Natural Enemy 1-10

The grin on his face was as wide as it had ever been.

Wide, hungry, and eager, it felt good on his face even as it stretched the scars on his left cheek tight, pulling at the tangle of his beard as it split to show teeth the color of old sailcloth.

The smell of salt and stale rum tickled his nose, a true man’s perfume, as the thick taste of victory — his favorite thing to chew on — filled his mouth, all copper and fear.

They were nearing the island they’d had their eye on for months now, waiting for the ripest time to pluck the fruit. A little spit of rock in the south of the West Blue, not too far from Ballywood Kingdom, Kaihua was known for its big wild party twice a year.

And Captain Gregor “Grisly” Cawlfield could see it now through his spyglass. A few dozen smears of wooden huts on a white sandy beach, thousands cheering as the waves broke high and hard. Even from here, he could hear the music and their voices.

Exactly what he’d waited for since Makano.

An island filled to bursting with guests and travelers in time for a party.

Drums beat, smoke rose, and bright colors flashed under the sun, enjoying their little festival.

A feast, laid out just for him. Perfect.

“Look at ‘em.” The words were a grunt, a low grind from his scarred throat as he shoved an elbow into his first mate’s ribs. “Dancin’. Singin’. Like they ain’t got a care in the world.”

The first mate cackled loud, almost coughing up a lung with a wet hacking sound that came from the mouth of a skinny little rat-faced bastard who all called Finlay; Fin for short. “Singin’ won’t be for long at all, Cap’n.”

Gregor spat something thick onto the deck, the splatter red as his tricorn. “Singin’ sounds better when they’re screaming, anyway.” He grinned wide again, showing off a mouthful of bleeding gums. “Adds flavor to it.”

The raid was a thing of beauty.

They usually were, but this one was almost like art.

Gregor was no strategist, nothing like a ‘pansy’ tactician. He wasn’t a Marine or nothing like that, and this wasn’t war. He was a true-bred pirate down to his bones and had been for the past fifteen years of his life; a hammer in a world full of very soft nails.

The music stopped long before his pride and joy — the barnacle encrusted tub of a flagship he called the Red Rust — dropped anchor alongside the Sea Vulture and the Maggot’s Scab. Men hit the beach with roars that drowned out the screams and panics for a good few seconds.

There it was. His favorite tune, a harmony better than any he’d ever heard in any port he’d burnt down before. 

Some of the locals, big brown fellas with tattoos crawling all over ‘em, tried to fight back; they came at his boys with fishing spears, wooden paddles and — he laughed out loud as he saw them — their own damned surfboards.  

He was hacking harder than Fin as he watched from the waterline, boots sinking into the wet white sand as a couple of them swung the brightly colored planks like they were clubs.

Like wood could stop good steel.

One of his own, a brute named Stumps, jumped back from a clumsy swing from a local man as the idiot stumbled forward. Without wasting a minute, Stumps swung his cutlass down.

The board cleaved in two with a crack as the villager just stared at the half-plank in his hands, eyes wide; stupid and shocked, like he couldn’t believe the world didn’t play by island rules.

Like before, Stumps didn’t believe in waiting.

A heavy fist the size of a full ham caved the man’s face in, and he dropped to the sand, bleeding free from his nose and mouth.

“Secure the beach!” Gregor’s voice was a cannon blast, practiced over a decade of shouting over storms, raids and dying men. “I want the rum! I want the gold! And I want entertainment for the trip home, so tie up the pretty ones and the young lasses!” He roared again, more laughter than anything in his voice. “The younger the better!”

It was going smooth, just the way he liked it; no different than good rum down a greased gullet.

“What the-”

Gregor turned at the shout, Fin’s voice high and raspy in confusion, mouth open to shout more orders at the first mate. The words never left him as the water shifted, suddenly moving wrong out of nowhere.

The red-painted brigantine, sitting fat and happy on its anchor a hundred yards out, gave a sudden, violent lurch; the anchor chain screamed with it, higher and thinner than lil Fin’s voice and enough to set Gregor’s teeth on edge.

No…

His pride, his joy, his beloved Red Rust; Gregor could only watch as it moved with the waves; the ship heeling over hard to port, like a Sea King had grabbed it from below and yanked.

