By my ninth day in Paradise, I had come to appreciate why every competent pirate in the series carried a Log Pose.
I didn't have one.
Now, before anybody says anything, yes, yes, I knew what a Log Pose was. We watched One Piece. I knew the Grand Line's magnetic fields made ordinary compasses about as useful as motivational quotes during a house fire. The problem was that knowing a fictional navigation device existed in my previous life hadn't magically placed one on my wrist in this one.
In hindsight, I probably should have sorted that out before launching myself over Reverse Mountain.
Minor oversight.
The regular compass sitting on the table beside me had spent most of the morning pointing south-east, north, directly at my breakfast, and then spinning in a slow circle as though trying to remember what its job was. I tapped the glass twice.
"Pick a direction."
The needle continued rotating while my News Coo watched from the railing.
"Don't."
He tilted his head.
"I know."
The bird made a low noise in its throat.
"I said I know."
The stolen Grand Line chart had gotten me this far, but charts were significantly less useful when the ocean itself refused to acknowledge concepts like north. Islands were marked ahead, routes drawn between them, and notes on currents and weather patterns, yet none of it mattered if I couldn't reliably tell which way I was facing.
So, for nine days, I was lost.
Not dangerously lost, to be fair. I had enough food, plenty of water, a sturdy ship and the ability to survive several things that would kill normal people. There were worse places to be, but that didn't change the fact that I had absolutely no idea where the fuck I was going.
The weather didn't help either. The Grand Line had already introduced me to snow, hail and summer temperatures within the same afternoon, and since then it had continued experimenting. Twice, cloud cover stayed thick enough that I couldn't use the sun properly, and one night the stars vanished behind fog so dense I could barely see the front of my own ship.
I kept correcting by memory whenever I could, adjusting for whatever currents and wind I could actually read before finding my original heading again and continuing until the sea invented another problem.
By the sixth day, I started noticing something strange.
Whenever the ship drifted too far from the direction I had been holding, I felt wrong. It wasn't sickness or dizziness, but something closer to that faint internal discomfort you get after walking down a staircase and expecting one more step that wasn't there.
At first, I assumed I was just getting better at sailing, which, obviously, I was. Nami's teachings had finally managed to penetrate my incredibly powerful skull.
Then, on the eighth day, I woke up in the cabin after falling asleep at the table and knew immediately that the ship had turned.
I hadn't looked outside, couldn't see the sun, and the compass was still possessed, yet I sat there for several seconds before pointing through the wall.
"We're facing that way."
The News Coo, which had been sleeping on top of a sack, opened one eye.
I went upstairs.
The sail had shifted during the night, and the ship had turned noticeably east from the heading I'd kept the previous evening.
"Huh."
I corrected us, and that unpleasant little feeling disappeared.
Interesting.
For most of the next day, I deliberately kept fucking with it. I'd turn the rudder away, wait, then close my eyes and slowly bring us back until the pressure in my balance settled. After doing it enough times, the distinction got clearer. The Grand Line still had its weird magnetic pulls dragging the compass needle around, but those same pulls were becoming increasingly obvious to me.
Not as directions exactly, more like pressure. Somewhere ahead, slightly to the west, a steady pull had become an anchor my body used amid all the conflicting nonsense.
The mark across my hand warmed.
Clink.
I stared at it, then toward the horizon.
"Did I just adapt to being lost?"
My bird had nothing useful to contribute.
I slowly grinned.
Adaptation, you smexy beast!
It wasn't like a map suddenly appeared inside my head. I couldn't tell what island was ahead, how far away it was or whether something enormous and hungry sat between us and it. But I could keep a direction without a compass now, and more importantly, I could feel which magnetic pull remained consistent long enough to probably belong to something.
I followed it.
Land appeared the next afternoon.
I stood at the bow with my arms folded while a forested island gradually rose over the horizon. The News Coo landed beside me and looked up.
"Never doubted myself."
He pecked my ankle.
…
My first-ever Grand Line pirate crew attacked me roughly two weeks later.
I say attacked because that was technically what happened.
They would probably describe the event differently.
