The commute to the battlefield was, without a single doubt, the most agonizing experience of my two lives.
‘Altitude: Four thousand feet.
Atmospheric oxygen density is rapidly dropping,’ the cold, analytical part of my brain narrated my misery as I violently kicked the empty air, propelling myself upward in jagged, concussive bursts of *Geppo*.
‘The lactic acid in my quadriceps has entirely replaced my bloodstream.
My calves feel as if they are actively on fire.
I am fourteen years old.
I should be sitting at a desk somewhere, practicing how to sleep with my eyes open.
Instead, I am literally kicking the sky to death just to reach a fight.
I need to unionize.’
Far above me, the Golden Lion’s floating armada looked like a nightmare painted against the ash-choked clouds.
Dozens of massive pirate galleons were suspended in mid-air, defying every known law of gravity, their cannons firing blindly down into the ruined kingdom below.
But they weren’t firing at me.
They were firing at the human missile tearing through their formation.
Vice Admiral Garp wasn’t just breaking the laws of physics; he was insulting them.
I watched, breathless and panting, as Garp crashed headfirst into the hull of a massive flying warship.
The impact didn’t just splinter the wood—it completely vaporized the galleon’s lower deck.
Garp erupted from the top deck a microsecond later, holding a three-ton cannon in each hand, and casually threw them at two adjacent pirate ships, sinking them in the middle of the sky.
‘He is not a Marine.
He is a localized natural disaster,’ I thought, my deadpan exhaustion completely overriding my awe.
‘When this is over, I am going to ask Tsuru for a transfer to the filing department.
I will gladly take paper cuts over this.’
I finally breached the altitude of the lowest floating island—a massive chunk of bedrock with a pirate fortress built into its side.
My polished black shoes slammed onto the cobblestone courtyard of the floating fortress.
I immediately bent over, resting my hands on my knees, gasping for the thin, freezing air.
My bespoke grey suit was soaked in sweat.
“Intruder!” a voice bellowed.
I looked up, entirely unimpressed.
A squad of roughly fifty pirates, armed with cutlasses and flintlocks, were charging across the courtyard toward me.
They looked angry.
I just looked tired.
‘Fifty hostiles.
Armed.
Distance: forty feet,’ my assassin’s instincts hissed, the suffocating red mist bleeding from my pores and pooling at my feet, begging me to draw the blade and scatter their remains to the wind.
‘Recommendation rejected,’ I mentally replied to my own dark urges, standing up straight and adjusting my fedora.
‘Drawing the blade requires emotional commitment and sweeping kinetic motions.
I have exactly zero stamina remaining.
We are doing this the lazy way.’
Before I could even unclip my scabbard, three blurs of motion slammed onto the cobblestones beside me.
Garp had not come entirely alone; his personal strike team had managed to follow his apocalyptic wake.
They were, without exception, the weirdest collection of human beings in the entire Marine organization.
None of them went by their actual legal names.
Garp, possessing the attention span of a goldfish for administrative details, had arbitrarily reassigned them monikers based entirely on their builds and fighting styles.
Military protocol had eventually just given up and accepted it.
“Bwahaha! Made it!” yelled a man Garp called Brick.
He was built like a literal rectangular block of granite.
He had no neck, a jawline that could cut glass, and his fighting style consisted entirely of letting people hit him in the face until they broke their own hands.
To Brick’s left stood Skip.
Skip was seven feet tall, entirely composed of lanky, double-jointed limbs, and wore heavy steel springs strapped to his sandals.
He couldn’t actually use *Geppo*, so he had literally just bounced off the falling debris all the way up to the stratosphere.
And finally, there was Spoons.
He was the dreadnought’s head chef.
He was dual-wielding two massive, iron soup ladles, and he looked incredibly furious that the pirates had interrupted his dinner prep.
“Leave some for us, Warrant Officer!” Brick roared, immediately charging headfirst into the pirate vanguard.
