Natural Enemy 0 (One Piece/Infamous)

Chapter 0: Broken Piece

“Stop running, ya rats! It’s only pain!”

Splinters that used to be the thick painted wood of the fruit stand — Mama Elina’s pride and joy — bit into her palms. Her fingers half-curled, two fingers on her left refusing to go any further as sticky-sweet mango pulp mixed with something else. Something hot, something thick, something red; that she didn’t want to think about.

All she knew was that it didn’t belong anywhere at all near fruit and festival decorations. 

“If it’s shiny, bag it! If it screams, ya gag it!”

Breathe. The command didn’t do much to stop her chest shaking, lungs not working as every gasp came up too short, like being held under by a bad wave. Get up, Lani. The kind that scraped you along the reef and stole all your direction and just kept tumbling you until you forgot which way was up. 

“Quit stabbing the dead ‘uns, ya freak!”

You have to get up.

The last one didn’t sound like her, her dad’s voice going off loud in her head. 

But Dad wasn’t here. 

Not next to her, not now.

Dad was fighting with the elders and older boys, all of them pushing back against these loud stinking men that had come from the water, looking for loot and whatever else.

Lani Moa pushed herself up as a scream cut through the air, another one high and thin and belonging to someone she had known since she was a baby. Knees scraped on scattered coconut shells and trampled flowers, the lei she’d helped string that morning crushed into the dirt as the world blurred around her. 

Her people ran for cover, and the few tourists that had come for the festival; they all scattered for whatever safety they could find.

And them. The pirates.

She’d seen bounty posters before, the same ones the Marines had tacked up by the harbor, men with teeth missing and angry glares in their photos. It was nothing like seeing them, though. 

For one, pirates were… dirty; face cracked by sun and salt, beards caked with food and much worse. But not like the faces of fishermen, not like Uncle Toma’s deep-worn lines. Theirs were mean. Wide smiles full of broken yellowed teeth as they swung their swords.

They’re just men.

A little bubble of her father’s stubbornness floated up through the fear, the same voice that made her argue with the elders even when Mom kicked her under the table.

Ugly, stupid men.

Another scream came loud as Mr. Haku took a hard hit to the back of his head; Mr. Haku, who only ever carved wooden turtles for the kids, who gave her one shaped like a sea cow when she turned seven because she’d asked too many questions about them. The old man crumpled and Lani shut her eyes as she kept running as fast as she could make her legs move.

Get high. She had to get away, away from the shore, away from where they’d landed. The bluffs…

Her legs felt wrong as she scrambled away, laughter and drums of the festival music replaced by shouts and splintering wood and that one high thin scream that just kept echoing in her skull even though it had stopped, it had stopped, why was it still—

Her eyes went wide as she saw one of their ships sitting in the bay, the thing smaller than she expected; a name painted on the side in a sloppy red.

Sea Vulture.

Vultures; picking at the bones of their home, their festival, everything they’d spent weeks preparing.

Where’s Kai?

The thought cut through the noise as she remembered her friend, the new boy to the village. He was supposed to be surfing; he loved the water, which… which made sense, considering he treated the ocean like it was the only thing that made sense to him. Maybe he paddled out past the break the second he saw the ships; the smart thing. 

The safe thing.

Of course he got away.

Kai was always separate, no matter how much she tried to get him to join. 

Even when she dragged him to help with festival prep, even when she tried to get him to do more than just surf and eat and stare at the horizon; he always stayed the strange quiet boy from somewhere else, the one the old women said was blessed by Kanarowa.

Where are you, water boy?

Something shook the sand under her feet, the island itself shuddering as Lani almost went flying. Her legs still stumbled under her, her hands catching her against the warm stone of the fire pit as the big boar took to the sky.

Pork and broth and days of preparation went flying over her head, all of it spilling across the sand like it didn’t mean anything. Move.

The chief’s daughter scrambled and scrambled against the sand, moving without thinking until she found herself a space. A sliver of dark between two supply huts where they kept spare nets and surfboard wax. Chest still heaving, Lani squeezed herself into it, the fourteen-year-old pressing her back against the rough planks, making herself as small as she could.

Her heart wouldn’t stop, a drum against her ribs louder than cannonfire. Get-away-get-away-get-

From here, she could see the bay. A slice of it, anyway.

And what she saw made no sense.

The water was moving wrong. The clean rolling lines of a good swell were nowhere to be seen as the ocean shook and shuddered like something huge and angry was stirring it from underneath. A second later, Lani’s mouth dropped as a bulge of water swelled up right in the middle of the harbor, the thing taller than any she’d seen since the last storm.

That’s not…

It wasn’t a wave; you could read a wave, you could see it coming. This was just… water. More water than there should be, doing things water shouldn’t do.

One of the smaller pirate ships, the one closest to shore, suddenly lurched sideways, the whole thing tilting at an angle as a hard current slammed into it.

