The air crackled between them, a silent countdown to chaos. Words had run dry. Luffy's fists were clenched, his sandals planted in the dust of the ruined square. Across from him, Buggy the Clown grinned, a predator's smile that didn't reach his cold, calculating eyes.
"Enough chatter," Buggy sneered, his voice a low rasp. "Let's see what a brat from the East Blue is really made of."
But as he raised his hands, his gaze snagged—not on Luffy's defiant face, but on the crown of his head. The wide-brimmed straw hat, weathered and proud. Buggy's smirk faltered, replaced by a flicker of genuine, unsettling recognition.
"That hat…" Buggy murmured, the taunt dying on his lips. His eyes narrowed. "That damn hat. It reminds me of a certain red-haired man. A real pain in my neck, from a long time ago."
Luffy's entire posture shifted. The fight-ready tension didn't leave him, but it was overlaid by something sharper, more urgent. "Red hair? You know Shanks?"
Buggy's laugh was short, harsh. "Know him? That freeloading, good-for-nothing… *Shanks*." He spat the name like a curse, confirming it. "He ruined my life! My dreams!"
"Where is he?" Luffy demanded, taking a step forward, all thoughts of tactical positioning gone. His voice was raw, stripped bare. "Tell me where Shanks is!"
Buggy's expression twisted into something sly and cruel. He let the silence hang, savoring the desperation on the boy's face. "I *might* know," he drawled, tapping a finger against his chin. "A man hears things on the Grand Line. But why would I tell you?"
"You're an idiot," Luffy stated, the words flat and certain. "The way you said it. You don't know anything."
The insult hit its mark. Buggy's face flushed a violent purple beneath his clown makeup. "IDIOT?!" he roared, his body beginning to tremble and segment. "You think you can talk to me like that?! Can you reflect knives, you little worm?!"
Luffy blinked, his anger momentarily sidelined by the absurdity of the question. "No."
"THEN DIE!"
Buggy's torso shot forward like a cannonball, his hands disconnecting, each one gripping a gleaming dagger. Luffy didn't think—he *jumped*, launching himself high into the air above the swirling dust.
"FOOL!" Buggy's floating head cackled from below. "You're helpless now! You can't fly like I can!" His disembodied hands arced upward, blades aimed for Luffy's heart.
But Luffy was already moving. His right arm elongated with a rubbery *thwip*, stretching impossibly far across the square to wrap around the iron post of a broken streetlamp. He yanked.
The world became a blur. He was ripped sideways through the air just as Buggy's knives sliced through the space he'd occupied. Momentum became weapon. Still soaring, Luffy cocked his other fist back and let it fly—a piston-straight punch aimed at Buggy's smirking face.
Buggy's head simply detached, bobbing aside with ease. "Predictable!" he jeered. "Your power is your weakness, brat! You've overextended! You're wide open!"
He didn't see it. He was too focused on the retreating fist. But Luffy's stretched arm hadn't retracted. It had kept going, past Buggy, fingers splaying to grab the stone ledge of a shattered second-story window.
*Gotcha.*
Using the ledge as an anchor, Luffy changed trajectory mid-air, becoming a human slingshot. He hurtled back toward Buggy, a roaring, sandal-clad missile.
"What?!" Buggy yelped, his body parts scattering in a panic. Luffy shot through the empty space where Buggy's torso had been and plowed, back-first, into the crumbling wall of a bombed-out house with a thunderous crash.
From her perch on a distant rooftop, a heavy sack of stolen treasure at her feet, Nami watched with wide, conflicted eyes. "You reckless moron…" she whispered, but her knuckles were white where she gripped the tiles.
Among the scattered, "unconscious" pirates in the square, one cracked an eyelid. "Just… just keep playing dead," he hissed to his crewmate. "The Captain's gone mad, and that rubber kid is a demon. We get up, we die."
Buggy, reassembled and furious, saw his opening. "Enough games!" His right arm shot out, but this time it separated at the wrist. The hand, now holding three knives between its fingers, became a independent, flying guillotine.
Luffy, pulling himself from the rubble, saw it coming. He snatched at the disembodied hand mid-air, his fingers closing around the wrist.
Buggy's grin returned. "Fool! I can separate at any joint!" The hand detached again, leaving Luffy holding a useless forearm. The knife-wielding hand continued its deadly arc.
Luffy twisted, but he was too close. One blade grazed his cheek, drawing a thin line of blood. The next two struck true—not on flesh, but on the crown of his head.
*Th-th-thunk.*
A sickening, dry sound.
Luffy froze. The world narrowed to a single, horrific sensation. The slight, sudden weight on his head. The violation.
Buggy retracted his parts, his hand reforming. Impaled on the tips of his three knives, like a grotesque trophy, was Luffy's straw hat.
"Hurt, didn't it?" Buggy taunted, holding the hat aloft. The noonday sun shone through the fresh, ragged holes punched in its brim. "A little scar to remember me by!"
Luffy slowly raised a hand to his stinging cheek. He wiped the blood away, his eyes never leaving the hat. When he spoke, his voice was low, a vibration of pure, unadulterated rage that seemed to still the very dust in the air.
"My face is fine."
He lifted his head. His eyes were no longer those of a spirited boy, but of a storm.
"YOU DAMAGED MY HAT."
Buggy blinked, taken aback. "What? It's a piece of straw!"
"IT'S MY TREASURE!" Luffy's roar echoed off the ruins. A promise, made years ago on a sun-docked dock, flashed in his mind: *'Keep it. Give it back to me when you've become a great pirate.'*
As Buggy dangled the hat mockingly, Luffy charged. Not with a clever plan, not with a rubbery trick, but with raw, desperate speed. He had to get it back. Nothing else mattered.
Buggy, seeing the blind fury, began to laugh again, bobbing just out of reach. "So attached to a ratty old hat? Sentimental fool!"
Luffy leaped, stretching an arm to snatch it. "GIVE IT BACK! THAT HAT BELONGED TO—"
Buggy's laughter cut off. His eyes, fixed on the hat impaled on his knives, went wide with a dawning, earth-shattering realization. The straw. The shape. The boy's ferocity. The name he was about to scream.
The hat hadn't just *belonged* to Shanks.
*This was Shanks's hat.*
The world stopped. Buggy's face cycled through shock, into fury, and settled into a look of terrifying, vindictive epiphany. He looked from the hat to the desperate boy before him, and a monstrous smile spread across his painted lips.
"Oh," Buggy whispered, the word dripping with venomous delight. "Oh, this is perfect. So *you're* the one."
He raised the hat higher, the knives glinting. "Red-Hair gave his *own hat* to you? Then tell me, boy… how do you think he'll feel when I send you back to him in pieces… starting with *this*?"
His free hand detached, fingers morphing, sharpening into five long, gleaming scalpels. He aimed them not at Luffy, but directly at the heart of the straw hat.
Luffy screamed, "NO!"
And Buggy brought the blades down.