Stealth, in the world I remembered, was a rigorous, highly scientific discipline.
It involved ghillie suits, suppressed submachine guns, wind-speed calculations, and spending seventy-two hours lying perfectly still in a puddle of freezing mud just to take a single shot.
It was a miserable, grueling process that demanded absolute perfection.
Stealth in the Grand Line, I had quickly learned, was whatever Vice Admiral Garp decided it was.
“Alright, listen up, men!” Garp bellowed, his voice echoing across the deck of the dreadnought with enough acoustic force to shatter glass.
“The Iron-Bones Pirates are dug into the cove up ahead! It’s the dead of night, which means we have the element of surprise! I’m going to throw a three-ton anchor through their main gate as a distraction! Then, you all run in screaming!”
The assembled Marines—a hundred fresh-faced recruits clutching standard-issue flintlocks—saluted so hard they nearly gave themselves concussions.
“YES, VICE ADMIRAL!”
I stood near the railing, leaning heavily against the polished wood, the brim of my fedora pulled low over my eyes.
I was eleven years old, profoundly sleep-deprived, and dressed in a dark grey suit that had just come back from the dry cleaners.
‘Ah, yes.
The element of surprise,’ my internal monologue drawled lazily, entirely disconnected from the martial fervor around me.
‘Nothing says *covert infiltration* quite like a hundred men in bright white uniforms screaming at the top of their lungs while a literal ship’s anchor falls from the sky.
This isn’t a military operation.
This is a circus with a casualty quota.’
Garp marched over to me, popping a rice cracker into his mouth.
He looked down at his tiny, suited shadow.
“Bogard. You’re on overwatch,” Garp commanded, wiping crumbs from his chin.
“Your stealth has gotten terrifying lately. I want you to slip into the camp while the vanguard keeps them busy. Find the captain—Iron-Bones Donza—and observe. Don’t engage unless absolutely necessary. This is a training exercise for the rookies. Got it?”
“Understood, sir,” I replied, my voice a flat, deadpan whisper.
Internally, I was already calculating the most efficient route to find a hammock in the pirate camp.
Ever since I figured out how to completely sever my killing intent by treating combat as an administrative chore, my stealth had evolved into something resembling actual magic.
The mechanism was simple: Observation Haki detected intent.
If a pirate was looking for malice, anger, or bloodlust, I would shine like a lighthouse.
But if my brain was entirely focused on how much I despised doing laundry, or calculating the exact number of hours until my next scheduled nap, I generated zero kinetic intent.
To the sixth sense of this world’s monsters, I wasn’t a threat.
I was background noise.
I was a potted plant in a fedora.
The dreadnought anchored a mile off the coast of the rocky island.
Garp stepped up to the bow, casually hefted an iron anchor the size of a small house onto his shoulder, and threw it.
It flew through the night sky like a ballistic missile.
A few seconds later, a thunderous explosion rocked the island as the pirate fortress’s main wooden gate was entirely obliterated.
“CHARGE!” the Marine vanguard roared, swarming over the sides of the ship into the landing boats.
I didn’t take a boat.
I simply stepped off the railing and used a lazy, half-hearted *Geppo* to walk across the night sky, my hands shoved deep into my pockets.
The pirate cove was in absolute chaos.
Fires were burning, cannons were firing blindly into the dark, and men were screaming.
I landed softly on the wooden parapet of the pirate fort, completely ignored by the three snipers frantically reloading their rifles not ten feet away from me.
‘Target objective: Captain Iron-Bones Donza,’ the master assassin in my head hummed, scanning the chaotic courtyard below.
‘Bounty: 85 million berries.
Known for an anomalous skeletal structure that supposedly repels cannonballs.
The optimal strategy is to locate him, sit down in a comfortable chair, and let the Marines expend their caloric energy dealing with him.’
I walked down the wooden stairs into the main courtyard, dodging panicked pirates by simply stepping slightly to the left or right.
It was a fascinating sociological experiment.
Because my mind was entirely focused on composing a mental complaint letter to the Marine quartermaster regarding the chafing of standard-issue wool socks, the pirates’ Haki simply slid right off me.
I bumped into a massive buccaneer holding a cutlass; he mumbled an apology and kept running.
It was the ultimate lazy hack.
I found a relatively clean wooden crate near the center of the courtyard, sat down, and prepared to watch the Marines do the heavy lifting.
But as the first wave of white-suited rookies poured through the shattered gate, the math of the battlefield abruptly, violently changed.
A shadow detached itself from the main keep.
He was a hulking brute, easily twelve feet tall, wearing a spiked leather harness and carrying a massive, studded iron club.
“Marines!” Donza roared, his voice thick with arrogant glee.
He didn’t look threatened by the hundred men pouring into his camp.
He looked like a man who had just been served a buffet.
A squad of ten Marine rookies leveled their flintlocks.
“Fire!”
The volley of lead slammed into Donza’s bare chest.
‘Muzzle velocity: standard.
Projectile density: lethal,’ my mind calculated lazily from my crate.
‘He has no armor.
His heart and lungs should be perforated.’
But the bullets didn’t pierce the pirate captain’s skin.
They struck his chest, flattened with a dull *thwack*, and fell harmlessly to the dirt.
Donza laughed, his muscles bulging as his skin took on a strange, metallic grey sheen.
‘Correction,’ my internal monologue sharpened slightly.
‘Devil Fruit or specialized Haki application.
His dermal layer is rapidly hardening.
Blunt force resistance: extreme.
