Year 4093 of the Sky Calendar. Year 1503 of the Sea Circle Calendar.
The New World. Headquarters of Riskec Bank — the international bank.
Founded in Sky Year 3656 under World Government investment, Riskec Bank was the largest international bank in the New World, handling everything from currency issuance to policy-making to commercial banking.
It was also the go-to vault for the nobility of every affiliated nation.
The reason was simple: the World Government stood behind it, and the place was never not crawling with armed guards.
For most nobles, keeping their wealth in Riskec Bank was as close to a guarantee as money could buy.
Unfortunately, today, that guarantee wasn't worth much.
Because today, the era's most infamous all-star lineup of evil — the Rocks Pirates — had come calling.
The Rocks Pirates. In just their first two years together, they'd already racked up sixteen documented attacks on record. Fourteen ports burned. Five cities leveled. One nation brought to complete collapse. Three separate violations of Article 18 of the World Law. Twenty-five erased criminal records.
And that was only year two.
It had now been six years since the crew formed.
The crimes they'd committed since then had reached a scale that defied comprehension.
This was the same sea where the future King of Pirates, Gol D. Roger, would one day make his name — but in these years, while the great figures of the sea jostled for position, it was the Rocks Pirates' era, plain and simple.
"Wahoo!"
Gunsmoke hung over the Riskec Bank headquarters. The air was thick with the screams of guards and the cheers of pirates.
"Get everything out of here!"
"Look at all this — this haul is massive!"
"Nice work, everyone! We're taking it all!"
In the middle of the chaos, a long-haired pirate with three chins and a tongue like a snake's directed the operation, phone-slug pressed to his ear.
"Time to pull out, gentlemen!"
That was Wang Zhi — known to the underworld as the Pirate Patriarch — one of the Rocks Pirates' top officers.
All around him, the other officers were already falling back, loaded down with their respective shares of the loot. The guards threw themselves at them in a desperate attempt to stop the retreat, but against the Rocks Pirates, desperation didn't count for much.
"Please — wait!" The head guard dropped to his knees in front of them, voice breaking. "If you take everything, we have no way to answer to the nobility! We can't—"
Charlotte Linlin cut him off with a kick that sent him flying into the wall. "Mama-haha! Who gives a damn about that? Get out of the way!"
He hit the wall hard, coughing up blood as he slid down.
At that same moment, a man's voice crackled through the phone-slug in Wang Zhi's hand.
"Wang Zhi — check the elevator! We're still down in the lower vault!"
Wang Zhi killed the line with a click of his tongue. "Noisy bastard..." He glanced sideways. "Hey — Shiki!"
The young Golden Lion blinked, then broke into a grin. "Right, right — almost forgot about those guys."
Without missing a beat, Shiki pulled a lit stick of dynamite from somewhere and tossed it casually down the elevator shaft behind him.
BOOM.
The explosion tore through the building. Black smoke billowed up, lit orange at the edges by the flames.
"Gee-hahaha! More gold for the rest of us!"
Shiki covered his ears, grinning like it was the funniest thing he'd seen all week.
"Idiots." Wang Zhi scoffed.
But then — through the smoke — a bolt of lightning flared.
Wang Zhi and Shiki went still at the exact same moment.
"Oh, hell—" Wang Zhi's instincts kicked in before his brain did. Run.
"Gee-hahaha — not good, not good!" Shiki was already shooting skyward.
Across the hall, the head guard had dragged himself upright against the wall, watching Linlin and the others bolt for the exits. He looked like he'd eaten something rotten.
"Where's our backup?!" he shouted.
"On the way!" someone called back.
"Activate the emergency defense systems! Don't let them off this island!"
"Yes sir!"
But before anyone could move — the sky changed.
Black stormclouds gathered from nowhere, swirling into a massive rotating eye above the island. At its center, a dark void pulsed with lightning.
Then the sky cracked.
BOOM.
It was nothing like the dynamite blast. That had been loud. This was something else — a sound so deep and sharp it felt like the air itself was splitting, like something enormous had broken clean in two, the crack of it cutting straight to the bone—
The next instant, lightning filled the world.
It poured down without ceremony.
Guards crumpled where they stood. Two bolts twisted through the air like living things and found Wang Zhi and Shiki mid-flight, stopping them cold.
"AAAAAH — it's Lord Anus! He's pissed!"
The pirates scattered in all directions.
Wang Zhi and Shiki hit the ground with smoke coming off their teeth. Every nerve in their bodies had gone numb. Their hair stood straight up, ends singed black. Their skin was charred.
The head guard knelt on the rubble-strewn floor, broken glass digging into his knees, and stared at the figure walking out of the elevator shaft.
The man had long golden hair. His face was young — young enough that you'd expect to find him singing in a church choir somewhere. But his eyes didn't match. They belonged to someone much older, or something much colder — it was hard to say which.
Those eyes swept across the wrecked bank floor. They passed over the smoking Wang Zhi and Shiki. They drifted to the hole blown through the ceiling. Then they landed on the head guard.
