On the Grand Line, on an island called Little Garden.
It was a tropical rainforest island, with towering trees and endless beastly roars, looking like danger lurked everywhere.
"Mm, I'll go for a walk with Luffy too and relax."
Seeing everyone eagerly preparing to "go out," Vivi pulled herself together and went out to "clear her head" as well.
"Isn't that too dangerous...?"
Facing Nami's concern, Vivi pointed at the mount beside her, "Fast Runner." "It's fine. He'll protect me."
Hey, hey, hey, your duck was already so scared it couldn't even make a sound...
But in the end, the land duck still carried Vivi and Luffy off as a group, "happily" heading out to explore. As Zoro prepared to leave, Sanji casually added:
"Bring back some food while you're at it."
To little experts like them, fierce beasts such as lions and tigers were standard "ingredients."
"Fine. I'll bring back prey you can't handle."
At Zoro's casual remark, Sanji raised an eyebrow and jumped off the Golden Merry as well.
"You mean you can bring back prey bigger than mine?"
"Mm, looks like you have some self-awareness after all..."
"What did you say, you damn Green Algae Head?!"
"Hah? What did you say, curly-browed pervert chef?!"
Clack, clack, clack.
With their legs braced against their blades, the two kept bickering and competing as they headed away.
"Fine, let's have a contest..."
"Who's afraid of who?!"
In the blink of an eye, only the tearful Nami and Usopp remained aboard the Golden Merry.
"Why is everyone like this...?"
"Nami, I understand how you feel."
Faced with Usopp's comfort, Nami merely edged away from him.
"Hey, hey, hey, am I really that unreliable?!"
"Forget it, at least Roman is still here..."
However, when the two turned around, Roman, who had been steering the ship, was already staring blankly at the sky with vacant eyes, looking utterly dazed.
"It's over, it's over. I want to go home."
"Hey, hey, hey, how can a man of the sea be so afraid...?"
"Sorry, I'm not a man of the sea." Nami helplessly waved her hand. "Also, your legs are shaking so fast I'm seeing afterimages..."
Splash—!
Just as the two friends were teasing each other, the jungle beside the Golden Merry suddenly parted to both sides, revealing a helmeted, heavily bearded, rather comical... human face?
Of course, the fact that this face was bigger than the Golden Merry rather ruined the mood:
"A... a giant?!"
"We're... we're going to get eaten..."
Nami and Usopp, who had stayed behind to guard the ship, were so shocked that their eyes rolled back.
They began playing dead.
"Puhahahaha, it's been so long since I had visitors!"
Amid a voice like thunder, the giant rose to his feet, towering as high as a dozen-story building, and laughed heartily.
"Do you have any alcohol? You two little people—"
"If you have alcohol, I'll trade meat for it."
"Puhahaha."
Even seated, the bearded giant was still as enormous as a high-rise. He warmly offered Nami and Usopp a house-sized chunk of "meat." But:
They couldn't eat it at all~~
Hey, Nami, do you see those human bones over there?
Yeah, I see them.
Beside the two... no, the three of them, were piles upon piles of human skeletons. If Roman hadn't been "offline," he definitely would have remarked:
So many Brooks.
"Um... Mr. Giant."
Seeing that he had no intention of treating them as "after-dinner dessert" for the time being, Nami gathered her courage and asked.
"How long does it take for this island's Log Pose to set?"
"One year!"
Faced with the giant's solemn answer, Nami and Usopp instantly began shedding tears of despair.
As for Roman beside them? Naturally, he was still offline. Because aboard the Golden Merry, a new Roman transformed from the White Knight was examining the gains from this period.
"Gahahaha!"
On the other side of the island, faced with another giant whose beard hung down to his waist, Luffy unceremoniously tore into a house-sized slab of meat.
"It tastes pretty good, giant uncle."
"Gahahaha, then I'll take this bento of yours too. Though the amount is a little small."
"My companion made that food with great care! If you dare say it tastes bad, I'll beat you up!"
"Gahahaha, it's delicious~~~!"
Watching Luffy and the long-bearded giant truly "chat and laugh merrily," Vivi was left in awe, cold sweat running down her face.
