Another 26 chapters dropped to patre0n.com/moctopus (total 34 chapters ahead of public release)
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Usopp had no idea that his careless words had managed to activate a 'sleeping mine.' Yosaku, Sanji, and Johnny involuntarily lowered their heads, already knowing exactly what was coming, while only Robin's eyes lit with interest. The woman had not said a word in the past half hour, as usual preferring to listen, evaluate, and draw conclusions.
"I'm going to start feeling sick from hearing those words!" Luffy shuddered all over, his face twisting into an expression of such overwhelming disgust that one might think he had swallowed a toilet fly.
I've heard them since I was a kid! In all kinds of variations! Killed someone? So what? Why the hell should I respect them?" The boy leaned toward Usopp despite Johnny, Yosaku, and Sanji sitting between them. "Or do you seriously think that if someone kills me one day, I'll care in the slightest about their respect? They can shove it up their ass! And anyway, I've said this before, but what exactly does 'respect for a fallen opponent' even mean?" With an irritated face, the boy made quotation marks with his fingers. "What am I supposed to respect them for? For fighting me? If I wanted to kill them, obviously they'd fight me! Only a complete idiot wouldn't fight for their life! Is that supposed to be a reason to respect someone? An ordinary rat trapped in a corner will fight desperately for its life too! Am I supposed to respect the rat afterward? Like, wow, it fought really well, respect! Is that it? Cool rat! Thousands of cool rats! Millions of cool rats! Respect! What the hell kind of nonsense is that?!! Damn it, you ruined my whole mood!!!"
BANG!
Yosaku did not even have time to blink before his brains scattered across the area and his body fell into the water through the gap between the pier and the ship. On the way down, his head also slammed hard into the pier boards, breaking his neck and losing even more brain matter. The usual method for improving Luffy's mood did not help much this time, so the irritated boy disappeared into the cabin he shared with Nami, muttering various nasty things under his breath. The meaning behind all of them came down to one thing: since someone had dared ruin the mood of 'Great Him,' it was time to ruin someone else's.
"What happened?!" Nami was aboard the ship almost instantly.
An excellent example of the fact that the girl stood half a millimeter from mastering Observation Haki. Everyone constantly killed Yosaku for reasons both good and nonexistent. Logically, Nami should not even have reacted to yet another one of his 'murders.' Yet the instant the gunshot rang out, the girl, without any hesitation, left (!) Vivi (!!) in Igaram's care (!!!), crossed the pier at a fast walk bordering on a run, and practically flew up the gangplank onto the ship.
"Usopp mentioned respect for fallen opponents," Sanji said with a grimace, flicking his finished cigarette overboard before lighting another.
"Usopp, what the hell?!" Nami planted her hands on her hips and glared indignantly at the long-nosed boy. Neither the look nor the pose made her more intimidating, though they certainly made her more beautiful. "Why did you say that?!"
"How was I supposed to know he'd react like that?!!" Usopp felt completely unfairly accused.
Respect for a fallen opponent who proved themselves worthy is perfectly normal everywhere in the world!"
"And how would you know?" Sanji asked. "You never left your village once in your life."
"I didn't, so what? Are you saying no one shows respect to fallen opponents?" Usopp asked in disbelief.
"No, why would I say that?" the blond backed off. "They do. Lots of people do."
"Exactly! I didn't say anything wrong!"
"Actually, Usopp has a point," Johnny said, scratching his chin without taking his eyes off the place where Yosaku's 'corpse' had fallen. "Maybe we should finally make a list of forbidden subjects when talking to Luffy and hand it to every new family member or ally. It's lucky Usopp was the one who screwed up this time, but what if Robin had said something like that?" Every gaze present involuntarily converged on the quietly standing woman, whose face noticeably lost color as she vividly imagined the possible consequences.
"He wouldn't have done anything to her!" Nami rolled her eyes when a noticeable pause arose in the conversation all by itself, sounding openly ominous in the context of everything just said. "He would've washed her brain out for a while and then calmed down. Hardly the end of the world. But Robin, I suggest you start getting used to Luffy already. With him, the sooner you begin, the less you'll suffer later."
"Nami's right," Johnny agreed eagerly. "Once you get used to Luffy, your life becomes much, much easier."
"That much easier?" Sanji raised his spiral eyebrow.
"...At the very least, getting used to Luffy changes the way you look at the world so much that most problems move into the category of solvable."
