,000,000 KP ]
[ SORU Lv.2 — Final: 150,000 KP ]
[ TEKKAI Lv.2 — Final: 150,000 KP ]
[ GEPPO Lv.2 — Final: 150,000 KP ]
[ KAMI-E Lv.2 — Final: 150,000 KP ]
[ RANKYAKU Lv.2 — Final: 150,000 KP ]
[ SHIGAN Lv.2 — Final: 150,000 KP ]
[ LIFE RETURN Lv.1 — Final: 80,000 KP ]
[ FORCE AUTHORITY Max Output — Stamina Dependent ]
The warmth came again — but different this time. Not in his chest like Life Force. This moved through his head, behind his eyes, a pressure that spread outward slowly and then settled like something had quietly opened.
He sat very still and paid attention to what it felt like.
The ship. He could feel the ship — not hear it, not see it, but feel it, the way you feel a room you're sitting in with your eyes closed. Thirty sailors below deck, each of them a presence, a weight, a vague emotional colour he didn't have words for yet. Haas, awake in his bunk, not sleeping — that particular restless feeling of a man turning something over in his head. Tarro, actually asleep, nothing complicated there. Corro, snoring loud enough that the feeling of it was almost comic.
And from the spare bunk — small, warm, deeply unconscious, completely at peace.
Bonney.
Light sat on deck in the dark with 250 KP and the beginnings of something the inherited memories had called Haki, and thought that Level 1 was genuinely just the beginning. The range was maybe forty meters. The detail was vague. Under stress or in a real fight he suspected it would blur and stutter. But a half-second warning before an attack landed — that alone was worth three months of grinding.
He'd get it to Level 2. Eventually.
He went to sleep.
⬛ ⬛ ⬛
Two weeks passed.
Bonney settled into ship life with the ease of someone who had been doing something like it before, which Light noted and filed away without asking about. She had her bunk, she had her meal schedule — which was less a schedule and more a continuous ambient negotiation with whoever was on mess duty — and she had, apparently, a standing arrangement with Corro that involved him making funny faces on demand whenever she was bored.
She was also watching Light.
He noticed this about four days in. Not constantly, not obviously — just occasional glances at specific moments. When he came back from a patrol. When he read the numbers above someone's head in port. When he smiled at something in a way that didn't quite fit the situation.
He didn't say anything about it. Neither did she.
Until the morning she did.
⬛ ⬛ ⬛
It was an ordinary morning. Light was on deck going through patrol reports, Bonney was beside him eating her fourth meat bun of the morning, and a merchant vessel had just pulled into the harbour two hundred meters away. Light glanced at it out of habit.
The merchant captain had a red value of about four hundred. The crew was similar. Completely ordinary. Light looked away.
But Bonney had been watching his face when he looked.
"You just checked those guys," she said.
"Yes."
"And decided they were fine."
"Yes."
"But if they weren't—" She took a bite of her bun and chewed thoughtfully. "You'd kill them."
"If they were above the threshold, yes."
"Even though they haven't done anything to you."
"What they've done has nothing to do with me."
Bonney looked at him sideways. She had that expression she got sometimes — the one that was way too sharp for a kid her age. "You really enjoy it," she said. "Don't you. Like — not just the justice part. The actual killing part."
Light was quiet for a moment. He considered lying. He didn't.
"Sometimes," he said.
Bonney nodded slowly, like he'd confirmed something she'd already decided. She took another bite of her bun. Then she said, very casually, like she was commenting on the weather:
"You're kind of a psycho, Big Brother."
Light turned and looked at her.
She looked back at him with completely innocent eyes and kept chewing.
"Say that again," he said.
She thought about it. Tilted her head. Grinned. "Big Brother Psycho."
The next thirty seconds were undignified for everyone involved. Bonney shrieked and ran approximately four feet before Light caught her by the back of her collar and sat down on a crate and put her across his knee, and what followed was a spanking that was more symbolic than painful, which Bonney responded to with a volume of outrage that was entirely out of proportion to the actual discomfort.