Men were shouting on the deck, feet sliding on the slanted wood as their voices came thin and panicked, carried away by wind pushed by the water.

The wave climbed. 

A dozen feet of water climbing up the side of the hull in a solid sheet; a living wall of blue-green wrapping around the ship like fingers.

The deep groaning crack of wood was loud enough to hit her ears like force, shaking through the bones of her jaw.

A split second later, the mast snapped. Not from a cannonball, not from anything she could explain. Just a fist of water that clenched around it and squeezed.

No.

Lani’s eyes went wider.

No, th-that’s not happening.

The pirates on the beach had seen it too, their laughter fading away as the last few screams of their friends on the first ship died out. A few of them pointed, mouths falling open as the second ship went too.

This time it was different. A torrent, a spear of water, shot out from the bay. It moved faster than a leaping marlin; a solid spraying jet that punched a hole clean through the ship’s side.

One second, a solid wall of wood. The next, a gaping mouth showing the other side of the bay and throwing men free from the ship and into the churning ocean.

The water boy.

She’d seen his little tricks; the balls of water floating between his chubby gloved hands, making a tiny waterspout from his mouth to make her laugh. 

But that was a puddle.

This was the ocean.

The whole, entire, angry ocean.

Oh gods.

A cold dread washed through her, colder than any deep-water current she’d ever felt.

He didn’t run.

“…Kai?”

The world was all just water, noise and water; a whirlwind she could barely track. She couldn’t see Kai, couldn’t see anything except the shaking surf and the cannonballs punching holes in the sand; men screaming things she couldn’t even make out.

Wh-where is he?

A pirate, a big one with a chest as big as a barrel, got lifted off his feet. A tendril of water, thick as a man’s arm, snaked right out of the surf and yanked him by the ankle before he even got a chance to scream.

Just… gone. A splash. Nothing.

The main ship, the Red Rust, tried to turn. Its movements were clumsy, slow; almost flailing and desperate with its sail torn open by one of the cutting waves that had soared high just moments ago. 

The water didn’t give it the chance to run as two swells, massive and terrifying, rose on either side. Not waves. Walls. 

Just slamming together with the hull caught between them.

The sound was wet. Heavy.

Wood splintered, cannons ripped free from their mountings, all of it tumbling into the sea like dropped stones.

The water was alive, and it hated these men.

Tearing them to pieces with the methodical, unthinking rage of a shark in a feeding frenzy. No hesitation. No mercy. Just destruction that kept going and going and—

Her mind kept trying to put him in the picture, because who else could it be?

Kai.

Awkward Kai, the same one that wore that stupid leather jacket every single day, no matter how hot it got. Hungry Kai, who had gone from skinny and shrimpy to blowing up like a killer whale because he ate three plates of food at every meal. Quiet Kai, who never talked about where he came from, no matter how much she asked.

How could that boy hold all of this inside him?

She remembered the day she first saw. He thought he was alone, behind the big rocks at the little cove up north. Just pulling water from the air, and playing with the little spirals he made between his gloved hands.

The panic in his eyes when he saw her. He’d looked like a kid caught stealing a mango from someone’s tree. Just a boy.

This wasn’t a boy.

The screaming stopped.

Slowly, all at once, it just… stopped. And the silence that came after was louder than the noise had been. All she could hear now was the crackle of a few fires and the gentle, normal lapping of waves on the shore.

Like nothing happened.

The water was dark. Thick. Stained red with the sunset and with… other things she didn’t want to name.

Wreckage floated everywhere. Splintered planks. A broken mast. A pirate’s hat bobbing on the surface.

Bodies.

A murmur started as figures began to creep out from their hiding places.

Her people.

Faces were pale under their ocean tans, eyes wide with a raw fear that hadn’t been there before. The fear of the ocean itself turning against them.

Lani blinked and shuddered, time passing in front of the girl’s eyes, as her father was suddenly there. She stared up at him, big brown eyes confused; the island chief standing half as tall as a palm tree as he pulled her out from between the huts, big hands checking her arms, her shoulders, her face for injuries.

“Lani…”

She just pointed, her finger trembling. “The water…”

Everyone was looking at the water now.

At the ruin of the pirate fleet. At the bodies floating in the harbor. At the impossible thing that had just happened to their quiet little island.

“Kanarowa…” someone whispered behind her.

“The sea spirits…”

But Lani knew it wasn’t a spirit.

Not when somebody was already walking out of the ocean.

He moved through the red, bloody surf, the water parting around his knees as if afraid of him. His dark skin was dry, as if untouched by the water itself, black hair in short twists much the same.

Everything about him, from the sleeveless leather jacket to the cutoff shorts and even the dumb gloves… all of it dry.

Kai.

Her waterboy wasn’t hurt. He wasn’t even breathing hard as he stopped at the edge of the shore, the water lapping at his slippers, as he turned back to look at everything.

At the burning village. At the stunned faces of the people he’d just saved.

“Not chill, brah.”