"Unfurl the foresails! Tighten the main tops'l! I said tighten it, not strangle it!—You, don't just hug the mast, move it!!"
Isuka's voice sliced through the chaos like a whip-crack, sharp and commanding despite the biting cold. She stomped across the deck, boots skidding on the ice-slick planks, coat flaring like a cape behind her as she bellowed orders that only half the crew seemed capable of understanding.
It was pure bedlam—ropes swinging wild, sails flapping like panicked birds, and more than one marine running in circles pretending to be useful. A barrel rolled across the deck. Someone screamed. It might have been the barrel.
At the helm, Poqin spun the wheel like he was trying to win a carnival game. "Wheeeeeew! Okay, this is either going very well or very poorly! No in-between!"
Shockingly, it was going well.
Sure, they'd grazed a couple icebergs earlier—nothing fatal, just a few crunchy love taps—but now, the monk was steering through the frozen labyrinth with a kind of drunken grace. It was like watching a tipsy uncle moonwalk through a minefield and somehow not explode.
"Hey Gale!" Poqin called out over the wind, grinning like this was the best day of his life. "I think I'm getting the hang of this!"
Gale, clutching the railing beside him, did not share that enthusiasm. "Good for you, buddy! We only almost died four times!"
"Three and a half," Poqin corrected, spinning the wheel to the left as another iceberg loomed. The ship tilted dangerously but swerved just in time. "See? Graceful!"
But just as the crew started to find their rhythm and the sails began responding properly to Isuka's thunderous commands, the temperature dropped again.
Then everything—everything—went quiet.
Too quiet.
Gale's eyes narrowed. "That's not a good sign…"
A shadow passed over the deck, vast and unnatural. He tilted his head slowly, dread coiling in his stomach.
And there it was.
A gargantuan iceberg, larger than the ship itself, hanging in the sky like some angry god had thrown an entire glacier at them from the heavens.
Gale's mouth dropped open. "You have got to be kidding me."
Screams erupted. Isuka's eyes went wide. "ALL SAILS! BRACE FOR IMPACT! MOVE—MOVE!!"
But the crew… didn't move.
They stared up at the falling mountain of ice with the dead-eyed expression of men who had accepted the reaper's cold embrace. One marine actually crossed himself. Another dropped to his knees and muttered something about writing to his mom.
Gale winced. He didn't need haki to sense it—morale had hit rock bottom and started digging.
'Two dozen low-rank marines. A battleship. Sent to fight a warlord-level pirate and his 300 goons. Under the command of two clueless rookies and an ensign who clearly deserved better. Yeah… not exactly confidence-inspiring.'
But still.
Gale wasn't about to let this be his exit. Not when he'd worked so hard to not die.
With a sigh, he turned, walked up to the nearest frozen marine, and wordlessly yanked the rifle off his back. The marine blinked. Gale didn't even look at him.
"Mine now," he muttered, raising the weapon skyward.
As he held it up, he focused. The familiar warmth of his Devil Fruit pulsed through his arm.
The rifle began to hum softly as its density changed—metal condensing, internal components fortifying, the barrel narrowing just enough to keep from bursting. The pellet inside the chamber was next—compressed tighter than steel, heavier than lead.
Meanwhile, the gunpowder? He did the opposite. Decreased its density, reduced the pressure. A bigger bang with less force. The idea was simple:
Make the bullet the fist. Make the explosion a whisper.
He lined up the shot with one eye, took a slow breath… and fired.
Pop.
Not a bang. Not a boom. Just a pathetic little pop—like someone had stepped on a piece of bubble wrap and wanted applause for it.
But what followed?
Chaos.
Gale didn't even see the shot fly. What he did see was an all-consuming white flash that felt like someone had poured a gallon of bleach straight into his eyeballs. His vision went full laundry detergent commercial—bright, clean, and utterly blinding.
Then the recoil hit.
It wasn't so much a kick as it was a declaration of war. The rifle bucked like an angry sea king, nearly wrenching Gale's arm from its socket. The deck cracked beneath his boots.
No, scratch that—the entire ship sank half a meter into the sea like it had suddenly remembered it was too old for this crap, before lurching back up with a wheezing groan of protest.
'So yeah,' Gale thought, blinking away the retinal damage, 'maybe I overdid it on the gunpowder density math...'
The rifle, bless its splintered heart, snapped in half like a breadstick. He let it clatter to the deck. Worth it.
Because the iceberg? It hit.
A single black speck against the sky—his overcompressed pellet—struck the descending behemoth square in the center. For a breathless moment, nothing happened.
Then—
KRRRR-KSSHHHHHHH!
Cracks spiderwebbed out across the entire iceberg with a deep, crystalline groan. The massive chunk of frozen doom shattered like glass under a hammer, exploding into thousands of deadly shards.
"Oh, great," Gale muttered, eyes widening. "Now it's raining knives."
