**ONE PIECE FANFICTION: WORLD WALKER**
*The Shadow Monarch's Journey Across Worlds*
---
## Chapter 9 — "What Usopp Knows and What Kuro Forgot"
---
Syrup Village arrived the way gentle places always arrived — without announcement, without drama, green hills rolling down to a quiet harbor, the kind of town that existed in the comfortable certainty that nothing particularly significant would ever happen here.
Arean stepped off the boat and felt the Observation Haki spread outward.
Warm. Settled. Ordinary life moving at ordinary pace.
And underneath it — very faint, very deep — something that didn't belong. Not hostile yet. Not active. The specific emotional quality of something that had been patient for a very long time and was approaching the end of its patience.
*Something is waiting here,* he thought. *Has been waiting for a while.*
He stored it. Said nothing yet. Let the town be what it appeared to be while he gathered more.
Luffy had already found a girl with an orange in her hand and was attempting to negotiate its acquisition through a combination of charm and rubber-limbed persistence. Zoro was looking at the hills with the expression he used when he was trying to determine cardinal directions and finding the exercise unrewarding. Nami — who had come this far with them while maintaining that she was absolutely not a crew member and this was purely a navigational coincidence — was already studying the local map posted at the harbor entrance with professional focus.
Arean walked into town.
---
They heard Usopp before they saw him.
"ONE HUNDRED PIRATES ARE COMING TO THIS VILLAGE."
The voice came from a small rise at the town's edge — loud, committed, delivered with the specific energy of someone who had been doing this for long enough that the performance had its own momentum regardless of the audience's response.
The audience, such as it was, consisted of three elderly men who were sitting outside a shop with the patient resignation of people who had heard this announcement every morning for an extended period and had made their peace with it.
Arean looked up at the figure on the rise.
Usopp was maybe sixteen — a lean, long-nosed boy with an enormous slingshot over his shoulder and an expression of theatrical alarm that was, Arean's Observation Haki noted, not entirely manufactured. There was real anxiety underneath the performance. Not about the hundred pirates — that was clearly fiction. About something else. Something he was performing *over.*
*Interesting,* Supreme Genius noted. *He uses the lie as a container for real feeling. The fiction is load-bearing.*
Luffy had already run up to him with the directness of a missile that had acquired a target.
"Are there really a hundred pirates?" Luffy asked, delighted.
Usopp stared at him. "Yes. A hundred. Very scary. You should leave."
"I want to meet them."
"That's — that's the wrong response."
"Are they strong? How strong? Stronger than a Marine captain?"
Usopp looked at this boy with the rubber-limbed enthusiasm and the straw hat and processed something that clearly didn't fit any category he'd prepared for.
"Who are you?" he said.
"Monkey D. Luffy. I'm going to be King of the Pirates."
Usopp stared.
Then his eyes moved past Luffy to Arean, who had arrived at a more moderate pace and was watching this exchange with quiet attention.
Usopp's gaze was different from most people's. It moved fast — catalogued quickly, with the specific quality of someone who had learned to read situations rapidly because situations had a habit of becoming dangerous if you misread them. It landed on Arean and stayed there slightly longer than it had on anyone else.
"You're real," Usopp said. Not to Luffy. To Arean.
"Usually," Arean said.
"No, I mean—" Usopp gestured vaguely at all of him. "You're the real kind of strong. I can tell." He said it with the matter-of-fact certainty of someone who had developed this particular sense through prolonged exposure to the genuine article. "Your dad was like that."
Arean looked at him. "What?"
"Not your dad." Usopp shook his head quickly. "Mine. My dad. He's a pirate. Sails with Red Hair Shanks." He said the name with the careful casualness of someone trying to sound like it wasn't the most important thing they'd ever said. "He has that. What you have. The real kind."
Arean was still.
*Yasopp,* he thought. *Usopp's father is Yasopp. Who I sat in Partys Bar with ten years ago while Yasopp cleaned his rifle and told me things about wind direction and trajectory.*
"I know your father," Arean said quietly.
Usopp went absolutely still.
The theatrical energy drained out of him completely — like a lamp turned down, the performance layer peeling back to reveal something much younger and much more raw underneath.
"You—" His voice came out different. Smaller. "You've *met* him?"
"Sat with him in Foosha Village. Years ago. He talked about shooting." Arean paused, choosing carefully. "He talked about his son."
