Chapter 34

"Since someone has to sink-"

He spread his hands. "Why can't it be those sitting in the high towers?"

The barrel by the door made its presence felt more and more strongly.

Whenever the two captains' gazes swept over it, their pupils contracted slightly.

They smelled it-not sea wind, not fish, but something sharper, like the sensation of a red-hot iron needle lightly scraping the inside of their back teeth.

Vergo's breathing was terrifyingly steady. He kept three fingers' breadth between his heel and the barrel, always three fingers' breadth.

"There's no other path left."

Rossi's voice dropped, as though he were stating a fact measured long ago. "When the gears jam, all you can do is smash open the gearbox.

"Or..."

He tilted his head toward the oak barrel. "Let ** decide who should shut up."

The burly lieutenant colonel uncrossed his arms.

The movement lowered the temperature in the captain's quarters another few degrees.

He stared at a spot on the floor, as though he could see the rusted rivets in the hold through the planks. "Justice..."

He chewed over the word like a piece of hard bread soaked in salt. "If we win..."

"After we win,"

Rossi picked up where he left off, "the port warehouses, the dock deeds, the ink marks in **'s ledgers-they'll all bear a different name."

He paused. "And the newspaper headlines.

"'Navy removes a cancer entrenched for sixteen years.' How does that sound?"

Greed rose in the two captains' eyes like grease floating to the surface of soup.

The lieutenant colonel clenched his knuckles white. He was imagining other kinds of weight: the weight of medals pinned to his chest, the weight of the public's gaze, the weight of a line of print in a history book.

Dreams.

The word swelled in the silence, filling every corner of the room.

Everyone's dream had a different shape, yet now the outline of the same oak barrel squeezed them into similar shapes.

Later, when Rossi pushed ** the door to the chart room aboard the **, the smell of rust from the captain's quarters behind him still seemed to cling to his collar.

The brass components of the surveying instruments gleamed coldly in the dim light.

"It's too dangerous, Rossi."

The voice came from behind the chart table.

Trebol stood in his way, while another figure behind the chart table **.

"The ships and supplies are in our hands,"

the viscous voice said persuasively, "but we're short on people.

"Going after the Jedi Family now is too hasty."

He was the oldest of the four and often regarded himself as their future strategist.

Now he was trying to change Rossi's mind.

"You may not understand. The Jiedi Family isn't an opponent we can crush at will.

"Especially when they're all together and there are only a few of us."

A few people against hundreds.

Even with Doffy and Rossi, the four of them would have to give everything they had to handle a ship carrying a few dozen men.

If they ran into hundreds prepared for battle, they would practically be gambling with their lives.

In Trebol's eyes, Doflamingo, possessed of such a rare gift, would stand at the top sooner or later. Why gamble now?

"What part of making a living at sea doesn't involve risk?"

Undisguised contempt seeped into Rossi's voice. "Only by becoming strong enough can we truly gain a foothold."

Giant sea beasts, storms that tore sailing ships apart, even accidentally stumbling upon some powerful figure's secrets... any of them could make a person disappear without a sound.

"That's why I came up with this plan."

The plan was simple, a play performed time and again throughout history: feigned surrender.

With those two ships under their control, the Jedi Family would see them as prey already caught in the net.

"Have Pica and Diamante hide aboard the Gear and the Lever.

"The moment they encounter anyone from the Jedi Family, open fire."

Two ships suddenly turning their guns would be enough to throw the other side into confusion for a while.

"The three of us will go straight for 'Big Bucks' Thompson.

"Once the leader falls, even the biggest gang will fall apart."

That was Rossi's plan.

Trebol's original idea, however, had been to blow up the ships after taking the supplies, then leave without looking back.

Rossi could only shake his head inwardly.

Typical raider thinking: looking only at today, never tomorrow.

"Trebol, we're heading for the very top. We don't have time to drag our feet-"

In another possibility he knew of, that Family had taken more than a decade to gradually make a name for itself and attract some later recruits.

But more than a decade? Too long.

He walked to the wooden rack by the wall and pulled out a recent newspaper.

Printed on the page was a boy with hair as wild as a lion's mane and eyes as cold as if he had just crawled out of a sea of blood.

The black-and-white image could not conceal that vicious aura.

The headline sprawled glaringly beneath the photograph: "'Devil's bloodline'

"Comes aboard! Roger Pirates gain another deadly blade!"

The sea breeze carried the cries of gulls, beating again and again against the edge of the white stone embankment.

The breakwater extended into the deep blue, with a ship moored at its end.

Its hull gleamed with fresh paint, its gunports arranged in neat rows, yet none of that could hide its ostentatious wealth. Rather than a warship, it looked more like an expensive toy displayed in a shop window.

The deck was packed with people.

Every face turned in the same direction, toward the figure seated in the broad armchair.

He was a balding middle-aged man whose belly stretched his silk shirt tight.

He rarely spoke. Whenever an indistinct syllable rolled from his throat, someone beside him rushed to handle everything for him.

"Lord Thompson, my father asked me to convey his regards."

"Mm."

"Lord Thompson, I'm from the Flashgold Merchant Guild-"

"Sit."

Another smiling face leaned close, but before the man had finished half his sentence, two men in black suits silently hoisted him up and dragged him out of that glittering circle.

No one spared him another glance, as though a speck of dust had merely been brushed away.

The ship had a name so blunt it bordered on vulgar: the Money.

But no one dared laugh.