Paradise pirates were already more interesting than their East Blue cousins. The ship that approached mine from the north had three masts, armour plated around the bow and enough cannons along one side to turn my little vessel into very expensive firewood.
Their captain had also apparently eaten a Devil Fruit.
I found this out when he jumped aboard, slapped both palms against my deck and folded half of it upward.
Literally folded it.
Wood creaked beneath my feet as planks bent along a perfectly straight line, one side of the deck rising as if someone had installed a giant hinge underneath it. My table slid past me, followed by a barrel, while the News Coo flew upward screaming.
I caught the barrel.
My table hit the railing and shattered.
I slowly looked at the captain.
He was broad, bald and wearing enough belts around his torso to restrain a small elephant.
He smiled.
"Recognise me, Branchbreaker?"
I looked at the remains of my table.
"No."
His smile twitched.
"Garris Holt. Captain of the Hinge Pirates."
"You broke my table." I frowned.
One of the pirates behind him lowered his sword slightly.
Holt spread his hands. "I ate the Hinge-Hinge Fruit. Anything solid I touch can bend around a point I choose."
I looked around my ship again. The deck had been folded, part of the cabin wall was bent outward and my table was dead.
I nodded slowly.
"That's actually pretty cool."
His grin returned.
"Thank you."
"Still gonna beat the fuck out of you, though." I grinned.
Most of his crew were regular pirates, which meant the difference between them and the people I'd fought in the East Blue was mostly confidence. Holt himself was more irritating. Every surface became a problem once he touched it; sections of deck snapped upward under my feet, walls folded over to block me, and at one point he bent the base of my mast far enough that the entire thing started coming down.
I caught it on one shoulder.
Everything stopped.
Holt stared at me from across the deck while I held the mast upright with one hand.
"Do you have any idea how annoying sails are to repair?"
His crew went considerably quieter after that.
I put the mast back where it belonged, crossed the deck and punched Holt through his own cabin.
The remaining enthusiasm disappeared quickly.
Twenty minutes later, the Hinge Pirates were tied together on their deck while I searched their supplies for anything useful. Holt lay unconscious beneath what remained of his dining table, which felt appropriate, and their navigator followed me around with the nervous attention of a man trying to make sure I didn't accidentally steal something essential.
Unfortunately for him, I saw his wrist.
I stopped.
He stopped.
A small circular device was strapped to it beneath his sleeve, three needles sitting beneath the glass.
I pointed.
"Is that a Log Pose?"
His face fell.
"Excellent."
I held out my hand.
He hugged his wrist against his chest. "You can't just take our Log Pose!"
"Your captain folded my ship."
"That doesn't mean you can rob us!"
I stared at him.
He stared back for perhaps three seconds before slowly removing it.
"Thank you."
I strapped it around my wrist and turned it over. One needle had already settled toward the island they'd last visited while the other two shifted more gradually.
My internal sense tugged in a similar direction.
Oh.
That was interesting.
Not identical, but close.
My power had apparently built me the biological equivalent of a discount navigation tool.
I was keeping the real one.
Backup, I guess.
The next newspaper found me three days later.
The article claimed the Hinge Pirates had been "decisively dismantled during an encounter with the notorious Branchbreaker," which made the entire thing sound much more professional than it had actually been. Holt had attacked me, broken my table, nearly ruined my mast and then lost his Log Pose.
Natural consequences.
The new poster beneath the article read:
"BRANCHBREAKER" KAI VOSS
DEAD OR ALIVE
103,000,000 BERRIES
I stared at the number.
Gentlemen, we've done it, 100M (～￣▽￣)～!!!
"One hundred and three?"
The News Coo leaned over my shoulder.
"They couldn't round it?"
He pecked the corner of the poster.
"Yeah, stupid number."
…
The next few months blurred, not because nothing happened but because too much happened.
The first lesson Paradise taught me was that surviving the Grand Line and navigating the Grand Line were very different problems.
My little built-in compass became more reliable the longer I travelled. Magnetic shifts that once made my head feel strange eventually became as easy to notice as a change in wind direction, and if I concentrated, I could usually separate the strongest nearby pull from all the rest.
