章節 242: Rebecca

Cherry, Nightmare, saw a large familiar figure walk into the room along with his two grandsons. Chinjao stood tall and proud, much unlike the depressed and relatively meek air he gave off the first time Cherry met him, undoubtedly due to his sharp and pointy head being restored to its former glory.

Chinjao met Nightmare's eyes, but gave no sign that he recognised or even acknowledged her presence except for the ghost of a smile that formed on his lips. His two Grandsons also met her gaze, but they lacked the experience and power of observation to see through her disguise instantly as Chinjao had.

Nightmare approached the trio and directly offered her services. "Old timer, would you like me to set your creaky bones and aching joints right with my massage arts? Although we are to be competitors, it would be too sad for you to fall in the preliminaries to a bunch of youngsters barely out of diapers without even showing your full might, no?"

One could have heard a pin drop in the following silence. Everyone held their breath, waiting to see if Chinjao would turn the young woman into a bloody paste. Sai and Boo looked simultaneously furious at Nightmare, but also nervous that their Grandfather would burst a gasket and get himself disqualified for fighting outside the arena.

"Hiyahohohoho!" Contrary to everyone's expectation, he didn't lash out in rage but gave a hearty laugh instead. "Massage arts, eh? Did your master tell you to tease me just like she did back in the day? I'd suppose she'd be a grandmaster at her age now. Go ahead then, it'll remind me of old times. Just don't put me to sleep."

Nightmare smiled, she didn't expect that Chinjao would actually play along well enough to improve her disguise. She wondered if the master he referred to was a real person and if she was the one who taught Serene. It wasn't terribly unlikely, as Chinjao was a renowned martial artist so he would be familiar with other martial arts masters around the world.

Nightmare did as she said she would, and also like the gladiator Ricky from before she gave him vital energy to enrich and strengthen him. This was different from a direct infusion like she did for Whitebeard two years ago. She used her fusion fruit to create a bundle of vital energy that would slowly release itself into the body over the course of about half a day. It wasn't as great a boost as a direct infusion, but lasted a great deal longer.

It wasn't as draining as what she did for Whitebeard either, as she had gone up a realm since then so her vital energy was not only in larger supply but in greater quality as well. Chinjao didn't really compare to Whitebeard either, though she wouldn't say that out loud.

"There you go, old man. Like this, you could take a punch from Garp no problem, maybe even two before he put your lights out again." Nightmare said.

"Hiyahohohoho! Just for that, I won't go easy on you!" Chinjao laughed goodnaturedly.

"I wouldn't ask you to. We have to put on a good show for the audience, hm?" Nightmare said with a meaningful look.

Chinjao nodded and stood up. "Let's go, Sai, Boo."

Once out of earshot, or at least what he thought was out of ear shot, Sai asked, "Do you know that woman, Old Man? Who is her master that you mentioned?"

Chinjao responded with an admonishing knuckle to his head. "You need to work on your haki, you fool of a grandson. You won't become the head of my Happo Navy like that!"

Sai rubbed his head and couldn't think of a reason that he deserved a blow to the head. It obviously had something to do with that woman from before, but he didn't know what.

Nightmare didn't stick around to twiddle her thumbs waiting for the tournament to start, but instead went to explore the colosseum. The bars on the windows were made of sea stone alloy, making it seem more like a prison than an arena for entertainment. She found out that that was a very apt comparison after ten minutes of wandering the halls.

"You guys look pretty rough." Nightmare said to the gladiators sitting in a prison cell, many of whom were heavily bandaged from injuries and even had amputated limbs.

"..." The gladiators paid no mind to her, sulking in their pitiful circumstances. Cherry didn't blame them, as it was not outside the realm of possibility that visitors to their little cell mocked them from outside the bars.

"Are any of you willing to tell me a little more about Dressrosa? I'm a foreigner in these lands and the city outside these walls seems a little too perfect for a country run by a ruthless pirate like Doflamingo." Nightmare said.

That caught their interest, as it wasn't common for someone to badmouth Doflamingo in his own domain, even if the bad mouthing was entirely true.

"How about I bring you some food in exchange for answering my questions? I doubt you're being fed properly, right?" Nightmare hammered the final nail in the coffin to seal the deal.

"Food first." One of them spoke up. They were already as good as dead, there was no harm in taking a risk to acquire a decent meal for the first time in years.

"I'll be right back, then." Nightmare left them and soon returned with a whole food cart with her. She had purchased the entire stock from the vendor and added a little extra to rent the cart from him. The man was more than happy to make such a big sale and finish working for the day.

The gladiators in the cage were dumbfounded.

"What? Did you think I'd only feed one or a few of you or something? A friend of mine wouldn't forgive me if I did that. Well, he would, but only reluctantly. Okay, maybe he wouldn't even be mad at me in the first place, but that's besides the point." Nightmare spoke in a stream of consciousness.

The gladiator's were moved to tears by this act of kindness and generosity. They had rarely been treated as fellow human beings in their time fighting for their lives in the colosseum, and never by an outsider.

