章節 412: An Unexpected Result
Jinbe's fishman karate launched a river of juice in a high arc over Prometheus and splashed against Big Mom's body, thoroughly dousing the flames that licked her skin and knocking her back a ways, but not off of her flaming mount.
The heart demon, the majority of which are known for their hatred of all things and destructive tendencies, naturally redirected its ire towards Jinbe who had last attacked it.
Although it possessed its own form of sapience, it was fairly simple minded. It was only when a heart demon subsumed its host entirely that it would become more complex, having transformed into a genuine demon.
'I'm not sure that can even happen to a mortal, though. It's already odd enough to find a heart demon so advanced in people so young,' Cherry thought. 'Perhaps a giant could manage it, but they're the only ones I know of in this world who live so long and all the giants I've met are very true to themselves. Not ideal conditions to form a heart demon.'
Cherry thought of Brook then. His skeletal state may very well lead to an unnaturally long life, and having spent half a century in total isolation in the place of his many dear friends' deaths… she would have to keep an eye out for him over the years, and make sure he doesn't lose himself.
Her attention was completely brought back to the battle at hand as Big Mom leveled a horizontal slash at her. Cherry lifted her sword in a reverse grip, rising along her arm to block.
Haki lightning crackled in the air as the swords connected. Cherry was pushed back, as empty air wasn't great for bracing oneself.
The drill spear appeared in her other hand and she chucked it as it began to spin at thousands of revolutions per second.
Big Mom used the momentum of her swing to twist out of the way, but still got clipped across the ribs.
Cherry lunged, fracturing the bones of her legs from the shear force, propelling herself forward well beyond the speed of sound. She buried Sakura Tengoku to the hilt in Big Mom's upper back, missing her spine by mere centimeters.
Big Mom dislocated her own arm in her attempt to grab her, but the spear returned just in time to intercept her grubby fingers, puncturing straight through her palm and out the back of her hands.
"RAAAAAGH!!!" Big Mom roared, more in rage than in pain.
Cherry flipped off of Big Mom's back. With a single thought, Big Mom lit up as she was subjected to the full might of a thunderstorm from the inside.
This time Big Mom's scream was entirely from pain.
""MAMA?!?!"" Napoleon and Prometheus cried out in alarm simultaneously.
Cherry took that as good news, since they had been awfully quiet since they had arrived.
Big Mom slowly turned her head, struggling to do so as her whole body was spasming up a storm. Cherry saw cruel intelligence in her eyes.
"Oh? Did you wake up?" Cherry chuckled. She hadn't intended to literally shock the woman back to consciousness, but that worked out in her favor anyways.
"W-what is…?" Big Mom was clearly confused. That was understandable, considering that she suddenly found herself in a very different place than she remembered last.
"Wedding cake?" Cherry said, then laughed as she saw the woman's eyes light up in recognition and desire.
"Where?! Can I have some?!" Big Mom said in almost childlike wonder.
"Hoh boy," Cherry didn't expect THAT at all.
Cherry only very briefly considered kidnapping Big Mom before deciding it wasn't worth the trouble no matter how hilarious it would be.
'Robin probably wouldn't let me keep her either,' Cherry thought.
"There's a wedding cake being made just for you as we speak," Cherry said, making Big Mom's eyes sparkle with innocence and streams of drool spill out of her gaping mouth.
"Don't listen to her, Mama! She's lying!" Prometheus proclaimed.
"Mama? Am I your mama?" Big Mom asked.
"He's just confused; don't listen to him. How could a young lady like you already be a mother?" Cherry intervened.
"Oh, that makes sense," Big Mom accepted easily, taking the 'truth' that was most favorable to herself as fact. "Take me to the wedding cake!"
"Help me convince her, Napoleon!" Prometheus shouted.
"There's no point," Napoleon gave up immediately. Neither of them could go against Big Mom's wishes, even if she wasn't quite in her right mind.
There was only a single exception to that rule, which was Zeus. He was able to defy Big Mom because, as one of her special homies, he inherited Big Mom's gluttony. Nami's Clima-Tact was able to sate that gluttony in a way Big Mom never could, allowing him to leave her side.
Cherry pulled her vivre card booklet out and pointed in the direction of Sanji. Big Mom feebly leapt off of Prometheus and plummeted into the ocean below.
Cherry watched her fall and splash down into the juice before remembering to summon her sword back to her side. Jinbe surfaced not too far away then looked between the now drowning Big Mom and Cherry with clear confusion on his face.