A pirate swung a heavy battleaxe directly at Brick’s forehead.
The axe shattered into iron shrapnel with a loud crunch.
Brick didn’t even blink; he just headbutted the pirate’s chest, launching the man thirty feet into a stone watchtower.
“Boing! Take that!” Skip yelled, ricocheting off a fortress wall and delivering a devastating, high-velocity dropkick to a pirate sniper’s jaw.
“The consistency is all wrong! Needs more salt!”
I watched them work, leaning my weight onto my sheathed katana like an exhausted old man leaning on a cane.
‘I strongly approve of teamwork,’ my inner voice noted with profound laziness.
‘It outsources the caloric expenditure to individuals who actually enjoy cardio.’
A few pirates managed to slip past Brick’s human-wall defense and charged at me.
I didn’t unsheathe the katana.
I simply unclipped the black wooden scabbard from my belt, gripping it like a baton.
The first pirate lunged, bringing a heavy cutlass down in a wild, uncoordinated chop.
‘His center of gravity is pitched entirely forward.
He is relying on momentum instead of balance,’ my mind calculated, a bored yawn threatening to escape my lips.
I took a half-step to the left, letting the cutlass bury itself into the cobblestone.
Before the pirate could blink, I tapped the side of his right knee with the steel butt of my scabbard.
I didn’t swing hard; I just applied exactly thirty pounds of pressure to the peroneal nerve.
The pirate’s leg folded backward with a sickening snap, and he collapsed, screaming in agony.
I moved with absolute apathy, letting their own panicked swings do the heavy lifting.
I redirected a spear thrust into another pirate’s neck with a lazy flick of my wrist.
I hyperextended elbows, shattered kneecaps, and crushed windpipes with precise, minimal-effort taps of my wooden scabbard.
I didn’t want to kill them; I just wanted them to be physically incapable of making me do more work.
In less than two minutes, the courtyard was a graveyard of groaning pirates.
Brick, Skip, and Spoons were busy tying up the survivors with thick anchor rope.
I stood over the final, terrified squad leader, raising my scabbard to put him to sleep, when the sky above me suddenly tore open.
*BOOOOOOM.*
It wasn’t thunder.
It was the sound of the atmosphere physically shattering.
I snapped my head up.
Higher in the sky, on the flagship of the armada, Garp had finally reached Shiki the Golden Lion.
The two legends clashed.
Garp’s fist, coated in absolute Armament Haki, met Shiki’s legendary swords.
The resulting shockwave defied all logic.
It didn’t just ripple through the air; it visibly cracked the sky, a massive ring of distorted atmospheric pressure expanding outward at supersonic speed.
‘Kinetic anomaly detected,’ the frantic, deeply human panic in my brain screamed, my eyes widening in sheer, unadulterated terror as the shockwave barreled down toward the lower island I was standing on.
‘The concussive force is equivalent to a direct hit from a naval dreadnought.
Defensive maneuvers are irrelevant.
The structural integrity of this island is failing.
Evade!
EVADE!’
I couldn’t evade.
There was nowhere to go.
The shockwave slammed into the floating fortress.
The sheer, apocalyptic pressure of the clash of top-tiers instantly pulverized the cobblestone courtyard.
Brick, Skip, and Spoons were violently blown off the edge, screaming as they fell into the ash clouds.
The pirate squad leader in front of me was atomized, blown away like dust.
The concussive force hit my fourteen-year-old body like a freight train made of solid iron.
I felt my ribs crack.
The air was violently expelled from my lungs, and the world spun into a chaotic blur of grey and blue.
The floating island shattered beneath my feet, and I was violently ejected from the sky, shot down toward the ruined Kingdom of Eidolon below like a broken cannonball.
‘Altitude: Five thousand feet and dropping,’ my mind calculated, coldly assessing my impending death as I tumbled through the ash-choked air.
‘Gravity has re-engaged.