It was a small truth. Yasopp had mentioned Usopp once, briefly — the specific wistful quality of someone who carried a name they didn't get to say enough. But it was real, and Usopp's Observation Haki — undeveloped, unconscious, but present in the way it was present in all people who had learned to survive by reading others — knew it was real.
His eyes went bright and wet and he looked away immediately.
"Oh," he said. "Cool. That's — that's cool."
Luffy put his arm around Usopp's shoulders with the complete naturalness of someone who had decided they were friends approximately forty seconds ago and saw no reason to delay the physical expression of this.
"You should join my crew," Luffy said.
"I'm a great warrior of the sea," Usopp said, voice still slightly unsteady. "I have many options."
"Great," Luffy said. "Join my crew."
---
Kaya's mansion sat on the hill above the village with the comfortable authority of old money — well-maintained, surrounded by gardens, looking down at Syrup Village with the benign oversight of something that had been there longer than most things and expected to remain.
Arean felt it before they reached the gate.
The wrong thing he'd sensed when they arrived — the patient waiting quality, the thing that had been biding its time — it was here. Concentrated. Specific. Coming from inside the mansion's grounds.
He stopped walking.
Zoro stopped beside him. "What."
"Someone in there," Arean said quietly. "Not the girl. Someone else." He reached further with his Observation Haki, pressing gently at the shape of the presence. "Patient. Very controlled. Almost invisible emotionally — like they've been suppressing their real nature for so long it's become second nature."
He felt Supreme Genius process this alongside the Observation data.
*Suppressed identity. Long-term patience. High control. Calculating rather than reactive. This is not a simple person.*
"How dangerous?" Zoro asked.
Arean considered honestly.
The presence was controlled enough that direct threat assessment was difficult — like trying to gauge a fire that had been banked, the heat contained rather than radiating. But the *control itself* was a signal. Ordinary people didn't have that kind of suppression. Only people who had trained it, deliberately, over years.
"More than anything we've faced," he said.
Zoro's hand moved to his swords. Not drawing — just touching. Acknowledging.
"Good," Zoro said simply.
---
Klahadore — who was Kuro, who had been Captain Kuro of the Black Cat Pirates before he'd decided that piracy was beneath his intelligence and arranged his own death and hidden in plain sight as a butler for three years — was exactly what Arean's assessment had suggested.
In the controlled social setting of the mansion's sitting room, he was impeccable. Cultured, patient, slightly condescending in the specific way of someone who had decided that most people were beneath their notice but was too disciplined to make this obvious. He deflected Luffy's energy with practiced ease, managed Kaya's fragile health with apparent genuine care, and looked at Arean exactly once with the eyes of someone conducting a rapid and comprehensive assessment.
Arean looked back.
For one second, the masks dropped — both of them — and what exchanged in that look was pure information.
*I know what you are,* Arean's look said. *I know you're hiding something and I know it's significant.*
*I know you're dangerous,* Kuro's look said back. *More than you should be at your age. I've noted it.*
Then both masks went back up, and the conversation continued as though nothing had happened, and Nami was negotiating permission to look at the mansion's navigation charts, and Luffy was eating something that hadn't been offered to him.
But the information had been exchanged.
Walking back down the hill, Zoro fell into step beside Arean.
"The butler," Zoro said.
"Yes."
"You know him."
"I know *of* him." Arean looked at the village spread below them, peaceful in the late afternoon. "His name isn't Klahadore."
A pause.
"What is it?" Zoro asked.
"Kuro," Arean said. "Captain Kuro. Black Cat Pirates." He paused. "He's been waiting for three years to take everything that girl has and disappear."
Zoro was quiet for a moment.
"Tonight?" he asked.
"Soon," Arean said. "Very soon. His patience is ending — I could feel it." He looked at the hill. "He's going to move within days."
"Then we end it first."
"No." Arean shook his head. "We let it play out until the crew is committed. There's someone here who needs to choose something. If we end it before he gets the chance, he never makes the choice."
Zoro looked at him with the evaluating look he used for things he didn't fully understand but was deciding whether to trust.
"The liar kid," Zoro said.
"He's not really lying," Arean said. "He's just telling the truth in the wrong format."
Zoro stared at him.
"That's possibly the strangest thing you've said," Zoro said.
"Give it time," Arean said.
---
The night the Black Cat Pirates came, the air smelled like rain.
