章 27: Chapter 36. Big Mom Vs. Elbaf
Chapter 36. Big Mom Vs. Elbaf
A petulant, old woman weeped ashore as she gauntly gazed at the misty sea. The evening was cold, the air chiller than usual, but her tears were warm with raw emotion as she reminisced her loss.
Everything she had worked for…
All she had earned and achieved.
And yet, it was never— would never be enough. Not with what she had lost.
It might have been many years ago, but that which had been taken from her still made her heart ache, broken like the island she was nested on.
"Mo-the-r Carmel!" Big Mom continued to weep while Prometheus tried to comfort her, even warming her with his heat. "I miss you mother. Why did you leave?"
"Where did you go?"
A few dozen sharks I could kill, but the ones I was struggling against were one too many. I felt my weight diminish as the oxygen supply within me dwindled.
Terrified that I might actually reach Davy Jone's Locker, a warm liquid started oozing from my body as the shark's teeth began sinking in my flesh.
When hope bleached, and all seemed bleak, I sighed and left it all to fate.
More bubbles escaped through my mouth and nose, dark tunes played in my ears, while more blood oozed from my veins, until I started seeing the light.
It was a strange light, flickering like hope and descending toward me. The closer it got, the more ambient it became as it enlarged, taking on the shape an animate object, like a man. An exponentially large man. A giant?
"BUBUBUBUBU…" Large bubbles swirled around me as the giant face in the descending light came into view. Simultaneously, the sharks wiggled their fins in a scattered escape, either from fear or reverence to the incoming giant.
His features weren't clear in the dark waters, but I sensed he was here to save me, thus allowing him the honor. His giant arms wrapped around me and pulled me close to his warm body as he swam back to the surface.
Next thing I remembered was feeling a heavy weight pushing on my chest and forcing water out of my lungs. I had unluckily drunk a lot of sea water over the years, but no experience had been this dreary. This was the pinnacle of all those moments.
"Gah- Coff! Coff!!" I came to as a refreshing wind rushed to fill my lungs. I spout out more water as I struggled to seat.
As my vision cleared, I noticed the atmosphere was still dump and dull from the dark of the evening and the fog. Shaking my head to relieve my ears of the water, I finally processed the words from the booming, strong voice that had been talking to me.
His identity was no longer a mystery. It was Loki, the prince of Elbaf that had saved me from the uncanny ordeal. However, he was not whom I was thinking about.
"Where is she!?" I blurted out with a promise of vengeance in my tone as I stood.
I didn't need his reply. The devil herself was standing before me, her eyes giving me a ghastly, gaunted stare, like she was disappointed I hadn't perished by her antics.
I clenched my jaw and fists, and staggered as I lunged at her. She didn't need to be disappointed or look resentful. One of us would definitely die here!
"Wait!" Loki tried to stop me, but his words fell on deaf ears and bubbling rage.
"YOU PIECE OF ****!!"Angrily, I cursed, blustering before throwing my fist at the unshaken girl. "I WILL TAKE OF YOUR HE—"
I paused the second my hurled fist landed on nothing but the air as Hela's body turned into mist and waved off to the side where she reappeared.
Too angry to contemplate, I followed her with another fist, only to meet the same fate. This only seemed to make me wild with rage as I yelled vocabulary I didn't even realized I knew.
"Please calm down… She can't be touched…" all the while, Loki tried to reason with me, but it was my exasperation that finally got me to halt for a second.
"I'm sorry for what has happened," Loki started apologetically. "I'm sorry for my sister's behavior."
"Behavior!?" I retorted with a disrespectful snap. "The bi*** just tried to drown me! Who knows what she has done to my family!??"
"Your siblings are all fine," Loki said with solemn nod at me. "My crew made sure of that."
I felt a weight lift for a second. "And my mother?"
Loki hesitated, giving Hela a hopeful stare. Hela, dead as she looked, nodded at her kneeling brother before resuming her hollow stared.
"Hela would never let anything bad happen to your mother," Loki said.
"I have an experience that would suggest otherwise," I grumbled, seeing lesser reasons to keep blustering. Instead, it was time I got some answers before reaffirming my decision to kill Hela.
"What kind of devil fruit power grants one dominion over sharks and the ability to turn into mist?" I wondered while giving Hela a look of disdain. "And why the hell did she ambush us and try to kill us!!!?"
Hela remained unmoved, but Loki took a long, sad sigh.
"Look at her eyes," Loki requested.
"They are the hollow shells of a murderer who is seconds our from an execution," I said without giving Hela as much as a glance.
"Close," Surprisingly, Loki accepted my response. "But look closely, and you will see."
For the sake of Loki's impatience, I gave it a go. The light had been snuffed out of them, and there wasn't really anything interesting for a while, until I gazed at her closely and noticed the momentous difference.
"The stars. They are barely there," I observed, recalling how I had registered the sparkling stars in Hela's eyes when we first met.
My moment of wonder got quickly replaced by my anger and rage. "Several stars are missing, but how does that justify the crime she just tried to commit?"
