One Piece of Music: Chapter 9

One Piece of Music: Chapter 8

One Piece of Music: Chapter 9 - The Roar
"DIE!" roared Hanone and Tsume in unison as the both of them pounced upon Aharon. Before he could so much as complete a single wink of all things, Aharon found himself on the receiving end of the rage he'd incited within Hanone and Tsume. Hanone's fangs sunk into Aharon's left shoulder as if it were no tougher than the most tender of steaks. And Tsume's claws dug into Aharon's right shoulder as easily as a mole could tunnel through the softest of earth. As a means of maintaining his composure in the face of the excruciating amount of pain he was experiencing at the moment, Aharon gritted his teeth to the point where just about no one would have blamed you for believing that he was in desperate need of a crapper. Unfortunately for Aharon, the admittedly short amount of time it took for him to grit his teeth was several times more than enough time for Hanone and Tsume to send a flurry of blows his way.

"To think we'd have to resort to consuming a Wonder Fruit..." vehemently hissed Tsume as the both of his arms blurred into an innumerable amount of swings. Like a child to the wrappings of a Christmas, Tsume's claws tore into Aharon's body without so much as an iota of restraint. And like water from a sprinkler, the resultant lacerations spilled more than just a few fluid ounces of Aharon's blood in all directions. "...it's as if we're no different than the common rabble!"

"As long as he dies..." roared Hanone a moment before he slammed his now grotesquely oversized fist into the very center of Aharon's chest. With a retch and a gush of blood from each of the lacerations Tsume managed to litter his body with, Aharon found himself hurtling far beyond the boundaries of the Tora no Tomarigi's zenith. Not longer after that, Aharon was plummeting towards the West Blue. "...who cares?"

"D-d-damn," murmured Aharon as he descended not only towards the sea, but also into a recollection of the entirety of his twenty years of life. Once Aharon had fallen to the point where he was halfway to the surface of the sea, his descent was abruptly stalled by time coming to an unexpected halt. As if the universe itself was going out of its way to provide Aharon with some sort of an exception to the whole time waits for no man thing.

It was only at this time that Aharon managed to take notice of the fact that a number of images were being displayed to him. There was no sequence to the display. No pattern. Or any semblance of order at all. Though each of the images were indeed a sight that Aharon had the (dis)pleasure of seeing at some point in his life, they were not shown to Aharon in chronological order as one might have expected. Instead, they were simply displayed at random.

"Time just came to a standstill and my life is flashing before my eyes..." begun Aharon with only a metaphysical shake of his head due to the fact that his actual head was frozen in place alongside time itself. "...well I'll de damned. I'm dying aren't I?"

Much to Aharon's confusion, he could not bring himself to be scared of his current predicament. Instead, he found that he could only be a tad bit disappointed. To make matters worse, it wasn't even an extreme brand the disappointment. Rather, it was that laid-back brand of disappointment. The brand that just about anyone could have brushed off of their mind with little if any amount of effort. Aharon was kind of annoyed by this. For the Marine had never considered himself to be the type who could be accepting of death. He'd always figured he go down kicking and screaming...

"Well who would've thought-" was all Aharon managed to say to himself before a particular image was displayed to him. A sight he'd been struggling to repress for months on end. a blast from the past, and not one of the pleasant ones. It was Iroppoi. With tears in her eyes and prayers on her lips.

Immediately afterward, time awoke from its slumber with a vengeance. Everything happened so fast. It was as if history itself was being fast forwarded. Out of nowhere, Aharon snapped to attention and burst into action. He pulled his knees to his chest, going so far as to literally pull with his hands. And then, only a moment before he would've plunged into the sea, Aharon kicked.

At a speed comparable to the velocity of a Pawapafu of all people, Aharon's feet slammed directly onto the surface of the sea. As if it was just as solid as the ground itself, the sea imploded. Waves that were more than worthy of the Gura Gura no Mi itself majestically rose into being. A crater outwardly spread from the portion of the sea that had Aharon kicked. And a thunderclap boomed as Aharon rocketed into a spiral ascent with his teeth clenched and his hands balled into fists.

"Mari-n Panku! (Marine Punk!)" wailed Aharon as his ascent took him through the side of the Tora no Tomarigi in a manner that allowed him to diagonally erupt from the ground of the Tora no Tomarigi's zenith. Hanone and Tsume's jaws dropped in perfect unison as Aharon burst from the ground and rose to being directly above them. If Hanone and Tsume weren't shocked by the fact that they were being subjected to a subterranean ambush by a guy they'd just to send hurtling over a cliff, if they weren't shocked by the fact that the aforementioned guy was currently smiling like a maniac in spite of the fact that he was heavily injured at the moment, then two of them must've been shocked by the following transformation.

