Chapter 8: First Blood
Briss Island, East Blue — Day 13, Pre-Dawn
Ino's knees ached from crouching behind a cargo pallet for eleven minutes in the pre-dawn cold.
The warehouse district was quiet — that dead-hour silence between the night shift going home and the morning crew arriving. Mist crawled off the harbor and settled between buildings in thin layers. The loading door was thirty meters ahead. The side door was around the corner, invisible from this angle, where Yosaku had disappeared four minutes ago.
Johnny stood beside the loading door with his katana drawn and his back flat against the wall. The kid was vibrating — not with fear, with anticipation. His grip on the sword handle was white-knuckled, his breath coming in controlled bursts through his nose.
Ino watched through a gap between the pallet and a stack of crated sailcloth. The detection pulse from inside the warehouse was steady. The fruit user hadn't moved from the corner where Ino had seen him the night before. Same position, same energy signature. Either sleeping or too weak to relocate.
Four minutes for Yosaku. He'll need another two to get into position along the east wall shelving. Six minutes total from when he left.
Five minutes, thirty seconds. Six minutes.
Ino picked up a loose bolt from the ground beside the pallet — rusty, heavy enough to carry. He lobbed it in a high arc toward the loading door. It struck the metal hasp with a sharp clang that cracked the silence like a gunshot.
Johnny moved.
The loading door crashed inward — broken hasp giving way as Johnny's shoulder hit it. He was through in a heartbeat, katana up, feet spread, bellowing something that might have been a combat yell or might have just been enthusiasm finding a physical outlet.
"BOUNTY HUNTER! STAY DOWN AND—"
A sound from inside. Wet, heavy, like a bag of sand hitting the floor. Then Johnny's voice again, sharper:
"He's moving — BEHIND THE—"
Ino's pulse kicked. He left the pallet and sprinted to the loading door, pressing himself against the frame, not entering. Through the opening he could see the warehouse interior lit by thin gray dawn through the high windows. Johnny was advancing toward the southwest corner. Crates were overturned. The oil lamp had been kicked aside, guttering on the floor.
And Softhand — Doran — was on his feet. Barely. One hand pressed to his side where the wound had soaked through a makeshift bandage, the other gripping his cutlass at an angle that said the arm was working but the body wasn't. His face was gray beneath the grime. Three days of blood loss and no medical care had done what bounty hunters hadn't — turned a Devil Fruit user into something fragile.
But not helpless.
Johnny closed the distance. His katana swept in from the right — a clean diagonal cut aimed at the weapon hand. Doran's free hand shot out and caught the flat of the blade.
The steel rippled.
Ino watched the katana's edge go soft — not melting, not breaking, but losing its rigidity, bending like heated plastic under Doran's fingers. Johnny yanked back and the blade came free, but the top six inches drooped at an angle that made cutting impossible.
"The hell—"
"Told you," Ino muttered from the doorway. "Don't let him touch the blade."
Johnny adjusted. He reversed his grip, stepped left, and swung the katana like a club — using the still-rigid lower half as a blunt instrument. The strike caught Doran's outstretched arm at the wrist. Bone cracked. The pirate screamed, cutlass clattering to the floor.
And Yosaku came through the east side like a shadow that had learned to hold a sword.
He moved along the shelving the way Ino had described — low, fast, angled. One step put him behind Doran. The katana reversed in his grip. The pommel struck the back of Doran's skull with a sound that Ino would remember longer than he wanted to.
Doran dropped. Face-first, no catch, the boneless collapse of a body that had been switched off mid-stride. He hit the warehouse floor and didn't move.
Johnny stood over him, breathing hard, his ruined katana hanging at his side. Yosaku straightened up from the strike and checked Doran's pulse with two fingers against the throat.
"Out," Yosaku said. "Not dead. Skull's intact — I pulled the hit."
"Good," Ino said, stepping inside. His voice was steady. His hands were not. "I need to check the body."
"He's not dead," Johnny said, confusion crossing his face. "I mean — we're taking him alive, right? The bounty—"
"The bounty office pays for confirmed captures. I need to verify identity before we haul him across town." Ino was already kneeling. Already positioning. His right hand found the unconscious pirate's chest, pressing flat against the sternum through the bloodstained shirt.
Eight seconds. Start now.
[CORPSE EXTRACTION: Target Status — ALIVE. Live Extraction unavailable (Rank 2 required). Corpse Extraction unavailable. Target must be deceased.]
The notification hit like cold water. Alive. Doran was alive. The system couldn't extract from a living target at Rank 0 — that was Rank 2, which required 2,000 CXP he didn't have.
