As the last trace of the setting sun completely sank below the horizon, Windmill Village was shrouded in a deep blue night.
The chaos at the village entrance had not yet completely subsided; Makino was organizing the villagers to tidy up the stalls destroyed by the bandits, and a few daring young people were helping drag the injured bandits to one place, preparing to wait for the town sheriff to handle them.
Luna stood beside Shanks, taking small sips of the spicy liquor, feeling the scorching heat burn all the way from her throat to her stomach.
Her Rubber Constitution seemed to have increased her tolerance for stimulants, at least preventing her from coughing from the choke like an ordinary five-year-old child.
“Not bad, right?” Shanks looked at her with a smile, picking up another bottle of wine himself and taking a large gulp, “A pirate’s victory drink.”
“It’s alright,” Luna spoke the truth, handing the bottle back.
Most of her attention was actually still on the system interface—that brief and one-sided battle just now had made the experience bars of several skills jump up another notch.
Especially [Combat Olfactory Sense] and [Elastic Potential Energy Control], which had each increased by more than twenty experience points.
It seemed that battles with humans and battles with beasts were indeed different.
Although the bandits were lacking in strength, they at least knew how to use weapons, understood coordination, and even a few erupted with decent ferocity in fear, which gave her more experience in dealing with different types of opponents.
Just as she was immersed in reviewing the details of the battle, a faint groan came from the pile of “human mountain” at the village entrance.
It was Higuma.
This man who claimed to be the “Mountain Bandit King” had quite tenacious vitality.
After taking that [Rubber Instant Strike] powerful enough to shatter the internal organs of ordinary beasts, he actually showed signs of waking up less than ten minutes after losing consciousness.
Struggling, he propped up his upper body from beneath the old oak tree, and the bloody word “Weak” on his forehead appeared particularly glaring in the night.
“Cough…
cough cough…” Higuma spat out a few mouthfuls of bloody saliva, his blurred vision sweeping around.
When he saw that all thirty-some subordinates he brought had collapsed on the ground, with groans and wails rising one after another, his face first showed bewilderment, followed by fury, and finally settled into a nearly crazy sense of humiliation.
Then, he saw Luna.
That black-haired little girl was standing sideways to him, talking with Red-Haired Shanks, and her face even carried a relaxed smile, as if she hadn’t just defeated the entire bandit crew single-handedly, but had just finished playing a game.
Higuma’s string of sanity snapped completely at this moment.
“Brat…!!!” A hoarse roar squeezed out from the depths of his throat, carrying bloody foam and hatred.
He violently grabbed the sword that had fallen beside him, stood up with all his might, swaying, but burning with a desperate madness in his eyes, “I’ll kill you…
I will definitely kill you!!!”
He did not rush toward Luna—perhaps because the terrifying memory of that punch still lingered in his subconscious—instead, he staggered as he turned around, sprinting wildly toward the coastline on the other side of the village entrance!
Parked there was their bandit crew’s small boat, a crude wooden sailing boat big enough to seat over a dozen people, which they had snatched from some unlucky fisherman.
“Want to run?” Luna raised an eyebrow, putting down the cup she had just picked up.
Shanks pressed down on her shoulder: “Let him go, scum like this isn’t worth it.”
But Luna shook her head: “No, he doesn’t want to run.”
Her [Listening] skill was fully activated.
Higuma’s heavy, chaotic, yet frantically obsessed breathing, along with his lowered, repeatedly muttered curses, clearly reached her ears.
“He’s muttering ‘There’s something in the sea’ and ‘Let’s die together’…” Luna’s gaze turned cold, “This bastard wants to lure me into the sea.”
Shanks’s expression changed slightly.
As a pirate captain who had roamed the Grand Line for many years, he instantly understood Higuma’s plan—Devil Fruit users cannot swim, which was common sense.
Higuma wanted to lure Luna onto the sea and use the ocean as a natural weakness to perish together, or at least cause trouble.
“Then that’s all the more reason not to—” Shanks didn’t finish his sentence.
Because Luna had already rushed out.
It was not a reckless dash, but a rhythmic sprint.
Under the blessing of [Elastic Potential Energy Control], every step she pushed off the ground accumulated strength, and her body flew like an arrow skimming the ground, moving so fast that it dragged a blurred black shadow across the night.
“Luna!” Makino exclaimed.
Shanks’s eyes narrowed, and he glanced at Yasopp and Lucky Roux beside him.
The two understood and immediately followed, maintaining a distance—they knew the captain wanted to see how Luna would handle it, but they were also prepared to rescue her at any moment.
Higuma had stumbled all the way to the shore, throwing himself onto the bandit boat.
He frantically chopped the mooring ropes and slapped the sails with the body of his sword, trying to get the boat away from the shore as quickly as possible.
Because of panic and injuries, his movements were clumsy beyond belief.
The small boat rocked in the waves, almost capsizing several times.
Luna rushed to the edge of the beach and leaped without hesitation!
“Rubber Rocket!”
Her legs instantly stretched backward like a spring compressed to its limit, and then suddenly released the moment her soles touched the water!
