Argentus didn't hesitate. Didn't waste breath on a scream.
He spun on his heel, digging his boots into the soft earth, and exploded into a sprint.
Behind him, the amphitheater erupted. The rhythmic drumming vanished, replaced by a cacophony of shrieks and the thunder of hundreds of bare feet slapping against the dirt.
Thwip. Thwip. Thwip.
Arrows sliced through the foliage around him. One grazed his cheek, leaving a stinging line of heat. Another embedded itself in a tree trunk mere inches from his ear, the feathers still vibrating from impact.
"Dinner! Dinner! Dinner!"
The chant was closing in. They were fast—unnaturally fast in their home terrain. They swung through the trees and vaulted over roots like monkeys.
Argentus didn't run in a straight line. That was how prey died.
He zigzagged. He used his Garp-hardened body to plow through thorn bushes that would have stopped a normal man. He vaulted over fallen logs, breathing controlled, mind icy.
I can't outrun them forever. They know every root of this island.
He needed to vanish.
He saw a ravine ahead—a sharp drop-off leading to a muddy riverbank below. A twenty-foot drop into darkness.
He didn't slow down. He launched himself into the void.
He hit the mud with a wet, heavy thud, rolling instantly to disperse the impact. The mud was thick, smelling of rot and decay.
Perfect.
He scrambled backward, forcing himself into the hollowed-out space beneath the massive, exposed roots of a giant mangrove tree. The roots formed a cage, obscured by hanging moss and darkness.
Argentus pressed his back against the wet wood. He grabbed handfuls of the foul-smelling river mud and smeared it over his face, his arms, his silver hair.
He drew his knife. He held his breath.
Seconds later, the tribe arrived at the ridge above.
He could see their silhouettes against the moonlight filtering through the canopy. They stopped at the edge of the drop, their antenna-hair twitching. They sniffed the air, their bulbous noses quivering.
"Where..." one hissed.
A tribesman jumped down, landing in the mud just three meters from where Argentus was curled in the roots.
Argentus didn't blink.
The tribesman stepped closer. He held a bone spear. He poked at a bush near the roots.
Argentus tightened his grip on his knife. If the spear comes one foot closer, I'll have to sever his achilles tendon and silence him before he screams.
The spear tip stabbed into the mud, inches from Argentus's boot.
The tribesman paused. He sniffed loudly.
But the stench of the river swamp—and the mud covering Argentus—masked his scent.
"Gone," the tribesman grunted. "Beach. Check the beach."
The figure turned and scrambled back up the ravine wall with spider-like agility. The group above chattered in their strange tongue, then turned and thundered back toward the coast.
Argentus let out a breath that shook slightly.
He waited another ten minutes, counting his heartbeats, before he moved.
The mud on his skin had dried into a cracking, grey crust, itching and pulling at his scars.
Argentus didn't wash it off. Didn't even wipe his face.
He'd dragged himself through the undergrowth for hours, moving away from the drums, away from the coast, until he found a small fissure in the rock face—a shallow cave hidden behind a curtain of hanging vines.
He collapsed onto the cold stone floor. His lungs burned. His legs felt like lead. The adrenaline that had carried him across the ravine finally drained away, leaving him hollowed out.
He lay on his back, staring up at the jagged ceiling of the cave.
Outside, the jungle was alive. Insects buzzed. Night birds called. And in the distance, the faint, rhythmic thrum of the drums continued—the heartbeat of a tribe that were the masters of this island.
Argentus listened to it.
Doom-doom-doom.
It was the sound of predators celebrating. The sound of creatures who had never been hunted.
He lay there for a long time, breathing slowing, silver eyes tracking a spider weaving a web in the corner.
They chased me, he thought. Like a rabbit.
The thought tasted sour. It tasted like weakness. It tasted like the boy who used to hide and steal food in Oakhaven village.
Slowly, the corner of his mouth twitched.
It wasn't a grimace of pain. It was a twitch of amusement.
The twitch grew. It stretched across his mud-caked face, revealing his teeth. It wasn't the smile of a sane person. It was the jagged, feral grin of someone who had always fought and survived from the day he was born.
A low, dry chuckle escaped his throat. It bounced off the cave walls, sounding entirely out of place in the dark.
