– Byron –
As far as diabolical plans for world domination went, this one was just plain pathetic. What had Ratchet been thinking?
That the world was simply going to roll over and give up, just because he had gained some tenuous control over a giant moving turtle? Admittedly it was a very large turtle with a city on its back and a lot more room for canon emplacements. If he were given enough time, he could even man those emplacements with his mechanical toys to turn Mecha Island into a heavily armed and mobile fortress.
But that was all it was…a single floating fortress. Any competent marine vessel would be able to outmaneuver Ratchet and his two officers and force a landing, never mind what a squadron of marine warships could do.
No, this plan was doomed from the very beginning and Byron had the distinctive pleasure of being in a prime position to break the news to this arrogant manchild. Then again, why do it himself when he had two rookies who could do it in his stead?
Actually…
"Why are you looking at me like that?" Helena flinched, before wrapping her arms around herself in a protective gesture. A futile one. "I don't like it. I don't like it at all."
…make that three.
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Judy's opponent turned out to be General Maji, the officer in charge of the island's entire military. Or at least he would have been if the island had a military worth mentioning in the first place. As it didn't, the man came marching out the castle with a troop of toy soldiers at his back.
"Do I really have to fight? I'm just a bartender."
"You are my bartender which makes you a pirate sailing on my ship." Byron growled at the lad, giving him no room to argue and firmly pushing him forward. "Fight."
Still, the boy hesitated, glancing back and forth between Byron's finger and the approaching general several times, before slowly trudging towards his target. He did noticeably speed up though when Marie cheered him on.
"I believe in you Judy!"
Judy did make one last attempt at diplomacy, trying to convince General Maji to surrender before anyone got hurt. But unfortunately for the officer, like his master, General Maji did not have the ability to recognise that the odds were stacked against him.
The fight began with the crackling of rifle fire, the mechanical line infantry doing their best to riddle Judy with bullet holes. Unfortunately for them, for all their sophistication and wonderfully detailed uniforms, their movements were limited and their intentions clearly telegraphed. Judy simply had to do what Judy did best, which was to run away faster than the soldiers could re-adjust their aim. And that was what he did.
Oddly enough, that was also the only thing he did.
"Shura?"
"Yes, captain?"
"You did teach him how to throw a punch, right?" Byron asked his first mate while glancing at him out of the corner of his eye. Shura returned the look, through with a slightly confused tilt of the head.
"No captain, I thought you were going to."
Right, he had said that hadn't he? This was somewhat awkward, especially with Marie giving her captain a disbelieving look.
"...I knew I missed something." Byron muttered, intentionally ignoring his medical officer's gaze, which was increasingly resembling that of a dead fish.
"Do...do we interfere?" Shura stammered out, clearly caught off guard, but Byron shook his head. What was done was done. There was no use in crying over split milk and Judy wasn't in any real danger yet.
"Not yet, let's give the lad the chance to figure things out first. Who knows? He may even surprise us."
As it happened, Judy did manage to surprise Byron. Once he had clonked onto the fact that he wouldn't be winning a fight if he didn't do something other than run circles around his opponents, Judy had elected to run even more circles. But not before linking one of the toy soldiers and his own belt via a steel wire he'd borrowed from Shura. The result was the entire toy squadron being bound together like a bouquet with General Maji stuck in the middle.
"That's a pretty good idea actually. Pity he isn't physically strong enough to pull it off properly." Shura mused, more to himself than to Byron. Byron however didn't reply to that, as he was distracted by something else he was just noticing.
"Is he…is he getting himself drunk?" Byron asked incredulously, causing Shura to do a spit take.
To give Judy the due credit he deserved, he wasn't getting drunk as that would require him to ingest more alcohol than his body could reasonably break down in a timely manner. What he was doing though, was chugging the contents of half a dozen vials, which Byron knew to contain the lad's experimental cocktails. The next thing Byron knew, Judy suddenly found some hidden reserves of strength with which he heaved on the wire, quickly tightening the loose bonds he had prepared previously and crushing General Maji with the weight of his own troops.
