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75.09% One Piece: Dream of Immortality / Chapter 383: Sneak Thieves

章節 383: Sneak Thieves

It was in the late afternoon, close to evening, that Cherry returned to the supply closet inside the Whole Cake Chateau.

"I'm probably not too late for supper, am I?" Cherry wondered, picking up the bewildered den den mushi and leaving the supply closet.

She left the little snail outside the communications room with a knock, and pranced off to the kitchens.

As it turned out, she was not too late for supper; but even if she were, Streusen assured her that he would bend over backwards to make her a meal if he had to. She supposed that his regained vigor was something that he was very grateful for.

"Ah, I would ask that you settle for the cooking of my subordinate chefs if you require a late night snack. I have a wedding cake to work on in the early morning and I must be at my best when I do so," Streusen added.

Cherry left the kitchen pulling a feast fit for ten behind her on a serving cart. Aoon, she arrived outside a room that she expected to be a prison, but was surprised to find was actually a library.

'I see, so it's both a library and a prison. That explains why Pekoms' life signature was so weird…' Cherry thought as she walked inside.

"This is not a place you should be, soir." An egg shaped man blocked her path.

"I'm just here to have dinner with Pekoms. You can join us if you mind your manners," Cherry said.

"Pekoms is not here. This is a bibliothèque," Tamago insisted.

Cherry blinked at him.

Tamago blinked at her.

Cherry glanced at a specific book on a shelf that held many oversized books ranging from three to four meters in height, then back at him. Tamago knew that was the very same book that currently held Pekoms within its pages.

Tamago's lips stretched thin beneath his mustache as he frowned.

'Do we have an information leak? No, this one has probably been snooping around…' Tamago considered quietly.

This was a tricky situation to find himself in. While any actions in direct opposition to the Big Mom pirates taken by Cherry could be responded to in kind, lesser subordinates like himself were forbidden from offending her only hours ago. Cherry wanting to share a meal with Pekoms was hardly a jailbreak, but it was easy to see how it could become one.

Unfortunately for Tamago, just going along with whatever she wanted could lead to that exact circumstance and if he failed to stop her, then excuses about what he was ordered not to do would more likely result in his head flying rather than being considered acceptable.

In other words, he was stuck between a rock and a hard boiled egg.

Tamago sighed, he could only do his best and hope for the best in turn. "Very well. I will be supervising, however."

"Do as you wish," Cherry said.

Tamago pulled the book out himself and turned to the correct page holding Pekoms' cell to avoid any shenanigans from Cherry.

"Pekoms! I brought some food for you," Cherry said when she saw the lion mink.

"Why?" Pekoms asked.

"Why not? At present, most of my crew is indisposed so I can't have a meal with them very easily, and I've grown quite used to having my meals with company. You're available, so why not?" Cherry said, setting up a folding table from the cart up against the bars in the book.

Pekoms was pinned to the back wall of his paper cell and naturally he pointed out this particular inconvenience. "I'm not exactly in a good position to keep you company either, as you can see."

Cherry looked at Tamago.

"Don't look at moi. It is not within my pouvoir to release him; neither by authority or ability." Tamago decided to be as unhelpful as he could be within reason.

"Guess you'll have to feed him then, with those long arms of yours," Cherry said, as if it were the only natural solution.

Cherry finished setting the table with three places, her own place being absolutely stacked with food.

Tamago looked at Pekoms and saw that his old comrade was drooling a bit. He could only set aside his own pride and acquiesce, it seemed. Pekoms certainly wasn't complaining as he'd hoped that he would.

Watching all this from the hallway were Brook and Pedro, who had intended to rescue Pekoms before moving on with their other goal. Stealing an etching of the road poneglyph from Big Mom's vault, while important, was not quite as important as saving an ally from certain doom.

"What should we do? Can we entrust Cherry to rescue Pekoms?" Pedro whispered a question quietly to Brook.

Brook stared into the room for a moment before turning to Pedro and… shrugging.

