Chapter 17: The Hardest Walk
Conomi Islands, East Blue — Day 36, Dawn
The tribute collector arrived at sunrise.
Ino watched from the sloop's deck as the fishman — different from the one at the harbor, shorter, broader, with the flattened head of a manta ray — walked the village's main road with a ledger and a sack. He stopped at each house. Knocked once. Waited. The door opened, money changed hands, the ledger was marked, and the fishman moved on.
The efficiency was precise. Institutional. The fishman didn't threaten, didn't shout, didn't need to. The system ran on memory — every household remembered what happened when payment was late, and that memory was more effective than any weapon the collector could carry.
A woman at the fourth house counted coins twice before handing them over. Her hands trembled. The fishman waited with the patience of bureaucracy and marked his ledger when the sum was complete.
A man at the seventh house came to the door with a child on his hip. The child stared at the fishman with wide eyes. The man paid. The fishman moved on. The child buried its face in the man's neck.
This is Day 36. In the manga, Arlong's occupation ends somewhere in the next few weeks — Luffy arrives, fights Arlong, destroys the park. Nami goes free. The village goes free. The tribute stops.
In the next few weeks. Not today.
Today, the woman's hands tremble and the child hides and I stand on a boat and watch because the math says watching is the right move.
Ino gripped the railing. His knuckles went white. The wood was rough under his palms — salt-weathered, splintered in places, real in the way that mattered.
"We should go," Johnny said behind him.
Ino turned. Johnny stood at the mast with his katana strapped and his pack over one shoulder. His face had the particular flatness of a man holding a reaction behind his teeth.
"Yeah."
They cast off in silence. Yosaku handled the sail. Johnny stood at the bow and watched the village recede. Ino took the tiller and pointed the sloop north-northwest, away from the Conomi Islands, toward open water, toward nothing.
---
Johnny held it for two hours. Then the dam broke again, the way it always did — not with a trickle but a flood.
"We're just leaving?"
Ino kept his eyes on the horizon. The Conomi cluster was still visible behind them — distant now, a smudge of green on blue, shrinking with every minute of good wind.
"Yes."
"Those people are living under a fishman who takes their money every month. The kids are scared. The adults are scared. There's a whole park full of fishmen a mile from the village, and nobody's doing anything about it."
"The Marines know about Arlong. They've known for years."
"And they're not doing anything either!" Johnny's voice cracked upward. Not shouting — the pitch of a man whose frustration had overflowed the container his discipline provided. "So who does? Who fixes it?"
Ino turned from the tiller. Johnny's face was red — not embarrassment but the flush of moral indignation pressing against the skin, looking for an outlet. His hand was on his katana grip. Yosaku, at the mast, watched without intervening.
He saw the tribute collection this morning. He saw the child. And now he wants to know why we're sailing away instead of sailing back.
I owe him an answer. Not the full answer — he can't have that. But something that's true enough to carry the weight of what I'm asking him to accept.
"Someone stronger is coming for the fishman," Ino said. "I can't tell you how I know that. But I know it the same way I knew where Softhand was hiding, and the same way I knew the Fang Brothers were raiding that village. My information is good."
"How soon?"
"Weeks. Maybe less."
"And if they don't come?"
"They'll come."
Johnny's jaw worked. The muscles in his forearm tensed around the katana grip, released, tensed again. He was fighting the instinct that had made him pick up a sword in the first place — the drive to act, to intervene, to put himself between harm and the people absorbing it. That drive was Johnny's best quality and his most dangerous one.
"If we went back—" he started.
"If we went back, we'd die." Ino said it flat. No emphasis, no drama. The clinical delivery of a prognosis. "Arlong is a fishman with a bounty of twenty million berries. His crew includes at least eight fishmen, all of whom are physically stronger than any human bounty hunter in East Blue. You and Yosaku are good, Johnny. You're not good enough to fight eight superhuman opponents and a captain who can punch through stone walls."
"You don't know—"
"I do know. VIT twelve. STR fourteen. AGI eleven. Those are my numbers. Yours and Yosaku's are better, but 'better than pathetic' is still a long way from 'can fight fishmen.' We'd die on the beach before we reached the park."
The numbers landed. Not because Johnny understood the system — he didn't — but because the specificity carried conviction. A man who knew his own weaknesses in precise detail was a man who'd thought about them, and a man who'd thought about them had already considered and rejected the heroic option.
Johnny stared at the shrinking islands. His hand left the katana grip. His shoulders dropped an inch.
"The person who's coming," he said. "Are they strong enough?"
"Strong enough to break the building."
"And the fishman?"
"He won't survive it."
Johnny breathed out — long, slow, through his nose. The kind of exhale that carried a decision being swallowed rather than made.
"Okay." The word was quiet. Not agreement — acceptance. The kind of acceptance that left a mark, like a bruise that would yellow and fade but never quite disappear. "Okay."
He walked to the bow and sat down with his back against the forward storage compartment and his katana across his knees. He didn't speak for the next three hours.
Yosaku adjusted the sail and caught Ino's eye across the deck. The swordsman's expression was unreadable — not suspicious, not sympathetic, something between. He'd heard the conversation. He'd weighed it.
"He'll be fine," Yosaku said. Quiet. Not a question.
"He'll carry it."
"That's what I said."
The Conomi Islands vanished behind the curve of the earth. Ino didn't look back — not because he didn't want to, but because the pull was too strong, and giving in to it would mean confronting the image of a blue-haired woman washing wine cups in a house overlooked by a tyrant's fortress, and the knowledge that she'd be free soon wasn't enough to make the watching painless.
This is what foreknowledge costs. Not ignorance — complicity. The informed decision to stand by while people suffer because the algorithm says the optimal outcome requires their suffering to continue for a defined period.
In pharmaceutical terms: the control group doesn't get the treatment until the trial is complete, even when the preliminary data shows the drug works. You let people get sicker because the protocol demands statistical significance.
I hate this protocol.
Yosaku bought a bag of tangerines from a village kid before they'd cast off — Ino had seen the transaction from the stern. The kid had asked for fifty berries. Yosaku had paid a hundred and fifty without negotiation, without explanation, and without looking at Ino when he came back aboard.
The tangerines sat in a net bag at the stern, smelling like everything Ino was sailing away from.
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