"Have... you... completely... lost... your mind?" Yosaku barely forced out while coughing up clots of blood and scraps of internal organs, then dropped lifelessly onto his back.
It was not that Yosaku felt any particular resentment or strong surprise—he had been killed too often, for every conceivable reason no matter how trivial, and sometimes for no reason at all, for feelings like that to arise. Emotionally, he was more confused than anything. Johnny's stunt was ordinary enough, but the timing was somewhat inappropriate. Hadn't Luffy warned them about looking cool and dramatic? Coming back to life after an enemy killed you was one thing—a 'joke' that Yosaku himself could never grow tired of—but coming back after being killed by a member of your own family was something entirely different. The effect was not the same at all. That was what confused him. No matter how badly Johnny wanted to fight Mr. One, Yosaku thought his friend had gone a little overboard this time.
"Wh-what... what... what..."
Time began moving forward again for Johnny, but his consciousness, as though it had just been involved in a brutal collision, was still unsuccessfully trying to restart his equally nonfunctional brain. He had quite literally fallen into a stupor. Everything had happened too quickly, and events had developed in a way far too unpredictable for him. He simply could not understand how his powerful rush forward and sudden strike at an enemy had somehow resulted in the death of Yosaku standing beside him. What had happened? How had that happened?
"There it is! There it is! What an expression! What a magnificent work of art!"
While Johnny tried to gather the scattered pieces of his brain back together, Mr. Three practically glowed with happiness, and the reason lay in one of his rather disgusting hobbies. Galdino had once eaten the Doru Doru no Mi, the Wax-Wax Fruit, gaining the ability to secrete wax from his entire body, and that wax was almost as hard as iron. Fire was the only significant weakness of his wax—and that was precisely the weakness Mr. Three used in his vile hobby.
Using the power of his Devil Fruit, he created an enormous platform and fixed his victims onto it by simply encasing their feet in wax as though pouring them into concrete. Then, using the same Fruit power, he created a gigantic candle beside them shaped like a spinning pumpkin. The pumpkin rotated, the flame burned, and flakes of paraffin scattered through the air, slowly coating his victims' bodies. Once it cooled, the paraffin regained iron-like hardness, gradually robbing the victims of their ability to move and then to breathe, until they were transformed forever into wax statues.
That was Mr. Three's hobby. He loved watching his victims suffer, loved watching the expressions on their faces as they slowly but inevitably became lifeless statues. The death agony permanently captured on those wax faces was, to Galdino, the finest reward for all his effort. The idiot who considered himself a genius called it art.
"I have no idea what you just did, but I suggest you start praying now, because later it'll be too late!" Johnny declared.
His stupor and confusion gave way to anger and embarrassment. Or rather, his anger only grew stronger because of how embarrassed he felt. First Sanji with his tea, and now Yosaku dead by Johnny's own hand. On top of that, everyone present had seen his idiotic expression, jaw hanging open and eyes bulging. And the stuttering? He had stuttered like a complete moron! Personally, Johnny knew only one guaranteed method to wash away his shame and make sure the incident never became public knowledge: kill all the witnesses! Fortunately, every witness belonged to one of exactly two categories—family members and enemies. The first group had already screwed up badly enough themselves—Yosaku was lying dead, Usopp was trembling with fear, and Sanji was happily crunching the enemy's cookies, which in Luffy's eyes deserved no less than death—so all of them would definitely keep quiet. The enemies, meanwhile, could simply be killed.
Perfect!
"Hadoken! Raging Wave Fist!"
Jokes aside! This time Johnny was as focused as possible, maintained maximum vigilance, and his strike flew directly toward the crowd of enemies! It was hardly surprising, then, that when he saw his second attack nearly tear Yosaku's corpse in half, he experienced a truly indescribable range of emotions.
"WHAT THE FUCK IS GOING ON HERE?!"
Despite all his problems with attentiveness and logic, all the agitated young man needed to do was stop, take a deep breath, and think for a moment to reach the correct conclusion. But he was clearly in no condition to stop and think.
"You absolutely must come to our ship and try the cookies I baked myself," Sanji said a short distance away, paying no attention whatsoever to anything happening nearby. "I've worked on the recipe for more than a year and a half, and I'm more confident in their quality than in anything else!" he boasted.
At that moment, Usopp finally understood that he needed to get the hell out of there immediately.
"I... I... I th-th-think I'll go... g-g-go get Zoro!"
He shouted the swordsman's name over his shoulder while already running at full speed in the opposite direction from the enemies. Johnny and Sanji did not react to this at all, but Mr. Three turned his attention toward him and gave a short order.
"Catch him."
An enraged roar from several thousand people answered him as they all charged after Usopp. After everything that had happened, the Baroque Works members were practically overflowing with fighting spirit and the desire to tear someone apart. And naturally, one could not forget the money they had been promised. A pack of hungry wolves chased a white rabbit. Luffy would have made an excellent taxidermist—the dead rabbit's skin really did fit Usopp as though made for him!
At the very same time, though in a slightly different place, that same 'taxidermist' involuntarily stopped and laughed.
"What idiots!"
"Who do you mean?" Nami asked from where she sat on his shoulders. "Our enemies or our boys? If you mean the boys, what did they do this time?" Tugging Luffy by the chin, she forced him to tilt his head back and look into her eyes.
