Nico Robin vs Jannali
The wind tears at Robin's face like invisible claws.
She hangs suspended beneath the Hatzegopteryx's talons, her arms pinned to her sides, her legs dangling over a drop that would turn a normal person into a red smear on the rocks below. The gray fog whips past her in streaming tendrils, cold and wet, stinking of salt and something older—something like rust, like decay, like the breath of a world that has forgotten how to breathe.
Below, the Thousand Sunny burns.
Robin twists her head, craning her neck to look back at her home—her family—and her heart seizes in her chest. The ship is a silhouette of fire and shadow, explosions blooming across its deck like malignant flowers. Blue-white lightning arcs from somewhere near the main mast. Black-purple Haki flares near the helm. Wood splinters. Smoke billows. And through it all, the sounds of battle—clashing steel, screaming voices, the particular crack of something breaking that should never break.
"No..."
The word escapes her, torn from somewhere deep. She can't see them—can't see Luffy, or Zoro, or Nami, or any of the others—but she knows they're there. Fighting. Bleeding. Dying, maybe, while she hangs helpless in the grip of a creature that shouldn't exist.
"I won't leave my friends!"
Her arms cross. The motion is automatic, drilled into her muscles by years of combat, years of survival, years of refusing to be a victim. Her fingers interlace. Her voice rises, clear and sharp despite the wind.
"Cuerpo Fleur!"
Her body dissolves.
It's not teleportation—not truly. It's something stranger, something that exists in the space between being and not-being. Her physical form scatters into a storm of petals—pink and red and white, delicate as cherry blossoms, sharp as broken glass. They swirl through the air, caught in the turbulence of Gosan's flight, tumbling and spinning and moving.
The petals land on Gosan's back.
They reform.
Robin materializes behind Jannali, her body solid once more, her arms crossed, her eyes burning with cold fury. She looms over the woman who has taken her—the stranger with the afro and the headscarf and the golden hoop earrings that catch the wind like tiny bells.
Jannali doesn't turn around.
"Grab a pew, love."
The words are casual. Dismissive. The voice of someone who has already calculated every possible outcome and found none of them threatening. Robin's brow furrows. Her arms cross again.
"Sies Fleur."
Nothing happens.
Robin's eyes widen. Her hands move to her shoulders, her arms, her thighs—searching for the familiar sensation of her power activating, the strange doubling of perception that comes when she sprouts limbs from surfaces that shouldn't have them. But there's nothing. Her Devil Fruit is silent.
"What—"
Gosan dives.
The Hatzegopteryx folds its wings and plunges like a stone, and Robin—caught off guard, caught mid-thought—loses her footing. Her feet slip on the creature's leather back. Her arms windmill. And then she's falling, tumbling through the air, the wind screaming past her ears, the sea rushing up to meet her.
The world becomes a blur.
Gray fog. Dark water. The distant glow of fire. Robin twists in the air, forcing her body to rotate, to orient, to see—
And she sees it.
A rocky reef juts from the churning sea like the spine of some ancient beast, its peaks jagged and black, its slopes littered with the bones of ships that came before. Masts jut from the waves at crazy angles. Hulls lie broken against the rocks, their ribs exposed, their paint peeled away by salt and time. And there—at the center of the wreckage, perched on a flat shelf of stone like a monument to failure—is a ship.
It's old. Ancient. Its hull is weathered to a pale gray, its deck warped and splintered, its masts long since snapped and fallen. But it's intact—mostly. Intact enough to land on.
The wind tears at Robin's clothes. The spray of the sea stings her face—cold droplets that feel like needles against her skin. The roar of the ocean fills her ears, a constant thunder that drowns out everything else. She can taste salt on her lips. She can smell rot and rust and the particular mustiness of wood that has been soaked and dried and soaked again a thousand times over.
She angles her body. She crosses her arms.
"Cien Fleurs."
Wings erupt from her back—not real wings, not flesh and bone, but limbs, dozens of them, sprouting from her shoulders and spine in a blossom of pale skin and reaching fingers. They catch the air like parachutes, slowing her descent, guiding her toward the deck of the abandoned ship.
She lands hard.
Her feet hit the warped wood and she drops into a roll, her shoulder absorbing the impact, her body moving on instinct. She comes up in a crouch, one hand planted on the deck, her breath coming in ragged gasps.
The ship groans beneath her. The sea churns around it. And somewhere above, the Hatzegopteryx circles.
Robin rises.
She scans the deck—the splintered planks, the rusted cannons, the tattered remnants of sails that hang from the broken masts like ghosts. The ship's name is painted on the stern, barely visible beneath decades of salt and grime: The Wandering Albatross.