Arean was already on the cliff road when they landed — had been there for an hour, having felt the shift in the waiting presence up at the mansion and known the timeline had collapsed. Usopp was there too, having apparently arrived at the same conclusion through completely different means — which was to say he'd heard the ships and come running.
Arean looked at him.
Usopp was terrified. The Observation Haki read it clearly — genuine, deep fear, the kind that lived in the body and made the hands shake. He was shaking slightly right now, standing on this cliff road in the dark with a slingshot and no backup, waiting for a pirate crew to land.
And he was staying.
Not because he wasn't afraid. Because he was and he was staying anyway.
*There it is,* Arean thought. *That's the real thing underneath all the stories.*
"You came alone?" Arean said.
Usopp startled — hadn't heard him in the dark. "I — yes. This is my village. I—" He stopped. Reset. "Yes."
"Scared?"
"Absolutely not," Usopp said, in a voice that was doing a remarkable job of communicating the opposite.
"Good," Arean said.
Usopp blinked. "Good?"
"Courage isn't the absence of fear." Arean looked at the beach where the ships were landing. "It's being afraid and standing on the cliff road anyway." He paused. "You're standing on the cliff road."
Usopp was quiet for a moment.
"My dad stands on cliff roads," he said. Very quietly. "All the time. That's what pirates do."
"Yes," Arean said. "It is."
The Black Cat Pirates came up the road.
---
The crew handled the landing party.
Luffy arrived — because Luffy always arrived, drawn toward conflict with the reliability of a compass finding north — and the beach became a controlled disaster zone in the specific way that Luffy-involved fights became controlled disaster zones. Zoro worked the flanks. Nami, who had come despite herself, managed the chaos with the tactical eye of someone who couldn't help seeing the geometry of a fight even when she was theoretically not involved.
Arean let them handle it.
Because Kuro was coming down from the mansion.
He felt it — the presence that had been patient for three years finally releasing, the banked fire opening, the cold intelligence that had hidden behind a butler's mask dropping all pretense. It hit his Observation Haki like a temperature change — the air going sharper, more dangerous, the quality of something that had been suppressed becoming something that was no longer interested in suppression.
Arean moved up the hill.
He met Kuro on the road above the beach.
In the moonlight, without the mask, Kuro was a different person. The cultured patience was still there — it was too deeply built to disappear entirely — but underneath it was something colder and more honest. The round glasses caught the light. The long fingers rested near the weapons at his wrists — the cat claws, Arean knew, designed for speed rather than power, for the specific fighting style that had made Captain Kuro legendary.
Kuro looked at him.
"The dangerous boy," he said. His voice was different too — stripped of the butler's careful warmth. "I wondered when you'd appear."
"You've been tracking me since the mansion," Arean said.
"Since before. You walked into the village with the awareness of someone twice your age." He tilted his head slightly — the gesture of an intelligence assessing a problem. "What are you?"
"Someone who's been training for this," Arean said simply.
"How old?"
"Eighteen."
Something moved in Kuro's expression. Not quite surprise — he'd clearly already estimated the age. More like a revision of what the age meant.
"Eighteen with that level of haki development," he said quietly. "And that body." The assessment was clinical, entirely professional. "You're not natural."
"I had good teachers," Arean said.
"No," Kuro said. "Teachers don't produce this. I've seen the best the East Blue produces. You're something else." He paused. "It doesn't matter. You're still eighteen. And I spent three years hiding in a village so I could think without interruption. I've had a great deal of time to perfect things."
"I know," Arean said. "That's why I came up the hill instead of staying on the beach."
A pause.
"You wanted the real fight," Kuro said.
"I need the real fight," Arean corrected. "There's a difference."
Kuro looked at him for one more moment.
Then he moved.
---
Captain Kuro was the fastest thing Arean had ever fought.
Not fast the way agility stats were fast — not the clean, measurable speed of someone who had trained their body to its limits. Fast in the specific way of someone who had built a technique around speed as a *philosophy* — the Shakushi, the movement that became so rapid it erased the user from perception, that moved through opponents before they could register the attack.
The first pass happened before Arean consciously processed it.
He felt it coming — Observation Haki firing in the half-second before the movement resolved, the intent spiking like a signal — and moved, but not enough, not fast enough, and Kuro's claws opened a line across his left shoulder that burned immediate and deep.
He was moving before the pain fully registered. Rotation, creating distance, Observation Haki screaming a second warning—
The second pass he dodged completely.
Barely. By a margin that was almost not a margin. But completely.
