Not long ago, Nami stole more than a million berries from some pirate crew, slipped away from them in secret, and returned to Cocoyasi Village in the dead of night, where she hid all the money in the tangerine grove.
The moment she stepped through the door, though, she was hit with shocking news.
The Arlong Pirates were gone.
Wiped out so thoroughly they'd practically been ground to dust.
Nojiko threw her arms around her little sister and told her she didn't have to suffer like that anymore, because the village had already been saved.
Nami refused to believe it. She shoved Nojiko aside, ran out of the house, and sprinted toward Arlong Park.
If the Arlong Pirates had really been destroyed, then what had all her suffering over the years even meant?
Was it all just bad luck on her part?
But when Nami reached Arlong Park, she found that it was gone.
What stood there now was nothing but devastation.
Nojiko, who had chased after her, told her what had happened: not long ago, a few strangers had come to the village, killed one of the Arlong Pirates' officers, and then summoned a gigantic thousand-armed monster that casually obliterated Arlong Park.
The members of the Arlong Pirates and Arlong Park itself had all been destroyed together.
The bodies had been smashed into paste.
The kind of paste you couldn't even piece back together if you tried.
Once Nami confirmed that the Arlong Pirates were really gone, she returned home with Nojiko in a daze and burst into tears.
She cried and cried until she eventually fell asleep.
Nojiko stayed by her side the entire night.
When Nami woke up the next morning, she felt fully alive again, and the first thing she wanted to do was go apologize to the villagers.
After all, she had spent all those years working for the Arlong Pirates.
In the villagers' eyes, she was a traitor.
Now that the Arlong Pirates were gone, she naturally wanted to apologize properly and ask for their forgiveness.
But when she tried, Nami was stunned to discover that the villagers had already known the truth all along—that she had joined the Arlong Pirates and worked for them only for the village's sake.
So in the end, Nami never got to apologize.
Instead, the villagers apologized to her, thanking her for everything she had done for the village over the years.
It moved her so deeply that she burst into tears on the spot.
Genzo, the village sheriff, even teased her, saying she was still like a child who did nothing but cry all day.
That made Nami laugh through her tears, and she punched him several times.
Just like that, Cocoyasi Village finally got its happy ending.
The days that followed felt like a dream.
Getting up on time every day. Going to sleep on time. No longer needing to stay tense all the time. No longer having to fear the oppression of the Arlong Pirates. Living each day carefree, like something out of a fairy tale.
And yet, for some reason, Nami couldn't shake the feeling that it all wasn't real.
After living in Cocoyasi Village for a few days, she started getting restless. It felt like her bones were itching.
Nojiko noticed everything and eventually found a chance to sit down and have a serious talk with her.
Only then did Nami realize that over all those years, she had already gotten used to life on the sea.
She had grown used to adventure.
This peaceful life was good, yes—but it didn't suit her.
More importantly, even though the Arlong Pirates were gone, her dream still hadn't been fulfilled.
She didn't want to spend her whole life trapped in a tiny place like this.
In the end, with Nojiko's support, Nami decided to set sail.
This time, she had two goals.
The first was to find the people who had saved Cocoyasi Village and thank them properly.
The second was to fulfill her dream and draw a complete map of the world.
With those two dreams in her heart, she said goodbye to the villagers and her sister, then left Cocoyasi Village without hesitation in her little boat.
And then she got caught by a bunch of pirates.
"Huh?" That sudden twist nearly threw Rowan off balance. He looked at Nami with sympathy. "Wow. You really are unlucky."
Nami let out two dry laughs. "It's not that bad, really. I stole more than a million berries from that pirate crew not long ago, so they were specifically chasing me."
"I just had rotten luck and ran right into them the moment I went back out to sea."
Rowan said, "Damn. I sympathized too early."
She totally had that coming.
Just then, a sea breeze swept over them, and Nami suddenly sneezed.
Only then did Rowan remember—she had just fallen into the sea and was still soaked from head to toe. If this kept up, she might catch a cold.
"Take her to wash up and get her into a change of clothes." Rowan waved a hand, and Kanae led Nami into the cabin.
As for the pirates still splashing around in the water after falling overboard, Rowan thought for a moment, then said to Minato Namikaze,
"Kill them all."
The nearest shore was nowhere close, and Rowan was already pretty sure those pirates weren't going to make it.
But considering how absurdly tough people in the One Piece world could be, what if someone really did manage to hold on until rescue came? What if someone actually survived?
Then the ones who would suffer later would just be more innocent people.
So it was safer to kill them all.
Minato didn't refuse.
To him, pirates in this world weren't much different from the bandits in his own world—they were all the same kind of people who blocked the road and robbed others.
If you ran into the "decent" kind, they took your money and let you live.
If you ran into the worse kind, they took your money and your life.
He didn't know these pirates, and he had no idea which kind they were.
But pirate was pirate.
Killing them was the safest option.
After all, when he had been a ninja, he had killed plenty of people. Killing didn't bother him.
So Minato formed hand seals and used Water Release: Great Waterfall Technique.
The sea instantly surged up in waves dozens of meters high, swallowing the pirates and their ship whole and dragging them straight into the depths.
By the time Nami finished taking a hot bath and came back out in a clean set of clothes, not only were the pirates gone, even the wreckage of their ship had vanished.
Still, Nami was quick-witted enough not to ask questions about that.
Instead, she changed the subject and asked who Rowan and the others really were—and why they had saved Cocoyasi Village.
In her eyes, Rowan's group had no ties to Cocoyasi Village at all, so there was no reason for them to save it.
And they didn't look like bounty hunters either.
After all, what kind of bounty hunter would smash the Arlong Pirates into meat paste?
Without heads to prove who the pirates were, how were they supposed to collect the reward from the Marines?
That didn't fit the behavior of bounty hunters at all.
So Nami was genuinely curious what their reason was.
Had they really just done it to save Cocoyasi Village? Out of simple goodwill?
In this broken, rotten world, Nami didn't believe people like that existed.
But if she said they had some ulterior motive, that didn't seem right either, because after taking down Arlong, they had just turned around and left. They hadn't asked the villagers for any reward.
So no matter how hard she thought about it, Nami just couldn't understand what they were after.
Now that she had finally run into Rowan and the others again, she could no longer hold back her curiosity and asked them outright.
"If I had to say," Rowan said, "it was for you."
~~~
Patreon(.)com/Bleam
— Currently You can Read 70 Chapters Ahead of Others!