The pair of idiots had no idea what was currently happening on the island or what exactly the man they found so uninteresting had already done. Otherwise they would have been running without looking back or, being idiots, would have immediately tried to slit sleeping Usopp's throat while he was defenseless. As it happened, however, responsibility for replenishing the camp's supplies had fallen on their shoulders today, so they—and nearly another hundred and fifty people along with them—had been excluded from participation in the coming battle. Naturally, nobody would have kept that many people away from the fighting if anything truly serious had been expected. But had anyone on the island expected a genuinely serious battle? At most, a somewhat troublesome one, and even that view belonged to only a few. As a result, more than a hundred people were currently wandering the island without the slightest idea of the danger hanging over them. Some got lucky and learned of the threat one way or another—for example, by finding piles of other agents' corpses or seeing the devastated camp from a distance—but the pair of idiots who stumbled across Vivi and Usopp were not among those people. They still inhabited their imaginary world of fantasies.
"Be a good girl and don't resist," the first man said when only a few meters remained between him and Vivi. Spreading his arms, he abruptly lunged forward, eager to grab his 'weak, defenseless victim' as quickly as possible. "Don't let her escape!" he shouted to the second.
Vivi had no intention of escaping. Waiting for exactly the right moment, she spun sharply and delivered a lightning-fast, technically perfect roundhouse kick. And it was perfect not so much because the movement itself was polished—though it was—as because of her exquisite control over her Devil Fruit power. In the single instant required for the roundhouse, Vivi managed not only to change her overall weight several times, but also to alter the weight of different parts of her body independently several times. The most brilliant and gifted person in the world could not have reached such a degree of mastery over a Fruit acquired only two months earlier. It was absolutely impossible. Impossible not merely according to ordinary logic, but even by the insane logic of the Grand Line. Devil Fruits or not, hundreds upon hundreds of years had passed since their appearance, and certain patterns had long since been identified. Vivi simply did not care about any of them. It was comparable to Zoro picking up a sword for the first time at fifteen and reaching the level of the World's Strongest Swordsman within two months. With all due respect to the green-haired swordsman's talent, that was simply impossible. Nevertheless, Vivi had succeeded in making the impossible possible.
WHOOSH! THUMP!
Those sounds best described Vivi's lightning-fast strike—exactly as she had been taught every day for the previous two months. Luffy had not only personally designed her entire training program, but also spent considerable time helping with her training himself. There was nothing unusual in the first part; he always did that. His active participation in Vivi's training, however, had once caused considerable surprise. Normally Luffy dumped all monotonous work on Zoro—in truth, this time had not been an exception either—and only intervened occasionally, and that was when dealing with members of the family. Still, one could hardly deny that a major reason for his unusually active participation in Vivi's training was the power of her Fruit. Without Luffy and Zoro actively using Armament Haki, the girl would have destroyed the Going Merry during her very first training session after leaving Whisky Peak. Even with the two men involved, the ship had taken quite a beating before she learned to control her Fruit properly.
"Grab her! Hey, what are you—?! MOTHERFUCKER!!!"
His mouth hanging wide open in astonishment, the shocked Baroque Works agent froze literally one meter from an equally shocked Vivi. Her entire face, cap, and chest were drenched in still-hot, fresh blood, while the headless body of the first man lay at her feet. His filthy, flattened, bloodied head—with its jaw mangled and teeth knocked out—lay nearby, conveniently beside the still-sleeping Usopp. Vivi truly had delivered the kick exactly as she had been taught. The problem was that her teachers were the Straw Hats. Accordingly, after acquiring her Fruit power, the only people she had ever fought were them and Tashigi. As a result, the girl had no idea how powerful her attacks actually were.
"WHAT THE FUCK?!!" The second agent still could not accept his new reality.
Vivi's roundhouse kick, accelerated and amplified through exquisite use of her Fruit, caused trouble even for some members of the Straw Hat family, so what chance did ordinary Baroque Works agents have? At the instant of impact, the girl's elegant leg weighed ten tons. Ten fucking tons. Vivi could easily kill a person merely by placing her foot on their chest and activating her Fruit. What, then, could be said of a full-force strike? Training with a family made entirely of Monsters had left the girl unaware of her own strength. At least until now. A severed human head was a rather clear indicator of striking power.
