"This island should've been called Big Fuckup instead of Little Garden," the equally gloomy Zoro joked darkly. "Except for Usopp, everyone else seems determined to disgrace our family as badly as possible today. Sanji has spent half an hour unable to beat some weakling you could kill with one strike. Ryu nearly died because of his own stupidity, and Yosaku outright lost because of his. I can't imagine what Luffy is going to say."
Zoro was somewhat unfair to himself there, because elsewhere on the island even Luffy himself had no idea what to say. Sanji, Johnny, and Yosaku had managed to distinguish themselves today in a way they never had before.
"You know, if you save Yosaku and help Sanji, that might actually be the best possible option." Zoro's face suddenly acquired an expression that small children and pregnant women should never have been allowed to see. "I'm already looking forward to seeing their faces when you do it."
The young man was cruel in his anger and disappointment. For Sanji and Yosaku, any hellish training and any amount of Luffy's psychological torment would be a thousand times preferable to Tashigi intervening. Not now. Not in a situation like this. Otherwise their pride would go straight down the toilet. Death itself would be preferable. Zoro personally would have chosen death, but Luffy certainly would not have allowed it. Nor would he allow Sanji and Yosaku to die, so the two men would spend a very long time trying to 'wash away' the shame. Luffy himself could not have invented a better punishment. Zoro had definitely acquired a taste for psychological games.
"All right, follow me," he tossed out, then jumped ashore without waiting for a response.
After a slight delay, Tashigi landed beside him. Like Zoro himself, she always carried her sword, so she required no preparation. White shirt, black trousers, boots, sword in hand, and glasses on top of her head, though those were now more a tribute to tradition and a reminder of the past. With an entire medical team and a cheating captain available, it would have been foolish not to use their help. So Zoro had. In the past, without her glasses, Tashigi could not always distinguish a post from a person—which had irritated the green-haired swordsman terribly—but now she needed them only for especially small print.
"Are you going to help the guys?" Tashigi asked toward the back of the young man already heading into the jungle.
"I'm going to get a good look at their humiliated faces."
Zoro truly was cruel. On the other hand, from the beginning the Straw Hat family had operated on the principle that whenever one of them stumbled, everyone else mocked them until they developed complete immunity to teasing on the subject.
"By the way, you still haven't answered why Luffy-san is training Vivi," the girl reminded the swordsman a little later, once they had gone fairly deep into the jungle.
"And you still don't want to think for yourself?" Zoro asked without turning around.
"No. Especially not right now."
"I'm not sure what his original plans were, but now I can tell exactly what he's decided to do."
Before finishing, the young man had to be distracted by an attack from a suicidal tiger. Or rather, 'distracted' was generous. He simply stopped and stood still while Tashigi did all the dirty work, instantly appearing in the path of the house-sized tiger attacking them. It was an unfair battle that ended in a single strike.
"So what has Luffy-san decided?" the girl asked, sliding her sword back into its sheath and turning toward Zoro.
"Isn't it obvious? He's going to turn Vivi into the coolest queen in the entire history of Alabasta. Luffy has never settled for anything less."
Hearing that answer, Tashigi involuntarily stopped. It was not that the answer was particularly obvious or shocking, but it directed her thoughts down a very specific path. If Vivi was being trained so she could become a worthy queen, then why had Tashigi herself been trained? What was she supposed to become? Tashigi truly knew far more about her own problems than she showed those around her.
"Catch up!" Zoro called from farther ahead.
Tashigi had no choice but to obey. Yet after walking only a couple dozen steps behind him, she froze again when she saw a mangled human body ahead. The blood sprayed everywhere had not yet coagulated, so the girl's first thought was of the tiger she had killed. She assumed it had attacked and torn the person apart, but only a few minutes later she was forced to revise that opinion. Tashigi realized the tiger had attacked and killed nobody; it had merely torn apart a person someone else had killed recently. She reached that conclusion after continuing onward and soon seeing another body, this one intact, then another, and another. Before long she stood at the edge of a small clearing literally covered in corpses. Fairly fresh corpses, already being feasted upon by swarms of insects, hundreds of birds of every possible kind, and dozens of different predators. Hundreds upon hundreds of bloody bodies lay everywhere the eye could see, while the scent of blood hung so thickly in the air that the characteristic metallic taste seemed to appear in her mouth. The jungle buzzed, chirped, cracked, growled, and chewed, rapidly consuming the buffet spread before it. Tashigi had never in her life seen anything simultaneously more horrifying and disgusting. Her feet seemed to root themselves into the ground, refusing to move farther.
