Smooth Sailing Chapter 12: Kumate Island 1 (Patreon)

Chapter 12: Kumate Island 1

Thankfully, there were no new surprises after discovering our little stowaway. Instead, it looked like Smooth sailing for the rest of the day!

“Kinda wish your neighbors hadn’t blown up Ganzack’s ship. I mean, I know it was tactically the smart move so he couldn’t escape, but I wanted to steal it for myself.” I admitted to Medaka as we prepared to eat some lunch. “The Lovey Dovey is getting kinda cramped.”

I could fit maybe four more people onboard, though the bedroom was already a tight fit with three adults and one kid in it.

“Didn’t you sink the ship when you threw that big rock at it? And then when you smashed it really hard with your mace?” Medaka pointed out, and I coughed awkwardly at that while my traitorous crew snickered at me.

“Details!” I said, waving my hand grandly.

“Bah, don’t worry about that! The Big Top will have plenty of room for all of ya!” Buggy assured me.

“Well, we’d best find it quick, then,” I replied. “Because Medaka might be small, but I don’t think I can stick her in a cupboard like I can with you.”

At that reminder of where he’d been forced to sleep the past couple of nights onboard the Lovey Dovey Buggy grumbled under his breath about disrespect.

As I spoke, Pep and Pop finished moving one of the tables from the galley out onto the deck so we could enjoy our meal under the sun. Meanwhile, Eliza and Jodie brought out the food.

Once we’d eaten, we got back to the important task of figuring out where Buggy’s crew had gone off to after the fight with Luffy.

“Well, there’s a couple islands we can investigate,” Hep said, pulling out the map and laying it on the table, avoiding any splotches of spilled lunch as he did so. “Lemme see, here’s where we are… and these are the closest islands to Orange Town within and around the Bund Span that they could have set sail for.”

“They won’t have gone anywhere with a Marine presence, so cross Nazawaka City off the list,” Buggy told him, examining the names. “Kestrel Town, too.”

Hep nodded and dutifully removed those islands from consideration. They were on the outside of the Bund Span anyways, so it wasn’t likely the Buggy Pirates would have gone there.

“Still leaves a couple,” Pep noted.

“Well, we won’t find Buggy’s crew by sitting on our butts,” I said, clapping my hands to get their attention. “Let’s see if they’re near any of the abandoned islands in the area. Those aren’t typically put onto maps, so those get ignored by most sailors. Perfect places to lay low.”

“That will be these three of ‘em,” Eliza noted, pointing to a trio of islands Buggy had scribbled down onto the sea chart.

“I think we can cross the first two off,” I said after a moment studying them. “If Buggy’s crew was there, they’re likely gone by now, since they seem to be little more than tiny rocks with few ways to resupply.”

“Depending on how badly beat up Strawhat and his crew left them, it could have taken a couple days to reach any of the islands,” Pop claimed. “Trying to sail while injured sucks and slows everything down.”

“Good point, Pop,” I said, not having taken that into account.

“Guess that means we have to check them all,” Medaka claimed, and we all sighed at that.

“At least they’re close together, so we can check them all in less than a week, three days, at the least, assuming the weather remains stable,” Hep said, trying to find some silver lining to the issue we found ourselves in.

“Fetch Quests suck,” I grumbled under my breath, and Buggy nodded sagely.

We had a mission. Now, came the hard part: getting there in time so the clown-themed morons didn’t get eaten by cannibals!

Thanks to my Meta-knowledge, I knew that Buggy’s crew was going to be found on Kumate Island. I couldn’t just say ‘Oh, go there, that’s where they are!’ without any proof, of course.

Luckily, as the captain of the Lovey Dovey, I decided where we went, and so I told them to head to Kumate first.

“Why there?” Buggy inquired.

“While it’s not that close to Orange Town, it is on a straight path, so if they set sail and were fleeing in one direction, they’d end up there eventually. Not to mention, it’s deserted, so it makes sense they’d head there if they’re low on supplies and morale. And it’s next to the other possible options on the map, so if we find nothing there, we can just swing around and visit the others easily enough,” I explained.

We could also reach Kumate in just a couple hours, arriving sometime at night, which was another reason in its favor for visiting it first.

“Good enough for me,” Buggy said with a nod after a moment.

Hearing that, Hep made his way to the helm, and Pep and Pop adjusted the sail’s rigging. We were finally on our way to save some circus reject weirdos! Truly, this was a worthy adventure!

111 &&& 111

Our worthy adventure turned out to be rather boring for the next few hours. The water was fairly calm, and nothing tried to eat us. We did find a bunch of ugly looking sea monkeys watching us, but they swam away as soon as they realized we’d spotted them.

