The ship had been at sea for two hours when Light realized the Karma System did not have an 'off' switch.
He had initially assumed it was an active ability—a tool he would call upon when casting judgment. It wasn't. The numbers were simply there, floating above the head of every person on deck whether he focused on them or not. They were a permanent, luminous overlay on a world he was still quietly dissecting.
The sting of the salt air was real. The groan of the wood under his polished boots was real. The thirty Marines moving around him with the practiced efficiency of seasoned sailors—all of it was real, all of it was his to command, and the numbers floating above them were as concrete as the rifles slung across their backs.
He spent some time just observing the metrics, leaning against the railing with an expression of polite mildness. Most of his crew sat in a reasonable, mundane band: Greens in the low thousands, Reds scattered between a few dozen and a couple of thousand. Ordinary people. The Red wasn't nothing, but it wasn't a death sentence either. It was just a life's worth of small, pathetic failures.
Light was still synthesizing how this system mapped onto the world's power structure—his inherited memories were full of abstract concepts like Rokushiki and Haki that his new muscles hadn't fully synced with yet—when his First Lieutenant stepped up beside him.
"Captain," Haas saluted cleanly. "We have them. Two degrees starboard, about four kilometers out."
Light followed the man's gaze. Three ships were cutting through the open water in a loose, sloppy formation, flying black flags.
"Close to boarding range," Light ordered, his voice the picture of calm authority. "Restrain where you can. I want prisoners."
Haas nodded firmly and went to shout orders. Light remained at the railing, watching the distant sails. Prisoners, he thought, testing the word in his mind. Let's see exactly what a pirate's life is worth.
⬛ ⬛ ⬛
The Iron Jaw Pirates scattered the moment they realized they were being hunted, one ship peeling off in each direction while the flagship made a desperate run straight ahead. The South Blue's coastline in this sector was a treacherous maze of reefs and headlands, a geography the pirates clearly understood far less than the Marine navigators. Within forty minutes, all three ships were cornered.
Light boarded the flagship himself.
It was loud, chaotic, and completely lacked the clean, theoretical elegance he had absorbed from his inherited memories. Real naval combat was blood slipping on wooden planks, the deafening crack of flintlocks, and unpredictable, desperate bodies.
Two men rushed him simultaneously from his blind spot before his mind had fully oriented to the shifting deck. Light reacted on pure instinct. He flicked his left hand, using Force Authority to violently repel the air, sending the first man crashing through the mainmast. Simultaneously, he braced his right arm. Tekkai. The second pirate's cutlass shattered harmlessly against Light's forearm as if striking an anvil.
Light barely blinked. The movements were clunky, a genius mind operating a machine it hadn't fully calibrated yet, but they were devastating. He stepped over the groaning men and walked toward the aft deck.
[ Bors — Pirate Captain, Iron Jaw Pirates ] [ Green: 410 / Red: 24,800 ]
Bors was exactly what his bounty poster had promised: a massive wall of muscle with a literal iron plate bolted across his lower jaw. He was wielding a spiked club that had already crushed the skulls of two Marines by the time Light reached him.
The captain didn't hesitate. He swung the club low and incredibly fast.
Light took it on his Tekkai-braced arm. The kinetic force rattled violently up his bone to his shoulder. Light's eyes narrowed slightly. Bors hit hard—harder than the inherited memories had prepared him for. This wasn't just a brute; he was a seasoned killer. In this world, human biology could be pushed to monstrous extremes.
Light stepped inside the wide arc of Bors's recovery and drove his saber upward, aiming beneath the ribs. But Bors dropped his club, grabbed Light by the lapels with his massive free hand, lifted him clean off the deck, and threw him backward.
Light slammed into the mast. He had exactly one second to confirm that Tekkai had absorbed the spine-shattering impact before Bors was charging again, roaring through his iron jaw, drawing a heavy pistol.
Enough, Light thought.
He dropped his stance and activated Soru.
It was a single, explosive step that erased the distance between them faster than the human eye could track. Light materialized inside Bors's guard. He didn't just thrust his saber; he channeled Force Authority into the blade, creating a localized vacuum of attraction at the tip that pulled the weapon forward with the weight of a falling meteor.