He's alive. I can't extract. I told Yosaku to pull the hit because I assumed—
No. He hadn't assumed. He hadn't thought about it at all. He'd planned the assault, planned the flanking, planned the timing — and completely failed to plan for the extraction condition. Corpse Extraction required a corpse. A dead target. And he'd sent two honorable bounty hunters to capture a man worth 1,800,000 berries alive, because that's what bounty hunters did, because he'd been thinking about the fight and not the aftermath.
Stupid. Pharmaceutical-grade stupid.
His hand stayed on Doran's chest for three more seconds — long enough to look like a pulse check, short enough not to raise questions. He stood.
"It's him. Voro Doran, alias Softhand. The wound matches the reports."
"So we haul him in?" Johnny was already looking for rope.
"We haul him in."
They tied Doran with cargo cord from the warehouse supplies. Johnny's katana was warped six inches from the tip — he held it up to the light and his expression curdled.
"My blade."
"It'll straighten out," Ino said. "The fruit effect is temporary. Give it thirty minutes."
"How do you—" Johnny started, then stopped. Shook his head. Accepted the information the way he'd accepted everything else: quickly, without deeper inquiry.
Yosaku watched from the doorway. His eyes moved between Ino's hands and his face. He said nothing.
---
[ESSENCE DETECTION: Source Status — Alive, Restrained, Signal Stable. No Extraction Available.]
The bounty office opened at eight. A bored Marine petty officer checked Doran's face against the poster, confirmed the warrant, and counted out 1,800,000 berries in mixed notes and coin. The process took twenty minutes and involved three forms.
Alive bounty. Full payout. No extraction.
Ino split the money evenly. Six hundred thousand berries per person. He handed Johnny and Yosaku their shares with steady hands and a face that showed nothing but professionalism.
Johnny counted his stack twice, then hugged it against his chest like a child with a festival prize. "Six hundred thousand. Yosaku — six hundred thousand. When's the last time we made this much on one job?"
"Never," Yosaku said quietly, folding his bills into an interior pocket with the care of a man who'd lost money to holes in cheaper pockets.
Ino pocketed his own share and walked to the harbor. He needed air. He needed to think. He needed to not be standing next to a pirate whose essence was sitting inside his body, tantalizingly close and completely inaccessible, because he'd built a plan that forgot the most basic requirement of his own power system.
Corpse Extraction requires a corpse. Not unconscious. Not restrained. Dead. I need dead Devil Fruit users, or I need to find uneaten fruits. Option A means either scavenging battlefields or making harder calls about what "bounty hunting" means. Option B means finding physical fruits in the wild, which is like finding a specific needle in an ocean of haystacks.
Or I level up to Rank 2, unlock Live Extraction, and do this properly. But Rank 2 needs 2,000 CXP, and I'm sitting at zero because I haven't extracted anything.
The bootstrap problem. Again.
He stood at the harbor railing and watched the morning tide shift fishing boats at their moorings. The phantom warmth of Doran's chest was still on his palm — not from extraction, which hadn't happened, but from the contact itself. The first time he'd touched another person in this world with intent.
It hadn't been medical intent. It hadn't been kindness. It had been hunger, the system's hunger channeled through his hands, and the fact that it failed didn't make the reaching any less predatory.
He scrubbed his palms against his trousers. The warmth lingered.
[OPTIMIZATION SUGGESTION: Target Retained by Marine Authority. Essence Window Active. Recommend Alternative Acquisition Method.]
There is no alternative at Rank 0. You already know this.
The notification dimmed. The system accepted the constraint with the same indifference it accepted everything else.
Ino turned away from the harbor. His crew — his crew, two swordsmen he'd met twelve hours ago — were waiting at the tavern to celebrate a payday that was missing the only payment that mattered.
He went back and bought them all breakfast. Eggs, salt pork, fresh bread, real coffee. The coffee was terrible compared to Tokyo, and perfect compared to everything he'd drunk since arriving. He held the cup with both hands and let the heat soak into his palms, replacing the phantom warmth with something earned.
Next time, he told himself. Next time the plan accounts for every variable. Including the ones that aren't comfortable.
Johnny was talking about buying a new katana to replace the one Doran had warped. Yosaku was eating eggs and almost smiling.
The first job was done. The extraction had failed. And the next target was already forming in the back of his mind — three names from a bounty board, cross-referenced against a mental map of East Blue pirate territories, filtered through the knowledge of a world he'd read about on a train.
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