Chapter 6. PUBG — PIRATEUNKNOWN BATTLEGROUND! Getting the players ready for the fight at the Little Garden, and a little bit information about our old friend -> is already available in the patreon.com/moctopus (and a lot more chapters) (it is nearly a month ahead compared to here)
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After that, one would have needed to be a truly impenetrable idiot, or possess an ego on Don Krieg's level, not to understand the underlying situation. No one present feared explosions themselves. What terrified them was the aesthetic nature of Mr. Five's ammunition.
And when one remembered that even one of Miss Valentine's strongest attacks had produced absolutely no effect on Johnny, it became entirely understandable why the two numbered Baroque Works agents had begun gradually realizing the seriousness of their predicament.
When comprehending the depth of the shit surrounding you, the important thing was to begin. The moment they stopped holding their noses in the air and looked properly around, the result arrived without delay.
"Mr. Five…" Miss Valentine's face literally turned gray. "Look at the ships."
They stood almost directly on the shore, so the Heart Pirates' submarine, moored at the pier alongside the Going Merry, was less than a hundred meters away. Despite the night, the woman had no difficulty seeing the pirate emblems—and, far, far worse, identifying whom they belonged to.
It would be no exaggeration to say that by the end of the Grand Line's first half, no one cared about even the strongest pirates from North Blue and East Blue. There was no point mentioning the New World; there, people had simply never heard of them.
But this was the very beginning of the Grand Line, and almost every numbered agent paid attention to such people. They represented potential enemies and potential allies at once. Trafalgar Law, the Surgeon of Death, and Roronoa Zoro, the Pirate Slayer, stood out even among the other remarkable rookie pirates, of whom an almost absurd number had appeared that year.
The chief Pirate Slayer and his crew drew especially intense attention. They had never lacked press coverage, and after the chaos Roronoa Zoro created in Loguetown, their names could be found in literally every newspaper.
Miss Valentine had seen them.
So had Mr. Five.
"Miss Valentine…" the man whispered rather than spoke.
Then he fell silent. Mr. Five simply did not know what to say. They had voluntarily entered a deadly trap without even noticing it.
Now he understood who stood before him. Yosaku 'the Butcher' and Johnny 'Beheader', fifty million berries each.
The problem was that the men simultaneously resembled their wanted posters and did not. Perhaps the difference lay in their expressions. On the posters, the Butcher and Head-Taker looked like envoys of Hell walking the earth. At the moment, they resembled two frightened clowns.
A different question was how anyone could fail to recognize the Queen. Although, Mr. Five realized, the situation there was the direct opposite of the Butcher and Beheaders. If the men in real life were faded imitations of themselves on the posters, then the Queen's poster was an even more faded imitation of the real woman.
Mr. Five saw her directly before him and still could not believe anyone could truly be that beautiful.
"Everyone, check out what I found! I can't believe I never thought of this myself!"
As always happened with bad situations, it could become worse.
Mr. Five and Miss Valentine had no idea who the exceedingly cheerful boy was, dressed in a colorful T-shirt, shorts, and a straw hat atop which he had placed a golden crown. But they immediately recognized the two people he dragged behind him.
The first, being merely Mr. Nine, was of no interest. The second was instantly and unmistakably identified as Roronoa Zoro, the Pirate Slayer.
Most remarkably, Zoro was unconscious, and his face was covered in blood.
Mr. Five reacted almost instantly—and very, very stupidly.
"Nose Fancy Cannon!"
The overwhelming majority of people behaved extremely irrationally in critical situations. And a critical situation did not necessarily involve a threat to life. Sometimes people did completely insane things over the smallest reasons, such as possibly being late for work. Most importantly, in the overwhelming majority of cases, they evaluated their own actions at that moment as nearly brilliant.
Mr. Five decided it would be useful to begin by thoroughly intimidating his newly arrived opponent, and chose a repeatedly tested method to do so. 'Brilliant,' for fuck's sake.
BOOM!!!
"Oh, God…"
Nami covered her mouth and nose with both hands and stared with round, shocked eyes at Luffy, who had disappeared inside the explosion cloud. Johnny, Yosaku, and Usopp began collectively imitating goldfish.
"Mother of God…"
The crown rolled across the ground. A little farther away, the straw hat drifted gently down. The rapidly dispersing cloud revealed a lightly smoking and noticeably singed Luffy.
The boy stood in exactly the same place and exactly the same position, still gripping Mr. Nine and Zoro by the lapels of their clothing. His appearance, however, had changed considerably.
The hat and crown were gone. His hair stood straight up. His sunglasses had fallen apart. His T-shirt was almost completely burned away.
And Luffy was not smiling.
No emotion whatsoever could be read on his face. He simply stood there, staring at Mr. Five with a completely blank expression.
