…
"I might swerve, bend that corner, woah"
Mao Zedong, 1976
…
The fourth attempt at transforming into Mahoraga ended with my right hand the size of a dinner table, my left arm completely normal, several pale structures growing over my face, and my entire body tipping sideways through a chair.
Splintered wood dug into my back while I lay on the cabin floor, one oversized hand pressed against the wall to stop the rest of me from rolling with it. My News Coo watched from the table above me.
"Don't."
He tilted his head, first at my giant right hand, then my completely ordinary left arm and equally unimpressive legs.
"I was close. Progress isn't linear."
His attention moved to what remained of the chair.
"That thing was already weak."
It absolutely hadn't been weak. I'd bought it three weeks ago.
Sitting up was considerably harder when one side of my body weighed several times more than the other, but I eventually managed it and concentrated until the oversized hand began shrinking. The pale skin darkened back toward normal, my fingers shortened, and the black nails receded. The structures over my face disappeared soon after.
Those were fairly new. I'd first managed them about two weeks ago during another failed attempt at the full transformation, and unlike the arm blade, larger hands or altered musculature, they appeared to have absolutely no practical use.
Aside from aura farming, of course, and as they say, some investments didn't need financial returns.
Once I was upright again, I took stock of the damage. The table had survived, as had my bed. A new hand-shaped dent marred one wall, but Crest's ship had accumulated enough unexplained structural injuries that another barely registered. The chair, however, was completely fucked.
"Attempt four. Mixed results." I mumbled.
The News Coo screamed at me.
"Write your own research notes then."
I grabbed the notebook from the table. Several months had passed since Robin first walked onto my ship, and while progress in some areas remained painfully slow, things were moving.
Haki was still irritating.
Observation came in tiny, deeply unsatisfying pieces whenever my adaptation decided that enhanced hearing, smell, balance, vibration sensitivity, or some completely different solution was easier than whatever I was trying to achieve. Armament had become a little more consistent around my hands, although "consistent" mostly meant I could sometimes produce something intentionally instead of punching metal while concentrating on willpower like a lunatic.
We didn't talk about Conqueror's.
My Devil Fruit was going considerably better, assuming we used a generous definition of better.
The forearm blade remained the easiest manifestation by far. I could summon it intentionally on most days, though the first attempt after resting still demanded concentration. My arm thickened, the skin shifted pale, and the wrappings formed around the blade within seconds rather than the awkward minute it had taken at Redhook.
The hands came next. That discovery had been accidental. I'd tried recreating the arm from Cocoyasi without producing the blade and overshot badly enough that both hands became enormous, pale and tipped with black claws. Useful information, terrible afternoon for my cutlery.
Musculature turned out to be even more useful. I could push individual sections of my body toward the larger form without transforming everything else, changing my shoulders, back, arms or legs as needed. It wasn't a minor boost either. Muscle genuinely shifted beneath the skin, changing density and proportion until parts of me resembled what had climbed out of Arlong's pool.
The downside was that my body didn't immediately understand what to do with the difference. I could produce far more force than expected, but changing the leverage of half my body while moving did strange things to coordination. The first time I transformed both legs during a sprint, I cleared nearly thirty metres in one stride and entered a bakery through the second floor.
The bread had been excellent, which made paying for most of the wall slightly less painful.
Then there were the facial structures. I still had no fucking clue what they did. Maybe they had some deeper function I hadn't discovered, or perhaps whatever creature my fruit represented simply needed wing-like growths across its face for reasons known only to nature and Oda. For now, their main combat application was convincing people that whatever they were doing probably wasn't worth it.
I opened my notebook.
FULL TRANSFORMATION ATTEMPTS
Nothing.Right arm transformed, left leg transformed, fell overboard.Both arms, facial structures, partial torso enlargement. Tore trousers.Giant right hand, facial structures. Chair casualty.
I studied the page while the News Coo wandered over and started poking at my foot.
