A faint scream startled Luffy from his fleshy dreams. So faint, in his daze, he wasn't even sure he'd heard it. He tried to listen for the sound again, but it was gone. He looked around and couldn't help but feel that something was missing. Remembering what had happened before he'd fallen asleep, he realized: the orange-haired girl was no longer there.
Her eyes opened wide.
Things were slowly starting to make sense in the boy's mind now that he was more awake. Luffy swam to where he'd left his clothes and quickly put them on. The scream he'd heard must have been the orange-haired girl's. He wasn't sure, but he had a feeling, and he always trusted his instincts. He needed to find the cave. He was certain the girl had gone in there. Even though she'd said she wouldn't! That lying peeping Tom!
After getting dressed, the boy, slightly indignant, quickly returned to the forest to look for White and the pups. He would have started searching for the orange immediately, but the shout had only woken him up. At that moment, he wasn't conscious enough to know where it had come from. So, since White knew where the cave was, he was going to ask her to take him there. Simple as that. Luffy pushed off with his legs as fast as he could, and the trees began to blur before his eyes as he mindlessly dodged the numerous tree trunks. The only thing on his mind was his destination.
White and her pack were soon in Luffy's sight, and he accelerated even faster, skidding towards the clearing. "White!" he exhaled, hands on his knees. "I need you to take me to the cave, NOW!" Almost as if the she-wolf sensed the boy's urgency, she darted into the woods. The straw-hatted teenager followed her, then immediately broke into a run, as did White's pups. The black-haired boy and the younger wolves quickly caught up with the she-wolf, and the group ran together as what they were: a pack.
Zoro glanced at the small spring and sighed contentedly. He'd been lucky to find it before nightfall. Otherwise, he would have had to sleep outdoors. Now he had a pleasant hot spring to relax in and get some sleep.
The young man sat in a small pool that ended just below his chest. Steam rose from the water like a steaming volcano, a testament to its heat. Trees formed a circle around the area, making it almost enclosed and relatively private. Zoro liked that. The pool itself could only hold three or four people at most, and he found it odd that it resembled a crater more than a hot spring after peering underwater.
Saul had told him to go into the forest and chop down a tree, saying he needed wood for a job. So, being a good worker, he did it. Apparently, the man had "forgotten" to tell Zoro it was impossible. He'd tried everything. Every move he had. Well... every move he had with a single sword. None of them left even a scratch. He still didn't quite understand it. He'd ventured deeper into the forest to see if all the trees were impossible to cut down and... Well... he got lost. Now that he thought about it, it made perfect sense why Saul couldn't stop laughing when he gave him the job.
Zoro gave up as night fell, resigning himself to trying again the next day, and left the area in search of a good place to sleep. Little did he know that his feet would lead him to the small corner of paradise where he found himself.
The green-haired teenager frowned to himself. Even with the lucky discovery of the spring, he was still angry with Saul for giving him such a stupid job. He rested his head on the edge of the pool and closed his eyes. He could think about how he would get revenge on the man later. Right now, he needed to sleep, and he would.
Silence fell over the area, and Zoro began to slowly drift off into sleep. Just as he was about to fall into the Sandman's clutches, a scream pierced the air.
Adrenaline surged through the swordsman, and his weariness dissipated in a wave of fight-or-flight instincts. Well, in his case, fight instincts. The verdet glanced in the direction of the shout before leaping out of the warm water and getting dressed. He grabbed Wado Ichimonji and tucked it into his haramaki, running into the woods in search of the distress call. The sound was close enough for him to pinpoint its source, so it couldn't be far.
He pushed his way through the trees, going as fast as he could, and soon Zoro reached his destination. However, he was not prepared for what awaited him there.
A vast clearing, almost like a battlefield with the amount of debris surrounding it, lay before an enormous dome-shaped cave. More precisely, it was a hemisphere. Like the moon cut in half. Actually, that description was the most accurate. Its material seemed to shimmer in the moonlight, giving the impression that there was an actual moon buried in the ground, craters and all. Zoro had never seen anything like it. To add even more surrealism, a black wolf stood at the mouth of the cave. A huge black wolf. Huge was almost an understatement.
The boy turned pale.
Zoro wasn't sure, given the distance, but he figured it might be as big as one of his fangs. For the second time in recent memory, the swordsman was lost. Things like what he was seeing simply couldn't be real. First, he had to deal with the madness Luffy had unleashed on him, and now there were wolves the size of buildings?! What was next? Islands in the sky?
The teenager cleared his head and ran like a madman toward the cave entrance. He really didn't have time to think about such things at that moment. Even in his caution, there was a part of Zoro excited. Who could say they had fought a beast of such magnitude? There couldn't be many. The green one smiled a bestial grin as he closed the distance to his target.
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