The blood-soaked docks of Oakhaven were dead quiet, save for the crackling of the burning village and the violent, rhythmic sloshing of the displaced bay against the splintered pilings.
Vice Admiral Monkey D.
Garp stood in the center of the absolute carnage.
The heavy, pristine Marine coat draped over his impossibly broad shoulders billowed softly in the sea breeze, completely spotless against the backdrop of total slaughter.
He didn’t look at the mountains of butchered Oykot and Roshwan soldiers.
He didn’t look at the shattered hulls of the warships.
His eyes—dark, weathered, and carrying the infinite, heavy sorrow of a man who had seen a lifetime of war—were locked entirely on the ten-year-old boy standing barefoot in a puddle of gore.
Elian’s head snapped toward the giant.
The suffocating red mist bleeding from the boy’s pores flared violently, reacting to the colossal, overwhelming presence that had just dropped from the sky.
Instantly, the fragmented memories of the master assassin—the life Elian had lived long before this one—rose to the surface, frantically trying to dissect the man standing before him.
‘I remember how a human body is supposed to work,’ the cold, intrusive voice whispered in his mind, analyzing the giant with a frantic, desperate clinical precision.
‘A normal man possesses a definable center of gravity.
A normal man has physiological limitations.
But the biology standing in front of me is impossible.
His muscle density is entirely wrong; a regular human skeleton would collapse into dust under the sheer weight of that upper body mass, yet the wooden planks beneath his boots aren’t even groaning.
I cannot out-muscle him.
To pierce a hide that thick, the kinetic force required completely surpasses what this ten-year-old frame can currently generate.
A normal person couldn’t survive a localized impact of that magnitude.
There is no leverage to exploit here.
His joints are anchored like steel pylons.
He is a walking impossibility.’
Elian tightened his grip on the chipped, blood-stained boning knife.
His small chest heaved, his breathing shallow and erratic.
The sheer terror of encountering something that so blatantly defied the natural laws of his previous world threatened to shatter what little was left of his mind.
‘I cannot kill him conventionally,’ the analytical static concluded, the calculations turning stark and unyielding.
‘The physical requirements are currently impossible to meet.
The math does not work.
The only variable left to me is absolute momentum.
I have to break him before he realizes I am nothing but a child playing in the dark.’
Elian didn’t run.
The shattered, traumatized boy was buried too deep beneath the survival instincts of a cornered predator.
He launched himself at the Vice Admiral.
He moved flawlessly, abandoning raw speed for perfect stealth.
He exploited the shifting shadows of the dawn, moving in the exact blind spots of human peripheral vision, syncing his footfalls with the sound of the crashing waves.
To an ordinary soldier, or even a seasoned veteran, Elian would have simply vanished into the acrid smoke.
But Garp didn’t even blink.
The Vice Admiral just tracked the boy’s impossible, ghostly trajectory with tired, sorrowful eyes.
He didn’t shift his stance.
He just waited.
Elian reappeared directly in front of Garp, airborne.
The cheap, serrated boning knife was aimed perfectly at the exact space between Garp’s collarbone and jawline—the carotid artery.
The red aura crawled up Elian’s arm and poured into the cheap steel, hyper-compressing into an edge one molecule thick.
Absolute Penetration.
He didn’t just swing a knife; he threw the entire conceptual weight of a million simulated deaths into a single, desperate kinetic point.
It was a law of reality forced onto a piece of kitchen cutlery.
It was meant to sever anything it touched.
Garp sighed.
It was a low, rumbling sound.
His right hand casually rose.
As it did, the skin on his index and middle fingers shifted, taking on a shiny, pitch-black hue that seemed to absorb the morning light.
It wasn’t armor.
It was willpower weaponized into a physical barrier—Armament Haki.
He didn’t bother to dodge or strike back; he simply pinched the empty air right where the knife was heading, anchoring his arm like a mountain holding back a hurricane.
