Chapter 135: Bloom of Death
Blood soaked into the sandstone streets of Alubarna.
The alley was choked with silence, burnt air and the faint tremble of a coming storm. Nami's back slammed against a crumbling wall, her teeth clenched through the agony of the spike wound in her shoulder. Blood streamed freely down her arm, warm and wet, each beat of her heart pumping more life into the dusty ground beneath her boots.
Across the shattered street, Miss Doublefinger approached with a sultry strut, blood splattered across her fishnet thighs and lips painted cruelly red.
She licked the crimson from her fingers, savoring it.
"You should've stayed a navigator, little girl," she purred. "Playing pirate doesn't suit someone like you."
Nami said nothing. She grit her teeth and adjusted her grip on the bo staff. Her palm slick with sweat and blood.
"I mean look at you," Doublefinger chuckled, mockingly sauntering closer, spikes protruding from her arms like jagged glass. "No Devil Fruit. No claws. No training. Just tits, legs, and a stick. How cute."
"You talk too much," Nami rasped, her lips already bruised. "Trying to convince yourself you're winning?"
Doublefinger's smile twisted.
She charged.
Nami dodged left, rolling across the blood-slick tiles just as a spike exploded from the ground where she'd been a second before. Stone shards flew, slicing her leg. She hissed and spun low, swinging her staff into Doublefinger's ankle, crack, a tendon ruptured, but the assassin didn't even flinch.
"PAIN is part of the flower's bloom," she said, madness flaring in her eyes.
She retaliated with a spinning backhand, a spike erupted from her knuckle and pierced Nami's thigh.
Nami screamed. Not just in pain. In fury.
She used the momentum to pull herself forward, bringing her face close enough to bite down on Doublefinger's wrist. Teeth tore flesh.
The assassin shrieked and yanked back, taking a chunk of her own arm out with Nami's jaws. Blood sprayed against Nami's lips.
"You fucking bitch!" she howled, blood trailing from her shredded wrist.
Nami spat out meat and rose, half limping, half crawling. Her bo staff in hand.
She remembered Goku's words, loud and thunderous in her skull, from those days before Alabasta, when the desert was just a name on a map:
"No more playing pirates. This is war now. You want to survive the Grand Line? Make sure they never forget you. Step up. Break through. Make every fight a hell they pray to never see again."
Nami's chest burned. Not just from pain. But power. Something inside her snapped loose.
"You're right, Doublefinger," she said, her voice suddenly calm. "I'm not just a pirate."
The wind shifted.
"I'm your fucking executioner."
Nami's skin began to glow, barely at first. A trembling hum in the air. A heat that shimmered along her arms. Her staff trembled in her grip.
Miss Doublefinger blinked. "What the hell…?"
"I've been training," Nami said, voice low. "You see, Goku taught me something. That even if we're weak… we can burn hotter than any Devil Fruit user when it counts."
She spun the bo staff, once, twice, and then slammed its end into the ground.
A shockwave burst from her position, cracking the stone beneath her feet. Her body exploded into motion, faster than Doublefinger expected.
The assassin reacted, but too late.
Nami was in the air, twisting.
Her staff glowed like it was forged from lightning, and she brought it down in a blinding arc.
CRACK.
It smashed into Doublefinger's skull. Bone split. Blood erupted like a geyser. One of her eyes popped instantly, blood and white jelly running down her cheek.
Nami landed hard, rolling through the dust as Doublefinger staggered. Half her face was caved in. But she still stood.
Still breathing.
"Die, you bitch!" she snarled, blindly swinging a spike from her ribs...
Nami caught it. With her bare hand.
Blood poured down her palm, but her grip didn't falter.
She yanked Doublefinger forward and slammed her knee into the woman's gut. Then again. And again. Ribs snapped.
Doublefinger coughed blood onto her cleavage, trying to stab with her other arm, but Nami twisted her wrist, snapping it backward at an unnatural angle.
Her scream was feral.
