…
Two weeks at sea had given me a lot to consider about life at sea. Mostly that I was built differently, obviously, but also that whoever invented boats needed to be dragged out of history and hit with one.
Not killed. I wasn't unreasonable.
Just hit.
Preferably with another boat.
I sat in the middle of the tiny wooden insult I'd stolen from Shells Town, one leg hanging over the side, one arm resting over my knee, staring out across the endless blue. Every direction looked the same.
Water. More water. Some...clouds??
The first week had been rough, I'll admit that. Not emotionally, because I wasn't about to start crying over being forced into the mysterious outlaw era of my own making. Physically, though, it had been annoying.
I'd left Shells Town with a small boat, a half-empty barrel of water, a sack of stale biscuits, three bruised apples, and the confidence of a man who had never actually planned a sea voyage in his life.
In my defence, I had been a little busy committing career-ending crimes and also, y'know, regular crimes. The food lasted four days. Five, if I counted licking biscuit dust off the inside of the sack, which I absolutely did not do.
Nobody saw it, so it didn't happen.
The water lasted longer, mostly because I rationed it like a responsible adult for the first two days, then realised I hated being a responsible adult and started drinking whenever I wanted. By day seven, the barrel was empty, and so was my stomach.
Then, much to my happiness, my body did the thing.
The mark on my right hand shifted one quarter-turn while I was lying on my back, staring up at the sky, wondering if dying of thirst would be cringe or aesthetic. There had been the usual pressure under my skin, of my body taking notes, and then the wheel tattoo clicked.
That beautiful little sound.
After that, the hunger didn't disappear exactly, but it stopped being a problem. My body still wanted food, but the pain dulled into background noise. Same with thirst. I wanted water eventually, probably, but my mouth stopped feeling like the inside of an oven, and my head stopped spinning whenever I stood up too fast.
Adaptation, my beloved.
If I could marry a biological process, I would.
No, I wouldn't.
That's weird.
Probably.
The sun had also been getting disrespectful, so my skin adapted to that too after a few days of being slow-roasted like some giant, pale idiot on a wooden plate. I didn't tan, because apparently I was turning into some mini-Raga human hybrid…thing. My eyes stopped aching from the glare. My balance got better with the rocking. Even the sea air stopped making my lips crack.
Honestly, the first week had sounded terrible on paper, but in practice? Manageable.
The second week was worse.
Because the second week was boring.
And boredom, I had decided, was the true enemy of mankind.
Not pirates. Not Marines. Not corrupt officers or the Celestial Dragons.
Boredom
I had spent one afternoon counting waves.
I made it to four hundred and twelve before realising I was becoming the kind of person who counted waves, and that was harder to swallow. I even spent another day trying to teach myself to whistle, failed for six hours straight, then got so mad I bit the edge of the boat.
The boat won.
I'd done push-ups until the boat started tipping. I had practised footwork until I almost kicked a hole through the floor. I had punched the mast, adapted to splinters, then remembered I needed the mast to keep doing mast activities, so I apologised to it.
"Two weeks," I muttered, dragging a hand down my face. "Two weeks and not one sea king. Not one pirate ship. Not one dramatic storm. Nothing. I got exiled to the filler episodes."
The boat creaked.
"Don't talk to me."
The boat creaked again.
I narrowed my eyes at the plank near my foot. "Keep pushing it, and I'll eat you."
The boat, being a boat, had no response because it was a coward.
I leaned back and reached for the only thing keeping me from turning my own skull into a maraca out of pure boredom.
The ledger.
Black leather, now salt-stained book with its thick pages and tiny, stupid handwriting. Names, numbers, shipment marks, island codes, Marine contacts, underworld buyers, medicine stock, stolen weapons, bribe routes, payment dates, and enough illegal dealings to make Captain Isolde Vale look even more dead than she already was.
Not rest in peace, by the way.
Rest in piss, maybe, no, even that felt too generous. She could rest in whatever sewage her soul had crawled out of.
