In the fog-shrouded Florian Triangle, Thriller Bark floated silently, like an isolated island cut off from the world.
This enormous pirate ship was the domain of Gecko Moria, one of the Shichibukai. It looked like a gothic horror theme park that had gone all-in on the horror.
A handful of zombies wandered around, while most lurked in the graveyard... or in even stranger places.
They had been assembled from corpses and shadows Moria had stolen. Essentially, the corpse was the hardware, running the original shadow owner's operating system.
Inside the castle at the center of the massive ship, a girl with pink twin tails and a crown sat leisurely by a window, engrossed in a horror manga. Her legs swung back and forth in black-and-white patterned thigh-high stockings, her black gothic boots making little tapping sounds.
-Ghost Princess Perona, who could freely create negative spirits, was one of Thriller Bark's Three Mysterious Monsters.
If you thought with your big head, she was a dark gothic girl.
If you thought with your little head, she was a legal gothic loli.
If you thought with your rabbit head, she was a mechanics-based monster with rock-bottom base stats-essentially a counter card.
(She was nineteen at this point, and twenty-three when she first appeared.)
"Horohorohoro..."
She let out her signature laugh at a scene she loved. Just as she was enjoying her leisurely time...
-BOOOOM-!!!!
A thunderclap startled her so badly that her soul left her body-literally. Her soul flailed in the air a couple of times before snapping back into her body.
"Kumashi-!"
"...Mmph, mmph, mmph."
Perona grabbed her pet and pulled him into her arms.
Kumashi was a zombie teddy bear covered in patches and bandages. Perona had sealed his mouth shut so he couldn't speak.
Even when she squeezed him so hard that his head nearly started spilling stuffing, he couldn't protest. All he could do was struggle and make muffled noises.
She had thought it was just one thunderclap, but then a barrage of thunder erupted outside, as though they had sailed into a thunderstorm.
"What in the world is going on-?!"
Meanwhile, at the other end of the ship, Doctor Hogback was busy conducting his medical experiments-the kind with no shortage of cadavers...
The laboratory was packed with strange instruments and test tubes filled with unidentified liquids and biological samples. The singer zombie Cindry stood respectfully beside him like an assistant.
The thunder startled him too. Thunderstorms were nothing new in the Florian Triangle, but he had never encountered thunder this relentless before.
...Outside the castle...
"Yohohoho... Lightning lad, you're far too brutal! You scared me so badly I wet my pants! Ah, although I no longer have that function... Boohoohoo..."
The skeleton in gentleman's attire, sporting an afro, leaned against the castle wall at a forty-five-degree angle as he spoke, then began crying in a thoroughly embarrassing fashion.
He was Brook, a musician and swordsman who had eaten the Revive-Revive Fruit. After Moria stole his shadow, he had been trapped in the Florian Triangle. If fate ran its course, he would become the ninth member of the Straw Hat Pirates in four years.
"...Don't make yourself cry. Speaking of which, how can you still shed tears?"
The speaker's voice was impossible to identify as male or female. It sounded as though multiple audio sources had been heavily layered, then artificially tuned into a single unified voice.
It sounded like a man and a woman, an adult and a child, a saint and a prisoner. And it was saturated with an electronic sound-literally electronic.
...He was probably a person, at least. In a certain sense, even Brook felt that, judging by appearances alone, this fellow qualified as a humanoid creature at best.
"I simply feel a serenade-like sorrow in my heart, although I don't have a heart! Yohohoho-"
Brook adjusted the brim of his hat. His temporary companion, who called himself [Satellite Shining], was undoubtedly a Rumble-Rumble Fruit user. Ever since they had met, he had maintained his elemental form nonstop with downright insane dedication. Like a genuine elemental being, he showed no trace of a human appearance. (Image posted in the comments.)
If one had to describe him, he was like a bolt of lightning splitting the long night, drawing every eye with astonishing speed and power.
He wore a silver-gray hooded trench coat and lightweight pieces of high-tech armor, giving him the sharp edge of a futuristic warrior. Where human skin should have been exposed, his elemental body flickered with electricity. Beneath his silver-gray coat spread a pair of wings formed from dense, branching bolts of lightning.
Even his head was a ball of black lightning with two eyes crackling with electricity mounted on it. A truly electrifying gaze. (Note 1)
(The explanation for black lightning is in the author's notes. Any future details requiring extra explanation will be marked "Note.")
"This is the best way. Isn't it great to solve problems so easily?"
After Sephiroth learned through Memory Crystal technology that preconceptions from his previous life had prevented him from taking an elemental form like [Thunder God], he also came to understand the key to the belief-driven power of Devil Fruits-you had to believe in it yourself.
What form would even his subconscious accept?
Sure enough... all that Yu-Gi-Oh! hadn't been for nothing!
-The Satellite Shining deck.
The current appearance of Sephiroth's Rumble-Rumble Fruit alter ego was almost an exact replica of the card art for [Satellite Shining Jetstream].
One of his main goals on this trip was to find Brook and earn a favor from Crocus. It wasn't just about getting him to save Bonney; he also hoped Crocus would agree to let him copy his medical knowledge into a Memory Crystal.
While he was at it, he would take care of Moria and give this Rumble-Rumble Fruit identity a little more weight.
At the moment, he and Brook stood on the castle's outer wall. He had no intention of going inside. Instead, he unleashed a thunderstorm right there and swept the castle's interior with saturation strikes.
Every so often, a shadow was released as its zombie was completely destroyed.
The invisible man Absalom had come to investigate, only to be zapped senseless the moment he showed up. If Sephiroth hadn't held back on the chance that he might someday acquire a way to extract Devil Fruits or obtain Lineage Factor technology, the lion-faced modified human would already have been charcoal.
His high-collared long coat was now in tatters, and he lay unconscious on the ground, twitching from time to time.
As for the relentless bombardment inside the walls, Sephiroth's extraordinary Mantra allowed him to avoid directly attacking Moria and the other key members for the time being.
Outside the walls, the clueless onlookers finally realized that someone was attacking Thriller Bark. Every so often, someone burst into tears of joy as their shadow returned.
"What a magnificent sight..."
Brook watched the Zombie Army being tossed every which way by the dense barrage of lightning. Even the General Zombies were no exception. The survivors could only hide inside buildings and cling to life.
In fact, even Moria had given up on confronting the enemy by any normal route after being struck by lightning several times. Grinding his teeth, he slipped into the shadows and vanished.
Brook had said at the beginning that only sea salt could defeat zombies.
Yet, strangely, Mr. Shining had answered, "Bullshit. A pedicure works too," leaving Brook utterly baffled. What did this lightning bombardment have to do with a pedicure?
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