Sengoku could only sigh at Garp, then explained, "Three days ago, Ares became a Rocks Pirates division commander and he even traded blows with Charlotte Linlin."
"From here on, Ares is no less dangerous than Whitebeard or Shiki," Steel Bone Kong warned Garp. "Don't treat him like the kid from a year ago, or you'll pay for it."
Garp's eyes lit with a familiar itch for a good fight. He grinned. "I won't underestimate that brat."
Kong spread a chart across the desk. "This is their approximate range. They're after a treasure. We strike after they find it." He slid out a slip of white paper from a drawer. "This Vivre Card will point you to them. Don't dawdle move now."
A Vivre Card.
Sengoku's gaze sharpened as he took it. So his hunch was right the Marines had someone embedded near the Rocks Pirates.
"Once you locate them, destroy the Vivre Card," Kong added, voice flat.
The sea glittered to the horizon.
It was the sixth day since Tengetsu Ares and company had put out to sea.
In the captain's room, Captain John sat before a slope of charts broad, coarse maps piled with finely inked detail-sheets. He frowned. "These markings sketch parts of the ruins, but there's no precise mark for the stash… We'll have to reach the indicated site and find the ruins first."
He'd narrowed down the general zone, but some of the cartographer's symbols defied easy interpretation.
He tapped a blank patch labeled only with a crude boundary. "Next up is the Sea of Death. The New World's weather is fickle, but this zone is nothing but disasters. I'd better warn the navigators."
He set the charts aside.
The ship lurched.
Maps slithered off the table and fanned across the floor. John's face darkened. "What now ?"
The next jolt was worse. The deck heaved until the tilt felt near forty-five degrees.
John stuffed the treasure map into his coat and sprinted out. Sea had already sluiced through the corridors; water dripped steadily from every seam.
He burst onto the deck and froze.
A field of ocean whirlpools punctured the sea like black pits. Between towering waterspouts lay the narrow strip their ship currently occupied, walls of slamming waves attacking from every side. The vessel pitched like a leaf in a gale, on the edge of capsizing with every breath.
A breaker slammed across the deck.
"Hel help!" A pirate lost his footing and vanished over the rail. His cry was shredded by the current; no one could spare a hand to haul him back.
Chaos. Most men could only clutch whatever they could grasp; moving was a gamble.
John fought his way to the helm where Wang Zhi wrestled the wheel. "Can you steer us through this gauntlet?" he shouted.
"No guarantees," Wang Zhi shot back. "We don't know how wide this belt runs. One mistake and we're corkscrewed into the deep. The waves are hammering us nonstop the rudder's barely biting."
John didn't need him to finish. They'd be dragged into a whirlpool, torn apart by the current, and join the New World's countless wrecks on the seafloor.
The sea thundered, the wind howled and John's mind raced uselessly.
"Leave it to me!"
Ares's voice cut through the storm. He had arrived on deck in time to hear them.
John's eyes brightened. "Then I'm counting on you."
In the next instant, Ares surged skyward his frame unfurled, scales flashed, and a vast Azure Dragon coiled above the mast. Blue plates gleamed under the sun as he lorded over sky and sea like a beast from myth.
"Flame Clouds!"
Blood-red clouds billowed into being, enfolding the ship and lifting it clean off the water.
The hull rose out of the maelstrom's teeth. Men sagged with relief; a few simply collapsed, gulping air like fish.
"Good thing Ares is with us," Wang Zhi exhaled. "Otherwise I don't see how we clear this zone. No wonder they call it the Sea of Death. You probably need a Treasure Tree Adam hull just to try it."
Captain John nodded, still shaken. "First time here. Didn't expect to hit a field of whirlpools at the border."
He cupped his hands and bellowed down the length of the deck, "Catch your breath, but stay sharp. We've only just entered the Sea of Death, and the target is still a long way off. The weather here turns on a whim expect worse. Steel yourselves!"
He turned toward the cabins then a wrongness brushed his cheek. A wind with weight to it.
He stopped dead. "No. This wind…"
"This wind is wrong."
High above, the Azure Dragon's pupils narrowed. Ares's voice boomed down, "Waterspouts ahead!"
Even he had never seen so many columns that dwarfed anything he himself could conjure. He knew exactly how savage such a force was. Give this storm an island and it would tear it to quarters.
On the horizon, sky-piercing waterspouts stitched ocean to cloud, each birthing gales and sucking walls of sea into the heavens. If a landward tornado chewed stone and timber, then its ocean twin devoured water itself dragging it into a spinning pillar while sowing whirlpools and hurricanes in its wake.
And these moved.
"Damn it how can there be this many?" Wang Zhi swore. In this place, foul weather came in packs, and each event rose to the level of a natural calamity.
Even hardened pirates blanched, hollow-eyed as if death itself had pulled up alongside them.
John bit back his own curse but couldn't stop the thought: Who drew this treasure map and why hide a hoard in a deathtrap like this?
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