One Piece: Lust Haki

The fingers were wrong.

Kael stared at them in the half-dark of the hold, turning his hand over like he'd picked up someone else's glove. Thinner than his. Longer. Calluses on the pads where his had been smooth, smooth where his had been rough. The knuckles were bonier than he remembered, and there was a scar across the back of his left hand, a short pale line he'd never earned.

He sat up. His head hit a beam, and the pain was so ordinary and stupid that it cut through everything else. Oak. Real oak, with a knot in the grain right where his skull had connected. He rubbed the spot, and the curly hair under his fingers was wrong too. His hair had been straight. This was thick, ash-blonde, a mess of it falling across his forehead and into his eyes.

He was on a bunk. Below deck on a ship. The air was salt and old sweat and lamp oil, and the floor tilted under him with the steady roll of a vessel cutting through open water. Other bunks lined the walls. A dozen, maybe fifteen, most of them occupied by sleeping bodies in white uniforms. Marine uniforms. He looked down at himself and found the same thing. White shirt, blue neckerchief, trousers that fit a body he didn't recognize.

He reached into his pocket out of instinct that didn't belong to him, and his fingers closed around a piece of paper.

Small. Crumpled. Creased in a way that said it had been balled up, smoothed out, and balled up again more than once. He brought it close to the lamp nailed to the bulkhead beside his bunk and read it.

Congratulations. You have been blessed with Lust Haki. All three types unlocked. Grow stronger through physical intimacy. Have a lot of sex. Good luck.

He read it again.

Then a third time, because the words didn't change and he wanted to be very sure about that.

No signature, no seal, no second page. Just a crumpled scrap of paper with six sentences on it, written in a hand he didn't recognize, telling him the rules of his new life like a cosmic post-it note left on the fridge. Hey, moved you to another dimension. Milk's in the door. Fuck your way to godhood. — Management.

He folded it once, twice, slipped it into his boot under the inner sole, and pressed his foot flat against the floor to make sure it stayed.

Okay.

He sat on the edge of the bunk and let the ship rock under him and thought about Portgas D. Ace dying on a platform he hadn't seen yet. Because that was where his brain went. Past the absurdity, past the body, past the note, straight to the math. Two years. He had roughly two years before Luffy set sail, and then the clock started ticking toward Marineford and the war that killed Whitebeard and Ace and changed the entire sea. Two years to get strong enough to do something about it, or smart enough to get out of the way, or both.

He didn't know yet which one he'd pick. He wasn't sure it mattered at this point. Right now he was a nineteen-year-old nobody on a transport ship full of recruits, heading to the most dangerous military headquarters in the world, with a body he'd had for maybe ten minutes and a power system he'd been told about in fewer words than a takeout receipt.

The recruit in the bunk below him mumbled in his sleep and rolled over. The blanket had a stain on it, brown and old, roughly the shape of Italy if Italy had been sat on.

Kael stood up. His center of gravity was different, taller, maybe an inch, and the weight sat higher in his shoulders. Lean. This body felt borrowed. He was aware of where it didn't quite fit, where the Marine shirt hung loose, where the balance wanted to tip. He pushed the sleeves up past his elbows without thinking about it, and the motion felt right in a way that told him the body had done it a thousand times before he'd gotten here.

He climbed the ladder to the main deck.

Morning. The East Blue spread out flat and blue-green in every direction, open ocean so wide the horizon looked like a drawn line. The sun was low enough to turn the water gold near the ship and leave the rest of it dark. A pair of recruits were on deck swabbing. One of them had managed to get the mop handle stuck in a coil of rope and was just staring at it. Nobody was helping him.

Kael went to the railing and put both hands on it and closed his eyes.

Observation Haki. The note was real. The body was real and the ship was real and the ocean under the ship was real, so the note was real, and that meant he had it. All three types, floor level. The note said unlocked. He wanted to know what that meant in practice.

He tried to feel the ship around him the way Rayleigh had described it. Presence. Intention. The aura of living things. He reached out with whatever part of his brain was supposed to reach out, and what he got back was static. Fuzzy, distant, like tuning a radio between stations. The two recruits on deck registered as warm spots, roughly person-shaped, in the direction he knew they were standing. The bodies below deck were a blurred cluster he couldn't separate. Maybe fifteen feet of range before everything dissolved into noise.

Floor level. The note hadn't lied.

He opened his eyes, flexed his right hand, and tried Armament. Luffy's fists went black. Vergo coated his entire body. Kael willed the hardness into his knuckles, concentrated on the feeling of his spirit becoming armor, and got absolutely nothing. His hand looked exactly the same. He squeezed his fist until the tendons stood out, held it, held it, and felt his nails digging into his palm and that was it.