Piercing resistance: extreme.’
“My turn,” Donza sneered.
He swung the studded iron club in a wide, devastating arc.
It slammed into the front line of the Marine rookies.
The sickening sound of snapping bones and shattered ribs echoed over the gunfire.
Five young Marines were instantly launched into the air like broken ragdolls, their white uniforms blossoming with red as they crashed against the stone walls.
The surviving Marines froze in sheer terror.
“Is that all the Navy brought me?!” Donza laughed, raising his club to smash another squad of terrified kids.
“I’m going to grind your bones into my bread!”
On my wooden crate, my lazy facade fractured.
I hated cardio.
I despised training.
I actively sought the path of absolute least resistance in every aspect of my new life.
But as I watched those young Marines—kids barely older than I was, kids who had shared their rations with me on the ship—bleeding out in the dirt, the cold, administrative detachment in my brain violently short-circuited.
The psychopathic system I had kept locked in its wooden cage for a year suddenly woke up.
It didn’t whisper.
It screamed.
‘Friendly units compromised.
Hostile threat level: Absolute.
Empathy suppression failing.
Lethal intent rising.’
‘He thinks his bones are iron.
Let us test the tensile strength of his spine.’
The heavy, suffocating red mist began to bleed from my pores, pooling at my feet like a sea of blood.
The temperature in the courtyard plummeted.
Donza stopped laughing.
His rudimentary Observation Haki flared, and the massive pirate whipped his head around, his eyes locking onto the tiny, suited boy sitting on the crate.
“What the hell is that?” Donza muttered, taking a step back as the sheer, physical pressure of my killing intent washed over him.
I didn’t say a word.
I stood up.
I vanished.
Using a highly compressed, completely silent burst of *Soru*, I crossed the courtyard in a fraction of a millisecond.
I reappeared in the air directly in front of Donza’s face.
I didn’t draw my sword.
Following Garp’s training, I gripped the black wooden scabbard like a heavy baton, twisting my body to deliver a maximum-velocity strike to the pirate’s temple.
*CLANG.*
It sounded like a church bell being struck by a sledgehammer.
The kinetic shockwave traveled up my arms, vibrating my bones.
Donza’s head snapped to the side, but he didn’t fall.
His eyes rolled back into focus, bloodshot and furious, his skin entirely coated in that metallic grey sheen.
“You little rat!” Donza roared, swinging a massive hand to swat me out of the air.
I kicked off his forearm, flipping backward and landing gracefully in the dirt, my left hand firmly gripping the hilt of my sheathed katana.
‘Threat assessment updated,’ the Absolute Murderer in my head hissed, its cold logic intertwining with my rising rage.
‘The kinetic force required to bypass his iron structure with blunt trauma exceeds my current physical output.
If I continue to use the scabbard, it will take exactly four hundred and twelve consecutive strikes to cause a localized cranial hemorrhage.
Time required: three minutes.
Estimated Marine casualties in that timeframe: forty-five.’
I looked at the bleeding rookies on the ground.
I looked at the giant, arrogant pirate preparing to charge at me.
‘Blunt force is inefficient,’ my mind concluded, the red mist thickening until it warped the air around me like a desert mirage.
‘The scabbard is a cage.
But sometimes, a cage needs a door.’
“Die!” Donza bellowed, bringing his massive iron club down in a strike that promised to crush me into paste.
I didn’t dodge.
I didn’t raise the scabbard to block.
Instead, my thumb moved.
*Click.*
I pushed the tsuba of my katana, sliding the blade exactly one inch out of the black wooden scabbard.
For an entire year, I had kept the blade sheathed.
I had kept the Absolute Murderer chained to the wood.
But the second that single inch of polished steel was exposed to the night air, the lock snapped.
The red mist didn’t just leak out; it violently erupted.
A suffocating, apocalyptic aura of sheer, unadulterated slaughter blasted outward, instantly freezing every single pirate and Marine in the courtyard in absolute, mind-shattering terror.
The air turned heavy, tasting of copper and ozone.
‘Absolute Penetration engaged,’ the system whispered, compressing the conceptual weight of a million deaths entirely into that single exposed inch of steel.
‘Durability is a concept.
Concepts can be severed.’
As the giant iron club descended upon me, I simply stepped forward and swung the sheathed sword upward, leading entirely with the one inch of exposed, glowing red metal.
The blade met the club.
There was no sound.
There was no struggle.
The iron club, as thick as a tree trunk, simply fell apart, cleanly bisected at a molecular level.
Donza’s eyes widened in sheer horror.
The momentum of his swing carried him forward, directly into my perfectly calculated, frictionless pivot.
I didn’t draw the sword completely.
I merely dragged that single inch of exposed steel lightly across the center of Donza’s metallic, invulnerable chest as I slipped past him.
I stopped ten feet away, clicking the sword entirely shut.
*Clack.*
The red mist instantly vanished, sucked back into the scabbard.
The suffocating pressure lifted, returning the night air to normal.
Behind me, Captain Iron-Bones Donza stood perfectly still for three seconds.
Then, the upper half of his torso slowly slid off his waist, hitting the dirt with a wet, heavy thud.
The courtyard was dead silent.
The remaining pirates dropped their weapons, falling to their knees in absolute, mind-breaking terror.
I let out a long, exhausted sigh, adjusting my fedora.
‘Cardio,’ I thought lazily, feeling the adrenaline immediately crash into a desperate need for a nap.
‘I really, really hate cardio.’