In an instant; Aharon's overall physique took on a uniformly boneless appearance in a manner that was reminiscent of mollusks such as a snail, his arms and legs were elongated to the point where they were more than twice as long as they were before, all of his fingers were lengthen enough to allow each of them to serve as rope with which one could collectively tie an entire crew of pirates, his face became devoid of any feature other than a protrusive eye, and his complexion shifted into a color scheme of light blues, dark blues, and white.

"Mari-n Panku: Aoiroryuu no Mari-to-Kusari! (Marine Punk: Ball-and-Chain of the Blue Dragon!)" said Aharon in an ecstatic laugh as he raised his arms directly overhead and then densely tangled all of his fingers into a sphere of flesh. Because of the sheer length of his transformed fingers, said sphere was much larger than even what a combination of Hanone and Tsume would have been. Needless to say, Hanone and Tsume were scared shitless by that very fact.

"Just what the hell-" was all Hanone managed to say before Aharon threw his body into a somersault in order to accumulate enough potential energy to allow him to lash out with the both of his arms in a manner that swung his tangled fingers down onto Hanone and Tsume with enough force to smash Hanone and Tsume through the surface of the Tora no Tomarigi's zenith and onto the ground of one of the Tora no Tomarigi's many caverns. Afterward Aharon untangled his fingers, reverted to being naught but a human, and then casually landed on the zenith of the Tora no Tomarigi.

"I had almost forgotten..." snickered Aharon to himself as looked through the hole he'd made on the zenith's surface and onto the unconscious forms of Hanone and Tsume. "...that I was no longer a man with nothing to lose!"

Elsewhere
"Gyojin Karate, Senmaigawara Seiken! (Fishmen Empty Hand, Thousand Tile True Punch!)" said Samesuke, a twenty-five-year-old male who was one of the very few individuals to have been born as a Megalodon Fishman within the span of the current millennium, as he threw a punch into the stomach of a humanoid tiger with enough force to immediately bring the beastial human to its knees. Subsequently, a girl with thigh-length blue hair abruptly lunged into a kick that sidewardly embedded the humanoid tiger face-first into the boards of the pier. Afterward, the girl landed upon the very tips of her toes and then pirouetted into standing upon the both of her feet.

"You should be more careful," advised Bekki, the aforementioned girl, to Samesuke.

"What are you talking about? I had that situation under-" begun Samesuke a moment before Bekki raised one of her legs into the air and then slammed the foot of that leg upon the right hand of the humanoid tiger. Though he may have been more than a little bit loathed to show any amount of weakness to a human such as Bekki, Samesuke couldn't help but to gasp when Bekki's actions resulted in both the sound of something being crushed and the release of the remains of a derringer from the humanoid tiger's right hand.

"Whoever it was that was supposed to teach you how to take notice of hidden weapons should be decked in the face for the piss-poor job they did," asserted Bekki to Samesuke, completely betraying the fact that she wrongly believed that it was perfectly normal for an individual to have been taught such a thing.

"You mean to tell me that man was about to..." whispered Samesuke more to himself than to Bekki. Samesuke then wasted no time in abandoning the sentence in favor of glowering at Bekki. "...why? Why did you help me human?"

"First of all, my name is Bekki!" snapped Bekki out of nowhere, frightening Samesuke into backing away from her as she did so. And then - without so much as a single warning - Bekki abruptly replaced the frown on her face with a smile, took a hold of one of Samesuke's hands, and then pulled the bewildered fishman into charging a horde of humanoid tigers with her. "Second of all, JUST BECAUSE!"

"Vile miscreants! Your wrongdoing is a diminishment of the divinity of the daylight. For daring to the taint the sacrosanct rays of The Sun, which is the the holiest of stars, this clergyman of the Solar Immaculacy shall bring to you blessed retributions!" announced Gol Dee Locks - blonde man who was masking his face with a lengthy scarf and toting around both a bible of some kind and a peculiar-looking staff - while he was utilizing the butt of his staff to chalk a number of sigilia onto the boards of the pier. As Gol did so, a number of ferals burst into laughter at the sight of his actions.

"I've always heard that the West Blue was home to sun-worshiping retards, but this is just too much!" cackled a feral. By this point in time, Gol had managed to finish chalking sigilia onto the boards of the pier. Gol then begun to twirl his staff overhead, doing so at a rapidity that induced enough friction to quickly ignited the entirety of the staff. Not long afterward, all of the sigilia begun to glow in an eerily otherworldly manner. The ferals gawked at the scene before them and then proceed to take flight; however, it was already too late for them to run...

"Feel the power of The Scorching Reason, The Infernal Element..." demanded Gol of the ferals as he stopped twirling the staff in order to slam the butt of the staff onto the sigilia, setting the sigilia aflame as he did so. As the sigilia burned, a kaleidoscopic vapor arose from this. Said vapor accumulated above Gol, forming a sphere as it do so. At first the sphere was stable, but it wasn't long before it begun to rotate in an erratic manner. And then. There was a hell on Earth. And it's name was... "...Forblaze!"