"Run?" he whispered to the spider.
He sat up. The exhaustion didn't leave his body, but his mind overrode it. He looked at his hands—scarred, dirty, lethal.
"I am Argentus D. Drake," he murmured, the grin widening until it reached his eyes, making them burn with terrifying light. "I don't run."
He reached for his knife. He tested the edge against his thumb. It drew a thin line of blood. Sharp.
"They have numbers," he whispered, voice dropping to a cold, jagged edge. "But they're loud and stupid."
He stood up. He rolled his neck, cracking the stiffness out of his spine.
He thought of his mother's dying words. The world eats the weak. It devours the poor. It spits out the kind.
He thought of Garp's training. True power is imposing your will on the world.
He thought of Dragon's words. The strong do not ask. They take.
"I've decided not to run anymore," he declared to the darkness. "I'm going to hunt every single one of them."
He stepped toward the cave entrance, then paused.
No. Not hunt. That's still reactive.
His grin widened.
I'm going to exterminate them.
Day 1: Reconnaissance
For the first twenty-four hours, Argentus did not sleep.
Instead, he watched.
From the high vantage point of a strangler fig, he mapped the island—not on parchment, but into the fibers of his muscles. He memorized the topography. To the north, the river currents were violent, a death sentence for a swimmer. To the south, a sulfur vent spewed yellow, choking gas—a dead zone where nothing grew.
The sulfur. It smelled of rotten eggs and brimstone, strong enough to burn the nose.
Perfect, he thought. A blind spot.
The sun rose, piercing the canopy in shafts of humid light. Argentus shifted his position, silver eyes tracking movement on the game trail below.
They came in a line. Five of them.
The Kumate.
Seen from this close, they were hideous caricatures of humanity. Their striped shirts were stained with grease and dried blood. Their bulbous pink noses twitched constantly, expanding and contracting like bellows, sucking in the scent of the forest.
Argentus noted the leader. His antenna-hair was significantly longer than the others, bound with a piece of blue coral. He walked in front, barking guttural orders, slapping the trees with the flat of his spear. The others flinched when he moved.
He watched their patrol pattern. They stopped at the same stream to drink at noon. They took the same narrow path between two massive boulders at dusk.
That path is a fatal mistake.
Day 2: Preparation
Argentus waited for them to pass, vanishing into the foliage. Once the sound of their footsteps faded, he dropped from the tree.
He moved to the narrow path between the boulders. The earth here was soft, damp loam.
He drew his knife.
He didn't dig quickly—he dug carefully. He carved out a rectangular pit, three feet deep. He worked in silence, placing the displaced dirt onto a tarp of large leaves so he could carry it away and dump it in the river. No fresh piles of earth to give him away.
Next came the bamboo.
He cut twelve stalks. He whittled the tips until they were sharper than needles. He didn't just leave them green—he hardened the tips over a tiny, smokeless fire he built deep in a hollow log, turning the wood as hard as iron.
He planted them at the bottom of the pit, angling them inward.
Gravity does the work, he thought, wiping sweat from his brow. I just provide the invitation.
He covered the pit with a lattice of thin twigs, then layered leaves and moss over it until the ground looked undisturbed. He finished by sprinkling a handful of dry dirt over the top to match the surroundings.
It was invisible.
Argentus retreated, climbing thirty feet up into the canopy of a mahogany tree overlooking the trap. He wedged himself into the fork of a branch, checked his iron spear, and waited.
Night fell. The jungle chorus began—the insects, the frogs, and the distant, maddening thrum of the drums from the cannibal village.
Argentus didn't mind the drums anymore.
They were just noise. And noise couldn't hurt him.
Day 3: First Blood
The sky began to lighten. Gray turned to lavender. Lavender turned to the bloody orange of dawn.
Snap.
A twig broke in the distance.
Then came the voices. The guttural, wet speech of the Kumate.
Argentus gripped his spear. His face, caked in dry gray mud, was a mask of stone. Only his eyes moved, shifting to the narrow path between the boulders.
The patrol was coming. The same five men. The leader with the blue coral in his hair was in front, picking his teeth with a fish bone, stepping confidently toward the patch of moss that looked exactly like solid ground.
