Chapitre 195: Now there are two of them!
While the Straw Hats were talking Caribou was glancing around in search of his ship and crew. Surely they'd come back after they got that damned sea cow back under control.
When he turned to look to the ship's left he saw something shift in the dark waters in the distance. He squinted his eyes in an attempt to see better and when he made out what he was looking at, he nearly pissed himself in fright.
"You have to turn starboard!" Caribou shouted.
"Why would we do that? Are you trying to trick us?" Usopp asked skeptically.
Caribou pointed toward their port side. "Look! There's a damned kraken headed straight for us!"
"""..."""
"Why are you looking at me like that?! We're all going to die!" Caribou started to panic, he wished he had never decided to chase after the real Straw Hats. They were insane!
"Takako~!" Cherry cheerfully called out as the great beast approached them. "Did you bring me something~? What a good girl you are, Takako~!"
Takako smiled shyly and presented her prize, the sea cow that had been pulling Caribou's ship. It had long since fallen unconscious from mortal terror.
Caribou saw the broken ropes attached to its body and lost all hope of rescue.
"Now what should we do with you?" Nami pondered aloud, looking at Caribou with disdain.
"I-I'm just your helpless prisoner! You can't kill me, that'd be a war crime! A sin against God!" Caribou argued.
"Tying him up wouldn't do any good since he's a logia type, but we can't just let him run wild on our ship either," Franky said.
Cherry picked up the barrel they had been using as an elbow rest for their arm wrestling competition. She pushed it outside the bubble and filled it with sea water before bringing it over to Caribou.
"Get in." Cherry commanded.
Caribou really didn't want to make himself helpless like that. "Surely we can come to some arrangement-?"
Cherry grabbed him by the throat, just firmly enough to make it hard to breathe whilst her nails drew blood from where they dug into his skin.
"There's only two options. You go into the barrel, or I have a little fun with your heart?" Cherry gave him an ultimatum whilst racing a finger across his chest above his heart, effortlessly leaving a shallow cut.
While Cherry had said it in a way that insinuated she would rip his heart out with her bare hand, she was actually referring to placing a seal on his devil fruit inscription. The sea water barrel was easier though, not to mention that she didn't want to be in physical contact with this greaseball for an extended period.
Caribou got into the sea water barrel, feeling the devil fruit curse taking hold as he did so.
'Damn it all! I'll get my revenge!' Caribou cursed to himself.
Cherry popped a hole in the barrel's lid with her fuse fruit and screwed it back onto the barrel nice and tight, leaving only Caribou's head poking out.
"Nami! It looks like we've reached the undersea current!" Robin called out.
Everyone gathered to look upon the downward current that would bring them into the true depths of the ocean, several kilometers below the surface.
"Awesome! Shishishishi!" Luffy laughed.
"It's so dark I can't see the bottom…" Usopp cowered.
"Will the Sunny be able to take a current like that…?" Nami sounded unsure.
"Trust in the Sunny, She's made of Adam Tree wood after all!" Franky assured her.
"And in Takako. She won't let anything bad happen to us." Cherry added, Takako concurring with her version of a thumbs up.
"I don't suppose you have TWO krakens?" Caribou asked, looking over the edge of the drop off with Cabernet's kind assistance.
Sure enough, when they peered over the edge, they saw a yellow colored kraken with several crushed ships wrapped in its tentacles.
"OHHHH! Let's make that one pull the ship! Shishishishi!" Luffy made up his mind.
It would normally be an insane idea, but with Takako the others didn't feel all that threatened by the beast.
"I guess you just need to decide whether you want to fight it yourselves or have Takako bully him into submission." Cherry said.
"Of course we'll fight him ourselves! And you stay out of it too, Cherry! You already got to tame a kraken, this one's mine!" Luffy insisted.
Luffy, Zoro, and Sanji signed up for this particular suicidal outing. Cherry managed to fashion water tight bubble suits for them, a simple matter for a skilled craftsman especially given the malleability of the material.
"Why are you helping these idiots?! What if they get swept into the current?!" Nami asked incredulously. She knew there was no stopping them, but Cherry didn't have to enable them.
"They'll be fine~... probably. Takako can fetch them if they get swept away." Cherry did a poor job at assuring her.
The yellow kraken that was snarling at them suddenly lashed out. Before he could grab a hold of the Sunny, he was blocked by the three idiots.
Takako, who was hanging back behind the ship, caught sight of the tentacle and squinted her eyes in annoyance. Krakens were very solitary creatures and occupied vast territories. They didn't like running into each other outside of their mating season, which only happened once in every decade or so.
'Who does this punk think he is?' Was essentially what she was thinking.
If Cherry didn't stop her, she would have pummeled the poor thing into the cliff side. Takako has been stewing in Cherry's high quality vital energies for over a year now, so she was easily a step above other krakens.
The three idiots predictably defeated the big octopus, they also predictably got sucked into the current alongside the beast.
When a body that big gets jolted to the side, it moves a lot of water. So naturally the ship also got dragged into the current right behind them.
The ship turned forward, facing directly down into the black abyss. They moved so quickly that even gravity seemed to lose all meaning as they were pulled to the back of the ship instead of the front.
The weaker members of the crew passed out while the stronger members made sure they didn't get hurt while bracing themselves.
"This is rather nice isn't it? I thought it'd take a lot of time to get to the bottom, but at this rate we might even get there today." Cherry spoke whilst plastered to the wall.
"I'm faster." Cabernet claimed.
"Not over long distances, you aren't." Cherry rained on her parade.
"Am too." Cabernet insisted.
After only about a minute or so, the ship leveled off in an area of complete darkness. A few minutes after that the others all started to wake up.
"It sure is cold down here…" Usopp spoke, trying to distract himself from the fear of the endless darkness before them.
"I don't like dark places! Something is watching me, I'm sure of it!" Brook said, which made sense as this place was even darker than the Florian Triangle was.
"You're probably just feeling that creep's eyes wandering your backside, Brook." Cherry pointed at Caribou, who felt aggrieved at the accusation. He couldn't say anything though, as he really had been looking at the skeleton at that moment.
"Either that or the horrible deep sea monsters all around us." Robin said darkly.
"""Don't say something so terrible!""" Nami, Usopp, and Chopper shouted. They hoped she was joking. She was not.
"We're about seven kilometers below the surface." Franky said.
"That leaves about three more to go then." Robin continued.
"I hope Luffy, Zoro, and Sanji are okay…" Nami worried.
"I'm sure they're fine, wherever they are. Takako, dear, would you mind towing us along until we find the idiots- ahem, boys?" Cherry sweet talked the blue kraken.
Takako assented to the task and grabbed onto the Thousand Sunny gently. Cherry pulled out her book of vivre cards and told Takako which direction to bring them.
État de l’alimentation hebdomadaire
-- Classement
Power Stone 
-- Power
stone