The white smoke filling the sky, which had been as tough as solid matter, was sliced cleanly apart like tofu under that swing.
The Haki-wrapped stick struck a point within the smoke with unerring accuracy-the location of Smoker's only solid body.
"Pfft."
Smoker, who had thought victory was assured, felt as though a speeding Sea Train had slammed straight into his chest.
That overwhelming black power forcibly tore through his elemental defense, and agonizing pain instantly swept through his body.
With a dull crash, Smoker's towering body shot backward out of the white smoke like a cannonball. He smashed through the courtyard's last two stone pillars in succession without slowing, finally crashing hard into the dense forest outside Arlong Park.
Dust billowed, and the crashing of falling trees rang out without end.
The white smoke filling the sky lost its controller and rapidly dispersed into the air.
Lin Xuan stood where he was. Unable to withstand that terrifying burst of force, the mop handle in his hand was already covered in cracks before it snapped into a heap of splinters.
Lin Xuan dusted off his hands as though he had done something utterly trivial.
At the gate, all thirty fully armed elite Marines stood with their mouths hanging open, their muskets clattering to the ground.
What had they just seen?
Captain Smoker, the Logia Smoke-Smoke Fruit user known as the "supernova of Marine Headquarters"... had actually been sent flying like a baseball by this boy wielding a lousy wooden stick?
A deathly silence settled over Arlong Park.
Looking rather bored, Lin Xuan glanced at the dust rising deep in the forest. Despite all the commotion, he could sense that Smoker's "qi" had not disappeared. It had even grown more violent.
"Tch. Logias really can take a beating."
Lin Xuan rolled his slightly aching shoulders, his gaze slowly sweeping over the trembling Marine soldiers at the entrance before settling on the forest.
"Hey, how much longer are you going to lie there?" His voice carried through the ruins with a hint of a challenging smile. "If you don't come out soon, I'm heading over to that tavern for a drink."
Chapter 39: Oh No! I Screwed Over the Old Man's Precious Grandson!
A tremendous crash of shattering rock came from deep within the forest, then everything fell silent.
Lin Xuan brushed the splinters off his hands and casually discarded the remaining half of the mop handle.
Dust filled the collapsed stretch of forest in the distance. White Hunter Smoker was embedded in a slab of granite, his limbs splayed out, unable to move.
"Hey, can you still move?" Lin Xuan called toward the dust.
There was no response, only a few loose stones sliding off the rock face.
The thirty elite Marines at Arlong Park's entrance stood frozen.
They looked at the human-shaped crater in the distance, then at the boy standing amid the ruins, completely unscathed apart from his slightly damaged clothes. Their throats bobbed, but none could speak.
That was a headquarters captain, a Logia user, a monster who could pretty much do whatever he pleased in the East Blue.
And a mop handle had... sent him flying?
Just then, several muffled booms sounded overhead, as though someone were charging down through the air by stepping on it.
Lin Xuan's heart jolted. An intense sense of danger made his hair stand on end, even stronger than when he had faced Smoker.
He instinctively leaped backward, and almost the instant his toes left the ground-
Boom!
A burly figure slammed into the spot where he had just stood.
The earth shook violently, and Arlong Park's already shattered courtyard became an enormous circular crater.
The dust cleared, revealing the newcomer's broad back.
He wore a Justice Cloak and a dog-head hat. His temples were gray, but the aura he gave off was far more terrifying than Arlong's.
The Hero of the Marines, Iron Fist Garp.
"You little brat..."
Garp slowly turned around. His gaze swept over the Fish-Man corpses littering the ground, then over Smoker embedded in the distant rock, finally settling on the standard-issue Marine sword Lin Xuan had tossed aside like scrap metal.
"I sent you to the East Blue to cultivate some self-discipline, and you went straight into the demolition business!"
Garp's booming voice made Lin Xuan's eardrums buzz.
Picking his nose, the old man pointed at the devastation around them. "Look at all these dead fish. You went way too hard. If that old bastard Sengoku finds out you've caused this much trouble before even officially joining, he'll confiscate all my Senbei again."
