Dawn — The Island Port
"Old man, I'm going to the sea," Elric said simply. "I need a boat."
The old man's movement paused mid-step.
His face went wide, processing the words. Then something shifted in his expression, cracking open into an enormous smile that seemed too big for his weathered face.
And almost like he was afraid Elric would change his mind before the sentence fully landed, he directly sprang up from where he'd been sitting and started running toward town at a speed that had absolutely no business coming from someone his age.
"EVERYONE!" His voice carried across the entire port. "EVERYONE, THE CALAMITY IS LEAVING! QUICKLY, PREPARE A FUCKING BOAT!"
The response was immediate.
"Wait—is he actually going out?!"
"What are you standing around for?! Go find the most luxurious boat on the island! MOVE!"
The island erupted.
To understand the reaction, you had to understand the history.
Elric was, by origin, just a normal kid born on this island. Quiet personality, kept to himself, never drew much attention. The kind of person who could sit in the same tavern for a week and the regulars still wouldn't remember his name.
Nobody had paid him much attention.
But then, about two years ago, something changed. Nobody knew exactly what happened—whether he suddenly got extraordinarily strong, or whether he'd always been that strong and simply hadn't bothered showing it before.
Either way, after that point, island life changed completely.
Before Elric's transformation, life on the island had followed a comfortable, well-established rhythm. Rob a passing merchant ship. Acquire women, supplies, rum. Start a banquet. Enjoy themselves for three months. Then go rob again. Simple, reliable, satisfying.
Pirates had been doing it this way for generations and saw no reason to change.
After Elric intervened, the rhythm became: rob, then get beaten. Try to rob again, then get beaten significantly worse. Then nothing, because eventually nobody wanted to die.
So they'd obediently started farming.
As a lifestyle change for people who'd spent their entire lives as pirates, this was roughly equivalent to asking fish to climb trees. They'd tried to fight back, obviously. Multiple times, with increasing seriousness—gathering capable fighters from across the island, recruiting people who'd come down from the Grand Line, even bringing in people who could use two types of Haki.
It made no difference. Everyone went home bleeding and reconsidered their choices.
So they farmed.
And they waited, in the way that people wait for weather to change, for the situation to somehow resolve itself.
And now, finally, the situation was resolving itself.
The war god was leaving.
Two days of almost continuous work followed. Day and night, rotating shifts, nobody complaining about the hours. They finished a large, fully loaded luxury vessel, stocked with enough supplies to last months at sea.
By the time the boat was ready, the whole island had gathered at the port.
Elric stood at the stern as the island slowly began to grow small behind him.
He sighed quietly.
Logically speaking, he thought, watching the shrinking outline of the port, he should probably destroy this island before leaving. It was full of pirates. He knew exactly what would happen the moment he cleared the horizon—they'd go right back to their old habits. Merchant ships would start disappearing again. People would get hurt.
The rational, clean decision was obvious.
But even if they were pirates, they'd never treated him badly. When his parents died, it was these same rough, loud, perpetually drunk people who'd made sure he didn't starve. Who'd checked on him without making a show of it. Who'd grumbled about it loudly while doing it anyway.
Before hearing Marvel-Elric's words in the white space, he might have actually done it—destroyed the island while forcing his better instincts down, telling himself it was the logical call.
But he changed his mind.
Prioritize yourself before anyone else. That was what Marvel-Elric had said, and he was starting to understand what it actually meant. It didn't mean selfishness. It meant knowing what you could live with.
He could live with pirates going back to piracy.
He couldn't live with burning down the people who'd fed him as a child, and he didn't want to start becoming someone who could.
He pulled out the map and spread it across the railing, studying it as the wind came off the water.
He didn't have a precise plan yet. But he had a direction.
This world was genuinely beautiful—the oceans, the islands, the impossible variety of people and creatures crammed into its geography. He'd always known that, even through the worst of his frustration with it.
And it was being ruined. Systematically, generationally ruined by the Celestial Dragons and the structures built to serve them—the corrupt Marines, the slave trade operating in plain sight, the World Government grinding ordinary people into dust to maintain the comfort of people who'd done nothing to earn it.
He could push the world forward by sheer force, obviously. Just walk in a straight line and flatten everything in his path until the structure collapsed.
But he already knew how that ended. Kill everyone who stands in the way, and what you're left with isn't an improved world. It's a more chaotic one, with his own violence baked into its foundations.
He needed forces. He needed people who could manage what he built. He needed infrastructure, not just power.
He looked at the map, and his eyes settled on a specific location.
Amazon Lily.
Boa Hancock, he thought, and there wasn't much else that needed saying about that particular calculation.
After Amazon Lily, Vegapunk. The cloning technology the scientist had been developing could mass-produce Way Big—actual To'kustar giants as a military force. With that kind of army and the right people managing it, the rest became significantly simpler.
The island was barely visible now, just a dark shape against the morning horizon.
He folded the map.