Ghosts Without a King
Maps and rubbings were spread across the library's great table like a cartographer's fever dream. Robin stood at the center of it all, ink on her fingers, eyes alight with that quiet fire Vegito loved — discovery.
"Three Road Poneglyphs confirmed," she said, touching each charcoal rubbing in turn: Zou, Totto Land, Karakuri Reef. "The fourth… was rumored to have been courted by Teach before he died. With him gone, the trail fractured. But the currents of power didn't stop — they pooled."
"Where?" Bell-mère asked, cigarette sending a thin ribbon toward the vaulted ceiling.
"A lawless atoll in the New World's grey band," Lilith answered, flicking a hologram alive over the table. A ring of basalt teeth jutted from stormy water; the projection pulsed with hidden structures beneath. "Neverskull. It used to be a relay for underworld auctions. After Vegito erased Teach, every bitter shark who'd hoped to feast under him swam here instead."
"Cute," Nami muttered. "An island named like a threat and an invitation."
Vegito's tail made a lazy s-curve. "Remnants without a king," he said. "Which means they'll try extra hard to pretend they have teeth."
Robin's mouth quirked. "And you'll take them away."
"Gently," he promised, already grinning. "Gently… for me."
Neverskull
The Heaven's Embrace descended through slate clouds and sheets of sideways rain. Below, Neverskull presented itself like a dare: a caldera-atoll whose outer ring formed a broken crown. Inside it, the lagoon boiled with vents and cross-currents; shanty piers clung to rock like barnacles. Masts bristled. Cannon mouths glared. Flags of ten different crews snapped in the wind — the stitched-together pride of an alliance built from spite.
A conch horn blared. Magnified voices followed.
"Sky-ship! You're in Coalition water! Identify or be stripped!"
Vegito floated off the bow, rain streaking off his shoulders like second thoughts. "Name's Vegito. I'm here to read a rock."
Silence, then disbelief, then laughter rolling across the water.
A broad-beam loudhailer crackled. "You mean the rock? The one that makes emperors? You must be stupid, small man."
"Frequently," Vegito agreed. "Let's do this the easy way. You let my archeologist read it, we buy out your taverns, you keep your noses, and nobody swims home."
Banter rippled through the coalition flotilla — doubt, swagger, greed. And then a new voice cut the rain, steady and clipped:
"Fire."
A dozen flashes. A dozen shells, screaming. Vegito sighed, pinched two fingers in midair. Every cannonball froze, rotating slowly as if embarrassed, then spun back like naughty dogs. The blasts blossomed among the outer boats, flipping four cleanly, dunking crews. No deaths. A lot of sputtering.
"Easy way's getting easier," Bell-mère said around her cigarette.
On Neverskull's king-pier, the coalition's council strode out under a bone-awning — a pageant of grudges in coats and scars: Sister Riza of the bladed nuns, a smile like a razor; Goliath Hark, a warlord in rusted plates; Avalan Varo, a masked broker with rings on every finger; and a handful more hungry enough to pretend they weren't already bleeding.
Varo raised his hands. "Peace! Captain Vegito, rumors say you killed Teach with a flick. Rumors say lots of things. We deal in proofs."
Vegito drifted down until his boots touched the slick planks in front of them. His tail curled like a question mark. "I'm proof enough."
Riza's eyes cut to Robin. "Your scholar reads our relic, your ship pays Neverskull's tithe — triple for trespass."
Nami opened her mouth. Vegito lifted a hand. "Tithe this: I leave the pier still standing."
Hark lumbered forward, plates clanking. "Cute. I'll mount that tail on my prow."
"You can try," Vegito said gently.
Statement of Intent
The boardwalk trembled. Hark roared and swung a quarry-hammer downward. Vegito didn't move his feet. He lifted his forearm, let the head kiss hardened skin, then tapped the handle with one knuckle. The hammer atomized. Hark blinked. Vegito flicked him — a lazy backhand — and the warlord sailed in a dignified arc into a tar barrel.
Sister Riza vanished — a whisper of habits and knives. She reappeared behind Robin. Twelve hands bloomed from the air — Cien Fleur: Tapis — and set Riza gently on a fish crate in a seatbelt of arms. Reiju leaned over and tidily dissolved Riza's blades into ribbons with a caress of acid.
"Everyone's so tense," Reiju said, sugar-sweet. "You'll wrinkle."
Avalan Varo's rings clicked as he recalculated his odds. "Captain Vegito. Perhaps… a contest. You win, you read. You lose, you leave your ship's keys."
Carrot's ears shot up. "He doesn't have keys! She sings for him!"
Vegito's grin sharpened. "Contest is cute. But time's a luxury I spend elsewhere." He looked up. "Bell-mère."