The knife struck Garp’s blackened fingers.
The air violently cracked, screeching with the deafening sound of black lightning.
For a fraction of a millisecond, the universe tried to reconcile a paradox: an unstoppable, localized conceptual force colliding directly with an immovable, absolute defense.
The kinetic energy had nowhere to go.
It couldn’t bypass the Haki, and the Haki refused to yield to the penetration.
The energy rebounded with devastating, explosive ferocity.
SNAP.
The cheap butcher’s knife, unable to handle the sheer conceptual pressure of the clash, shattered into a hundred jagged pieces.
The dull steel rained down onto the bloody planks, tinkling softly against the wood.
Elian hung in the air for a fraction of a second, his hands holding nothing but a broken wooden hilt.
Garp let out a bored huff, slowly lowering his hand.
But as he did, he stopped.
He blinked, raising his darkened fingers closer to his face in the dim dawn light, his brow furrowing in confusion.
Right on the hardened, impenetrable black surface of his index finger, a single, tiny bead of red blood welled up.
Garp’s eyes widened in genuine, profound shock.
The absolute defense of a man who crushed mountains for practice, who had fought the Pirate King to a standstill, had just been pierced.
By a ten-year-old boy.
With a broken kitchen knife.
‘The blade is gone.
The conceptual weight failed,’ Elian’s mind screamed, frantic, unmoored, and spiraling into sheer panic.
‘Weapon lost.
Improvise.
Tear the cornea.
Find the brain stem through the ocular cavity before he retaliates.
Move.
Move.
Move!’
Before Elian’s small, blood-stained hands could even twitch toward Garp’s face, the Vice Admiral moved.
It wasn’t a martial arts technique.
It was just raw, terrifying displacement of air that a normal human eye could never hope to track.
Garp’s massive, calloused hand clamped down on the back of Elian’s neck.
He didn’t squeeze hard enough to break it—he was incredibly gentle for a man of his size—but the colossal, blunt force of the impact alone instantly scrambled the fluid in Elian’s inner ear, completely severing his equilibrium.
“That’s enough of that,” Garp rumbled quietly, his voice a soothing, heavy anchor in the chaos.
A perfectly measured, microscopic wave of kinetic force bypassed Elian’s skull, shocking his central nervous system into an immediate, involuntary shutdown.
The red aura fractured like cheap glass and violently dissipated into the sea wind.
The suffocating, mechanical weight of the Absolute Murderer vanished entirely, taking the cold, calculating apathy with it.
In that brief, excruciating microsecond before unconsciousness claimed him, Elian wasn’t an assassin.
He wasn’t a monster.
He was just a terrified, heartbroken ten-year-old boy again.
The crushing, physical ache of his parents’ death—the memory of the poison, the blood in the square, the absolute loss of his entire world—hit him all at once.
A single, jagged sob tore from his throat.
A hot tear carved a clean path through the dried blood on his cheek.
Then, his eyes rolled back, and the world went beautifully, mercifully dark.
### A Waking Nightmare (The 18k Challenge)
*Faceplants onto the spacebar…*.
Okay, you guys are getting way too good at waking me up.
Let’s raise the stakes so I can *hopefully* win a long nap.
* **The Goal : :** Hit **18,000 views**.
* **The Reward:** I will sacrifice my precious REM cycle to drop *4 bonus chapters*.
If you want to ruin my sleep schedule, please share this story with your fellow knowledge fans of Bogard!
Also, please forgive me in advance.
If I have to write four chapters back-to-back, I will be operating on a single, sleep-deprived brain cell, and I might make some questionable plot choices that you don’t instantly love.
But please, stick with my hazy ideas!
I promise the payoff will be entirely worth it once the plot unfolds (and I finally get some coffee).
If you fail to hit the goal, the blanket burrito stays undisturbed and I get to hibernate.
Let’s see who wins.
*System shutting down…
Thud.* — **Typing_In_My_Sleep**