Chapter 10: The Harder Catch
East Blue, Coastal Village Near Organ Islands — Day 17, Afternoon
Smoke rose from behind the tree line in a column too thick to be a cooking fire.
Ino spotted it from the sloop's bow as they rounded the headland, and the detection ping slammed into focus — not one source but a cluster. Three warmths at varying intensities, two baseline-human and one that burned brighter, denser, with the unmistakable signature of a Devil Fruit pushing against its container.
"Village," Yosaku said, standing at the mast with one hand shading his eyes. "Fishing settlement. Maybe forty houses."
"And somebody's burning them," Johnny finished. His hand was already on his katana. The cheap replacement blade from Briss Island caught the afternoon light, and the pull-left problem was visible even at rest — a slight curve in the steel that no amount of maintenance would correct.
The sloop's bow cut through shallow water toward a narrow beach south of the village harbor. Ino could see the pirate vessel now — a battered cutter, thirty feet, anchored in the harbor with its sails furled and its deck empty. The crew was ashore. Doing what pirate crews did to fishing villages.
[ESSENCE DETECTED: Zoan-Class (Common). Distance: ~220m. Signal Strength: Strong. Source: Active Transformation.]
Active transformation. The fruit user was shifted — partial or full, the system couldn't tell at this range. But the signal's intensity meant the Zoan was being used right now, which meant the fight was happening right now, which meant their clean ambush plan was already garbage.
"The fruit user is transformed," Ino said, pulling the sloop's tiller hard to port. "Zoan type. He's in the village."
"How do you—" Johnny started.
"I can feel it. Same way I found Softhand. Move."
The sloop ground against sand. Johnny was over the side before it stopped, splashing through knee-deep water, katana drawn. Yosaku followed — quieter, more controlled, checking the tree line as he moved. Ino jumped last, boots sinking in wet sand, and ran after them through the scrub brush toward the sound of screaming.
---
The Fang Brothers had already done their work.
The village's main street — a packed-dirt lane between wooden houses — was scattered with overturned carts and broken crates. A merchant's stall had been tipped, fruit and grain spilling into the mud. Three villagers were down: two holding injuries, one not moving. A woman stood in a doorway clutching a child, face blank with the particular stillness of someone whose fear had overloaded into shutdown.
Two men stood near the village well, loading stolen goods into canvas sacks. Regular pirates — weathered, armed with cutlasses, no fruit abilities. The Fang Brothers' muscle.
The third brother was at the far end of the street.
Garro "Boar Fang" stood a head taller in partial transformation. His upper body had thickened, shoulders bulging with corded muscle beneath skin that had taken on a gray, bristled texture. His jawline had elongated, lower canines pushing out into tusks that curved upward past his cheekbones — yellowed ivory, each one the length of a man's hand. His legs remained human. His arms had not.
He was holding a village elder by the collar, one-handed, lifting the man off the ground with the casual ease of someone picking up a bag of rice.
"Where's the tax chest? Every village has one. Don't make me ask your neighbors."
The elder's feet kicked air. His hands clawed at the grip on his collar. His mouth moved but nothing came out.
"Here's what we do," Ino said, crouching behind a fish-drying rack at the street's edge. His voice was low, fast, clinical. "The two normals are by the well. Johnny — they're yours. Standard swordsmen, nothing special. Yosaku, the Zoan. He's in partial form. Faster and tougher than baseline, but he's top-heavy in that shift. Hamstrings, ankles, get him on the ground."
"And his tusks?" Yosaku asked.
"Don't let them touch you."
"Brilliant advice."
"Best I've got. Go."
Johnny went. Not subtle — Johnny didn't do subtle. He came around the drying rack at a dead run, katana high, and the two pirates at the well had about three seconds to process the incoming threat before steel met cutlass and the street erupted.
The first pirate parried. The second drew too slowly — Johnny's blade caught his shoulder, opening a cut that sent the man staggering into the well's stone rim. The first pressed back, but Johnny was faster, younger, and running on twelve days of frustration about a blade that pulled left. He compensated by overcommitting right, and the cutlass went spinning into the mud.
Garro dropped the elder. The old man crumpled. The Zoan turned toward the noise with the heavy pivot of a body carrying too much mass above its center of gravity.
Yosaku was already behind him.
The katana bit into the back of Garro's left knee — not a slash but a precise, driving thrust aimed at the joint where human anatomy met Zoan reinforcement. The blade went deep. Garro screamed, a sound that was half-human and half-animal, and his leg buckled.
But he didn't go down.
Zoan durability. The muscle and bone were denser in transformation, the tendons thicker, the pain tolerance shifted toward animal instinct. Garro pivoted on his good leg — impossibly fast for a man with a sword in his knee — and his arm swept in a backhand that caught Yosaku across the guard. Yosaku blocked, but the force sent him skidding back three meters, boots carving furrows in the dirt.
Garro ripped Yosaku's katana from his own knee with one hand and threw it aside. Blood poured from the wound. He didn't seem to notice.
He noticed Johnny.
Johnny had finished the second pirate — flat of the blade to the skull, unconscious — and was turning toward the Zoan when Garro charged. Partial transformation, bad leg, blood trail — and still faster than anything Johnny had fought before. The tusks came first, a low head-rush designed to gore, and Johnny twisted sideways but the angle was wrong and the left tusk caught him across the ribs.
Six inches of torn fabric and opened skin. Red bloomed through Johnny's shirt.
"JOHNNY!"
Ino's shout cut the street. Involuntary — the sound ripped out before his brain could suppress it, loud enough to turn Garro's head for half a second.
Half a second was enough.
