Old Woods Burns Better - Chapter 10

Vivi scrubbed the deck like her royal dignity depended on it—which, at this point, it absolutely did. The salty wind whipped her hair across her face, her hands raw from the rough wooden planks, and above her stood the Emperor of Elders, Woop Slap himself, glaring down at her like a disappointed grandfather reviewing a particularly subpar family reunion.

“Cleaner, girl!” Woop Slap barked, thumping his cane against the deck. “What is this? Are you attempting to gently persuade the dirt to leave? Put your back into it! Use your wrists! Back in my day, even the barnacles had better work ethic!”

Vivi swallowed a scream and bit down on her pride like it owed her money.

This mission was supposed to be easy. Easy.


Enter the Grand Line. Infiltrate Baroque Works. Take control of the giant whale guarding the entrance like it was some sort of nautical bouncer. Neutralize the kindly old flower-obsessed lighthouse keeper, Crocus. Grab some intelligence. Maybe get a tan.

Instead, it all went to hell immediately.

First sign? Two impossibly old men sitting outside the lighthouse, sipping tea like they had all the time in the world—which, judging by their ages, was either a gross underestimation or a terrifying truth.

Second sign? They were absolutely roasting a severed, still-talking clown head like it was the main course at a comedy banquet. Woop Slap jabbed at it with his cane. “So tell me again, Nose-on-a-Stick, was it a genetic failure or a tragic accident that left your brain so underdeveloped and your survival instincts on par with a fruit fly?”

Crocus sipped his tea. “I’m voting genetic. Even when he was young, he was dumb as my goat. You can see the lineage of bad decisions right there in the nostril flare. Classic case.”

The clown head—a miserable, red-nosed, still-somehow-talking severed head—fumed. “I am the great Captain Buggy! A name feared across the seas!”

Woop Slap didn’t miss a beat. “Feared? Boy, the only thing your name inspires is pity and chronic secondhand embarrassment. If delusion was a Devil Fruit, you’d have awakened its final form.”

“Unhand me, you decrepit relics!” Buggy barked, thrashing helplessly on the table as the lighthouse goat, a creature with the fashion sense of a pirate and the dead-eyed patience of a therapist, casually chewed on his ridiculous clown wig.

Crocus gave the goat an approving nod. “Even the livestock knows you’re a disgrace. See how he’s trying to help you shed that tragic excuse for a persona? Noble creature.”

Vivi and her partner had frozen on the spot, watching this brutal psychological demolition in progress like two tourists stumbling onto an execution they hadn’t paid for.

The green-haired swordsman—Zoro, the Pirate Hunter himself—leaned against the wall nearby, smirking as he cleaned his swords. “Never seen a grown man lose an argument to a goat before,” he muttered.

The orange-haired girl beside him snorted. “Please, the goat has better leadership skills.”

Vivi had turned to her partner. “We… should leave, right?”

But no. Like idiots, they had attacked.

The last clear thing she remembered was Crocus rising slowly to his feet, his arms shimmering jet black as he muttered, “Photosynthesis Bloom: Old Garden Style.”

Then… darkness.

And now? Now she was here, scrubbing decks under the tyrannical supervision of a man who looked like he personally signed the Treaty of the Grand Line but still had enough energy to destroy her soul one withering insult at a time.

“Back straight! Wrists firm! If this were the Navy, you’d have already polished a Vice Admiral’s boots and been court-martialed twice by now!”

Vivi gritted her teeth so hard she was in danger of cutting diamonds. How, how was this her life? How was it that she, a literal princess, was being outclassed by a goat that had already achieved Employee of the Month status on this ridiculous boat?

Somewhere nearby, Buggy’s head wailed again.

“UNHAND ME, YOU VILE OLD COOT! I DEMAND—”

Thwack.

A cane gently smacked the clown nose with the precision of a sniper shot.

“Silence, Decorative Failure,” Woop Slap muttered, before turning back to Vivi. “And you, young lady, have exactly three minutes to figure out if you’re cleaning the deck or attempting to rehydrate it with your tears.”

Vivi swallowed a sob and scrubbed harder.

Tomorrow. Tomorrow, she swore, she would escape this madness. Or, failing that, at least convince the goat to unionize with her. Because at this rate, she was going to die scrubbing this deck while an ancient old man lectured her corpse about proper posthumous work ethic.

The Grand Line, she decided, was not a place. It was a curse.

— — —

Miss Valentine adjusted her parasol with all the grace and disinterest of a woman who had seen one too many sweaty bounty hunters try to hit on her with rum breath and half a missing tooth. This was supposed to be a simple hit. A quick cleanup. Find Miss Wednesday—who, surprise surprise, had turned out to be some pampered princess with a kingdom-sized death wish—and eliminate her before Crocodile’s blood pressure did the job first.

And yet…

“Why is it so quiet?” she muttered, stepping carefully over a suspiciously undisturbed pile of puke outside the main tavern.