That did not tell me there was a cyclone between me and it.
I found that out personally.
The sky had been clear when I left an island that morning. By midday, clouds had rolled over us so quickly that the horizon disappeared, and fifteen minutes after that, I was standing ankle-deep in rainwater while the ship climbed waves taller than some buildings in Goat Village.
The storm itself wasn't the problem. Cold stopped bothering me quickly, pressure changes barely registered anymore, and my balance adjusted to the deck faster than the deck could throw me.
My ship, unfortunately, had not eaten the Hito Hito no Mi.
That became important when a waterspout formed close enough to start lifting loose barrels from the deck.
I spent the next hour fighting ropes, sails and physics while the News Coo hid in the cabin and screamed encouragement.
At least, I assumed it was encouragement.
The main lesson was simple: my body could adapt to weather.
Wood could not.
I became much more respectful of forecasts after that.
Slightly.
The people were stranger than the weather.
One bounty hunter on an island called Larka had eaten a fruit that let him grow teeth from any solid surface he touched.
Not his own teeth.
Just teeth.
Walls, floors, tables and apparently the street itself.
I spent several deeply undignified minutes being attacked by architecture. At one point, the ground beneath me opened into an enormous set of molars and tried chewing my leg.
I hated that man.
Fortunately, Arlong had already done extensive research on how effective teeth were against me, so his entire fighting style had the unfortunate problem of being based around something my body remembered extremely well.
The first bite sorta hurt.
The second did nothing. By the time he tried making a building chew me, several of the people watching had already started leaving.
He retired from bounty hunting shortly afterwards.
Voluntarily.
Probably.
A woman three islands later could make anything she struck vibrate hard enough to shake itself apart. You could say she really knew how to find the right spot to completely wreck a man's defences.
She touched a stone wall and reduced it to rubble without throwing a proper punch.
Another pirate could change the weight of anything he spat on. Gross.
The newspapers kept finding me through it all.
One hundred and eight million, then one hundred and sixteen.
The World Government never seemed particularly interested in explaining the increments, and the articles attached to them became increasingly unreliable. Apparently, I'd terrorised a merchant convoy I had actually rescued from pirates, destroyed a Marine listening post I'd never even seen, and had begun "forcibly recruiting criminals throughout Paradise."
That last one confused me.
I didn't even have a crew.
I showed the article to the News Coo.
"Do you count?"
He bit the paper.
"I'll put you down as undecided."
The rumours were worse. Branchbreaker Kai Voss could breathe underwater, Branchbreaker Kai Voss ate cannonballs, and according to one particularly ambitious storyteller, Branchbreaker Kai Voss had killed Garp and was wearing his skin.
I almost choked when I heard that one.
One rumour, however, kept showing up without changing much.
Baroque Works.
The first time I heard the name, two bounty hunters were whispering about it near a port noticeboard. I would've ignored them if one hadn't complained that Baroque Works had been taking contracts across three different islands and paying independent hunters to disappear into its network.
The second time, a bartender mentioned them while complaining about the sudden number of bounty hunters passing through Paradise.
By the third, I found a small black card inside the coat of a man who had tried collecting my bounty.
BAROQUE WORKS
Nothing else.
No address.
No names.
Just the words.
I sat in my cabin that night with the card between two fingers.
"That's early."
The News Coo slept beside the lamp.
At least, I thought it was early.
That was the problem.
Baroque Works meant Crocodile.
Probably.
In the story I remembered, Crocodile created the organisation, filled it with numbered agents, used it to destabilise Alabasta and eventually ended up with Robin as Miss All Sunday. Very simple when you watched it happen from a sofa.
I wasn't on a sofa anymore.
I was also several years early, my memory of exact dates was absolute garbage, and I had already spent enough time changing things to know that treating canon like a timetable was asking for trouble.
Maybe Crocodile already had the whole organisation running. Maybe this was the early version; Robin might already be involved or she might not, and I had no reliable way of knowing how much of the future I remembered was still moving along the same path.
