Chapter 58: Blood and Water

I stood in the galley of the Titan’s Glory, holding the golden Den Den Mushi to my ear.

On the other end, Vice Admiral Garp was laughing so hard he was practically wheezing.

“Bwahaha!

You actually bagged the Mammoth?!” Garp roared.

“Sengoku is going to pop a blood vessel!

But listen to me, kid.

Do not take a Billion-Berry Yonko Commander to a standard New World base.

If Kaido finds out you dropped his Lead Performer at G-5, he’ll send his entire fleet to sink the island just to avenge the humiliation.”

“So where do you want the delivery?” I asked, glancing out the window at the massive spider-silk cocoon dangling beneath my ship.

“Since you can fly, bypass the New World outposts entirely,” Garp ordered.

“Bring them directly to Impel Down.

I’ll meet you there.

As for your cousin and his crew, Bogard will have them waiting for you at a secure base just outside the Tarai Current.”

“Deal,” I said, hanging up the snail.

The journey to the great underwater prison took a little over a week, and it wasn’t a straight flight.

We had to make a brief, covert detour to the Sabaody Archipelago to drop off the Revolutionary asset at a secure rendezvous point.

However, the little girl we had pulled out of Tesoro’s vault alongside him stayed aboard the Titan’s Glory.

Before he disembarked, the Revolutionary confessed he had absolutely no idea who she was or where she was from.

She had been violently tossed into his cell the exact same day we arrived to rescue him.

She was completely terrified and had cried non-stop until she passed out from sheer exhaustion.

She was still lying unconscious in our sickbay.

Until she woke up and could give us some information about who she was, the crew mutually agreed to let her stay under our protection.

Meanwhile, Jack the Drought was becoming a massive problem.

The Awakened Ancient Zoan possessed an absurd healing factor.

Every few hours, he would start thrashing inside the cocoon, threatening to tear the ship apart.

I called Koala for advice.

After consulting with the Revolutionary Army’s doctors, she gave me the name of a highly restricted, hyper-potent sedative gas that could drop a sea king—but she didn’t have the actual recipe to synthesize it.

As I was wracking my brain for a solution, Gammamon tugged on my pant leg and suggested we call Dr.

Kureha.

It was a brilliant idea.

I dialed Drum Island, and the 139-year-old doctor cackled over the line.

She not only gave me the precise chemical recipe for the gas, but instructed me on how to alter the compound to make it three times more potent.

While I brewed the toxins and pumped them directly into Jack’s cocoon to force him into a deep coma, Gammamon hijacked the Den Den Mushi, happily swapping wild adventure stories with Tony Tony Chopper for the next three hours.

A week later, the Titan’s Glory hovered directly over the massive, ominous Gates of Justice at Impel Down.

Vice Admiral Garp was waiting in the stone courtyard, surrounded by hundreds of heavily armed, nervous jailers.

When I cut the spider-silk line, the massive cocoon holding Jack the Drought and the webbing containing the solid gold statue of Who’s-Who crashed into the pavement, cracking the stone.

Garp grinned, shaking his head.

He looked exhausted, his uniform heavily scuffed and torn in several places.

“You look like hell, old man,” I noted, landing lightly on the courtyard.

“How did the clash with the Golden Lion go?”

Garp’s smile faded into a grim, dark scowl.

“Shiki is a cowardly bastard.

Bogard and I had him dead to rights in the airspace above the East Blue.

We cornered his flagship.

But when he realized he was going to lose, he used his Float-Float Fruit to drop his massive, floating islands right out of the sky, aiming them directly at the populated islands below.”

I whistled lowly.

“A hostage situation on a continental scale.”

“Exactly,” Garp grunted, clenching his massive fists.

“I had to break off the attack and focus entirely on shattering the falling landmasses before they wiped out millions of innocent people.

The people Shiki had enslaved on those islands are finally free, and we evacuated them safely.

But Shiki and his top officers used the chaos to slip away.

They’re still at large.”

“He hid for twenty years,” I said.

“He’ll slip up again.”

“Just focus on your end, Warlord,” Garp sighed, waving for the jailers to haul the Yonko Commander into the prison depths.

“Go get your family.”

A few hours later, we arrived at the Marine base just outside the Tarai Current.

I disembarked alone, greeted by Bogard’s stoic nod.

The swordsman led me down into the base’s maximum-security holding cells.

What I saw when we reached the bottom floor almost made me burst out laughing.

In the left cell, battered, bruised, but glaring with unyielding defiance, sat Trafalgar Law.

And in the cell directly adjacent to him, stripped of his pristine Commodore coat, devoid of his weapons, and bound in heavy Seastone handcuffs, was my cousin, Alister.

“What happened to the golden boy?” I asked Bogard, raising an eyebrow.

Bogard sighed, adjusting his fedora.

“Commodore Silva intercepted the Warlord mandate.

When he realized you were coming to collect the Heart Pirates, he attempted to organize an unauthorized, immediate execution of every member of the pirate crew.”