"What happened? Did you defeat her?" Jinbe asked as Cherry hopped down to him.
"Amnesia? I suppose I probably hit her on the head pretty hard before, and that lightning likely didn't help with that at all," Cherry explained. "She even forgot that she can't swim…"
"... Shall we leave, then?" Jinbe asked.
"Yeah, I don't have the heart to finish her off when she's like this," Cherry said. Blood spewed from her mouth and out of her helmet with a concerning amount of pressure. "Oh, whoops. I should turn that off."
The Big Mom fleet had been steadily encroaching upon the battle whilst maintaining a relatively safe distance, but now they were rushing forwards after seeing Big Mom drop into the sea. Since they were so kind as to provide an outlet for Cherry's excess King Energy, she let them have every last drop.
The ships that were hit by the resulting blast didn't even hear it coming. Dozens of ships splintered into pieces no bigger than mulch, and the crews aboard them didn't fare much better.
Cherry's right arm dropped limply to her side, to which Jinbe said, "Is your arm okay?"
"It just got liquified, that's all. Too much force all at once," Cherry reassured him, though she didn't do a very good job of it.
Several of the Big Mom ships were undeterred by the show of force, determined to save Big Mom from a death by breathing juice.
"Do we stop them? Big Mom is a formidable enemy to leave alive…" Jinbe asked, not feeling it was right to make that choice since it was mostly Cherry's fight.
"I'll only get stronger from here on and I dare say that Big Mom is only going to get weaker. I didn't paralyze like I wanted to, but she'll still have permanent nerve damage on top of other devastating injuries," Cherry said. "If she even recovers her memory, that is."
"I suppose that's true. Luffy will eventually be strong enough to handle an emperor himself as well. Big Mom isn't a fool, and she is very selfish too. She won't risk offending us again for fear of losing everything she has," Jinbe surmised.
"And if she chases after us to Wano, she'll be a good practice run for Kaido," Cherry said.
"Only you would suggest using Big Mom as a 'practice fight'," Jinbe shook his head.
"Hey, having gradual stepping stones is a good thing! There's just too much of a gap between the likes of an emperor and Katakuri. I'm honestly concerned that Luffy will die if he faces Kaido with only Katakuri under his belt," Cherry said, already moving back to the ship with Jinbe in tow.
"You can't help him, you know," Jinbe said. "His dream isn't one that allows for hand holding. He would rather die fighting for his dream than have someone else do all the work for him."
"I know, Jinbe. Us old people have to let the youths forge their own destiny," Cherry said.
Jinbe gave her an odd look that said both "I'm not that old" and "You're one of those youths" at the same time.
Cherry laughed at his face.
章節 413: A Cunning Old Monster
As Jinbe and Cherry vanished into the distance unimpeded, the Charlotte children amongst the fleet managed to fish Big Mom out of the juice sea.
The emperor used what strength she could draw forth to clamber the rest of the way onto one of the many Tarte ships' decks and rolled over onto her back sputtering as she caught her breath.
"Mama! Are you alright?! How did you become so thin?!" Daifuku called out with concern, though from a safe distance in case she started to rampage again.
"I'm alive," Big Mom spoke simply as she sat herself up and leaned against the mast. "Prometheus, how did I get here? Last I remember, I was fighting that little girl on Whole Cake Island, not out at sea."
"You've remembered who you are, Mama?" Prometheus asked hopefully.
"I never forgot, idiot! Do you take me for some kind of fool who forgets who she even is?!" Big Mom spat, making the fireball shrink pathetically. "As much as I hate to admit it, I was at that little girl's mercy, so I took a risk and made up some nonsense. I didn't get this far in life just by being a meathead like Kaido."
Seeing that Prometheus was still cowed by her scolding, Napoleon answered her previous question in his stead. "Mama, you brought us out to sea after Cheapshot knocked you out and destroyed the chateau. You were acting a bit strangely, but you were still chasing the Straw Hats and looking for the wedding cake, so we just went along with it."
Big Mom looked pretty pissed at the idea of getting knocked out by an upstart, but it wasn't like Napoleon would lie to her about it so she could only accept it as the truth. "Hmm, right. The wedding cake."
The Charlotte siblings flinched. Big Mom's hunger pangs had never ended without being sated before, and they had no reason to think now was any different.
