Chapter 112: Foodvalten 102

The way through the Red Line took nearly five days to complete, and as they went through one lock after another Bill and the others frequently marveled at the fluorescent mosses and fireflies that provided the artificial channel with light.

Besides admiring the view, during this time the crew had settled in doing their routine and Bill found himself training with Vergo each morning. To put it mildly, despite all of the Vice Admirals eccentricities the man was very strong.

He could tell the Vice Admiral hadn’t any Devil Fruit nor consciously mastered Life Return, however he was still able to match Bill when it came to the hydraulic weight presses.

Of course, Bill wasn’t using his full strength and he suspected neither was Vergo, nevertheless, it really just showed how valuable the ‘Meditative Pushup’ taught by Instructor Trapano could be. Which was to say that in this world a person didn’t need to have complete conscious control over their body to train it to superhuman levels.

With Ricky back in his company, Bill found himself with a lot more free time to start making designs and catching up on cybernetic engineering. Particularly, Bill was looking for ways to aid his Departments human Special Operators at a cost that they could afford.

The Pulse Boots and Gloves were amazing pieces of technology, but they were just too expensive to produce on mass, and so Bill was constantly fiddling around with cheaper alternatives.

His father really hadn’t lied all those years ago when he told Bill that the Marines could only ever spare the absolute minimum of resources needed to get the job done.

The Fish-men sailors were a day-by-day dilemma and being confined in the long tunnel didn’t help. Although they were ‘human’ in some ways, and thanks to that they were bearable at all, they also had their own standards that could only be seen as weird or even offensive to the humans in their company.

One easy example that Bill found was that they considered themselves as a ‘pod’ and if one member of the pod was insulted, then you were insulting the group. Likewise, if one member of the pod was beaten in a duel, or in weightlifting, or even in a simple card game, the entire pod would come one after another to try and win.

In these cases, they wouldn’t simply take ‘no’ for an answer and wouldn’t hesitate resorting to violence if their challenge wasn’t answered. Likewise, if one member of the pod beat someone at anything, it was the same as the entire group doing so.

Bill never brought it up, and he knew he would never know, but he pondered if this was why whale pods on Earth would beach themselves. Maybe it was just when one member got stuck on land, all the others wanted to prove that they could go and get free.

Whatever the case, this species peculiarity made Bill bring Willy more and more into the fold. Willy was shrewd as far as Fish-men went, and his leadership was invaluable to the others.

Yoko had almost immediately taken up to following Sasha around again, and Bill was mildly surprised when he found out that his two friends could cut steel with their swords. In Sasha’s words, that the determining factor between a sword user and a swordsmen and Bill wasn’t one to debate the point.

He had watched them spar in the training hall and could somewhat tell using his third eye that it was indeed the case that their spirit was infused with the swords, however for whatever reason he wasn’t able to normally ‘see’ peoples’ souls as he could with the Devil Fruit entities.

For him, souls were like the movements a person would see out of the corners of their eyes, but when they looked, they would find nothing.

The fact that they only ever seemed to be shadows made him think, but the idea wasn’t dwelled on, and he chalked it up to the fact that souls were only visible when they were affecting with reality.

Besides Sasha and Ricky, Bill of course made time for the others, he always ate his meals with Yoko and sometimes others would join too.

Pearson constantly played with his Devil Fruit in secret and didn’t seem to realize that Bill could tell whenever it was being used on the ship. This was aggravating but the only time Bill stepped in was when Pearson was playing cups with the Fish-men.

They understandably could not understand that he was creating holes on the bottom of the table and dropping the ball from under the cup to inside his pocket.

The amount of consternation this simple gag produced was outrageous, and for Sasha who hadn’t been there during the Hannabal Island raid, she naturally wasn’t prone to cut the newly enlisted man any slack.

Ricky handled it better, since Bill had assigned Pearson to aid him with the paperwork, pointing out that Pearson couldn’t be fully blamed for not knowing the way Fish-men thought.

But in the end, Bill had to step in himself to resolve the tension and in doing so gained another insight in the worldview of Fish-men.

The last major thing to have happened as they were traveling through the Red Port was that Bill had tested Miyagi’s ‘Miracle Drug’. This drug, according to Miyagi, would instantly heal any wound anywhere on the body for a period of six hours but once that time was over the wounds would reappear and double.

The idea of a drug that could cure any wound was intriguing, and with the control he had over his body, what could go wrong? Bill thought.

On Earth, he had never done any drug besides alcohol, but having lived through ‘Reefer Madness’ and later the ‘War on Drugs’, Bill knew as much as any lay person what effects various drugs would have on people.

So, to his surprised, when he took this so-called ‘Miracle Drug’ he found that it was basically ‘Super Meth’.

The main effect was that the drug produced was the ‘Rush’ but unlike regular meth that increased heart rate, this drug turbo charged pretty much every aspect of the immune system.

This definitely resulted in deadly injuries being temporarily restored, but the ‘crash’ would probably be fatal if the original wounds were worse than a fractured limb.

This wasn’t to say that the drug wasn’t interesting. Even for a person as anti-drug use as he was, the obvious utility of having a six-hour long ‘boost’ to the immune system was enough to warrant more research.

So, in spite of Bill never planning to have a squad of suicide warriors, he told Miyagi that their Department wouldn’t ever use this version of the miracle drug but then challenged the doctor to make a toned-down version.