Later, when Byron grilled the lad on what substance he'd imbibed that had given him that boost in strength, the bartender turned pirate only had one thing to say.
"Uhm…liquid courage?"
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Whereas General Maji had relied primarily on the strength of his toy soldiers, Colonel Honki had opted to go the exact opposite route. By which Byron meant that the colonel had attempted to augment his personal power with some sort of mechanical battle armor. In all honesty, it reminded Byron more of a lumbering gorilla than anything else and it was probably about as dangerous. While its raw strength may have been respectable by the standards of the four Blues, Byron had witnessed the might of the Grand Line at Marineford. Especially when compared to Vegapunk's creations, Honki's battle suit was nothing more than a shabby toy.
Which was why Byron had felt absolutely no remorse whatsoever when he shoved Helena forwards to earn her own keep. Helena may have been an East Blue pirate but she had survived long enough on the Grand Line that this shouldn't have posed a serious threat to her wellbeing.
The fight, if you could call it that, was incredibly one-sided. No sooner had Honki fired his shoulder cannons, did Helena liquify and proceed to engulf the man in a giant ball of her pink fluid. This in turn forced the colonel to make a choice. He could either wear the mask and suffer the enormous heat his suit generated or he could forgo the mask and risk drowning. Or…as it turned out, he could choose to do nothing and get hurt when Helena's liquid used the opening afforded by his inaction to infiltrate his suit and mess with some critical component. This in turn caused the whole contraption to destabilize and explode, ending the fight before it could really begin.
Byron did have to put Helena back in her place, when buoyed by her victory, she turned her gaze onto the Harmony pirates in a less than innocent manner. It didn't take minder reader to know that she was trying to judge whether or not she could forcibly subjugate Byron's crew into doing her bidding. After all, she was a logia and hence invulnerable. That was, unless she did something silly, like allowing herself to be trapped in a bottle. But no-one would be quite that silly, right? Byron quickly disabused her of the notion by humming a lullaby and magnifying the girl's drowsiness enough to instantly put her to sleep. When Helena woke up again, he dangled a pair of seastone handcuffs in front of her face, which together with his humming, did a lot to convince the girl to behave from then on.
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Now, with both officers taken down and out for the count, that left only the honorable Doctor Ratchet for Marie to take care of.
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Ratchet was an intelligent young man. While Byron had already noted that his creations paled in comparison to Vegapunk's masterworks, the mere fact that he'd managed as much as he'd had with self-study and limited resources, deserved a certain amount of respect. Additionally, due to the invasion of Mecha Island by the Trump Pirates, the young lord had been able to gather plentiful data regarding the combat worthiness of his mechs. Or lack of combat worthiness, when one considered that the Trump Pirates had successfully ransacked the castle and made off with whatever valuables they could get their grubby hands on. Hence, it should not have come as a surprise to anyone that a motivated and talented tinker like Dr. Ratchet would take those lessons to heart when he went back to the drawing board.
The result was the Iron Man #33, a mech which had its functionality streamlined until it was utterly unsuited for anything other than combat. It was his greatest creation to date, incorporating the secrets of the King Cannon Mark 2 into its design, the remnants of which the Bear King had been forced to leave behind, and being armed with several gatling guns. Or so Ratchet claimed, when the lad had boastfully introduced his creation to Marie.
Marie remained thoroughly unimpressed, merely snapping her fingers and activating her devil fruit ability...the Neko Neko no Mi: Model Nekomata.
Marie's fruit was an interesting one, in Byron's opinion. While he was aware that devil fruits, especially zoan fruits, tended to influence their user until their character was more aligned with the ability itself, Byron had never witnessed a case where this effect had been as drastic as with Marie. On most days, the girl was as sweet as they came, polite and demure to a fault, but whenever she entered a combat situation and especially if she used her devil fruit, it was as if she'd flipped a switch somewhere. In other words, the girl became a whole different person.
image [https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcSHWZz_qfp6PMZH7jnPVisJo6deFu-M6xRa2A&s] vs image [https://i.pinimg.com/736x/a1/39/75/a139754fecd24f9feb09a724a9686daa.jpg]
Vulgar where she'd once been polite, playful and mischievous where she'd been serious…and where she'd once been demure and reserved…well. Let us say that Judy's self-control was greatly challenged every time he saw his fiancee transform into her hybrid form.
