In the silent, grand calculus of the cosmos, a single, misaligned variable flagged itself for review.
Before the first dawn stained the sea, the celestial being that had set its pawn in motion felt a tremor in the grand design. Its attention, a force spread across galaxies, was snagged by a singular, insistent whisper—an infinitesimally small spark of its own observing essence, returning from the boy with a report that was not scheduled.
Its arrival was a message in itself: The unpredictable has occurred.
With a thought that was less a command and more a simple act of being, the spark was reabsorbed. Its data unspooled not as numbers or facts, but as a fleeting, potent memory: a genuine, dream-fueled smile. It was the ghost of the boy that was supposed to be, a final, brilliant surge from the original Will, burning with impossible brightness before guttering out into near-nothingness.
A ripple of cold appraisal flowed through the being. The leash it had forged—that crude but necessary System of reward and ambition—was performing its function. The gangster walked the path. But the data revealed a cancer in the methodology. The leash was too tight, its pressure so constant that it was actively scouring the original Will from existence, grinding its light into dust.
The projection was not a possibility, but a sentence. Within a year, perhaps two, the foundational Will of the boy, the very engine of this era's destiny, would be gone. The vessel would be a hollow thing, inhabited only by a gangster whose shallow ambition would starve the timeline until it fractured.
This was not a complication. It was a critical failure. The pawn was threatening to break itself long before the endgame.
Unacceptable. A correction is required.
Its cosmic summons remained, a galactic imperative pulling its attention to grander wars on other planes of existence. Direct, prolonged guidance was impossible. But a final, precise intervention, a masterstroke of celestial surgery, could salvage the teetering project. It could not restore the boy's heart, but it could force an integration. A violent fusion.
A merger, not an erasure. A final act to stabilize the asset.
A new spark of golden, cosmic energy detached from its form. It did not merely travel; it pierced the veil of reality, a scalpel of light aimed at the soul of a single boy on a small blue sea. It was not there to observe, but to catalyze.
Its direct part in this flawed experiment was over. Now, it could only watch the fallout.
__________
The man inhabiting Luffy's body knew nothing of the cosmic verdict just passed upon him. He felt no divine spark, no golden catalyst dissolving into the very fabric of his being. He was not even aware of the silent, fundamental war that had defined his new existence from its very first moment.
From the instant his soul was caged within this vessel, two Wills had been locked in an unseen stalemate, a conflict that raged entirely below the threshold of his consciousness. On one side, the stubborn, sun-bright Will of the original Monkey D. Luffy—a force of impossible, innocent conviction. On the other, the hardened, cynical soul of the man the young upstarts back home had taken to calling 'Purana Khund'. It was a name spat with equal parts fear and derision, and it belonged to a soul forged in a world of concrete and betrayal. The two were poison to each other.
A true merger had never been an option. To force two potent, opposing Wills into a single mind was to ignite a psychic civil war that would have left the host a shattered, drooling husk. The Deity's initial, cruder solution—the System—had been a cage built around this very conflict, a way to steer the ship from the outside while the mutiny raged, unfelt, below deck.
This imperceptible war was the only reason the Marines in Shells Town still drew breath. Where the gangster's cold arithmetic demanded a bloodbath to silence all witnesses, some unbidden, alien instinct—a flicker of the boy's will—had stayed his hand. To the gangster himself, it was a moment of inexplicable hesitation, a choice made for reasons he could not articulate, which he had likely already dismissed and forgotten.
But that was before.
The word "Dream," spoken with such raw fire by the swordsman, had been a clarion call to that dying echo. The original Will answered it, surging forth in one final, brilliant flare that burned its last reserves of light down to embers. This was the critical failure the Deity had observed.
And in that failure lay a terrifying opportunity.
A Will that has been reduced to embers cannot fight an inferno. It can only be consumed.
This was the reversal. The catalyst was not a gentle nudge; it was a divine solvent, an agent of dissolution designed to methodically annihilate the final barriers between them. The failsafe was being abandoned for the nuclear option. The high-risk procedure that had been avoided at all costs was now the only path forward.
The balance of power had not just shifted; it had shattered. At a fundamental level he could not perceive, the gangster's soul was surfacing, no longer bridled by an unseen enemy. He was becoming more himself, without even realizing he had ever been anything less.
__________
On the deck of the Miss Love Duck, the crew was deep in the sleep of the well-fed and the recently terrified, dead to a world that rocked them gently on the black cradle of the sea.
All except one.
Zoro sat cross-legged, still as stone, his three swords laid across his lap. Their familiar, solid weight was an anchor in the shifting tides of his new reality. He wasn't sleeping; he was trying to find his center, to forge a single, still point in the whirlwind of the last few days: a rubber captain with the eyes of a predator, a promise made under duress, and a path that had violently swerved into the unknown.
He breathed in the cool, salt-laced air, and let the darkness behind his eyelids become absolute. A controlled void.
And against that perfect, disciplined blackness, a single mote of impossible, golden light bloomed and was gone.
His eyes snapped open.
The deck was empty. The sea was a sheet of placid ink under the stars. Nothing.
He let out a low grunt, a sound of pure dismissal. A phantom. A trick of exhaustion.
He closed his eyes again, sinking back into his meditation, entirely unaware that the golden phantom he had just dismissed was the first and only sign of a god's scalpel beginning its work.
__________
Miles behind them, in the pre-dawn stillness of Shells Town, a silence that felt heavy, pressed down by the iron will of the fortress, was about to shatter.