I flipped the ledger open on my lap and ran my finger down the latest page I'd been studying. Vale had been many things: a baddie, a corrupt Marine, a murderer. A woman who could somehow make a uniform look unfairly good, which was honestly rude given the whole rotten-inside thing. But credit where credit was due, the woman had kept records as if she were trying to get audited by God.
Every payment had a note. Every shipment had a route. Every name had a mark beside it.
Some were Marines.
Some were merchants.
Some were nobles, because of course they were. Rich people smelled crime from three islands away and started salivating.
And some names had little symbols beside them that I still hadn't figured out. A circle with a slash. A little fishhook shape. A black dot beside certain ports. Vale had been using some kind of code, and if I had a functioning brain cell left that wasn't being boiled by seawater boredom, I might have solved it by now.
Unfortunately, my current thoughts were mostly:
Food would be nice.
A fight would be better.
A bed would fix me.
A bigger boat would fix me harder.
Money would fix everything.
People said money didn't buy happiness, but people also said justice mattered and Marines protected civilians, so clearly people loved lying for sport. Money absolutely bought happiness. Money bought food. Money bought ships.
You didn't get to the top by being broke, and choosing to be broke was not noble either.
So, yeah, I was going to rob dead Vale's entire contact list.
For justice?
Sure.
For revenge?
A little.
For the greater good?
If the greater good had a wallet, maybe.
But mostly, I was doing it for the berries.
And spite.
Spite was free fuel, and I was running premium like I was the Strait of Hormuz.
I squinted at the next entry.
"Port Tragedy," I read aloud. "South-east route. Medicine stock transferred through Dockhouse Three. Payment held by… Marlo Grest."
I tapped the name.
Marlo Grest had appeared six times in the ledger. Not a Marine, from what I could tell. More like a broker. One of those greasy middlemen who never touched blood directly but somehow always got paid when someone else bled. Vale had sent stolen medicine through him. Stolen food too. Weapons, once. Ammunition twice. There were notes beside his name about "quiet sales," "branch protection," and "civilian pressure."
Civilian pressure.
What a clean little phrase. It sounded professional.
But I knew what it meant. I had seen it in Shells Town. Medicine went missing, prices rose,
Create the wound, sell the bandage, then charge extra for not stabbing them again.
"Marlo Grest," I said, letting the name sit in my mouth. "Congratulations, my guy. You might be my first official side quest."
The problem was that I had no idea where Port Tragedy actually was.
Minor issue.
Basically irrelevant, except for the part where the ocean was extremely large and my boat was extremely stupid.
I turned the page and checked the rough map Vale had folded into the back cover. It wasn't a proper sea chart, because apparently even evil accountants had limits, but it had enough notes to make me think Port Tragedy was somewhere north-west of Shells Town, tucked between a few trade routes and one Marine patrol path. I had been trying to follow the sun, the stars, and the general direction of "please not death," but after two weeks, I was starting to suspect I had invented a new direction called "Zoro."
I looked up.
Water.
I looked down.
Ledger.
I looked at the boat.
Disappointment.
"Okay," I said, slowly closing the book. "New plan."
The boat rocked gently beneath me.
"I need to get out of this stupid boat."
The statement felt good. Powerful. Like the beginning of a grand declaration, except the only audience was a seagull that had landed on the mast and had been judging me for the past hour.
I looked up at it.
It looked down at me.
We understood each other instantly.
Enemies.
"Don't even think about it," I said.
The seagull blinked.
"I swear on Vale's smoking corpse, if you shit on me…"
It opened its beak and screamed.
I pointed at it. "Yeah, that's what I thought."
Then I heard it.
A bell.
Not loud. Not close. Just a faint metallic sound carried over the water, thin enough that I almost thought my brain had finally started adding sound effects to keep itself entertained.
I sat up.
The seagull screamed again, but this time I ignored it.
There it was. Another bell. Then voices.
Real voices.
Not mine, which was already a massive improvement.
I stood too fast, the boat swayed, and I had to grab the mast before my dramatic moment became a slapstick drowning attempt. I narrowed my eyes at the horizon, scanning the endless blue until I saw something that made my soul stand up and start clapping.
