Chapter 37: The Surgeon's Masterpiece

Brook eagerly accepted the invitation.

We hitched his ruined ghost ship to the back of the pontoon carriage, and I cracked the reins.

The Glacial-Inferno Sovereign led us deeper into the oppressive, suffocating fog of the Florian Triangle until the massive, walled outer gates of Thriller Bark loomed out of the darkness.

It wasn’t just a ship, it was an entire island converted into a floating gothic nightmare.

I didn’t feel like knocking, and I certainly wasn’t going to play by the rules of a haunted house.

I channeled a surge of Fa-Jin through the reins into the Sovereign.

The jade unicorn reared back, its horn blazing with absolute zero.

It unleashed a massive wave of ice that completely bypassed the iron gates, forming a towering, frictionless ramp directly over the outer walls.

We launched up the ramp, catching air over the fortress walls, and violently crashed our steel pontoon sled right into the center of the mansion’s sprawling courtyard, shattering the cobblestones.

Instantly, the ground shifted.

Graves burst open, and dozens of grotesque, stitched-together General Zombies clawed their way out of the dirt, groaning for our flesh.

A massive, three-headed zombie Cerberus, which clearly had a fox head stitched onto one of the necks, bounded out of the shadows with a terrifying roar.

“Oh dear,” Brook gasped, drawing his cane-sword.

“We are surrounded!”

Gammamon stood up on the carriage seat, his yellow eyes wide and sparkling with excitement.

He looked up at me and tugged on my coat.

“Victor,” Gammamon pleaded, bouncing on his heels.

“I haven’t fought anything strong in a while!

They look super tough.

Can I play with them?

Please?”

I chuckled, stepping out of the sled.

“Knock yourself out, Gamma.

Just try not to burn the mansion down before I get inside.”

“Yay!” Gammamon cheered.

The little white dinosaur leaped into the air.

He didn’t even digivolve.

He just landed directly on the center head of the giant Cerberus, reared back his stubby fist, and punched it with enough raw, kinetic force to crater the massive beast straight into the bedrock.

The zombies swarmed him, and Gammamon happily opened his jaws, unleashing a torrent of bright red fire that incinerated a dozen undead soldiers in a matter of seconds.

He was treating the terrifying monsters like living chew toys, laughing the entire time.

Brook’s jaw literally dropped, unhinging with a loud clack.

“My word!

He is quite formidable!”

“He’s a Digimon,” I grinned.

“Listen, Brook.

You know this island better than I do.

Go find the zombie samurai who has your shadow.

I’m going to go hunt down the Warlord.”

“Ryuma is a master swordsman,” Brook warned, gripping his cane.

“And with my shadow, he possesses all my techniques.

It will not be an easy fight.”

“Then you shouldn’t fight alone,” I said, unhooking the black disk from my hip.

I swiped my thumb across it.

Emerald mist erupted on the cobblestones, rapidly condensing into solid jade.

The Night-Terror Ferret materialized, its red eyes glowing in the gloom.

It chittered softly, melting in and out of the shadows of the carriage.

“Take the Ferret with you,” I told the skeleton.

“Moria’s powers are based entirely on shadows, and the Ferret is a creature born of them.

It should give you the tactical edge you need.”

Brook looked at the liquid-shadow jade beast, overwhelmed with gratitude.

“Victor-san…

I will not fail you!

Yohohoho!”

Leaving Gammamon to happily terrorize the undead horde outside, I walked up the cracked stone steps and pushed the massive double doors of the mansion open.

The interior was dripping with gothic horror, dimly lit candelabras, dusty red carpets, and creepy paintings that seemed to follow my movements.

I strolled down the hallway, my hands in my pockets, enjoying the architecture.

As I turned a corner, several semi-transparent, floating ghosts materialized through the walls, moaning eerily.

Floating right behind them, holding a cute red umbrella and dressed in gothic-lolita attire, was the Ghost Princess, Perona.

She opened her mouth, ready to command her Negative Hollows to drain my will to live.

I didn’t stop walking.

I didn’t reach for a weapon or tense up.

I just looked at her, offered a polite nod, and smiled.

“Terrible weather we’re having outside, isn’t it?” I said casually, stepping right through the middle of her ghost entourage.

“Good evening.”

I kept walking down the corridor, whistling a quiet tune.

Behind me, Perona was left floating in absolute, stunned silence.

She blinked her large, round eyes, completely baffled by the tourist-level greeting she had just received in the middle of a haunted fortress.

She didn’t even try to attack, she was just utterly confused.

I closed my eyes, letting my Advanced Observation Haki bloom outward, painting the entire island in my mind’s eye.

I easily located Gecko Moria.

His presence was massive, sitting high up in the central mast of the ship.

I shifted my weight to take the stairs up to the Warlord’s tower.

But right as my foot hit the first step, my Haki snagged on something else.

It was faint.

Incredibly faint.

Deep underground, buried beneath layers of stone and iron, was an erratic, struggling heartbeat.

Someone was down there, barely clinging to life, surrounded by a suffocating aura of pain.

I paused, looking up toward Moria’s tower, and then down toward the basement levels.