He squawked once.
"Thank you. Finally, some support."
Then he walked to the edge of the ship and shit overboard.
(._.)
…
Baroque Works did not appreciate my research methods, particularly because a growing amount of my practical testing involved their employees.
The latest disagreement began outside Tamarisk, which, if anyone remembers, was where the Straw Hats eventually said goodbye to Vivi. Still brought a tear to my eye thinking about it.
I genuinely hadn't been looking for trouble that night. I'd bought food in town and was heading back toward the ship when I noticed six carts moving from a warehouse toward a private dock. Several men escorted them, and enough of their coats shifted while they walked for me to catch the rectangular shape of Baroque Works cards underneath.
Then I recognised one of them.
He'd tried collecting my bounty two islands ago.
At that point, walking home felt rude.
I followed.
The first crate held rifles, the second medical supplies, and the third enough ammunition to make the purpose of the shipment fairly obvious. By the time somebody finally noticed me, I was sitting on the fourth crate eating the pastry I'd bought in town.
The supervisor stopped when he saw me.
I swallowed. "Evening."
Hands moved toward weapons throughout the warehouse. I looked around at them before tapping the crate beneath me. "These yours?"
"Get off the cargo."
"So yes."
His eyes narrowed as recognition settled in. "You're trespassing, Branchbreaker."
I sighed. "Just Kai."
One of the younger agents whispered the epithet again before the supervisor silenced him with a glance. Apparently the name had travelled ahead of me.
I finished the pastry and brushed the crumbs from my shirt. "Where's all this going?"
"You think we're telling you?"
"No, not really. I was mostly being polite before I steal it."
The supervisor drew his staff.
Fair enough.
Most of what followed barely deserved recording. Guns, blades and clubs had been part of my life for long enough that ordinary examples struggled to accomplish much. Bullets flattened or failed to penetrate properly, and the average blade did little better unless somebody competent happened to be holding it.
The supervisor, at least, knew what he was doing.
His iron staff caught me across the ribs hard enough to shift me several metres and send two crates apart when I landed. I caught the next strike on my forearm but still felt the force run through my shoulder, and by the time he committed to a third, I decided I had enough information.
I reached inward and pushed my shoulder and upper back toward the larger form.
The change happened underneath my shirt. Muscle thickened, my frame shifted slightly, and the next swing stopped against my forearm with a metallic crack that travelled back through the staff. The supervisor nearly lost his grip.
I rolled the altered shoulder once. "Much better."
He disagreed and shouted for the riflemen.
While they repositioned, I brought out the blade along my right forearm. Several agents hesitated immediately, which was interesting. Redhook had travelled farther than I thought.
The supervisor didn't give me much time to enjoy that discovery. He came in again while rifle fire cracked around us, trying to push me away from the cargo. I blocked once, moved under his follow-up and brought my forearm across the middle of the staff.
The iron separated cleanly.
Half of it hit the floor while the supervisor stared at what remained in his hands.
I looked down too. "Still really cool."
Apparently, getting distracted by my own abilities remained a tactical weakness. Another agent tackled me from the side, and although the impact accomplished almost nothing, instinct made me manifest the larger hand.
My fingers closed around his torso as the arm expanded.
I threw him.
He went through a stack of empty crates and continued through the wall behind them.
Conversation inside the warehouse stopped.
Night air came through the new opening while I leaned slightly to see past the broken boards. The man outside was moving, which was probably the important part.
"I'm still learning."
The explanation failed to reassure anyone. The supervisor's attention moved from the forearm blade to my oversized hand and lingered there long enough for another stupid idea to occur to me.
I manifested the facial structures.
They unfolded across the sides of my face, and while I still had absolutely no idea what purpose they served, the effect on the room was immediate. One agent lowered his rifle without seeming to realise he'd done it. Another muttered something under his breath. Even the supervisor stopped advancing.
I smiled at him. "Yeah, I don't know what these do either."