"That doesn't exactly inspire confidence," Pedro said.

"I don't believe that she'll let him come to harm… probably not anyways. It's possible that she has some other plan in mind with him, and by intervening we may put her in a bad position." Brook said. "Personally, I do not think that Cherry has taken quite as much of a liking to Pekoms as the rest of us, though."

Pedro stole a glance back inside the library and saw Cherry delightedly relaying a tale about how she had met Gol D. Roger earlier today, and that the old pirate king had had 'some work done' to avoid recognition.

"She seems to like him well enough, to me," Pedro remarked.

Brook said, "If Cherry is smiling at you, she is just as likely to see you as a friend as she is a walking dead man. You can trust my word on this, since I happen to be both. Yoho-!"

Brook's laugh was quickly silenced by Pedro placing a hand over his teeth and clamping his jaw shut. He had had to do this more than a dozen times since they had infiltrated the chateau. He was beginning to think that Brook had some sort of obsessive compulsion to tell bad skeleton jokes rather than just liking them.

Little did Pedro know that Brook only retained what little sanity he had left by telling himself those jokes over his half a century of isolation on a ship filled with his dead friends' skeletons. He really couldn't help it, but he also couldn't care less. There were people to laugh at his jokes now, and that sound brought him more joy and solace than anyone could imagine.

It was rather inconvenient to burst out laughing when he was trying to be sneaky, though, so he was grateful to have Pedro here to cut him off.

"I will just trust in her good nature. She helped my people for little reason and even less reward, I'm sure she will not leave Pekoms to die." Pedro chose to trust her. "I'd rather not fight with Tamago, either, so we should steal the poneglyph etching while he is distracted."

Brook nodded his agreement and the two of them skulked off to another part of the chateau where they would undoubtedly achieve their goal with little to no resistance whatsoever.


章節 384: Breathless

"Well, that was pleasant. Thanks for lending a hand, egg-boy." Cherry wiped her lips politely with a napkin.

Tamago's brow twitched in response. "I take it that you'll be leaving then?"

He sure hoped that she would leave without a fuss. While the portion afforded to him looked small compared to Cherry's mountain of food, which she somehow consumed both hastily and with perfect manners, the meal had left him feeling somewhat bloated and slow.

Normally that wouldn't make any difference, but every little factor would matter if he was to get into a fight with someone who outclassed him.

Cherry stood up and said, "See you later, Pekoms… or not, if you die before we meet again. Want me to pass on any messages to the minks if you do?"

"I said my goodbyes before I came here," Pekoms spoke solemnly.

Tamago felt sorry for him, but his old friend made his choice and Tamago had made his as well. There was nothing else to say about it.

Tamago shut the book and stuffed it back into its place on the book shelf. When he turned around, he felt relief to see that Cherry was already leaving.

Then he saw that she didn't bother to take the table, dishes, or cart with her. His annoyance came back with a vengeance.

"Sacre bleu…" Tamago muttered.

Cherry stepped outside just in time to hear that and smile. She shut the door and walked a short distance down the hall, then she turned pale and translucent before turning directly into the wall and vanishing inside.

Pekoms silently hung by the pins piercing his hands inside his now pitch black paper cell. He wished that they would just get this over with. He didn't enjoy this empty darkness, not like he enjoyed the vast starry sky on the nights when Zunesha's fog would clear just enough to see it.

For a moment, he thought that he could almost see a star, peering through this oppressive blackness. As the star grew larger and formed a familiar face, he realized that he wasn't seeing things after all.

"Yo." Cherry greeted him with a whisper and a smile.

Pekoms sighed. He wondered whether it would be better to be alone and in the dark.

"Hey now, none of that. Or do you not want me to bust you out of here?" Cherry asked, seemingly bemused. "You know, I wasn't going to save you myself, but then I heard Pedro and Brook saying that they'd leave it to me instead of doing it themselves. Since my presence changed their plans, it's only right that I should follow through, no?"