She's never heard of it.
Above her, Gosan hovers. Jannali knelt on its back, her posture relaxed, her head tilted as if listening to something Robin can't hear. The wind whips her afro, makes her earrings dance. Her third eye—hidden beneath her headscarf—is invisible. But Robin can feel it. Can feel the weight of that unseen gaze pressing down on her like a physical thing.
Jannali mutters something. The wind steals the words, but Robin catches fragments: "...bloody hell... spot on..."
Robin's jaw tightens. Her hands curl into fists. She is not going to wait for this woman to finish whatever calculation she's running. She is not going to stand here like a helpless child while her friends fight and die.
She crosses her arms. Her fingers interlace. Her voice comes out cold and sharp.
"Seis Fleur."
Arms sprout from Jannali's body—from her shoulders, her arms, her legs, her back—dozens of them, pale and grasping, wrapping around her limbs, her torso, her neck. They pin her in place. They squeeze. They hold.
Jannali's eyes go wide.
Her mouth opens—to scream, to curse, to something—and Gosan shifts. The massive creature collapses in on itself, folding and twisting and changing until it's no longer a dinosaur but a spear—a long, segmented shaft of dark metal, its tip gleaming with the dull sheen of metal. It clatters toward the deck, Jannali still wrapped in Robin's arms, still falling—
They hit the deck together.
Robin's arms release. Jannali rolls across the warped planks, her body tumbling, her limbs flailing. She comes to a stop near the railing, face-down, her afro askew, her headscarf slipping.
Robin walks toward her.
Her footsteps echo across the deck—slow, deliberate, the footsteps of a woman who has survived horrors that would break lesser souls. She stops in front of Jannali. She looks down at her. And her eyes are cold.
Jannali looks up.
Their eyes meet—Robin's cold fury, Jannali's wide-eyed surprise. For a moment, neither of them moves. Robin is about to begin her interrogation.
Then Jannali smiles.
The smile is wrong. It's too calm. Too knowing. Too amused.
Robin's blood runs cold.
Jannali disappears in a wave of fluttering petals.
Robin blinks.
The petals swirl around her—pink and red and white, delicate as cherry blossoms, sharp as broken glass. They dance on the wind, fluttering in the gray light, spinning in lazy circles. And then they're gone.
The deck is empty.
Robin stands alone, her arms still crossed, her body still braced for combat. Her breath comes in short, sharp gasps. Her heart pounds against her ribs. She scans the deck—the splintered planks, the rusted cannons, the tattered sails—but there's no sign of Jannali. No sign of Gosan. No sign of anything except the Wandering Albatross and the sea and the gray, gray sky.
"What—"
A voice cuts through the silence.
"Robin?"
She knows that voice.
She knows it.
Robin turns. Her heart is pounding. Her hands are trembling. And there—standing on the deck of the abandoned ship, impossibly, impossibly—is a giant.
He's massive—easily thirty feet tall, his body broad and powerful, his skin tanned by decades of sun, his hair a wild mane of orange-red. He wears the tattered remnants of a Marine coat, the word JUSTICE barely visible on its back. His face is kind. His eyes are warm. And his voice—that voice—is the voice of the only person who ever believed in her when the world told her she was a monster.
Saul.
"Saul?" Robin's voice cracks. She takes a step forward. "Saul, how—"
The giant tilts his head. His expression is curious, gentle, familiar.
"Who is your mother, little one?"
The words hit Robin like a physical blow.
No.
She knows this moment. She knows it exactly. This is Ohara. This is the beach where she found Saul washed up on the shore. This is the conversation where everything changed. This is—
"My mother is Nico Olvia."
The words leave her mouth before she can stop them. She's eight years old again, small and alone and desperate for connection, desperate for someone to see her as more than the demon child with the cursed power.
Saul's face goes pale.
"Dereshi!"
He stumbles backward, his massive feet crushing the sand, his eyes wide with panic. Robin doesn't understand. She doesn't know what's happening. She doesn't know that Saul knows her mother, knows what Olvia has done, knows what the World Government will do to Ohara because of it.
She doesn't know that she's just sealed her home's fate.
The sky darkens.
Robin looks up. Her blood runs cold.
The ships are coming. Marine battleships, dozens of them, their sails emblazoned with the symbol of Absolute Justice. Cannons line their decks. Marines swarm their rigging. And above them all, a golden Den Den Mushi screams its signal across the waves.
Buster Call.
The world dissolves into fire.
---
Jannali watches from above.