So, naturally, I decided to take advantage of things and get some training done. Namely, for my crew.

“Come on, Medaka, try again!” I called out as the red-head ran into the mast again, her naginata getting stuck in the wood. “You can’t just charge in and expect to hit something!”

“I’m! Trying!” Medaka called out, pulling her weapon out with a grunt.

“Well stop doing the same thing over and over, then!” I retorted. “Swinging it wildly doesn’t work, either! You need to have more control over your weapon!”

I then glanced at the other two newbies on my crew. “Jodie, it is a pair of swords, not live gators! They won’t bite you! And Eliza! I appreciate your enthusiasm, but please watch where your wires are going! You almost decapitated one of the peach trees!”

“Is it really ‘decapitation’ if I nearly cut off a branch or two?” Eliza wondered idly.

“I dunno, but I don’t really don’t want to lose one of my trees!” I called back.

“Sh-shouldn’t we be doing something else?” Jodie asked as gingerly snapped the twin blades together, forming the scissor-blade mode.

“You two have never held weapons before, right? Well, this is how you learn!” I told them. "Getting used to your tools of the trade is as important as anything else. We can get to the physical stuff once you both know how to hold your weapons and won’t accidentally slice a finger off by accident!”

I then glanced over at Hep, Pep, and Pop. “Don’t think you’ll be getting out of training, either! You have new gear but I won’t let you three look like amateurs while fighting!”

The guys winced but called back, “Yes, Captain Alvida!” in unison, not willing to argue with me.

‘And to be fair, I think they want to get stronger. Their loss against Lieutenant Wooster and the Marines has got to sting,’ I thought to myself as I got back to my exercises.

For my training, I was doing some physical conditioning for my body. Namely, leg stretches and lifting weights with my feet. This was being done to strengthen my lower half, all in the name of eventually learning the Six Powers.

It was a bit of a longshot, but the World Government’s ‘secret’ martial arts would help me get stronger.

Iron Body and Paper Arts would be somewhat useless, as my Devil Fruit already gave me a pretty potent defense. And the things that could hurt me couldn’t exactly be stopped by either of these techniques. Though I had a feeling figuring them out would help with mastering the four others.

However, Shave and Moon Walk would definitely be of immediate use to me. Improved mobility, as well as the ability to ‘walk’ on the air, gave me far more options.

The final two techniques, Finger Pistol and Storm Leg, would also be helpful. Adding some combat techniques to my repertoire was necessary since I was mostly a defense-oriented type Devil Fruit user right now.

‘If I want to be able to use these techniques, though, I have to develop a body capable of such,’ I thought to myself.

For Shave and Moon Walk, that meant making my legs strong enough to kick the ground ten times in one second in order to create the burst of movement that allowed for these abilities. Hence my leg exercises.

After a few more reps, my limbs felt sore, and I put the weights down with a thump, holding back a yawn. I pushed myself up, my legs wobbling a little from the exhaustion.

“Phew! Alright, everyone! I think you’ve done enough! Take a break and relax!” I called out.

Medaka slumped, panting a little as she let her naginata drop to the deck, while Jodie and Eliza both put their weapons away.

“Th-thanks, captain!” the red-head huffed. “Wow! My arms feel like rubber!”

“Heh.” I chuckled a little at that, my mind going to a certain straw hat wearing pirate.

“You should have joined us too, Buggy,” I said, turning to the blue-haired clown.

“I’m busy,” he grunted.

Buggy had been standing at the railing of the Lovey Dovey for hours, now, eye pressed against a golden spyglass he’d fished out from… somewhere. I don’t think he actually had that when we rescued him from the crab. Maybe he got it from Clatter Town or looted it from Ganzack?

Shaking those thoughts away, I instead rubbed my chin as I squinted at the clown-captain.

“So, I have a question,” I asked Buggy.

“Yeah?” he asked grumpily, the spyglass glued to his face as he stared out at the horizon, trying to spot any sign of his ship or crew.

“Remind me, why can’t you use your Devil Fruit powers to return your body to normal right now?” I inquired. “Distance shouldn’t be that much of a factor.”

“You’d be surprised,” the red-nose man grumbled. “I told you before, it’s hard to do things and coordinate my actions the further the parts are from each other. Not to mention my power works on the position of my body itself when I Chop it apart. I can move around the individual pieces independent of each other, and reform at will, but if, say, my feet are too far from my torso, then my torso can fall onto the ground since I’m no longer ‘standing’ on them.”

