Chapter 20: Sworn Brotherhood and Dreams
"I see..."
Sabo lowered his gaze for a moment, as if gathering all the dreams he had kept hidden in his heart, then suddenly looked up.
"Ace, Luffy, Axel, one day we have to leave this country and sail out to sea. We have to see the world, live freely, and never let anyone lock us in again." His eyes shone brighter with every word. "I want to learn navigation. I want to record our adventures in a journal. I want us to become stronger. And one day, I want us to become pirates!"
His voice rang through the forest clearing with a sincerity that made the air itself seem to tremble.
For a second, there was silence.
Then Luffy laughed.
Ace laughed too.
Bright, carefree, full of life.
Watching it happen right in front of him was completely different from watching it from behind a screen.
Axel felt it clearly.
That strange warmth.
That pull in the chest.
That sense that this moment was far more real, far more vivid, and far more dangerous than any story had ever made it seem.
Just like in the original future that Axel remembered, Ace soon declared his own ambition, his voice filled with fierce pride. He would become a great pirate. He would force the whole world to acknowledge his existence.
Luffy immediately puffed up and started insisting he would do the same, though his explanation was as vague and chaotic as ever. Then, naturally, the two of them began arguing over who would become captain first.
Axel listened quietly.
A dream.
The word drifted across his thoughts.
What was his dream?
Did he want to become a pirate too, just like them?
The answer did not come easily.
To be honest, he did not feel much longing toward piracy itself. In fact, his feelings toward pirates were complicated at best. People like Luffy and his future crew were rare. Painfully rare.
Most pirates were not adventurers.
They were predators.
Even Whitebeard's vast fleet surely contained all kinds of men. Could every single one of them be called good people? Of course not.
Greed.
Violence.
Chaos.
Those were the words that fit pirates best.
The Great Pirate Era had not only created freedom and dreams. It had also created suffering on a massive scale. It gave people an excuse to indulge their worst impulses under the banner of ambition.
Nami's tragedy.
Crocodile's ambition.
Doflamingo's madness.
Countless nameless islands ruined by men who called themselves dreamers after raising a flag and taking a ship.
The World Government was rotten.
The nobles were filth.
The so called order of the world was already decaying.
But the Great Pirate Era had not healed any of that.
It had accelerated the collapse.
If there had been no Great Pirate Era, perhaps the world would still have rotted quietly beneath its false surface. Ugly, yes, but stable enough that many ordinary people could go on living in peace.
That thought was still circling in Axel's mind when Luffy abruptly shoved himself into his line of sight.
"Axel, join my crew!"
The words came so suddenly that Axel blinked.
For a moment, he honestly did not know how to respond.
Before he could even form a sentence, Sabo jumped in.
"That's cheating, Luffy." He pointed at Axel with complete seriousness. "Axel, join my crew instead."
Ace immediately cut in too.
"No. He's joining mine."
Axel looked at the three boys in front of him and felt a headache coming on.
"I never said I wanted to become a pirate."
The instant those words left his mouth, the clearing fell silent.
Even the breeze moving through the trees seemed to pause for a moment.
Luffy stared at him in complete disbelief.
"What?!"
His face practically screamed betrayal.
"Why don't you want to be a pirate?"
Axel opened his mouth, then closed it again.
Explaining that properly to Luffy sounded like a nightmare.
Fortunately, Sabo stepped in to smooth things over before the conversation turned into an emotional disaster.
"We never asked about your dream," he said. "Maybe it's just different from ours."
Axel looked at him, then at the other two.
For a while, he said nothing.
Then he carefully sorted through his thoughts and chose the answer that felt closest to the truth.
"I want to sail freely," he said. "I want to uphold justice. And..." He hesitated slightly, then admitted it anyway. "I want to be a hero."
The moment he said it aloud, Axel immediately felt a little embarrassed.
Wanting to be a hero was one thing.
Actually saying it out loud made it feel absurdly childish.
Yet the reactions he got were not what he expected.
Luffy, Ace, and Sabo all stared at him with extremely strange expressions.
"What?" Axel asked.
Luffy was the first to recover.
"Axel..." His face became serious in the most suspicious way possible. "So you want to be a Marine?"
Axel blinked.
"When did I say that?"
Sabo looked genuinely surprised.
"But you said you want to sail freely and uphold justice." He tilted his head slightly. "Isn't that basically the same thing?"
Axel stared at him for a moment.
Then he realized something.