She's still circling—Gosan's wings beating against the gray sky, carrying her in a slow, lazy arc around the wrecked ship below. Her third eye pulses, projecting images into Robin's mind, weaving memories into nightmares, turning the abandoned deck into the burning streets of Ohara.
The woman below stands frozen, her body rigid, her eyes wide and empty. She's not here. She's somewhere else, somewhere far away, somewhere that exists only in memory and nightmare.
Jannali tilts her head. Her lips press together.
"Bloody hell," she mutters.
Gosan screeches—a sound that might be agreement, might be mockery, might be nothing at all.
Jannali watches Robin twitch. Watches her hands rise to her head. Watches her mouth open in a silent scream.
"Right then," Jannali says. "Time I get on with it."
Gosan descends.
The Hatzegopteryx lands on the deck of the abandoned ship with a sound like a building collapsing—wood splintering, metal shrieking, the entire structure shuddering under the creature's impossible weight. Jannali slides from its back, her feet hitting the deck with the casual grace of someone who has done this a thousand times.
She reaches up. Her fingers find the edge of her headscarf.
And she pulls it away.
The third eye is open. It glows—not with reflected light, but with something deeper, something older. A pale luminescence that pulses like a heartbeat, that sees in ways normal eyes cannot. The eye is set vertically in the center of Jannali's forehead, its iris a deep, shifting violet, its pupil a vertical slit that contracts as it focuses on Robin.
Robin doesn't react. She can't. She's eight years old, running through the streets of Ohara, the sky raining fire, the screams of her people filling the air. She's watching the Tree of Knowledge burn. She's watching her mother die. She's watching everything she ever loved turn to ash and memory.
Jannali approaches.
She stops in front of Robin. She looks at her—really looks at her, at the tears streaming down her face, at the way her body shakes, at the raw, unfiltered grief pouring out of her.
"Yeah, nah," Jannali says. "Nice try, mate."
Robin doesn't respond.
"You'll be stuck in the spin cycle for a bit."
Robin's hands grip the sides of her head. Her mouth opens. A sound comes out—not a word, not a scream, but something in between. Something broken. Something endless.
Jannali blinks.
Her expression shifts—just for a moment, just a flicker. Something that might be discomfort. Something that might be guilt.
"Far out, mate," she says, her voice quieter now. "Sorry you're having to relive that bloody nightmare."
Robin swallows hard. Her jaw goes slack. And then she screams.
It's not a scream of pain—not physical pain, anyway. It's something deeper. Something that comes from the place where all her oldest wounds live, the place she's spent twenty-two years trying to bury, the place that Jannali has just ripped open with surgical cruelty.
Robin falls to her knees. Her hands fly to her head. Her fingers dig into her hair. And she screams, the sound raw and broken and endless.
Jannali watches.
Her lips press into a thin line. She nods—once, twice, the nod of someone checking off a box on a list.
Then she turns. She walks back to Gosan. The Hatzegopteryx spreads its wings, ready to take flight.
Jannali mutters, almost to herself.
"A little too spot on, I reckon."
She climbs onto Gosan's back. The creature launches into the air, wings beating against the gray sky, carrying her away from the abandoned ship, away from the screaming woman on its deck.
Jannali circles once.
She looks down. Robin is still on her knees, doubled over, her body shaking with sobs, her cries echoing across the wreckage. The sight of her—the raw, unfiltered grief of her—makes something twist in Jannali's chest.
She looks away.
Gosan turns. The wind catches them. And they fly back toward the Thousand Sunny, back toward the battle, back toward the chaos.
Behind them, Robin screams.
And the memory of Ohara burns on.
---
The sea stretches in all directions—gray and cold and endless. The wrecked ships jut from the rocks like the bones of dead things. The wind howls through broken masts. And on the deck of the abandoned Wandering Albatross, Nico Robin relives the worst day of her life.
She's eight years old.
She's running through flames.
She's watching everyone she loves die.
And there's no one there to save her.
---
Jannali doesn't look back.
She can hear Robin's screams even from a distance—faint now, swallowed by the wind and the waves, but still there. Still present. Still real.
She tells herself it doesn't matter.
She tells herself it's just a job.
She tells herself she's done worse.
But her hands are trembling on Gosan's back. And her third eye—still open, still glowing—aches in a way it hasn't ached in years.
"Bloody hell," she mutters.
Gosan screeches in response—a sound that might be agreement, might be mockery, might be nothing at all.
The Thousand Sunny appears in the distance. Still burning. Still fighting. Still alive.
Jannali takes a breath. Lets it out. Forces her hands to steady.
"Right then."
She leans forward. Gosan dives.
And the battle continues.