*The technique removes him from visual tracking,* Supreme Genius processed rapidly, clinical and fast. *But Observation Haki doesn't track visually. It tracks intent. His intent has a shape even inside the Shakushi. Find the shape. Follow the shape.*
He stopped trying to see Kuro.
He *listened.*
Not with his ears. With the expanded awareness of his Observation Haki in full surrender-expansion mode — the water filling every available space, feeling every disturbance, every ripple of intent in the surrounding field.
Kuro moved.
Arean moved with him.
The third pass — Arean's shoulder dropped, his body rotating on the precise axis that Observation Haki had calculated, and Kuro's claws passed through empty space.
Kuro stopped.
Looked at him.
"You're tracking me," he said. The control in his voice was intact but something underneath it had recalibrated. "Inside the technique. How."
"Intent has a shape," Arean said. His shoulder was bleeding steadily. He ignored it. "Even when the body is invisible."
A silence.
Then Kuro attacked without the technique — dropped the Shakushi entirely and came with raw speed and the cat claws working in the rapid alternating patterns of someone who had spent years refining close-range combat into something merciless.
It was better, in a way. More honest. Arean could track it fully now, Observation Haki reading every strike before it landed, Armament coating appearing on his forearms as he blocked and redirected.
The fight was real.
Genuinely, completely real — the first fight of his life where he felt the distance between his current capability and what he was fighting close to zero, where every exchange mattered completely, where a single lapse in attention would end it decisively and not in his favor.
He took hits. Kuro was too fast and too precise for him to avoid everything — three more cuts, one significant one across his ribs that made breathing sharp and immediate. He gave hits back — Armament-coated strikes that registered on Kuro with the specific solidity of hardened haki meeting a body that had no equivalent defense, that made Kuro's breath change, that accumulated.
They moved down the road, trading, the moonlight catching them in pieces.
*He's better than me in pure technique,* Arean assessed cleanly, without panic. *Three years of isolation to perfect his style. The speed is genuine and the precision is extraordinary.*
*But he's been hiding. Three years as a butler. His body has maintained but it hasn't been *tested.* Mine has.*
*Endurance. This fight goes long enough, endurance wins.*
He stopped trying to match Kuro's speed and started managing the fight's *length.* Defensive positioning. Letting Kuro come to him. Spending his own energy efficiently — each Armament coating applied only where needed, each movement the minimum necessary, conserving while Kuro, unused to sustained resistance, spent more freely.
Kuro felt it.
Arean watched it happen in the Observation Haki read — the first flicker of something that wasn't quite frustration but was adjacent to it, the first crack in the absolute cold patience that had defined Kuro's entire approach to life.
He's been in control for three years, Arean thought. Total control. Every variable managed. And now one variable won't behave.
"You're stalling," Kuro said.
"I'm managing," Arean said.
"There's no difference."
"There is," Arean said. "Stalling hopes something changes. Managing knows something will."
Kuro attacked.
Arean took the hit — absorbed it across his Armament-coated forearm, let the force redirect rather than resist, used the momentum to close distance instead of create it, and hit Kuro in the center of his chest with everything.
Full Armament coating. Both legs planted. Every stat point in Strength behind it.
Kuro flew backward.
Hit the road hard. Slid. Stopped.
Didn't get up immediately.
Arean stood breathing — his shoulder burning, his ribs protesting every inhale, three other cuts making their presence known in the specific way injuries did after adrenaline started tapering.
Kuro pushed himself up slowly.
The glasses were gone. His hair had come loose. The cold intelligence in his eyes was still there but it was looking at Arean differently now — not reassessing threat level, but doing something more fundamental. Reassessing category.
"What are you," he said again. The same question from the beginning, but different now. Genuine now.
"I told you," Arean said. "Someone who's been training for this."
Kuro got to his feet.
He was going to come again — Arean could feel it in the intent, the pride of someone who had defined themselves by being the smartest and most capable person in every room they'd ever entered refusing to accept a conclusion it hadn't chosen.
He came again.
And Arean, whose Observation Haki had been reading him for the entire fight and had now mapped every pattern and tendency and habit he had, was already moving before Kuro's first step completed.
He hit him four times.
Clean. Precise. Each strike placed with the surgical accuracy of Supreme Genius and Observation Haki working in complete concert — not the hardest he could hit, but exactly hard enough, exactly where it mattered, the accumulated damage of the entire fight compressing into four final points.
Kuro went down.