A single light burned in the Marine barracks, a lone point of wakefulness in a sea of sleep. Coby couldn't rest. The crisp fabric of his new uniform, still stiff and unfamiliar against his skin, felt like a costume he hadn't yet earned the right to wear. He was a Marine. The impossible dream was real, but a new, quieter thought nagged at him: he had never said a proper goodbye.
He thought of Luffy, who had given him his freedom, but his mind lingered on Nami. He remembered her sharp, confident eyes, the way she never seemed to flinch. She had been his first real teacher in what it meant to stand up for yourself.
They might still be at the docks, he thought, the idea a sudden, urgent mission. I have to thank her. they might set off in morning.
He slipped out of the barracks into the biting pre-dawn chill. The most direct path to the port would take him past the main training grounds and out the fortress gate. The grounds themselves were hauntingly empty, the wooden posts and targets standing like skeletal sentinels in the gloom. As he continued toward the main gate, a cold dread began to crawl up his spine. The gate, normally a bastion of floodlights and security, had been swallowed by an unnatural darkness.
It wasn't just dark. It was wide open. A wound in the fortress's defenses.
He stared into the gaping, black maw. The guard posts on either side were dead-silent silhouettes against the first, faint hint of dawn. Wrong. Terribly wrong. He took a hesitant step forward, his hand trembling as he pushed open the door to the nearest post. The creak of the hinges was deafeningly loud in the stillness.
And then he screamed—a choked, silent thing that died in his throat.
Inside, tangled in a grotesque heap, five marines were piled like cordwood.
Coby stumbled back, his gorge rising. A primal, two-year-old instinct screamed at him, a voice he knew all too well: Run! Flee! Disappear! He was about to turn, to bolt into the shadows, when some new, fragile thing inside him refused. He stopped. He drew his hand back and slapped himself, hard, across the face. The stinging, white-hot pain was an anchor in his sea of panic.
No, he thought, the words a silent oath, the image of Nami's unafraid gaze flashing in his mind. I am not that person anymore. I am a Marine now.
From the very bottom of the pile, a hand twitched.
The boy who scrubbed decks and flinched at shadows died in that instant. In his place, a foreign confidence—sharp, cold, and clear—boiled up from his gut. He strode forward and began the arduous, grim task of pulling the heavy, unconscious bodies from the guard post. He finally reached the last one, the man at the bottom, whose eyes fluttered open.
"Alarm..." the man rasped, his voice a dry rustle of leaves. "Sound... the alarm..."
It took another five minutes of frantic, desperate searching before Coby found it: the emergency bell. He gripped the thick, rough rope and pulled with all the strength he possessed.
DONG! TU-TU-TU! DONG! TU-TU-TU!
The catastrophic, rhythmic clang murdered the silence and shattered the dawn. It ripped through the barracks, waking every sleeping marine with a jolt of adrenaline, so loud that lights began to flicker on across half the town.
High above, in the darkness of his office, Axe-Hand Morgan also heard the toll. He was waiting, waiting for the stage to set to perform one last performance.
__________
The noon sun was a hammer blow against his eyelids, dragging him from the depths. Luffy sat up, his head pounding with the dull, familiar throb of an old acquaintance. A ghost-memory surfaced: late nights in smoke-filled rooms, the burn of cheap liquor, the inevitable price of the morning after.
He ran a quick, internal inventory of the previous night's celebration. He was managing the fallout far better than their navigator, at least. He had a vague recollection of her, thoroughly drunk on the liquor she herself had bought, dissolving into tears over some village before passing out. Even he couldn't outlast the swordsman; Zoro had been the last man standing, a silent, stoic mountain of tolerance against the chaos.
He stretched, his rubbery limbs groaning in protest. As the haze in his mind cleared, a single, clear imperative cut through the static. It's noon. Lunchtime.
"Shihahaha..."
The sound rumbled from his own chest, and he paused, his stretch half-finished. He catalogued it with cold curiosity. That was the third time now. The vibration was deeper, the tone rougher than the "Shishishi" he'd grown accustomed to. For a moment, he considered the constant, subtle shifts happening within this vessel, the strange evolutions he couldn't control.
Then he dismissed it with the pragmatism of the man he used to be.
This body is an engine of absurdities. One more strange noise is irrelevant. A flicker of dry, cold amusement crossed his mind. The final absurdity would be something like 'Nigagagaga'...
He snorted. A useless thought.
Across the deck, Nami watched him smile to himself, and a coil of pure ice slithered down her spine. Her own head throbbed in a dull, miserable rhythm, but it was a distant drumbeat compared to the frantic hammering of her heart against her ribs.
Shards of memory from the night before pierced her thoughts, jagged and terrifying. Telling them things. Things about Cocoyasi. About Arlong. About the 100 million berries.
But that wasn't the worst part. The worst part was that it shouldn't have happened. This was their first night drinking together, and She knew her limits. She'd spent eight years honing her tolerance, drinking seasoned pirates under the table as a basic survival skill. She was sure she could drink Zoro into the deck.
But last night... it was as if her own defenses had been chemically sabotaged. It wasn't just getting drunk. It was like... something else had been pouring the words out of her. A compulsion she couldn't fight. A dam breaking, leaving her utterly exposed.
She dug her thumbnail into her arm, the sharp, grounding pain a welcome distraction from the spiraling panic.
How much did I say? What do they know?
__________
[Author's Note]
For those who might try to use logic, remember that in the world of One Piece, the soul is not so unfadeable a thing.
Brook can flash you his if you want to see it...
__________
SKULL JOKE! Yohohohoho!
But on a serious part, there is also Big Mom. So, can we all agree that the Will is the most unfathomable thing in one piece world?