Geppo is unavailable due to massive blunt force trauma to the intercostal muscles.
The suit is completely ruined.
My tailor is going to kill me if the impact doesn’t.’
I squeezed my eyes shut, entirely out of options.
I willed the red mist to pool entirely around my vital organs, trying to create a hyper-compressed cushion of killing intent to act as a physical shock absorber.
The ground rushed up.
*CRASH.*
I slammed into the pulverized ruins of what used to be a massive stone cathedral.
The impact shattered the remaining pillars and buried me beneath a mountain of crushed limestone and timber.
I lay in the rubble, my ears ringing with a high-pitched, deafening whine.
Every single nerve in my body was screaming.
My right arm felt dislocated, my breathing was a ragged, wet wheeze, and I was entirely certain I was bleeding internally.
‘ Multiple fractures detected.
Extreme fatigue.
I am immobilized’ I thought weakly, coughing a spray of blood onto the dust in front of my face.
Slowly, agonizingly, I pushed a slab of rock off my chest with my good arm.
I dragged myself out of the crater.
My bespoke grey suit was shredded.
My fedora was miraculously resting in the dirt a few feet away.
I grabbed the hat, jammed it onto my bleeding head, and leaned back against a shattered archway.
I was done.
I didn’t care if Shiki dropped the moon on us; I was taking a nap right here in the dirt.
Then, I heard it.
A small, shifting sound in the rubble about ten yards to my left.
Instantly, the master assassin in my brain flared, flooding my exhausted veins with adrenaline.
‘Potential hostile.
Evaluate threat.
Terminate upon visual confirmation,’ the cold logic whispered, forcing my trembling, dislocated arm to reach for the hilt of my katana.
I forced my dead, exhausted eyes to focus through the thick curtain of ash and dust.
I drew the blade exactly half an inch, ready to unleash the full weight of the Absolute Murderer on whatever pirate had survived the fall.
The dust parted.
It wasn’t a pirate.
It wasn’t a Marine.
Standing in the shadow of a collapsed archway was a tiny girl.
She looked to be about eleven years old—three years younger than me.
She was wearing a dirt-stained, torn kimono, her dark hair tangled and matted with ash.
She was shivering violently, clutching a broken wooden practice sword in her small, bruised hands.
She looked absolutely terrified, tears carving clean lines through the soot on her face, but she didn’t run.
She held the broken wooden sword up, pointing it directly at me with a desperate, trembling defiance.
I stared at her.
And then, something in my brain completely, fundamentally shifted.
For the past four years, I had viewed the world through the lens of a cold, psychopathic calculus.
Every person was a matrix of vulnerabilities, a series of fatal strike zones to be exploited or ignored.
The red mist had always radiated outward, a suffocating aura of death designed to dismantle everything it touched.
But looking at this tiny, terrified girl holding a broken stick…
the math just stopped.
The urge to kill vanished, instantly replaced by a terrifying, overwhelming, and completely irrational spike of protective aggression.
The red mist violently snapped inward, swirling around the girl in my vision, but not as a threat.
‘Wait.
She’s tiny,’ my mind raced, the cold logic unraveling into a frantic, deeply human panic.
‘The ceiling is unstable.
The rubble is shifting.
She’s shivering.
If a single rock touches her…
if anything breathes near her…’
The sword clicked shut in my scabbard.
My apathy was gone.
My laziness was gone.
A new, terrifying instinct completely overwrote my exhausted brain.
She was fragile.
She was completely alone in a kingdom that had just been crushed from the sky.
And I suddenly knew, with absolute, unshakeable certainty, that if Shiki the Golden Lion or anyone else tried to harm her, I was going to figure out how to jump back into the sky and rip their heads off with my bare hands.
I didn’t know her name.
I didn’t know where she came from.
But I slowly stood up, ignoring the agonizing pain of my cracked ribs, and limped toward my new little sister.