Yosaku retrieved his katana from the mud and came in low and fast from behind. The blade found the back of Garro's right ankle — the good leg, the weight-bearing leg — and this time the cut was savage, no precision, just force and edge through tendon and bone. Garro's leg folded. He hit the dirt face-first, tusks driving into packed earth, and Yosaku was on him before the impact settled, blade reversed, pommel driving into the base of the Zoan's skull once, twice, three times.
Garro stopped moving.
Yosaku stood over the body, breathing hard, katana dripping. His eyes found Ino across the street.
"How bad?" Yosaku called.
Ino was already running. Johnny was on one knee, hand pressed to his ribs, blood seeping between his fingers. The gash ran diagonal from his left side to his sternum — shallow at the edges, deeper in the center where the tusk had dug in. Not organ-deep. Not fatal. But ugly, open, and bleeding freely.
"Let me see." Ino pulled Johnny's hand away. The wound gaped. Pink muscle visible beneath the skin. His stomach turned and he pushed through it. "Okay. Okay, it's not deep enough to hit anything critical. Pressure. Keep pressure."
He pressed the wadded cloth against Johnny's ribs and Johnny hissed through his teeth.
"Son of a — that hurts—"
"Good. Pain means blood flow. Hold this."
Ino's hands were shaking. Not from exertion. From the image that wouldn't stop replaying — Johnny turning, the tusk catching his side, the spray of red. Three seconds earlier and the angle would have been different. Three inches deeper and the tusk would have found a lung.
My plan. My target. My intelligence said "minor Zoan, common type." I said he'd be manageable. I was wrong.
He'd made the same mistake he'd made on that bunkhouse floor sixteen days ago — the mistake of treating this world like data instead of physics. The Fang Brothers' bounty poster said 3,200,000 berries combined. Minor. East Blue small-time. But a common Zoan in partial transformation was still a transformed animal-human, and transformed meant faster, stronger, tougher than the numbers suggested, and Johnny had paid for Ino's spreadsheet confidence with six inches of opened flesh.
The gap between knowing and understanding. I read about Zoan users on a train. Yosaku just fought one in the mud.
---
Garro bled out four minutes after the fight.
Yosaku's ankle cut had severed something arterial. The Zoan transformation receded as the body weakened — bristled skin smoothing, tusks shrinking, the extra mass melting away like a fever breaking. Garro became a man again in the last minute, and the man bled faster than the beast had.
Ino watched the detection signature dim. Flickering. Guttering.
Gone.
[ESSENCE DETECTED: Source Status — Deceased. Extraction Window Active. Time Remaining: ~8 minutes.]
He was kneeling beside the body before the notification finished. Johnny was fifteen meters away, leaning against the well, eyes closed, focused on breathing through the pain. Yosaku was binding the other two brothers with rope from the fish-drying rack. Neither was watching.
Ino put his hand on Garro's chest.
The extraction was nothing like he'd expected. No light, no sound, no dramatic visual. A pull — internal, deep, like drawing a breath from a place lungs couldn't reach. Something moved through his palm, through his arm, into a space behind his sternum that hadn't existed before the system activated. The body beneath his hand went still in a way that was different from death. Emptier.
Eight seconds. The HUD registered the intake.
[CORPSE EXTRACTION: Success. Inoshi Inoshi no Mi, Model: Boar. Purity: 72%. Potency: 22. Signature: Force. Stored: Slot 1/3.]
[CXP +120. Total: 120/500.]
[CURSE WEIGHT: +8. Current CW: 8/117. Tier: Ghost (Undetectable).]
He pulled his hand away. The palm tingled — not warm this time, but electric, a buzzing that faded over thirty seconds and left behind a faint numbness in his fingertips. The essence sat in his inventory like a stone in a pocket, present but inert. No power. No ability. Just potential, stored and waiting.
"Ino." Yosaku's voice, behind him. "What are you doing?"
"Checking if he's dead." The lie came automatically now. Second time. Smoother than the first. "He is."
Yosaku stood over him. The swordsman's breathing had normalized, his katana cleaned and sheathed, his expression unreadable. He looked at Ino's hand on the dead man's chest, then at Ino's face.
"You always check the dead ones."
"Bounty verification."
Yosaku said nothing. He turned and walked to Johnny.
The villagers emerged slowly. The elder that Garro had been holding was alive — shaken, bruised, but functional. He offered the crew food, water, a place to rest. Ino accepted the water and declined the rest. They needed to move. Johnny needed a real doctor, not a village herbalist, and the Fang Brothers' surviving members needed a Marine office.
The bounty on the three brothers combined was 3,200,000. Split three ways minus the inevitable deduction for dead-instead-of-alive on Garro, that was roughly five hundred thousand berries each.
Ino didn't count the money. He held cloth to Johnny's ribs on the sloop's deck and watched the village shrink behind them and did math that had nothing to do with berries.
How strong is "strong" when you can't verify anything firsthand? How reliable is a data point from a manga page when the thing it describes can open someone's chest with its face?
The Fang Brothers were listed as minor. Garro's Zoan was common. And Johnny is bleeding through bandages because I trusted a category instead of doing recon.
Next time, we watch first. We verify. We confirm the target's capability with our own eyes before committing the swords.
Next time, nobody bleeds for my assumptions.
Johnny slept in the cabin with fresh dressings. Yosaku took the tiller. Ino sat on deck with a dead man's essence humming faintly in his inventory and the knowledge that confidence had a cost measured in someone else's blood.
The nearest town with a real doctor was two days south. The same direction as Orange Town — where, if the timeline held, a rubber boy had recently punched a clown through a building.
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