All in all, Cherry didn't get too much information from them. They knew of Dressrosa's local legends as well as some of the tyranny that Doflamingo had inflicted upon them. The story about how the previous royal family was deposed was interesting, in a tragic sort of way. The gladiators only knew the side of the story that Doflamingo told the public, that the previous king Riku had gone mad, stealing the peoples' wealth on false pretenses before turning around and slaughtering them. However, they were quite insistent that the story had to be a load of bullshit, even if they didn't know the full story themselves.

"Why are you so sure that it's not true though? Just because Doflamingo is an evil bastard, that doesn't mean that this King Riku wasn't guilty of those things." Nightmare asked them.

They looked at each other as they ate the fried rice dish from the food cart. They seemed to communicate between themselves with their eyes some unknown secret that they were unwilling to tell her.

"They can't believe it because of me. They have too much faith in my feeble self." A female gladiator said, walking over from behind a nearby corner. "I am that king's granddaughter, so they cannot believe that the king could be such a fiend, especially with his previous track record of pacifism and charity."

She had pink hair in a long braid that came out from beneath a brass helmet. Her only other armor was a round shield on her back, a scale mail bikini top and loin cloth, and knee high sabatons.

"You're not dressed like that by choice are you?" Nightmare raised an eyebrow at her.

"This is the only armor they allow me to wear. I can either accept the modest protection this offers me or protect my modesty without any armor at all." She stated flatly, though a light blush at her cheeks betrayed her inner sense of shame.

"That's it, I'm gonna kill that giggly bastard." Cherry swore with a glint in her eyes. This girl couldn't be much older than Robin was when she had met her all those years ago.

The pink haired girl flinched slightly, even though the anger displayed on Nightmare's face wasn't directed at her. She was very used to murderous looks being sent her way, but she had never seen or felt one so focused and intense. She even briefly even believed the woman could do as she said she would before her logical brain took over and told her it was a false hope.

"Do not pity me. I am a gladiator and I will fight my own battles." She said, mostly to steel her resolve rather than to admonish Nightmare.

"Alright, then." Nightmare's anger seemed to scatter to the winds like it was never there to begin with. She held out her hand for a handshake. "I'm Nightmare."

"Rebecca." Rebecca replied and took the hand, which gripped her hand more firmly than she would expect given how soft it was. "Thank you for giving my friends here a proper meal, by the way."

"It's a fair trade, nothing more. They were very forthcoming in sating my curiosity after all." Nightmare said. "Perhaps we can talk some more later, but for now I want to see if I can catch one of these fairies I heard about just now."

As Nightmare walked away, Rebecca and the gladiators got the feeling she was an eccentric person. Then they got the impression that she was a dangerous person, as each step left a pulverized footstep behind in the stone. Apparently she was still angry even if she hid it well.

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章節 243: Fairy

Cherry was pretty pissed off right now. She didn't reckon that Doflamingo was the type to perv on young girls, so Rebecca's overly revealing armor was probably only meant to humiliate her. She wasn't about to accept any of his excuses, though.

'I need to calm myself…' Cherry thought to herself.

The method by which she would do so was to hunt down one of the 'fairies' that were so well known in Dressrosa. Cherry figured that the small creatures scurrying around with unusual strong life forces was a good bet. There was even one sneaking around the colosseum.

Cherry disappeared in a flash of high speed movement and snatched something small as it tried to scurry past her feet unnoticed.

"Geh! I've been caught by a human!" The small creature cried out.

It looked like a tiny person with a big head and pointy nose, its body was pear shaped and had a bushy tail. The hair and tail were both hot pink and it wore a green sock hat, coat, and pants with little brown boots.

The 'fairy' struggled with all his might in Cherry's grip, but even with his physical strength that was greater than a grown human man's he could not budge Cherry's fingers even a little bit.

"Well, hello there. Aren't you just the cutest?" Cherry said.

"Huh? Do you really think so?" The fairy paused in his struggling and asked innocently.

"Of course!" Cherry assured.

The fairy burst into tears. "The human thinks I'm cute! Even though I'm a man! This is the worst day of my life!"

Cherry was caught off guard by the sudden outburst. She hadn't intended to make him cry, although she secretly thought it was kind of funny.

"Don't cry, I was just teasing you. It's my favorite pastime, teasing strong masculine men." Cherry lied.

"R-really?" The fairy's crying slowed down.

"Sure." Cherry affirmed.

"Oh, so I am a big strong manly man! I knew it! HAHAHA!" The fairy seemed to gain tremendous confidence.

"Yes, and that big strong manly man is currently trapped in the dainty little hand of a weak and helpless woman." Cherry said with a smirk.

"Ehhhhh?! S-so I'm really not a big strong manly man after all…?" The fairy started to tear up again in despair.

"I'm just teasing you again, of course. I'm obviously super strong myself." Cherry smirked. She liked how horrendously naive the little guy was.