The blade punched through Bors's chest, obliterating his heart and exiting through his spine.
Bors went down heavily and did not move again.
The System chimed in Light's mind.
[ KARMA SYSTEM ] [ KP: 2,480 ]
[ LIFE FORCE Lv.1 — Next: 20,000 KP ] [ WEAPON ARTS Lv.1 — Next: 10,000 KP ] [ OBSERVATION Lv.0 — Next: 500,000 KP ] [ ARMAMENT Lv.0 — Next: 500,000 KP ] [ CONQUEROR'S Lv.0 — Next: 1,000,000 KP ] (Rokushiki Skills hidden for brevity)
Light stared at the first number. 2,480. He looked down at Bors's corpse. The man had 24,800 Red Karma, but the System had only awarded him a tenth of that total. Standing amidst the dying echoes of the battle, Light's genius intellect ran the arithmetic instantly. Ten percent yield.
He looked at the Haki thresholds. Half a million points. A million points.
I see, Light thought, his expression turning terrifyingly cold. I am going to be doing this for a very long time before I become a god here.
He turned his attention to the center of the deck. Thirty-one surviving pirates were being shoved to their knees, their wrists bound in heavy iron cuffs.
Haas jogged over, sporting a shallow cut above his eye but otherwise unharmed. "Captain's down. Thirty-one restrained. Four over the side," he reported briskly. He glanced at Bors's body. "I'll have the prisoners processed and transported to the nearest base for—"
"That won't be necessary, Lieutenant," Light interrupted smoothly.
Haas stopped, blinking. "Captain?"
Light was already walking toward the line of kneeling men. He didn't look at their faces; he looked at the numbers hovering above them. 8,000. 12,000. 9,500. Not a single one of them registered below five thousand Red. These weren't starving thieves. These were men who had burned ships and butchered merchants. Thirty-one freely made choices, quantified and weighed.
Light drew his saber.
"Captain." Haas's voice dropped, suddenly thick with dread. "They're restrained. The battle is over—"
The first pirate in the line looked up, saw the dead, dark emptiness in the Marine Captain's eyes, and understood exactly what was about to happen.
Light didn't break his stride.
The executions took a few minutes. The deck was loud with screaming, then it was reduced to wet, choking gasps, and finally, it was entirely quiet.
The Marines stood perfectly still, their rifles lowered, gripped by a paralyzing, primal terror. Something about the way their Captain moved down the line—fluid, unhurried, his pleasant expression never wavering as he slit throat after throat—made stepping forward to intervene feel physically impossible. It wasn't a battle frenzy. It was pest control.
When it was done, Light pulled a white handkerchief from his pocket, methodically wiped his saber clean, and checked his panel.
[ KARMA SYSTEM ] [ KP: 39,230 ]
Thirty-nine thousand. He looked back at the Haki thresholds, doing the math once more.
He was going to need considerably more pirates.
"Log them all as killed during the boarding action," Light told Haas, his voice light and conversational as he stepped over a pool of blood and walked back toward the bow.
⬛ ⬛ ⬛
Light spent the rest of the voyage on the deck, letting the cool ocean wind wash over his face. He watched the South Blue roll by, his mind calculating variables.
How many crews like the Iron Jaw Pirates were moving through these waters right now? Hundreds? Thousands? The numbers on the panel were going to move slowly. He understood that now. This wasn't going to be an overnight ascension.
But Light was nothing if not patient.
He had a sanctioned posting, a white coat that served as the perfect mask, a crew currently too traumatized to ask dangerous questions, and an ocean full of floating red numbers that had absolutely no idea what had just been unleashed into their world.
He could be very, very patient.
⬛ ⬛ ⬛
Half a world away, across the Red Line in the quiet waters of the East Blue, a boy named Monkey D. Luffy sat on a dock, swinging his legs. He was sixteen years old, counting down the agonizingly slow days until his seventeenth birthday, when he would finally be old enough to set sail.
Two absolute forces, quietly preparing for an ocean that was not ready for either of them.