Argentus leaned forward, breath held in his chest.
The leader's foot found the center of the trap.
For a fraction of a second, the moss held. Then, with the dry snap of breaking kindling, the illusion of solid earth disintegrated.
There was no time to scream. Gravity snatched the Kumate leader into the earth.
THWACK-SQUELCH.
The sound was wet and horrific—the unmistakable noise of meat being pierced by wood. The leader hit the bottom of the pit, the hardened bamboo stakes driving through his thigh, his stomach, and his chest. His breath left him in a gurgling wheeze as blood instantly began to pool around the spikes.
The four remaining tribesmen froze. Their identical faces contorted in a synchronized mask of shock. They stared at the hole where their commander had been just a heartbeat ago, their bulbous noses twitching frantically, smelling the sudden, overwhelming copper scent of death.
"Up!" one of them shrieked, pointing a trembling finger at the canopy.
He was fast. But Argentus was faster.
He dropped from the mahogany branch twenty feet above, plummeting like a stone, knees tucked, iron spear held point-down.
He landed directly on the shoulders of the second tribesman.
CRACK.
The impact was devastating. The tribesman's spine compressed instantly under the force, his neck snapping with a sound like a pistol shot. He crumpled to the ground, Argentus riding him down into the dirt.
Three left.
Argentus rolled off the dead body, coming up in a crouch. He was covered in gray mud, silver eyes burning like coals in a skull.
The third tribesman roared, thrusting a bone-tipped spear at Argentus's chest.
Argentus didn't retreat. He stepped inside the guard. Garp's training took over—not the flashy techniques of the Marines, but the brutal efficiency of a brawler. He slapped the spear shaft aside with his left hand and drove his right palm into the man's throat.
The tribesman gagged, dropping his weapon, clutching his crushed windpipe. Argentus spun, driving a heavy elbow into the man's temple. The cannibal dropped like a sack of grain.
Two left.
Panic broke the hive mind. The remaining two looked at the pit, at the broken bodies, and then at the mud-covered boy.
They turned to run.
"Mistake," Argentus whispered.
He grabbed the bone spear dropped by the third man. He didn't know how to throw with elegance, but he knew how to throw with power. He launched it at the retreating back of the one on the left.
The spear flew true, catching the cannibal in the calf. He went down screaming, tumbling into the underbrush.
Argentus ignored him. He chased after the last one.
The final tribesman was fast, scrambling over roots, breath coming in ragged gasps. He reached for a vine to swing across a small gully.
He felt a hand clamp onto his ankle.
Argentus didn't just pull—he yanked with the strength that had dragged boulders through the surf. He ripped the tribesman from the air and slammed him into the trunk of an ironwood tree.
THUD.
The air left the man's lungs. He slid down the bark, dazed, looking up with wide, terrified eyes.
Argentus stood over him, blocking out the morning sun.
The tribesman opened his mouth to scream.
Argentus's knife flashed once.
Silence.
He walked back to the injured one and ended it with a single, efficient strike.
Silence returned to the jungle. The birds began to sing again, indifferent to the carnage below.
Argentus stood in the center of the clearing, surrounded by bodies. He looked at his hands—coated in mud and blood.
He didn't feel guilt. He didn't feel triumph.
He felt... calm.
This was survival. This was the law of the jungle. The strong ate the weak.
And he refused to be weak ever again.
Argentus vanished into the foliage, leaving the bodies for the animals to feast on.
Four patrols to go, he thought, climbing back into the canopy. Then I'll deal with the main camp.
He looked toward the center of the island, where the drums still beat their endless rhythm.
"I'm coming," he whispered to the wind. "And when I do, you'll learn what it means to be hunted."
(END OF CHAPTER)
"Can't wait to see what happens in the next episode of Drag.....chapter of One Piece: World domination?
You don't have to wait! I have already released advance chapters on Patreon. Join the Epic tier today to binge-read the upcoming arc right now and leave the cliffhangers behind.
Special thanks to all my EPIC members and,
MYTH: Asaf Montgomery
MYTH: Dutchviking
MYTH: Robert Hernandez
MYTH: Kevin Boutte jr.
patreon.com/xxSUPxx