Whatever confidence remained in the warehouse deteriorated from there.
By the time I left, the agents were tied beside the building, the rifles had gone into the harbour, and several bewildered dockworkers were hauling the medical supplies toward a local clinic. Nobody questioned why a wanted criminal in a suit had appeared after midnight with free medicine.
I took the berries with me.
Crime had property law too.
Finders keepers.
…
That incident should probably have satisfied me for a while. Instead, Baroque Works gradually became something between an enemy organisation and a recreational activity.
Over the following months, I kept encountering their operations across Alabasta and the surrounding islands in Paradise. "Encountering" became less accurate once I learned enough of their markings, couriers and routes to recognise them.
Sometimes there was a reason to interfere. Other times they had something useful. Once an agent recognised me while I was eating and decided poison was the appropriate response.
That operation lost three shipments out of principle.
Another group tried taking my ship while I was away from the harbour. I caught them before they finished and spent the next twenty minutes making increasingly unreasonable demands for compensation. They eventually decided it was cheaper to fight me.
It wasn't. A warehouse collapsed during the disagreement; in my defence, that part was an accident.
Mostly.
The best part was discovering how easy it was to ruin their reports, as I'd usually give differing information to select agents.
Robin appeared on my ship the following week carrying several folded reports.
She sat opposite me, opened the first sheet and read without preamble. "According to this, you are currently travelling toward Drum Island to recruit a doctor."
"Could be."
She placed another page beside it. "You have also entered negotiations with Whitebeard."
A third page joined the first two. "And you're searching beneath Reverse Mountain for an ancient weapon."
I leaned back in my chair. "That one sounds important."
"You told seven different agents seven different destinations."
"Eight. The eighth one thinks I retired."
Her eyes dropped back to the papers for a moment, and a quiet breath escaped through her nose before she gathered them into a neat stack.
"You realise somebody has to sort through these."
"That's why I did it."
"I assumed as much."
A few months earlier, she would have followed with questions about where I was actually going, what I knew and why I had targeted those particular operations. Instead, she straightened the papers and moved on.
That had become increasingly common.
Robin remained careful, as someone who had survived her life probably had to be, but our conversations had stopped feeling like every answer was being weighed for a report. Sometimes she came aboard because Baroque Works had something to discuss. Other times she asked about an island I'd visited or a ruin I'd mentioned in passing. Once she arrived carrying an old travel account concerning sites farther into Paradise after I'd complained about how useless most ordinary history books were.
She read it while sitting on deck, finished the last page, then left the book on my table when she departed.
"I won't need that again for a few weeks."
I still had it.
Those visits also tended to stretch well beyond whatever excuse had brought her there. We talked sometimes, but there were afternoons where Robin read while I repaired something nearby and neither of us made any effort to fill the quiet. Silence around most people eventually became an obligation. Around her, I could spend twenty minutes fixing rigging, glance over and find her exactly where she'd been, absorbed in a book as if neither of us owed the other entertainment.
She remained private about herself. Direct questions about her past went nowhere, and I had no intention of throwing Ohara into conversation just to prove I knew it. She already understood I had information I shouldn't, and I had seen enough of her reaction during our first meeting to know where that boundary sat.
The smaller changes said more anyway. She began correcting historical dates when I misremembered them instead of asking where I learned them, and switched from my surname to my first name.
There were visits where Baroque Works never came up at all, and somewhere along the way she also discovered that being quietly correct about something irritated me far more than arguing ever could.
That became especially obvious several towns later when we were sitting outside a café, and I finally voiced the conclusion I'd written in my notebook.
"I'm almost certain my fruit's a Zoan."
Robin turned another page in the book across her lap. "I'd assumed you reached that conclusion already."
I stared at her. "That's rude."
"You transformed into a large humanoid creature several months ago."
"That was completely involuntary."
"You can now reproduce individual parts of the same transformation whenever you choose."