It was being pulled still, dragged sideways against the wind and tide, twisted out of place by a current that wasn’t there a few seconds past. 

By a current that shouldn’t exist.

The Red Rust held fast though, its size and anchor keeping the brigandine from being pulled out onto the sea but…

By the four Blues… His other two ships were drifting even still, both of them too small to fight the force. They were caught in a choppy river sucking them toward the hard and jagged teeth of the reef.

“What in the blazes?” Fin’s rat-face pinched with confusion as he squawked loud. “There’s no tide this strong! Not ‘ere! Charts sai-!”

Gregor’s wordless bark shut him up. “Charts don’t pull ships, ye idjit! Somethin’s got ‘em!”

His men eased up, their roars quieting as they looked at the shaky ships off the shore, something clearly not right — not natural — about all this.

Then a shape…

Someone drifted out onto the water on a board.

Gregor narrowed his eyes. A boy?

It was.

Just a damned boy, and nothin’ impressive either.

Barely any muscle on him, he was wide around the waist and thick in the face, skin dark and black hair messy and knotted up like old rope under a black cap plastered to his head by the water. Wearing nothing but some ripped shorts, a white shirt already soaked through, and a stupid looking leather jacket with no sleeves, he was just floating there on his board, legs dangling in the water as he drifted out past the shore break.

What in Davy Jones blasted locker is goin’ on? Gregor squinted, eyes watering directly under the sun as the kid raised a hand high.

He stuck out his thumb and pinky in some kind of lazy, stupid gesture and wiggled it. “Shaka, brah.”

Gregor blinked and, before his brain could even catch up or try to respond to the sheer, bloody nerve of it — a simple boy? Talking back to him? — the water behind the boy began to swell.

And not with a simple wave.

It was a bulge.

A half-dome of surging water just… rising up; a fat blue blister forming on the ocean’s skin lifting the kid and his board up, up, and up. 

Five feet.

Ten.

Twenty.

“Cannon!” The word tore out of his throat as he beat feet on the sand, raw and sudden as he ran to board his flagship. He moved off instinct, years of raiding and pirate life in the West Blue guiding him faster than though. “Load the bloody cannon, ya daft bastards!”

On the deck of the Red Rust, the men still aboard scrambled. Scared or not, they knew how to load a gun and they knew how to kill. It was all he damn well needed them for.

“Blow that damn freak back to Davy Jones’ locker where he belongs!” His fist clenched as he neared the ship, breath coming in big gulps of air. “NOW!” 

The gun atop the deck fired as if his final command was all it needed to light the fuse, a sound enough to deafen drowning out his voice as a cloud of black thickness belched out sulfure and brimstone.

The iron screamed across the water, the ball aimed perfectly on target. Near dead-on to center mass, it was an easy kill.

At least, it would have been.

Gregor’s red-rimmed eyes widened as he climbed the gangplank, the water under the boy exploding upwards instead of cresting.

A solid pillar of blue just off the shore, a geyser of water enough to launch the boy in the air like a wine cork. The fat brat shot up a good fifty sixty feet, a dark shape against the brightness of the sky as the cannonball passed through the space where he’d been just a second before.

It hit the sea uselessly as the kid hung there at the top of his impossible jump for a second that stretched forever with all eyes on him.

The boy looked down at the Red Rust and swung his fist with a shout.

“WATER FIST!”

That’s when Gregor’s world chose that moment to break apart in front of him.

A burst of water, in the shape of a massive fist as big as the kid himself, shot out through the air and hit the main mast with a crack as loud as cannonfire as everyone stared.

One second, it stood tall as a solid piece of seasoned timber thick enough to hold three sails. 

The next, it toppled over as nothing but water splintered it in half.

The top half of the mast fell free, sails ripping apart and collapsing like a dead bird.

The boy landed back on the water, his board somehow right there under his feet and waiting for him as he didn’t wobble or fall. One hand pointed out, fingers aimed like a pistol. “Water Gun!”

A jet of water, no thicker than a finger, flew free from the kid’s finger. It tore through the still-standing sail, ripping a hole clean through from speed and force alone.

“Water Gun: Quik-Shot!”

