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The filthy, badly battered princess was not merely covered in blood. She was sitting in a pool of her own blood. Never mind the minor bruises, cuts, and scrapes—a piece of wood as thick as a grown man's arm had pierced straight through her. Her ash-gray face, sunken eyes, sweat-covered forehead, ragged breathing, and the blood flowing from her mouth all indicated that she had only minutes left to live.
"…Don't tell me that slowly fading 'voice' near you belongs to her?"
"Yeah."
"Ah, shit! My billion berries! Why did you kill her? Couldn't you have predicted her value in advance?! Idiots! So much money!"
"After that, just try saying one more word about my 'female logic'!" Nami did not miss her opportunity.
"What other kind could you possibly have? Male logic? Animal logic?"
"Luffy-aniki, we didn't lay a finger on that girl!" Yosaku hurried to intervene in the emerging argument and clear himself of the baseless accusation at the same time. "Judging by the bloody trail, she most likely crawled here straight from the building where the party was held… Who destroyed that building?"
"That damned Zoro!" Luffy instantly found himself a new culprit. "My billion! Can the money still be saved?"
"She's been run through by practically an entire tree trunk!" Johnny growled. He had crouched beside the girl and was now examining the wound. "The surprising thing is that she's still alive. Anyone else would have kicked the bucket long ago."
As though Vivi had only been waiting for someone to notice her, she whispered with the last of her strength:
"S-save me…" Her voice was so faint that it could barely be heard amid the Hell around them. At that moment, Vivi no longer cared whom she begged for help. Nearly limitless terror had taken hold of her. She did not want to die! Hunters, pirates, or demons—it did not matter, so long as they could help. "P-please… save… please…" Her tears ran down her cheeks and chin, mixed with blood, and dripped ceaselessly onto her chest. "I… don't… want… to… die…"
Of everyone present, only Nami's face darkened slightly. Killing someone was a hundred times easier for her than refusing to save them.
"Well?" Luffy persisted. "Law is an awesome doctor!"
"Only if he has a spare liver, kidneys, ten meters of intestine, and about five liters of blood."
Johnny was exaggerating slightly, but not by much. Vivi truly had suffered horrific injuries.
"Some people don't even have five liters of blood in them!" Luffy absolutely refused to part with his billion.
"I don't know about that," Yosaku said, shaking his head. "Looks like she's spilled at least twenty."
At that moment Vivi made one final, desperate attempt to call for help.
"P-please…"
There was a strange thing about death. People said that until you accepted it yourself, you would not die. Sometimes death came so quickly that a person died before they had time to understand anything. They simply had no chance to resist before the realization arrived that they were already dead. But sometimes the opposite happened. People who, by every indication, should long since have died not only continued to live, but ultimately survived. And naturally, the reverse rule existed as well: people who could have continued living for years surrendered too soon and died.
With injuries like Vivi's, she should have died in less than a minute. Yet even half an hour after being wounded, she remained alive and continued clinging to life.
Until this moment.
The moment of acceptance.
From the very beginning, she had known that she could not survive such a wound, yet she had still fought with all her strength to live. But there was no point in fighting any longer. Not even every doctor in Alabasta together could have saved her, while Whisky Peak had only one physician, and he was a former veterinarian.
At the very end, when she finally understood that death was inevitable, all her fears for Alabasta and its people fell away. Only one regret remained in Vivi's mind.
"D-Dad…"
Luffy, despite not being physically present, reacted first.
"Aw, damn. Did she just—"
"Yeah!" Johnny cut him off. "Now, if you want your billion, you'll need a necromancer."
The girl's lifeless body collapsed into a shapeless heap on the ground.
"…What rotten luck!" Luffy shook his head sadly on the other side of town. "Where were you earlier?" he asked his present conversation partner, disappointed, as he tucked the small Den Den Mushi back into his pocket. "Couldn't you have told me all of this as soon as we came ashore?" As always, he did not concern himself with the presence of logic in his words whenever it interfered in the slightest with expressing his thoughts and emotions.
His current 'conversation partner,' however, was in no condition to worry about the flaws in Luffy's logic.
"…Vivi-sama?" Igaram's face literally turned gray. "Vivi-sama is dead?"
"You really are far too naive," a seventeen-year-old boy told a fifty-year-old man. "You dragged an ordinary little girl to the ass end of the world, infiltrated an organization that threatens an entire country with her, and made hunting people who live by robbery and murder her everyday job. You're right—why would she ever die?" Luffy made no attempt to restrain himself, and his words drove into Igaram's bleeding heart one after another like poisoned arrows.
"P-please! Please!! Please, save Vivi-sama!!! We can find more money, I promise!!! You asked for ten billion to take us to Alabasta?!! I agree!!! I agree to anything!!! Perhaps not immediately, but Cobra-sama will pay whatever you ask for saving Vivi-sama!!!"
Luffy's expression looked as though every tooth in his mouth had begun aching at once.
"Were you even listening to what I was saying to my family just now?" the unusually disappointed boy asked. "That's it. Game over. The train has left the station. Your precious Vivi-sama is finished, so I suggest we stop wasting time and discuss the terms of a new deal. Or do you think Alabasta will save itself?" If Luffy possessed compassion, he concealed it so thoroughly that no one had ever seen it. "Besides, as compensation for killing your beloved princess, for the first time in my life I'm prepared to offer a discount on my services. Saving you and your country will now cost Alabasta not one billion berries, as before, but only nine hundred ninety-nine million nine hundred ninety-nine thousand berries. Unheard-of generosity on my part! Appreciate it."
The man did not hear a word.
"Waaaaah! Vivi-sama! Hnnngh! Vivi-sama! Vivi-sama!"