"I'm not complaining, gao." Pekoms said. Cherry being the one to do it, assuming she was being honest, would certainly give the highest chance of success, he thought, but also had the highest chance of getting on his nerves in the process. A sacrifice he would just have to make, unfortunately.

"I'm surprised you didn't rat out Bege," Cherry said as she stepped completely into the closed book cell.

"What for? Bege will fail, and miserably so. I don't know what asinine plan he has cooked up, but no amount of plotting and planning is enough to beat Mama." Pekoms scoffed. "Snitching wouldn't change the outcome of that little conspiracy, but it would increase the security around the wedding which in turn would be doing your lot a disservice when I'm meant to be helping you. So I kept quiet."

Cherry gave him a smile that was almost pleasant. 'Almost' because it didn't have enough fangs to feel entirely genuine to his mink sensibilities.

"How are you doing that, anyways?" Pekoms changed the subject.

"What? This?" Cherry motioned at her body, still a ghostly flame in the shape of her physical form.

Seeing Pekoms nod, she said, "That's easy to do, less easy to explain."

'Largely because I don't want to tell the truth,' Cherry thought.

"However, if you must know, then I'll ask you a question in turn. Did you know that while matter can feel quite solid, even the densest and hardest materials are mostly empty space and connective repelling forces? I'm taking advantage of that by unfusing all my bits into the smallest particles, then slipping them through that empty space in matter, like this book." Cherry fed him a bullshit explanation.

Pekoms was only vaguely aware of her abilities and like most people, assumed any strangeness that came from her was related to her devil fruit in some way. Combine that assumption with being casually told that everything is mostly empty, and you have a recipe for a lion mink that won't ask any further questions.

"Right, so can you get me down? My hands are cramping up, gao." Pekoms asked politely.

Pekoms was plunged back into darkness. If not for the sound of Cherry stepping towards him, he might have thought he had imagined the entire exchange. He felt the pins in his hands vanish unexpectedly and dropped to the floor of the cell with a soft thump.

"Now, how to get you out of here?" Cherry thought aloud.

"You didn't consider that beforehand?" Pekoms was already feeling the exasperation and that wasn't a good sign. He'd never heard of anyone dying of exasperation before, but he'd rather not test if it was possible.

"Of course not, who do you take me for? Some kind of robot surgeon?" Cherry asked rhetorically. "Oh, I know! I'll put you in my pocket."

"You're going to what?" Pekoms was dumbfounded.

Unfortunately, he couldn't see a damned thing, so when Cherry not only didn't explain but picked him up, he failed to react in time before he felt himself being stuffed into what felt like a burlap sack, except softer.

Right before his head was stuffed inside last, Cherry warned, "Take a deep breath, I'm not sure how much air is in there, if any at all."

Pekoms quickly did as she bade him for fear that she wasn't joking and that he might actually suffocate.

The inside of the 'pocket' was a strange place. It felt like he was in a fabric cocoon that stretched and changed shape as he moved around, grasping for any kind of solid surface of which he could find none. All sounds from the outside had ceased completely once inside, and he had a weightless sort of feeling like being underwater but without the water.

'I'm sorry that I complained about how dark my cell was, Gao! This is a million times worse, Gao!' Pekoms practically screamed in his mind.

The worst part was definitely having to hold his breath without knowing if he'd be able to take another if he let it out. The uncertainty of it was far more dreadful than it would be just knowing for sure that there is no air.

The slowly growing panic was burning his oxygen faster than otherwise, he knew that, but he couldn't stop it. The seconds dragged on longer and longer, making him feel like minutes have passed already.

Then there was light. Blessed light.

"BWAAAAA!!!" Pekoms released his held breath that had been hammering against the inside of his chest painfully to escape, then took several deep breaths in succession as he calmed down.

"You were only in there for half a minute, Pekoms," Cherry said, a pink set of armor sinking into her skin as she spoke.


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