“He tried to kill them out of spite?” I asked, my blood running cold.

“To ensure you didn’t get the reward of your deal, yes,” Bogard confirmed.

“Fortunately, there had been numerous complaints about his rough treatment of prisoners.

The base commander caught him preparing the firing squad early on.

Silva has been imprisoned, demoted to the rank of Captain for gross insubordination, and his equipment confiscated.”

Law let out a raspy chuckle from his cell.

The irony that the man who captured him was now rotting in the cell next door was not lost on the Surgeon of Death.

I walked up to the iron bars of Alister’s cell.

He looked up, his eyes burning with absolute, psychotic hatred.

Slipping entirely into Hindi to keep the Marines and Law in the dark, we immediately started hurling the most vile, obscene curses at each other.

“Kya haal hai, madarchod?

Yahan bhi apni aukaat dikha raha hai, kutte?” (How are you, motherf***er?

Showing your true colors here too, dog?) I sneered.

Alister gripped the Seastone bars, his knuckles turning white.

“Bhenchod, Victor.

Tu yahan bhi wahi ghatiya aadmi hai.” (Sister-f***er, Victor.

You are still the same pathetic man here.)

“You couldn’t even manage a firing squad,” I mocked in English, deciding to extract some information.

“Why try to kill them if you knew who they were to us?

And by the way, what exactly did Damien leave you in that little package of yours?”

Alister’s expression twisted with genuine disgust.

“I tried to kill them because they are pirate scum, and you don’t deserve a victory.

As for that old man, he was a kidnapper and a liar!

When I woke up in this universe, I was in a filthy hotel in some random North Blue town.

Before I could even open the box he left me, the town was attacked by pirates.

In the chaos, I was captured.

It took days for the Marines to save me.

When I finally went back to where I hid the box…

there was only one thing inside.

A metal disk for alchemical weapons.”

My breath hitched slightly, though my face remained a mask of stone.

There were supposed to be three items in that box.

If Alister only got the disk, that meant his Digivice and the vial of Compound V had been stolen by some random pirate.

There was a vial of superhero serum and a digital monster floating around the Grand Line.

“Fascinating,” I muttered.

I nodded to the heavy chains on his wrists.

“Why the Seastone, Alister?

Normal iron not strong enough for a disgraced Captain?”

Alister looked at me like I was a complete idiot.

“Because I ate a Devil Fruit, you moron.

That’s how I got strong enough to rise through the ranks.

I assume a powerful Devil Fruit is the only reason a loser like you has any power, too.”

He had no idea about Haki.

He didn’t even know this world was a fictional anime; according to him, this was just a brand new, parallel world he knew nothing about.

I smiled, patting his cheek through the bars.

“Stay warm, cousin,” I whispered.

I turned to Bogard.

“Open Law’s cell.

We’re leaving.”

The moment we were airborne in the Titan’s Glory, I brought Law and Bepo onto the quarterdeck.

The rest of Law’s crew was resting in the larger waiting rooms below deck.

I grabbed the heavy Seastone cuffs binding Law’s wrists, coated my fingers in internal-destruction Haki, and completely shattered the indestructible metal.

Law instantly stumbled back, his hands glowing with a blue, spherical aura.

“Room.” He glared at me, his tattooed fingers twitching.

“What’s your angle?

A Warlord trades a Billion-Berry Yonko Commander for my life?

What does the World Government want with me?”

“The Government doesn’t want anything to do with you,” I chuckled, holding my hands up peacefully.

“Drop the sphere, Law.

I didn’t do this for the Marines.

I did it because we’re family.”

Law’s eyes narrowed.

“I don’t have any family.”

“Yes, you do,” I said softly.

Robin, who was standing nearby with Brook and Perona, tilted her head.

“Captain…

how did you know that Marine in the cell?

And why are you calling Trafalgar your family?”

I took a deep breath, leaning against the railing.

“Sit down, everyone.

It’s a wild story.”

Law hesitated, but eventually dropped his Room and sat on a barrel, Bepo standing nervously behind him.

“I’m not from the South Blue,” I began, looking at my crew.

“I am from a completely different world.

Earth.”

Brook dropped his teacup.

Robin’s eyes went wide.

“Two hundred years ago, our ancestors lived in this world,” I explained carefully.

“But they were hunted by the Celestial Dragons.

They were saved by a Planeswalker—a man named Damien who possessed the incredible power to travel through different dimensions and worlds.

Our ancestors traveled with Damien across dimensions for a long time before deciding to finally settle down.

Most of them settled in my old world, Earth.

But some of them chose to stay behind in this world, settling down in the White City…

Flevance.”

Law’s breath caught in his throat.

His stoic, guarded exterior violently cracked.

“You…

you share the Amber Lead bloodline?”

“From my mother’s side, yes,” I nodded.

“Damien promised that one day, when this world needed us, he would bring the descendants back.

He brought me, my younger sister Jasmine, and unfortunately, Alister.