"Ryu-chan is absolutely right," Nami agreed, walking up to Robin and placing a hand on her shoulder. "I can't imagine how hard your life must have been before, being a threat to the World Government. But close contact with Luffy will help you look at familiar things you've known forever in a completely different way. I think your life really will become much easier afterward. Like I said, the main thing for you now is to get used to Luffy as quickly as possible. And don't be so afraid of him. If he gave his word that he won't do anything to you and will let you go after Alabasta, then that's exactly what will happen. No matter how he behaves or what he says, Luffy always keeps his word."
Usopp was standing behind Robin, so fortunately she could not see the expression on his face. Unlike the other family members, the boy's biological and psychological ages had not yet drifted very far apart. Looking at Robin, he did not feel older than the woman, though he did not consider himself much younger either. Even so, after the conversation he could not shake the feeling that he belonged among old pedophiles. Get used to Luffy? Behind that innocent-sounding advice lay a one-way road. Getting used to Luffy meant nothing other than the infamous Luffification, and after that there was no return. Most importantly, look at how they presented it! Everything sounded so reasonable, decent, and sincerely helpful! Exactly like a stranger making an offer to a small, naive girl. Usopp truly did not consider himself older than Robin, but at that moment he felt a powerful urge to hide her behind his back. Right now she genuinely seemed to him like a little naive girl whom someone with the dirtiest intentions imaginable was trying to lure into a dark alley. Let her go after Alabasta? Luffy would let her go, sure—but would Robin still be able to leave? Usopp had serious doubts. And not because anyone would stop her.
"All right, I'll go calm down our biggest child," Nami said with a heavy sigh after finishing her 'brainwashing' of Robin. "Only God knows what might come into his head right now," she added as she headed toward the cabin she shared with Luffy.
Zoro, sitting not far from the bow and pretending the entire time to be asleep, involuntarily cracked open one eye and glanced toward the troubled Nami. Observation Haki allowed the swordsman to know that Luffy was speaking with someone on a large Den Den Mushi, but he did not know how to read lips with Haki—or how to read lips normally, for that matter—so he had no idea what the conversation was about or who the other speaker was. Even without any details, however, Zoro could say with complete confidence that whoever Luffy was speaking to, the conversation promised nothing good for anyone. Otherwise his mood would not have started improving so dramatically the moment he made the call. Timely intervention by Nami might save all of them from yet another insane stunt by their equally insane captain.
"Hah!" Tashigi exhaled sharply as she swung her sword.
Zoro's gaze involuntarily shifted to the girl training in front of him. Over the past weeks, Tashigi had grown so accustomed to Zoro's presence at every training session that she no longer paid any attention to him. Sweat-covered forehead, flushed face, quickened breathing, and a determined, focused gaze. The family had slightly overestimated just how dense Zoro was. Certainly, when Tashigi had first appeared aboard the ship, the green-haired boy truly had not understood how to treat the girl or what emotions he was supposed to feel when looking at her. Important clarification: he had not understood before. By now, everything had long since become obvious to Zoro. Although, admittedly, the main reason he had achieved such unusual clarity in matters of relationships was Nojiko. At the very least, without those brief but genuine romantic experiences, even Zoro understood that he would almost certainly still be 'playing dumb' for real. Now, however, he had merely been pretending to 'play dumb' for quite some time.
"Hah!" Another sharp exhale and another sword swing.
At that moment Tashigi had her back turned to Zoro, so he immediately took advantage of the opportunity. In a single second, the swordsman appeared behind her with a bokken raised to strike—the same bokken that, only an instant earlier, had been lying on the deck beside him.
BANG!
Two bokken collided in midair. Tense body, eyes practically blazing with fighting spirit—Tashigi resembled a cat with its fur standing on end, ready to leap into a fight at any moment. A month earlier, such a sudden and powerful strike from Zoro would have sent her into a deep knockout. Knockout? Forget it. A blow that strong would more likely have caved her skull in. And even if she had somehow inexplicably reacted in time and managed to block, the result would not have changed much. She would simply have had a shattered bokken added to the broken skull.
"Not bad," Zoro bared his teeth in a grin.
The next second, an endless barrage of blows crashed down on Tashigi. Their speed and force noticeably surpassed the girl's own, but she had already grown accustomed to that. Since their very first joint training session more than a month earlier, Tashigi had not once fought an opponent equal to herself. Every sparring match imitated a fight to the death as closely as possible against an enemy vastly superior to her in strength, speed, and skill. At first she lost in mere seconds, and every defeat was extraordinarily painful both for her body and her pride. Then the length and intensity of the sparring sessions began to increase. And there had been nothing 'gradual' about it! Over the past month, Tashigi had practically forgotten that word altogether, along with her pride as a swordsman and the incredible sensation of having a body that was not 'screaming' in pain. It did not take her long to realize that her new sensei might theoretically have known other teaching methods existed, but personally preferred only one. It sounded roughly like this: 'Get stronger fast or die!' Perhaps the hardest thing to accept was that the approach genuinely worked.
