The atmosphere thick with tension hung heavily along the broad, ancient branches of the Torino Kingdom's world tree.
Hundreds of short, stout natives, their bodies wrapped in rough hides, maintained a suffocating perimeter around Ace and his companions. Their knuckles reeled white against the shafts of their poisoned spears and primitive blowguns. Though their eyes fixed directly on the intruders, their heads constantly darted upward, tracking the low, sweeping orbits of the three giant birds circling the high canopy.
"Clear the sacred timber! You demons walk in the shadow of the raptors!"
The tribal chieftain, his face masked in thick bands of charcoal and greasepaint, took a heavy step forward, brandishing his spear with a guttural roar. At his command, the surrounding hunters raised their blowguns, their lips tightening against the mouthpieces.
"Waaah! They're locking targets! They're going to shoot!" Dr. Indigo shrieked, instantly dropping to his knees and wrapping his arms over his head as he shivered violently in the leaves. "Captain, the parameters are too volatile! Let's clear out!"
"Stand your ground," Ace said, his voice entirely flat. His dark eyes remained fixed on the blue-nosed reindeer beside him.
The fact that these natives utilized the standard sea dialect saved them a considerable amount of structural friction.
"Please, drop your weapons! We didn't navigate here to draw blood!"
Chopper swallowed hard against his own rising panic, but the sight of the gleaming ironwood tips forced a sudden surge of resolve through his small frame. Stepping cleanly out from the shadow of Ace's long trench coat, he opened his short arms in a gesture of total surrender.
"We aren't thieves or plunderers! We crossed the sea strictly to harvest the rare herbs and old texts that can cure disease!"
Hearing the small creature in the pink top hat articulate their own language with perfect clarity, the chieftain froze, his raised spear dipping a fraction of an inch.
"You didn't descend to claim our timber?" The leader's eyes narrowed behind his greasepaint, his thumb gesturing toward the high canopy. "Then why do you share the sky with those wretched monsters? Those birds have hounded our settlements for generations!"
Chopper didn't argue with the man. Instead, he snapped his head upward, letting out a sharp, rhythmic series of barks and high-pitched trills that belonged exclusively to the animal kingdom.
"Great birds, restrain your talons! I know you are merely shielding the nests! They are only striking out because they are terrified!"
"Coo-coo! Coo-coo-coo!"
The largest of the raptors glided low, its massive beak clicking as it let out an aggrieved, low-frequency trill that vibrated through the leaves. Thanks to the absolute weight of Ace's baseline authority, the creature was unusually compliant. "The two-legged ones steal our catch! They burrow into the hollows where our eggs are laid!"
Chopper turned back immediately, his small face tight with the absolute focus of a dedicated translator.
"You've misread their intentions!" Chopper shouted to the chieftain. "The alpha bird says that foreign pirates regularly scale the trunk to steal their chicks for the slave markets. They've grown aggressive strictly to protect their offspring. Furthermore, when your people fled into the upper branches to escape those same pirates, you accidentally occupied their ancient nesting hollows! Every attack was an attempt to clear their nursery!"
"What?!" The chieftain's jaw went slack, the paint along his lips cracking as the words settled.
The bloody, multi-generational war that had locked the humans and the avians in an unrelenting cycle of attrition was rooted entirely in a structural breakdown of communication and the historical scars left behind by foreign outlaws.
"Even if the lineage is old... our hunters have bled heavily in the brush," the chieftain muttered, his eyes casting down toward his right thigh. The limb was wrapped in crude fiber bindings, a slow, dark discharge of black fluid seeping through the cloth. "The talons carry poison..."
Above them, the largest bird let out a low, mournful cry, extending its left wing to reveal a festering wound where a native spearhead remained embedded deep within the muscle tissue.
Ace watched the mutual display of trauma, his expression cool.
Chopper's presence underwent an immediate, total transformation. The lingering timidity and panic in his frame vanished, replaced entirely by the clinical severity of a master physician. His round eyes shone with an absolute, unyielding clarity.
"I am the ship doctor! Stand clear!"
He snatched the straps of his oversized blue medical kit, breaking into a sprint toward the armed chieftain without a single glance at the guards.
