"Garp! You bastard! Can't you knock before coming in?!" Admiral Sengoku stared at the office door, which swayed precariously from the impact. Veins bulged on his forehead as he roared, "And get your booger off my report!"
"Huh? Sorry, sorry." Garp flicked the booger away without a care, then picked up the detailed mission report on the desk and read it with relish. "Well, well. 'Complete annihilation, total eradication.' That kid really doesn't pull his punches! I like him!"
"Like him? Do you know what this means?" Sengoku seethed. He pointed at the few simple lines on the report, but his voice was exceptionally grave. "It means he went through no judicial proceedings whatsoever and executed every pirate right there at sea! His ruthlessness is even more extreme than Akainu's! This is a double-edged sword, Garp! Used well, he'll be a mighty weapon for the nation, keeping the seas in check. Used poorly, he could become a thug more terrifying than the pirates!"
"A thug? Hahahaha!" Garp laughed as though he had heard the greatest joke in the world, almost laughing himself to tears. "Sengoku, Sengoku, you think too much! In this day and age, you want to reason with those bastards murdering, burning, and selling slaves in the New World? Follow procedure? By the time you finish their trials, hundreds more civilians will have lost their homes and families!"
Garp abruptly stopped smiling. A terrifying gleam flashed through his usually sleepy eyes.
"To deal with trash, you have to be more vicious than they are! Beat them until they're afraid, until they don't even have the courage to set sail! That's our justice as Marines! That kid is just carrying out what I've always wanted to do, but never managed because you lot kept stopping me!"
"You..." Garp's twisted reasoning left Sengoku momentarily speechless.
"Enough, enough. Stop arguing." Zephyr waved a hand from beside them, interrupting their dispute. "Garp has a point. Against an enemy on Rocks's level, what we need is the kind of brute force Yas has. We can discuss keeping him in check later. Right now, we need to figure out how he completed the mission so quickly."
"Do you even need to ask?" Garp crumpled the report into a ball and casually tossed it into the trash, speaking as though it were obvious. "He sailed out, ran into them with a 'bang,' beat them up with a 'bam, bam, bam,' and finished them all off with a 'boom'!"
That crude, simplistic explanation made the corners of Sengoku the "Resourceful General's" eyes twitch wildly.
"Let's go, let's go! Stop wasting time here!" Garp gave neither of them a chance to continue the discussion. He hooked an arm around Zephyr's neck and dragged him outside. "That kid must be starving by now. We need to hurry and bring him the best meat as a reward! He's our Navy's future treasure!"
Marineford, Third Mess Hall.
Unlike its usual bustle, the Third Mess Hall was exceptionally quiet that day.
Or rather, one particular corner of the mess hall was as silent as a vacuum.
Yas sat at a long table, with a mountain of plates piled higher than his head in front of him. Using Three-Finger Nukite twice in a row, coupled with awakening Armament Haki for the first time, had exhausted the energy in his body. He urgently needed large quantities of protein and energy to replenish it.
He held an entire roasted Sea King leg bigger than his head, tearing through it voraciously, even crunching through the bones.
Not a soul sat within ten meters of him.
Every Marine who came to eat, whether a recruit or a field officer, instinctively gave Yas a wide berth the moment they saw him. They went to the other end of the mess hall, even lowering their voices considerably, as though terrified of disturbing the primordial beast at its meal.
Were they kidding?!
That god of slaughter was back!
In less than ten hours, he had single-handedly wiped out the Butcher Pirate Crew, with its eighty-million bounty!
The news had already swept through all of Marineford like a hurricane!
Those who had mocked Yas at the docks earlier did not even dare raise their heads now. As for Major Raymond, who had led the provocation, word had it that he had wet himself in fright upon seeing Gore's severed head and was now in confinement.
In the eyes of every Marine, Yas was no longer a "genius" or a "rising star."
He was a living legend, a walking taboo no one dared provoke!
Amid that strange silence, someone kicked the mess hall doors open with a bang.
"Hahahahaha! The smell of meat! I can smell it!" Garp's signature laughter boomed through the mess hall like rolling thunder.
Everyone turned toward the sound and saw Garp the Hero striding inside with a freshly slaughtered giant bison over his shoulder, blood still dripping from it. Admiral Zephyr followed behind him, looking helpless.
Every Marine sprang to their feet in unison and saluted!
"Vice Admiral Garp! Chief Instructor Zephyr!"
"All right, all right, sit down and eat!" Garp waved impatiently. His gaze swept across the mess hall and immediately locked onto that "isolated" corner.
"Hey, kid! There you are!"
Carrying the bison, which was taller than he was, Garp walked straight toward Yas.
The soldiers around them backed away in fright, clearing a wide path.
Garp stopped in front of Yas, glanced at the mountain of plates, then at Yas's lean, solid body without a trace of excess fat, and nodded in satisfaction.
"Good! You have to eat well to fight well! With a build like yours, how could you not eat more meat!"
With that, he threw the still-twitching bison from his shoulder onto the table with a bang, making the plates jump.
"It's on me today! This Ironclad Bull is a New World specialty. Firm meat, incredibly nourishing! Eat all you want! If it's not enough, I'll catch another!"
Yas raised his head, glanced at the bison on the table, which was the size of a small car, then at Garp's wide-open mouth. He said nothing, merely tearing off another Sea King leg in silence.
"Hahaha! Still as surly as ever, this kid!" Garp did not mind. He tore a large chunk of raw meat off the bison himself, stuffed it straight into his mouth, and chewed, blood running down from the corners of his mouth.
Zephyr frowned at the sight. He pulled over a chair and sat down, watching Yas with a complicated look in his eyes.
The young man before him was growing at a rate that had gone completely beyond his comprehension. He had read that mission report no fewer than ten times, particularly the description Bullet had written in the appendix with trembling handwriting-"sank a giant ship with one finger."
Zephyr knew very well what that meant.
It meant the power of Yas's Hell Stab had undergone another qualitative leap! It might even have surpassed the strike that had forced Garp back on the training grounds!
And all of this had happened in less than ten hours!
"Kid." After a long silence, Zephyr finally spoke, his voice low. "I read the mission report. You did very well, even exceeding all our expectations."
He paused, his piercing gaze seeming intent on seeing Yas inside and out.
"But I have one question. Did something else happen to you on that island?"
Zephyr's intuition told him that something seemed different about Yas since his return. His aura was more concentrated than before, and more... dangerous.
Yas swallowed the meat in his mouth, raised his eyes, and met Zephyr's gaze.
He knew he could not hide his awakening of Haki from these two men who stood at the pinnacle of the world.
Nor had he intended to hide it.
Yas slowly raised his right hand and clenched it into a fist.
He did not activate his Lightning Release Chakra.
He simply held his fist casually in midair.
The next second.
A faint, almost imperceptible black sheen instantly covered his entire knuckles, like ink dripping into clear water!
Hum!
A barely perceptible tremor sounded in the air.
"Pfft!"
Garp, who had been wolfing down meat, suddenly spat out all the beef he had yet to finish chewing!
His eyes widened like brass bells as he stared fixedly at Yas's unremarkable fist, which nevertheless radiated a heart-pounding aura. His expression was a hundred times more shocked than when Yas had forced him back with Four-Finger Nukite!
"A-Armament Haki?!!"
Garp's voice cracked from sheer shock. He seized Yas's arm and looked him up and down as though inspecting a monster.
"You brat... what the hell did you do out there?! It hasn't even been a day! How can you already use Haki?!"
Before you continue