Then Nami stepped back, raised her staff like a spear, and roared.
"KAIKASHO!!"(Blossom Release.)
The tip of the staff glowed, pure Ki, burning like the heart of the sun.
She thrust.
The staff stabbed through Miss Doublefinger's gut, clean through, splitting her spine.
The woman froze.
Her blood splashed across Nami's face, steaming from the energy crackling off her weapon.
"You should've never touched my crew," Nami whispered, shoving harder.
The spike-covered assassin gurgled, eyes wide.
And then Nami ripped the staff upward, slicing her body in two from the stomach up through the breastbone.
Blood sprayed in sheets.
Her body twitched once.
And collapsed into a ruin of gore.
Nami stood there, panting, the glow of her staff fading, the only sound the drip… drip… drip… of blood from the ends of her fingers.
Her clothes were torn. Her skin broken in places. Her shoulder still bleeding.
But her eyes were fire.
The words echoed again:
"Step up. Break through. Make them fear you."
Nami turned away from the corpse and limped back into the smoke-stained streets.
The alley behind her reeked of blood and burnt flesh. Chunks of gore decorated the cracked walls like violent artwork, shards of Miss Doublefinger's clothes, fragments of her body, her skull split and left staring skyward with a hollowed-out eye socket.
Nami didn't look back.
She just kept walking.
Her boots left sticky red footprints behind her.
'Her heart was pounding too loud. Too fast.'
'What the hell did I just do…?'
She stared down at her hands, still trembling, still bloodied. The heat of the Ki hadn't faded from her palms. The smell of seared muscle still clung to her fingertips.
'She's dead.'
Not unconscious. Not incapacitated. Not beaten.
'Dead.'
Nami had split a woman in half.
A spike of nausea climbed up her throat. Her legs slowed. Her shoulder throbbed violently from the earlier wound, blood still dripping with every step. Her thigh ached. Her body was wrecked.
But nothing compared to the screaming storm inside her head.
"She was going to kill me," she whispered, as if saying it aloud made it more real. "It was her or me."
Silence.
She stumbled past a collapsed building. Sand coated the streets. Alubarna was deserted in this district. Everyone had fled to the palace, or to the battlefield. The screams of war echoed faintly in the distance. Blades clashing. Gunfire. Explosions.
It felt like another world.
"I had no choice," Nami said, louder now. "I had no choice."
She stopped in the middle of the street and leaned against a shattered post, gasping for breath. Blood trickled from her lips. She hadn't even realized her nose had been broken at some point.
'No choice. But that doesn't change what happened.'
She closed her eyes.
And saw Doublefinger's body twitching on the ground.
Saw her eyes as she died. The terror. The realization. The hatred.
'I killed her.'
"No," Nami muttered. "I stepped up."
Her fingers clenched around her staff. The glow of her Ki had faded, but its residue was still in her bones, still flickering in her muscles like echoes of lightning.
'Goku was right.'
Back then, on the deck of the Going Merry, when they trained. When he pushed her beyond exhaustion, even as she cursed his name and wept and screamed and fell to her knees.
"You want to protect your crew? You want to stop crying every time the world punches you in the face?" he'd said. "Then get the hell up. Step up. Or die."
She'd hated him for it. But now… she understood.
Doublefinger had been a killer. Cold. Merciless. A weapon in a woman's skin.
If Nami had hesitated even a second… if she'd held back…
She would've died.
"It's us or them now," she said to herself.
She pushed off the post and walked forward again. Limping. Her body bleeding and broken, but her soul harder than before.
"I don't care how many of them I have to bury," she whispered. "No one hurts my crew. No one."
The roars of war grew louder with every step. Nami crossed into a main street, where the distant palace stood in the sun like a throne of gold and sand. Smoke curled into the sky. Fire had caught to some of the rooftops. Cannon fire boomed in the distance.
The civil war had reached its boiling point.
She could hear the screams of soldiers now. The clash of sabers. The crying of frightened beasts.
Her knuckles tightened around her staff.