"W-why didn't he dodge?!" Usopp forced out.
A question worth ten billion berries at once.
With Luffy's Observation Haki and speed, he could have reached the opposite end of the island before the thought of attacking him even occurred to Mr. Five. And he certainly had not chosen to take the attack deliberately.
Not an attack made with an exploding booger.
Johnny and Yosaku's reaction would have been far more appropriate. Otherwise, the shame would last a lifetime. The Pirate King, once blown up by a booger! Why else had the men reacted so violently to such a weak attack? They might not claim the title of Pirate King, but they had ambitions of their own.
The most reasonable explanation was that Luffy had simply fallen into a stupor at Mr. Five's actions. He had long considered himself the Pirate King, and someone had just attacked him with a booger bomb.
Shock.
Then Luffy left Mr. Nine and Zoro behind and began moving.
"M-Mr. Five…" Miss Valentine forced out as she instinctively began backing away from her partner.
There were many possible ways to interpret the sight of the unconscious Zoro. Countless explanations could be invented for why he had lost consciousness and was covered in blood. But Luffy had dragged the swordsman there, and dragged him with no respect whatsoever.
There was no fear of the strong shown by the weak. It looked more like the fearlessness of the strong toward the weak.
The appropriate conclusions suggested themselves.
"Don't come closer!" Mr. Five shouted, distinct panic in his voice.
He shouted and immediately began doing everything in his power to prove his complete inability to react appropriately in a crisis.
Seriously, a man who responded to an approaching enemy by frantically digging in his own nose could hardly be called rational.
Nami, the only Straw Hat present who retained the ability to speak, could say only one thing in response.
"What is that idiot doing?!"
"Nose Fancy Cannon!"
Only God knew precisely why the dark-skinned man's first attack had reached its target, but expecting Luffy to allow such a thing a second time would have been supremely foolish.
The familiar sensation descended over the world around them—as though the air itself had transformed into thick jelly through which breathing and movement became difficult. This time, however, the sensation was an entire order of magnitude stronger.
Mr. Five had barely launched his projectile. It passed slightly to one side of the slowly advancing Luffy.
Then the boy abruptly vanished and reappeared directly in front of him.
"Khah!"
Blood erupted in a literal fountain, spraying in every direction and drenching Luffy from head to toe as though someone had emptied a bucket over him.
Mr. Five, who had not yet understood that he was already dead, stared in fascination at the bloody heart in the hand of the boy standing before him. Simultaneously so large and so small, it continued beating.
Mr. Five's trembling hand involuntarily reached toward the pulsing mass of muscle and blood. The reaction was nearly universal.
"Like it?" Luffy asked indifferently. "You can have it back."
Driving teeth inward and shattering the jaw, Luffy's fist, with the crushed heart inside it, plunged deep into Mr. Five's throat. Leaving the heart's remains in the dark-skinned man's ruined mouth, Luffy withdrew his Armament Haki-coated hand and watched indifferently as Mr. Five's corpse collapsed to the ground.
The boy crouched and drove his fingers deep into the earth, as though attempting to seize it more firmly. Tensing his entire body and never releasing his grip on the ground, Luffy abruptly straightened to his full height.
Like some overturned table, a massive slab of earth—at least five meters deep and ten meters in both width and length, with Mr. Five's bloodied corpse at its center—was effortlessly flipped upside down.
In a single instant, Mr. Five's corpse ended up five meters underground, buried beneath dozens of tons of earth. Only the slightly loosened surface remained as evidence of what had occurred.
"Damn it, Ryu! Because of your newly acquired pyromania, I've lost one of my favorite T-shirts!" Luffy declared in his most ordinary voice. "And because of you, I need to take a shower now!"
At that moment, the world returned to normal, and it once again became possible to breathe. Every person present immediately took advantage.
Miss Valentine's legs gave way nearby, and she collapsed helplessly to the ground. The deathly pale woman trembled violently, while cold sweat ran down her face.
"I'll wash, get dressed, and come back!" Luffy shared his plans. Picking up his straw hat and crown, he bounded cheerfully toward the Going Merry.
A long silence followed. Yosaku broke it with one concise, accurate word that described everything that had just happened as fully as possible.
"…Holy shit."
It had already been said, but Zoro's topographical idiocy and dangerous Luffy were phenomena of the same kind. In both cases, people constantly forgot those two characteristics.
Zoro performed the role of a reliable first mate too well. Luffy perfectly portrayed a cheerful troublemaker who constantly caused problems for everyone.
Behind the first hid an idiot capable of becoming lost aboard his own ship. Behind the second hid a killer for whom most human lives meant no more than worms meant to a fisherman.
In fact, Luffy treated nearly all people merely as bait with which to catch adventures.
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