"...They... got along that quickly?"
"Giant uncle, why are you here alone?" Luffy casually asked as he gnawed on the house-sized chunk of meat. "Don't you have a village?"
"I do." The long-bearded giant sitting on the ground patted his knee.
"It's a place called Elbaf, somewhere in the Grand Line."
"But our village has a rule."
"If you have a dispute with someone and neither side will back down, you settle it through a duel. The great God of Elbaf protects the victor."
Simple, brutal—and highly effective.
Every conflict in this world could ultimately be settled through violence. Whether that violence came in the form of fists, blades, or guns and cannons...
If you couldn't eliminate the conflict, then eliminate the people causing it!
"I had a dispute with someone too, and this island became the site of our duel."
"But a hundred years have already passed." The long-bearded giant threw back his head and laughed. "We still haven't decided a winner, gahahaha~~~!!"
"Puhahaha!" On the other side, the bearded giant Nami and Usopp had encountered was also laughing at the sky.
"That was a formidable opponent. We fought a total of 73,465 times. Neither of us had the upper hand!"
"That's incredible..."
Although Nami could not understand the giants' "meaningless" behavior of fighting for a hundred years, Usopp's eyes gleamed beside her, as if he had met his idol.
"That's right, I want to become a man like that!"
"What? You want to become a giant?"
"..."
While they spoke, Roman's body was mechanically gnawing on the room-sized chunk of meat in front of him! And his "consciousness"—
"Sigh, how exactly am I supposed to win?"
Aboard the Golden Merry, Roman in his "White Knight" form rubbed his temples. Before him lay all kinds of rough drafts for plans he had made to deal with what was coming. But:
Even the cleverest housewife couldn't cook without rice,
And even a famed general couldn't fight empty-handed.
With the Straw Hat Pirates' current strength, facing a Great Pirate with a bounty over a hundred million would leave them with no outcome besides being instantly defeated, right? There was none...
"Luffy did defeat Crocodile by exploiting his fear of water. But... is that really reliable?"
Crocodile... that was, Sir Crocodile, clearly possessed the ability to instantly drain all the moisture from someone's body, and could even turn buildings into sand in a second. Just how much water—or rather, what kind of timing—would be needed to catch him off guard?
"Forget it. I can't figure it out."
"Things like Devil Fruits shouldn't be explained with science."
He should see whether he could replicate Luffy's miracle and take down Crocodile with water... or even blood!
"Come to think of it, Luffy and the others seem to have gotten rather slack lately..."
Roman stroked his chin. He had been training painstakingly day and night, while they were just fooling around every day—no, as the saying went, "joy shared is joy doubled." How could he let Roman be the only one "training" and growing stronger? Next, it would be their turn. Mwehehehehe!!
Feel my pain!
In the jungle not far away, two figures hidden in the bushes saw Roman's "sinister" smile aboard the Golden Merry and immediately began cautiously crawling backward.
"Miss Valentine, you saw that, right?"
The sunglasses-wearing man in a brown trench coat was covered in cold sweat, as if he had seen some primordial beast!
"Mr. 5, that's right, it's that devil!"
The fashionably dressed woman not only failed to make her usual exaggerated laugh, she did not even care that crawling along the ground would leave her entire body filthy and disheveled.
—There was absolutely no mistake!
The guard aboard that ship was the "kind-hearted citizen" the two of them had encountered outside Whiskey Peak Town a few days ago! Not only had they been brutally beaten by him, but he had also bled them and experimented on them, nearly making the two Baroque Works officers think they would die there.
"Looks like this guy is actually one of the Straw Hat Pirates. We were careless! Who would have thought they had a puppet captain? How despicable..."
Luffy caught a stray bullet as usual.
"What do we do? We're no match for that devil at all..."
"Let's find Mr. 3 and Miss Goldenweek first."
Mr. 5, dressed like a rock star, thought for a moment. In the end, he still could not swallow this humiliation! After all, unlike the two of them, who only had bounties of ten million, Mr. 3 and Miss Goldenweek were both experts with bounties above thirty million.
They had even hunted a Great Pirate with a forty-five-million bounty. Surely they could help them avenge this grievance.
Before you continue