He unclenched. His palm had four red crescents in it from his fingernails.

Conqueror's he didn't even try. He'd watched enough of the show to know that one was triggered by extreme emotion, and standing on a quiet deck at sunrise didn't qualify. Later. If it was real, it would show up when it showed up.

A gull landed on the railing four feet from him, looked at him with one flat eye, and took off again. He watched it go. Wondered if this was what the rest of his life was going to feel like. Standing on a ship in someone else's body, testing invisible powers that mostly didn't work, waiting for the timeline he remembered to start moving. The gull circled once and flew south, and he forgot about it.

The cannon hit the water thirty yards off the port side, and the geyser of spray that came up was tall enough to soak the deck.

Everything happened at once. The recruits started shouting. A second cannon punched through the railing amidships and took a chunk of the hull with it, and wood splinters sprayed across the deck like shrapnel. A Petty Officer Kael hadn't noticed was already on the quarterdeck bellowing orders, his voice cutting through the noise with the authority of a man who'd done this before. Kael grabbed the railing and looked toward the source.

A ship. Smaller than the transport, faster, with a black flag he couldn't read at this distance and a crew already swinging across on boarding ropes. Pirates. East Blue pirates, which meant they were the weakest pirates in the weakest sea, and that was good because Kael was the weakest version of himself he'd ever be.

The first boarders hit the deck and the fighting started.

Kael had never been in a fight in his life. Either life. The body he was wearing might have had some basic training. His hands came up in a guard he didn't remember learning. But whatever muscle memory the previous owner had left behind, it wasn't much. He blocked a cutlass swing from a pirate with a bandana and bad teeth by getting his forearm in the way, which hurt enormously and only worked because the pirate was scrawny and swung like he was chopping firewood. The second swing he ducked, and the ducking felt weird. His body moved a half-beat before he told it to. Observation Haki. The static fuzz gave him just enough of a twitch, a sense that something sharp was coming from the left, and his legs took him out of the line before he'd consciously decided to move.

He hit the pirate in the jaw with a punch that had no technique and all of his new body's weight behind it. The man went down. Kael's knuckles throbbed and he was pretty sure he'd done it wrong.

Three more were on the deck in front of him. A recruit beside him took a club to the shoulder and crumpled. The Petty Officer was fighting two at once near the mast, doing considerably better than Kael, movements clean and trained in a way Kael's weren't. One of the pirates rushed Kael with a short sword held overhead like a hammer. The Observation twitch fired again. A warm pulse behind his eyes, a direction, a speed. Kael sidestepped and the blade hit the deck where he'd been standing. He kicked the pirate in the knee. It worked. The man screamed and folded sideways.

He was breathing hard. His hands were shaking. He had no idea what he was doing and the parts that were working were working because of a power he'd had for twenty minutes.

Then the deck shook.

She came over the railing like a landslide. Alvida. Iron Mace Alvida, pre-fruit, pre-transformation, and every inch of her was exactly what the manga had drawn. Big woman, wide-shouldered, thick-armed, with dark wavy hair and freckles scattered across her face and chest. She wore a floral bikini top and a white cowboy hat and she carried an iron mace the size of Kael's torso. She was tall enough that when she straightened up on the deck, the nearest recruits actually stepped back from the sheer size of her.

She grinned. "Which one of you is the captain?"

Nobody answered. The Petty Officer had blood running down his arm from a cut above his elbow and was breathing through his teeth. He looked at Alvida and didn't move.

"Doesn't matter," she said. She rested the mace on her shoulder. The metal gleamed where it wasn't rusted. "Your cargo belongs to the most beautiful woman on the seas now. That's me, in case you were wondering."

Kael looked at her and knew immediately he couldn't beat her. She outweighed him, she had a weapon that would cave his ribs in, and she'd been a pirate captain long enough to have a crew and a reputation and a nickname that involved the weapon currently resting on her shoulder. But underneath that calculation, quieter: she's dead in two years if Luffy doesn't show up different. And Luffy's not here yet. And neither is the fruit that makes her beautiful. And I'm the one standing on this deck.

"Hey," he said. His voice came out steadier than he felt. "The cargo's rice and uniforms. Not really worth the cannonballs."

Alvida looked at him. Her eyes were dark, and the grin sharpened at the edges. She'd decided he was funny enough to hurt slowly. "A brave little recruit. I like that. Makes it more fun when they run."

She swung the mace.