This time he didn't get up.
The road was quiet except for Arean's breathing and the distant sounds of the beach fight resolving below.
Then the status window arrived.
[ COMBAT VICTORY — CAPTAIN KURO ]
[ Opponent Class: Named Pirate — Legendary East Blue Captain ]
[ Former Bounty: Significant ]
[ Three years of isolated perfection ]
[ Base EXP: 1,200 ]
[ Named Pirate Bonus: x1.2 ]
[ Legendary Class Bonus: x1.5 ]
[ Sustained Combat Bonus (length/difficulty): x1.3 ]
TOTAL EXP GAINED: +2,808
Running Total: 2,889 / 5,000
[ !!! LEVEL UP: 20 ]
[ !!! LEVEL UP: 20 ]
[ LEVEL 20 ACHIEVED ]
╔══════════════════════════════════════════════════════╗
║ !!! MILESTONE SKILL UNLOCKED !!! ║
╠══════════════════════════════════════════════════════╣
║ ║
║ RULER'S AUTHORITY ║
║ ║
║ Command shadows at any distance. ║
║ No range limitation. ║
║ No line of sight required. ║
║ ║
║ Secondary Effect (Passive): ║
║ Monarch's Presence — ambient authority aura. ║
║ Those nearby unconsciously recognize ║
║ something sovereign in the host. ║
║ Effect scales with level. ║
║ Current intensity: Subtle. ║
║ ║
║ The King does not need to be present ║
║ to rule his kingdom. ║
╚══════════════════════════════════════════════════════╝
He felt it arrive.
Not like Shadow Extraction had arrived — that had been a door opening, cold air from a deeper place. This was different. This was something settling. A quality of authority that moved outward from his center like ripples on still water, faint and ambient, the specific feeling of something that had always been his nature becoming something he could now consciously hold.
The fourteen shadows in his shadow space — dormant, waiting — responded immediately.
He felt each of them with perfect clarity. Not just their presence — their position. Vael, three hundred meters below on the beach road. Suri, in the shadow space beside her. Each of the fourteen, mapped with absolute precision, connected by threads of will that had no length limit, no distance that could sever them.
Arise, he thought. Not spoke — thought. Directed at Vael specifically.
Three hundred meters away, in the darkness of the cliff road below, Vael rose.
He felt it happen. Felt the shadow peel from the ground at his silent command, felt it stand, felt it await the next instruction — all of it without a word spoken, without Arean moving from where he stood over Kuro's unconscious form.
Return, he thought.
Vael descended.
Arean stood in the moonlight and held the threads of fourteen shadows in his mind simultaneously and felt the shape of what Ruler's Authority actually was — not just range, not just convenience. It was sovereignty. The particular quality of a will large enough that distance was irrelevant to it, that his army was his army whether he was beside them or on the other side of the world.
The Monarch's Presence pulsed once, gently, outward.
Below, on the beach, he felt something curious happen in his Observation Haki — several of the Black Cat Pirates who had been fighting Luffy's crew faltered slightly, the way people faltered when something moved through them that they couldn't name. Not fear. Something older than fear. The instinctive recognition of something in the hierarchy above them, felt in the blood before the mind caught up.
Arean looked at his hand.
Then he looked at Kuro.
The shadow stretched long behind the fallen captain in the moonlight.
He thought about Level 30. About Shadow Sharing. About what Kuro's shadow would carry — the Shakushi technique, the speed, the cold precision of three years of isolated perfection. Growing, with no cap, in the shadow space. Becoming something beyond what Kuro himself had achieved.
Not yet, he told himself again.
But this time not yet felt very close to soon.
He crouched down beside the unconscious man.
"You were good," he said quietly, to someone who couldn't hear him. "You were genuinely, seriously good. If I'd fought you two years ago it would have gone differently." He paused. "I'll carry that forward."
He stood up.
Walked down the hill toward the sounds of his crew.
Usopp was sitting on the cliff road when Arean passed, watching the beach with the expression of someone who had just discovered something true about themselves and was still processing the weight of it.
He had fought. Arean had felt it through the Observation Haki even while managing Kuro — Usopp on the cliff road, slingshot in hand, genuinely terrified, genuinely staying. The crew below had handled the pirates but Usopp had stood on his road and held it.
He looked up when Arean approached.
"You're bleeding," Usopp said.
"Occupational reality," Arean said.
"Did you—" Usopp looked up the hill. "Klahadore?"