Bang! Bang! Bang!

More blasts, so fast Gregor could barely track them as the screaming started up again. Each one shredded the rest of the canvas sails, turning them to wet fluttering rags. Blast after blasts punched tiny holes in his deck, turning his railings into toothpicks as Gregor’s mouth hung open to catch flies.

The boy pulled his hand back, raising both of them up for a second, before grunting and shoving both his palms forward.

The water between him and the ship erupted in a battering ram of a wave. A solid wall of churning ocean, white with foam, rose up and slammed into the side of the Red Rust. It was worse than almost any storm, too sudden and aimed their way instead of the natural state of the sea’s temper.

A scream tore from Gregor’s lips, the captain gripping tight to a railing as the whole ship listed hard with the force of the ocean against it.

Wood groaned until it gave, timbers screaming as they snapped; unprepared men swept off the deck like toys from the hit, all their screams lost in the roar of the water.

The boy didn’t stop there.

He kicked off his board, water launching him again and this time right toward Gregor’s ship. The fat water-boy landed on the deck, a heavy thud beneath his sandaled feet that Gregor could feel in the soles of his boots.

And then the real screaming started.

No boy should be that strong.

Each punch was a deathblow, even a graze was enough to send a normal man flying. Like watching a wolf loose in a chicken coop, it was more a slaughter than anything else. Gregor watched, helpless, as One-Eye Jack — his biggest and his bosun, a bastard who used a logging axe like a hatchet — charged the kid.

Jack swung a killing blow the kid didn’t even bother to jump away from.

He just rushed forward, body almost a blur, and there was a wet snap of a sound before anything else. Jack’s axe went flying, the beast of a weapon spinning end over end into the angry sea.

“Ghhrrk!” The kid’s hand found Jack’s throat before the big man could do anything to stop him other than stare at his missing weapon. A man almost thirty stone if he was anything was lifted clean off the deck with one arm by a boy less than half his size.

And then the kid threw him.

Not overboard.

The boy flung him right at the ship’s wheel, a good thirty feet away. Jack hit the wheel so hard the whole helm’s assembly shattered into kindling, the big man not getting up.

The kid was a whirlwind, too fast if he wasn’t already too strong. A near-blink of an eye and then one of his men would just be… broken. 

Bent at an angle a man shouldn’t bend, arms snapped backwards, and knees went entirely the wrong way.

He saw the kid grab the barrel of one of the smaller deck cannons, a swivel gun bolted tight to the railing.

That didn’t seem to matter to the boy as he planted his feet tight and grunted.

Bolts screamed as they were torn from the wood, iron twisting free. The boy roared loud, veins bulging in his fleshy arms as he ripped the entire cannon — fifty stone of cast iron — from its mounting and swung it like a club.

The deck was swept clean as three of Gregor’s best went overboard in a spray of blood, bone and brain. 

Water was everywhere, and all of it from him. It snaked around his arms, and coated his legs as he lashed out with it like whips, hardened into fists and made them all know the pain of the storm as he brought it to them.

Like the sea given legs and a bad attitude.

Gregor’s hand, shaking like a sail in bad winds, finally found the grip of his own pistol. The flintlock was heavy in his hand, cold as he raised it.

He aimed the thing, all that fancy writing work on the barrel making the weapon suddenly feel flimsy and stupid.

He fired.

The ball flew true with a crack of sound.

The kid turned, the bullet cracking into his face as his head snapped back. The bullet deformed, flattening against his face, blood weeping from where it hit, before it just fell to the waterlogged deck, a defeated piece of lead. 

Blue eyes looked over, right at him, dead eyes meeting his own for a flat second.

“…f-freak!”

The kid leapt again, thick legs carrying him high and far in a single impossible jump up to the ship’s prow. “Water Spout!” 

With just those two words leaving him, the boy sucked in a deep breath, chest and cheeks puffed out like a blowfish as the ocean seemed to calm for a split second.

Gregor felt his own eyes widen as he saw the kid’s mouth open and a torrent of clear blue water, dense and fast as a cannonball, rushed down to swallow him whole. The captain of the Barrel Scrapers opened his mouth to scream, but the only thing that came out was a wet, useless gurgle before his broken body met the sea.