A grimace of immeasurable grief distorted Igaram's already less-than-handsome face. Tears poured from his eyes in streams, mucus ran from his nose, and he continued wailing without pause:
"Vivi-sama! Vivi-sama! Vivi-sama!"
Luffy could only step aside and sit down on Igaram's bound body, while the man's severed head, stuck atop a barrel, continued its uninterrupted chant of "Vivi-sama." Igaram had fallen into hysterics—admittedly a fairly common occurrence whenever Luffy was nearby putting his ideas, plans, or desires into practice.
"Zoro, just look at what you've done to the man!" Luffy reproached the swordsman, who had only just returned after more or less satisfying his thirst for blood.
Zoro did not look. First, he had heard everything perfectly well already. Second, he did not feel or consider himself guilty in the slightest. Walking over to a crate of bottles, he selected a wine to his taste and headed for several empty sofas that had prudently been dragged out of nearby houses before they burned down.
"I've always wondered what kind of books you read as a child," Luffy began pestering his first mate as usual while waiting for Igaram to calm down. Fortunately, listening to all his captain's nonsense was apparently part of Zoro's official duties. At least, that seemed to be what Luffy sincerely believed. "Don't you know that princesses are supposed to be rescued, not killed? Where have you ever seen or read about princes killing their princesses, huh? Huh? Huh?"
Zoro barely suppressed the urge to point out that he was no prince, that Vivi was not his princess, and that he had never intended to kill her. But the green-haired man knew his captain far too well and understood the complete futility of any objection.
"So, what? Now that you've found yourself a Marine girl, you suddenly don't care about any princesses?"
Zoro had never cared about princesses in the first place, but, just as before, he wisely kept his opinion to himself. It did not even occur to him that he had no objection whatsoever to the phrase 'your Marine girl.'
Noticing the complete indifference on his first mate's face, Luffy pursed his lips in displeasure and began looking around in an obvious attempt to find a new victim. He failed. There were plenty of people around, but none of them interested him.
Law's entire crew had consumed so much alcohol laced with sleeping drugs that half the crew remained completely unconscious, while the other half brooded over the evening's failure. Those who were entirely sober stared without pause at the burning town, mentally reassessing the Straw Hat Pirates. No one among Law's men had doubted the Hats' danger before—the past month had provided more than enough evidence—but knowing was one thing and witnessing the destruction of an entire town full of bounty hunters was another.
It was always that way with people. Once again, a fitting example lay directly before them. Every hunter in Whisky Peak had known about the Pirate Slayers, yet they had still chosen to oppose them. They knew in advance that the pirates had to be extraordinarily strong, but instead of fleeing, they had picked a fight. Only when they began being slaughtered like chickens in autumn, only after they were made to feel their absolute helplessness, did the hunters finally understand exactly whom they had dared to challenge.
Unlike the Straw Hats, the residents of Whisky Peak had considered Law's crew far less dangerous—an entirely correct conclusion, but not a sensible one—so no one had intended to kill them. Every member of the Heart Pirates was prudently shackled in Seastone handcuffs and dragged into a spacious house that the hunters had long ago converted into a temporary holding facility for captured pirates.
Every single 'missing' member of Law's crew ended up there. The drunk ones were carried in. Those who had gone to the toilet were knocked unconscious, as were those expecting a more interesting continuation to the evening in more pleasant company. The last group suffered most of all. That was especially noticeable beside the exceedingly satisfied Sanji, who sat on one of the sofas with an arm possessively around each of the two girls clinging to him.
The pair of huntresses sitting with him trembled visibly with fear. They understood perfectly well that had they not left with Sanji several hours earlier—and had he not forgiven their attempt to knock him unconscious—they would already be dead.
Four more girls sitting on a neighboring sofa beside the sweetly sleeping Usopp thought along much the same lines. The difference was that Sanji's girls had tried to knock him out. He was an unknown man with no bounty, he practically spread himself at women's feet, and he did not look dangerous, so they had decided to take him alive. The girls who had accompanied Johnny and Yosaku had tried to kill them, which made them a hundred times more frightened now.
How did the huntresses usually work?
"Darling, turn around, please! I need to get ready!"
"Powder my nose," "I'm shy," "I want to surprise you"—underline whichever applied. After that came either a blow to the head with something heavy or a merciless knife driven into the back.
In Sanji's case, they had tried to knock him out with a baseball bat. The bat simply shattered into splinters against his head. Sanji had taken no offense, while the girls instantly understood their mistake, and the rest of their time together proceeded according to the original plan.
With Johnny and Yosaku, events followed much the same course. Almost.
Before the girls could deliver their standard "Darling, turn around, please!" they had already been stripped and laid out on the bed. Rare, but it happened. At that point, it was time for Plan B.
While one girl restricted the target's movement and vision—a passionate kiss usually solved both problems—the other retrieved a concealed knife and plunged it into the back of yet another idiot caught in the honey trap as old as the world.
The problem was that Yosaku chose to explain the knife in his back as the girl being offended because he had neglected her in favor of her partner. Honestly, was he supposed to interrupt long-awaited sex over some knife in his back?! Johnny, meanwhile, failed to notice the attempt on his life at all. He had long used partial transformation during his amorous adventures, and the quality of both the knife and the girl's strength proved catastrophically insufficient to leave even a scratch on him.
After that, the girls, just as in Sanji's case, decided to placate the men using another method as old as the world. And now, while looking at the burning Whisky Peak and the numerous corpses of their former comrades, they silently thanked every god they knew for that wise decision.
They were in no hurry to relax, however. They had seen and heard enough to understand how indifferently the Pirate Killers regarded the lives of strangers.
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