"Not bad, not bad," Zoro repeated, not even slightly out of breath, pausing his attack for several seconds while the girl in front of him had already become drenched in sweat. "Didn't think you could handle this pace yet. In that case... level up! As Luffy likes to say."
Tashigi had long since learned that any mention of the captain of the Straw Hat Pirates was never followed by anything good. She had already confirmed that from personal experience more than once. Some of the worst moments she had endured during the past month were inseparably connected with that name. This time proved no exception. When she saw Zoro take a second bokken in his free hand, Tashigi involuntarily stopped breathing for a moment and her legs turned to jelly, instantly losing almost all their strength. Understanding what a true master was capable of represented one of the most important stages of training. A person incapable of cutting a wooden post in half would never believe that somewhere in the world there were swordsmen capable of slicing whole galleons apart unless they saw it with their own eyes. And forget galleons—entire cities, even islands! That was exactly why, almost at the very beginning of Tashigi's training, Zoro had demonstrated what some of his strongest techniques could actually do. Thanks to that, the girl understood with perfect clarity the difference in power between Zoro with one sword, Zoro with two swords, and Zoro with three swords. This was not simple addition. It was closer to multiplication, where every sword carried a value of 'three.' There was such a concept as 'bullying,' or, more simply, 'tormenting someone.' From Tashigi's point of view, by taking the second sword in hand, Zoro had decided to end the sparring session and was now preparing to torment her properly.
"Where did all that fighting spirit of yours go?" Zoro asked with an unpleasant grin.
Then again, as had been mentioned more than once, considering the peculiarities of his face, pleasant grins had never really been an option for him. Nature had worked hard on that particular point.
Tashigi caught herself wanting to say the sacred words: 'That's not fair!' She instantly crushed such a shameful impulse, tightened both hands around the hilt of her bokken, and assumed a defensive stance. She might have suppressed her shameful urge, but there was no damn way she was going to attack the meat grinder standing in front of her. She had not gone that insane yet. Contrary to popular belief, the famous phrase about offense being the best defense came with a whole pile of clarifications and exceptions. Usually, reality was exactly the opposite. The defender almost always had an advantage over the attacker. The important part was knowing how to use it.
"I'm attacking," Zoro said. His grin became even more disgusting and arrogant, as though he had managed to read the thoughts of his 'student'... or perhaps simply student now?
No sooner said than done. The moment the boy began his attack, Tashigi immediately remembered the first days of her training, when every sparring session had felt like trying to break through a wall with her wooden sword—a wall made from a single solid piece of metal ten meters thick and several hundred meters high. But there was a difference from back then too. And a very noticeable one. One second, two, ten, twenty, a full minute—and somehow, in a way Tashigi herself did not understand, she kept deflecting the blows raining down on her. Every successful block made her feel her internal organs shake and her muscles groan. Every successful dodge reminded her of those moments when a person escaped what seemed like certain death only by some impossible miracle. If she were completely honest, Tashigi herself had not suspected she was capable of moving like this now. The girl understood perfectly well that, according to normal logic, she should have been lying on the deck long ago with a couple of fresh bruises on her body. In reality? She was not lying down, and the training fight simply continued and continued. Tashigi could not help wondering: at what point had the logic she knew stopped working not only for every member of the insane family, but for her too?
At a certain point Tashigi felt a strange numbness she had never experienced before begin inexorably spreading through her body. Gradually the pain from her bruises disappeared, then the pain in her muscles vanished, and finally every thought left her head. The world around her began to fade and narrow until, in the end, only two unnaturally glowing swords remained in complete darkness, still attacking her from every direction. Most astonishingly, despite her body feeling filled with lead—unnaturally heavy and almost completely numb—it became significantly easier for Tashigi to block and evade the strikes. In her present condition, however, she was no longer capable of consciously recognizing such a remarkable fact.
Zoro, on the other hand, certainly could.
