*Crunch*
In a dark room, lit only by the flickering of a bright TV, a middle-aged man with an average face and build was sitting on a wide leather couch, his body tense in suspension of what might happen next on the screen before him. His entire attention was focused on the scene, only interrupted by his occasional reaching into the chips bag.
His dark eyes reflected the scenes on the screen. A boy with white hair and a wide grin freely manipulated the land and space around him and changed his own body proportions while beating up an already injured leopard.
"Come on Luffy, stop playing with him and kill him already. I hate that guy, bringing shame over every single assassin or hitman with his amateurish skills." The man cursed at the TV, small crumbs of chips flying out of his mouth.
The next few scenes disappointed the man, who slumped back into the soft cushion. Not that he hadn't expected it, after all he already read all the manga chapters and was about to catch up with the anime as well. He had already known what would happen beforehand.
But he couldn't resist watching the anime anyways. It was just way too good!
*Crack*
The shattering of glass resounded throughout the room, making the man jump up in fright.
"Haha, I don't remember installing such high quality speakers." He said to himself with a wry smile, but his years of experience had already led him to take cover behind the sofa he had just been sitting on moments ago.
At the same time he pulled out a small hand-gun from seemingly nowhere with practiced movement, only to abandon it the next second. He decided that it was much smarter to cover his ears instead.
*BOOOOOMMMM*
An earshattering sound combined with a retina-singing flash of light resounded, but for some reason the expected impact did not shake the ground or rattle his bones.
'Only a flashbang. Seems like their mission is to capture me alive again. But they should think about surviving first after interrupting me right in the middle of a One Piece episode.'
His anger was burning bright and only seas of blood could extinguish it.
Just at that moment he felt five small impacts shake the ground in rapid succession.
'Seems like they are at least coordinated. Makes it so much more interesting than that rag-tag team that came the last time.' He though with some excitement. The last time he had been in action, was about 50 episodes ago.
It was time to quench his thirst.
While silently moving towards the left of the couch, he carefully threw a pillow to the right. Of course so careful that it sounded accidental. This led to all of the intruders looking that way.
The next moment he peaked out on his side and pulled the trigger 2 times. Sadly only one of the bullets really hit its target, instantly ending one of the invaders lifes, while the second one only grased a cheek.
'Seems like I'm out of practice. Usually this should have been at least 3 clean hits. Well, who cares, not like I'm going to lose this anyways.'
With that he quickly made his way towards the door while still crouching. This was the first time he was glad that he had arranged his living room with the couch facing away from the door, as it now allowed him to get out of that very unfortunate spot.
The invaders had entered through the windows, so he needed to head for the backdoor. Chances were that they had more people waiting out front. With the room still being almost completely dark, the invaders couldn't see him clearly, so he got out of the room relatively unscathed.
Just as he was about to head to the stairway leading down to his promised freedom, he heard even more people coming up with heavy steps, as well as someone shouting inaudible commands. This made his excited expression vanish immediately.
Lets be real. This isn't some kind of crazy movie where the main character fights against 20 armed and trained man with just a knife and plot armor. This is real life. Or at least a novel that tries to imitate it.
With the excitement now wiped from his face, the man immediately turned serious. A hint of finality and even satisfaction appeared in his eyes, as he made his way towards the toilet with confident steps.
He had already known that this day would come eventually. Even the house was built with this moment in mind.
Once there, he opened his shower drain, revealing a large red button with the inscription 'Self-Destruct. Only press in case of emergency or suicidal thoughts.'
The man didn't hesitate one bit, immediately pressing down with a force that didn't leave any other option than the mysterious button's unknown mechanism being triggered.
Right as it was activated, an alarm started blaring through the entire house, sending a wave of shock through the invaders.
"5 seconds until self-destruction. Please evacuate immediately!"
While noise started erupting from the corridor as the invaders hurried out again, the man already closed his eyes peacefully.
He had lived a moderately long life of 40 years, with the constant action - running, hiding, spying, killing - making him feel as if it was much longer.
He had started working as a hit-man when he was 16, trying to earn some quick money on the side, until it eventually developed into his entire career. Now, almost 25 full years of mostly successful work later, he was content.
He had only ever killed bad, real evil people. Corrupt politicians, terrorists, Nazis, the list goes on. People that didn't deserve saving. Not humans, but animals only acting for their own interest. Even the most vicious of animals had more compassion than the people he killed.
Sadly there was a ton of those people still left in the world- work left for him. He tried his best, but in the last few years he slowly lost hope. He kept on killing, cleansing and purging, but for some reason nothing ever changed. The people didn't even realize his good deeds. They called him a psycho who attacked democracy and free speech, but he knew better.