"Mm?" A single rifle report was louder than thunder.
The coalition's entire signal mast — flags, cables, the pretension of order — toppled in two clean pieces. The stump steamed in rain.
"Consider this a courtesy visit," Vegito said. "Show us the vault. You get to be the coalition that brokered a deal with me instead of the one I made an example of."
Varo swallowed. Sister Riza's smile went from knife to needle. And the elder of Neverskull chose sanity over pride.
"This way," croaked a bone-thin man in a salt-stiff cloak. "Before the storm remembers it hates us."
The Spiral Below
Neverskull's throat spiraled downward through basalt throat and fossil, a corkscrew stair cut when the world was softer. Water sweated through the walls in glistening veils. Ahead, ward-lamps guttered. Robin's fingers traced grooves worn by centuries of guarded steps.
"Old," she murmured. "Older than the coalition. Older than the Government."
"Naturally," the elder said, the words a ritual he'd swallowed his whole life. "Neverskull remembers debts older than your bounties."
Lilith walked with a hologram hovering over one palm, mapping ambient fields. "They've layered sea-stone into the rock. Clever. Annoying."
"It won't stop us," Kuina said. "It'll slow hands and blades that rely on tricks. Ours do not."
They reached a sealed antechamber. Basalt slab. Seastone pins. The elder lifted a ceremonial key as if it weighed a life, slid it into the heart of the stone, twisted.
Mechanisms thunked. The door sighed inward.
Cold, quiet space. In its center, a red monolith breathed age. Road Poneglyph.
Robin exhaled like a prayer. "At last."
She paced to it, palms hovering, then resting, eyes scanning, mind dancing down each groove of history. Words unspooled in a low murmur — ancient tongue, modern mind.
Nami watched the entrance, fingers on clima-tact. Reiju leaned against the wall, smile easy, eyes merciless. Vegito… just listened. He never tired of that tone in Robin's voice. It meant we win without punching.
Except the world never let him have it quiet.
The door slammed. Bolts dropped like falling anvils. A hiss: vents opening. A sharp, metallic scent.
"Gas," Reiju said, almost bored. She flicked a wrist. Poison kissed poison. The vapor turned from lethal to sleepy in a heartbeat, curling like a cat and dying.
A slow clap. Varo stepped from a side slit, mask off now: handsome, paint-pale, eyes too hungry.
"Insurance," he said. "A relic for a crown. You kill me, the charge on the vault detonates and cracks the stone. You spare me, I profit."
Riza's voice bled from the dark behind Robin: "And perhaps we keep the scholar."
Half a dozen gun barrels whispered out of hidden slots, black flowers opening.
Vegito didn't sigh this time. He just looked tired for a blink, like a father catching toddlers with kitchen knives. Then he smiled again.
"Lilith?"
"On it."
Reality hiccuped. The vault floor pulsed — a micro-gate thrummed open beneath every gun slot. All the barrels fell an inch… and reappeared three decks up inside Neverskull's customs house, where they went off into a cache of fireworks, staging what on the surface must have looked like a very enthusiastic festival.
Riza lunged. Kuina's blade drew and sheathed between heartbeats. Riza froze mid-pounce, one strand of hair drifting down, the breath she'd held shifting into something like awe.
Varo reached for a trigger hidden in his sleeve. Vegito tapped his knuckle. Tiny bones gave way. The trigger clattered. Vegito held out his hand; a blinking core — the vault fail-safe — floated out of the wall's guts and into his palm like a scolded firefly.
"No," Vegito said kindly. "We do this without making new craters."
Varo's smile cracked. "You can't keep all the worlds you topple from falling on you."
"I don't topple worlds," Vegito said. He turned the fail-safe off with a thought and crushed it. "I stand them back up."
Robin didn't pause her reading. Her voice warmed, then tightened, then steadied, like a needle finding thread.
"Got it," she said softly. "Coordinates locked. The final vector to Laugh Tale."
The room heard it as a sentence. The world would hear it as a verdict.
Price of a Quiet Exit
They climbed. Above, the rain had gentled, the basin lit by accidental fireworks and Coalition confusion. A half-burned banner fell into the lagoon, hissed out, drifted like a dead cuttlefish.
Vegito stepped back onto the king-pier and smiled at the council as if they'd merely concluded a difficult business lunch.
"Good talk," he said. "We'll be off. Neverskull keeps its docks. Its people breathe. Its pirates… revisit their life choices."
Sister Riza flexed fingers that would have found throats if fate were less cruel to her timing. "You'll make enemies by letting us live."
"Make?" Bell-mère echoed, amused. "Sweetheart, have you read a paper?"
Avalan Varo clutched his hand and tried to look dangerous while calculating second careers. "You can't hold every sea with charm and threats."