Around lunch on the fifth day natural light was seen at the end of the tunnel and the crew rejoiced.

They still had a few hours to be undocked however things went smoothly and once they were out at sea Boss spread his wings. While he and Yoko flew around and around the Fish-men jumped overboard diving down deep and bringing back a feast of Mini-Express Shrimp.

With a dinner feast of barbecued shrimps, fine low-alcohol beers, and citrusy deserts the crew welcomed the New World. Bidding farewell to the Red Line shrinking in the distance behind them.

You are reading story The Marine Part One at novel35.com

Marine Bases in the New World had a somewhat different naming system than the rest of the Blues. Starting with G-1 they had firm control over the surrounding territory, and even though the World Government didn’t control every island along the chain of G- bases, they were seen as relatively safe harbors in the dangerous sea.

Besides those, there were fringe bases that lined the territories of the four Pirate Emperors. Every Marine base played important roles, however the scale of those fringe bases were naturally smaller.

Bill had never seen an Admiral fight; however, he had read reports of Admirals being able to destroy entire landscapes with their power. Considering that the Pirate Emperors were individually stronger than the Admirals, it was no surprise that the bases nearer to them were spartan outposts primarily designed for reconnaissance.

In this way, sailing through the night the Frontier Run past by G-1 and headed in the general direction of G-5. As they were following an Eternal Pose, there route would take them past G-2 and G-3, and the next Marine base they would see was G-4.

Ocean travel on the Grand Line was well known to be treacherous, however, the New World brought challenges that really did make the first half seem like ‘Paradise’.

Huge rolling currents were only interceded by afternoon heat waves and they in turn were only interceded by bitterly cold nights.

Clothing was always a problem for people living on the sea. Fabrics tended to ware down quickly in the salty breezes and Bill found that washed cloths never seemed to really dry in the New World.

‘They’re either wet with salt water and sweat, or frozen solid.’ He mused.

Still, despite everything the small Frigate plowed ahead. Training, Classes, and other general work was done like normal – if anything had changed it was the fascination with sewing cloths by the human crews’ female members.

Without many extra supplies on board, those female Marine who were disproportionally Sail Makers, could charge premium prices to mend clothing or pack bedding.

Bill didn’t stop for now, but he figured in the future to have this added to the list of duties for that profession – even if that meant he would need to increase their wages.

After three weeks had passed in this way, they were just a week out from G-5 when Yoko burst into Bill’s office.

“Captain!!” she said giving a salute before dropping the pretense and continuing quickly coming to the desk: “We spotted pirates!”

Looking down at the teenage girl, who was only 5’4”, Bill nodded and asked: “Are they pursuing us?”

Shaking her head, Yoko started talking fast: “No, I saw them flying on Boss! They were anchored off an island we’re just passing, two ships in total, but they’re flying Jolly Rogers.”

Nodding again, Bill closed his file and standing up followed an excited Yoko out of his cabin.

They had never talked about what had happened at Hannabal, the girl had stayed perfectly quiet for some weeks, and even though he knew he should, Bill couldn’t bring himself to be hard on her after seeing the look on her face while he was being carved up.

She got over it though, and he was somewhat glad and somewhat troubled. The girl had been witnessed to pirate raids all her life, and Bill wasn’t sure if that made her resilient or more cynical.

Either way, now standing on the starboard side of the Frontier Run, Bill followed the direction was Yoko was pointing, and after adjusting his eyes, he saw the two ships sitting in a nature harbor.

He didn’t recognize them, and chasing pirates wasn’t his current duty, and so shaking his head again, he said: “I don’t recognize the flags, so we’ll pass them this time. We have a schedule to keep.”

Bill knew that he was going to get some level of push back, but what he didn’t expect was a voice that came from behind him.

“Don’t be so quick to pass this up. It’s an opportunity.”

Turning his head, Bill glanced down at Vergo who was nearing him with his arms folded behind his back and asked: “You know who they are?”

Bill knew Vergo had good eyesight after spending weeks training together, though perhaps not as good as his own, and this was confirmed when the Vice Admiral pulled a telescope from his pocket and looked.

He stayed silent for a few moments and they closing the telescope replied: “That island is called Foodvalten, and the ship with the pink panda belongs to Blamenco, 6th Division Commander of the Whitebeard Pirates. The ship with the black lightning bolt belongs to a subordinate crew led by the pirate McGuy.”

Pausing again for several more moments, Bill could see the gears turning, but as he was about to still refuse, Vergo said decisively: “Three weeks ago, there was a report that Whitebeards 2nd Division Commander Fire Fist Ace was captured and delivered to us by the newly created Warlord, Marshall D. Teach.

This close to the Red Line, we have to assume that this is the staging point for a rescue mission.”

Bill clearly knew where this was going and began to shake his head before he was cut off by Vergo: “Between the two of us, and the rest of your crew, we can overcome only McGuy and the 6th Division Commander. We can score a pivotal strike against any operations taken against our comrades.

Captain Ox, I want you to go with me willingly, but remember I can just order you to do so.”

Shaking his head again, Bill sighed and simply said: “Alright, but wipe that egg off your face.” After that, he turned back to his crew and started getting ready for the assault.

No matter what, he clinched his fists and told himself, this wouldn’t be the same as Hannabal.