The nightmare always starts the same.
Fire. Screaming. The smell of burning wood and something worse—something I don't want to name even now, seven years later.
I'm thirteen again, hiding behind the well in the village square. My hands are shaking. There's blood on them—not mine. I don't know whose. Maybe everyone's.
The pirates move through the smoke like demons. Laughing. Always laughing. One of them has pink feathers on his coat, and even in the dream I know that's important, know that's the detail I need to remember, but I can't move. Can't breathe. Can't do anything but watch.
My mother's body is ten feet away. Father's is somewhere in the burning house. I can hear my sister screaming—Aria, her name is Aria, and she's only ten years old and she won't stop screaming—
Then he appears.
The silhouette. Tall. Grinning. His smile cuts through the smoke like a knife, white teeth gleaming in the firelight. He's looking right at me. Seeing me even though I'm hidden, even though I'm small and pathetic and useless.
He reaches down. Picks up Aria by her hair. She's still screaming.
"This one," he says. His voice is smooth. Amused. "The girl with the interesting fruit. The boss will like her."
I try to move. Try to run to her, save her, do something, anything—
But I can't.
I never can.
The silhouette turns back to me one last time. Still grinning. And I know—I know—that he's letting me live on purpose. That my survival is part of the joke.
Then everything goes dark.
I wake up with my hand already reaching for a weapon that isn't there.
The room comes into focus slowly. Cheap inn. Cheaper bed. The kind of place where you don't ask questions and they don't ask for your real name. I've been staying in places like this for seven years now.
My heart's still racing. Sweat soaks through my shirt—the only shirt I have left that isn't covered in blood or dirt or seven years of hunting.
"Fuck," I mutter.
The nightmare's getting worse. More detailed. Like my brain's decided that seven years of distance isn't enough, that I need to remember every single detail of the worst day of my life just to make sure I don't get comfortable.
Not that there's any danger of that.
I sit up, running a hand through my hair. Blonde. Too blonde, really—the kind of gold that makes people look twice, that marks me as different even when I'm trying to blend in. Just one more gift from the bloodline I didn't ask for.
The bloodline that makes me special.
The bloodline that makes me a king.
I almost laugh at that. King of what? King of a pile of ashes and corpses? King of a village that doesn't exist anymore?
But the thought doesn't sting the way it used to. Because the truth is, I am special. The power that woke up in me that night—the power that's been growing for seven years—that's real. That's mine. And it makes me better than almost everyone else in this shithole world.
I stand up, stretching. My body's lean, muscled from seven years of training. I'm twenty now. Not the scared thirteen-year-old kid hiding behind a well. Not anymore.
I'm something else entirely.
The memories of my past life come back in pieces. Always have.
I was someone else once. Someone named... I don't even remember the name anymore. It's been too long, and honestly? It doesn't matter. That person is dead.
What I do remember: I was a detective. A damn good one. Top of my field, the kind of guy who could look at a crime scene and see things other people missed. Patterns. Connections. The little details that cracked cases wide open.
I also remember dying.
Gunshot. Clean through the chest. I was investigating something—something big, something that got me killed. I remember the pain. The cold. The feeling of my life draining away while I lay on the ground staring up at a sky I'd never see again.
Then nothing.
Then this.
I don't know why I got a second chance. Don't know if it was luck or fate or some god's idea of a joke. But I woke up in this world as a baby, born into a family I didn't choose, in a village I didn't know.
And for thirteen years, I lived a normal life. Or as normal as you can get when you've got the memories of a dead detective rattling around in your head.
Then Doflamingo came.
Then everything burned.
Then the power woke up.
I've thought about it a lot over the years—why the power chose me. My family was part of some old royal bloodline, the kind with history and secrets and enemies we didn't even know about. Most of them never awakened anything. My father didn't have it. My mother didn't. None of my aunts or uncles or cousins.
Just me.
One person per generation, if that. Sometimes the power skips entire generations. Sometimes it never shows up at all.
But it showed up in me.
Lucky me.
The power of Gilgamesh, they called it in the old stories. The King's Arsenal. The ability to open portals to a golden void and pull out weapons—any weapon, as long as you've claimed it first. As long as you've made it yours.
It's not a devil fruit. It's something older. Something rarer.
Something that makes me worth killing.