Cherry brought the fairy into an empty room where they wouldn't be disturbed. Once the fairy had calmed down again she asked, "What are you doing here in the colosseum? Stealing weapons?"

"We don't steal anything!" The fairy insisted. "And I can't tell you what I'm doing here, it's a secret!"

"You can trust me, I won't tell anyone." Cherry said.

"Huh? Well, if you won't tell anyone… No! It doesn't matter if you won't tell anyone because I can't tell you either!" The fairy was almost fooled.

"Your boss said it was fine for you to tell me, though?" Cherry said, thinking that surely he wasn't THAT trusting.

He proved her wrong immediately. "Oh, the general said it's okay to tell you? Okay then, but why didn't he just tell you himself?"

"You know how busy he is. Just didn't have the time, you know?" Cherry said, still reeling from the little fairy's naivety.

"Yeah, that makes sense! I was here on my secret mission to monitor the movements of the Doflamingo family in the colosseum. Can't afford any surprises during the attack on the factory, after all." The fairy said with a smile.

Cherry was inwardly surprised. She wasn't expecting to get a hold of information about the factory this way. She was just wasting time before the tournament and calming herself so she didn't tear somebody's arm off during the fight.

"I haven't introduced myself yet. My codename is Nightmare, so you can just call me that for now." Cherry said.

"I'm Meppi!" Meppi said cheerfully.

"Right, where was the factory again? I forgot." Cherry said.

"Right below the colosseum, silly. You must be really forgetful, huh? Haha!" Meppi 'reminded' her.

"I sure am." Cherry said.

Cherry burned through some vital energy to boost the range of her Life Sense downwards. Life Sense normally used living entities as buoys to increase its range, so it hadn't extended far enough to find the factory before.

Sure enough she found a lot of people, a few of which were devil fruit users, and more of those autonomous toys deep beneath the colosseum. More importantly she found tanks of that delicious S.A.D. juice and a few hundred wonky devil fruit signatures. About nine out of ten of the wonky devil fruits seemed to be useless, with only the curse remaining intact.

She supposed that she should tell the others where the factory was, but she knew that Law would want them to leave as soon as they destroyed it. Dressrosa was a beautiful place (with lots of beautiful women) and she wanted to explore it a bit more.

She could always do it later, of course, she had a long life to live after all. Putting off the things you want to do until later just felt like no way to live to her. She's spent hundreds of years of her last life cooped up in a hot sweaty forge, so she wanted to set aside some time to mess around.

Cherry sighed and decided to do the right thing after all. With her band of misfits and miscreants, things would probably go sideways even if they had the information anyways.

"Um, could you put me down?" Meppi asked timidly.

Cherry set the little fairy boy down on the ground and gave him a military salute. "Good luck with your mission soldier!"

Meppi made an attempt at mirroring the salute, only for it to look rather odd with his unusual proportions. "You as well!"

Meppi scurried away with remarkable speed for his little legs, Cherry chuckling at the sight.

"Right, then." Cherry expanded her Life Sense across the city to find the transponder snail the search and destroy group had on them to fill them in on the factory's location.

Except they had split up. Franky was with Kin'emon heading out of the city… and Luffy, Zoro, and Sanji were inside the colosseum. Because of course they were.

…

Ten minutes earlier.

Rock'em Sock'em's sock jaw dropped when he saw a familiar face hidden behind an obvious fake beard. He didn't know why Luffy was here, but he sure was glad to see him. Also extremely embarrassed, but definitely glad too!

Nevertheless, he wouldn't let this chance slip away. Thunder Thigh needed all the help he could get, his army of Tontatta just wouldn't cut it against Doflamingo and his crew.

Rock'em Sock'em straightened his top hat (not unlike a certain pipe wielding blond's) and tuxedo that let him walk about freely, as it was fairly normal for stuffed toys to wear clothing. He also made sure his bandolier of grenades was properly secured under his coat, he couldn't risk someone spotting them.

He approached the group of black coat and bowler hat wearing old men that stuck out like a sore thumb with hasty steps.

"Psst!" Rock'em Sock'em made the classic 'I'm trying to get your attention, but discreetly' noise and tugged at Luffy's shorts.

"Hm? A monkey wearing a monkey suit?" Luffy said, causing Rock'em Sock'em to snort. He knew that Luffy would get the joke.

"Hey, Luffy…" Rock'em Sock'em motioned for him to lean down, then whispered something into Luffy's ear.

Luffy's face contorted with confusion, embarrassment, and shock. "H-how do you know that?!"

"Because I'm actually Sabo." Rock'em Sock'em lied.

"Ehhhh?!" Luffy exclaimed, drawing more attention to the group.

"Let's go somewhere more private to talk…" Rock'em Sock'em led him, and the rest of the curious group of fake old men, into an isolated alleyway.

"Who's Sabo, Luffy? Do you know him? What did he say to you?" Franky asked, thinking maybe this was something that came before he joined up with the Straw Hats. He looked at Sanji and Zoro and found they were just as ignorant as he was.

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