"Motherfucker!" Johnny shouted as he was knocked off his feet, clutching his nose while blood poured from it. "I didn't do it on purpose! It was all that little runt's fault!" Lying flat on his back, he pulled his left hand away from his face and pointed toward Miss Goldenweek and Sanji.
"I know," Yosaku answered calmly. "I hadn't completely lost consciousness when you hit me the second time. It wasn't hard to draw the right conclusion after that."
"Then why the fuck did you hit me?!" Johnny jumped to his feet, his face already completely healed.
"Felt like it."
"Oh! Then that's fine."
After all, Johnny sometimes killed him for no reason too.
"Sanji-aniki, are you actually planning to fight?" Turning away from his friend, Yosaku addressed the blond man drinking tea. "If not, don't whine at us later that we didn't leave anybody for you."
"Why the hell are you asking him?" Johnny did not understand. "Didn't you see the green symbol on his chest? He's obviously not himself right now."
"And if the bounties on our heads increase after today's mess, that won't be our problem either," the immortal young man added as though he had not heard his friend's objection.
"Ah, forgive me, lovely lady, but I'm afraid I must take my leave," Sanji said pompously after finishing his third cup of tea and placing it on the saucer, making no attempt to hide his sincere disappointment. "Urgent business forces me to leave your hospitable company. But please, do not be sad. It won't take long, and afterward I shall personally escort you to our ship. I promise you, you will remember the taste of my cookies for the rest of your life," Sanji declared confidently as he rose to his feet.
If one thought about it, that sounded rather suggestive. No, anyone who knew Sanji even slightly could be certain there was no hidden meaning in his words and never could have been. He meant exactly what he meant. But from his opponents' point of view, the blond's speech did not promise anything good for Miss Goldenweek. Considering she looked like a cute little girl, almost everyone who heard him immediately suspected the young man of a certain unhealthy inclination. Miss Goldenweek herself was no exception, which caused the teacup in her hand to begin trembling visibly. She stared at Sanji with wide, frightened eyes, her entire lazy air vanishing. Luffy would definitely have approved.
"I don't get it," Johnny said, baffled. "Isn't he enchanted by that weird symbol?"
"Enchanted?" Yosaku repeated with undisguised disgust. "Are you serious right now?"
"Fine, hypnotized! Why do you always nitpick every tiny detail?"
"If you thought before opening your mouth, I wouldn't have to nitpick."
"Enchanted sounds cooler than hypnotized," Johnny remained incorrigible. "And anyway, that's not the point! Tell me why Sanji feels normal. I thought the symbol on his chest was supposed to do something to him!"
Johnny was far from the only one asking that question while watching the blond casually light a cigarette and walk straight toward Daz Bones. The numbered agents and some hunters who knew perfectly well how Miss Goldenweek's power worked also could not fully understand what was happening, including the 'genius' Mr. Three. At first, after receiving the mark of 'calm', Sanji had behaved exactly as he was supposed to behave after receiving such a mark. Now, however, it looked as though the mark had somehow stopped working even though it remained in place. Aside from Johnny and Yosaku, nobody else understood that Sanji could behave exactly the same way without any 'symbol of calm' whatsoever. A lovely lady had offered him tea—why refuse? And although Miss Goldenweek fell considerably short of the blond's usual beauty standards—in that regard all the 'Hats' had been hopelessly 'spoiled' by Nami's constant presence—it was not in his nature to refuse a lady.
"How many times do I have to tell you? Try using your head once in a while!" Meanwhile, as happened constantly between them, the two old friends continued bickering while completely ignoring the numerous enemies around them.
"What's there to think about? If the symbol is on him, then it has to affect him somehow!"
"Why? You saying Zoro-aniki or Luffy-aniki would let some shitty mark hypnotize them?"
That argument instantly stumped Johnny, leaving him able to produce only an incoherent:
"Uh..."
"Finally got it?"
"You're saying you immediately understood that the weird symbol didn't affect Sanji-aniki at all?" Johnny did not believe his friend.
"I'm still not sure it had no effect on him."
"What do you mean?!"
"Judging by our opponents' reaction, the green mark means something like friendliness, calm, or tranquility. Only a bunch of complete weaklings were surprised by Sanji's behavior after he got the mark. None of the leaders even raised an eyebrow."
"You mean if somebody else had been in Sanji's place and gotten the green mark, they'd have gone off drinking tea and eating cookies too?" Johnny finally began to understand. "But then that means..."
"Yeah." Yosaku nodded before he could finish. "Just look at his peaceful face." He pointed toward Sanji walking calmly in their direction. "The mark may still be working."
"It just doesn't matter much in his case," Johnny finally understood the situation completely.
Indeed, considering the blond's personality, total tranquility, calmness, or peacefulness could not possibly prevent him from killing all his enemies. After all, a person could murder enemies while perfectly at peace with himself and the surrounding world, or while remaining completely unruffled. Peacefulness was not a problem either. Once he killed all his enemies, there would definitely be peace. Out of all the Straw Hats, Miss Goldenweek had managed to place her mark on the one person almost completely immune to that specific mark simply because of his personality and worldview. It was difficult to decide whether that counted as incredible bad luck or equally incredible good fortune.
"You said your bounty is seventy-five million berries?" Sanji asked when he had almost reached Daz Bones. Without waiting for an answer, he added: "Good enough."