The surrounding hunters panicked, their arms flexing to drive their spears into the reindeer's path. But before a single ironwood tip could move, an invisible, mountain-like weight dropped over the entire branch.
Ace's presence didn't trigger a concussive shock, but it locked the air within their lungs. Every native felt their chest constrict, their limbs turning to lead under the sudden, silent authority of the Outlier. The thought of resistance evaporated from their minds. They could only stand frozen, watching in absolute silence as the small creature approached their leader.
"The tissue is highly necrotic and suppurating," Chopper murmured, his hooves moving with a rapid, mechanical agility as he unrolled his instruments. "Common poultices are useless here. The dead mass must be excised, and the matrix needs immediate disinfection."
He selected a scalpel, hemostats, and a bottle of high-purity disinfectant from his kit. His movements were a blur of absolute precision. Within minutes, the blackened, rotting edges of the wound were cut away, the area flushed clean, and the skin brought together in a sequence of flawless, uniform sutures.
"Test the articulation," Chopper said, wiping the sweat from his nose with a forearm.
The chieftain shifted his right leg experimentally. The blinding, burning agony that had crippled his stride for days had vanished, replaced by the clean, cool pull of the thread. He stared at the perfect stitching on his flesh with an expression of pure, unadulterated awe.
Before the leader could speak, Chopper turned toward the branches, gesturing sharply to the hovering raptor. "Great bird! Bring your wing down to the bark! I need to extract the ironwood before the bone is infected!"
The giant avian glided down smoothly, resting its massive frame along the timber. It remained perfectly still as Chopper's hooves clamped onto the blackened shaft, pulling the poison spear from the meat with a clean jackpot before packing the cavity with a specialized antidote compound.
Seeing this miraculous creature in the pink hat heal their sovereign leader and their ancient enemy in the same hour, the native hunters dropped their spears into the leaves. The hostility vanished from their features, replaced by a profound, religious reverence.
"The messenger... the messenger has descended!"
Led by the chieftain, hundreds of tribal hunters dropped to their knees, bowing their foreheads against the bark before Chopper and Ace.
"Eh? A messenger?" Chopper's fur instantly fluffed out, his body twisting into a ridiculous, wavy-lined dance of intense embarrassment as he barked, "Even if you treat me like a king, it won't buy you any favors, you bastards~!"
Ace watched the camp settle into harmony, a dry smile touching his lips. Subduing the board without drawing a blade remained the highest application of tactics.
With the blood feud broken, the chieftain approached Ace with the utmost respect. "Powerful travelers... to repay the debt of this clearance, our people will guide you to the deep heart of the timber. Every text our ancestors preserved is kept within the core."
Following the leader through a series of wide, hollow vine tunnels weaving through the interior of the trunk, the small party advanced toward the center of the world tree. After a ten-minute descent, the narrow path opened into a vast, monolithic vault.
Even Dr. Indigo, accustomed to advanced laboratories, found his jaw dropping at the architecture.
The interior of the massive world tree had been carved out to form a hollow space as expansive as a cathedral. Lining the curved timber walls were thousands—hundreds of thousands—of ancient parchment scrolls, heavy stone rubbings, and leather-bound medical codices. They sat in silent rows, radiating the ancient, heavy scent of lost wisdom.
The ultimate treasure of the Torino Kingdom: the Ancient Botanical and Medical Library.
"Staggering... this is the single greatest archive on the lower seas!" Indigo shouted, tears of academic ecstasy running through the soot on his cheeks. "With these indices, we won't just isolate the SIQ toxins—we can map the entire latent potential of the human cellular matrix!"
Chopper's antlers were shaking with pure excitement as he rushed toward the nearest mountain of parchment. "Ace! The ancient active compounds are all cataloged here! I can feel the answers in the air!"
"Begin the extraction," Ace said, his eyes scanning the endless rows of scrolls with cold satisfaction. "Chopper, Indigo. Your station is here until every line of this archive is filtered. Find the exact formula needed to break past human limitations."
"Captain," Indigo asked, clutching a thick roll of vellum to his chest. "Where will you be?"
"I have a personal ledger to verify," Ace said, turning his back to the vault. His voice held a cool, unyielding swagger. "These pages are wasted collecting dust among the leaves. Once the research is mapped, we're packing the shelves. This entire library is leaving the island with us."
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