"This is what I was talking about," Zoro said beside her. He had deliberately stopped at the clearing's edge to wait. "Despite all my training, you're still completely green. This is what the aftermath of almost any serious battle looks like, and it mustn't frighten you. A sight like this can disgust you, make you angry, or enrage you, but it should never create fear. Ideally, you shouldn't feel anything at all. Treat it like an ordinary part of the job, even if it's an unpleasant one."
"...And you?" the girl asked quietly. "What emotions do you feel?"
"Do you think they called me the 'Pirate Killer' for no reason?" Zoro raised an eyebrow in a rhetorical question. "In East Blue, our family saw scenes like this almost every day, just on a smaller scale. Pirate crews usually range from a few dozen people to several hundred. Most battles happened aboard ships, so afterward there were always piles of corpses and decks covered in blood. We almost always sold the captured ships, meaning every time we had to get rid of the bodies and scrub the decks clean. When you spend several years doing things like that, blood and corpses begin to feel like daily routine. The important thing is knowing how to relax, otherwise you risk turning into a soulless monster. I prefer alcohol and training. Ryu and Yosaku disappear into brothels. Sanji unwinds in the kitchen. But none of that would probably help us much if we didn't have our family. Especially if our family didn't have Nami."
"Nami?" Tashigi asked in surprise. "What does she have to do with it?"
"Do you even understand who killed all these people?" Zoro asked instead of answering, nodding toward the corpse-covered clearing.
"Nami did all this?!!" the girl stared at him in disbelief.
"What?!" Zoro immediately stared back at her. "No, of course not! What does Nami have to do with it?! God, woman, are you planning to use your head at all today or not?!"
Thoroughly embarrassed, Tashigi lowered her gaze to the ground.
"What else was I supposed to think when you answered so unclearly?" she muttered quietly to herself. "You could've just explained everything immediately instead of asking another question."
The longer the girl lived among the Straw Hats and the more she interacted with them, the more clearly she understood that direct answers were not popular in their family. Usopp and, to some extent, Sanji aside, she almost never managed to receive a direct answer immediately. Practically any question, especially one unrelated to training, was answered with another question. The girl had begun to suspect they were simply psychologically incapable of giving direct answers. The recent conversation about Vivi was yet another confirmation of that fact, and now here they were again.
"Instead of muttering resentfully under your breath, try finally turning your brain on," Zoro advised, having heard her quiet voice perfectly well.
Contrary to his words, Tashigi immediately began muttering under her breath again, only now her voice was even quieter and the contents considerably less polite. Only after venting a little did she name the two most likely possibilities.
"Ryu and Yosaku? They killed everyone here?"
"Does this look like their work?"
There it was again, another question from Zoro. Predictably, however, it made the girl think hard and also look at the recent massacre from another angle. The moment she managed to abstract away from the blood, corpses, and creatures eating them, the truth immediately opened itself before her. A truth Tashigi was incapable of believing. Any other truth, but not this one. Yet only people could lie, not facts. Facts could be fabricated or misinterpreted, but facts themselves always remained facts. And now, no matter how the girl tried to interpret them or convince herself they were impossible, they stubbornly insisted on their own conclusion. Worst of all, they did not look fabricated either. And what would be the point of faking them? Certainly not for her.
Anyone who looked more closely at the clearing—though there was hardly any need to look closely, because it was perfectly obvious—would immediately notice that the bodies of the dead Baroque Works agents lay everywhere except the very center. In fact, the largest piles of bodies surrounded that corpse-free center. Their positions suggested that at first all the dead had been trying to reach the person standing in the middle of the clearing, and then, later, had done everything possible to flee from that same person. The wounds on their bodies did not resemble injuries left by bladed weapons either. In reality, everything had been obvious from the beginning. The characteristic wounds, their variety, and most importantly the range of the attacks combined with their surgical precision. Among all members of the family, only one person fit every one of those factors. In theory. In reality, Tashigi was ready to ask someone to stop the Earth so she could get off.
