"WAAAAAH! I'm so HUNGRY!" she wailed into his knee, her voice echoing off the blood-splattered brickwork. "I haven't eaten ANYTHING! And it's been SO LONG! And I was SO SCARED!"
Light looked down at the pink-haired child currently using his pristine uniform as a tissue. Then he looked at the four butchered Cipher Pol agents bleeding out onto the cobblestones. Then he looked back at the child.
He hadn't missed the seamless transition. Three seconds ago, she had been backed against a wall, coldly calculating her survival odds with the dead eyes of a veteran. The absolute second the threat was neutralized, she had weaponized her childhood. It was manipulative, entirely self-serving, and flawlessly executed.
Light found himself genuinely impressed.
"How long since you last ate?" he asked, his voice entirely devoid of paternal warmth.
"HOURS! Can't you see I'm wasting away?! I'm so thin! Wuhuhuuuu!"
"How many hours?"
"Many hours!" She abruptly stopped fake-crying, tilted her head back, and looked up at him with massive, impossibly wide eyes. "Are you going to feed me, Big Brother?!"
Light stood there in the dim alleyway—a weeping child clamped to his leg, four highly-trained government assassins dead at his feet, and the half-million Karma Points required for Observation Haki finally sitting in his System. He reflected, not for the first time, that this world had a spectacular habit of producing variables that refused to fit neatly into his calculations.
He could leave her. He could hand her over to the local authorities.
But he looked down at those big, expectant eyes and realized something rare: he wasn't bored. For the first time since he had woken up in this world, he was looking at someone who didn't immediately disgust him.
"Yes," Light said. "Fine. Let go of my leg."
She immediately dropped her crocodile tears, shifted her grip to latch onto his hand instead, and began dragging him toward the harbor. "There's a food stall that way!" she commanded. "They have meat!"
"You were cataloging food stalls while being chased by government assassins?" Light asked, raising an eyebrow.
"I was hungry, you know!" she snapped, looking back at him as if this explained the fundamental laws of the universe.
Which, Light supposed, it did.
⬛ ⬛ ⬛
He had to bring her back to the Marine ship because she quite literally ate the food stalls out of inventory. That was not an exaggeration; two vendors had closed their shutters weeping over their depleted weekly stock.
First Lieutenant Haas was coming up from below deck to check the perimeter when he froze. He saw his Captain—the Smiling Reaper, the man who had spent the last three months turning the South Blue into a slaughterhouse—walking up the gangplank with a pink-haired girl swinging lazily from his hand.
Haas's brain briefly stopped working. "Eh? Captain," he said carefully, his hand hovering near his sidearm out of pure confusion. "Who is—"
"She was hungry," Light said, as if that were a complete operational briefing.
The girl peered around Light's leg, fixing Haas with large, critically appraising eyes. "Is there food on this ship? Big Brother said there was food."
"The mess hall has—" Haas started.
"AYE! LET'S GO!" she cheered, dropping Light's hand and sprinting past the Lieutenant like a cannonball.
Haas turned slowly to look at his Captain. Light was staring up at the sky, an expression of profound, quiet resignation on his face.
Haas took her to the mess hall.
Her name was Bonney. She mentioned this somewhere between her third and fourth plate of heavily salted sea-boar, without ceremony, while simultaneously demanding more bread. The crew learned her name the way you learned most things about Bonney—as a brief footnote attached to something she was currently demanding.
Second Lieutenant Tarro crouched next to her chair, putting on his best, most enthusiastic 'fun uncle' face. "Hey, I know a joke! Want to hear it?"
"No," Bonney said, inhaling a bread roll without looking up.
"Come on, it's a really good one—"
"I said no. Are you deaf? More rice! Quick!"
Tarro scrambled to scoop her more rice. "Okay, but what do you call a fish without eyes?"
