And indeed. Several kilometers away, Johnny stopped pretending to be a brainless fire-breathing lizard and began using his head instead of acting solely on emotion and instinct. The moment he engaged his brain, the young man quickly connected everything that was happening and had happened with Miss Goldenweek and her strange symbols. The hunters surrounding him immediately found themselves in a dangerous situation—but not as immediately, and not as dangerous, as in Usopp's case. This time the young man used the mask at the right moment, and the 'voices' of the hunters around him began disappearing at a truly terrifying speed.
Nodding approvingly at Usopp's actions, Luffy headed toward the cabin exit and waved to Nami in farewell.
"All right, don't get bored without me. I'll be back soon."
The boys' fight was amusing, of course, but everything there had been obvious from the beginning, so the fleeing Robin interested Luffy much more. Especially since she was about to reach the ambush ships, and the young man had absolutely no desire to chase her across open sea.
"Ha... ha... ha..."
Breathing heavily, Robin ran through the prehistoric jungle with all her strength. Sweat flooded her eyes, her soaked dress clung unpleasantly to her body, and her lungs literally burned from lack of oxygen. On any other day, the woman's physical condition would easily have allowed her to run a ten-kilometer marathon without difficulty and regard it as no more than a light warm-up. But that was any other day, not today. Robin needed to cover no more than two kilometers to reach the closest ship in the ambush against the Going Merry. Mere minutes, even through nearly impassable jungle filled with various dangers. Yet before she had covered even half the necessary distance, she already felt as though she had run not a miserable thousand meters but an entire hundred-kilometer race.
Fear was to blame.
Fear so strong that the woman's body barely obeyed her. Every step required such effort that it felt as though invisible chains wrapped around her from head to toe, heavy weights dragging along the ground behind them. It would be no exaggeration to say that under these conditions Robin was losing strength a hundred times faster than she should. And she still managed to keep running. Yes, constantly stumbling and falling as though her legs could not support her, but she ran, thereby losing what little strength remained even faster.
That was the price of understanding what she had done.
Robin's exceptional intelligence had already been mentioned many times, so it would have been extremely strange if she failed to understand her situation now. Escape from a ship while Roronoa Zoro was present? His sleeping appearance did not fool her at all. Sleeping or not, if he had been given an order, Robin had no doubt she would have been caught before she even managed to step onto shore. Her successful escape from the Going Merry meant only that Zoro had received no such order. And the woman understood why perfectly well.
Over the weeks spent traveling with the Straw Hat family, she had come to know their most important member reasonably well and had also estimated the approximate level of his strength. Robin clearly understood that as long as she remained on the same island with him, there was no way to hide from his 'all-seeing eye'. Until recently she had not known about the different types of Haki or their capabilities. And although she could not say how much truth there had been in Nami's explanations about Haki, Robin was not deceived by the absence of pursuit. That day at Whisky Peak, she had been found and caught faster than she could ever have imagined, and things like that were not forgotten.
More than that, perhaps it was only her imagination running wild, but with every cell of her body Robin could literally feel a gaze directed at her. A very familiar gaze.
The open sea seemed like the only way to escape it.
Fortunately, the ambush ships were within reach.
"What the—?!" a tall, broad-shouldered bearded man wearing a black bandana and black leather armor exclaimed when an unexpected, uninvited guest in the form of Robin appeared on his ship. "Who are you... Miss All Sunday?!"
When the pale, trembling, sweat-soaked woman quite literally dropped out of the sky onto the deck of the hidden ambush ship, the captain managed to recognize Robin almost instantly despite her frankly pitiful appearance. If one were being honest, he recognized her primarily by her eyes. She could change her clothes, hairstyle, hair color, gain weight, lose weight, or even undergo plastic surgery, and she would still be recognized without difficulty by those eyes. Luffy's 'joke' about keeping a jar containing Robin's eyes on the bedside table had contained a considerable amount of truth. The woman possessed eyes so beautiful and exotic that once a person saw them, forgetting them was practically impossible.
"Raise... ha... raise the sails immediately!" Robin ordered urgently despite her heavy breathing.
"Excuse me, wha—"
"Quickly!" she shouted, rising from her knees to her feet at the same time. "We don't have time!"
"Raise the sails!" the captain's booming voice thundered across the ship.
The man deserved credit: he turned out to be experienced enough that before demanding explanations, he first hurried to give the necessary order. If it proved unnecessary, he could always cancel it. But if the situation was truly as disastrous as Miss All Sunday herself looked—and she was none other than the right hand of the Boss himself, Mr. Zero!—then any delay could cost them their lives. Aside from the lucky, the extraordinarily intelligent, the powerful, and the unimaginably cowardly, this was exactly the kind of person who survived longest on the Grand Line. And frankly, not only there. The Great Pirate Era was the kind of age in which, when someone shouted 'Get down!', the person who usually survived was the one who immediately dropped flat on his stomach rather than starting to look around in an attempt to figure out who had shouted, why they had shouted, and whether they had actually been shouting at him. As was easy to guess, the captain of this particular ship belonged to the first kind of people.