A strange, instinctual tug pulled at my chest.

It was a gut feeling, loud and undeniable: If I don’t go down there right now, I am going to regret it for the rest of my life.

I turned my back on the stairs and headed down into the dark.

I descended into the damp, freezing catacombs of Thriller Bark, following the fading heartbeat.

At the end of a long, stone corridor stood a pair of heavy iron doors.

I didn’t bother looking for a handle.

I channeled my Fa-Jin into my right boot and kicked the doors squarely in the center.

With a deafening crash, the heavy iron hinges sheared off completely, and the massive doors flew into the room, kicking up a cloud of dust.

It was a sprawling, horrific surgical laboratory.

Beakers bubbled with strange fluids, and the walls were lined with rusted surgical tools and jars of formaldehyde.

Standing over a heavy metal operating table in the center of the room was a bulbous, grotesque man wearing a doctor’s coat and a pair of dark goggles.

Standing next to him was a blonde maid covered in stitches, holding a tray of bloody scalpels.

Dr.

Hogback spun around, absolutely livid.

“Who dares?!” Hogback shrieked, his high-pitched voice echoing in the stone room.

“You ignorant brute!

You’ve ruined the sterile field!

I was in the final, most delicate steps of my ultimate masterpiece!”

He squinted through the gloom, pushing his dark goggles up.

He stared at me for a long moment, the anger slowly draining from his face, replaced by a twisted, theatrical realization.

“Wait…” Hogback muttered.

“That coat.

Those daggers.

Victor D.

Costa?

The Beastmaster?”

Instead of panicking that a man with a billion-berry bounty had just kicked his door down, Hogback’s massive, twisted ego took over.

He actually threw his arms wide and gave me a sick, sweeping bow.

“Fosfosfosfos!

What an absolute honor!” Hogback laughed gleefully.

“I should be angry at the intrusion, but honestly, I must thank you!

If it wasn’t for you, I never would have acquired my newest, most magnificent test subject!”

I stepped fully into the light of the surgical lamps, my eyes dropping to the metal operating table.

There was a woman strapped to the cold steel.

She was heavily sedated, her chest barely rising with each shallow breath.

I couldn’t recognize her.

Her face and arms were covered in horrific, jagged surgical lines, thick black stitches, and mismatched patches of flesh.

Hogback had been actively mutilating her, carving her up to customize her body into whatever twisted, stitched-together general he was trying to build.

“You see, she was being quite a nuisance in Paradise,” Hogback monologued, pacing around the table like a proud artist.

“She was spotted actively searching for leads on you, Beastmaster.

Poking around for your whereabouts.

Naturally, that drew the attention of the Marines.

Vice Admiral Johnathan of G-8 chased her relentlessly across the ocean.”

I stopped walking.

The air in the room suddenly felt incredibly thin.

“She had nowhere left to run,” Hogback laughed, taking a scalpel from the zombie maid.

“She was forced to flee blindly into the Florian Triangle to escape the warships.

She drifted right into our web.

Master Moria took her shadow to animate a beautiful new soldier, and I claimed the empty vessel for my experiments!”

Hogback gestured grandly to the mutilated, unconscious woman on the table.

“Allow me to introduce my greatest work in progress…

the Demon Child, Nico Robin!”

The name echoed off the damp stone walls, hitting me like a physical blow.

I looked down at the cold metal table.

I forced myself to look past the horrific, jagged surgical lines, the crude black stitches, and the grotesque patches of mismatched flesh.

Beneath the brutal swelling and the heavy sedation, the faint, familiar remnants of her facial structure remained.

It was her.

My breath caught in my throat.

A sickening, suffocating wave of guilt crashed over me.

I had wanted to meet Nico Robin eventually, just to cross paths with the legend, maybe offer her a safe harbor if she needed it.

But I had never planned to recruit her.

I never wanted to drag her into the crosshairs of my chaotic life.

She was supposed to survive.

She was supposed to find her own crew, her own family.

Instead, she had been hunted like an animal because of me.

She had been relentlessly chased by Vice Admiral Johnathan, driven off the map, and forced into the jaws of the Florian Triangle simply because she was trying to find the Beastmaster.

This nightmare was entirely, undeniably my fault.

Because I had made too much noise in Paradise, she was currently bleeding out on a dirty metal slab, stripped of her shadow and treated like spare parts.

The guilt twisted violently in my chest, instantly calcifying into pure, unadulterated fury.

I didn’t yell.

I didn’t summon my beasts or reach for the jade daggers at my waist.

I just stood completely still.

A heavy, absolute silence dropped over the laboratory.

The ambient temperature in the room plummeted, the moisture in the air instantly freezing.

The glass beakers lining the shelves began to spider-web and crack under the sheer, invisible atmospheric pressure radiating from my body.

Hogback’s gleeful, theatrical smile slowly faltered.

The twisted doctor took a step back, his breath hitching as his survival instincts finally kicked in.

He realized the air had literally been sucked out of the room.

He wasn’t looking at a rookie bounty hunter anymore.

He was looking at a man who had just realized the blood on this operating table was on his hands, and the monster standing across the room was about to pay for every single drop.

Word Count: 1846

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