Maybe something I had done in the East Blue had knocked over a domino I couldn't see yet, although Crocodile changing his entire criminal operation because I punched a fish-man felt a little self-important.
Still, "should be" was becoming a dangerous phrase.
I turned the card over.
Blank.
"Crocodile," I muttered.
The bird opened one eye.
"Potentially."
It closed again.
Helpful.
I stored the card beside Vale's old records and moved on.
For now.
…
The fight that changed things started because somebody stabbed my ship.
Again.
Apparently, something about Crest's vessel encouraged pirates to commit maritime vandalism. I wonder why?
I'd stopped at Redhook Port to restock food and replace a section of rope when shouting came from the docks. By the time I returned with two bags under one arm and half a grilled skewer hanging from my mouth, twelve men had surrounded the ship.
Three were already aboard, and one was trying to catch my News Coo.
That was ambitious.
The bird flew over his head, doubled back and pecked him hard enough that he fell off the railing.
I stopped at the end of the pier.
"Good bird."
The News Coo screamed triumphantly.
Every pirate turned toward me.
Their captain stood nearest the gangplank, a heavily built man wearing iron guards over both forearms. A deep scar ran from the side of his nose into his beard, and a heavy hooked weapon rested against one shoulder.
His eyes travelled upward until they reached my face.
Recognition followed.
"Branchbreaker."
I pulled the rest of the skewer from my mouth.
"That's what the government calls me."
"One hundred and sixteen million." He smiled. "That's a good payday."
I looked past him.
There was a fresh hole through the railing of my ship where his hooked weapon had apparently gone through.
I sighed.
"You people keep damaging my shit."
The smile faded slightly.
"What?"
"The last pirate captain folded my deck."
A few of his men exchanged glances.
"Now you've stabbed the railing."
The captain lowered the hook from his shoulder.
"I don't care about your railing."
He came at me first.
The fight spread across the dock quickly, although most of his crew barely mattered once things got moving. I had gotten used to Paradise pirates by then. They were stronger, meaner and occasionally carried tricks that would've made them captains back in the East Blue, but familiar problems still stayed familiar.
One man tried a sword and discovered why that was a poor career decision.
Another used a weighted chain and actually managed to catch one ankle before I pulled him across half the pier with it. His friend tried helping, which mostly meant I ended up dragging both of them.
Their captain was different.
His name was Draeger, and the weapon wasn't just a hook. The entire thing could separate into linked sections, turning from a heavy curved blade into something halfway between a whip and an anchor chain. He kept changing its length while fighting, snapping the blade around corners and using the docks, masts and posts to alter its direction.
The first clean hit opened my shoulder.
The second barely did.
By then, though, he had noticed.
Draeger pulled the weapon back and stared at the closing cut.
"So the stories are true."
"Some of them."
"You really don't stay hurt."
He attacked again.
I caught one section of the chain and immediately regretted it when the remaining links wrapped around my arm. Draeger twisted, dragging the hooked blade back toward my throat.
I planted my feet and stopped it inches away.
He pulled harder, yet nothing happened.
His men had gone quiet behind him.
I glanced at the blade beside my neck and then toward Draeger.
"You done?"
His answer was to let go.
The chain went slack, and three pirates attacked from behind while I was still wrapped in it.
Fair enough.
For the next minute, the dock became expensive. Draeger kept enough distance to stay irritating while his crew tried to occupy me, and I gradually stopped bothering to chase him. I took the space instead, pushing the fight farther down the pier until my ship was behind his people and I had nowhere useful left to circle.
Then Draeger changed tactics.
He wrapped the chain around the base of a cargo crane, ran the links across two mooring posts and pulled the hooked blade back toward himself.
I understood what he was doing approximately one second too late.
The entire framework came down.
Men scattered.
I put both arms over my head as several tons of timber and iron collapsed onto the dock.
The impact cracked boards beneath my feet and drove me through them to the thighs.
Dust rolled across the harbour, followed by a burst of cheering from somewhere near Draeger's crew.
I pushed upward.
The beam across my shoulders moved.
The cheering died.
I got one foot free, then the other, and stood beneath the wreckage with the largest support beam balanced across my back. Draeger stared from the other end of the ruined dock.
