In the Name of Uchiha

The four finally gathered together again, and Barlow spoke first.

"I don't know this place's exact location. I investigated along the alleys, but instead of finding the front entrance, I found the back door." He glanced down at the man kneeling by his feet. "Caught this coward trying to run, too."

Melton knelt on the floor, his tie crooked behind his shoulder. His forehead pressed against the carpet, hiding his face.

Barlow kicked him. The toe of his shoe sank into the fat at Melton's side. Melton grunted, his body tilting sideways before slowly straightening again.

Damian sheathed his dagger. "How did you think to come here?"

"The docks," Barlow said. "I saw the Bloodhand Pirates' ship at the docks. Koldo told me Blood Hand was Melton's honored guest, and that those people had just come ashore today. I knew they would come here, and that you would probably be here too." He lowered the musket from his shoulder. "So I came."

He looked down at Zager's still-smoking corpse. "That guy was a Zoan Devil Fruit user. Zoans allow their users to transform into the corresponding animal form after activating their powers. That one was a hyena, a type of Canine-Canine Fruit. After transforming, physical abilities and close-combat strength increase greatly. Their skin gets tougher, their strength grows, and animal instinct suppresses their sense of pain."

"There's something like that?" Mila said.

"Devil Fruits have always been called treasures of the sea. Eating one grants a corresponding supernatural ability. There are three major types—Zoan, Paramecia, and Logia. But the price comes with it. From the moment they eat the fruit, the sea rejects them, and they become landlubbers who can never float again for the rest of their lives."

Roy nodded thoughtfully.

Damian picked up the thread. "We have Uchiha power. We don't need Devil Fruits."

He reached out, took hold of the back of Melton's collar from Barlow, and lifted him off the ground like a sack of potatoes. "Lead the way. I'm looking for Edwin and Morris."

Melton's feet slipped. It was not that he did not want to stand; his knees simply could not support him. "I-Inside... the luxury private room. The door at the very end of the hall. They go there every time they come."

His voice was thin and clipped, every word squeezed through the gap in his throat. He began walking forward while Damian still gripped the back of his collar.

After passing through the double doors at the back of the hall, the wall lamps in the corridor dimmed. The air changed from the smoky, boozy sweetness of the casino into a heavier kind of fragrance.

At the end of the corridor stood a pair of gilded wooden doors. There were no windows on them. Melton reached out and pushed them open.

The room was even larger than the casino outside. A glass chandelier hung from the domed ceiling, its light warmer and yellower than that in the hall.

All four walls were covered in dark red velvet. The floor was carpeted in long ivory pile, thick enough to swallow the soles of their shoes. In the middle of the room stood a circle of dark red leather sofas around a marble coffee table, littered with wine bottles and several half-eaten fruit platters.

The fragrance in the air was thick enough to choke on. At the far end of the room stood an absurdly large round bed. Its sheets were crumpled into a heap, and half the bedding hung over the edge.

Edwin knelt beside the bed, frantically trying to pull on a pair of trousers.

He was probably in his early fifties. His hair should have been gray-white, but it had been slicked with oil, clumping into strands against his scalp. His belly was huge and sagging. His belt had not even been fastened before getting caught beneath his navel.

Morris was younger and thinner than his father, his ribs faintly visible beneath his skin. Alcohol had swollen his face.

He was not even wearing trousers. He leaned against the sofa backrest, surrounded by several naked women. The women did not look at him. Their faces held nothing.

When Morris saw Melton push the door open, his mouth split into a grin. He staggered to his feet from the sofa, swaying twice before steadying himself. "Melton! Got more good stuff?" His gaze passed over Melton and landed on Mila's face behind Damian. His eyes lit up. "Why's it some little girl? At that age—"

His hand reached toward Mila's face.

A flash of steel crossed the marble table. Morris's hand was severed cleanly at the wrist. It fell into the fruit platter, its fingers still stretched forward, knuckles sunk into the segments of a half-peeled orange. Only after a moment did blood erupt from the stump, spraying over the white long-pile carpet and soaking one patch of its fibers flat.

Morris lowered his head to stare at the blood spurting from his wrist. His mouth opened, and a scream forced its way from deep in his throat, shrill and broken, like a dog with someone's foot on its neck.

Edwin knelt on the floor, his trouser belt still unfastened. He watched his second son's severed hand lodged in the fruit platter, watched those fingers twitch faintly, watched blood run along the veins of the marble toward the edge of the table. His legs began to shake.

