(Bellamy POV)
If there was one thing I knew about Vegapunk’s creations, it was that you didn’t wait around for it to hit you.
“Scatter!” I called out the order and Laki reacted near instantly like the trained soldier she was, taking a confused Aisa with her to a better vantage point and hence to relative safety. With Urouge and X-Drake jumping into action as well, we quickly managed to create a small encirclement around the robot mere moments after it landed in our part of town.
Then we rushed in.
In the face of our assault, the pacifista defaulted to its base combat algorithm, which consisted of charging up its three lasers and aiming them at the greatest threats; or in other words Drake, Urouge and I. By the time the shots were fired, we were only about two meters away, giving us milliseconds to react.
With a single thought, I transformed my torso into a single extended coil, the beam of light passing harmlessly through the empty space provided, with two more steps bringing me within punching distance. From what I could see, Urouge and Drake had dealt with the beams in their own ways, Drake crouching to run underneath the laser while Urouge used his metal pillar as an improvised shield.
“Spring Death Knock!” On a normal human, that should have broken his neck. On a paradise veteran, that should still have broken his neck. The pacifista shifted three inches to the right. Well, if it didn't work once…
"Double Death Knock!"
…it probably won’t work a second time. What was the definition of insanity again? Trying the same thing over and over again while expecting a different outcome?
All I managed was to bring its full attention upon my own person, including all three of its lasers. And contrary to my first instincts, that turned out to be a good thing as it left the robot open to one gravity assisted downward smash by a metal pillar. A pillar wielded by a newly grown and much larger Urouge. “Karmic Retribution!”
The blow staggered the pacifista and provided a prime opening, which Drake took advantage of by attempting to behead it with his four-bladed axe. I wasn't entirely sure what he had been thinking, but if my spring death knock didn’t work...why would his simple swing?
“We’re going to need a little bit more oomph than that!” I called out to him, ducking a laser beam.
“Shut up! Don’t see you doing any better, Hyena!” Drake testily snapped back as he pulled a couple of his crew members out of the way of another.
“Karmic Retribution!”
Sliding underneath the pacifista’s relatively thin and spindly legs, I hooked both of my transformed arms around them and…retracted. Like I had previously found out, I could manipulate the state of my springs regardless of the actual force required. If I wanted them retracted, they were retracted. And I was braced while the pacifista was not, which resulted in it obtaining first hand experience in exactly what happened if one’s legs were yanked out from underneath them.
And neither the half-dinosaur Drake nor Urouge wasted any time in hammering the downed pacifista into the ground.
“Don’t just stand there!” I roared at the surrounding crews. “If you have nothing useful to do, at least fucking sit on it!”
Within moments, the pacifista was dogpiled by a dozen grown men, leaving only the head free. Not that trying to bury the robot under the weight of numbers helped very much. Barely had the last man leaped on top of the pyramid of bodies, did the pacifista heave and send them all flying into the air.
“Ten million volt Vari!” The world lit up blue, wet grass instantly being turned to cinders by the mere vicinity of the electrical discharge. And for a moment, it was clear to everyone why Aisa was worth her bounty, depraved as the original reasoning may have been. Most of them truly believed that no flesh and blood being could have possibly survived that blast and their faces reflected as much.
Except for a couple. For one we, captains, had never taken their eyes off the pacifista and more than anybody else, I knew it wasn't going to be enough. Not only because I had seen people get hit by greater voltages and survive, but also because of Faraday’s cage. Regardless of the voltage, Aisa’s electricity physically could not penetrate deeper into the robot’s shell.
Though, it wasn’t as if it had done nothing. By the time the light had faded, our enemy could no longer be mistaken for anything other than what it was…a robot. The entire synthetic skin covering its body had been burned away and even some of the plating had been scorched.
Unfortunately for us, it was still fully functional, showcased by how it leaped at us, one arm drawn back in an unmistakable gesture. Thankfully, this early model wasn’t that fast, giving me enough time to draw out one of my aces.
The punch, thrown with all the weight of a three ton mass of metal behind it, was stopped short with a soft “plink”. The same with the subsequent three others.
Plink plink plink
“Reject!”
You ever saw those anime shows where a portion of the floor was suddenly subjected to a giant increase in gravity? Imagine that, but on the pacifista’s torso if you wanted to picture the result of such an impact, roughly forty times as strong as one of its own punches, affecting Vegapunk’s creation. The mere fact that the external plating didn’t completely collapse was a testament to the incredible achievement of the world’s greatest mind.
Of course, our work wasn’t done but we finally had our opening. Something that Drake immediately capitalized upon, by clamping his jaws around the weakened metal and squeezing with everything he had. The metal screeched and tore, the connecting components starting to rip apart at the seams.