"Seriously?"
I shoved it aside.
The timber hit the water hard enough to send spray over the nearby boats.
"Yeah."
He swore and brought the hook around again.
This time, I didn't move immediately.
Something had been bothering me ever since Cocoyasi.
The transformation.
Whatever climbed out of Arlong's pool was still me, even if calling it human would've been generous. I remembered the size, the altered face, the cloud wheel and the blade extending along my arm.
Especially the blade.
Over the months since, I had tried recreating pieces of it deliberately.
Most attempts produced absolutely nothing. Once, my fingernails darkened. Another time, the muscles in my forearm shifted enough to tear my sleeve, then immediately returned to normal.
The only useful conclusion was that the full transformation wasn't some completely separate creature my fruit summoned. My body had already made those structures before.
Which meant, theoretically, it could do it again.
I just had no clue how to ask nicely.
Draeger's hooked blade came toward me.
I raised my right arm.
Not everything.
Just this.
I reached for the memory of the arm that had dragged me from Arlong's pool, the weight attached to it and the strange sensation of having something that shouldn't exist fixed alongside my own bones.
My fingers tightened.
Something pulled underneath the skin.
Draeger's weapon hit.
Metal screamed.
He stopped.
So did I.
My sleeve had split from wrist to elbow. The forearm beneath it was no longer entirely mine: pale flesh thickened around the muscle, my hand grew slightly larger, and dark nails replaced the ordinary ones at my fingertips. Heavy wrappings had formed along the outside of the arm, holding a long blade tightly against it.
Not imagined or halfway there.
The Sword of Exorcism, or Extermination, I can't remember too well.
Draeger's hook was pressed against its edge.
I stared at my arm.
"Oh."
Draeger pulled his weapon back, and I turned my wrist. The blade followed perfectly as a large grin slowly stretched across my face.
"Oh, that's fucking sick."
"What the hell are you?"
I looked up.
"Very happy right now."
He swung again.
I met it.
The Mahoraga blade cut through the hooked weapon near the middle.
Half of it spun away, crossed the dock and buried itself in a warehouse wall.
Draeger stared at the handle remaining in his hand and I stared at the blade on my arm.
The fishermen watching from farther up the harbour had gone completely silent. One of Draeger's men slowly lowered his sword, then noticed nobody else seemed interested in volunteering either.
"Captain?" somebody called.
Draeger threw the broken weapon aside.
Credit where it was due, he still came forward.
I also appreciated the opportunity.
The blade changed the fight immediately.
Not because I suddenly knew swordsmanship. I didn't, and my technique with the thing was probably offensive to anyone who had ever seriously trained with a blade, but it sat along my forearm rather than in my hand, so treating it like an extension of my punches worked surprisingly well.
Draeger discovered that quickly.
He tried getting inside its reach and took a shallow cut across the iron guard around his forearm.
The metal opened.
Not his arm.
I turned the blade deliberately at the last moment.
He noticed, so his next approach was considerably more careful.
That was the part I cared about.
I had control.
Not perfect control, because the arm felt heavier than normal and every movement pulled differently through my shoulder, but this wasn't the desperate monster that had crawled from the sea at Arlong Park.
I had chosen this.
The thought almost distracted me enough to get punched.
Draeger landed one clean hit across my jaw, which reminded me to stop admiring myself.
"Right."
I rolled my jaw.
"My turn."
Ordinary exchanges didn't last much longer after that. Draeger kept moving and using the environment, but he'd lost the weapon that made him dangerous, while I had gained something neither of us properly understood yet.
His confidence finally cracked when I drove the blade through a mooring post beside his head.
The entire top half slid sideways.
Draeger stared at the cut.
I pulled my arm free.
"Still worth the payday?"
He stepped back, but I crossed the space between us and hit him in the stomach with my left hand.
He folded around it and left the dock, sailed over two moored boats and disappeared through the canopy of a fish stall on the opposite pier.
A few seconds later, something collapsed over there.
Nobody else moved.
I looked around at the remaining pirates.