More than ten years ago, quite a few people had called its owner by another nickname behind his back.

Those voices had long since sunk, along with the people who uttered them, to some cold stretch of seabed in the North Blue.

Far away, at the other end of the breakwater, someone lowered the newspaper in his hands.

The far-too-young face in the picture folded into shadow.

The person holding the newspaper said nothing, merely turning the side bearing the picture toward the two beside him.

A gaze behind sunglasses swept over the paper, followed by a short sneer.

The other, viscous figure instinctively turned his head away, not daring to meet the eyes on the page.

"Fifteen."

The person holding the newspaper spoke, keeping his voice very flat. "At this age, someone else is already standing on the deck of that ship at the end of the world."

A gull's cry suddenly pierced the air.

"And us?"

He continued, every word like a polished stone. "Facing some local boss in a little North Blue town, we still have to work out how many steps to retreat, how long to wait? Thinking like that-"

He stopped. The unfinished words hung in the air, stinging more than if he had spoken them.

The viscous figure hunched his shoulders, his face flushing dark red.

The one wearing sunglasses stood then, extending an arm between them.

"Enough."

His voice carried an unquestionable tone, as much a declaration as a command to stop.

He pushed up the sunglasses that had slipped down his nose, their lenses reflecting the flickering lights aboard the distant "Money"

as he spoke. "The plan stays the same.

"If we can't even do this..."

He paused. The wind carried the clamor from the deck to them for a moment, then quickly swept it away.

"That will prove this is all we amount to."

The wind shifted, carrying brine and faint music from afar through the empty corner of the docks.

The newspaper was folded again and tucked into a pocket.

Three shadows left the edge of the embankment, silently melting into the deeper night as though they had never existed.

Only at the end of the breakwater did that enormous vessel named the "Money"

remain brilliantly lit, like a golden ** nail driven into the dark sea.

The sea breeze thinned the clamor on deck into an intermittent hum.

Neatly cut steaks of exotic beast meat gleamed coldly with fat, wine clung to the rims of stemmed glasses without quite dripping, and fruit platters were piled with thornfruit from the East Blue, their skins mottled green and red like congealed bruises.

Everyone who could linger here had numbers embedded in the lines of their palms.

They gathered in clusters of three or five, heads drawing together and apart, the whispers rolling from their throats shattering amid the clinking glasses.

Then came a chorus of laughter, always so uniform it seemed measured.

With every laugh, a deal counted in millions silently branded its mark upon the air.

"So this is what power in Spandamruze looks like..."

In a shadowed corner, the gaze behind the lenses moved slowly.

Wesker leaned against the rail, his fingertips unconsciously rubbing the slender stem of an empty glass.

The ship was suffocatingly large.

The sails had a muted ivory sheen beneath the moonlight, and the string music flowing from the musicians' fingers was torn into fragments by the wind.

Scents-cooked meat, alcohol, perfume, and sweat steaming through the gaps in fine clothes-all mingled into a viscous current that burrowed deep into his nostrils.

He blinked, seeming to see countless grains of golden sand spilling from those swaying sleeves.

The sand gathered into rivers, and the rivers solidified into invisible hands that gripped everything in sight by the throat.

That power mingled with the complex smells filling his surroundings and seeped into his corneas.

He had to have it.

His gaze brushed ever so lightly over the figure surrounded ** the crowd, and the merchant tightened his grip on the glass stem.

"I advise caution regarding the food, Mr. Wesker."

A flat voice came from beside him.

The man called Codename 8674 stood with his feet apart and hands behind his back, his face beneath his sunglasses utterly expressionless, like a reef dressed in a suit.

"Given our intervention, the Jedi Family won't act openly.

"But if they infiltrate through the digestive system..."

The rest vanished beneath the dull thud of waves against the hull.

"I know."

Wesker nodded, the liquid in his hand swaying gently with the motion.

He had not let a single drop touch his lips all evening.

Today's gathering had come about because certain people who did not know their place had colluded with the local "Four Suits"

and attempted to score a crack in the Jedi Family's scepter.

The latest report was that the rats who had fled to sea had been intercepted by Spandamruze's two warships-the Gear and the Lever-working together, and were now being escorted back to port to await Thompson's final judgment.

It seemed those brothers' voyage could only end here.

Just as well.

Once the Jedi Family was satisfied with this, he could terminate that contract with Germa 66 that could suck even his marrow dry.

Yet somewhere in his heart, a very faint regret he could not even name still rose and fell gently with his breathing.

"They're here."

Someone murmured the words.

The entire deck abruptly fell silent.

Every face turned toward the horizon, and even the musicians' fingers hovered above their strings.

Three black dots pierced the twilight.

They rapidly swelled: first the spikes of masts, then billowing sails, and finally the cold, hard outlines of hulls-

Two warships flanked an armed freighter, breaking free of the far side of the horizon and racing toward the harbor.

Within a few heartbeats, people could already make out the emblems on the sides of the two leading vessels: a gear and a lever.

Together with the Bearing, which patrolled year-round, they formed Spandamruze's iron net at sea.

Now that iron net was drawing closed as it returned.

Smoke rose between the Lever's masts, drawing murmurs from the crowd ashore.

"Look, the Gear's damaged too..."

Three sailing ships slowly entered view, their hulls covered in scorch marks and gashes.

Ink-like stains across their sails silently told of the clash at sea.

The armed merchantman trailing behind was especially wretched-its hull planks curled outward, as though a giant beast had gnawed on them.