Mr. 5 shrugged, his hands jammed deep into his pockets, where Miss Valentine knew for a fact he was lazily juggling two snot bombs. “Dunno. Maybe they already killed the pirates and passed out drunk?”

“No music. No screaming. No off-key karaoke of ‘We Killed Us Some Idiots’?” She twirled her parasol, squinting up at the rooftops. “That’s not Baroque Works standard protocol.”

She sighed. “Fine. Boost me up.”

With all the enthusiasm of a man severely underpaid for this nonsense, Mr. 5 crouched, and with a grunt and the faint scent of gunpowder, launched her skyward.

“Kilo Kilo no Mi—1 Kilo!”

She shot into the air like a perfectly dressed cannonball, rising above the clay rooftops and—

“Oh... oh hell no.”

Below her stretched what could only be described as the most bizarre public humiliation in the Grand Line's history.

Every single bounty hunter from Whiskey Peak—dozens upon dozens of them, men and women trained for years to be ruthless, cunning, and merciless—stood in neat military rows in the center of town. Correction: they knelt. On their feet. Heads bowed, hands locked behind their backs like terrified schoolchildren lined up for public execution.

Several were openly crying.

One particularly large, tattooed bruiser was audibly sniffling, hiccupping between sobs, “I’m sorry, mama! I should’ve been an accountant like you said!”

And at the center of this living diorama of despair sat…

An old man.

Not just any old man. The oldest-looking human fossil Miss Valentine had ever seen. He sat on a completely humiliated Mister 8 who was currently curled up like a lawn chair beneath the old man’s bony rear, face mashed against the dirt with a flute still sticking out of his mouth like the world’s saddest kazoo.

The old man held a cane as if it were the Supreme Staff of Authority. He was lecturing at full volume, each tap of his cane punctuated by a fresh wave of terrified sobbing.

“AND YOU!” the old man barked, jabbing his cane at Igaram’s twitching leg. “The worst failure of a royal guard I have ever seen! Your spine’s got less starch than a wet noodle! Back in my day, a guard would rather swallow his own moustache than disgrace his uniform like this!”

Igaram could only produce a low, mournful hooooooo from around his mashed flute.

“And you!” the cane jabbed toward a girl furiously scrubbing the cobblestones with a tattered rag. Princess Vivi.

Miss Valentine blinked hard. Yep. That was her. On her knees. Scrubbing a street that was, in fact, made of sand and dirt.

“Scrub harder, girl!” the old man snapped. “Royalty these days—no stamina, no humility! Back in my day, princesses at least had the decency to know the proper angle for floor polishing! Look at this! Aristocratic privilege has collapsed! I weep for the economy!”

Vivi, her face flushed with either exertion or the kind of shame that lasts generations, muttered through clenched teeth, “Yes, Master Slap…”

Miss Valentine stared down in horror.

“Master what?”

Mr. 5’s voice floated up lazily from below. “Find anything?”

“Oh, I found something,” Miss Valentine croaked. “And it’s my will to never return to this continent again.”

Below, the old man—Master Slap apparently?—was now giving a scathing moral dissertation on “why begging for mercy was the first sign of economic ruin” while the entire bounty hunter squad bawled like a preschool class after nap time was canceled.

"Aha, good joke, Valentine. Have you forgotten we're number agents ?"

Miss Valentine didn’t even have time to sarcastically remind him that numbers didn’t equal brain cells before Mr. 5 swaggered forward like a man whose ego had signed a contract his body was about to violently regret.

“Step aside, lady,” he sneered, brushing nonexistent dust from his lapel. “This is why they put a number next to my name. I’m elite. I’ll handle one shriveled grandpa and his sob-fest tea party. Watch and learn.”

With a dramatic exhale that smelled faintly of nitroglycerin and delusion, he crouched low.

“Explosive Dash!”

There was a BOOM that rattled the sand dunes, sent small desert rodents scrambling for their miserable lives, and blew the nearby cactus population straight into early retirement. Miss Valentine took a careful step forward to get a better look… and immediately regretted it. Because through the clearing dust, sailing majestically past her head like a particularly stupid and highly flammable comet, was the severed, still-smoking head of Mister 5, his shades miraculously still perched on his face.

“AAAAAAAAHHHHHHH—!”

Miss Valentine blinked.

The head turned mid-air, somehow managing to look back at her in absolute betrayal before tumbling end over end toward the nearest cactus. With a wet thump, it landed upright in the sand, his mouth still moving.

“…I’m fine,” the head mumbled weakly before a small puff of smoke escaped his nose and he promptly passed out.

Miss Valentine slowly lowered her parasol, her knuckles white on the handle. She cleared her throat, forced a trembling smile, and muttered under her breath:

“…I’m opening that bakery. Today.”

And behind her, Master Woop Slap’s voice rang out with terrifying clarity, like the final bell before an apocalypse class.

“AND THAT, CHILDREN, is what happens when you charge headfirst without proper etiquette and a written plan!”

Every bounty hunter wailed in despair.

Miss Valentine considered joining them.