Lin Xuan rubbed his ears and rolled his eyes. "Spare me, old man. If we'd waited for you Marines to go through your procedures, the grass on Cocoyasi Village's graves would've grown two meters high."
"Hmph. Nonsense." Garp scolded him, but there was little anger in his eyes. Instead, a trace of approval flashed through them.
He surveyed their surroundings, then suddenly frowned. "Right, where's the man in charge here? That captain called... Nezumi? Tell him to get his ass out here and clean up. I'm not bothering with this mess."
The air suddenly froze for a moment.
The surviving Marine soldiers shuddered in unison, their gazes involuntarily drifting toward a nearby stone pillar.
Lin Xuan gestured with his chin in the direction they were looking, his tone flat. "Over there."
Garp followed his gesture.
Beneath the broken stone pillar, Captain Nezumi lay with his eyes wide open and a bloody hole in his chest, long since cold.
Garp's nose-picking finger froze in midair.
For a moment, a blank expression appeared on the Hero of the Marines' face.
He blinked, seemingly checking whether his aging eyes were deceiving him, then looked at Lin Xuan and back at the corpse.
"Dead?" Garp's voice was somewhat dry.
"Yep, dead." Lin Xuan nodded as though it were perfectly natural. "The bastard pointed a gun at me and tried to pocket a hundred million Beli. It was self-defense, so I killed him while I was at it."
"Killed him... while you were at it?"
The corners of Garp's eyes twitched.
That was a branch captain!
A useless one, perhaps, but still an officer appointed by the World Government!
Killing pirates earned merit. Killing a superior Marine officer was rebellion!
"You little brat! Do you know what you've done?!" Garp strode up to Lin Xuan, spittle flying. "This means a court-martial! Do you want me to haul you into Impel Down myself?"
Garp's spittle was practically hitting Lin Xuan's face, but Lin Xuan still had the leisure to dust off his clothes.
"Stop yelling. It's not that big a deal." Lin Xuan raised his head and met Garp's eyes, which could have frightened Sea Kings to tears, a smile curling his lips. "Old man, either you smooth this over for me and say Nezumi died fighting pirates-he's dead, so he can't contradict you anyway."
"You dare bargain with me?!" Garp raised his famous iron fist.
"Or..." Lin Xuan shrugged, looking utterly unconcerned. "I'll run away right now. With my skills, I could pick any island and raise a flag. Maybe next year you'll see Pirate King Lin Xuan making headlines. Then we can meet at sea, just the two of us, you chasing and me running. How exciting."
Garp's raised fist stopped in midair, veins bulging.
Luffy alone already gave him enough headaches. If Lin Xuan became a pirate too... just imagining it made Garp's temples throb.
"You... you rotten little brat!" After struggling for words, Garp finally lowered his fist reluctantly, his old face scrunching up. "If Sengoku finds out about this... forget it! That Nezumi wasn't any good anyway! Just this once. Never again!"
Lin Xuan chuckled. He had known this would work on the old man.
"I knew Vice Admiral Garp understood the bigger picture."
"Enough flattery!" Garp glared at him irritably, pulled a packet of Senbei from inside his coat, and crunched away indignantly.
As he moved, a folded sheet of paper accidentally slipped halfway out of his roomy pocket.
Lin Xuan's sharp eyes instantly locked onto one corner of the paper.
It showed a photograph of a black-haired boy with a few freckles on his face and a brilliant smile.
Something stirred in Lin Xuan's mind, and he subconsciously activated the Qi Manipulation ability granted by the Scissor Seven template he had just obtained.
The paper rose into the air on its own and landed in Lin Xuan's hand.
"Hey! Give that back, brat!" Garp froze briefly and reached to snatch it, but Lin Xuan had already stepped back twice.
He unfolded the paper in his hand.
Sure enough, it was a wanted poster.
[Portgas D. Ace] [Bounty: 50,000,000 Beli] [Dead or alive]
"Fifty million?" Lin Xuan raised an eyebrow at the spirited boy in the photograph. "Ace hasn't been at sea that long, and he's already making quite a stir."