The Observation twitch screamed at him. He threw himself sideways and the mace cratered the deck where he'd been standing. The impact came through his feet, up through his legs, into his spine. Wood splintered. She was strong. Just casually, absurdly strong, a woman with a big arm doing what would've been a special effect back home.

He scrambled back. She pulled the mace out of the deck and swung again and he ducked it. The third swing caught him across the left arm. A glancing hit, the edge of the mace head, and the pain was so sharp and sudden that his vision whited out for a second. The arm went numb from the shoulder down.

He couldn't block that. Couldn't match it. The only thing keeping him in this fight was the half-second of warning his Observation gave him before each swing, and it wasn't consistent. It flickered, missed beats, gave him ghost signals that pulled him the wrong direction. He dodged two more swings and caught a knee to the ribs from a pirate he hadn't sensed coming from behind.

He hit the deck. Rolled. Came up wheezing. Alvida was already closing the distance, mace back, freckled face split with a grin.

She swung for his head.

His right hand came up to block, which was stupid, which was suicide, and somewhere between the decision and the impact his knuckles went black.

For half a second his fist was dark iron, and when the mace hit his hand the force didn't travel past his wrist. The clang was sharp and metallic and wrong. Alvida's grip broke. The mace spun out of her hands and hit the deck and bounced once and then Kael's knuckles were just knuckles again, pale and human and already aching.

Alvida stared at her empty hands. Then at him.

He hit her. A straight right, no technique, just forward momentum and his fist and the stupid reckless commitment of a man who knew if he gave her time to recover she'd kill him. It connected under her jaw and her head snapped to the side and she went down hard. The deck shook when she landed.

For a few seconds nobody moved. The pirates still standing looked at their captain on the deck and then at the recruit breathing over her. The Petty Officer had his cutlass up and was staring at Kael with an expression Kael couldn't read and didn't try to.

Alvida pushed herself up on one elbow. Blood on her lip from where she'd bitten the inside of her cheek. Her hat had fallen off. The dark wavy hair spilled across the deck and her eyes were furious and bright and locked on his face.

"Who the hell are you?"

The honest answer was complicated and involved another dimension and a note in his boot. He went with the simple version.

"Kael Vance. Chore Boy. Nice to meet you."

Her crew was already retreating. The ones still conscious were dragging the ones who weren't back toward the boarding ropes. The Petty Officer was barking orders at the recruits to secure the ship. None of that mattered to Kael right now. What mattered was the woman on the deck in front of him, bleeding and furious, and the question he could see forming behind her eyes: how?

He held out his hand.

"Get up."

She looked at the hand. Her jaw worked. The freckles across her nose caught the morning light, the pattern of them asymmetric, more on the left side than the right.

"Who's the most beautiful woman on the seas?" she asked. Her voice was hoarse.

"No idea," Kael said. "But you're pretty. Why would I hurt a pretty woman?"

Pretty. He said pretty, and he watched the word land. She'd wanted beautiful. She always wanted beautiful. Her whole thing, the word she lived on, the only answer she'd accept. And he'd given her pretty, and he'd meant it, and somehow that was worse. Her mouth opened. Closed. The fury in her eyes cracked into pieces he didn't have a word for and didn't have time to sort through.

She slapped his hand away and got up on her own. Wiped the blood off her lip with the back of her wrist. Picked up her hat, jammed it on her head, and walked to the railing without looking at him. Her crew had the ropes ready. She grabbed one.

"Next time," she said, "I'll kill you."

She swung back to her ship. Her crew followed. The pirate vessel pulled away, smaller and faster, its damaged hull trailing smoke from where one of the Marines had gotten a lucky hit with a fire bolt. Kael watched it go until it was a dark spot on the gold water and then just water.

The Petty Officer appeared at his elbow. Older guy, hard face, a fresh bandage on his forearm that was already spotting red through the gauze. He looked at Kael like he was trying to figure out what species he was.

"Where the hell did you learn to fight?"

Kael flexed his right hand. The knuckles ached. The brief black flash was already fading in his memory, becoming less real. He could almost convince himself he'd imagined it. Almost.

"Honestly?" he said. "I have no idea."

The Petty Officer kept looking at him for a few more seconds, then shook his head and walked away to deal with the damage. Kael stayed at the railing. The sun was fully up now and the East Blue was bright and flat and endless. Marineford was ahead of them. Out in this ocean, a girl was enslaved by a fishman and a girl's butler was planning to kill her. In a fishing village, a boy with a straw hat hadn't started his adventure yet. And a man with fire for fists was running out of time and didn't know it.

The paper in his boot pressed against his sole with every shift of his weight.

Two years. Give or take.

He pushed his sleeves up and went to help with the wreckage.