"Mostly whenever I choose." I corrected..
That earned a brief glance before she closed the book over one finger. "I don't think the lack of perfect control changes the classification."
"When you put it that way, it sounds obvious."
"It was obvious before."
Her expression held enough amusement that arguing would only make it worse. "Fine. Mythical Zoan."
Her attention settled more fully on me. "What makes you think Mythical?"
"I've never heard of a normal animal that looks like that. Unless there's some island populated by sixteen-foot humanoids with blades growing from their arms and wheels floating above their heads, supernatural seems like a safe assumption."
"That does narrow the possibilities."
"Exactly."
"Do you know the model?"
"Nope." I said, popping the 'p'.
Robin watched me for a second before reopening her book. "Perhaps the answer exists somewhere."
That sounded different coming from her, so I doubted she meant it lightly.
I leaned back and looked out toward the street. "Yeah. Probably."
A server arrived with our drinks a moment later, and Robin resumed reading while I tried to decide whether what I'd ordered contained coffee or industrial solvent.
…
As the months passed, Baroque Works stopped treating me like a recurring inconvenience.
The change showed up in small practical ways first; agents sent after me became more capable, the safehouses shifted once I discovered them, couriers travelled with heavier protection, and the people carrying useful information suddenly knew less about the parts of the organisation outside their immediate jobs.
Crocodile had been sitting in the back of my mind since I found the first Baroque Works card.
Sir Crocodile, one of the Seven Warlords, user of the Suna Suna no Mi, and the architect of Alabasta's civil war, was also one of the least trusting human beings alive.
I knew who ran the organisation. What I couldn't know was exactly how much of the future I remembered had already been built. This was years early. Maybe half the network existed in roughly the same form, maybe entire pieces hadn't been created yet, and treating canon like a schedule was a good way to get blindsided.
That uncertainty was why I hadn't simply walked into Rainbase and started kicking doors until I found him.
Every operation I disrupted gave me a little more information, though, and eventually I stepped on something important enough to get his attention.
Robin came aboard near sunset a few days after I'd raided another Baroque Works warehouse. I sat near the cabin trying to repair a sleeve ruined by Partial Manifestation when she walked straight over and stood beside the empty chair.
I lowered the needle. "Business?"
"Yes."
Usually there was at least some preamble.
"You destroyed another operation three days ago." Robin glanced toward the sleeve in my hands. "The shipment itself wasn't especially valuable, nor was the warehouse."
"So this is about the paperwork," I smirked.
Her eyes returned to mine. "You read it?"
"Enough."
The records had connected several smaller Baroque Works cells across neighbouring islands. None of it looked dramatic on its own, but the names and routes together gave me a useful picture of how information and supplies moved through that part of the network.
Robin rested a hand on the chair back. "Until recently, you were considered an unusual complication. Dangerous enough to watch, but inconsistent enough that observing you remained more useful than attempting to remove you."
"I'm choosing to hear that as flattering."
"It wasn't intended that way." A slight hint of amusement flickered in her eyes before she continued. "The records you took changed the discussion."
I folded the damaged sleeve over my knee. "Crocodile?"
She studied me for a moment. "You've never actually received that name from me."
"You've never needed to give it to me."
"No," she said, eventually pulling the chair out. "I suppose I haven't."
I smiled. "So what did our favourite Warlord say?"
"He requested every report concerning you."
"All of them?"
She nodded. "All of them."
I remembered what I'd been feeding their agents and had to cover my mouth.
"Even the Whitebeard one?"
"Especially the Whitebeard one, apparently."
That poor bastard. Robin waited until I stopped laughing, then continued. "He's reviewed Nanohana as well, along with several incidents you would probably describe as accidents."
"Some genuinely were."
"I'm sure."
"And?"
"He asked why you're doing this."
The question took a little of the humour out of me. "What did you tell him?"
