I tackled one as my sneeze mingled in the air with countless others. My dagger found a resting place deep in his neck. A fast stab and a long pull made a bigger gash. His blood squirted in sudden bursts, splashing against my arm, hot and metallic. He didn't even get the chance to cough. He dropped with a soft sound, like a sack of wet cloth. My hand didn't tremble. My breath didn't hitch. It was routine.
I moved to the next. Another man, frozen in place, eyes wide, blade trembling in his hands. He didn't even flinch when I came in close. I stabbed him in the neck. Same rhythm. Same pull. A clean gash that painted my sleeve in a second coat. His scream choked halfway through and came out in a wet wheeze. I let him fall.
Bang.
A musket went off. Far from me. I didn't even blink. The shot whistled overhead and clipped the mast behind me. A desperate shot. A blind prayer. They were panicking.
I smirked.
My dagger twirled in my hand, catching flickers of the dim light as I dragged it through the air with slow, casual loops. I didn't rush. I wanted them to see. To feel it. The hesitation. The regret. The fear.
This was the first human interaction I'd had in three months. No quiet monkey barter. No sneaky trade with forest creatures. No passing bird delivering folded news. This was flesh and fear and pain. Raw, ugly, honest.
I wanted to savor it. I wanted to release something deep in me. Something I couldn't show to the villagers, the kids, Merry, Kaya or Usopp.
I drank a gulp of the wine. It overflowed and spilled down my chin, down my neck, trailing down my collarbone like a line of warm honey. It never hit the floor. My skin drank it first. Absorbed it before it even had a chance to cool.
Yeah. Let's play.
I ignored the sneeze building up in my throat. The blood in me swirled and shifted, dulling the irritation, keeping the edge sharp. I didn't blink as the powder coated my lungs. I didn't waver.
And then I laughed.
It started as a chuckle. Quiet. Contained. But it grew with each breath I took. It grew as I stepped through the chili cloud like a ghost pushing through mist. My laugh echoed across the deck, rising and falling like waves crashing against rock.
I laughed as I dragged out a man by his collar—a man barely conscious, sneezing uncontrollably, mucus hanging from his nostrils, his eyes red and bulging from the heat of the chili smoke. His legs kicked, but his strength was gone. He was a sack of limbs.
Another musket fired.
I saw the flash. Felt the impact.
A bullet struck me right in the cheekbone. My head rocked back slightly. My mouth opened wider.
And I laughed harder.
The laughter cracked and clawed its way out of me, peeling through my throat, bouncing off the broken walls of the ship. I dug my dagger into the hole the bullet made in my face, twisting slightly until the bullet popped loose. I held it up between two fingers. Shining. Wet. Warm.
I threw it back. Not as a weapon. Just a message.
I spun the dagger again and pressed the tip to the neck of the man I was still dragging. I drew it across his throat in a clean arc. Blood sprayed. He jerked. Then nothing.
I kept laughing.
I ran towards the others. Their eyes met mine. Wide. Wet. Terrified. I saw it all. The panic. The disbelief. The pure, animal recognition that something was wrong. Deeply wrong.
And I fed off it.
I slit one throat. Then another. Blood covered my arms to the elbow. Not sleeves. Just consequence. Their bodies fell, twitching.
More bullets struck me. One in the shoulder. Another in the thigh. A blade dug across my ribs. Pain registered but didn't matter. My body moved through it. Over it.
I laughed.
I reached up and pulled the bullets from my flesh with slow fingers. Plucked them like splinters. My skin knitted over the holes even before the metal left. It wasn't clean. It wasn't painless. But it was efficient.
They stopped shooting, too afraid to move or busy reloading.
I walked forward, dragging one foot behind me for a moment, feeling the pull in my leg where muscle had not yet stitched back. My boots squelched through blood.
My dagger was no longer a weapon. It was a brush, and I was painting. Wide, sweeping strokes. A cut here. A tear there. No need for full kills anymore. Just damage. Just fear.
I laughed as one tried to crawl away, slipping in another man's intestines. His fingernails scraped against the planks, leaving trails. I stepped on his back and pressed down slowly. His spine gave with a sound I'd never forget.
Another swung at me with an axe. I didn't dodge. It hit. Bit into my arm. I dropped the dagger, grabbed the axe, and twisted. My bone cracked from the force. But so did his wrist.
He screamed.
I shoved the butt of the axe into his face and felt his nose break.
Still laughing.
My breath came in bursts. Sharp and ragged. My voice cracked with every giggle. It wasn't even joy anymore. It was release. It was pressure venting through sound. I laughed for the months at sea. For the empty sky. For the wine I couldn't taste.
I laughed because I didn't know what else to do.
A sword slashed across my stomach. I didn't block it. The edge slid through skin, muscle. I felt the warmth spill out. My legs went weak for a heartbeat.
But the blood in me surged.
It didn't roar. It didn't scream.
It smiled.
I straightened. My hand clutched the wound. The skin pulsed. Pulled together.
I stared into the attacker's eyes. He stepped back. His blade trembled.
I smiled wide. Too wide.
And I laughed again.
Louder than before.
I was no longer attacking. I was dancing. My steps bounced between bodies. My blade sang across flesh. My laugh harmonized with the chaos.
And somewhere in the swirl of violence and wine and smoke, something cracked.
Rationality.
Gone yet still there.
I saw it in my reflection on the edge of a blade—my smile stretched too far, my eyes glazed not from pain, but euphoria.
I had waited so long for this.
The release.
