Ash should run as far as he could from these people, but something was keeping him rooted to the spot. Penny... he had to stop her from doing anything stupid, and to do that, he had to play along with the masked man's whims.
The noble bastard continued to cry in the masked man's direction, but his shouts were muffled by the rag in his mouth. His legs were still tied to the mast.
"What do we do with him, Captain?" The masked man nodded toward the idiot noble.
Ash remembered the cocky laughter during the battle and the man's eyes sparkling with joy as the pirates were losing. "I was planning to add his skull to my collection. I have no use for the rest of him."
"Now, now, we shouldn't be so hasty. Captain. He can still be of use," the masked man argued, placing the mop on his own shoulder.
"You're not the one making the decisions here." Ash walked toward the dangling man, his hand reaching for the cutlass from the weapon rack. He felt the masked man behind him, not minding the weapon in his hand, but that only made him want to use it more.
"You're right, Captain." The masked man was so cooperative that it made Ash' blood boil even more, "I will leave it to you then. Do as you wish."
The noble bastard struggled even more, his eyes begging Ash to spare his life.
The sense of control gave Ash some sort of confidence that he could kill the noble bastard without any consequences. He didn't look important enough to the masked man. And the masked man seems to be favoring Ash more than anyone else right now, so Ash didn't hesitate to cut the noble bastard's throat.
"Aaaargh!" a scream echoed through the ship, making everyone pause.
The scream didn't belong to the noble bastard. The lethal thrust had only grazed the noble's neck.
Ash only registered a blade and a slash of red before him. Staggering back, he looked down in shock. He held his bleeding stump, his cutlass clattering to the deck along with his severed hand.
"Y-you..." he gasped, his head feeling light from the fact he would never being able to hold a weapon again. He fell to his knees from the shock, his knight rank preventing him from passing out.
"Criple the rest of them," the masked man ordered the hunters to start a new round of bloodbath, removing the feeble sense of security the pirates had felt for a brief moment.
"Aaaargh!" The hunters began to disarm the pirates, not by taking away their weapons but by taking away their ability to use them. A finger, a toe, anything that would render them useless for a very long time.
The pirates screamed from pain, but didn't plead for their lives. They endured the torture, knowing that the masked man was making sure they would never rise up against the Glory again.
As the blood poured from Ash's wrist, his knight experience took over. He didn't scream or crawl toward the ship's furnace for a hot iron to cauterize the wound.
Instead, Ash closed his eyes and forced his body to remember the freezing depths of his gold-stage underwater training. The spurting blood slowed and his heart rate instantaneously dropped. He then activated the survival trait he had suffered years to perfect: gold's ductility.
His skin began to draw itself outward, thinning like a sheet of gold, stretching across the gaping stump, weaving itself together.
The pain was excruciating, and his breath fogged up despite the warm weather. His body was expending a vast amount of energy to seal the wound, leaving him drained.
The masked man gestured to the rest of the pirates to tend to their wounds as well, "Your new Captain has shown you the way. Now follow his lead."
With that, the hunters let go of the pirates and watched as they used their own methods to stop the bleeding. Gold-stage's ductility was unique to Ash and couldn't be mimicked by others.
But the pirates had their own survival traits, like cauterizing the wound, tying a tourniquet around it, or even using the hot barrel of a cannon to burn it shut.
"Aaargh, AAARGH!" The screams didn't stop, echoing like a chorus of tortured souls.
Was their fate to become crippled pirates under a madman's command, or was there still a chance to turn their lives around?
They didn't know. But they knew that the masked man in front of them wanted to spread his roots deep into the underworld, and they would be the first seed to be planted.
╔═══ Author's note ════╗
Another potential Eastern Vice? 👀
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