A ship.
Not a tiny boat or floating garbage. A real ship.
Two masts. Brown sails. A wide hull. Big enough to have rooms. Big enough to have food. Big enough to have people who knew where the hell anything was.
I stared at it like it was a divine revelation.
Then I noticed the flag.
Not Marine.
Not pirate either, unless they had the most boring pirate flag in history. It looked like a merchant vessel, flying a blue-and-white company mark I didn't recognise. There were crates stacked near the deck rails, sailors moving around, and from the angle of its sails, it was cutting across my path rather than heading straight toward me.
Which meant I had a limited window.
I grabbed Vale's ledger, shoved it into the safest dry corner I had, and started untying the rope I'd been using as a makeshift belt for the sail rig. The boat jerked with every movement, like it wanted to argue.
"Shut up," I told it. "You had two weeks to impress me."
The merchant ship continued moving, unaware that salvation had appeared on the horizon in the form of them being robbed by a hungry, bored, emotionally unstable former Marine with a bounty problem.
To be fair, I wasn't planning to hurt them.
Probably.
Depends how they acted.
All I needed was food, directions, a better boat, maybe some clothes that didn't smell.
Very reasonable demands.
I cupped my hands around my mouth and shouted, "Oi!"
The wind ate half the sound.
The ship kept moving.
I frowned.
"Rude."
I tried again, louder this time. "HEY! OVER HERE!"
A few figures on the deck turned.
Finally.
One of them pointed.
Another ran toward the stern.
For a second, I felt relief. Actual relief. Human contact. Maybe rice. Maybe meat. Maybe someone who could tell me where Port Tragedy was before I accidentally discovered a new continent.
Then the ship's bell started ringing harder.
Not a friendly ringing.
Alarm ringing.
Men rushed across the deck. Someone shouted orders. A few sailors grabbed long poles. Others moved toward covered shapes near the rail.
My eyes narrowed.
"Okay," I muttered. "Weird~."
The covered shapes were pulled back.
Cannons.
I stared.
The nearest cannon turned toward my tiny boat.
I stared harder.
"Now that," I said, offended on a spiritual level, "feels unnecessary."
A puff of smoke burst from the ship's side.
The cannonball screamed across the water.
For half a second, I just watched it come, because a part of me genuinely could not believe these people had looked at one starving dude in a garbage boat and chosen artillery.
Then it smashed into the water a few metres away, throwing up a spray that drenched me from head to toe and nearly flipped my boat sideways.
Saltwater ran down my face as I could feel a little of my strength draining from me.
My eye twitched.
The seagull flew away.
Smart bird.
I slowly wiped water from my eyes and looked back at the merchant ship.
The sailors were shouting now. I could not hear every word, but I caught enough.
"Bounty!"
"White hair!"
"Voss!"
Ah. So that was how we were playing it.
I looked down at myself. Pale skin. long white hair, salt-matted and probably insane-looking.
Fair enough, still rude though. ￣へ￣
Another cannon fired.
I felt my grin spread before I decided to smile.
"Oh," I said, rolling my shoulders as the wheel in my hand gave a faint, eager pulse. "You guys have no idea how badly I needed this."
The third cannon fired.
I jumped.
The boat cracked beneath my feet as I launched myself forward, straight over the blast of seawater and toward the merchant ship cutting across the blue. Wind slammed into my face. My coat snapped behind me before flying off, and for one glorious second, there was no boredom, no hunger, no stupid boat, no endless empty sea.
I hit the side of the merchant ship hard enough to punch both hands through the outer planks. Wood exploded around my fingers. The whole vessel groaned. Men screamed above me. My body swung against the hull, legs hanging over open water, and I looked up at the deck with the biggest smile I'd had in two weeks.
"Good morning," I called.
A sailor leaned over the railing, saw my face, and went white.
I pulled myself up one handhold at a time, tearing fresh grips into the hull as I climbed.
"I'm not gonna lie," I said, as more terrified faces appeared above me. "You lot picked a terrible day~!"
…
End of Chapter!
Word Count - 2421