"You fucking bitch!!!"
If Vivi had been standing there with an impassive face, the surviving man would certainly have fled. Instead, the girl's initial shock quickly gave way to an entire spectrum of emotions: horror, disgust, panic. Vivi looked as though the only reason she remained standing was that she could not decide which specific emotion to surrender to. Start screaming in horror? Collapse into panic with shouting, tears, and snot? Faint? Or simply start vomiting because of all the blood covering her? As usual, the second agent did not miss the chance to worsen an already serious situation for the girl. Seeing Vivi's reaction to killing his partner, the idiot thought of nothing smarter than attacking her and trying to knock her out with a punch to the back of the head. The princess truly looked as though the surrounding world had ceased to exist for her, so a surprise attack was, in theory, a reasonable decision. Reasonable, but very, very wrong.
THUMP! CRUNCH!
A reflex was something perfectly capable of functioning without conscious participation. And Vivi's reflexes did not care in the slightest that their owner's conscious mind stood one metaphorical step away from either a panic attack or a deep faint. Surprise attacks had always been extremely popular among the insane Straw Hat family, so by now Vivi had developed excellent reflexes for preventing them. This time, she effortlessly slipped away from the blow aimed at the back of her head and immediately performed a well-practiced counterattack. The girl's ten-ton fist shattered the bones of the man's chest, tore through his heart and part of his lungs, broke his spine, and punched straight through his body. Vivi's terrified eyes, widened to their natural limit, met the rapidly fading, disbelieving gaze of the agent. For several long seconds, neither could believe what had just happened. Then, wheezing and choking on his own blood, the man began collapsing onto Vivi.
"E-e-e-e-e!!!" She did not so much scream or shriek as emit a long, high-pitched squeal.
The girl tried to shove the agent's body aside, but her arm was still buried in the hole through his chest past the elbow. Panicking, Vivi tried to free it as quickly as possible. The man's body, however, already hung from her as literal dead weight, his mass and broken bones securely trapping the girl's arm. The moment the already panicking Vivi realized she could not pull free, she activated both her Fruit power and her own strength to the maximum. Completely tearing open the dead agent's chest and coating herself from head to toe in his blood in the process, she ripped her arm free—but for her already battered psyche, that became the final straw. Bending double, she began vomiting violently, first what remained of her food and then only bile. In the end, exhausted and swaying from side to side, the girl managed only a few steps toward the sleeping Usopp before collapsing unconscious. Nightmares of Little Garden would definitely be added to those from Whisky Peak.
It was worth pausing here to explain that until today Vivi had never killed anyone. Naturally, as a numbered agent she had seen plenty of terrible things, including numerous deaths among pirates and other agents, but she had never personally taken another human life. Igaram had done everything he could to shield her from the most horrific consequences of their decision to join Baroque Works, and to a certain degree he had succeeded. Or rather, he had continued succeeding until the fateful encounter with the Straw Hat Pirates, when the girl received everything at once. At the same time, Vivi could by no means be called pure, innocent, or naive. It was impossible to preserve such qualities completely while belonging to a criminal organization, especially when working desperately to rise through that organization's hierarchy. No, Vivi looked pure, innocent, and naive only against the background of the Straw Hat family. The girl was entirely capable of killing an enemy, particularly someone like Crocodile. Yet shooting another person from several meters away was one thing; kicking someone's head off and immediately afterward killing a second person by punching an arm straight through his chest was quite another. The sheer amount of blood covering Vivi was enough to justify fainting by itself. For a first killing, such a bloody bacchanalia was obvious overkill. Quite possibly neither Zoro nor Luffy himself had expected this outcome.
At that very moment, Tashigi was already beginning to worry seriously.
"Where is Vivi-sama?" she asked aloud despite herself.