"I don't," Vegito said. "I hold them with friends."
On cue, Heaven's Embrace unfurled her wings to full span, runes bright as sunrise. Giants' gifts — coralsteel crescents — gleamed along the gunwales. Mink pennants snapped. The dragon-woman figurehead's eyes shone, amused.
The coalition flinched. Neverskull's elder, who'd watched more storms than their whole council combined, barked a laugh that was mostly cough. "Go, then, sky-man. We'll remember which pirate came for words instead of blood."
"Remember this too," Vegito said, stepping backward into the air, tail a playful hook. "If anyone here feels nostalgic for slavery, auctions, or chains — I collect those debts personally."
He rose until rain became mist and mist became nothing.
"Bell-mère," he called, not turning. "Give them a party favor."
"One," she said.
One shot. A weathered gallows on a satellite pier — relic of older cruelties — disintegrated into a cloud of matchsticks. No one cheered. They just breathed better.
Heaven's Embrace — Silence Before Thunder
In the strategy hall, the four rubbings lay like cardinal points around Robin's careful notes. Nami triangulated, fingers a blur. Lilith overlaid a star-map grid stolen from the Vault of Aegis. The room hummed. Lines snapped into a shape the whole crew could taste more than see.
A path. Through the New World's tantrums, through history's teeth. To a place sailors sang about and governments swore wasn't there.
Laugh Tale.
Carrot pressed her nose to the table. "That's… a lot of red squiggles."
"It's destiny," Nojiko said, smiling, "in Nami."
"Coordinates," Nami corrected, but she was smiling too. "We can sail it."
Robin's eyes were wet in the way that bled through her composure and made everyone else look away like giving a woman privacy in a crowded room. "Ohara will sail it," she whispered. "With us."
Vegito put his palm flat on the table's edge like grounding lightning. His tail coiled against his thigh, restless, quiet. "Then it's time."
"Party first," Bell-mère said, light but iron. "Then death-defying stunts."
"Deal."
Cosette had already started issuing orders like a benevolent hurricane — soups, stews, celebratory sweets. The galley clanged into joy. The minks dragged out drums. Boa, pretending not to care, positioned herself exactly where Vegito would have to sit.
Reiju slipped past, bumped his shoulder. "You always did like foreplay."
"With fate?" he said.
"With the world," she said, and kissed his cheek.
Coo on the Wind
They didn't invite the News Coo. The News Coo invited itself, landing with a haughty hop on the figurehead's horn. Bell-mère paid it with a sardine and a look. The paper it dropped already smelled like panic.
SKY PIRATE TAKES LAST ROAD — COALITION HUMILIATED, NEVERSKULL SPARED
Below it, the thing that mattered more than column inches: bounty sheets hot from the ink.
Vegito whistled at his own poster — the number had crept again like a tide that forgot how to turn.
Vegito – 9,500,000,000 Beli"Existential maritime threat. Approach only with admirals. Preferably gods." (Someone in Marine PR had a sense of humor left.)
The crew rustled and yelped down the list.
"Nami – 420,000,000?!" Nami said, offended. "I am worth at least—"
"Double," Nojiko said, deadpan, holding up her own 310,000,000. "We'll send a corrections note."
"Robin – 1,200,000,000," Robin read, tone dry. "A flattering terror."
"Kuina – 800 mil." Kuina shrugged. "I've had worse nicknames."
"Reiju – 600 mil? Stingy," Reiju said. "They haven't seen my bad side."
"Carrot – 300 mil? Wheee!" Carrot cartwheeled. Wanda caught her by the scruff, laughing around her own 285 mil.
Chopper stood on the capstan, poster in both hooves. He read it three times, ears going from perk to droop to warrior-proud.
"Tony Tony Chopper – 1,000 Beli," Cosette read gently. "From fifty."
Chopper's eyes glittered. "I DID IT! I'M SCARY NOW!" He punched the air and immediately apologized to the air.
They lifted him anyway. "To the Monster!" Vegito declared. The deck answered with a cheer that sounded like ten ships and a thunderhead.
On the Holy Land, papers would be thrown. In Marineford, teeth would grind. On a thousand tavern walls, bounties would be nailed crooked and stared at like weather. On the Heaven's Embrace, it was just the drumroll before a chorus.
World Ripples
Marineford. Sengoku rubbed the bridge of his nose. "He spared Neverskull."
"Which makes him look magnanimous," Tsuru said. "Which makes him more dangerous."
Pangaea Castle. The Elders listened to reports turned into apologies. Saturn's jaw tightened. Warcury's cane cracked a tile.
In the quiet behind the throne, Imu traced an old, old line on an older map and said, without turning, "He thinks Laugh Tale is the end of a page. Teach them it is the start of a knife."