One man dropped his sword and soon enough the others followed.
"Good choice."
Then I immediately looked back at my arm.
Still there.
Excellent.
I turned it over carefully, studying the pale skin and dark nails. The blade sat along the outside of my forearm, wrapped tightly in place despite no obvious seam between where normal me stopped and Mahoraga started.
I poked it with my other hand.
Solid.
The News Coo landed on my shoulder.
"Look."
He leaned sideways.
"I did that."
The bird pecked the blade.
"Hey, careful."
He pecked it again.
"Stop."
The third peck produced a small metallic tap
I narrowed my eyes. "You're jealous."
He flew away.
Stupid bird.
…
The partial transformation lasted thirteen minutes and some change.
I knew because I timed it.
The blade disappeared first. It didn't crumble or retract so much as lose its solidity, fading back into my forearm while the wrappings vanished with it. The extra size followed, then the pale skin darkened back toward normal until I was sitting on the roof of my cabin with two ordinary arms again.
Well.
Ordinary for me.
I flexed my right hand and concentrated on the memory again.
Mahoraga.
Arm.
Blade.
Nothing happened.
I tried adjusting the thought, focusing less on the blade itself and more on how the transformation had felt.
Still nothing.
"Come on."
The News Coo was eating beside me and offered no sympathy whatsoever.
I sighed and leaned back on my hands.
So it wasn't free, which made sense; nothing in life is. Most importantly, it'd happened deliberately once, which meant it could happen deliberately again.
Partial Manifestation.
I liked the name of it.
Simple, descriptive and, most importantly, made me sound like I knew what I was doing.
The next newspaper reached us four days later.
My fight at Redhook Port had apparently become an attack on an "independent pirate coalition," which was technically true if you considered twelve idiots attacking my ship a coalition.
The bounty beneath it was better.
125,000,000 BERRIES
I sat at the table, staring at the number, while the News Coo tried to steal dried meat from my plate.
"Twenty-two million in a few months."
I gave up and let 'em take it. The number didn't interest me as much as it normally would've. Instead, my attention kept drifting toward my right hand as the wheel mark sat across the skin like it always had, yet for once the thing that mattered wasn't an adaptation it had produced after somebody hurt me enough.
I had done something on purpose.
That was new.
Most of my growth since eating the fruit had happened through exposure. Find something dangerous, survive it long enough for my body to respond, let the adaptation settle and move on stronger than before.
It worked, clearly, and I would be an idiot to stop taking advantage of it.
But Partial Manifestation felt different. No new phenomenon had forced my body to develop an answer. I had reached into something my fruit had already shown me and deliberately dragged part of it out.
The distinction stayed in my head for the rest of the evening.
I had trained plenty over the years. Vale had drilled combat into me, the Marines had taught me weapons and movement, and every fight after Shellstown had added something. It wasn't like I had spent my life standing still while adaptation carried me.
Actually, I was entirely getting carried by it, but you get the idea. There's a difference between improving because I fought constantly and actually choosing the next wall I wanted to break through.
I stood from the table and stepped outside.
Night had settled over the Grand Line. The Log Pose rested around my left wrist, one needle holding steady toward the next island while the other two shifted faintly beneath the glass. I didn't need it as desperately as I had when I first arrived, but keeping it was still smarter than trusting my internal magnetic bullshit alone.
Far beyond that needle were Baroque Works, Crocodile and Robin. Beyond them lay the rest of Paradise, then eventually the New World.
That thought changed the scale of things.
I'd known about Haki since before I ate my Devil Fruit. Of course I had.
Anyone with my particular collection of useless former-life knowledge would.
Armament. Observation. Conqueror's.
I knew what they did in broad terms, how important they became once the real monsters started showing up, and that reaching the highest level in this world without Haki was basically fantasy.
The annoying part was that I knew almost nothing useful about actually learning it.
Remembering Rayleigh saying something about sensing presences was not a training manual. Knowing Armament involved willpower did not tell me how to make my fist turn black.
And shouting "Haki!" while punching a tree felt beneath me.
Only slightly.
I'd also been in Paradise long enough now to notice something else.