The head guard opened his mouth. To beg? To scream for help? To ask who are you?
He never got the words out. The man had already looked away.
Just like that. Like he'd glanced at a rock on the road and moved on.
"Anus!" Charlotte Linlin stomped over to him, pointing accusingly. "Next time you decide to go full thunderstorm, warn somebody first!"
Anus didn't answer her. He glanced at Wang Zhi and Shiki.
He didn't need to think hard about whose idea the elevator stunt had been.
If you were ranking the Rocks Pirates by who was most likely to sell out their own crewmates, Wang Zhi and Shiki would be fighting for first place. The rest of the crew weren't exactly saints, but none of them had quite hit those depths. Kaido, Linlin, Whitebeard — for all their faults, they at least had a code.
"Man, I'm jealous..." A massive figure stepped off what remained of the elevator platform — young, built like a wall, horns jutting from his head, a spiked club resting on his shoulder. Kaido looked at the aftermath of the lightning and shook his head with something close to reverence. "A Logia. The real thing. The power gap is just unreal."
"You'll have yours eventually," Anus said.
"Gurararara! Anus — what did I tell you?" The man who spoke was built even bigger than Kaido, a crescent of white beard across his jaw, blond hair loose around his shoulders. "Those guys were never going to hold that elevator for us. In this crew, stabbing each other in the back is basically a tradition."
It wasn't the first time. Whitebeard had been burned enough times to know better — so this time, he'd stayed on the surface.
"I figured as much," Anus said, glancing at him. "I'll settle it with those two back at Beehive."
Anus was a transmigrator. The wings on his back marked him clearly as a Skypeian. He was also the user of the Rumble-Rumble Fruit.
For this operation, Rocks himself had sat it out — personal business. Only the officers had been deployed. Without their captain, the Rocks Pirates had no real chain of command to speak of, and nobody was pretending otherwise. The fact that the officers hadn't started fighting each other was already a minor miracle.
In truth, it wasn't much different even when Rocks was present. The crew didn't see themselves as anyone's subordinates. Every decision they made came down to one question: what's in it for me?
"Alright — time to move!" Captain John called from higher ground, scanning the crew behind him. "Everyone got their cut?"
"Obviously!" the pirates shouted back, their shares already on their backs.
Nearby, a short, cook-dressed figure beside Linlin suddenly went quiet.
"Linlin — look." His voice had shifted. "Look at the water. The outer sea."
Shapes on the horizon. Several of them. Sails marked with seagulls.
"Warships. We're surrounded."
"Since when?" Linlin's eyes narrowed.
The Marines had moved fast.
"Gee-hahaha! Inconvenient!" Shiki laughed, though he didn't look the slightest bit worried. A warship blockade wasn't something that troubled the Golden Lion.
The ships closed in quickly, encircling the pirates' vessels in the harbor. Marines lined the railings with rifles raised, black muzzles aimed at the island. Behind them, officers in Justice coats stood ready, watching.
On the island, the guards who'd been dropped by the lightning — already recovering — felt their courage come back in a rush.
"Hold them here! Don't let them escape!" the head guard rallied, back on his feet.
Linlin clicked her tongue. "What a headache... now's not the time to pick a fight. Everyone to the ship, move."
"Don't tell me what to do," Anus shot back. He hated being ordered around. Full stop.
In the time it took to exchange those few words, most of the pirates were already boarding. The guards couldn't slow them down at all. When these monsters decided to move, the entire Riskec Bank security force was about as useful as a speed bump.
"Prepare to engage!"
Standard Rocks Pirates doctrine. Any ship that got in their way could expect exactly one thing:
Get sunk. Get robbed.
Straight into the blockade they went, crashing through the encirclement. The senior officers spread out, leaping onto Marine decks.
Anus was no different. A flash of golden lightning — and he was in the middle of them.
"It's Calamity Anus!"
"Stay calm! Load the Seastone rounds!"
Seastone ammunition — the standard answer to a Logia. Theoretically the best tool for the job.
Theoretically.
The best tool in the world is useless if it can't hit the target. And for someone whose existence was lightning, a few slow bullets were barely an inconvenience. Anus shifted to his elemental form, and the Marines' entire battle plan dissolved before it had even started.
"Bullets can't outrun lightning," he said, almost bored.
"Damn it — nothing's working!"
The Marines were sweating through their uniforms. Just being in front of this man — this angel-faced man — felt like standing too close to a storm drain. Every instinct said: don't.
"Don't back down! He's just a Logia!" An officer in a Justice coat shoved his way to the front, charging out ahead of his men.
The pirates around Anus exchanged glances.
Just a Logia?
Kid's got guts, I'll give him that.
Any Marine with real experience would have known better than to say something like that out loud.
Sure enough — the Justice coat dropped in the next flash of lightning.
"Vice Admiral Handola!"
The Marines stared. Handola — who they'd considered one of their strongest — had gone down that fast.
A Marine Vice Admiral stepped forward, expression grim. "Rookies, fall back. This man is out of your weight class."
"Vice Admiral Leo — you're stepping in?!"