The ship had been at sea for two hours when Light figured out that the Karma System never turned off.
He'd assumed it was something he activated — a tool he called up when needed. It wasn't. The numbers were just there, floating above every person on deck whether he looked directly at them or not, a permanent overlay on a world he was still, quietly, getting used to. The salt air was real. The wood under his boots was real. Thirty sailors moving around him with the practised ease of people who'd done this a thousand times — all of it real, all of it his now, and the numbers above their heads were as real as any of it.
He spent some time just reading them. Not with any particular purpose, just to understand the range. Most of the crew sat in a reasonable band — greens in the low thousands, reds scattered between a few dozen and a couple of thousand. Ordinary people. The red wasn't nothing but it wasn't much either. A life's worth of small failures.
He was still working out what the numbers actually meant in practice — the inherited memories told him this world ran on strength and will and something called Haki that he hadn't fully felt yet, and the System told him green and red, and he was somewhere in the middle of connecting those two things into a complete picture — when his First Lieutenant Haas appeared at his shoulder.
"Captain. We have them. Two degrees starboard, about four kilometres."
Light looked. Three ships in loose formation on the open water, running no flag.
"Close to boarding range," he said. "Restrain where you can. I want prisoners."
Haas went to give the orders. Light watched the ships and waited.
⬛ ⬛ ⬛
The Iron Jaw Pirates scattered the moment they realised they were being chased — one ship peeling each direction, the third running straight ahead. The South Blue's coastline in this stretch was all reefs and headlands, which the pirates apparently knew less well than the Marine crew did, because within forty minutes all three ships were cornered and the first two boardings were already underway.
Light boarded the Captain's ship himself.
It was loud and close and nothing like the clean theoretical version of it he'd absorbed from the inherited memories. Real deck combat was rope underfoot and unpredictable bodies and noise from every direction and two men who came at him simultaneously from his left before he'd fully oriented himself. He dealt with both — Force Authority sending one into the mast, a Tekkai-braced forearm breaking the other's sword on contact — but he was aware, distantly, that he was moving on instinct more than plan and that the instincts were not entirely his yet.
He kept moving toward the back of the ship.
[ Bors — Pirate Captain, Iron Jaw Pirates ]
[ Green: 410 / Red: 24,800 ]
Bors was exactly what his bounty poster had suggested — large, iron-jawed literally, wielding a club that had already put two Marines on the ground by the time Light reached him. He swung immediately, the club coming in low and fast.
Light took it on his Tekkai-braced arm. The force rattled up to his shoulder and he noted, with some surprise, that Bors hit hard in a way the inherited memories hadn't quite prepared him for. Not just a large man with a heavy object — a trained fighter.
He stepped inside the next swing and drove his saber up below the ribs. Bors grabbed him with his free hand, lifted him clean off the deck, and threw him into the mast.
Light hit it back-first and dropped and had one second to confirm Tekkai had absorbed the worst of it before Bors was coming again, bleeding but still moving, club one-handed.
He ducked, activated Soru — a single step that closed the distance before Bors could track it — came up inside the guard, and drove the saber through with Force Authority behind the full weight of the strike. Not just his arm. Everything.
Bors went down and did not get back up.
The System updated.
[ KARMA SYSTEM ]
[ KP: 2,480 ]
[ LIFE FORCE Lv.1 — Next: 20,000 KP ]
[ WEAPON ARTS Lv.1 — Next: 10,000 KP ]
[ OBSERVATION Lv.0 — Next: 500,000 KP ]
[ ARMAMENT Lv.0 — Next: 500,000 KP ]
[ CONQUEROR'S Lv.0 — Next: 1,000,000 KP ]
[ SORU Lv.1 — Next: 50,000 KP ]
[ TEKKAI Lv.1 — Next: 50,000 KP ]
[ GEPPO Lv.0 — Next: 10,000 KP ]
[ KAMI-E Lv.0 — Next: 10,000 KP ]
[ RANKYAKU Lv.0 — Next: 10,000 KP ]
[ SHIGAN Lv.0 — Next: 10,000 KP ]
[ LIFE RETURN Lv.0 — Next: 20,000 KP ]
[CROSSOVER PERK: FORCE AUTHORITY (Max Output) ]
2,480. Light looked at the number. Bors had 24,800 red and the System had given him a tenth of that. He stood in the middle of the dying fight and did the arithmetic quickly and arrived, fairly fast, at the conclusion that he was going to be doing this for a long time before the panel started looking meaningfully different.
He looked at the thirty-one pirates being pushed to their knees in the centre of the deck, wrists being cuffed.
Haas appeared from the far end, cut above his eye, otherwise fine. "Captain's down. Thirty-one restrained. Four over the side." He glanced at Bors. "I'll have them processed and transported to—"
"That won't be necessary," Light said.
Haas stopped. "Captain?"
Light was already walking toward the kneeling men. He looked at the numbers above each head. Not one of them was below five thousand red. Two burned villages. Dead merchants. Thirty-one freely made decisions sitting in the numbers above thirty-one heads. He drew his saber.
"Captain." Haas's voice had dropped completely. "They're restrained—"
The first pirate looked up and understood what was about to happen.
Light was already moving.
It took a while. The deck was loud, then quieter, then quiet. The Marines stood where they were and did not intervene — something about the way the Captain moved through the line, the same unhurried expression the entire time, made stepping forward feel like something none of them were physically capable of.
When it was done, Light cleaned his saber and looked at the panel.
[ KARMA SYSTEM ]
[ KP: 39,230 ]
[ LIFE FORCE Lv.1 — Next: 20,000 KP ]
[ SABER ARTS Lv.1 — Next: 10,000 KP ]
[ OBSERVATION Lv.0 — Next: 500,000 KP ]
[ ARMAMENT Lv.0 — Next: 500,000 KP ]
[ CONQUEROR'S Lv.0 — Next: 1,000,000 KP ]
[ SORU Lv.1 — Next: 50,000 KP ]
[ TEKKAI Lv.1 — Next: 50,000 KP ]
[ GEPPO Lv.0 — Next: 10,000 KP ]
[ KAMI-E Lv.0 — Next: 10,000 KP ]
[ RANKYAKU Lv.0 — Next: 10,000 KP ]
[ SHIGAN Lv.0 — Next: 10,000 KP ]
[ LIFE RETURN Lv.0 — Next: 20,000 KP ]
[ FORCE AUTHORITY Max Output — Stamina Dependent ]
39,230. He looked at the Haki thresholds. Five hundred thousand each for Observation and Armament. A million for Conqueror's. He looked at what thirty-two kills had produced and did the arithmetic again.
He was going to need considerably more pirates.
"Log them all as killed during boarding," he told Haas, and walked back to the bow.
⬛ ⬛ ⬛
He spent the rest of the voyage on deck, the wind on his face, watching the South Blue go by and thinking about how wide it was and how many crews like the Iron Jaw Pirates were moving through it right now and what a reasonable timeline looked like for working through them. The numbers on the panel were going to move slowly. He understood that now in a way he hadn't when he'd first read them.
Patient. He had a posting, a mask that fit well, a crew that was currently too shaken to ask questions, and an ocean full of red numbers that had no idea what was wearing a Marine coat in the South Blue.
He could be very patient.
⬛ ⬛ ⬛
Across the ocean in the East Blue, a boy named Monkey D. Luffy was sixteen years old and counting the days to his seventeenth birthday, when he'd finally be old enough to set sail.
Two forces the world wasn't ready for.