“So how exactly did they stop you from reforming or breaking apart further, then?” I asked, even though I already knew the answer thanks to my meta knowledge. “Did they have Sea Stone, or did they shove you into a barrel to keep you separated from the main mass?”

“No, they managed to wrap up most of my body parts up in rope and then forced the pieces I had left to reform like this, and then hit me so hard I went flying before I could even try to escape,” Buggy explained.

“Okay, so why didn’t you just break down your body into smaller pieces, then?” I asked. “You’d have been able to slip through the ropes easily in that case.”

Buggy lowered his spyglass to stare at me, jaw dropped wide open with a ‘why didn’t I think of that before?!’ expression on his face.

“Actually, how small can you Chop up your body?” I wondered, musing aloud to myself. “Could you make your individual pieces as small as a grain of sand? Sort of like a pseudo-Logia like the Sand-Sand Fruit? Or what about chaining your parts together to extend your reach? If, for instance, your parts can’t be that far from each other, would you be able to evenly space them a couple centimeters apart and make it stretch out like a giant chain, each piece sort of ‘stacked’ atop each other?”

I tapped my foot on the deck, no longer looking directly at Buggy as more ideas came to me, and continued to speak aloud. “Or what about Chopping yourself into uneven shapes, instead of uniform? How about detaching parts of yourself from larger parts? Like, say, a cube of flesh from your arm while said arm is also already Chopped off? Or maybe you could fuse different things to your body? The verb ‘to cleave’ can mean cleaving something apart but also cleaving them together. I know it’s called the Chop-Chop Fruit, but who says it couldn’t also do something like that? You can reform after Chopping yourself up, after all.”

Buggy continued to stare at me in disbelief, before face palming.

“Damn it,” he muttered to himself, before waddling off to think on what I’d said and brood in private.

“Is he an idiot?” Medaka wondered when he’d left, tugging on my coat, and I wobbled my hand back and forth.

“Eh, kinda. From what I’ve gathered from his stories, he used to be from the Grand Line but spent two decades hiding in plain sight in the East Blue. He’s been holding himself back this whole time, and never needed to think too hard about using his Devil Fruit in creative ways.”

I then patted her head. “Just remember that there is no such thing as a weak power, merely a weak user of said power.”

She nodded in determination, keeping my advice close to her heart, or so I hoped.

The sun was starting to set at this point, and so we got dinner ready for everyone. A very plain meal, consisting of rice and fish, with only a few spices for seasoning. It was the best we could do in such a short amount of time.

‘Next crew member we need, right behind a medic, is somebody who knows how to cook,’ I thought to myself as I finished my dinner.

With that done, Buggy got back to work staring forlornly out at the sea with his spyglass. Yet shortly after night fell fully across the East Blue, something loomed out of the darkness.

“There it is!” Buggy shouted eagerly, bouncing up and down in excitement. “Look! Over there!”

“That’s Kumate Island,” I said, squinting through the gloom at the stone pillars rising up out of the water. “It’s bigger than I thought it would be.”

Each of the tall spires was closer to a small mountain than I remember them being in the series. The forest was more of a jungle, and was also a lot thicker, with long vines dangling from the trees and trailing in the water. These became a danger to any ship that might try to dock at the deserted island, tangling up and snarling the rudder and oars.

“There’s a clearing that a ship should be able to make landfall at,” Buggy informed me. “Circle around until we find it!”

We didn’t have to sail very far, as a few minutes of skirting the edges of Kumate Island we discovered a large beach. And anchored right next to it was a familiar circus themed pirate ship.

“The Big Top!” Buggy crowed joyfully. “Oh, love of my life!”

He then cupped his hands around his mouth. “OI! CABAJI! MOHJI!”

Buggy waited for a moment for his right- and left-hand men to respond, but after a while he began to frown. “They’re not answering.”

“Could they be on the island?” I suggested, knowing that this was the case.

“If so, then somebody else should be watching the ship,” the captain grunted. “HEY! FUNAN BROS! ACROBAT FUWAS! SUPERHUMAN DOMINGOS! ANYBODY! SHOW YOURSELVES, IT’S YOUR DAMN CAPTAIN!”

Despite all of his shouting, the Big Top remained silent as the dead, and my own crew shared nervous glances with each other.

“It doesn’t look that badly damaged,” Pep cautiously ventured. “Could be they’re all asleep.”

“Somebody is always on night watch,” Buggy informed him. “That’s just common sense!”

“Where would they all go, though?” Pop wondered. “Did they abandon ship in a storm and it drifted here?”