He bolted for the mast, shouting over his shoulder:
"BRACE FOR IMPACT! COVER YOUR HEADS!"
Then he launched himself skyward.
With a flash of motion, he decreased the density of his body mid-jump—lightening himself just enough to sail up the mast, bounce off the sails like a springy trampoline, and flip into the air like a B-tier acrobat trying to go pro.
Up above the deck, silhouetted against the foggy sky, Gale drew his sword. The air around the blade rippled as its weight shifted unnaturally.
"C'mon, baby blue," he muttered, swinging it in a clean upward arc.
A cerulean-blue slash burst out diagonally, cutting through the falling ice with a sonic shriek, shattering dozens of shards into harmless dust.
Most of them, anyway.
One particularly stubborn chunk of ice plonked off Poqin's bald head with a dull thonk.
He blinked, completely unfazed. "Didn't feel a thing."
Still steering. Still grinning.
Gale landed with a skid back onto the deck, his boots crunching against the ice-dusted boards. He looked around. Half the marines were still crouched and wide-eyed, clearly waiting for the afterlife to arrive with coffee and a clipboard.
"Oi!" he snapped, voice cutting sharp through the frozen stupor. "I don't know about you guys, but I didn't sign up to die five days into this job!"
Some eyes turned to him. A few more blinked.
"You got families, right? People waiting back home? Well, unless you really want your obituaries to say 'Got iced because he forgot how ropes work,' I suggest you snap the hell out of it and MOVE!"
He slammed his sword into the deck with a thunk and pointed toward the sails.
"Everyone has a job! If you do yours, we'll get to Vashiri in one piece! And if you don't—well…"
He smirked. "I'll throw you overboard myself and write you off an accident."
It wasn't a speech worthy of a Fleet Admiral. It wasn't even that inspirational.
But it worked.
The crew shook themselves from their stupor. Like someone had lit a fire under their collective rear ends, they suddenly scrambled into motion—ropes pulled, sails caught wind, orders barked, boots slammed.
Even the guy who'd been praying earlier was now swearing like a dockhand while tying down a pulley.
Isuka passed him by, offering a brief nod—tight-lipped, but clearly impressed.
"You might actually make a decent captain one day," she muttered.
"Don't curse me like that," Gale muttered back, rubbing his sore shoulder. "Still not over the fact that I had to do all of that without so much as a proper Marine ID."
He looked over to see Poqin casually adjusting their course whistling casually.
"You okay up there, monk?" Gale shouted.
Poqin raised a thumbs-up. "Yeah! Ship's holding together, and so am I. My skull's the strongest part of me!"
"Can confirm!" Gale called.
He exhaled, a long breath of ice fog, and allowed himself a small, internal sigh of relief.
The crew was moving. The sails were up. The helm was steady.
And the Vashiri Principality, well... it was still fairly distant.
"All right…" he said aloud. "Let's not die before we meet the pirates at least..."
...
The western edge of the Vashiri Archipelago was already burning.
From the craggy cliffs of Isola Verdanza, the smoke of war curled into the pale morning sky. The once-quiet island village—famous mostly for silk beetle farms and an annual pastry festival that was only moderately rigged—was now a target. Not of fame, or trade, or curiosity.
But conquest.
On a hill just outside the village, standing tall in golden-accented armor that had clearly seen better decades, Sir Remiel Velnar of the Gilded Torrent narrowed his eyes at the pirate ship parked arrogantly off the coast, its cannons blazing, its black flags flapping in the salted wind like they owned the place.
"...They're not even aiming properly," he muttered to himself as another cannonball smashed harmlessly into a goat pen, startling the island's bravest goat. "Or maybe they are, and they just really hate goats."
Behind him, a ragged formation of villagers crouched behind overturned carts and hastily-built barricades. Grandfathers holding pitchforks, farmers gripping old sabers, and one enthusiastic teen dual-wielding frying pans like she was born to disappoint her parents.
"Sir Remiel!" shouted an out-of-breath watchman, sliding down the hill with the grace of a dying walrus. "They've taken Costa Vino—the town on the eastern shore! They're splitting up! Picking us off one by one!"
"I assumed as much," Remiel said grimly, tapping his sheathed blade. "A coward's tactic. But effective. With each island taken, they tighten the noose."
The watchman's eyes darted to the horizon. "We're not ready, sir. We've got two cannons that jam when you look at them wrong, and half our volunteers think 'broadside' is a fancy type of bread!"
Remiel clenched his jaw. He wanted to say something inspiring. Something knightly. But what came out was,
"…Well, at least it's not raining."
BOOM.
A cannonball whistled overhead and smashed into a bakery, flinging flour like a mid-tier theatrical explosion.
Remiel didn't flinch. "...That was the bakery."
The teen with the frying pans gasped. "They'll pay for that."