"OW — OW — THAT HURTS — DAMN BIG BROTHER YOU MONSTER—"
"It does not hurt."
"IT DOES IT REALLY DOES WAHHHH—"
Corro appeared from below deck, took one look at the situation, and immediately went back below deck. Tarro, who had been coiling rope nearby, became extremely focused on the rope. Haas, coming up the gangplank with the morning supply manifest, stopped, looked at the Captain administering a completely ineffective spanking to a shrieking pink-haired child, decided this was above his pay grade, and turned around.
Light set her back on her feet.
Bonney stood in front of him with her hands on her hips and her face red and her eyes bright with something that was definitely not tears and might have been laughter if she hadn't been so committed to the outrage.
"That was ABUSE," she announced.
"You called me a psycho."
"You ARE one!" She pointed at him. "Psycho! Big Brother Psycho! I'll say it forever and you can't spank me every time because your hand will get tired!"
Light looked at her. Then at his hand. Then at the patrol report he'd been reading, which was now on the deck.
He picked up the report.
"Sit down," he said. "You dropped your bun."
Bonney looked at the bun on the deck. Her outrage wavered briefly against her priorities. She picked up the bun, inspected it, and sat back down next to him.
They sat in silence for a moment.
"…Are you actually a psycho?" she said. Quieter this time. Genuinely asking.
Light thought about it. "By most definitions, probably."
"Hm." She ate the bun. "Okay."
"That's it?"
"I mean, you fed me," she said, like this was the complete moral calculus. "And you killed those guys who were chasing me. So." She shrugged. "You're my Big Brother Psycho. That's different from just a regular psycho."
Light stared at her for a long moment.
Then he went back to the patrol report.
"Don't call me that in front of the crew," he said.
"Okay," Bonney said, and immediately turned around. "HEY CORRO! BIG BROTHER PSYCHO SAID—"
"BONNEY."
"—that he's buying lunch today!" She turned back with a completely straight face. "That's what you were going to say, right?"
Light looked at her. She looked at him. She had exactly the expression of someone who knew she'd won and was enjoying it thoroughly.
He reached into his pocket and put some Beli on the crate between them without a word.
Bonney took it immediately. "Thank you, Big Brother Psycho."
"I will put you in the ocean."
"No you won't."
She was right. He went back to the report.
⬛ ⬛ ⬛
Three days later, a Marine courier ship pulled alongside them with a sealed intelligence packet.
Light read it on deck. Bonney tried to read over his shoulder. He held it higher. She climbed on the crate next to him. He held it higher still. She gave up and ate something instead.
The packet was from a Marine intelligence contact two islands east. A pirate fleet had taken up position off Roca Island — a small trading port, population eight hundred, currently under complete blockade. Sixty-three ships. Estimated four thousand men. The fleet's captain was a man named Gareth, bounty seventy million Beli, user of the Strong Strong Fruit. His weapon of choice was a spiked mace the size of a small tree.
The contact described what Gareth had done to the last Marine vessel that had tried to break the blockade. Light read that part twice.
He looked at the panel. 250 KP. Observation Haki at Level 1, barely functional, range forty meters on a good day. Rokushiki all at Level 2. Life Force Level 3.
He thought about 4,000 people on sixty-three ships and what their red values probably looked like and how much KP that represented at one tenth each.
He folded the packet and looked at the horizon.
"What is it?" Bonney said, mouth full.
"Work," Light said.
"Dangerous work?"
He thought about a spiked mace and 4,000 pirates and an island of eight hundred civilians under blockade.
"Yes," he said. Somehow, he was reluctant to lie to her.
Bonney chewed slowly. Then: "Come back in one piece, Big Brother Psycho."
He didn't answer. But he didn't tell her to stop calling him that either, which by this point was as close to affection as anyone on the ship had learned to expect from him.
He went to find Haas.