"The truth. I don't know." She settled one arm against the chair and continued before I could decide what to make of that. "I told him you're interested in Baroque Works, that you possess information you refuse to explain and that you interfere whenever the opportunity presents itself. I also noted that your objectives don't appear to be financial, despite the amount of money you steal."
Robin continued, her tone barely changing. "I also told him that sending ordinary agents after you would be wasteful."
My attention shifted back to her.
She had written that choice into a report going directly to Crocodile. Whether it came from practicality, professional judgment or something else, asking would only guarantee that whatever answer she gave me became less useful than the action itself.
"So he's annoyed, interested and coming after me?"
"Yes, although probably not in the way you're imagining."
"Shame." I shrugged.
Robin glanced toward the harbour. "Until now, Crocodile allowed me to handle your file because watching you served a purpose. You interfered with peripheral operations, created losses and made yourself irritating, but none of it threatened anything he considered essential."
"And now?"
Her gaze returned to me. "He's begun looking into you personally."
A grin pulled at my mouth before I could stop it.
Robin noticed and regarded me for a long moment. "You appear pleased."
"I've spent months stealing his shipments, wrecking his operations, beating his agents and feeding his intelligence network complete bullshit. I was starting to feel ignored."
"You have a strange understanding of positive attention."
"Never said it was positive."
She gave the faintest smile and reached for one of the papers she'd brought with her. "Whatever you're planning, I suspect I'll regret finding out."
"You probably will."
"I thought so."
I leaned back in the chair as she opened the report, still unable to shake the grin.
…
End of Chapter!
Word Count - 3462
(づ｡◕‿‿◕｡)づ
Hey everyone, first off, sorry for the wait on this one.
This chapter ended up taking way more fiddling than I expected because, on paper, it seems pretty straightforward. Kai trains, figures more stuff out about the fruit, keeps being a menace to Baroque Works, and we move the Crocodile setup forward. Simple, right? Yeah, no.
The hard part was making sure it all felt like real progression instead of just listing new abilities like a skill tree. I really wanted the Devil Fruit stuff here to feel like Kai was understanding something and not just randomly gaining powers because the plot said so.
That was the main point of the chapter for me. Kai's finally getting forced to confront the fact that this thing is very obviously a Zoan, and more specifically some kind of Mythical Zoan, even if he still doesn't know the proper in-world name for it.
The partial transformations were a lot of fun to play with because they let me show growth without jumping straight back to the full Cocoyasi monster form. The blade is still the cleanest manifestation, the musculature changes are probably the most practically useful, and the weird face structures still exist mostly to make people stop and reconsider their life choices, which, to be fair, is a valid combat application.
I also liked being able to show Kai becoming a genuine long-term nuisance to Baroque Works instead of one big confrontation and then moving on. Him stealing shipments, ruining reports, beating agents, destroying operations half on purpose and half by being himself, all of that was important because I wanted it to feel earned when the organisation finally stops going, "Who the hell is this guy?" and starts going, "No seriously, somebody deal with this bastard." Robin was also a big part of that. Their dynamic is still progressing in a pretty restrained way, which I prefer for her. She's not suddenly going to become super open, but you can see the little changes if you pay attention, and I think that's way more satisfying.
And yes, the big thing going into next chapter is exactly what it looks like.
Crocodile.
That's the fun part now. Kai has spent all this time poking at Baroque Works, kicking over pieces of the board, and generally refusing to act like a normal problem, so now he's finally attracted a Warlord's personal attention. Which is great news if you're Kai, terrible news if you have common sense, and deeply inconvenient news if you're Robin and have to watch this idiot get excited about being noticed by one of the most dangerous men in Paradise.
So yeah, next chapter should be a good one.
As always, let me know what you thought of the chapter, the fruit progression, the Robin stuff, and Kai's ongoing side quest of making organised crime worse at organising.
If Kai somehow talks shit to Crocodile within like five minutes of meeting him, just know I tried my best.
Bye bye