"All of them at once!" he answered with a smile.
"So our boys did do something after all, huh?"
"Nothing special. Those morons are performing in their usual roles, so expecting any new repertoire from them is pointless."
"You mean Usopp too?" the girl asked doubtfully.
"You underestimate our long-nosed sniper way too much," the young man scolded her. "For your information, he voluntarily took half the entire army of hunters gathered here onto himself!" he declared proudly. "A real man! Just as expected, he fit into our family perfectly!"
Despite the words, Nami's face displayed nothing but skepticism. Or perhaps the reason was precisely Luffy's words? They sounded far too much like another one of his 'truths'.
"Nothing's going to happen to him, right?" she asked just in case.
Though she already knew the answer without asking.
"To Usopp? What's some tiny little army going to do to him? Seriously, stop underestimating him so much! That's exactly why I called the hunters idiots, by the way: they're underestimating him too! They took only half their forces and threw them at him, when even all of them wouldn't be enough. I almost feel a little sorry for them," the young man lied shamelessly, because it had long since been established through practical experience that he felt pity for no one. "Those guys have absolutely no idea what they've gotten themselves into."
It was not that Nami felt noticeably better after hearing that, but neither did she feel worse. She still did not understand where Luffy's unconditional faith in Usopp's strength came from, but the girl knew for certain that he would never send any of them to certain death. And if he promised Usopp would be fine, then physically there was nothing particularly dangerous threatening him right now. That, however, was expected. Nami was much more concerned about psychological threats. For an ordinary village boy, Luffy's methods could prove far too cruel—to put it mildly. After all, sometimes they seemed excessively cruel even to people who were anything but ordinary village boys. And to find yet another confirmation of how inhuman his methods could be, Nami did not even need to go far or remember some old incident. All she had to do was look around right now.
"Die!"
"Aaaaaah!"
"Drop dead!"
"Argh!"
"Croak!"
"RAAAAAH!"
Luffy, with Nami sitting on his shoulders, strolled leisurely straight through the center of Baroque Works' camp while everyone around them went insane for what appeared to be no reason whatsoever. Friends who had been laughing together only a few minutes earlier now had eyes reddened with blood as they savagely tried to kill one another. Rifle and pistol shots rang out from every direction, swords clashed, grenades and cannonballs exploded, and the furious screams of fighters mixed with insane laughter, groans, and the crying of the wounded and dying. The entire Baroque Works camp was engulfed in bloody madness and fire, yet nobody paid attention to any of it, completely absorbed in murdering one another.
And as usual, Luffy simply watched it all.
Without touching a single enemy himself, he had once again made their blood flow like a full river.
"I don't know exactly what you're doing right now, but this looks like the way you frightened my Robin at Whisky Peak, right?" Nami asked while looking around.
"Something like that," the young man admitted without trying to deny it. "I've always wanted to expand what my Conqueror's Haki can do, but only recently have I started getting anything even remotely useful out of it."
"Remotely useful? You're saying a result like this still isn't enough for you?" Nami swept one hand around at their surroundings.
Their enemies were already killing one another, while not even a splinter from the countless explosions managed to reach Luffy and Nami themselves. How much further could it possibly go? What else was there left to do? Nami could not imagine.
Luffy could.
"You simply have nothing to compare it to, so you don't understand," the young man began lecturing her in a mentor's tone, wearing an expression as though there were not a single other person anywhere around them. "The ordinary ability of Conqueror's Haki is suppressing an enemy army. That's the situation where quantity stops mattering and quality moves to the front. That's not bad by itself—it's actually great—but eventually everyone knocked unconscious by Conqueror's Haki wakes up. Which means once they recover their strength, they can still cause problems. Imagine a situation where you knock out the entire enemy army with Haki, defeat their commander who's equal to you in strength, squeeze yourself completely dry in the process, and then, half-dead and without any strength left, you watch the surviving army start waking up. And remember, by that point you don't even have enough strength to run away. How do you like that scenario?"
"That's what all of us are for! Our whole family!" Nami objected passionately, clearly not especially impressed by the picture he had painted.
"Did I ever say there was only one commander?" Luffy answered with a rhetorical question. "An army always has a certain number of especially strong people. That's what makes it an army. In a situation like that, someday every member of our family could end up completely drained. And then what? Die?"
"..."
Nami had no answer to that. Though she still found it impossible to imagine such a disastrous situation actually happening. In the girl's eyes, Luffy possessed a mind far too devious and strength far too overwhelming to ever end up in a position like that. Would he ever allow his enemies to corner him? And even if he did, it would definitely be only so that afterward he could switch places with them! There could be no other way. Although the girl clearly understood that no person in the world was protected from mistakes or defeat, Luffy appeared to her as the single exception to that rule. Nothing and no one could shake the image of the young man hidden deep inside her heart. Logic could go to hell! As usual, such boundless faith had both weaknesses and strengths.
"I prefer getting rid of my enemies once and for all," Luffy concluded when Nami failed to answer. "And anyway, we've got more important business right now... which ship do we start with?" he asked, stopping beside the water and examining the aforementioned ships.
"I suggest that one!" the girl decided instantly.
With her eyes shining in anticipation, Nami pointed toward one of the richest-looking ships, though it was not especially large.
"Works for me!" the young man approved her choice.
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