The Knock-Up Stream was not a wave.
Rather, the Knock-Up Stream was the sea choosing, on some predetermined schedule, to turn itself into a vertical column of water ten thousand feet in height.
Kael did not know this was possible.
He felt it forty miles before they arrived—an anomaly in his chakra so vast that it seemed to warp his perceptions the way a rock distorts a stream current—and a reading told him that below them, waiting on the Grand Line, was a column of power building itself to launch them into the clouds.
He told Nami, and Nami told him about the Knock-Up Stream with three parts professional enthusiasm and one part dread.
He asked what it meant for them.
She told him.
By her plan as it stood when they arrived at the spot, they would apply a coating from the last shipbuilder to agree to help them to the bottom of the Going Merry, set the Going Merry atop the eruption point of the Knock-Up Stream, and ride the stream upward in a process of vertical ascent estimated to take less than a minute.
This much Nami had told him.
Her demeanor remained composed.
The stream erupted as predicted; indeed, Kael had counted off its arrival by the chakra pulses for ten minutes.
Water erupted with a ferocity that Kael had never encountered in his other life; earthquakes, typhoons, and the chakra field surrounding a tailed beast on the battlefield paled by comparison.
The Going Merry rose in the air, held by a column of seawater larger than a county to carry the eight-man crew straight up for a distance of ten thousand feet into unsettled sky.
The world became a roar.
He stood at the helm, for the captain—Nami—stood at the wheel because she was the only one on the Going Merry who could be.
Hands on the wheel, legs planted, eyes—the key to this experience—looking perfectly at home in the middle of it all.
The Knock-Up Stream was the first expression of her element to satisfy Nami, the realization of a lifetime of effort toward mastery of the air.
The composition of the column was a system of pressures and gradients, not chaotic but ordered.
And her Sage-Mode augmented map of those gradients gave her access to an incredibly detailed understanding.
She navigated as the column rose, turning the wheel with movements she could feel through the bones of her hands at velocities her conscious mind still could not process.
Kael stood at her side with his Sage Mode fully extended and followed her.
He had, before this, promised himself that if she could not pilot the Going Merry, he would catch her.
Nami did not need it.
The stream bore them upward.
Each transition of the layers of the atmosphere presented to Kael a series of pitches, adjustments to the natural energy field of his surroundings.
The natural energy of sea level was, to his knowledge, thick and slow.
As the Going Merry rose, however, the atmosphere began to thin.
The high-altitude field felt sharp and fast, like the difference between a cello and a violin.
He adapted.
His Sage Mode, tuned to the lower atmosphere, recalibrated for the new conditions, and orbs around his body adjusted their rotation subtly in response to the change.
Halfway up the stream, amid the roar, Nami turned to glance at him.
She did not say a word—there was no opportunity to, with a world of roaring behind her—, but her eyes, bright, meeting his in a heartbeat, and full of feeling, conveyed far more than any look she had ever exchanged with him from the cliff at an unnamed island, or at the bow under the moonlight.
He saw clearly that she was happy.
She was happy riding up a column of seawater larger than a country, on a boat that did not deserve such an undertaking, with a man beside her whom she trusted with a few months’ worth of weather data, with her hands on the wheel of her labor, accomplishing exactly what it should be accomplished.
Kael did not smile.
The roar was a distraction; he made sure to remain impassive and grant Nami her moment of realization, until the next pulse of pressure rose underneath the Going Merry, and Nami’s hands guided the Going Merry through it, and the world went back to roaring.
They reached the top of the Knock-Up Stream at its peak strength.
Going Merry soared up into the high sky, impelled by the momentum of the stream’s last kick, and in a single arc completed its flight to the cloud-sea above.
Landing on the cloud-sea produced a strange feeling—oddly enough, the strangest aspect of the entire ordeal—the sensation of landing in water.
The cloud sea held the chakra signature of the element but was not the same kind of water that Kael knew.
The cloud-water found in Skypiea was, by all measures, a substance unknown in the surface Grand Line.
There existed no buoyancy rules of which he knew, as if Skypiea’s cloud-water was the Grand Line’s sea distilled and left floating up in the atmosphere. You are reading on novelping.com, the official source.
Going Merry rode it.
Nami let go of the wheel.
She turned to face the rest of her crew.
Her crew survived.
Sanji had held Robin and Chopper as the ship ascended—not because it was necessary but because it was a decision Sanji had come to ahead of time, and they had cooperated with it.
Luffy, standing on the Going Merry’s figurehead, held both hands in the air and wore a wide grin visible from the moon.
Zoro had barely moved at all during the ride, supporting his body with one hand on the mast when the inclination nearly threw him out of position.
Usopp had his eyes closed for the entire trip, opening them just before reaching cloud level and surveying the scene in disbelief.
Nami let out a breath.
She took that breath and held it for quite some time.
Kael watched Nami and, at precisely the right moment, said:
“Well done.”
She turned to him.
Her face, red from sunburn and wet from spray, having passed well beyond her normal level of self-control, broke into a grin.
It was the kind of grin that said she had used every bit of herself at just the right time and that that usage had earned her the attention of someone else, and that for the moment, she was the person she had always been.
“Thank you.”
She did not remove her hand from the wheel.
He did not move from her side.
Going Merry sailed on cloud-water beneath the high sky, with Skypiea ahead: white islands in the distance, cliffs formed by clouds, and the strange sunlight striking the ship at a strange angle.
He activated his Sage Mode and absorbed the natural energy of the new surroundings.
It felt, even in the first minute, to be an entirely different language, and he would need to begin learning it from scratch.
He was happy to.