Chapter 116: The Widow of the Previous Generation, Rebecca
"A man who likes Luffy?"
Itachi studied Bartolomeo with the clinical detachment of an ANBU captain assessing a potential threat. The appraisal did not take long.
Green cockscomb hairstyle. A nose ring dangling from his septum—distinctive, if not exactly tasteful. His entire face was arranged in an expression that hovered somewhere between a sneer and a pout, the kind of look that belonged on a second-rate street thug who had watched too many underworld dramas. A winged tattoo sprawled across his chest. The fuchsia coat was... a choice.
Objectively speaking, Bartolomeo looked like exactly the kind of person an ANBU captain would arrest on principle.
"Who is this man?" Itachi asked, not bothering to lower his voice.
"Ah, this guy?" Sabo waved a hand with the casual air of someone introducing an eccentric but ultimately harmless acquaintance. "He's a pirate from the new generation. A supernova. Fairly notorious, from what I hear."
Bartolomeo's face crumpled. "The old man saying that about me... I'm actually a little hurt, you know!"
"Regardless." Sabo shrugged, his expression settling into something more serious. "As I said before, he's not a bad person. Not to us, anyway."
Itachi's crimson eyes lingered on Bartolomeo for a moment longer. Then, slowly, he released his grip on the man's wrist.
Bartolomeo stumbled back, clutching his arm and blowing on the reddened skin with exaggerated indignation. "What's wrong with you people?! Is 'grabbing first and asking questions later' just standard procedure on the Straw Hat crew?! Do you want to die?!"
Itachi ignored him completely.
Which, for Bartolomeo, was somehow worse than being threatened.
"Hey! Don't just ignore—wait."
Something clicked behind his eyes. A memory surfacing through the indignation. A connection forming between disparate pieces of information.
"The old man just said something..."
Sabo had mentioned, almost offhandedly, that the Straw Hat Pirates had gained another reliable person. At the time, Bartolomeo had been too distracted by his own complaints to process the implications.
But now...
His mind raced back through the news reports. The rumors. The bounty poster that had appeared seemingly out of nowhere after the Punk Hazard incident, sending shockwaves through the underworld.
'Hellfire' Uchiha Itachi. Six hundred million berries. The first Straw Hat crew member with a bounty higher than the captain's.
Bartolomeo's nose began to run.
His eyes widened.
His mouth opened and closed without producing sound.
"No way... no WAY..."
While Bartolomeo spiraled through the five stages of fanboy realization, Itachi swept the spectator gallery with a practiced tactical assessment. The upper levels were mostly empty—the audience had crowded toward the lower tiers for a better view of D block's bloody finale. No Marines. No tournament security. Just civilians hungry for violence.
His position was secure. For the moment.
Sabo had drifted toward the railing, his attention caught by the drama unfolding in the arena below. Itachi followed his gaze.
Rebecca was losing.
The pink-haired gladiator stumbled backward across the blood-soaked sand, her gladius barely deflecting Suleiman's strikes. Each impact sent visible tremors through her arms. Her footwork—precise, desperate, the footwork of someone who had learned to dance between raindrops—was slowing. Fatigue dragged at her limbs.
The crowd loved it.
"FINISH HER!"
"WHAT ARE YOU WAITING FOR, SULEIMAN?!"
"HER FIGHTS ARE ALWAYS LIKE THIS! BORING! MEANINGLESS! I DON'T EVEN KNOW WHY SHE'S ALLOWED TO LIVE!"
Itachi's brow furrowed behind the cat-face mask.
Do they hate her this much?
The question answered itself almost immediately. The toy soldier's words echoed in his memory: "The Riku family... Doflamingo destroyed them. Humiliated them. Made the entire country believe they were criminals."
Rebecca wasn't just a gladiator. She was the last surviving symbol of the old regime. Every time she refused to fall, every time she escaped death through evasion instead of violence, she reminded Dressrosa of what Doflamingo had taken from them. And the people—brainwashed, manipulated, terrified—had learned to hate that reminder.
The toy soldier knew this. That's why he asked me to protect her.
Sabo leaned against the railing beside him, his expression unreadable. "The crowd's really turned on her. I've seen bad receptions before, but this..."
"They want her dead."
"Yeah."
Sabo's voice was quiet. Not judgmental—he understood better than most how nations could be twisted against their own people—but heavy with something that might have been recognition.