"Hmph, that idiot grandson of mine." When Garp mentioned Ace, his face showed exasperation at his failure to live up to expectations, but a hint of pride was hard to conceal in his voice. "He turned down an invitation to join the Shichibukai and went to the New World to pick a fight with Whitebeard instead. He really doesn't know his limits."
Lin Xuan studied the photograph on the wanted poster.
Ace showed no signs of any Devil Fruit powers in the photograph. Had he made his name solely through martial arts and Haki?
No, that wasn't right.
Lin Xuan keenly noticed that in the background of the candid photograph, a pirate ship's mast was burning.
The flames' color and shape did not resemble an ordinary gunpowder explosion. Instead, they formed a spiral pattern.
"Hey, old man." Holding the wanted poster, Lin Xuan asked with an air of casualness, "Ace got pretty lucky, huh? With his bounty rising this fast, did he eat that legendary Flame-Flame Fruit?"
Garp abruptly stopped chewing his Senbei.
In that instant, the atmosphere grew delicate once again.
Garp slowly turned his head. His normally somewhat cloudy old eyes had become exceptionally sharp, fixing on Lin Xuan.
"Lin Xuan." Garp's voice lowered, losing its previous loud, joking tone. "Only the top brass at headquarters and a very few people who've fought him know Ace ate a Logia Devil Fruit. Intelligence only confirmed and filed it yesterday. It hasn't even made the papers yet."
Garp took a step forward, and the oppressive presence of a hero descended.
"You've stayed in this backwater, the East Blue, and you've never been out of my sight for long. How did you know a specific name like the Flame-Flame Fruit?"
Lin Xuan's heart gave a slight jolt.
Careless.
As someone who had transmigrated, he knew the plot so well that the name had simply slipped out.
At this point in time, Ace had only recently obtained his power. That was information no one in the East Blue could possibly know.
Looking into Garp's sharp eyes, Lin Xuan knew that unless he provided a logical explanation, this seemingly easygoing old man would become deeply suspicious of him.
That would be extremely detrimental to his future plans within the Marines.
He had to explain this away.
Lin Xuan's mind raced, rapidly constructing a connection between the flames in the wanted poster's background and his own past experiences.
"Don't look at me like you're interrogating a criminal." A hint of distaste appeared on Lin Xuan's face as he took something from inside his clothes and waved it.
It was a yellowed scrap of parchment with worn edges.
"This is the other thing I was just about to tell you about. That bottle I fished out of the sea when I went fishing before..." The parchment looked like a page torn from an ancient book. Several crooked, concentric flame patterns were drawn on it, with a line of Ancient Script beside them and a rough set of latitude and longitude coordinates.
"When I was fishing on the Goa Kingdom's coast before, this was what was stuffed inside the drifting bottle that old sea turtle had in its mouth."
Lin Xuan shook the parchment with a rustle, his tone thoroughly unconcerned. "The picture looked like a burning pineapple to me. Since Ace was always going on about making some big news, I copied the coordinates for him when I wrote him a letter a while back. Who knew he'd actually find it?"
In fact, this was a treasure map fragment (fake) he had redeemed for 50 points in the system shop, specifically to patch any plot holes that might arise later. He had not expected it to come in handy so soon.
Garp stared at the paper, the muscles in his face twitching twice.
He was holding a flask he had swiped from Arlong's banquet table and had been about to take a drink.
Crack.
With a sharp crack, the pure silver flask instantly warped under his grip before he crushed it completely into a lump of scrap metal.
Fragrant rum streamed between his fingers and splashed over the ground, soaking his worn wooden clogs.
"That was... the Logia Flame-Flame Fruit..."
Garp forced the words through his teeth, his voice trembling slightly. "That was one of the greatest treasures on the seas! You wasteful brat! You actually gave it away as some random coordinates for a burning pineapple?!"
The Marine soldiers nearby, who had still been playing dead, were practically popping their eyes out of their sockets.
A Logia!
Before you continue