Dr. Ratchet himself froze for a good thirty seconds as he took in the sight of Marie in her new outfit. And while Byron pondered the mystery of why her clothing changed with her, Marie wasted no time in pouncing upon her opponent. That the mech had its guns trained on her seemed to bother the girl not a whit, as Ratchet would have to identify the real Marie first. One Marie became two, then five, then ten, throwing her opponent into a wild panic as he was suddenly confronted by a small horde of grinning, yowling catgirls charging at him from all directions. Byron didn't blame the boy for failing to respond in an adequate manner, as he knew first hand how disorientating Marie's illusionary clones could be. And that was despite his ability to pick up the slight auditory inconsistencies between the illusions and the main body. But even those seemed to be lessening every day.
Belatedly, Ratchet tried to ward his opponent off, his battle suit's arms flailing wildly about itself and emptying its magazines. But his panicked defense availed him not as Marie sinuously danced her way through the incoming hail of bullets as if she were taking a stroll through the park. Another snap of her fingers and the ground beneath the Iron Man #33 turned into a swamp, the mud unable to support the ton-heavy weight and the mechanical suit sinking into the ground up to its chest as a result. And with that, the fight was essentially over, Marie only needing to deliver the finishing blow to an immobilized opponent. Which she did with gusto.
The last thing Ratchet saw, before his facial structures were rearranged, would have probably have been Marie's heel coming down in an axe-kick to smash through his mech's metal helmet.
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The Price of Sugar
Welcome to Marineford Daily News, your only source of accurate and unbiased truth.
It is a well documented fact that the world has seen a slight increase in crime rates across the globe after the recent commotion at Marineford. This has mostly been kept under control thanks to the tireless efforts of our marines, but unfortunately they are too few in number to be everywhere at once. While this is something that is being rectified at this very moment, new recruits entering the corps in droves, for now the occasional petty crime does take place.
As one resident of the island of Jam told us: "They stole half the strawberries! And the other half was voluntarily tributed to the fucking most gracious, most generous, divine World Nobles, in an act of bloody cruelty great benevolence." The residents request that he be allowed to remain anonymous has been filed with the appropriate authorities.
As Jam and her sister islands of Confiture and Marmalade were responsible for 52.8% of the world's sweet strawberry preserve, this audacious fruit robbery is expected to have dire consequences for the global supply chains.
Already the price of jams, confitures and marmalades has risen by a whopping 34.1% within the last three weeks and is not expected to slow down any time soon as the scramble for the limited stockpile has begun.
Thankfully the divine land of Mariejois is above such petty concerns and is as stable and peaceful as ever, but rumblings of concern have been detected within the New World.
Even before the shortages began, the shipping routes had been hazardous, the convoys having to navigate pirate infested waters, protected only by the flag of one of the four emperors. Now, not even that seems to be enough.
As the famed jam is a staple of every breakfast table of note, it is hardly surprising that some overly eager subordinates sought to curry favor with their tyrannical captains, leading to raids and counter raids on the supply convoys headed to Whole Cake Island and Wano.
Rumor has it that an entire shipment was hijacked, leading to severely heightened tensions between the Big Mom Pirates, who rightly feared for their lives should Big Mom not get her daily dose of breakfast confiture, and the Beast Pirates, who sought to defend their overlord's right to a peanut butter and jam sandwich, in a confrontation already being called the Second Jam Crisis. (The first had been caused by Gold Roger stealing the heavenly tribute twenty five years prior).
On a completely unrelated note, the sole Emperor uninvolved in the Jam Crisis was witnessed spreading generous helpings of limited order strawberry delight marmalade on his scones during afternoon tea.
Whether this standoff will lead to outright war between the two superpowers of the New World remains to be seen but for now the build up of forces continues as the world waits with bated breath.
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This was Marineford Daily reporting.