The sphere didn't so much as explode as it burst. There was no shockwave involved. No "kick" to blow anything apart. But in exchange, there was fire. A whole lot of fire. All around Gol, there was naught but a raging inferno and an innumerable amount of charred bodies. It was as if he was amidst the Lake of Fire itself.

"Such is the fate of heathens!" dismissively spat Gol as he blew his staff free of the flame that was enveloping it.

"Are you positive about this being an investment worthy of our time?" asked Michael - an effeminate man who was dressed in a long-sleeved, collared shirt and a chest-high skirt - of Musashibō Uchibenkei - a princely-looking individual whose chin-length hair was colored like ice. Unlike a supermajority of the Tora no Tomarigi's current inhabitants, neither Michael nor Uchibenkei were involved in the battle that was raging across the piers of the Tora no Tomarigi. Instead, the two of them were watching the conflict from the balcony of a restaurant.

"But of..." started Uchibenkei a moment before he was distracted from the conversation by the sight of a feral being feathered with an arrow which was alight with a blue flame, courtesy of a blonde girl named Quincess. "...now how the hell did she-"

"Focus Uchi-sama," sighed an exasperated Michael, all-the-while cursing his inability to accustomize himself to Uchibenkei's short attention span. "If this little scheme of yours fail, we stand to lose an entire nation's worth of beli!"

"Failure?" chuckled Uchibenkei as a number of ferals were sent flying in his and Michael's direction by the vibrantly electrified kicks of a manservant named Jeeves. All while the two of them were taking a sip from their individual teacups, Uchibenkei and Michael casually leaned into a number of dodges that caused the ferals to crash within the interior of the restaurant instead of into either of them. "Failure isn't an option here Michael. Not because I wouldn't allow such a thing, but rather because such a possibility simply does not exist,"

"We must be watching a different battle Uchi-sama," snorted Michael with a roll of his eyes. Michael then pointed towards a scantily clad woman of the name Margaret Darling, whom was drunkenly beating the everliving hell out of a horde of ferals with as much ease as she could down a bottle. And trust me when I say that she could down a bottle REALLY FREAKING EASILY.

"What we are watching is not a battle Michael," cooly stated Uchibenkei as Bekki and Samesuke arrived to the scene, brawling with the unruly Margaret for a short while before teaming up with the drunkard in order to take down yet another wave of ferals and humanoid tigers. "It's a skirmish,"

"A skirmish?" parroted a confused Michael, earning himself a knowing smile from Uchibenkei. "How so Uchi-sama? Are you trying to tell me that this host of the Year of the Tiger Pirates is simply the vanguard?"

"Oh heavens no," denied Uchibenkei as Enshoku, a fiery-looking piratess with a large mass of knee-length blonde hair, utilized Ho Kenpo to augment a vicious flurry of punches and kicks with a blaze that was burning far brighter than even the largest of bonfires. Enshoku grinned a gleeful grin as each of her strikes reduced a feral into an unconscious lump of burned flesh. Following Enshoku was Onken, the older sister of the Gebahyou, with the Dolorous Stroke of Arthurian Legends. Even though Onken's blade failed to make contact with any of the ferals, a large number of the them were still felled by her swing. "That'd be SUCH a disappointment don't you think? What I'm trying to tell you isn't that there are reinforcements on the way, but rather that the defeat of these rank-and-file pirates are of no consequence. Cause when it comes down to it..."

"Bakushou! (Roar of Laughter!/Damage or Injuries Caused by Bombing or an Explosion!)" heard Michael, Uchibenkei, and all of the combatants. Immediately, Uchibenkei covered his ears and Michael instinctively followed suit. Not long after the two of them had done so, a tiger-like roar commence to resonate throughout the battlefield. However, the roar was less of a noise and more of a catastrophe.

First everyone's vision came to be obscured as the roar somehow managed to blur the local illumination. Next, deafness became the norm as eardrums were blown left and right. Shoot, some of them went so far as to be literally blown off their owners' person alongside their owners' ears. Last but not least, a kinetic assault came into play. Not an explosion as one might have expected, but something far worse. Far, far, worse. The combatants weren't simply pulverised with kinetic energy, but rather they were ravaged by it from the inside out. From the head to toe and from the brain to the bones in the feet, each and every single last one of the individuals on the pier were subjected to ruination.

By the time it came to an end, there were only three people who were still conscious. Uchibenkei, Michael, and an older man who was hefting an axe behind his back.

"...they weren't recruited to be of actual use to the Tora no Jijitsu (Times of the Tiger). But rather, they were recruited as a convenience. To lighten the burden. But when it comes down to it, those four are more than enough to conquer these piers. All. By. Them. Selves!"

One Piece of Music: Chapter 10