Below, the pirate ship loomed—barnacled, ugly, and spitting iron. Its crew of thirty or so howled with glee as they loaded another round. Without Blight's mist to disable the town's already questionable defenses, they were going for brute force instead.
And it was working.
A third of the village was already reduced to rubble. Chickens ran screaming (probably), and morale hovered somewhere between "mild panic" and "accepting death as a Tuesday."
Remiel stepped forward, voice booming over the roar of war.
"Listen to me! These dogs think Vashiri is weak! That her people will roll over and beg for mercy!"
He drew his sword, the golden hilt still gleaming despite the soot.
"But we are not broken. We are not alone. And we do not beg!"
A cannonball hit one of the barricades, launching a hay bale into the stratosphere. Someone started crying. The teen screamed, "I'M STILL WITH YOU, SIR!"
Remiel opened his mouth to rally again—
Then he stopped.
A shadow passed overhead. One that didn't belong to a cannonball. Or a bird. Or a vengeful goat.
"...That's not one of ours," he muttered.
Out at sea, cutting through the waters like an angry, steel-clad shark, came a Marine battleship—sleek, fast, and massive.
"Wait…" one villager gasped. "That's a Marine ship!"
Another squinted. "They're not firing on us, right?"
Remiel sheathed his sword with a grin. "Not unless we've made very poor life choices."
The pirate ship must've noticed, too, because their crew suddenly froze. A panicked shout echoed across the water. Cannons stopped mid-load. One pirate dropped a cannonball on his foot. Another fell overboard in confusion.
And then—
BOOM.
A sound rolled over the sea—not the sharp crack of a cannon, but something deeper. Stranger. It was like the ocean itself had gasped or maybe it was a burp?
From the coast of Isola Verdanza, Sir Remiel Velnar watched in disbelief as the pirate ship was—there was no polite way to put it—obliterated. One second it was a proud, if ugly, war vessel.
The next, it split straight down the middle like a hot knife through badly funded woodwork.
The explosion didn't scatter debris so much as vaporize the center of the ship. What remained was two jagged halves drifting apart, taking on water like a pair of drunken logs.
"…That wasn't a normal shot," Remiel muttered under his breath, eyebrows furrowed. "No cannonball does that."
But he didn't have the luxury to ponder marine science or suspicious physics trickery. Survivors were already flailing in the water, and a few pirates were trying to climb into floating wood like desperate crabs.
He turned to his people, voice regaining its usual righteous boom.
"Launch the boats! We finish this before they get clever!"
As the villagers scrambled with a newfound sense of hope (and a little bloodlust), Remiel vaulted down toward the dock, golden cape fluttering dramatically behind him.
In his head, he made a mental note to write an official thank-you letter to the Marines. Maybe include a fruit basket. Or at least the good kind of bread.
..
On the battleship, Gale scratched the back of his head, staring at the smoking wreckage of a cannon that was now… very much retired.
It wasn't supposed to explode-explode. Just, you know… densify the cannonball a little. Maybe give it some extra punch. Not planet-destroying laser cannon energy.
The cannon sat twisted and bent like a pretzel that had seen war. He let out a sigh. Maybe he should take a page out of Garp's playbook and start hurling canon balls in the future... it would be a lot more cost-effective if nothing else.
"…Please tell me that's not coming out of my paycheck."
A low whistle sounded behind him.
Poqin leaned against the mast, arms crossed, sandals dangling lazily off one foot as if he hadn't just watched his best friend commit naval overkill.
"That was awesome," he grinned. "Ten out of ten as far as first impressions go. If I was a pirate watching that I'd have wet my pants already..."
Gale gave him a tired side-eye. "I was aiming for intimidating, not traumatizing."
"You split a ship in two like it owed you money."
"That ship did owe me peace of mind."
Isuka approached, arms crossed, wind tugging her hair as she looked over the battlefield.
She didn't comment on the busted cannon or the creative accounting Gale was clearly planning for the damage report. Instead, her tone was sharp and focused.
"One ship down. But Blight's fleet is still holed up smewhere. If we want to stop them, we'll have to move fast before they regroup."
Gale nodded. "Yeah. We'll get a report from the locals and chart a course inland. This was just the start."
Still, as he looked back toward the villagers launching boats and the last remnants of pirate flags drifting into the sea, a small smile tugged at the corner of his mouth.
He wasn't really the marine type. He still felt more like a guy who had to step up because real marines were busy doing the celestial dragons' bidding.
But…
He had to admit—blowing up pirate ships with scientifically questionable cannonballs?
Kinda fun.
"Alright," he said, rolling his shoulders. "Let's see how long we can ride this good first impression before someone realizes we have no idea what we're doing."
Poqin gave him a thumbs-up. "That's the spirit, Captain."
"Stop calling me Captain, you shitfaced monk."
Isuka pinched the bridge of her nose. "Don't tempt me to mutiny again."
...
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