"Miss All Sunday, where are we going?" the man asked Robin while she tried to catch her breath.
At the same time, the captain's subordinates, rushing to carry out his order, exploded into frantic activity across the ship.
"As far away from the island as possible!" the woman blurted out without giving herself even a moment to think.
Really, what difference did the destination make? The only thing that mattered was getting as far away as possible! Away from that entire insane family! Away from their main monster! And away from her! Especially from her! Before it was too late! Robin knew with absolute certainty that she would not survive another betrayal in this life. Not from them! Not from her! The 'armor' she had carefully 'forged' over two decades and arrogantly believed to be impenetrable now threatened to shatter into pieces after a miserable couple of months under siege. And then she would believe again. And afterward she would be thrown away again when she became unnecessary. That outcome frightened her far more than death.
Though that was obvious enough. Otherwise, the thought of fleeing the Going Merry would never have entered her mind.
"As far away from the island as possible?" the captain repeated with a deep frown. "Why? Perhaps it would be better to escort you to the main camp?"
At his suggestion, a faint laugh escaped Robin involuntarily. Despite the situation, the woman found the captain's words unbelievably funny. She was trying to run away from the Devil, and the man standing before her was kindly offering to escort her straight to that very Devil. And wasn't it funny that all the people gathered on the island still had no idea just how dangerous a situation they had entered? They had only minutes left to live, yet they still did not understand their position. It was as though all of them viewed the world through magical glasses showing them some kind of fairy-tale illusion. From Robin's perspective as an outside observer, they looked like a herd of enchanted sheep, bleating happily as they ran together straight into the open jaws of a gigantic monster.
Who wouldn't laugh at such an absurd picture?
Robin herself had no idea just how specific her sense of humor had become.
Funny too, but true.
"The main camp was destroyed a long time ago, and soon every other Baroque Works force on this island will be destroyed as well," the woman mercilessly began returning the foolish, unfortunate 'sheep' to reality. "And the same fate will happen to you unless we leave the island immediately."
"W-what?!" Not only the captain standing before Robin was stunned, but everyone who managed to hear her words. Those who had not heard began questioning those who had, and preparations to sail instantly stopped. "Who could have done that?! Who is our enemy?!"
"Your enemy..."
Robin never finished the sentence. She stared over the captain's shoulder while simultaneously feeling a sharp wave of helplessness at the sight before her. Before the inevitable happened, the man clearly managed to sense something—or perhaps reacted to the strange look in her eyes—and began to turn around.
He never got the chance.
The point of a razor-sharp saber plunged directly into his neck, nearly cutting it in half. Someone else's blood splashed across Robin's face. When the saber was violently yanked free and the captain collapsed onto his knees, blood sprayed across the woman's dress as well, and when the man toppled forward, even her legs were stained.
In the next instant, literal hell erupted around her.
The captain's killer, staring around with utterly deranged, wild eyes, was casually shot dead by another crewmate before he could swing his saber again. That same crewmate then gave an earsplitting roar filled with insane rage and lunged at a third man. Similar scenes began unfolding simultaneously across the entire ship. As though driven mad, the crew members savagely began murdering one another.
It took the crew of roughly fifty people less than a minute to reduce themselves to a handful of half-corpses choking on blood, and even those survivors did not last long.
Soon only Robin remained alive.
Or perhaps not.
"I thought we had an agreement," a carefree voice sounded behind the woman. "You don't run away, and we quietly and peacefully sail to Alabasta, after which you can go wherever you like. Wasn't that our agreement? And now you've gone and broken it so shamelessly. In my opinion, that calls for punishment. You're going to be punished, Robin."
A shiver involuntarily ran through the woman's body at the familiar words spoken in a familiar tone.
"Nami told me to tell you that she'll punish you personally."
"You... you lied to me!" Robin accused him in a visibly trembling voice, wrapping her arms around herself but still refusing to turn and face Luffy.
"Lied? Can't remember doing that."
"You never intended to let me go after Alabasta!"
"Of course we didn't!" the young man admitted without a trace of shame. "Let a treasure like you slip through our hands? That's a pure crime no self-respecting pirate would ever commit! I'm curious, have you ever met pirates who voluntarily gave up treasure that had fallen into their hands? But none of that means we lied to you."
"..."
"Will it really be our fault if you don't want to leave us?" Luffy's voice suddenly sounded almost directly beside Robin's ear, and another wave of goosebumps swept across her body from his warm breath. "Nobody is going to keep you by force. That isn't our method. It isn't my method. No, you'll stay with us voluntarily. And you don't need to be afraid of betrayal. Betrayal means throwing someone away, but we're going to use you, and use you, and use you, all the way to the end of your life. You'll become another victim on my personal list who'll happily kill herself over some black scrap of cloth with a skull in a straw hat painted on it. And you'll be proud of it! You'll look forward to the next time you're used for the good of our family. And as I already said, it'll continue until the end of your life."
To Robin, all of that sounded like the promise of a Devil planning to enslave her soul for eternity.
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