Urouge grabbed the other arm, fixing it in place while I wrapped my arms around its legs like several lengths of chains.
“Watch out!”
Sadly, Drake failed to wrench off a full part of the exoskeleton, due to having two holes shot into his dinosaurian body by the one laser we had failed to account for…its mouth. With the balance of the battle not just shifting but disintegrating, it was all we could do to drag Drake away from the pacifista before it could open up a third hole, this time through his head.
Of course, with its initial target no longer within reach, the pacifista began going absolutely batshit crazy, shooting lasers everywhere in a light show reminiscent of a nightclub. We only survived the initial barrage due to three reasons.
One, it was pretty obvious where it was aiming at, which made getting out of the line of fire relatively simple at sufficient distances. Two, the pacifista’s ‘light’ wasn’t actually travelling at light speed. Oh, it was certainly fast but considering that real light could circumnavigate the globe multiple times per second, comparing it to whatever the pacifista and hopefully Kizaru were toting about, was like comparing a formula one race car to a tortoise…and that’s doing the tortoise a disfavor.
And lastly, because the light was easy to predict and slow enough to react to, Lily jumped into the way of one beam and captured it with a flash dial. It was stupid. It was reckless and it probably should have taken her arm out, but whether by luck or by skill, it worked. It jolly well worked.
“Eat this, you piece of junk!”
“Twenty million volt vari!”
Two beams, one blue and one yellow, sent the pacifista reeling and off balance, the cracked and torn armor plating no longer able to fully protect it.
Then Eddy & Ross dropped half a building on top of it.
Turned out that if you used the axe dials enough times or in Eddy’s case, sliced at the walls in desperation, you could cut through walls at just the right angle to have a part of it slide off. The pacifista would still dig its way out eventually, but right now the robot had both his legs trapped beneath a dozen tons of rubble.
Unfortunately though, only one arm. The other…
“Eddy!”
“Kek!”
“Urouge, the chest!” Grammatically incorrect or not, the big guy understood me. Growing to his biggest size yet, the high priest of the Fallen Monk Pirates ripped out a fist sized hole in the armor plating, the culmination of all our efforts until this point.
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And into that hole I thrust my right arm and held out the other towards Aisa. And even as I transformed myself, I roared at the top of my lungs. “Aisa, charge me up!”
Millions of volts worth of current flowed through me and into the pacifista’s interior. At first it did precious little, the dozens and dozens of redundancies and failsafes keeping its circuitry intact and functional. But what Vegapunk had not counted on, was for the equivalent of a block sized electromagnetic pulse to go off from within the pacifista’s chest cavity.
Still, perhaps Vegapunk’s creation would have been able to deal with either part of the equation, but both occurring simultaneously?
The programming was wiped, the circuitry fried and the pacifista died.
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Cleaning up the battlefield didn’t take long. Despite literally being the toughest thing I had fought so far in my entire pirating career, due to its simplistic combat algorithms and our teamwork, our casualties were relatively light. My crew in particular had come out of it mostly smelling like roses. The sole notable casualty had been Eddy who was quickly flown back to the ship by Rivers. Thank goodness he came looking for us when he did. And that went double for Fuza.
The residents of Sabaody had not been as lucky. There were a good dozen bodies scattered around the streets, most having been caught in the crossfire. And not all of them were your everyday citizens either. One corpse still wore the remnants of the most extravagant collection of silks and frills I had ever laid my eyes upon.
And sitting calmly next to the body was someone wearing a slave collar.
“Why didn’t you run?”
“Where to? My collar will explode if the connected beacon doesn’t send regular signals…which it hasn’t for a while now.” Byron pointed out. “The robot melted the beacon along with my buyer’s heart.”
“And the key?”
“The man threw it away right after the purchase. Said he’d never take the collar off so why keep the key?” he shrugged throwing the corpse another glance. “Turns out he was right. He never did get to take the collar off me.”
“Just to confirm, this thing works electronically?”
“As far as I could garner, yes. It has some sort of internal clock and antenna system linked to an explosive load.” He calmly explained, seemingly at peace with his imminent demise.
Wait, this guy was a pirate captain, right?
“In that case, we may be able to help.”
“…?”
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We parted ways with both Urouge and Drake on good terms, even arranging to meet up with the former in a few days on some island. Urouge provided a pre-set log pose for that purpose.
The way back to our ship was practically peaceful and utterly relaxing in comparison to the ordeal we had just gone through. We breezed past the outnumbered and hopelessly outmatched marines, who offered only a desperate but doomed opposition, barely breaking our stride.