"Kuro," Arean said. "His name was Kuro. He's down."
Usopp was quiet for a moment.
"I fought tonight," he said. Not proudly. Carefully, like someone measuring whether it was true.
"I know," Arean said. "I felt it."
"I was scared."
"I know that too."
Usopp looked at his hands. "My dad would have — he wouldn't have been scared."
"Your dad," Arean said, "has been scared on every cliff road he's ever stood on." He looked at the boy. "The difference between your father and someone who isn't a pirate isn't the absence of fear. It's what they do with it." He paused. "You know what you did with it tonight."
Usopp's jaw was doing something complicated. His eyes were bright again, the way they'd gone bright when Arean had mentioned Yasopp.
"Yeah," he said quietly. "I guess I do."
Luffy appeared at the bottom of the road, already shouting something about meat and also about Usopp joining the crew, the two topics delivered with equal urgency and apparently considered equally important.
Usopp looked down at him.
Then he looked at Arean.
"He really going to be King of the Pirates?" Usopp asked.
Arean thought about Luffy at seven, declaring it to the ocean. Thought about the straw hat in the harbor light. Thought about ten years of watching that declaration become more true every day rather than less.
"More certain than anything I know," Arean said.
Usopp took a breath.
Stood up straighter.
"CAPTAIN USOPP," he announced, to nobody in particular, "will be joining this crew."
Luffy's cheer from the beach was loud enough to probably wake the village.
Arean smiled and started walking down toward his crew.
Later — much later, when the village was quiet and everyone was sleeping — Arean sat alone at the cliff road's edge.
He reached into his shadow space.
Sent the command outward — not to any specific shadow, but to all of them, the Ruler's Authority carrying it without effort across whatever distances separated them.
Arise.
They came.
All fourteen, rising from the darkness around him — peeling upward from the ground in sequence, the shadows solidifying in the still night air, the cold dark smoke trailing from each of them as they separated from the earth. The purple eyes opening last, one set after another, until fourteen points of cold light surrounded him in the darkness.
Arean looked at each of them in the moonlight.
Named each one quietly.
Felt each thread — perfect, clear, sovereign, his.
Then he looked up the hill toward where Kuro lay unconscious.
Ten more levels, he thought.
Ten more levels and I start collecting in earnest.
The shadows waited around him, patient as the dark between stars, and the night was very quiet, and somewhere below Luffy was probably still awake eating something, and the crew was growing, and the road ahead was exactly as long and dangerous and extraordinary as it had always promised to be.
He was ready for every inch of it.
╔══════════════════════════════════════════════════════╗
║ STATUS WINDOW ║
╠══════════════════════════════════════════════════════╣
║ Name : Arean │ Level : 20 ║
║ Age : 18 │ EXP : 289 / 6,000 ║
╠══════════════════════════════════════════════════════╣
║ STATS ║
║ Strength : 78 │ Agility : 91 ║
║ Endurance : 84 │ Perception : 87 ║
║ Mana : ∞ │ Mana Control: 42 ║
║ Haki (Obs.) : 47 │ Haki (Arm.) : 43 ║
║ Haki (Con.) : 0 │ Instinct : 52 ║
╠══════════════════════════════════════════════════════╣
║ SKILLS ║
║ ▸ Supreme Genius [ERROR TIER] — ACTIVE ║
║ ▸ Shadow Extraction — ACTIVE (Lv. 11) ║
║ ▸ Ruler's Authority — NEWLY ACTIVE ║
║ └ Range: Unlimited ║
║ └ Monarch's Presence: Subtle (scaling) ║
║ ▸ Shadow Sharing — LOCKED (Lv. 30) ║
║ ▸ Shadow Exchange — LOCKED (Lv. 40) ║
╠══════════════════════════════════════════════════════╣
║ SHADOW ARMY: 14/∞ ║
║ All threads — clear, sovereign, unlimited range ║
╠══════════════════════════════════════════════════════╣
║ CREW ║
║ Luffy — Captain ║
║ Zoro — Swordsman ║
║ Nami — Navigator (she said yes eventually) ║
║ Usopp — "Captain Usopp" (we let him have it) ║
╠══════════════════════════════════════════════════════╣
║ NEXT MILESTONE: Level 30 — Shadow Sharing ║
║ Powerful shadows ahead. ║
║ The collection begins soon. ║
╚══════════════════════════════════════════════════════╝
[ END OF CHAPTER 9 ]