Satisfied with himself, the swordsman had long since increased the tempo of his attacks to a level completely beyond Tashigi's normal reach. In her ordinary state, the girl could never have reacted to blows that fast and powerful. And it was not simply a matter of skill. Or at least, not only skill. Tashigi was still physically incapable of resisting the speed and force behind such attacks. Just as a small child could not oppose a grown man. The girl's swordsmanship was improving by leaps and bounds, but even Zoro's training could not force Tashigi's body to develop faster than its natural maximum. In that regard, she was fortunate to have trained with a sword since childhood. By the time of her first lesson with Zoro, from an ordinary person's point of view, she had been close to the peak of her physical development. The problem was that the 'major league' used a completely different scale for measuring that same 'peak physical development.' On that scale, Tashigi still did not even reach the average level. As a result, her current level of skill significantly exceeded the capabilities of her physical body. Without that imbalance, Zoro knew with absolute certainty that she would have progressed even faster. Perhaps several times faster. And that was incredible.
Fifteen minutes later, before Zoro could launch another attack, Tashigi's training sword slipped from her hands and she collapsed unconscious onto the deck. That was precisely why the green-haired boy knew for certain that if not for the weakness of her physical development, she would have improved even faster. Tashigi's body simply could not endure such a sudden leap in her own level of swordsmanship. Something like that could happen only to an absurdly talented person. Johnny and Yosaku, for example, currently had exactly the opposite problem: the level of their physical bodies greatly exceeded the level of their skill. As a result, they could win almost any battle not because of technique, but through simple superiority in strength and speed. Frankly speaking, at the time they first met Luffy, the two boys had not possessed even one hundredth of Tashigi's talent, either as swordsmen or as warriors. Even after the complete transformation of their destinies, they still remained far behind the girl in talent. Especially since Tashigi's own fate had also begun changing from the very second Luffy and Zoro met her in Loguetown. All of that could not help but please the swordsman. After all, even without considering any of the other reasons, of all the people aboard the ship, only Tashigi walked the same path he did.
Zoro had never suspected before that teaching someone else the thing he loved most could be so interesting. Or that one could feel such incredible satisfaction while watching another person's skill grow. Training Johnny and Yosaku had long since become something like ordinary routine to him. He regarded his own training the same way. Nami, in their family, was a rose growing in a pile of... ahem... and besides, she was not a warrior in the usual sense of the word. For the sake of people she loved, she could walk through every circle of Hell or tear an enemy's throat out with her teeth, but give her a choice and she would happily avoid every battle she could. That had nothing in common with Zoro himself, so training with her also felt like another routine.
Usopp, aside from whatever Luffy had done to him, possessed an absurd talent as a marksman, with all that implied. Sanji had every quality of an excellent warrior and never neglected his training, but he did not put even one tenth as much enthusiasm into it as he put into cooking or chasing women. Luffy never trained at all, and his involvement in the training of the other family members was fairly indirect, mostly preferring to rely on Zoro for that. More than half a year had passed since their last genuine sparring match with each other. That was why teaching Tashigi had become a completely new experience for Zoro—entirely unexpected, and all the more enjoyable because of that. Not to mention that teaching the girl strongly affected Zoro himself. More than once in his life he had heard someone say that teaching another person allowed you to look at many familiar things from a different angle, but only after he began teaching Tashigi did he experience that truth personally.
"You don't get off her until she loses consciousness," Nami's voice sounded, pulling him out of his thoughts.
Turning his head, Zoro saw the girl looking back and forth between him and Tashigi lying on the deck, wearing a strange expression.
"Maybe so, but this approach is very effective," Zoro replied with a slight shrug. "She's improving at a ridiculous speed," he added with a smile. "I'll admit it, I didn't expect results like this myself. She's incredibly talented."
"...That's not what I meant at all," Nami said, shaking her head with the same strange expression.
"?"
"Caught Luffy telling the 'truth' again," Nami sighed.
"Den Den Mushi?"
"Yeah."
In truth, both of them understood that there was no possible way Nami had actually 'caught' Luffy. With his Observation Haki, he knew perfectly well whenever anyone approached him. The boy had simply chosen not to hide.
"Is it that bad?"
"Not exactly bad. It's just that everything is your fault again."
"Nothing new there. And how much worse can it get? After his last stunt, almost every random person I meet will already want to kill me."
"It's not only about you," the girl replied with an involuntary smile. "And again I couldn't tell whether he's doing it purely for fun, or whether it's only part of some larger plan."
"Knowing Luffy? More likely he came up with a plan that lets him have as much fun as possible while carrying it out."
"You're probably right... Why can't he be even a tiny bit more normal?"
Zoro did not bother answering a question whose answer was obvious. A tiny bit more normal? Then he would no longer be their Luffy. And, quite possibly, there would be no Straw Hat Pirates either. That possibility was far more frightening than any stunt Luffy could pull, no matter how insane.
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