Idris watched Lucien walk forward.
No setup. No distortion pushed beforehand. Just Lucien, both arms coated, throwing a straight right hand at a man who had figured him out. It looked exactly like what it was, and Sakazuki read it the same way, stepping in clean with the counter already forming as his knuckles formed into molten lava.
Then something happened that Idris couldn't account for.
Sakazuki's body went the wrong way. Not slightly. Completely wrong, like his limbs had received a different instruction from the one his mind had sent. The counter folded inward instead of out. His weight shifted back instead of forward. Half a second of total disconnect, and Lucien's fist was already through the gap before it closed.
The impact carried across the clearing.
Sakazuki went down. Eyes rolling so back, Idris saw the whites.
Lucien went down immediately after, legs giving out before he had even fully straightened from the punch, hitting the scorched earth without catching himself.
Idris was already moving as he saw Lucien's knees buckle.
He had covered maybe ten metres when the light arrived. A beam of it, fast and clean, and Borsalino was standing next to Lucien before Idris had closed half the remaining distance. Idris's hand went to his rifle on instinct, and he kept running, closing the gap as fast as his legs would carry him, eyes on Borsalino the entire time.
Borsalino wasn't looking at him. He was looking down at Lucien with his hands still in his pockets, head tilted slightly to one side. The expression on his face wasn't what Idris had expected. Not threat calculation. Not the clinical assessment of someone deciding whether to finish something. Something closer to genuine curiosity. Like he had seen something he hadn't expected and was still thinking about it.
Idris came to a stop beside them and stepped between Borsalino and Lucien. He didn't raise the rifle. He just stood there, close enough that the positioning made the message clear, and looked at Borsalino directly.
Borsalino glanced at him, then down at Lucien, then back up at Idris. Something in his expression shifted into quiet amusement. He raised one hand and waved it loosely in the direction of the tree line.
"Go on," he said. "Take him and go."
Idris didn't move immediately. He held Borsalino's gaze for a moment longer, reading it carefully, looking for anything sitting underneath the surface of it, but there was nothing. Borsalino looked, if anything, mildly bored. Idris had seen that same expression on Lucien often enough while they sailed.
"You're going to have a lot of eyes on you after this," Borsalino said, looking back down at Lucien with the same curious expression he'd had since arriving. "More than before. The Marines. Others. Word travels fast when something like this happens on a small island in North Blue." He paused for a moment before continuing slowly, "Whatever he did at the end there."
He didn't finish the sentence. He looked at Lucien for another moment, then back up at Idris.
"Your sniper work was decent too, for what it's worth." He said it the way someone observes that the weather has been reasonable lately. "But decent isn't going to be enough going forward. Not for either of you."
He glanced down at Lucien one more time and then back up. "A captain like that draws a particular kind of attention, and the attention that's coming isn't going to give you time to ease into it. You should both get considerably stronger before it arrives, especially you."
"You should also think about a name. And a flag." He said it almost as an afterthought, as if he were remembering something he'd nearly forgotten to mention. "A crew without either is just a group of people causing problems for everyone around them. More problems than usual in your case, I'd say."
The amusement in his expression sharpened slightly.
"A strong captain deserves a crew worth looking at. Something to think about."
Idris looked at him for a moment longer. Then he crouched down beside Lucien, got him over his shoulder in one clean motion, and straightened up. He turned toward the docks without a word, without looking back, and walked. Law, who was observing to the side, immediately ran to him.
Behind him, Borsalino watched them go.
He stood in the middle of the burnt clearing with his hands back in his pockets and watched Idris carry Lucien through what remained of the tree line, the white hair visible until the smoke and the distance took them. Then they were gone, and the clearing was quiet except for the low sound of cooling ground and settling ash.
Borsalino looked at the forest around him. What was left of it. Blackened trunks standing at odd angles, scorched earth stretching in every direction, smoke drifting low and flat across the ground. A wide arc of burnt trees marked the path the fight had taken through what had been, until this morning, a perfectly functional piece of North Blue forest.
Then he looked down at Sakazuki.
Unconscious on the scorched earth, magma still cooling on his forearm, the cigar long since gone. He had the expression of a man who had intended the day to go very differently.
Borsalino considered him for a moment.
Sakazuki versus a nineteen-year-old with no sword and a fruit nobody had filed a proper report on yet, ending with both of them face down in a burnt forest on an island called Lake 4. An island that, before today, had been known primarily for shipbuilding.
He was going to need a very good story for headquarters. Several good stories, in fact, layered carefully on top of each other, with the right details pushed forward and the wrong ones buried deep enough that nobody with sufficient rank went looking for them.
The civilian property damage was going to require creative framing. The forest was going to require considerably more creative framing. The structural damage to the northern end of town was going to require him to invent an entirely separate narrative and hope nobody compared notes too carefully.
And the outcome of the fight was going to require something that could only be described generously as a work of fiction.
He looked at the sky for a moment, thinking about how to begin.
Then he looked back down at Sakazuki.
'What a mess,' he thought. 'Again.'
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