The deck of the pirate ship fell into a silence so profound it felt heavy.
The pirates stood frozen, their collective breath hitching in their throats. They stared at the wreckage of their front line—a dozen men leveled by a single, casual sweep of a hammer.
The swarming, aggressive momentum that had characterized the pirate ship mere seconds ago vanished. It was replaced by a hollow, creeping dread. Men who had been shouting for blood only moments earlier were now inching backward, their eyes darting toward the railings, desperate for any excuse to vanish into the churning salt water.
"A bunch of trash! Get out of the way! Let me handle the brat!"
Through the heavy, suffocating silence, a voice boomed—a sound of raw, unrefined arrogance.
A bald man stepped through the ranks. He was massive, his frame as broad and dense as Ornn's own. His muscles were exaggerated, rippling like coiled cables beneath skin that had been tanned by decades of exposure to the brutal sea sun. He hefted an axe the size of a door panel—a monstrosity of rusted iron and chipped edge that looked more like a slab of industrial scrap than a weapon of war.
"It's Captain Balu!" one of the minions gasped, his voice trembling with a mix of terror and reverence.
"The Bounty of Four Hundred Million Berries!" another chimed in. "He'll tear that boy apart!"
The pirate minions, who had been huddling together in sheer cowardice, suddenly found their courage. They clung to Balu's presence like a life raft, transformed back into a gallery of eager, bloodthirsty spectators.
Balu basked in the adulation. He held his axe high, catching the sunlight on the jagged blade, and looked down at Ornn with the kind of overblown confidence that suggested he had never once met a man capable of breaking his spirit.
"It's an honor for you to die by my hand!"
When Ornn didn't immediately shift his stance, Balu took it as cowardice. He roared, a sound that shook the very mast of the ship, and lunged. He brought the massive axe down in a vertical cleave, a strike meant to cleave the boy and the deck beneath him into two perfect halves.
Ornn didn't dodge.
He tracked the arc of the weapon. He felt the shift in the air pressure. He needed a benchmark—a concrete measurement of his current standing in this world. He gripped his hammer, his knuckles white, and swung upward to meet the falling blade head-on.
CLANG!
C-crack—
Two distinct sounds filled the air, jarringly different in their resonance. The first was the sharp, metallic bell-toll of a Heart of Steel mark being pulverized into nothingness. The second was the high-pitched, agonized scream of steel that had reached its structural limit.
The hammer, hardened by Ornn's latent energy and backed by his thousand-fold constitution, was an immovable object. The axe was not.
The blade didn't just bend; it disintegrated.
A jagged shard of the axe-head whirled through the air like lethal shrapnel, burying itself in the skull of an unlucky pirate standing five meters behind the captain.
Heart of Steel: +1 Stack.
The minions didn't even have time to scream for their comrade. Balu—the 'invincible god of war'—staggered. The shock of the impact had traveled up the handle of the axe like a kinetic ghost, shattering his wrists and dislocating his jaw in a single, violent vibration. Blood sprayed from his mouth as if a seal had been broken.
The bear-sized man retreated uncontrollably, tripping over his own feet and crashing into the deck with the grace of a falling tree. His broken axe fell beside him, punching a clean, jagged hole through the ship's wood.
"Captain Balu!"
The minions shrieked in unison.
But Ornn himself was the most shocked of all. He stood amidst the wreckage, his hammer still smoking with the residue of the clash.
He had known the extra damage bonus from the shattered Heart of Steel mark was significant, but the expressive power of the blow was staggering. He remembered the stories of Luffy fighting Don Krieg—a man with a significant bounty—and how those battles had been grueling, multi-staged marathons. Ornn had braced himself for a similar struggle. He had even mentally mapped out his transformation sequences, ready to lean into his Beast Form if he were pressed.
And this was the result?
For the first time, Ornn realized he had been underestimating his own arithmetic. A thousand layers of Heart Steel might be a drop in the ocean when facing a Yonko in the New World, but in the Blue Seas? It was an insurmountable wall. There were very few people in this corner of the world who could survive the impact long enough to actually call it a fight.
Balu, paralyzed by fear and agony, stared up at Ornn. He didn't dare move to retrieve his weapon. He used his remaining breath to scream at his crew.
"Don't just stand there! Shoot him! Kill him or you're all shark bait!"
The desperation in his voice broke the pirates' stupor.
"Fire! Open fire!!"
The first mate pulled his flintlock. A second later, the deck was a staccato rhythm of gunfire. Long guns and short cannons were aimed at the center of the ship, creating a wall of lead.
Clap-clap-clap-clap!
Modern instincts died hard. Despite the Lion King breastplate, Ornn wasn't about to test if his face was bulletproof. He slammed his fist into the deck.
[Volcanic Rupture]
A massive column of magma, half a meter in diameter, erupted from the boards directly in front of him. In the game, the pillar was a fixed size; here, Ornn could adjust the scale by the amount of heat he channeled. He pushed his energy into the floor, and the ship groaned as a molten barrier tore through the wood, swallowing ninety percent of the incoming lead.
But he was surrounded. The pirates at his back pulled their triggers.
Puff. Puff. Puff.
Ornn felt the series of sharp, muffled impacts against his shoulder blades. He winced, a reflex born of his past life, but the pain was underwhelming. It felt like being pelted by pebbles thrown by a child.
He reached back and casually plucked a rounded lead bullet from a shallow wound in his shoulder. He touched the spot; it was just a warm, shallow dent. The Lion Never Dies ability was already knitting the flesh back together; the blood had barely even begun to flow before the wound was sealed.
Is my constitution so high that lead only deals single-digit damage?
If that was the case... then there was nothing to fear.
Ornn walked around the cooling lava pillar, his eyes tracking the pirates. They were no longer threats. They were just walking stacks of steel waiting to be harvested for his growth.
"Demacia!" he yelled—partly as a joke, partly as a release of the tension that had been coiling in his chest for weeks.
He turned into a whirlwind of iron and heat. A berserker with a hammer. In less than a minute, the screams and the gunfire faded, replaced by the heavy silence of a defeated crew.
...
"Not bad, Ornn," Yamato said, leaping from their original sailboat onto the deck of the pirate ship. She looked around at the carnage, a wide, satisfied smile on her face. "You've been getting stronger. Much stronger than when we left the Moby Dick."
She stomped her foot on the deck, testing the weight. "And this boat... it's much more stable than ours. If we take this for the next leg, my seasickness might actually stand a chance."
Ornn didn't answer the remark about the ship. He walked toward the broken, trembling form of Captain Balu. He stood over the man, the heat of his hammer still shimmering in the salt air.
"I have questions," Ornn said, his voice flat and dangerously calm. "And I suspect you aren't in a position to reject me, are you?"
---
Note on Progression: For those tracking the math—in the world of One Piece, the disparity between raw power levels is exponential. If an average civilian has a Power Level of 10, an elite fighter like Rob Lucci sits in the thousands. A Yonko like Kaido exists in the millions. Ornn's current 1,000 layers of Heart Steel provide a significant boost—roughly doubling his base stats in his human form—but it does not make him invincible. He is currently scaling into the realm of mid-level Grand Line combatants. His progression, while rapid, is merely the foundation of the mountain he intends to climb. As he settles into the Four Seas, the focus will shift from survival to active discipline and mastery of his abilities.
The hunt for a crew begins now. The seas are vast, and the Illustrated Book has many pages yet to turn.
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