Haas laid the intelligence reports out on the navigation table.
"Thirty-three ships," the Lieutenant stated, his voice tight. "Approximately four thousand, two hundred men. One Captain with a seventy million Beli bounty and a Paramecia Devil Fruit that supposedly lets him punch clean through warship hulls. They have eight hundred civilians trapped on the island, and the blockade has been holding for eleven days."
"The nearest Marine fleet is four days out," Haas continued, tapping the map. "If we send for reinforcements now—"
"We aren't," Light said mildly, sipping his coffee.
Haas stopped tapping the map. He looked up. "Sir. That is four thousand men."
"I am aware of the math, Lieutenant."
"Our ship has thirty crew members. Even with your..." Haas paused, searching for a word that wouldn't get him executed, "...even with your capabilities, the numbers simply do not—"
"I am going alone," Light interrupted, his tone leaving absolutely no room for debate. "You will drop anchor two miles out, maintain radio silence, and wait."
Haas stared at him for a long, heavy moment. He looked at the Captain's pleasant, utterly unbothered smile. Then, Haas neatly gathered his papers, saluted, and walked out of the room. He didn't ask a single follow-up question. That was how Light knew the man was finally broken in.
Light finished his coffee and went to his quarters. He stripped off his pristine Marine coat and dressed in plain, dark clothes—a loose black jacket and dark trousers that would blend perfectly into the shadows. He strapped his saber securely to his side, checked his reflection in the mirror, and saw nothing but an ordinary man.
Perfect.
⬛ ⬛ ⬛
Bonney was sitting on the floor in the narrow corridor outside his cabin, her legs stretched entirely across the walkway, effectively barricading the door. She was violently tearing into a loaf of bread. She looked up as he stepped out.
"You're going now?" she asked around a mouthful of crust.
"Tonight."
She looked at his dark clothes. Then she looked up at his face. "How many are there?"
"About four thousand."
She went quiet for a moment. That didn't happen often. "Are you going to kill all of them?"
"Most of them."
Bonney chewed on the bread, thinking about that. She didn't look scared. She just looked like she was running a complicated calculation in her head. Finally, she swallowed and nodded. "Okay. Come back, though."
"I intend to."
"That's not a promise."
Light paused, looking down at the messy, feral child currently hoarding bread on his floorboards. "I will come back," he said.
She nodded, apparently satisfied with the contract, and went back to eating. Light stepped over her outstretched legs and headed for the deck.
As he walked away, quiet enough that she probably thought the sound of the ocean masked it, he heard her mumble:
"Don't get hurt, Big Bro Psycho."
Light didn't stop walking, but a faint, genuine smile touched the corners of his mouth.
⬛ ⬛ ⬛
He rowed a small dinghy until he was half a mile out, then slipped into the ocean and swam the rest of the way.
The South Blue water was freezing, but Light's Level 3 Life Force and Life Return rendered the temperature entirely irrelevant. His core remained perfectly regulated. He surfaced smoothly on the jagged rocks below the island's eastern cliff, lying flat in the shadows as he took in the harbor.
Thirty-three ships.
They were anchored so tightly together that their towering masts looked like a dead, wooden forest. Watchfires burned low on the decks, and the ambient, drunken voices of four thousand men carried easily across the water. It was the relaxed, arrogant noise of an army that felt completely untouchable.
Light scaled the cliff face with ease, looking down at the layout from the summit. The pirate forces were divided into three main clusters: the anchored fleet, the dockside warehouses and market stalls, and a massive inn near the harbor square. The civilian town further inland was pitch black and entirely silent. Smart people.
He climbed back down to the water. The ships were the priority. Thirty-three galleons panicking and breaking for the open ocean would ruin the harvest. He needed to lock the door.
⬛ ⬛ ⬛
He swam from hull to hull in the pitch-black water, pulling himself up the heavy iron anchor chains in absolute silence.
He didn't bother boarding to fight. He simply dropped to the rudder mechanisms at the stern of each ship and applied Force Authority. He didn't snap the iron—that would make too much noise. He just applied a localized, intense gravitational warp to the steering chains, bending the metal just enough that any serious tension would cause the rudders to violently jam.
Each ship took exactly four minutes. He was a machine, moving with methodical, terrifying efficiency.
The twelfth ship was completely empty on the lower decks. The thirteenth was not.
Night watch. A single pirate was sitting on a crate near the stern, fighting a losing battle against sleep, his chin resting on his chest.
[ Unknown — Pirate ] [ Green: 210 / Red: 4,400 ]
Light's hand snapped to the hilt of his saber before his conscious mind even registered the movement.
He stopped himself. 4,400. Six hundred points below the threshold.
Light stood perfectly still in the shadows, looking down at the man. He was just some low-level thug, probably not here as part of any grand, malicious design. He was likely just a man who had made a series of small, pathetic decisions that had eventually led him to a pirate ship. 4,400 points' worth of cowardice and petty cruelty.
Light thought, not for the first time, that five thousand felt like an incredibly generous baseline. Perhaps it was too generous. He hadn't fully decided yet.
The pirate shifted, his eyes fluttering open. He saw a shadow standing over him in the dark and sucked in a breath to shout.
Light stepped inside his guard and drove the heavy brass pommel of his saber directly into the man's temple. Crack. The pirate's head snapped violently sideways, and he dropped to the deck like a sack of wet grain. He was still breathing. He would wake up tomorrow with a fractured skull, a massive gap in his memory, and his life intact. It was his lucky night.
Light went back to work.
He found three more men below the threshold across the next twenty ships. They received the exact same treatment: fast, brutal, and non-lethal. The ones who registered above five thousand, however, he executed where he found them, as quietly as possible. Seven dead men across the fleet, their throats cleanly opened in the dark. The panel barely registered the KP influx.
He finished the thirty-third ship just before four in the morning.
⬛ ⬛ ⬛
Light swam to the main dock, climbed the wooden ladder without making a splash, and stood dripping in the harbor of Roca Island.
The camp was dead quiet. The watchfires had burned down to glowing embers. The vast majority of the four thousand pirates were deeply asleep—sprawled across coiled ropes, slumped against cargo crates, and packed into the warehouses, completely at ease.
Light stood perfectly still, closed his eyes, and let his Observation Haki bleed outward.
Fifty meters of range. It was a weak, blurry sphere of awareness at Level 1, but in the absolute stillness of four in the morning, it was more than enough. He could feel the shapes of them. Dozens packed tightly in the nearest warehouse. Dozens more lining the dock road. The inn ahead, radiating body heat with one single light still burning in an upstairs window.
And scattered sparsely throughout the sleeping army, he felt a handful of pale, muted presences. Low Red Karma values. Flawed civilians. Conscripts. Slaves. He mentally tagged their coordinates, filing them away to be avoided.
Then, he looked at everything else.
Hundreds upon hundreds of glowing, blood-red numbers. They were stacked on top of each other, painting the entire camp in a canvas of quantified sin. Some numbers were modest. Some were extraordinary. These were men who had burned homes, slaughtered crews, and taken whatever they wanted simply because no one in the South Blue had the power to stop them.
Until tonight.
A slow, wide, completely unhinged smile stretched across Light's face in the dark. He drew his saber, the steel hissing softly against the scabbard.
He had a strategy. And it was time to go to work.