(Koala POV)
From my booth in the shadowed corner of the Rusty Anchor, I watched the young man at the bar bury his face in his hands.
My heart was hammering a frantic, painful rhythm against my ribs.
From the moment I had stepped into the tavern and spotted him, a desperate hope had threatened to overwhelm my training.
He had the same dark hair, the same jawline, the same stubborn set to his shoulders as the photo, and an uncanny resemblance to Jasmine herself.
I had spent the last eighteen months holding Jasmine through night terrors, listening to the Thunder Maiden sob about the brother she had lost.
I knew that if this man was a World Government plant or an opportunistic bounty hunter trying to cash in on a resemblance, the false hope would utterly destroy my sister.
I took a deep breath, forcing my face into a mask of casual concern, and slid into the booth right next to him.
“Why do you look so sad?” I asked gently.
He didn’t look up.
He just let out a bitter, exhausted sigh.
“Because I just blew my only lead to reconnect with my sister.
I tried to be clever.
I tried to bait the hook, and I just wasted my time.
But it’s fine…
I’ll bounce back.
I’ll tear this whole kingdom apart brick by brick if I have to.
I’m finding her, come heaven or hell.”
My breath caught.
The sheer, unyielding devotion in his voice mirrored Jasmine’s perfectly.
Then, the small, cloaked figure across the table popped its head up.
“Hi,” the creature chirped, wiping barbecue sauce off a white snout.
“I’m Gammamon.
What’s your name?”
I offered a trembling smile.
“It’s very nice to meet you, Gammamon.
I’m Koala.”
The man’s entire body went rigidly, electrically stiff.
He slowly lowered his hands and snapped his head to the side, his eyes wide with absolute, paralyzed shock.
I looked directly into his eyes, my Revolutionary training keeping my voice steady, even as my hands shook under the table.
“You look a lot like her,” I said softly, testing the waters.
“But the bounty poster photo is a bit blurry.
She used to have really long hair, right?
Down past her waist?”
His shock wavered, a confused frown creasing his forehead.
“Jasmine?
No, she always kept it cut in a messy bob.
She hated it getting in her face.”
“Right,” I nodded smoothly, leaning in just a fraction closer.
“And it’s a real shame about that spider tattoo she had on her inner arm.
I heard it got completely ruined by a burn in her last fight.”
His eyes narrowed instantly.
“Spider tattoo?
Jasmine never had a spider tattoo in her life.
It’s a guild mark.
From an anime called Fairy Tail.
She begged me to get matching ones for her college graduation because her favorite theme in the whole world is the concept of ‘found family.’ It’s right here.”
He didn’t hesitate.
He rolled up the sleeve of his dark shirt, exposing the inner flesh of his bicep.
Resting right where she said it would be was a stylized, wing-like emblem.
All of my walls instantly collapsed.
Fairy Tail didn’t exist in this world.
It was a world Jasmine had spoken only in the safety of our underground bunkers.
I let out a choked, wet gasp.
Tears spilled hotly over my cheeks as I furiously rolled up my own right sleeve, showing him the exact same pink guild mark tattooed onto my skin.
“She told me what it meant,” I sobbed, a brilliant, watery smile breaking across my face.
“I didn’t just accept her as my friend.
She taught me the words.
I took her as my sagi bahan.
My real sister.”
He stared at my arm, his eyes welling with tears.
He recognized the Hindi words immediately, a language that didn’t exist anywhere on these oceans.
He let out a breathless, disbelieving laugh.
“You’re finally here…
bhai,” I whispered, using the word for brother as I threw my arms around his neck, pulling him into a crushing, desperate hug.
He hugged me back just as fiercely, burying his face in my shoulder.
“Thank you,” he choked out.
“Thank you for looking after her.”
For a long, beautiful moment, the grim reality of the Centaurea Kingdom faded away.
It was just family.
“Excuse me,” a small voice interrupted.
Victor and I pulled back, wiping our eyes.
Gammamon was standing on the booth’s bench, holding a massive, half-eaten rack of ribs.
“Are you gonna finish your ribs?” Gammamon asked Victor.
“Because if you’re doing the crying thing, I don’t want them to get cold.”
I burst into a wet, genuine laugh.
I reached out and patted Gammamon’s hooded head.
“You must be a Digimon.
Jas told me all about you guys.
And yes, you can finish his ribs.”
To avoid the Royalist patrols, I led them through a maze of back-alleys and down into the damp, stone-lined cellar of an abandoned fish market, which served as a covert Revolutionary safehouse.
Sitting around a small wooden table with a pot of hot tea, we finally traded stories.
I told him about the night terrors.
How Jasmine would wake up screaming, convinced that Damine pulling them across the multiverse had killed him.
I told him how Jasmine threw her grief into absolute, bone-breaking training, wielding that ridiculous pole-hammer and absorbing enough lightning to power a city, all to ensure she would never be powerless to protect her family again.
“She just shipped out two days ago,” I explained apologetically, pouring him a cup of tea.
“She wrapped up a campaign in the West Blue and is currently in transit to a major uprising in the Grand Line.
It’ll take her a few days to reach a comms relay.