I think that's why Doflamingo came. Not for the village. Not for the people. For us. For the bloodline. For whatever threat we represented just by existing.
He killed everyone.
Everyone except me and Aria.
And he took her because of her devil fruit—some reality-warping bullshit that makes her valuable. Makes her a tool.
I've spent seven years looking for her. Seven years following leads, tracking rumors, using every skill I learned in my past life to hunt down the bastards who took her.
And I'm close now. I can feel it.
I spend the morning training.
There's a clearing outside the town—far enough that no one will see, close enough that I can get back before anyone notices I'm gone. I've gotten good at finding places like this. Quiet spots where I can practice without drawing attention.
I stand in the center of the clearing and take a breath.
Then I reach inside myself, to the place where the power lives. It's like a golden warmth in my chest, coiled and waiting. I grab hold of it and pull.
The air ripples.
Five portals open around me, glowing circles of gold that hang in the air like tears in reality. They're beautiful, in a way. Proof that I'm not like everyone else. Proof that I'm meant for more.
I reach into the first portal and pull out a sword. Plain steel, nothing fancy. I found it in a bandit camp two years ago. The bandit didn't need it anymore after I was done with him.
I toss it into the air, then pull it back into the void. Open another portal. Pull out a spear. Then a dagger. Then an axe.
Five portals. Five weapons. That's my limit right now.
It used to be one. When the power first woke up, the night of the raid, I could barely open a single portal. Could barely pull out the broken sword I'd grabbed from a dead pirate's hand.
But I've been training. Growing. Pushing the limits of what I can do.
Five portals now. Soon it'll be ten. Then twenty. Then a hundred.
One day, I'll be able to open a thousand portals at once. One day, I'll have an arsenal that could level a city.
One day, I'll be unstoppable.
I spend an hour drilling—summoning weapons, launching them at trees, pulling them back. My control is getting better. Faster. More precise.
I'm not there yet. Not where I need to be.
But I will be.
After training, I head back into town.
Orange Town. A shithole of a place in the East Blue, barely worth the name. But my investigation led me here, and I've learned to trust my instincts.
Seven years of detective work—both lives combined—has taught me how to follow a trail. How to piece together fragments of information into something useful.
Doflamingo's crew doesn't move quietly. They leave marks. Rumors. Whispers of a man in pink feathers and a girl with strange powers.
The trail led me here.
I don't know what I'm going to find. Maybe nothing. Maybe another dead end.
But maybe—just maybe—I'll find something that gets me closer to Aria.
I stop by a tavern, order a drink I don't plan to finish, and listen.
People talk. They always do. You just have to know how to listen.
"—heard Buggy the Clown's in town—"
"—some pirate with a straw hat causing trouble—"
"—Marines are useless, as usual—"
I filter through the noise, looking for anything useful. Anything that connects to Doflamingo, to his crew, to my sister.
Nothing.
Frustration coils in my chest, but I push it down. Patience. That's what being a detective taught me. You don't crack a case in a day.
But seven years is a long fucking time to be patient.
I leave the tavern and wander through the streets. Orange Town is small, the kind of place where everyone knows everyone. I stand out—blonde hair, expensive coat, the kind of presence that makes people look twice.
Let them look. I'm not here to blend in.
I'm here to find answers.
And if I have to burn this whole town down to get them, I will.
By evening, I've learned two things.
One: There's a pirate crew in town. Some rookie with a straw hat and delusions of grandeur. Apparently he's causing trouble for Buggy the Clown, a small-time pirate who's set up shop here.
Two: No one knows anything about Doflamingo.
The second one pisses me off more than it should.
I head back to the inn, my mind already moving to the next step. If Orange Town's a dead end, I'll move on. There are other towns. Other leads.
I'll find her.
No matter how long it takes.
No matter what I have to do.
Because I'm not that scared kid anymore. I'm not powerless.
I'm a king.
And kings don't give up.
I collapse onto the bed, exhaustion finally catching up to me. My body aches from training, my mind aches from thinking, and the nightmare's still lurking at the edges of my consciousness, waiting for me to fall asleep so it can start all over again.
But I close my eyes anyway.
Because tomorrow, I'll keep looking.
Tomorrow, I'll get stronger.
And one day—soon—I'll find the bastards who took everything from me.
And when I do?
They're going to wish they'd killed me when they had the chance.