The list of potential targets didn't decrease in length with his growing experience though. Quite the opposite happening in fact, with the greed and hate in the peoples hearts only growing with time, slowly and unnoticed, like a poisonous flower. This had also led the man to become less active in the past few years, until he eventually discovered his passion for watching anime. Especially One Piece.
He had tried to clean this world of its filth. He really did. But it was way too much for one man, that was neither born into wealth or power.
'It would really be too great if I had lived in a world where my engagement had the ability to change anything. A world of freedom, unbound by anything. Well, too bad. Nothing I can really do about it.'
Just as he started wondering if there was truly a real God, or if science was right all along like he expected, the explosion went off.
From the street a huge ball of fire could be seen swallowing the entire house, being just shy of also affecting the surroundings. But it eventually stopped right in front of them. It seemed like the person who installed this mechanism was a true master of his craft.
Luckily the ball of fire at least reached the invaders that were scrambling to escape the death trap, doomed unable to succeed and destined to die along their mission target.
---------------------------------------------
Pain... and then... even more pain. That's all he could feel.
After a few seconds he finally pulled himself together and slowly opened his eyes. The light of the setting evening sun tenderly illuminated the entire room through a small dust-covered window. Though the light wasn't really intense, it still hurt his eyes that had already gotten used to the deep darkness that had enveloped his being just moments before.
He carefully looked around, taking in the scene. He lay inside a slightly damp bed in a moist room that was only illuminated by a single window, hammered closed with some planks of wood. Nearby he could hear the muffled sound of waves reaching the shore, informing him that he was near an ocean.
The man was happy about the sun giving some light, but at the same time there were some things he wished he could unsee. Like the mold covering extensive parts of the wall, or the other windows that were broken and nailed shut.
*Squelch*
While moving around, the unidentifiable object he rested upon made a wet sound, almost as if he had stepped into mud.
"Why is it so wet?" He asked himself, his voice so hoarse it barely sounded human. Looking down, he noticed that he was actually lying inside a small pool of blood.
Its origin?
His own body of course. His skin held countless bruises and cuts that supplied the bed with a steady stream of fresh red liquid, though most of it had already dried by now and the wounds had started forming scab.
With the pain slowly ebbing down, he was finally able to think straight again.
'Where am I even? As far as I can remember, I died after initiating the houses's self-destruct mechanism. And why did my entire body and all of my muscles shrink all of a sudden?' A few moments after thinking about those questions, he regretted it, as his mind was once again overwhelmed by pain, driving him to the brink of collapse.
Just as quickly as it had come, it also left again, only lasting for a few seconds at most. The pain had now been replaced by - or rather had brought - countless memories that felt alien and familiar at the same time. A weird sensation that he had never felt before.
He took a few seconds to sift through his new memories, before erupting into a depressed grin.
"Seems like reincarnation is true after all. Those One Piece fan fics didn't lie to me." He said with a smirk. Speaking of One Piece, that's the world he had reincarnated to.
From what he could tell he was in the West Blue, an island called Red Earth. The date was some day in January of 1516, so about 6 years before the start of the story line.
While he was excited to be reborn inside his favorite anime, he knew how dangerous the One Piece world was. Worse of all, its evil and corruption had spread even deeper than in his previous world, affecting almost every single citizen. And with the situation he was currently in, he didn't have the best starting point either.
The body he was illegally trespassing in belongs, or rather used to belong, to a 14-year-old boy called Sylas Letum. Now that he had taken it over it was obviously his. For some reason the man had forgotten his past life's name, but it didn't bother him. He decided to just go along with the one that had been given to his new body.
The previous occupier was an orphan and worked as a chore-boy in a bar called 'The hidden dagger'. While that sounded okay-ish at first, except for the ominous name, the problem was in his location and current state.
Red Earth was the biggest and richest non-government affiliated island in the entire West Blue. This meant it was a hotspot for Mafia and Pirates. And as fate, or his luck, would have it, he was inside the territory of one of those mafia families. Namely the Gambino family, one of the 5 families ruling over the entire West Blue with terror and force.
The reason why he was so beat up? He had failed to pay the monthly protection fee. His employer had cut his wage this month, saying he would need to first pay off the damages some pirates did last week.
'This place's employment situation is even shittier than in the US. No worker protection and the wage is a joke. This truly isn't the way the anime portrays it most of the time. Which makes sense considering that a lot of children read it as well, but still.'
'This also begs the question: Why even send me into this world just to kill me off?'
"Fuck you, whoever is responsible for this. At least give me a way to defend myself."
[Ding!]
[System fully initialized. Welcome to the Strongest Assassin System, host!]
*Gulp*
Seeing the words suddenly appearing on a game-like screen in front of him, Sylas swallowed heavily.
"Seems like I will need to apologize."