But the second she does, I am telling her you’re alive.”
Victor nodded, a massive weight visibly lifting off his chest.
“Just knowing she’s safe and she has you…
it’s enough for now.”
“So where have you been?” I asked, leaning forward.
“Jasmine has been looking for you for a year and a half.”
He gave me the condensed version.
He told me about waking up in a cave, the absolute hell of an island called Sanctuary, the fifty-foot dinosaurs, the time dilation, and the god-tier beasts he had survived to build his power set.
“And your box?” I asked.
“Jasmine said Damine gave each of you a locked box with three items.”
“I opened it the second I woke up,” Victor said, gesturing to Gammamon, who was happily raiding a crate of apples in the corner.
“It’s how I met Gammamon.
And it’s how I got the Fa-Jin kinetic abilities and my alchemical daggers.
I wouldn’t have survived ten minutes on that island without it.”
“That makes sense,” I mused.
“Jasmine actually gave our army’s top scientists permission to try and duplicate her Compound V and the Digivice.
They’ve been running tests for over a year, but they haven’t been successful yet.
The technology is just completely alien to this world.”
“Well, they can stop stressing,” Victor said, leaning back in his chair and offering me a warm, determined smile.
“Now that your brother is here, it’s his time to protect you all.
Not the other way around.”
Suddenly, a blaring, red klaxon began to spin on the ceiling of the safehouse.
Dust shook loose from the stone rafters.
My smile vanished.
I shot to my feet, dropping into a fluid, grounded martial arts stance, water vapor beginning to gather around my palms.
“Royalist Assassins.
They must have tracked my movements from the docks.
Get behind me, Victor.”
“Not a chance,” he said, his voice dropping an octave.
He stood up smoothly, unhooking a black disk from his hip.
“Let me show you exactly how I plan on protecting you.”
The heavy oak door of the cellar exploded inward in a shower of splinters.
Six men clad in dark, stealth-oriented leather armor poured into the room, short-swords drawn.
They moved with lethal, synchronized precision, immediately fanning out to surround us.
“Kill the Revolutionary,” the captain hissed.
“Leave the others.”
Victor didn’t even draw his daggers.
He just tapped the disk.
“Summon: Obsidian Gorilla.”
The cellar was instantly flooded with a thick, suffocating green mist.
Rising from the floorboards, scraping its massive knuckles against the low stone ceiling, was the jade avatar of a monstrous, shadowy ape.
The assassins froze, their eyes shooting up to the towering beast.
Pulse.
The Gorilla didn’t swing its fists.
It simply activated its gravity manipulation.
In the confined, airtight space of the cellar, the gravity instantaneously multiplied by ten.
It sounded like a car crash.
The six assassins were violently slammed chest-first into the stone floor, the sheer kinetic weight crushing the breath from their lungs and cracking the flagstones beneath them.
Their swords clattered uselessly out of their reach.
I gasped, my knees buckling slightly from the ambient gravitational pressure, but I managed to stay upright.
Victor walked forward casually, drawing a single Jade Wing dagger, the alchemical stone glinting in the red emergency light.
“Who sent you?” he asked the captain, who was currently pinned flat to the floor, his face purple with strain.
“Go…
to…
hell,” the captain wheezed, his eyes filled with defiant malice.
“Wrong answer.”
Victor didn’t hesitate.
He knelt down beside the struggling assassin to his left, and coldly, efficiently drove the jade dagger through the back of the man’s neck.
He died instantly, silently.
He pulled the blade out, moving to the next one, and repeated the motion.
Then the next.
And the next.
Blood pooled darkly on the stone floor.
I watched him kill five of the six men in less than ten seconds, his expression completely flat, his hands perfectly steady.
The only one left alive was the captain, who was now staring at his slaughtered squad in absolute, mind-shattering horror.
Victor crouched down next to his face, wiping the blood from his dagger onto the man’s leather shoulder pad.
“Tell your King,” Victor whispered, his voice dripping with terrifying intent, “that if he sends another squad after my family, I won’t just kill them.
I’ll drop an island on his palace.”
He dismissed the Gorilla.
The gravity snapped back to normal.
The captain gasped for air, scrambled to his feet, and bolted out of the shattered doorway, terrified out of his mind.
Victor clipped the dagger back to his hip and turned back to me.
I stared at him, my eyes wide.
But I wasn’t afraid.
I felt like I had just solved a puzzle.
“Jasmine told me a story about you once,” I breathed, stepping around the bodies.
“She told me that you were the nicest, most patient guy in the world…
right up until someone threatened your family.
She said you almost went to jail in your old world because a group of boys harassed her in an alley, and you shattered their legs with a cricket bat.”
He rubbed the back of his neck, feeling a little sheepish.
“They had it coming.
I take my family very seriously.”
I smiled, a fierce, trusting expression taking over my face.
“You are exactly the man she described.”
“So,” he said, gesturing to the shattered door.
“I’ve got some free time.
If you point me to the capital, I can go, crush the King for you right now.”
I shook my head, moving to grab my maps.
“I appreciate the offer, Victor, but we actually have the capital handled.