The slaughter.
I laughed as I slit another throat. As I carved a scream from a man's chest.
I laughed for the absurdity.
For the sickness.
For how twisted I was becoming.
And I didn't stop.
---------------
Life had been dull in the village. Not lifeless—just slow. A quiet sort of rhythm, the kind that wrapped around your bones before you noticed. Like a blanket warmed by the midday sun.
The first month or so, the villagers looked at me with wary eyes. I can't blame them. I came from the sea, dragging myself out of the tide like a half-dead beast, clothes torn, weapons at my side, dressed in the kind of gear that didn't scream merchant or sailor. It screamed pirate. Trouble. Danger. And worse, I had come in the company of the village's problem child.
Usopp.
He probably claimed he saved me from a warlord. Or beat me himself. The story changed depending on who asked, but the essence remained the same: I was here because of him. And that was enough to make every elder look twice.
The village chief met me the day after. His face was carved with age, his spine bent but unbroken. His eyes, though—his eyes were sharp. He asked me questions, words I couldn't catch. Japanese. I understood nothing then. I stood there like a fool as he spoke, and all I could do was shrug and shake my head.
He watched. He studied. Then he nodded, once, and pointed toward an old shack just outside the village edge. That was home.
I took it.
No door. No bed. Just a roof that didn't leak much and walls that rattled when the wind blew too hard. But it was mine. And in exchange, I worked.
Odd jobs. Dirty ones. Carrying crates, mending nets, hauling water. No one asked me to. I just did. Because food needed earning, and survival demanded motion.
It wasn't glamorous. But little by little, that suspicion in their eyes faded. They started handing me fish without scowls. Offered me rice without turning their backs. And after a while, a few even nodded when we crossed paths.
It was stupid to say, but that kind of life—that silent, small life—was better than anything I'd had before.
Back in my world, I survived. I scraped. I clawed and drifted. Nothing stayed. No place. No one. Even when I wanted to stay, the world had a way of shoving me forward.
But here?
Here, I lived.
The village didn't ask for more than you could give. And in that simplicity, I found a kind of breath I hadn't known I was holding. The kids started calling me aniki after a while. Big brother. Not loudly. Not in any official way. Just... naturally. It fit.
Especially with Usopp.
At first, he was terrified of me. His bravado stretched thin, barely holding up his legs that trembled whenever I stared a little too long. He'd threaten me, shout about his pirate crew, declare war in the name of adventure—then bolt before I could blink.
I messed with him. Of course I did.
I'd glare. Scowl. Flex a knuckle. He'd scream and run, calling for reinforcements that didn't exist. And for a while, that was our routine. Him trying to prove something. Me pretending to take the bait.
But somewhere along the line, it changed. The yelling quieted. The scowls turned to grins. And then he stopped running away.
We started talking. Well, sort of. He talked. I listened. And even when I couldn't understand the words, I understood the tone. The need.
Usopp didn't just want to be seen.
He wanted to be believed.
And I did.
Because belief costs nothing, and the returns are everything.
The kids followed his lead. Ninjin. Piiman. Tamanegi. Each of them loud in their own way, each of them looking for something they hadn't quite named yet. They fought over stupid things. Drew their battle plans in the sand. Called me commander, then traitor, then hero, depending on the day.
I laughed. I ruffled their hair. I shared scraps of smoked fish when I had it, told stories with gestures and drawings in the dirt when my Japanese failed.
They made me part of their little world.
I became their aniki. The one they could run to. The one who didn't scold too hard, who listened, who watched. I patched their scrapes. I taught them how to act older. I let them win fights they never knew I threw.
And in all that, I found something I hadn't had in years.
A role.
A place to stand. A mask that didn't feel like a mask.
Or maybe it was.
But the truth was, everything I showed them was a piece of me. But not the whole.
The face I wore around them was crafted. Not false—just curated. A version of myself that fit into their world. Calm. Strong. Reliable. Not someone who woke in the night from dreams soaked in blood. Not someone whose hands remembered how to break necks better than they remembered how to write.
I gave them the version of me that wouldn't frighten them.
And they gave me something in return.
Something close to peace.
But that peace had a cost. It didn't come free. It came from holding everything else back.
The nightmares.
The blood.
The memory of what I was before this. Of what I carried. Of what I had done to earn the scars hidden beneath the sleeves.
I bottled it all. Shoved it deep. Buried it beneath smiles and inside jokes and afternoons spent repairing broken carts.
And it worked.
Until it didn't.
Because that bottle? It doesn't stay sealed forever. No bottle ever does.
And when I left the village, when I stepped onto the ship and sailed away into silence and salt wind—the cracks started showing.
The bottle tipped.
Everything I had hidden, everything I had stuffed down to keep my hands steady for the sake of the kids, for the sake of that village that didn't deserve my demons—it started leaking.
And on that merchant ship, in that chaos of blood and smoke, it spilled over.
Not because I wanted it to.
But because some part of me had been waiting for permission. A reason. An excuse.
Three months without a single word from another soul. Three months adrift in nothing.
Then contact.
Violence. Guns. Screams. The familiar smell of blood. The familiar stench of scums of the waters.
And suddenly, the mask cracked.
I laughed. Not out of joy. Not out of cruelty.
But because I didn't know what else to do.
Because laughter was easier than explaining.
Easier than remembering.
The face I wore for the village was gone now. And the one underneath—the one I thought I had buried so deep it could never climb back out—it was staring out through my eyes.
And maybe the worst part?
It felt right.