The ocean breeze of the New World smelled of salt, roasted pine, and vulnerabilities.
Ten-year-old Elian sat on a splintering wooden stump behind a modest, thatched-roof cottage.
A dull iron hatchet rested in his small, calloused hands.
Above him, the sky was a piercing, idyllic blue, dotted with the iconic news coos of this strange, vibrant world.
Across the yard, his father, Tomas, was hauling fishing nets.
Tomas was a massive, boisterous man with a barrel chest and a laugh that could shake coconuts loose from their trees.
By all laws of normal biology, the sheer weight of the soaked ropes and iron weights should have shattered the man’s spine.
But this world operated on a cartoonish, exaggerated vitality.
Elian stared at him.
His eyes, dark and entirely too still for a child, traced the erratic, joyful movements of his father.
*’The left knee overcompensates.
An old injury from a storm, likely degraded cartilage.
A swift, low-angle kick to the patella would shatter the joint, forcing him to his knees.
The carotid artery on the left side of his neck is entirely exposed when he throws the net over his shoulder.
A rusted nail, a shard of glass, even the blunt edge of this hatchet…
applied with forty pounds of pressure…
time to expiration: fourteen seconds.’*
Elian squeezed his eyes shut, his breathing turning shallow.
He forced the hatchet down into the chopping block with a sharp *thwack* and buried his face in his hands, his small shoulders trembling slightly.
It wasn’t a voice in his head.
It wasn’t a glowing, gamified system screen dictating his actions.
It was infinitely worse.
It was his own mind—a ceaseless, suffocating, and entirely organic predatory instinct.
He was a master assassin from a world of blood, shadows, and cold concrete, reincarnated into the body of a fisherman’s son.
When he first realized he had been reborn, he thought it was a second chance.
He just wanted to be normal.
He wanted to eat his mother’s vegetable stew, listen to the crashing waves, and live a quiet, unremarkable life far away from the scent of copper and death.
But the **Absolute Murderer** inside his soul wouldn’t sleep.
It possessed a morbid, insatiable curiosity.
It relentlessly mapped out the structural weaknesses, psychological breaking points, and fatal strike zones of every living thing that crossed his line of sight.
Walking down the street was a waking nightmare of anatomical dissection.
“Elian! My boy!”
Tomas’s booming voice shattered the quiet.
A massive, calloused hand slapped Elian on the back, the force nearly sending the ten-year-old sprawling face-first into the dirt.
It took every ounce of Elian’s unnatural, compressed willpower not to pivot, snatch the hatchet from the block, and sever the man’s radial nerve.
His muscles twitched, his pulse spiked, but he forced it down.
He built the dam higher.
He painted on a fragile, childish smile and turned around.
“Hey, Dad. Good haul today?”
“The best!” Tomas roared, puffing out his chest with unearned pride.
“The sea is generous to the strong! Come, help me drag these to the market. Old Man Hops just docked his merchant ship. Word is he brought the latest papers from the Grand Line!”
Elian nodded mutely, dusting himself off.
As he grabbed the trailing end of the heavy nets, he pulled a cheap, woven straw fedora down over his eyes to hide his gaze.
### The Echoes of a Dead Era
The village square of Oakhaven was a chaotic mess of haggling locals, stray dogs, and the vibrant, obnoxious colors typical of a peaceful island in the New World.
Men drank ale at noon, children chased each other with wooden swords, and the scent of baking bread filled the air.
Yet, beneath the loud chatter, there was a palpable undercurrent of anxiety clinging to the adults gathered around the merchant’s stall.
Elian stood quietly by his father’s leg, a silent shadow amidst the noise.
“It’s getting closer,” Old Man Hops muttered, tapping a weathered, tobacco-stained finger against the front page of the *World Economic Journal*.
The old man’s hands were shaking.
“The Oykot Kingdom and the Roshwan Empire. They’ve completely abandoned the northern hemisphere. Their fleets are tearing each other apart just three islands over.”
Tomas frowned, his usual joviality fading into genuine confusion.
“Why? Why march a million men into the South? There’s nothing down here but fishing rocks like ours. They’re royals. What do they want with Oakhaven?”
“Because they have nowhere else to go, Tomas,” the merchant sighed heavily, rubbing his tired eyes.
“The North is gone. It belongs to the monsters now.”
Elian’s eyes flicked to the newspaper.
The bold ink spelled out tragedies that the villagers barely understood, but his analytical mind processed the geopolitical layout with terrifying, clinical clarity.