"But that's impossible..." the pale-faced girl whispered. "How is that possible?" she asked, shifting her disbelieving gaze to Zoro's face. "Is something like that even possible? It isn't possible, right?"
When a person repeats essentially the same question over and over, it is a reliable sign of shock. Tashigi was not repeating precisely the same words, but she was definitely shocked by the truth that had fallen onto her.
"What exactly seems impossible to you?"
This was definitely Luffy's fault. Because of his immeasurable love for violating the brains of everyone around him, he sometimes could not give a direct answer even to the simplest question. Someone could ask him the time and end up stuck beside him for an hour, then leave without a clear answer and with their brain folds tied into knots. Or smoothed completely flat. It would probably have been strange if that behavior had not rubbed off on the rest of the family. The funniest part was that once upon a time this trait of Luffy's had irritated every one of them terribly—it still did sometimes—and now a good half of the family was no better than he was.
"I don't believe Usopp did this!" Tashigi declared.
"If not him, then who else?" Zoro asked with interest.
"Luffy-san!" came the immediate answer. "He's definitely capable of something like this!"
"Fair," the swordsman was forced to admit. "Luffy really is capable of this, especially if he prepares in advance and puts in some effort."
"See!"
"It was still Usopp."
"I don't believe you!"
Zoro gave the girl beside him a suspicious look.
"I can't tell whether you're trying to piss me off today or what."
"But Usopp couldn't have done something like this!" Tashigi's voice acquired openly tearful notes, and her face became almost pleading. "He's completely different! He isn't like you, Ryu, or Yosaku! And he isn't strong enough to do this! Usopp isn't capable of something like this!"
It became obvious to the swordsman that his troublesome student was trying to retreat into complete denial of reality simply to preserve the integrity of her worldview, distorted though it already was. At the moment, she would gladly continue deceiving herself—or, put differently, continue burying her head in the sand—all for the sake of preserving the familiar picture of the world in her mind. Zoro could not say he failed to understand her or that such an irrational desire was foreign to him, but what was the point of postponing the inevitable? Sooner or later, reality had to be accepted for what it was. Long ago, what felt like an eternity now, when Zoro had believed with all his heart that he was already prepared to fight the World's Strongest Swordsman, Dracule Mihawk, his encounter with Luffy had become a serious trial. In the end, reality was always merciless toward illusions.
"Believe it or don't, but the facts are that Usopp killed all these people." Zoro followed reality's example and showed no mercy either. "After all these months, have you really still failed to understand what our family is? There are no normal people in it."
"It's just... anyone but Usopp... he's so... he's... so..."
Tashigi wanted to say 'non-confrontational', 'cowardly', and 'good', but in the end not one of those words made it past her lips. A clearing full of corpses simply would not allow her to say such things together with the long-nosed young man's name anymore.
"Let me guess. All this time you thought he was a weak, cowardly liar?" Zoro suggested with a smirk.
"I wouldn't say exactly—"
"You were right!" the young man interrupted before she could finish.
"What?!" Tashigi's jaw dropped.
A weak, cowardly liar certainly could not slaughter this many bounty hunters at once.
"Usopp really is weak. He really is a huge coward and an even bigger liar. But at the same time, he's the most abnormal member of our family."
"What do you mean?" Tashigi did not understand. "If he's weak and a coward, then how did he do..." Without finishing, the girl gestured toward the clearing before them.
"It's all Luffy's fault."
"Luffy-san? What does he have to do with it?" Tashigi failed to understand again. "You mean he helped him?!" realization struck immediately afterward.
"No. Luffy simply did something to him before we ever met you, and the result is what you're looking at now."
"Did something?" The girl looked at Zoro in confusion. "What did he do?"
Personally, she could not even imagine what one had to do to a weak and cowardly person to produce a result like this.
"How the hell should I know what he did?" the young man answered honestly. "We've been trying to figure it out ourselves for almost half a year. Whatever Luffy did to him, though, our Usopp now has serious problems with his head. On ordinary days it isn't noticeable, but when things become serious, the result appears... and the result is right in front of you."
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