The huge elasticity propelled her body high into the air, drawing a parabolic arc as she precisely landed toward the small boat that had drifted a dozen meters away from the shore!
“You lunatic!
You absolute lunatic!!!” Seeing that Luna actually dared to chase her out to sea, Higuma’s face twisted into an expression mixing fear and wild ecstasy.
He drew his sword, pointing it at the descending Luna, “Go to hell!
Together with the monster in the sea—ugh ah?!”
Luna didn’t land on the boat at all.
When her body fell to about two meters away from the sail, her arms suddenly whipped backward and upward, her ten fingers spread wide—
“Rubber Grapple!”
Her ten fingers stretched and thinned instantly, their tips becoming sharp like ten flexible rubber tentacles, wrapping around the top of the boat’s main mast with a swish!
The momentum of the fall instantly turned into a forward swing.
Using the mast as a fulcrum, Luna’s body swept through a semicircle in the air, her feet forward, kicking fiercely toward Higuma!
Higuma hurriedly raised his sword to block.
But the power of Luna’s kick far exceeded his expectations.
The rubber soles slightly dented and deformed the moment they contacted the blade, perfectly defusing the sharpness of the sword edge, and then the Elastic Potential Energy Control erupted!
“Bang!”
Higuma, along with his sword, was kicked flying backward, crashing heavily against the ship’s side.
The already crude wooden railing let out an unbearable groan, cracking open a gap.
Higuma let out a muffled grunt and almost passed out again.
As for Luna, she lightly landed on the bow of the boat using the reaction force.
The fingers wrapped around the mast quickly retracted, returning to their original state.
She stood on the swaying bow as stably as if rooted to the spot, the sea breeze blowing her pitch-black long hair, looking calmly at the disheveled Higuma.
The small boat had completely drifted away from the shore, rising and falling on the night-shrouded sea.
The lights of Windmill Village shrank into blurred spots of light in the distance, and the sound of the waves slapping against the hull sounded exceptionally clear.
“You…
aren’t you afraid of the sea?!” Higuma struggled to get up, leaning back against the damaged railing, his voice filled with disbelief, “Devil Fruit users should—”
“Should sink like a weight?” Luna tilted her head and actually smiled, “That applies to ordinary users.”
She lifted her right foot and gently tapped the wet deck.
Seawater seeped up from the gaps in the planks, soaking the soles of her shoes.
A sense of weakness immediately spread up from the soles of her feet, but it was much lighter than when she first contacted seawater.
The effect of [Underwater Adaptation LV142] was manifested—although her abilities still could not be used, and her body felt heavy and weak, at least she could stand firm and move, without collapsing immediately.
Higuma stared dead at Luna, looking at her composed posture.
The last trace of luck was extinguished, replaced by a complete madness.
“Good…
good…
since it’s like this…” He laughed hoarsely, blood flowing from the corner of his mouth, “Then let’s feed the monsters in the sea together!!!”
He turned abruptly, using his last bit of strength to tear a small leather pouch from his waist, throwing it fiercely toward the distant sea!
The leather pouch drew an arc in the air and fell into the dark seawater.
Inside was a specially made bloody bait—a foul-smelling mixture of various animal blood and internal organs, a little trick bandits occasionally used to attract sea beasts and create chaos.
Luna’s pupils shrank slightly.
Almost at the same time the leather pouch hit the water, her [Listening] skill captured an abnormality.
Deep in the sea, the low sound of water currents generated by the movement of some massive object was rapidly approaching!
It wasn’t a school of fish, nor an ordinary sea beast; that sound was heavy and slow, carrying a heart-palpitating sense of oppression.
At the same time, a sense of crisis originating from biological instinct crept up her spine.
The [Aura Perception (Faint)] skill actively triggered for the first time, transmitting a vague but extremely dangerous signal to her—below, there was a “big guy”, and it had been provoked by the smell of blood.
“You’re crazy!” For the first time, Luna showed true anger toward Higuma, “Luring sea beasts in coastal waters like this?!”
“Hahaha!
We’re going to die anyway!
Dragging you down with me is worth it!” Higuma laughed wildly, but his laughter was filled with despair.
Splash—!!!
The sea surface not far from the side of the boat suddenly exploded!
A breathtakingly huge black shadow broke through the water!
The moonlight barely outlined parts of its contour: a head larger than the entire small boat, covered in dark blue-black scales, its wide-open giant mouth revealing sharp teeth like pale white spears, and cold vertical pupils gleaming with an eerie light in the night.
Lord of the Coast!
The giant sea monster that bit off Shanks’s arm in the original work, swallowed Higuma, and reigned supreme in the coastal waters of the East Blue was, at this moment, lured out of the deep sea ahead of time by the bloody bait.
The moment it appeared, a terrifying sense of oppression enveloped the entire sea surface.
The small boat bumped violently in the huge waves it stirred up, as if it would disintegrate at any moment.
Higuma’s laughter cut off abruptly, the madness on his face turning into pure terror.
He was too close to that monster, close enough to smell the foul stench exhaled from its mouth.