The Royalists are starving themselves out, the King will fall on his own in a few months.
But…
there is a complication.
The King recently acquired a massive, illegal shipment of high-grade artillery.
Cannons, rifles, mortar shells.
It’s heavily guarded in a fortified armory on the eastern cliffs.
If that weaponry hits the front lines, my people will suffer heavy casualties.
I need it destroyed, but quietly.
If it blows up, the resulting firestorm will burn the civilian town next to it.”
He looked at the map, tracing the coordinates of the armory, then looked back at me.
“Why destroy it?
You have a rebel army fighting a war.
I’ll do you one better.
I’ll steal it, and transport the entire armory back to your forward operating base.”
I blinked.
“Victor, there are thousands of crates.
It would take a fleet of galleons to move it all.”
He looked at Gammamon, a wicked grin spreading across his face.
“I have a fleet right here on my hip.
Give me the coordinates to the rebel drop point.”
(Victor’s POV)
The Royalist armory was a stone fortress built into the side of a cliff, illuminated by sweeping searchlights and guarded by fifty armed soldiers.
Approaching it from the ground was impossible without being seen.
So, we didn’t use the ground.
Standing on a ridge a half-mile away, I summoned the Silken Widow-Maker.
Gammamon and I climbed onto the jade spider’s back.
The massive arachnid shot a thick, invisible Haki-infused thread directly into the stone wall of the armory, high above the searchlights.
With terrifying, silent speed, it reeled itself across the gap, soaring over the heads of the patrolling guards and clinging seamlessly to the dark stone wall.
“Drop the patrols,” I commanded silently
The spider moved along the roof’s edge.
Whenever a guard walked into a shadowed corner, a strand of invisible silk would snap down, wrap around their ankles, and silently yank them up into the rafters, leaving them bound and gagged before they could even draw breath to scream.
In ten minutes, the entire exterior perimeter was cleared.
We slipped through an upper ventilation shaft, dropping silently into the massive, cavernous warehouse.
It was packed to the ceiling with wooden crates of rifles, iron cannons, and stacks of explosive mortar shells.
“Okay, start spinning,” I ordered the Widow-Maker.
The jade spider went to work.
It moved through the warehouse in a blur, shooting massive, thick cables of Haki-infused silk, bundling dozens of heavy crates together at a time into enormous, tightly bound cargo nets.
Once the entire armory was wrapped into four colossal, house-sized bundles, I unhooked the disk again.
“Summon: Sky-Rift Roc.”
The massive, metallic bird materialized outside the warehouse, its sheer size casting a shadow over the entire cliffside.
I used the Obsidian Gorilla to casually punch a fifty-foot hole through the armory’s roof.
The Roc lowered its massive, razor-sharp talons through the opening, hooking them securely into the reinforced silk cables of the cargo nets.
With a deafening shriek and a single, hurricane-force beat of its wings, the Roc lifted the entire illegal shipment of Royalist artillery straight into the night sky, airlifting it directly to the rebel camp.
We spent the next three days helping Koala with logistics at the hidden Revolutionary base.
It was a strange, peaceful intermission.
I helped haul supply crates, and Gammamon became the unofficial mascot of the rebels, constantly surrounded by soldiers sneaking him extra rations.
I spent hours talking with Koala, learning about her Fish-Man Karate, her time with the Sun Pirates, and more stories about my sister.
It felt incredibly good to have family again.
On the morning of the fourth day, Koala met us at the hidden carriage in the forest.
“You mentioned you needed a transport job done,” I said, leaning against the teardrop cabin.
Koala’s expression turned serious.
“I do.
I need you to transport some children.
Orphan girls.
They come from different races, some are minks, some are from the long-arm tribe.
I found them during the rescue missions I completed a few days ago.
They have absolutely nowhere to go, and if the World Government finds them, they’ll be sold at auction.”
Koala handed me two small, white pieces of paper.
Vivre Cards.
“My contact with the Kuja Pirates said they were ready to accept them,” Koala explained.
“They will take the girls in and raise them safely on Amazon Lily.
The first Vivre Card will lead you to the safehouse on a neighboring island where the girls are currently hidden.
The second card will lead you to the Kuja Pirates’ rendezvous point near the Calm Belt.”
I pocketed the cards carefully.
“What’s the timeline?”
“The Kuja ship will reach the rendezvous point in exactly one month,” Koala said.
“They will drop anchor and wait there for exactly three days before heading back to Amazon Lily, with or without the girls.
You have that much time to get them there safely.”
“Consider it done,” I said firmly.
“Tell Jas I’m coming to see her the second this job is over.”
“I will, bhai,” Koala smiled warmly, pulling me into one last hug.
“Thank you for the weapons.
The Royalists are already in full retreat.”
I climbed into the carriage, shutting the heavy oak door.
Above us, the Sky-Rift Roc let out a sharp, metallic cry.
“Let’s go pick up the kids,” I told Gammamon.
The Roc spread its massive wings, the carriage jerking slightly as we lifted off the ground, leaving the smoke of the Centaurea Kingdom behind us as we headed north into the open sky.
Word count: 2858
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