After finishing washing Robin's blood away, she had gone with her to the captain's cabin to choose new clothes, while Vivi had returned to the deck to watch the situation. And now she had disappeared somewhere, leaving a sleeping Karoo behind. Tashigi searched the entire ship from bottom to top but found no trace of the princess. She considered it extremely unlikely that Vivi had suddenly decided to play hide-and-seek, but every other possibility promised nothing good. Of all days, today was certainly not one on which the Princess of Alabasta should leave the ship. Not on Little Garden, where an entire army of subordinates belonging to her Greatest Enemy had gathered. As a Marine lieutenant, Tashigi could not allow anything to happen to the Princess of Alabasta. Nor could she as one of Vivi's instructors. Or as a close friend. In short, she had absolutely no intention of sitting idle while Vivi might be in danger. Having reached that decision, Tashigi headed decisively toward the sleeping Zoro, but immediately slowed beside Robin.
"What are you doing?" the former... hm... temporarily inactive Marine lieutenant asked incredulously.
Tashigi's disbelief had good reason. Robin, now dressed in black trousers and a short-sleeved white shirt, had begun scrubbing the deck. And she was doing it with the complexion of a stale zombie and movements to match. In that condition, she should have been sleeping, not cleaning. Though Tashigi could not say she failed to understand where such a desire might have come from. Or rather, such a 'desire'. She asked the question more because of surprise than anything else. Why would Robin suddenly start scrubbing the ship's deck? And who could have forced her to do it? Both questions were rhetorical.
"I was ordered to clean the ship," Robin replied in a lifeless voice that harmonized perfectly with her stale-zombie appearance.
That answer made Tashigi somewhat uncomfortable. There was nothing she could do here except perhaps help with the cleaning. In the time since Whisky Peak, she had come to understand the 'inner workings' of the abnormal Straw Hat family far better. If anyone could help Robin, it was Nami, but Tashigi was not certain the black-haired woman would want that help. It was entirely possible that cleaning the ship was far better for her than any available alternative. Then again, who could guarantee that the alternative would not come after the cleaning anyway? Tashigi and Vivi knew with certainty that they could always rely on Nami's protection from the rest of the abnormal family, but in Robin's case danger—or 'danger'?—waited for her from every side. And it remained unclear who represented the greatest threat. By default that was usually Luffy for everyone else, but with Robin the situation might be different.
"I... I'll help you in a moment," Tashigi promised after shifting uncertainly in place. "As soon as I find Vivi-sama, we'll both help you."
She did not doubt for an instant that the princess of an entire country would help her former enemy clean a ship. Once they had been enemies; now, as Tashigi knew from personal experience, if one went to the kitchen early in the morning or in the middle of the night, it was easy to find Vivi sleeping wrapped around Robin. The princess even entangled her with arms and legs as though she were a giant octopus that had captured its prey. Much the same could be said of Tashigi herself. Not in the sense that she, like Vivi, slept embracing someone, but in terms of her attitude. Tashigi understood perfectly that Robin was a criminal with twenty years of experience and an enormous bounty for these waters. As a Marine lieutenant, she should have been thinking not about helping Robin clean a pirate ship but about how to send word to the nearest Marine base. Turn in the Hats, Robin, and Crocodile all at once. In fact, Tashigi did not even need to invent anything. She only had to walk into the kitchen and make a call using the large Den Den Mushi. Just a few meters.
Who would stop her now? Eternally sleeping Zoro with his limitless indifference? The girl had no doubt that without a direct order from his captain, he would not stop her even if she asked him to hold the Den Den Mushi while she turned their family over to her superiors. More likely, he would complain that she had woken him without any serious reason and was now trying to make him hold a Den Den Mushi. Zombie-Robin cared about nothing in her current state either, and there was nobody else aboard the Going Merry. An ideal opportunity. Call anyone, say anything, and betray everyone around her as much as she liked. As an active Marine lieutenant, Tashigi was simply obligated to use such a chance. As a lieutenant. As a lieutenant she absolutely was obligated. Which was exactly why she went to sleeping Zoro to ask where Vivi had gone. Protecting nearby members of royal families was also part of her duties, after all. And scrubbing the ship would be far easier with three people.
============================================================
Please Write a review/comments and support with power stones. Also check my other works.
Also if you want to support me, or access to some additional chapters, then check the patre on.com/moctopus