Nobody fucking used it.
I'd seen dozens of pirate crews, bounty hunters, Marines and assorted Grand Line lunatics since crossing Reverse Mountain. Some were dangerous. Some had bizarre Devil Fruits. A few were significantly stronger than almost anybody I remembered meeting in the East Blue.
Not once had I knowingly seen Haki.
That tracked with the story I remembered.
Haki existed here, obviously, but it wasn't something every random captain sailing the first half of the Grand Line had somehow mastered. Most probably didn't even know what it was. It was interesting given Haki wasn't introduced to the story until like episode 500 yet was present as being so vital to the world yet NO one in Paradise actually new it.
But let Oda do Oda, I guess.
The point was it made finding somebody to teach me a little difficult. I rested my forearms against the railing and watched the black water slide past beneath the ship.
Still, the Partial Manifestation had proved something useful.
Waiting for my fruit to solve every problem was no longer the only way forward.
I could pick something and work toward it. The blade had been the first proof.
Now I wanted something that wasn't part of Mahoraga at all.
Something every genuine monster in this world eventually seemed to possess.
The News Coo landed on the railing beside me.
I glanced over.
"I've decided something."
He tucked one wing in.
"I'm learning Haki."
The bird stared at me.
I waited. Nothing.
"You don't know what that is, do you?"
He began cleaning one of his feathers.
"Alright, fuck you too."
I turned back toward the horizon, though the thought had already settled properly. I didn't know how to awaken it.
Didn't have a teacher. Didn't even know where I would find one.
But for once, that was the point.
I smiled.
One form. That was enough to start.
Next goal: Haki.
…
End of Chapter!
Word Count - 5212
a/n -
I genuinely don't know what's wrong with me right now.
I have uni work. I should be studying. There are things I am actively supposed to be learning, assignments that will eventually come looking for me, and yet for some fucking reason my brain has suddenly decided that THIS is the perfect time to get insanely motivated to write.
The things I do for you guys.
Although realistically, I can't even blame you. Nobody is forcing me to open the document at stupid hours and start typing. I think I might just be addicted at this point. There are worse addictions, I guess.
Anyway, Chapter 30.
This one ended up a bit longer than I expected because I wanted it to feel like Kai had entered the Grand Line, rather than crossing Reverse Mountain and immediately teleporting to the next major plot point. We're still speeding through portions of these next few years because I'm not about to give every random island a ten-chapter arc, but I wanted Paradise itself to leave an impression.
The East Blue was somewhere Kai could increasingly get away with being absurd. Paradise is where the world starts getting weird enough to occasionally match him. I wanted to deal with the navigation stuff first because Kai entering the Grand Line without a Log Pose was objectively stupid.
Which means it was completely in character.
I didn't want the solution to simply be him finding one five minutes later, though. Adaptation is his entire thing, so having his body gradually learn to recognise the bizarre magnetic environment of the Grand Line felt like a fun extension of what we've already established. He's not literally becoming a perfect human Log Pose or suddenly downloading an entire map into his brain. It's more that his body is starting to recognise the magnetic pulls, shifts in direction and that general sense of where he's being dragged.
Basically, Kai adapted to getting lost.
Kai : 1, Zoro: 0
The little montage across Paradise was probably one of my favourite parts to write because it gave me an excuse to show how fucking strange the Grand Line is without committing us to entire arcs. Weird weather, weird Devil Fruits, bounty hunters, pirates and increasingly stupid rumours about Kai. I definitely want to continue doing that occasionally because one thing I love about One Piece is that you can invent some completely ridiculous power like "this man makes teeth grow from buildings" and it genuinely doesn't feel out of place.
Also, we finally broke 100 million.
Our boy has officially entered the triple digits.
Granted, the Government apparently believes he's doing half the shit attributed to him, so we're reaching the stage where Kai's reputation and actual actions are becoming two increasingly separate things. That should be fun.
Then there's Baroque Works, and we're getting there. I don't want Kai's canon knowledge to become a perfect walkthrough where he remembers the exact date, time, and favourite breakfast of every important character. He knows Baroque Works and Crocodile, and he obviously knows Robin. He remembers the important parts.