Elbaf. War horns answered themselves across valleys. The Sea Fang fleet carved Vegito's name into oaths and axe-hafts.
Whole Cake. Pudding underlined a headline and smiled in a way even a mother would fear to pry at.
Shanks' deck. Benn Beckman let the smoke out slow. "He'll force it."
Shanks's grin was all sunlight and blade. "Good. Me too."
Night Before the Edge
The party went long, as they always did when the course ahead was a straight line into legend. Meat mountains, stew rivers, cakes that tried to escape. Mink drums, Elbaf chants, Fish-Man harmonies, off-key Marine shanties remembered by Bell-mère and made her own.
Later, in the hush that follows joy, Vegito took first watch alone. The stars above were knives and salt. His tail tapped a rhythm the deck already knew by heart.
Sora slipped beside him, warmth in a blanket, in a hand curled at his elbow. "You watch like you can see tomorrow."
"I can," he said softly. "It has our footprints on it."
She rested her head on his shoulder. "Bring them all back."
He didn't promise. He never promised lies. He just looked at the path and decided again.
Behind them, life settled. Reiju's laughter, low. Robin's page turned. Chopper snored like a tiny storm. Bell-mère's cigarette bud glowed a small lighthouse on the quarterdeck.
He whispered to the night, because he liked challenging things that thought they couldn't hear him, "Laugh Tale."
The ship answered in the creak of content wood and the hum of impossible engines.
Cast Off Toward the Unpronounceable
Nami took the dawn watch with eyes already five islands ahead. Wind read her and behaved or pretended to. She glanced at Vegito. He nodded. She nodded back. Between them, a language older than ranks agreed:
Go.
The Heaven's Embrace turned her face toward a set of numbers that meant no one comes back the same. Runes brightened. Wings flexed. The dragon-woman figurehead smiled like she'd been waiting since the first board was hammered into the keel.
"Line is set," Robin said from the chart-table.
"Babies secured," Lilith said dryly over the intercom. "Maternity sector shields at absurd."
"Giant friends listening," Bell-mère added, tapping her transponder snail. "One call, we're a parade."
"Everyone eaten?" Cosette demanded.
A chorus of yeses, no's, and "always" rolled back. Vegito rolled his shoulders, cracked his neck, and let a sliver of his aura slip — enough to frost the rails with glitter and make the sun look twice.
He lifted one hand. The ship leapt like a heart.
"Next stop," he said, and it didn't feel like words but like the strike of a match in a dry world, "the edge of the map."
Bounties & Reactions — Crew Corner
They posted the new wanted sheets in the salon where everyone pretended not to look five times a day. The crew did their ritual — teasing, toasts, proclamations.
Chopper stood very straight in front of his 1,000.
"Doctor," Vegito said, solemn as a throne room. "That is a terrifying number. The seas tremble."
Chopper burst into happy tears, tried to hide, failed gloriously, and got hauled onto Vegito's shoulders for a lap of honor while the minks howled like a carnival.
Nami added a zero to her own with a pen. Nojiko added a second zero to Nami's zero. Peace was restored with cake.
Kuina and Tashigi, side by side, compared font kerning with swordswomans' disdain. "At least they spelled our names right," Tashigi said.
"For now," Kuina said. "We'll make them learn italics."
Robin folded hers carefully into a book. "Let history try to price what it fears," she murmured, but she was smiling like a storm sees a mountain and knows: today I become myself.
Vegito stuck his poster to the bulkhead opposite the galley where he'd have to walk past it every morning. The number didn't move him. The line beneath did:
"If found, do not engage."
He tapped the paper with one finger. "They do learn."
Bell-mère hooked her arm through his. "They do. Slowly. Like children. Like us."
He kissed her knuckles. "I'm older than I look."
"You look impossible," she said, and that was that.
The Wake We Leave
As Neverskull shrank into a punctuation mark on the horizon, its people discovered their gallows gone, their debt markers afloat and soggy, and their council a little humbler.
On shore, kids played on the toppled signal mast like a jungle gym and named their game Vegito because that was how names happen: suddenly, with laughter.
In the quiet under the island, where the Road Poneglyph sat as it had for centuries, the stone kept being exactly itself — a door only for the few who could read. But if you'd asked it, if relics spoke aloud, it might have admitted: It is pleasant to be seen.
On the Heaven's Embrace, the course line to a joke-named island scored the glass of the nav table like a scar that meant "we lived." The crew leaned into the wind. Vegito breathed like a man who'd found a size of sky that fit.
"Laugh Tale," he said again.
"Laugh Tale," the ship hummed back.
And the sea, because it understands more than it admits, made room.