The next instant, the sound of two heavy steel blocks colliding rang across the entire clearing—the result of a kick capable of leaving marks in metal striking Mr. One's metallic body. The blond's armor-piercing leg won, but only by a narrow margin. Daz Bones himself suffered no injury from the hit. The same could not be said for the people unfortunate enough to stand in the path of his flying body. Several died on the spot, while several more suffered injuries of varying severity.
And just when the long-awaited battle some of them had been expecting seemed ready to finally begin, two people burst from the forest behind Johnny and Yosaku.
"S-save us!!" one of them screamed hysterically.
The distinctive symbol on their clothing made it easy to tell that they belonged to the bounty hunters of Baroque Works. But before they could explain the situation, the head of the man who had been shouting burst apart into bloody scraps.
"Eeeek!!!" the second one shrieked and ran even faster.
It did not help. Suddenly, the trunk of one of the trees behind him seemed, at first glance, to explode into splinters, after which the hunter's head 'exploded' as well. In reality, the same effect could be reproduced by firing a powerful rifle: the bullet entered the tree trunk cleanly from one side, lost a noticeable amount of power as it passed through, and tore out whole chunks of wood on the way out, creating that very 'explosion effect'. The same thing happened to a human head. Only instead of bark and splinters, pieces of skull and brain flew out. Most importantly, after punching through both the tree and the skull, the deadly projectile had lost a great deal of its stopping power. Thanks to that, Johnny was able to see it plow through the ground, ricochet upward, and finally drop into the grass barely a meter away from him. It looked far too large to be an ordinary bullet, so he bothered to walk over and search for it in the grass. When he found it, he froze involuntarily, then slo-o-owly straightened to his full height without taking his eyes off his palm.
"What's wrong with you?" Yosaku asked despite himself.
"...Usopp likes firing steel pachinko balls from his slingshot, right?" the young man answered with a question of his own.
"And?"
Johnny silently showed him his open palm. In the center lay exactly the steel ball he had just mentioned.
"Oh!" Yosaku said in sudden understanding.
After that, both friends first looked at the two corpses lying nearby and then at the jungle behind them. In the end, Johnny simply could not resist asking the question that had already become painfully familiar to a great many people, himself included:
"Seriously, what did Luffy-aniki do to our Usopp?"
As the question itself made clear, only two people knew the answer. And, as usual, the first was far too mischievous by nature to hurry and share it with anyone, while the second had become the victim of the first man's unknown manipulations and actions and therefore did not even realize that such a question existed, much less know its answer consciously. Yet at the same time, he absolutely did know the answer! At least his subconscious did. Quite the paradox.
And while everyone else tormented themselves with that question, Usopp himself stared in incredible shock at the unremarkable mask in his hands.
"A teleportation mask..." he whispered almost reverently.
Words could not describe the horror the long-nosed young man had felt when, while running from an entire army of pursuers, he suddenly stumbled upon almost another army directly in his path. Before he had time to recover, he found himself surrounded from every direction! Thousands of enemies, each of whom Usopp sincerely believed was, if not stronger than him, then at least far more experienced! Constantly living among 'absurdly powerful monsters'—or perhaps the quotation marks were unnecessary here?—had made him completely incapable of evaluating his own strength properly. As a result, when the young man suddenly found himself encircled by enemies on all sides, he avoided fainting only because he unexpectedly remembered the mask Luffy had given him. More importantly, he remembered the conditions for using it! Only in critical situations? Thousands of enemies around him! Could a situation possibly be any more critical?! How much worse could it get?!! The mask instantly went onto Usopp's face. And nothing happened. Or rather, all sound vanished at once as if by magic. Battle cries, threats, the clatter of weapons, all of it—everything. And the moment he pulled the mask away from his face, he realized in astonishment that he was in a completely different place from where he had stood only seconds earlier. He was literally a hundred meters from the Going Merry! If that was not teleportation, then what was?!
"Incredible..."
Usopp took a step toward the ship, eager to share his incredible discovery with someone as quickly as possible—where had Luffy even gotten such an unbelievable thing?!!—when his legs suddenly gave out beneath him and he dropped weakly to his knees. Without much surprise, the young man realized that he had no strength left at all. None. Not a single drop. As though all his strength had been sucked out of him in one instant. Or perhaps sucked out by 'something'.
"Could've figured that out myself," Usopp muttered involuntarily.
Really, something as incredible as teleportation could hardly come without consequences. In the long-nosed young man's opinion, complete loss of strength was a perfectly reasonable price for such an effect. One might even call it minor. Especially compared with losing one's life: if not for the mask, they definitely would have killed him! None of his preparations would have helped! Speaking of those preparations... the bag slung over his neck had noticeably 'lost weight', most of its contents gone. Another effect of teleportation? Could outside objects get lost during transport? Still a small price for saving his own life.
The only thing Usopp regretted was that he had not managed to test some of the 'gadgets' he had prepared. On the other hand, at least he had not needed to test the 'gadgets' developed jointly with Luffy—there was no telling how many corpses would have remained after using those. Usopp still could not treat human life with the same indifference as the rest of his family. Nami was perhaps a little different. The key word being 'little'. Despite all her attempts to seem normal, Usopp could say with complete certainty that the girl had long since ceased to qualify as normal in any sense of the word. And her appearance had nothing to do with it. Sad though it was to admit, the young man had long since been forced to accept that he was the only absolutely normal person in his family. That thought became the last one in Usopp's mind before his remaining strength finally left him. Collapsing into the thick grass, he instantly sank into deep, dreamless sleep. A pity he could not appreciate the irony.
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