Thankfully, judging by the sounds of combat in the distance Admiral Kizaru was occupied elsewhere. Hopefully, Rayleigh was going to keep him busy long enough for us to get away. Though whatever the reason for his notable absence, our party plus one reached our destination without any difficulty, to find the Black Pearl ready to hoist the anchor and set sail.
Hewitt had used what little time he'd been given to stock up the Black Pearl’s larders as well as he could, sometimes clearing out the abandoned stalls and shops when he couldn’t get adequate service. The anchor was hoisted, the sails were loosened, and we left Sabaody behind while planning to return once the coast was clear once more.
It was only after we were a good ways away from the Sabaody Archipelago, that I could begin breathing easily once more. While this probably didn't need mentioning, we were not ready to face an Admiral just yet.
Our forced sabbatical did give me some breathing room to think about our three unexpected passengers…a pretty nurse, her wine merchant fiancé with a bullet wound and a former paradise pirate captain.
A captain who was currently sipping on Muret’s tea in my cabin, his neck conspicuously free.
Turned out that when you had your lighting chibi focus on maximizing her fine control for a few months, she became rather good at it. And unlike the pacifista, the generic slave collars did not provide proper insulation for the electrical components within, so that it was rather simple for Aisa to destroy the inner circuitry. With the way the system was apparently designed, the explosive load required an explicit signal from the circuit to detonate the explosives, which would usually happen after a timer ran out. If the timer was gone, there could be no signal. No signal, no explosion.
Once there no longer was the risk of something blowing up in our faces, we could focus on picking the lock. Which, we were rather good at as it turned out, many of us having been former street urchins and the occasional purloiner of property in our youth.
“So, let me get this straight. Your first mate drugged you and mutinied out of the blue…after five years of smooth sailing. But you have no idea why.” I summarised Byron's story.
“That is correct.”
“And you want my help in hunting them down and beating answers out of them.” I continued.
“That is also correct.”
“To top it all off, after the deed is done, it is your intention to commandeer a ship, pick up a crew and go raid, pillage, plunder and otherwise pilfer your weaselly black gut out.”
“Not quite how I would have put it, but essentially true. After all, I am a pirate captain.” He stated, as if that explained everything. And in some ways, it did.
“Tell me, why should I help you?” I asked him, leaning back and interlacing my fingers together. I wasn’t unwilling to help him, but it was the principle of the matter. Why should I risk the lives of my crew to help out someone who had no ties with us at all?
“Because once I rebuild my crew, we will become your first affiliate crew.” Byron answered simply. Well, that was certainly an interesting offer, but I tried to not let it show.
“What makes you think I want that?” My reply was met with a flat stare, the kind which a teacher might give a decidedly dull student.
“You fly Doflamingo’s flag, but it is obvious you chafe underneath it. I wager it won’t be long before you attempt to break free.” Was I that transparent? Had Doffy noticed? If so, why was I still alive? “When you do, having someone around to handle the riff raff can only be useful, no?”
Unless I managed to jump on the Straw Hat Revolution, I’d be facing the entirety of the Doflamingo Family with just my crew. Convenient wouldn’t even begin to describe having someone around to buy us the time we needed to take out the executives.
“You would oppose a warlord?” I asked, raising an eyebrow.
“I was a dead man. A warlord is not death’s equal.” It was an arrogant statement to be honest. Then again, Byron had been remarkably calm with a literal bomb strapped around his neck. “Also, I wouldn’t be facing Doflamingo himself, would I? You would.”
Touché. Then again, it wasn't as if the challenge he was offering to face was an easy one. Only nameless mooks they might be but they were New World mooks and Byron seemed at best a middling paradise captain.
To be honest, I would have preferred hijacking the members of the Straw Hat Grand Fleet, but the odds of the massive chain of coincidences happening in exactly the right way were so astronomically small that I didn't count on it working out.
Additionally, trustworthy captains didn't grow on trees and with how we had saved Byron’s life, he owed me, which made him about as reliable as could be reasonably expected of a pirate. Also, if need be, I could send one of my crew with him to act as an overseer when the time came..
“Do forgive me, but what makes you think you’ll be an asset instead of a liability?” Then again, all this only had any merit if Byron matched a minimum standard of ability. And the show had shown me exactly zero of what he was capable of. Zilch. Nadda.
All I knew was that he had been a captain and thus must have possessed some basic leadership ability, could play a variety of instruments, and made good wines.
“You want a demonstration, yes?” he said, stepping over to the piano Iceburg had randomly installed into the captain’s cabin. “Very well, I shall demonstrate. Prepare to be convinced.”
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I was convinced.