Right.
In this world, freedom on the sea was not something ordinary people got to have.
Sabo quickly explained, "Think about it. Right now, the people who truly sail the seas are basically divided into a few groups. Marines, pirates, and merchant ships. Merchant ships don't count for what you said, because they follow trade routes. They can't just go wherever they want."
Luffy had already lost the thread halfway through and was just staring blankly.
Sabo continued, "So if you want to travel freely across the sea, then realistically, you'd either become a pirate or a Marine. You just said you don't want to be a pirate, so of course we assumed you meant Marine."
"I see..."
Axel nodded slowly.
That logic did make sense from their perspective.
Luffy, meanwhile, looked even more alarmed now.
His grandfather was a Marine hero. In his simple little head, the words hero and Marine already had a strong connection. So if Axel wanted to be a hero, then was he going to become some future enemy?
That idea clearly bothered him.
Ace, sensing the direction of Axel's hesitation, stepped forward again.
"Then come with me," he said. "You can sail freely that way too."
Axel smiled faintly.
"We'll see in the future. I still don't know what I want to do."
And that was the truth.
He really was uncertain.
Would he follow someone out to sea and live as a pirate anyway?
Would he stay on some island and let his second life drift by?
Would he chase justice without joining the Marines?
Bluejam's defeat had not given him clarity.
If anything, it had done the opposite.
Once the strongest visible threat in their current world had fallen, Axel felt more aware than ever of how little he understood his own destination.
Sabo clicked his tongue and pointed accusingly at Ace.
"That was low!"
Ace looked unimpressed. "What was?"
"I was explaining all that so I could invite him properly, and you cut in first!"
Ace grinned shamelessly.
"So what?"
Knowing Axel would reject him for now anyway, Sabo chose not to waste more words on it. Instead, he watched as Ace turned and walked over to the bushes behind them.
A moment later, Ace came back holding a bottle and four bowls.
He set them on a tree stump.
Luffy immediately pointed.
"That's Dadan's booze, isn't it?"
Ace ignored him completely.
He pulled the cork loose, then filled each bowl with wine.
The liquid was weak and cheap, the kind of rough mountain liquor that burned more in spirit than in taste. But in that moment, with the four bowls lined up on the stump beneath the fading light, it looked strangely solemn.
Ace rested a hand on the bottle and spoke with unusual seriousness.
"One day, we'll all go our own ways."
That alone was enough to make the air quiet again.
He looked at the others one by one.
"Maybe we won't all end up on the same ship. Maybe our paths won't be identical. But there's something more important than that."
He picked up one bowl and held it out.
"If we drink the brotherhood sake together, then from this day onward, we'll be brothers."
His voice was steady.
"No matter where we are. No matter what we become. That bond won't break."
Sabo smiled.
Luffy grinned brightly.
Axel looked at the bowl for a second longer than the others.
This was it.
The moment.
He already knew how important it was.
But standing inside it felt completely different from watching it happen from afar.
He reached out and took his bowl.
Ace.
Sabo.
Luffy.
Axel.
The four of them raised their bowls and brought them together in the center.
Clink.
A few drops spilled over the rims, catching the sunlight in tiny flashes.
Together, they shouted:
"From today on, we're brothers!"
Then they threw back the wine in one gulp.
The alcohol itself was weak.
Barely stronger than flavored water, really.
But for some reason, Axel still felt his face grow hot.
It was not because of the drink.
It was because of the restlessness rising inside his chest.
The heat.
The surge.
The dangerous, impossible feeling that something in him had shifted.
Was this what it meant?
Was this what brotherhood felt like?
Axel lowered the empty bowl and stared at the others.
Ace was laughing.
Luffy was making a face because of the bitter taste.
Sabo was smiling in that quiet, satisfied way he had when his heart was full.
And looking at them, Axel felt that strange burning sensation grow even stronger.
He had entered this world alone.
He had survived as an abandoned infant, crawled through fear, blood, and hunger, and stumbled forward with no true goal of his own.
But now...
Now he was no longer alone.
For the first time since coming here, Axel felt as though he had truly gained something no power could replace.
He looked down at the empty bowl in his hand and murmured softly to himself,
"So this is brotherhood…"
.....
[If you don't want to wait for the next update, read 10–50 chapters ahead on P@treon.]
[[email protected]/FanficLord03]
[One Piece, Naruto, Bleach, Soul Land, NBA, and more — all in one place.]