"It doesn't," Loki said with the patience of a seasoned leader, helping to calm the adrenaline still surging within me. "But it brings you closer to understanding."
"My sister ate a strange fruit that cursed her eyes with the golems of chaos, the heretics of demise… the harbingers of death," Loki paused to take a breath. "The sharks that tried to drown you and your kin."
"They were just pups when she first saw them in her eyes," Loki continued. "She used to speak fondly of them and the wisdom they sang to her in her sleep. But no one could have guessed they were a devious kind that secretly plotted the extinction of mortals."
"When they matured, they wreaked havoc, killed countless, and earned the moniker 'Death.' And…" Loki hesitated, his voice trembling, "And…"
He fell silent for a moment. "All who survived called my sister the Goddess of Death, even though she hadn't done anything wrong."
"Even though she was the first to die by their songs, long before they emerged into the open," Loki muttered a curse under his breath.
I absorbed the information in silence, my gaze shifting to Hela, now struggling against a sense of pity.
I turned back to Loki. "If all of this is true… why would you want to betroth her to me?"
I couldn't help but wonder what level of mischief he might be playing at.
"To atone for Elbaf's mistake against your mother," Loki explained. "And to offer Hela a second chance at life."
"I thought you said she was…" I tried to make sense of what Loki had said. My understanding was that Hela was merely a vessel for the sharks— or something along those lines.
"Yes," Loki acknowledged with a sorrowful tone. "Hela is dead, but her soul never left her body. Death retained it, as it's integral to its survival."
"Her incomplete death is why she can exist in a ghostly form, and her soul is what keeps her face bright despite her other dark features," Loki explained.
"The strange Devil Fruit my sister ate is the Yomi Yomi no Mi (Revive-Revive Fruit), Model: Soul Reaper. It causes the user to die but traps their soul within their lifeless body, turning them into an undead being— a literal embodiment of death."
The term 'Soul Reaper' reminded me of Jake's past life, and the nature of the devil fruit got me thinking about Brook (who ate a similar Devil Fruit). But what did it mean for Hela?
"But she interacts… almost naturally," I noted, trying to be delicate and considerate.
"Since her soul never left, her consciousness is still intact. It's part of why I believe her complete sense of self can be restored," Loki said, his voice tinged with hope.
"Oh," I began piecing the details together. Loki must have intended for Big Mom to use her ability to restore Hela's soul, killing two birds with one stone if Big Mom accepted Hela's betrothal once she was restored to her right state. There was some mischief in it after all.
"I see what you were hoping for," I said, my tone almost sympathetic. "But once Big Mom realizes that Hela tried to sink us, it will be a war you can't escape."
Loki nodded in understanding, but I hardly saw his nod as I continued.
"Besides, why would you think Mama would help you with Hela's soul after all of the hate she received from the giants?" I noticed an astonished look on Loki's face, but continued anyway. "I know she did some wrong when she was young, but…"
I paused to structure my argument as I recalled what I knew about Big Mom.
Charlotte Linlin was a naive but loving girl when her parents abandoned her on the shores of Elbaf. She was innocent, but cursed with the terrible hunger pangs that had destroyed so many towns, albeit her young age.
Her fate was already sealed since birth, blessed with the size of a giant child and the strength that surpassed a giant's shield. Barely five years of age, she accidentally murdered an elder giant with just one punch, after starving for five days while participating in an important giant festival.
A while later, she found herself in a loving children's orphanage, but fate only had terrible plans for her future.
On her sixth birthday celebration, she accidentally ate more than the delicacies on the table, leading to the sudden disappearance of her fellow orphans, and Mother Carmel - the woman she still adores so much to this day.
Well… it was either that, or being sold to the Marines by Mother Carmel who was actually a child trafficker. Following the events of her sixth birthday, her fate finally settled for a ruthless pirate career that led her to becoming the Emperor of the Sea. Even with all of that, her dream to build a perfect world that discriminated against no one survived the trauma of her past.
"She aims to eradicate the kind of discrimination the giants showed her!" I found myself ranting, angry at something I didn't even know bothered me.
"She was just a little girl who didn't know what was happening with her, but instead of helping her, the giants chose to abandon her!" I seethed with rage as I spoke. "There was no one better than your kind who could assist her, shape her future and save her from a ruthless existence."
I was now getting more angry with the giants. I was wrong to think they could be good rulers of the world. I was now looking at them from a different angle, seeing their dark side and hating them for it.
Here he was with his 'beloved' sister, but what Loki didn't see was that it was Linlin's story all over again. The giants are faced with a problem, and they choose to refrain and let the world handle it instead, when they could do something about it..
"Nothing will ever justify all the crimes Mama has committed," I struggled to control my breathing, venting up all I wanted to say. "But the giants will always carry a part of the blame."
Feeling murderous, I chose to walk it off to find my family before I could start a war that Big Mom definitely would.
Given the strict adherence to the rules, the Davy Back Fight still had to happen, even through the night. And when it did, it would be a full blown war.
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