Thirteen years ago—exactly three years before Elian was even born into this noisy, chaotic world—an island called **God Valley** was wiped off the map.
A monster named Rocks D.
Xebec had been annihilated by a temporary, unholy alliance between the Pirate King, Gol D.
Roger, and a Marine hero named Garp.
The villagers spoke of it like a fairy tale, a victory of good over evil.
But cutting off the head of a beast didn’t kill the rot; it just let the parasites run wild.
Without Rocks to keep the underworld in check, his monstrous subordinates had scattered, carving up the New World for themselves.
Earth-shattering titans like Whitebeard, Big Mom, and Kaido were currently swallowing islands whole, building their own terrifying empires with absolute impunity.
*’Cause and effect,’* Elian’s mind calculated, the thoughts slicing through the warm afternoon air like a scalpel.
*’The apex predators claim the fertile territories.
The lesser kings are evicted.
The Oykot and Roshwan royals, displaced by monsters they cannot hope to defeat, are now turning their million-man armies on each other in a desperate bid to claim the remaining scraps of the New World.
It is basic displacement theory.
And Oakhaven is perfectly positioned in the crossfire.’*
“The Marines will stop them if they get too close,” Tomas said, puffing his chest with naive confidence, looking around at the worried faces of his neighbors.
“The World Government protects its citizens. Justice will prevail, just like it did at God Valley!”
Elian stared at his father’s broad, unprotected back.
*’Delusion.
A psychological defense mechanism to avoid processing mortal terror.
The Marines are stretched thin policing the fallout of God Valley.
Admiral-level assets will not be deployed to save an unaligned fishing village of three hundred civilians.
The strategic value is zero.
The logistical cost is too high.
We are already dead.’*
Elian looked around the bustling square.
He saw Old Man Hops laughing nervously, trying to change the subject.
He saw the local baker handing out sweet rolls to the children.
He saw his mother, Elara, walking toward them with a warm, gentle smile, carrying a basket of fresh laundry.
His mind involuntarily overlaid the sunny, vibrant village with a wash of suffocating crimson red.
*’The baker: obese, slow.
Poor stamina.
Fatal puncture to the left ventricle.
Time to death: six seconds.
The merchant: frail, poor bone density.
Crushed trachea.
Time to death: forty seconds of asphyxiation.’*
He looked at his mother.
His heart physically ached, warring against the cold, psychopathic algorithm running endlessly in his brain.
*’A million displaced, starving, bloodthirsty soldiers.
Three hundred undefended civilians.
Zero defensive fortifications.
No evacuation vessels.
Total mass displacement of kinetic force.
Probability of a complete massacre: 99.9%.
Time until the vanguard arrives: Less than seventy-two hours.’*
“Elian?” Elara’s soft voice broke through his trance.
She knelt down in the dirt, heedless of her clean dress, and brushed a stray lock of dark hair from his forehead.
“You look so pale, sweetie. Are you feeling ill? Is the sun too hot?”
Elian looked into her kind, completely defenseless eyes.
The lock on his soul, the desperate dam he had built for ten years to keep the **Absolute Murderer** contained, cracked just a fraction of an inch.
A terrifying, suffocating pressure leaked into the warm ocean air.
It was a dense, physical malice, heavy enough to warp the light around him.
Ten feet away, a stray dog that had been begging for scraps suddenly froze, let out a high-pitched whimper of absolute terror, and scrambled away, its tail tucked tightly between its legs.
The air temperature seemed to plummet.
Elian quickly clamped down on the killing intent, shoving it back into the darkest corner of his mind.
He adjusted his straw fedora, hiding the cold, dead look in his eyes.
“I’m fine, Mom,” Elian whispered, his voice startlingly calm.
“I was just doing some math.”
From: Typing_In_My_Sleep Hey everyone, My brain is thoroughly fried from studying, and the chaotic dream is taking the wheel again.
I wanted to give you all a quick, probably sleep-deprived heads-up on the current direction of Reborn as Bogard.
I am taking all this generic AI slop data and doing my absolute best to forge it into a much better, actually readable novel.
When I’m dead on my feet and the subconscious takes over, that’s when the real work happens to elevate this story and make it my own.
What this means for the story moving forward: The Process: I am stripping away the algorithmic mush and injecting raw, genuine chaos into the plot to build a better narrative.
The Schedule: Updates will remain entirely unpredictable as I juggle major exams and wait for exhaustion to fuel the next chapter.
The Promise: Every late-night, half-unconscious writing session is dedicated to turning this data into something worthwhile.
Thanks for sticking around for the ride.