The morning sea breeze with a salty smell brushed across the Windmill Village coast.
Luna carried a pack almost taller than herself, walking briskly on the path leading to the dock.
Inside the pack were all her belongings accumulated from hunting in the wild over the past year or more—actually, these past ten days or so—nearly two million Berries in cash (the rest already exchanged for supplies loaded on the ship), a few sets of sturdy clothes altered for her by Makino, some basic medicines, a few handwritten copies of navigation notes scrounged from the Red Hair Pirates, and a small bottle of “good stuff” said to be able to handle emergencies that Shanks secretly shoved to her before leaving.
The straw hat swayed slightly above her head, and the eyes under the brim were bright and resolute.
Today was the day of departure.
“Sister Makino, I will write to you as soon as I find my first crewmate!” Half an hour ago, she gave a tight hug to the slightly red-eyed Makino at the bar entrance, “I will be careful!”
“You must be careful…” Makino’s voice trembled slightly, wanting to say more, but in the end she only gently rubbed her hair, “On the way…
make sure you eat your fill.”
Luna grinned, revealing her white teeth: “Of course!”
At this moment, she was less than a hundred meters away from the shore.
She could already see the mast tip of her “departure” rising above the sea level.
She quickened her pace, calculating the upcoming route in her mind—first heading north along the Goa Kingdom coastline to Shells Town to inquire about the recent movements of the Arlong Pirates, by the way replenishing some fresh fruits and vegetables, then turning southeast toward Shimotsuki Village, Kuina…
If the timeline was right, she should still be at the Shimotsuki Village dojo, and how many years might be left from “that incident”?
But going early never hurts; that was one of her scheduled future Great Swordmaster crewmates.
Of course, what was even more important was beating those few fish into dried fish, letting them know that the East Blue was not a place where losers like them could run wild.
Thinking of this, Luna’s steps became even lighter.
However, at the very moment she was about to step onto the beach, on the distant sea level, an uncoordinated black dot broke into her field of vision.
Luna suddenly braked and squinted her eyes.
That was a ship, sailing through the waves at an extremely fast speed.
The ship type…
was huge and heavy, with the smooth lines and muzzle arrays unique to warships, and the shape of the bow—
A dog head.
Luna’s pupils suddenly shrank.
“Gramps…”
Fragments of original work memories instantly flooded into her mind: Shortly after Shanks left, Garp returned to Windmill Village to visit relatives, discovered that his grandson “was bewitched by pirates” and wanted to be a pirate, and thus forcibly took him away, throwing him into Mount Colbo to live with Ace and Sabo…
“Bad!” Luna cursed in a low voice.
The impulse brought by the Rubber Fruit made her almost want to rush directly onto the ship and hoist the sails to escape before the warship docked, but her past life’s reason held her back firmly—that was Vice Admiral Monkey D.
Garp, the Hero of the Marines, a monster who could use his fists to practice on eight mountains like sandbags!
Her current self, even with a system, was no different from a newborn cub in front of him, and a head-on conflict had zero chance of winning.
What was even more crucial was—she must never be taken away by him!
If caught by Garp and dragged to Mount Colbo, it meant at least several years of “imprisonment”-style life, meaning she would watch time slip away with her own eyes, missing the best timing to save Kuina, missing the period when Nami needed help the most, and missing the recruitment opportunities that might appear during Robin’s wandering…
I must set sail immediately!
“Absolutely not!” Luna’s gaze turned fierce.
With almost no hesitation, her body instinctively shrank backward, dodging into a dense cluster of reefs on the shore.
The pack was quickly unloaded by her and stuffed deep into the crevices of the reefs, while she herself curled up, hiding her figure with the help of the rock shadows and the thin mist that had not yet completely dissipated in the early morning.
[New Skill Acquired: Stealth LV4 (3/100)]
The system prompt flashed in the corner of her eye, but Luna had no time to pay attention.
All her attention was focused on that getting-closer dog-headed warship.
The warship’s speed was astonishingly fast, obviously with full sailing power.
The bow split the waves, and the white wake dragged long on the blue sea surface.
Luna could even clearly see the figures of the busy marine soldiers on the deck, and that gray-haired, stout figure standing motionless like an iron tower with arms crossed at the front of the bridge—even from so far away, the oppressive feeling hitting her face made her skin tingle slightly.
“Coming for me…
definitely.” Luna held her breath, with the [Listening] skill fully activated.
The sea breeze brought vague shouts and the roar of the warship’s engines, but clearer was her own accelerating heartbeat.
The warship did not directly dock at the small pier of Windmill Village, but began to decelerate and turn when it was still a distance away from the shore, aligning its broadside with the coast—accurately speaking, aiming at the “departure” moored at the simple berth!
Luna’s heart sank.
Just at the moment when her bad premonition rose to its peak, the muzzle of a secondary gun on the warship’s broadside flashed with fire!
Boom—!!!
The deafening shelling tore apart the morning peace.
The piercing whistle of the cannonball cutting through the air made Luna’s hair stand on end.
She watched with her own eyes as that black-dot-like cannonball drew an arc in the air, terrifyingly accurate, and then—
Bang!!!!
Wood chips flew everywhere, a huge bursting sound.
The “departure” that she had painstakingly modified and reinforced, which carried the hopes of her maiden voyage, under a single strike from the cannonball hitting right in the middle of the hull, was broken into two halves from the middle like a toy crushed by a giant!
The fractured keel made a teeth-aching groan, the sails wrapped around the mast collapsed with a roar, splashing huge waterspouts.
Shattered planks, ropes, her carefully prepared supply barrels…
scattered everywhere, floating and sinking on the sea surface.