I came here to find the cousins who were left behind.

Law…

you aren’t the last of your bloodline.

You have me.

You have Jasmine.

You have Ace of the Whitebeard Pirates, Koala of the Revolutionary Army, and a woman named Isa and her little daughter Aisa on a Sky Island.”

Law stared at me, completely stunned.

For over a decade, he believed he was a ghost, the sole survivor of a murdered nation.

Finding out he had an entire network of living cousins shattered his worldview.

“Wait,” Robin interjected, her brilliant mind processing the information rapidly.

“If Alister is from your world…

why did he try to execute Trafalgar?”

“Because Alister is a third-cousin from my mother’s side, and we are locked in a bitter blood feud,” I said, my voice hardening.

“His father assassinated my father over a land dispute back on Earth.

My mother died slowly from the heartbreak.

I’ve put Alister and his older brother in the hospital more times than I can count, and they’ve put me in the ICU a few times, too.”

“That explains the hatred,” Brook murmured.

“But to execute an innocent pirate crew?”

“Alister targeted Law because they were both in the North Blue, and Alister has a delusion that anyone related to him must do everything according to his will,” I explained.

“If anyone does anything he doesn’t like, he believes they are dishonoring the family, and he goes into violent fits.

Back on Earth, he had an outstanding arrest warrant for aggravated assault.

Him joining the Marines in this world is hilarious.”

“The man is insane,” Bepo muttered.

“Literally,” I nodded.

“Back home, he tried to force his sister-in-law to change her clothes because he didn’t like the color of her dress.

He almost tore her clothes off in front of her entire family.

Her family beat him to a pulp, she filed for divorce, and his family refused to get him checked for Autism.”

Law frowned.

“Autism?”

“It’s a neurodevelopmental condition from my world that affects social interaction and communication,” I clarified.

“The justice system back home forced a psychiatric evaluation.

They found out he didn’t have Autism at all; he was just a clinically insane psychopath.

Given how the rest of his family acts, I wasn’t shocked.”

Silence hung over the quarterdeck as my crew and Law digested the massive revelation.

Gammamon trotted over and patted Law’s knee comfortingly.

“This…

creature,” Law said slowly, pointing at Gammamon.

“He’s from your world too?”

“This is Gammamon,” I smiled, gesturing to the little white triceratops.

“And he’s a Digimon.

He’s not a creature from this world, or my world.”

“I’m from the Digital World!” Gammamon beamed proudly, explaining it to a very bewildered Surgeon of Death.

“It’s a completely different dimension made entirely out of computer data and communication networks!

Everything there is made of information, and Digimon live inside it!”

Law rubbed his temples, a small, genuine, exhausted smile finally breaking through his cynical facade.

“A Warlord, an assassin, a ghost, and a monster made of numbers.

Our family is a complete mess.”

“But we’re alive,” I said.

“And we look out for our own.”

Several days later, as the Titan’s Glory sailed peacefully over the New World, I sat in the galley with Law.

Spread across the table was the massive haul of treasure from Tesoro’s vault.

Sitting in the center was the rare, unknown Devil Fruit.

It was shaped like a pineapple, colored a deep, swirling metallic silver with spiral patterns.

Law was staring at it intently, turning it over in his tattooed hands.

“I’m telling you, Victor,” Law muttered, his brow furrowed.

“I memorized the entire catalog.

I know every fruit documented by the World Government.

This isn’t in the book.

Its shape, its color…

it’s completely unlisted.”

“An undocumented power,” I mused, taking a sip of coffee.

“Keep it safe.

We’ll figure out what it does eventually.”

While we examined our spoils, thousands of miles away on the island of Onigashima, the sky was violently tearing itself apart.

A massive, terrifying wave of Conqueror’s Haki flattened the trees and sent the lower-ranking Beast Pirates unconscious to the dirt.

Standing atop the skull dome, holding the morning newspaper, was Kaido of the Beasts.

The headline boldly proclaimed: WARLORD COSTA DELIVERS THE DROUGHT TO IMPEL DOWN!

Kaido’s rage was a physical, suffocating force.

A Warlord hadn’t just humiliated his Lead Performer; they had handed him over to the World Government like a common criminal.

With a deafening, earth-shattering roar, Kaido’s body rapidly expanded and shifted.

Blue scales erupted across his skin as he transformed into his massive, miles-long Azure Dragon form.

He took to the sky, lightning crashing around his serpentine body.

“BEASTMASTER!” Kaido’s voice echoed like thunder across Wano.

“I WILL MOUNT YOUR HEAD ON MY WALL!”

The New World had just become an active warzone.

Word Count: 2624

———————————————————————————————————

For more chapters

This month’s adventures wouldn’t be possible without the generous support of my patrons:

Greylocke33, Jordan D’souza, Big_Bro_Byakko, Doglore63, Curtis Branscum, Rudell Vincent Samson, Kevins Green, Eric, Diem Delgado, Byung Kang

thank you for believing in the story!