"I could go for a wedding cake, I guess. I didn't get to have any thanks to that rubber monkey…" Big Mom said, surprisingly calm. "Do you think they're actually making a new one?"
"Even if they are, they'll probably poison it, Mama," Napoleon said.
"That's what I would do if I were them. I'll just have someone test it first," Big Mom said, stunning everyone around her.
Big Mom, sharing? That was improbable even in her normal state of mind, but downright impossible doing her hunger pangs. Had she truly regained her senses?
Her eyes turned to Daifuku, making him gulp nervously. "Bring me to this supposed wedding cake. If they didn't make one or if they poisoned it, then I'll kill all their loved ones to send a message. If they really did make it, then… well, I suppose it wouldn't be wise to create a blood feud with them."
'Are you really deciding whether to create a permanent enmity between our crews over a cake?!' Big Mom's children thought.
Of course, they knew that the answer to that unspoken question was a resounding 'YES'. Big Mom didn't love anything more than she loved food.
In fact, the other three emperors had managed to keep her largely mollified by sending the occasional rare sweet her way every few years. Not enough to be called tribute, but enough to keep her from going on a rampage through their territories after remembering some slight from the past. War between the emperors never ended well for anyone involved, but Big Mom had odd priorities compared to the other three.
…
As Cherry and Jinbe arrived back at the Thousand Sunny, they saw Nami was distracting Zeus with a thunder ball, keeping it just out of his reach like you might do with a cat and a laser pointer.
"Good, you're back!" Nami was visibly relieved, allowing Zeus to catch the thunder ball. "You didn't get hurt again, did you?"
"I'm doing great actually!" Cherry said.
"Her arm turned into soup," Jinbe revealed.
"Snitch," Cherry glared at him. "It isn't even that bad! It'll be back in working order in half the time it took to regrow one!"
"Even if your body is super weird, you still have to take proper care of it, Cherry," Chopper spoke seriously.
"Okay, okay. It really isn't a big deal, though. Big Mom is in no condition to threaten us anytime soon, and by the time she might I'll be even stronger than before, as will Luffy." Cherry was confident in that. "I'll also go check on everyone's loved ones once things settle down a bit, if you want. Make sure there aren't any Big Mom pirates lurking nearby like there was back at my home island."
"Huh? How are you going to do that? And I thought you were from West Blue, so how did you check there?" Nami asked, not following.
"Den den mushi are very strange creatures," Cherry said cryptically. "We'll come back to that later, when we've collected Sanji and Reiju."
Needless to say, she had them all very curious and practically bursting with questions.
"Ah yes, magic snails," Chopper said. When everyone looked at him like he was stupid, he quickly said, "Luffy wasn't here to say it, so I did."
"You can't just steal your captain's thunder like that just because he isn't here, Chopper. Show some damned respect," Cherry said in an eerie Zoro impression.
Chopper and Brook were soon rolling on the deck in fits of laughter.
"Alright, enough joking around! Get your asses into gear or we're going to get surrounded again!" Nami clapped to gather everyone's attention.
Thus, after getting a heading from Sanji vivre card, they pushed onwards.
…
Some time later.
"Oh, wow. Sanji really went and made it to the same scale and everything," Cherry commented, peering at Bege's ship approaching in the distance.
"Did you have any doubt that he could do it?" Nami asked.
"Frankly, I just can't wrap my head around cooking on that scale in general. It's absurd," Cherry said.
"It is pretty crazy, but if anyone could pull it off, then it's our Sanji," Brook said.
"I'm definitely tasting it," Cherry nodded as she decided.
"Do you think it's a carrot cake?" Carrot asked, drooling a little bit.
"No, it's chocolate. I can smell it from here," Cherry crushed her dreams. Seeing Carrot sulk, she added, "I'm sure that Sanji will gladly make you a carrot cake, though."
"You really think so?!" Carrot's demeanor lit up immediately.
"Of course he will. You probably won't even finish asking him to before he's already whisking himself into the kitchen to make it just for you. Worse case scenario, you just have to flutter those adorable button eyes of yours at him and he won't be able to resist," Cherry advised.
"Please refrain from manipulating Sanji with your feminine wiles too much. He's had a rough time of it," Nami sighed in exasperation.
"Oh please, that's exactly what he needs right now. A return to some normalcy," Cherry argued.
"You can use your feminine wiles on me, if you like," Brook spoke to Cherry. She got the distinct impression that he'd be wiggling his eyebrows at her right now, if he had any.
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