Bonney actually stopped eating. She turned her head slowly and looked at the Marine officer with an expression of pure, exhausted contempt. "A 'fsh'. Everyone knows that one. It's the oldest joke in the world. You're incredibly boring."
Half the mess hall burst into roaring laughter. Tarro went beet red. Bonney went back to her plate, completely unbothered by the psychological damage she had just inflicted.
Corro, the ship's massive, heavily-scarred deckhand, leaned over the table, grinning a toothy smile. "You're pretty funny, kid."
"Heh! Just wait until I learn the pirate cuss words," Bonney bragged around a mouthful of pork. "I haven't had the chance to hear the really good ones yet, but when I do, I'll test them out on you!"
"Haha! I hope you don't!" Corro laughed, entirely charmed. "Hey, can you do any tricks? My niece does cartwheels—"
"Oh, shut up already!" Bonney groaned, rolling her eyes. She leaned back in her chair and spotted Light standing quietly in the doorway. "Biiiiig Brotheeeeer!" she whined loudly. "Tell them to stooooop!"
"They aren't doing anything," Light noted mildly, leaning against the doorframe.
"They're being annoying!"
"You are eating their weekly rations."
Bonney chewed on that logic for a second. "Fine!" she conceded. "But I want dessert now!"
"We don't have—" Tarro started to explain.
"Then someone go get some!" She didn't even look up from her plate, but she pointed a greasy finger at Tarro. "Huh?! Are you defying my Big Brother's orders?!"
Light looked at the ceiling, suppressing a genuine, highly uncharacteristic sigh. He reached into his coat, pulled out a thick wad of Beli, and tossed it to Tarro without a word. Tarro scrambled out the door to hunt down pastries.
Haas materialized at Light's shoulder, watching the chaos. The crew hadn't laughed like this in three months. The crushing, suffocating tension of serving under a monster had briefly evaporated, entirely dispelled by a gluttonous ten-year-old.
"Sir, she is calling you Big Brother," Haas murmured, visibly fighting to suppress a smile.
"I am aware."
"Will she be staying, sir?"
Light watched Bonney inform Corro that his 'funny face' was genuinely the most tragic thing she had ever seen and that he should think long and hard about his life choices. Corro looked absolutely delighted. Three other heavily armed Marines were already contorting their faces, aggressively competing for the child's verdict.
She was loud. She was demanding. She was entirely without manners.
But she also hadn't flinched at the sight of four dead bodies. She looked at Light not with the terror his crew felt, but with the demanding expectation of an equal.
"Yeah," Light said softly.
⬛ ⬛ ⬛
That evening, Light sat alone on the upper deck.
Below him, the ship had finally wound down. Bonney had passed out face-first at the mess table somewhere between her ninth plate and what would have inevitably been her tenth. Corro the deckhand and Tarro the Lieutenant had gotten into a heated argument over who had the honor of carrying her to the spare bunk. Corro had won the argument, but when he went to lift her, the sleeping pink-haired girl had reflexively punched him directly in the throat. Corro was currently resting in the infirmary.
Light leaned back against the railing, listening to the gentle lap of the waves, and opened his panel.
[ KARMA SYSTEM ] [ KP: 500,250 ]
Five hundred thousand.
Three months of methodical slaughter. Four dead Cipher Pol agents who had thought they owned the shadows. And one pink-haired kid who had just consumed roughly his entire monthly food budget in a single afternoon and was now snoring in his spare bunk.
He thought about the way she had watched four men get brutally ripped apart and immediately started thinking about roasted meat. He thought about the way she had latched onto the title 'Big Brother' as if she had made a unilateral decision and the universe simply had to accommodate it.
Light let out a breath that was half-sigh, half-chuckle. He didn't mind. If he was going to rule this new world, he supposed he could allow exactly one person to stand beside the throne without bowing.
He focused his mind on the glowing text. Having such a high price, he had been expecting these 'Haki' powers to be worth it.
Observation Haki, huh? Let's see what the gods see.