"She's the last one standing between Suleiman and the block victory. And the entire arena is cheering for her execution."
Itachi's mind was already working through the variables. According to the tournament rules he had memorized in the reference room, deaths in the arena were considered legitimate outcomes. No investigations. No consequences. The colosseum's charter explicitly absolved killers of any legal responsibility.
If Suleiman killed Rebecca in the next thirty seconds, it would be, in the eyes of Dressrosa's law, a sporting event.
The toy soldier understood this too. That's why his voice broke when he asked for my help.
Below, Suleiman's executioner blade rose for the killing stroke.
Itachi's hands moved through a single seal.
The wall behind him softened to mud.
And he was gone.
The Spectator Gallery — Moments Later
Sabo turned away from the arena just in time to see empty space where Itachi had been standing.
"...Where did he go?"
Bartolomeo, who had been leaning over the railing and heckling Cavendish with creative profanity, looked up. "Huh? Who?"
"The person I was just talking to."
"There was someone you were talking to?"
Sabo stared at him.
Bartolomeo stared back.
"Whatever." Sabo shook his head, turning back toward the arena. "He was here a second ago. That man moves like a ghost."
Bartolomeo's brain, which had been working overtime to process the earlier revelation, suddenly caught up with the present moment. He threw himself in front of Sabo with the desperate energy of a man who had just realized he might have missed something important.
"Old man. What did you just say."
"Hm? Did I say something? I don't think I did."
Sabo's expression was the picture of innocence—the carefully manufactured innocence of a Revolutionary Army chief of staff who had spent years perfecting the art of plausible deniability.
"You DEFINITELY said something! You said a NAME!"
"Did I?"
"YOU SAID ITACHI!"
Sabo winced. "Ah. That."
"THAT?! THAT'S ALL YOU HAVE TO SAY?!"
Bartolomeo's voice had climbed to a pitch that threatened structural damage to the colosseum's masonry. Sabo's hand clamped over his mouth before the next syllable could escape.
"Yes." Sabo's voice was low, urgent. "He's Luffy's new crew member. The Tenth Straw Hat. And if you don't stop screaming his name to the entire arena, I'm going to be very annoyed."
He dragged Bartolomeo toward a shadowed alcove, away from curious ears.
"Understand? No more shouting."
Bartolomeo nodded frantically, his eyes still bulging.
Sabo released him.
"He's really..." Bartolomeo's voice came out as a strangled whisper, all the aggression drained away, replaced by something that looked almost reverent. "He's really HIM? The most mysterious member of the Straw Hat Pirates? The one who appeared out of nowhere at Punk Hazard? The one who formed the alliance with Trafalgar Law?!"
"That's the one."
"'Hellfire' Uchiha Itachi! Bounty: six hundred million berries! Epithet earned from a battle with Admiral Kizaru that reportedly left Punk Hazard's coastline permanently altered! Devil Fruit ability unknown but speculated to involve flame manipulation, possibly an Ancient Zoan or—get this—a rare Human-Human Fruit variant! The fiery red skull that manifests behind him during combat is believed to be—"
Bartolomeo collapsed to his knees.
"I... I grabbed him. I threatened him. I tried to TOUCH HIS MASK."
He pounded the stone floor with both fists, tears streaming down his face.
"I'M THE WORST! THE ABSOLUTE WORST! HOW COULD I TREAT A SENIOR OF THE STRAW HAT CREW LIKE THAT?!"
"UAAAAAGH!"
Sabo watched the breakdown with mild interest, then turned away.
He'll be fine. Probably.
His eyes swept the arena, searching for a familiar black cloak among the sea of spectators. Where had Itachi gone? The man had vanished mid-conversation, and Sabo still had questions—about Rilke Callander, about Blackbeard's retreat, about what exactly had happened with the Big Mom Pirates' ship that had been spotted near Dressrosa's waters.
"Maybe he went to find Luffy after all..."
His gaze drifted toward the arena floor.
And stopped.
There. In the front row of the spectator seating. Barely ten meters from where Suleiman was about to execute Rebecca.
A figure in a black cloak. A white mask. Completely motionless amid the screaming, bloodthirsty crowd. None of the spectators around him seemed to notice his presence—their eyes were fixed on the drama below, their voices raised in savage anticipation. He had simply... appeared among them. Like he had always been there.
