Meanwhile.
Somewhere on the sea.
The Buggy Pirates’ ship was underway.
“Huh?”
On the main seat of the deck.
Buggy was staring blankly at a newspaper, his mouth falling open a little wider with every line he read.
His expression was one of total, paralyzed disbelief.
“Wha — wha — WHAT?!”
For a brief moment he wondered if his crew had fabricated it as a prank.
He checked the masthead.
World Economy News Paper.
Official print.
Not a prank.
Buggy’s eyes went vacant.
His body started to shake.
His voice dropped to the quiet murmur of a man whose soul had just quietly departed his body.
“I wiped out the Arlong Pirates?
I’m the one who slaughtered the Marines from Branch 16?
And I want to be King of the East Blue?”
“What…
what in the world is actually happening right now?!”
Buggy had gone completely numb.
When had any of this happened?
When had he done any of this?
This was slander.
Pure, calculated slander.
He hadn’t done a single thing, and the Marines had gone ahead and pinned all of it on him anyway?
“Unless…”
A face surfaced in Buggy’s mind.
Young.
Infuriatingly good-looking.
His teeth clamped together hard enough to creak.
“It was that damned guy.
He set me up!!”
No need to guess.
It had his fingerprints all over it.
The Arlong Pirates had been wiped out by him.
The Marines at Branch 16 had been killed by him.
And then he had turned around and handed every single one of those charges over to Buggy.
Made Buggy wear the whole thing.
How could one person be this vicious, this underhanded, this completely shameless?
“Captain Buggy, what…
what do we do?”
Cabaji’s voice had developed a noticeable shake.
“Fifty million Berries.
We’re the highest bounty crew in the entire East Blue now.
The Marines aren’t going to leave us alone after this!”
Previously, the highest bounty in the East Blue had belonged to the Arlong Pirates’ captain, and even Arlong had only sat at twenty million.
Their captain Buggy was now at fifty million.
Nobody in this sea had ever seen a bounty like that.
This was danger.
Real, immediate danger.
“What do we do?
A fifty million Berry bounty isn’t the same as a ten million Berry bounty.”
Buggy was grinding his teeth, eyes redder than his nose.
“We need to get out of the East Blue as fast as possible.
We cannot stay here.”
Why was the East Blue the weakest sea?
Because a certain old Marine made a habit of passing through and sweeping up dangerous pirates with one hand tied behind his back.
Other people might not know about Buggy’s buried identity.
That old man might.
If that old man set his sights on him, no number of lives would be enough to escape.
The East Blue had stopped being a place to hide quietly.
It had become a place that could get him killed.
However much it cost him inside, Buggy had no choice but to find his way out of the East Blue and into the considerably more dangerous Grand Line.
Not for glory.
Not for treasure.
Just to survive.
The thought of being forced to leave the East Blue for the Grand Line made something bleed in Buggy’s chest.
He ground his teeth and spat the words out.
“Damn you, Rocks.
You remember this.”
“You made me take the fall for all of it.
I, Buggy the Clown, will pay you back for every last bit of it!!”
“But Captain, we’re no match for that monster.
He knocked us all unconscious in one shot…”
Mohji, Buggy’s first mate, sat astride his lion Richie and said it quietly, with visible discomfort.
“None of us can even threaten him.
You’re the only one who possibly could, Captain…”
Buggy: “…”
Did you have to bring that up.
He was blowing off steam.
Did anyone actually think he was going to go through with it?
Rocks still had his secret.
Still held it over him.
Whatever false charges had been pinned on him, they were nothing — nothing — compared to his real identity being exposed to the world.
Nothing at all.
The news rippled out across the East Blue.
That newspaper.
That wanted poster.
Stirring up every stretch of water it reached.
A great pirate with a fifty million Berry bounty, right here in the weakest sea?
Remarkable.
Almost unbelievable.
And enough to make sure plenty of people remembered the name.
Clown Buggy.
Nearly a week had passed since Rocks and the others left the Conomi Islands.
Rocks was in no hurry to reach the Grand Line.
The heading was Loguetown, broadly speaking, but any island they happened to pass along the way was worth stopping at.
Stock up on supplies, go ashore, breathe air that wasn’t sea air.
Life at sea went flat without that.
In the East Blue, navigation didn’t require a Log Pose.
This was where a navigator’s value became concrete.
With Nami on board, the ship had not gotten lost once.
It moved steadily, purposefully, nothing wasted.
On a previous island stop, they had heard mention of a floating restaurant called the Baratie.
The name shook loose a few things in Rocks’s memory.
So now they were heading toward it.
“This should be the Sambas waters,” Nami said, chart in hand, checking their position.
“But the chart doesn’t mark the Baratie’s exact location.
We might need to search around a bit.”
“Don’t worry about it.
If it’s anywhere nearby, my Observation Haki will find it.”
Rocks had already spread his Observation Haki outward.
If the Baratie was within range, he’d pick it up.
Nami looked at him curiously.
“So what exactly is Haki?”
She had heard the word more than a few times by now.
Kuina was working on it with Rocks.
But Nami had no real idea what it actually was.
“Haki is a power that lies latent inside every person,” Rocks said, since she was clearly interested.
“It exists like an instinct.
Once you become aware of that instinct, you can bring it out.”
He smiled.
“Want to learn?
I can teach you.
Observation Haki is genuinely useful for navigators — you can sense changes in the sea’s weather before they arrive and plan ahead.”
“People really have something like that just sitting inside them?”
Nami still wasn’t entirely convinced.
But the part about sensing weather changes had gotten her attention.
“Can I actually learn it?”
Rocks nodded.
“Armament Haki, not yet — your physical conditioning needs to be further along before that one’s on the table.
But Observation Haki doesn’t have that requirement.
There are people born with it already active.”
Nami’s eyes lit up.
“Can you show me what Haki actually looks like?”
“Normally it’s invisible.
You can sense it, but not see it.
The only time Haki becomes visible to the naked eye is when it’s been refined to an extreme degree — that’s when it crosses over.”
Rocks spread his hands.
“My Armament Haki isn’t there yet.”
The coating form of Armament Haki — invisible, no qualitative change, nothing to see.
Armament Haki refined all the way to hardening was a different matter.
That crossed a threshold.
After that, it could be seen.
A swordsman’s Black Blade was the clearest example: Armament Haki worked into the steel itself, refined down until it became permanent.
As for the arguments that had gone on endlessly among fans in his previous life about whether Armament Haki was even visible at all —
Rocks had exactly one thought on the matter.
Oda was a manga artist.
What did he actually know about One Piece?