He had been the mayor of Orange Town for twenty years. He had seen people beaten to death at the docks, stabbed to death in alleys, and merchants dragged away before his eyes. He had never been afraid. Because none of their blood had splashed onto his carpet.

He shuffled forward on his knees for two steps and knelt before these blood-covered strangers. His knees sank into the long-pile carpet, pressing Morris's blood into the ivory fibers and staining them dark red.

"Gentlemen... sirs, I... I'm the mayor of Orange Town. I'm useful. There are many things I can do. Don't kill me, don't kill me..." His voice grew thinner with every word until the last one shattered into a breath.

He raised his head and saw four identical pairs of blood-red eyes. Pale yellow liquid ran down the inside of his thighs from beneath his unfastened belt, dripping onto the ivory long-pile carpet.

Damian lowered his head and looked at Edwin kneeling on the floor, at Morris curled into a ball nearby, at the severed hand still twitching faintly in the fruit platter, and at the numb eyes of the naked women.

He had originally had much to say: about Orange Town's location, about the merchants crushed beneath extortion taxes until they could barely breathe, about the old cobbler's words, "Fifty Beli," and about how long Ando had been imprisoned in that study. Now, all of it rotted inside him.

Words spoken to someone who could understand were words.

Words spoken to someone who could not understand were wasted spit.

He released Melton's collar and turned away. "Do whatever you want with them. I'm going back to find Ando." He stepped over the threshold, leaving a faint red print on the hallway floor with his boot, and headed toward the other end of the corridor.

Mila stepped forward, her hand still gripping the dagger. Morris's blood had not yet dried on the blade.

She walked up to Edwin and looked down at him.

Edwin opened his mouth, wanting to make one final plea. Mila's knife cut from the left side of his Adam's apple to the right, leaving the same wound as the bald man in the alley.

Edwin's plea rotted in his throat. He fell sideways, his face pressed against the long-pile carpet, his eyes still open.

Mila turned and walked over to Morris. Morris still clutched his severed wrist, his screams reduced to hoarse hissing.

He did not look at his hand or at his fallen father. He only looked into Mila's eyes.

Mila drove the knife into the left side of his chest, thrusting between his ribs and through his heart.

Morris fell backward onto the sofa, his eyes still open as he stared at the glass chandelier on the ceiling.

Mila pulled out the knife, wiped it back and forth twice against the leather sofa, then sheathed it at her waist.

She turned around. The women were still curled up by the bed. Some covered their faces. Others did not.

Mila walked to the bedside, picked up the clothes scattered across the floor, and placed them one by one along the edge of the bed.

"Put your clothes on, then tell me what happened to you."

Roy and Barlow each grabbed one of Melton's arms and dragged him out of the room. Melton's legs had gone limp like two waterlogged ropes, his heels scraping out two intermittent dragging sounds across the corridor floor.

They searched every business Melton owned. Melton did not volunteer anything, but Barlow asked and he answered.

Roy's knife pressed against his lower back. If he slowed down even slightly, the tip would sink half an inch into him.

They passed through narrow alleys and pried open the locks on four warehouses under Melton's name. One contained smuggled firearms and ammunition, gun barrels coated in rustproof oil and stacked neatly on straw mats.

One held rare spices smuggled out of the Goa Kingdom. A single sack was enough to feed the people at the docks for more than half a year.

One held antiques and jewelry. There was no need to ask where they came from to know they could not stand the light.

The last held no goods, only a row of iron cages. The cages were empty, but the straw on their floors still bore bloodstains that had not dried, along with several strands of torn long hair.

Melton said the latest batch of "goods" had just been transported away by the Bloodhand Pirates. They were no longer in Orange Town.

Melton walked at the front, his knees shaking, but his mouth never stopped.

He said his business covered the entire Wind Organ Archipelago, that he had an outpost at the Goa Kingdom's port and middlemen to handle connections in Loguetown.

He said Melton was not his real name. Before coming to Orange Town, he had been a financial officer on a larger island. After backing the wrong side once, he had been thrown onto a dock and left to die. He did not beg while saying this. He merely stated it, like a man laying his last remaining chips on the table.

At last, they reached a dead-end alley deep in the dock warehouse district. Tall stone walls stood on either side, with no windows, only a narrow iron door just wide enough for one person to squeeze through sideways.

Melton pushed open the iron door. Inside was a low, single-story house. Past the entrance was a corridor with four doors on each side. Behind them were cramped cubicles. Some had mattresses; some had nothing. Iron rings were nailed to the walls, and the air carried a faint bleach smell.

Apparently, this was where he trained female slaves.