The problem is that he's years early.
He doesn't know exactly when certain pieces fell into place, and more importantly, Kai has now existed in this world long enough to understand that assuming everything will happen exactly as he remembers it is probably a very stupid idea.
Some things he can rely on, and some things he thinks he can rely on. Those aren't necessarily going to stay the same.
Now, Partial Manifestation.
Yeah.
I've been waiting to start playing with this.
Kai's full Mahoraga transformation at Cocoyasi was never supposed to mean he could immediately just transform whenever he wanted and start walking around as the Divine General. That would make the progression after it significantly less interesting. What happened there was extreme, instinctive and brought out by a very specific situation.
This chapter is the first time Kai deliberately reaches into that transformation and successfully pulls something out.
Not a new adaptation or his body automatically solving a problem for him.
Kai himself deliberately going, "I want THAT," and actually getting it.
And obviously the first thing he manages to manifest is the giant fucking blade because why would he choose anything sensible?
I also wanted him to be exactly as excited about it as I would be.
You suddenly grow Mahoraga's blade out of your arm, and you're telling me you're not going to spend the next ten minutes staring at it?
Bullshit.
The distinction between adaptation and deliberate control will matter a lot more going forward. His "Devil Fruit" is ridiculously powerful; we've known that basically since the beginning, but Kai actually learning how to access and manipulate what it can do is a separate avenue of progression entirely.
Which leads into the end of the chapter.
Haki! FINALLY!
This is actually one of my little pet peeves with early One Piece.
Haki obviously wasn't properly introduced until much later, but the concept was being foreshadowed way before Sabaody. You can trace pieces of what eventually became Haki ridiculously far back, basically all the way toward the beginning of the series, and then you reach people like Smoker and Crocodile and nobody really talks about it.
Bruh.
Crocodile is a fucking Warlord, and Smoker is a high-ranking Marine officer, and BOTH are logias.
You mean to tell me nobody in that entire portion of the story is going to sit somebody down and go, "Hey, by the way, there is an entire power system based around willpower that can allow people to punch Logias"?
Obviously I understand the actual reason. Oda was still developing the system and One Piece had not fully settled on what Haki was going to become yet. That's just the reality of writing a story this long.
But because I'm writing this with the benefit of hindsight, I don't really have to pretend it doesn't exist until Rayleigh decides to explain it. At the same time, I absolutely DO NOT want Kai casually running into Armament Haki users everywhere in Paradise.
That would create the opposite problem.
Haki should be rare here.
Kai has been travelling through Paradise, fighting pirates, bounty hunters, Marines and Devil Fruit users, and he still hasn't knowingly encountered someone using it. Most of the people he's fighting probably don't even know what Haki is.
So Kai has a funny problem now. He has meta knowledge telling him that Haki is one of the most important abilities he can possibly develop, but meta knowledge doesn't actually teach him how to use it.
He knows Armament exists.
Cool.
How do you awaken it?
He knows Observation exists.
Wonderful.
How do you train it without somebody explaining what you're supposed to be sensing?
Remembering Rayleigh's explanation from an anime you watched in another life isn't exactly the same as having Rayleigh standing in front of you for eighteen months.
Which is why I wanted to end the chapter here.
Kai has spent most of the story improving reactively. Something hits him, his fruit adapts, and eventually he's better equipped to deal with it. Partial Manifestation is one of the first big moments where he consciously chooses a direction for his growth.
Now he's doing it again.
One form of Haki is the goal.
How does he actually get there? We'll see.
Anyway, I hope you guys enjoyed this one. We're properly into Paradise now, Baroque Works has finally started appearing around the edges of the story, Kai's bounty is climbing, the fruit is starting to open up in new ways, and we're slowly moving toward some characters I've been waiting a LONG time to write.
And while I'm here, go read my Narancia fic in JJK.
I'm serious.
Go read it, or I won't release another One Piece chapter.
...I'm kidding. I'm an addict. There will absolutely be another chapter.
Unfortunately for my degree (´.＿.｀)