"When did he—"
Sabo cut himself off, his breath catching.
The crowd around Itachi continued to scream. "KILL HER! CUT HER HEAD OFF! WE WANT BLOOD!"
Itachi's hand, hidden beneath his cloak, was already moving toward the Wind-Forest Fire's hilt. His crimson eyes—now shifted fully into their Mangekyō pattern, the three tomoe bleeding into the pinwheel design—locked onto Suleiman's descending blade.
Tsukuyomi. A single glance. That's all it will take.
He adjusted his position slightly, aligning his line of sight with the beheader.
I'll trap him in an instant of nightmare. Long enough for Rebecca to escape. No one will know—
The shadow moved.
Itachi's eyes widened.
What—
A blur of motion swept across the arena floor. It was fast. Faster than any fighter in D block had any right to be. Faster than Suleiman's descending blade. Faster, even, than Itachi's perception could fully resolve at this distance.
The blur passed through the remaining contestants like a wind through wheat.
And in its wake—
Silence.
The dust settled slowly, drifting down onto the blood-soaked sand like snow.
Every remaining fighter in D block lay crumpled on the ground. Suleiman. The warriors who had been circling for an opening. The veterans who had survived every melee until this moment.
All of them. Unconscious. Defeated in the span of a single heartbeat.
The crowd's roar died in their throats.
"What... what just happened?!"
"Who did that?!"
"Where did that come from?!"
Itachi rose from his seat, his Sharingan still spinning. The figure that had moved through the arena—he had caught a glimpse of its outline. A suggestion of a form. But the speed...
Even my eyes couldn't track it completely.
He had seen Kizaru move at the speed of light. He had tracked Fujitora's gravity-enhanced Soru. But this was different. This was raw, physical velocity—speed achieved not through Devil Fruit abilities or chakra enhancement, but through pure, overwhelming power.
Who—
And then he saw.
Standing in the center of the fallen fighters, barely winded, as if she had just completed a light warm-up rather than single-handedly ending a tournament block—
Was a woman.
She was tall. Imposing. Her dark hair fell in wild waves past her shoulders. One leg was a prosthetic—a gleaming construct of metal and engineering that clicked softly as she shifted her weight. Her expression was calm, almost bored, as she surveyed the carnage she had created.
The announcer's voice crackled through the colosseum's speakers, the man himself clearly struggling to process what he had just witnessed.
"L-LADIES AND GENTLEMEN! THE... THE WINNER OF D BLOCK... I CAN HARDLY BELIEVE IT, BUT THE RESULTS ARE CLEAR! THE LAST FIGHTER STANDING IS... REBECCA!!!"
The crowd erupted—not in cheers, but in howls of protest.
"WHAT?! NO! THAT'S IMPOSSIBLE!"
"WHO WAS THAT?! WHO INTERFERED?!"
"REBECCA CAN'T WIN! SHE'S NOTHING! DISQUALIFY HER!"
But Itachi wasn't listening to the crowd anymore.
His gaze was fixed on the woman who had just saved Rebecca's life—the woman who now stood protectively over the fallen princess, her one flesh leg planted firmly in the blood-soaked sand, her prosthetic gleaming under the arena lights.
You...
Rebecca stared up at her savior, tears streaming down her face. Her lips moved, forming words that the crowd's roar drowned out.
The woman bent down. Extended a hand. And when she spoke, her voice carried through the chaos with the impossible clarity of absolute authority.
"Get up. You're not allowed to die here."
Her eyes—dark and fierce and carrying the weight of battles Itachi could only imagine—swept across the screaming crowd with undisguised contempt.
"Not while I'm still breathing."
In the shadowed alcove above, Sabo let out a low whistle.
"Well. That's a complication."
Beside him, Bartolomeo had finally stopped weeping long enough to peer over the railing. His face went through several expressions in rapid succession—confusion, recognition, disbelief, and finally, something that looked very much like vindication.
"Wait. That's... isn't that..."
"It is." Sabo's voice was quiet. Measured. "The Revolutionary Army's been tracking her movements for months."
He watched the woman help Rebecca to her feet, watched her scan the arena with the cold assessment of a warrior who had already calculated every possible threat and dismissed most of them as beneath her notice.
"Kyros's wife. Rebecca's mother. The woman who was erased from history."
His expression softened—just slightly.
"Scarlet."
End of Chapter
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