Melton fell to his knees at the end of the corridor. Both knees hit the ground, and his forehead slammed against the cold cement with a dull, solid thud.

"I can... I can become a retainer of Uchiha. I have experience. I've run this business for so many years, from the black market to the docks to the markets, from the Wind Organ Archipelago to the Goa Kingdom. I can run this route with my eyes closed. I can manage these businesses for Uchiha. I only ask... only ask that you spare my life."

Barlow leaned against the corridor wall, one hand pinching his chin. He was genuinely considering whether it could work.

The fat man kneeling and kowtowing before them was scum. Undeniably scum.

But scum held Orange Town's entire underground trade network in his hands.

Kill him, and all of it would have to be rebuilt from the ground up.

Spare him, and Uchiha would gain a ready-made foothold in Orange Town.

The iron door at the corridor entrance was pushed open.

Mila walked in. Her pace was not fast, but every step was firm. Bloodstains stretched from her collar all the way to her waist. She passed the first door, then the second, then the third, opening each one to look inside. The iron rings in the cubicles reflected a cold bluish-gray gleam beneath the dim lights.

She kept walking until she reached the end of the corridor and stopped behind Melton.

She looked around at everything. Iron rings, mattresses, the smell of bleach.

She had learned about this place from those girls.

She remembered the scar-faced man leaning toward her with a smile and saying, "Melton is just lacking this kind."

She remembered the dealer kneeling on the ground, clutching Melton's leg with his forehead pressed against Melton's shoe.

Now it was Melton kneeling on the ground.

Mila's eyes began to change. The two Tomoe in her pupils began to turn, shifting from a slow drift into rapid rotation.

A third Tomoe emerged, its outline becoming clearer and clearer. It took less than half a breath to go from blurred to distinct. The three Tomoe formed a complete ring across her blood-red irises.

"You like women so much. Why don't you become one yourself?"

Melton looked into Mila's eyes, and then his consciousness shattered, as though it had been peeled completely apart and shoved into another reality.

Now he was the woman locked inside the iron cage. His wrists could feel the icy iron rings. His knees could feel the coarse straw.

He looked down at his body. What he saw was not the three-piece suit he had worn for over twenty years, but the body of a woman—a body he had seen countless times, bought countless times, and sold countless times.

Several old men with bellies as large as his entered the cubicle. Their faces wore the smile he had seen countless times in the mirror, the smile he had worn from beginning to end whenever he selected "goods."

He recognized that smile. He recognized this waiting. He began to scream, making the sound of a man shoved into the cage he had built with his own hands.

His body convulsed on the floor. His hands clawed at the air, his nails digging into the cracks in the cement until they broke. Blood seeped out from beneath his nails.

He was still himself, but everything in his world had become something else.

Barlow watched Melton convulse on the floor, watched his mouth open and close, close and open, while sounds no human should be able to make squeezed from his throat.

Barlow lowered the hand pinching his chin and shrugged.

"Fine. A little trouble is still just trouble."

He straightened away from the wall and turned toward the corridor exit. As he passed Mila, he paused for a moment, looking at the three spinning Tomoe in her eyes, then at Melton struggling within the Genjutsu on the floor. He said nothing and walked through the iron door.

The next day, Orange Town's docks.

The bloodstains on the stone-paved road had already been washed clean by seawater. The Bloodhand Pirates' ship was still moored in a corner of the docks, but its flag had been torn down and tossed into a metal trash bin by the pier.

At the berths, shipowners who had signed contracts were loading cargo. Crates of fruit were stacked neatly, and the laborers worked harder than usual, calling out work chants to one another.

At the market, the fruit stalls opened as usual. The old fish seller was dozing behind his stall again. Flies landed on the fish eyes, and he waved them away with his fan.

The tightly shut doors before the town hall opened. Ando stood beneath the portico, his silver-rimmed glasses gleaming in the sunlight. Behind him stood a young man in a dark short jacket, holding a stack of newly written documents in his arms. Ando adjusted his glasses.

"Dock berth fees will be reduced by twenty percent starting today. Market stall rent will be reduced by twenty percent starting today. From today onward, no 'dock money' will be charged for any warehouse at Orange Town's docks."

The town square fell silent for a moment. Then someone began to clap. The old cobbler was the first, followed by the hunched old man selling dried fish, then several vendors from Orange Street. The applause was scattered, but it did not stop.

They knew who had given them this.

Ando stood at the entrance to the town hall and looked into the distance.

At the docks, the fan crest flag on that single-masted sailboat still fluttered in the wind.

"Uchiha," Ando murmured.