“Then it couldn’t have dropped anchor,” I pointed out. “No, I think something else happened. They might be here, on the island…”

“How sure are we this place is abandoned?” Jodie wondered anxiously.

“Oh! You think some other pirates might have taken over the island and nabbed Buggy’s crew?” Medaka guessed.

“Could be,” I hummed. “We won’t find out just standing around, though. Hep, bring us up alongside the ship. We’re boarding it.”

Hep saluted and turned the Lovey Dovey towards the Big Top, bringing us close enough that we could throw mooring ropes onto the deck and climb aboard.

“Weird,” Medaka muttered, glancing around the abandoned ship. “It’s like everyone just up and vanished!”

“Recently, too,” Eliza said, picking up a mop. “Look at this! Still wet! If this had been abandoned during the day, it’d be dry as a bone!”

“So, somebody was using the mop at some point, but not anymore,” Pop said slowly.

“They must have all gone to the island for some reason,” Buggy surmised after searching the ship and coming up emptyhanded.

“Hey, Buggy, can you feel your body parts?” I asked, and he frowned.

“I can,” he said. “They’re not here on the ship. They’re… on the island?”

Buggy did a wiggle, and frowned even harder. “Okay, I think my body is stuck. I can’t move my pieces back towards me.”

“…Do you think they buried you?” I wondered.

At that, Buggy groaned and facepalmed. “Did those idiots think I was dead?! Why didn’t they check for a pulse?! Or, Hell, my heart is still beating! Why didn’t they notice?!”

“Come on, we need to get to the island so we can dig up your not-corpse,” I said aloud with a sigh. Medaka snickered at my turn of phrase while Buggy scowled even harder.

Returning to the Lovey Dovey, we sailed the much smaller vessel directly up to the beach, leaping out with a series of splashes.

Not wanting to be caught off guard by cannibals, I brought my mace with me, and my crew grabbed their own weapons. Even Buggy put on his claw gauntlets, ready to rumble if he needed to.

Near the beach, we discovered evidence of a party. Discarded bones and bits of food, empty bottles, broken barrels, and a few campfires and a tent all lay around the edge of the jungle. We could also see signs of a scuffle, with dirt kicked up.

“Somebody was fighting here,” Buggy declared, peering down at the footprints. “It looks like… Cabaji and Mohji? Yes, definitely those two, I’d recognize their footwear anywhere.”

“You sure?” Eliza asked, looking down at the markings in the dirt.

“Yeah. Mohji wears boots that look like animal’s paws, and nobody else on my crew wears these tiny, pointy toed shoes other than Cabaji,” Buggy claimed. “He has the tiniest feet on the crew.”

“Why were they fighting?” Medaka wondered. “I thought they were crewmates!”

“Probably trying to decide who’d be the captain, since they thought Buggy was dead,” Jodie guessed. “I mean, how else would pirates decide who’d be the boss?”

“Fair guess, and that’s likely what happened,” Buggy agreed with a sigh. “Cabaji is my First Mate, so he’d expect to take over if I was gone, but Mohji is definitely strong enough to try and usurp that position. They’ve always been rivals.”

“Where’d they all go, then?” Hep asked, which was a fair question. Where did a couple dozen pirates vanish to while leaving so much litter behind?

“Dunno. But I can feel my body over there,” Buggy announced, and we following his pointing finger to a cliff where a freshly dug dirt mound could be seen nearby. There was also a crude cross with a photo of Buggy attached to it, complete with black ribbons.

“At least they cared,” I said as we went over to the mound.

Grabbing shovels, we dug up Buggy’s pieces, all of which were now rather stained with dirt.

“Oh, come on!” Buggy groaned as he saw the pile of Chopped up limbs. “They didn’t even untie me!”

“At least they didn’t strip you naked,” Pop offered.

The clown just grunted and before our eyes the body parts broke apart into even smaller chunks before floating into the airs and flying over to Buggy. Watching him reassemble his body was very strange, like seeing a ghost build a Gunpla kit.

‘At least he’s taken my advice for how to use his power better,’ I thought as Buggy groaned and cracked his back.

“Shit, I’m sore all over,” he complained, before looking around. “Now, where the Hell is my damned crew?! I have a few choice words for them!”

“Does anyone smell smoke?” Eliza asked, sniffing the air, and we all took a moment to do the same.

“It’s coming from deeper in the jungle!” Jodie realized.

“I have a bad feeling about this,” I muttered. “Anyone else?”

“Yeah, sure do, captain,” Pep claimed, his brothers nodding in agreement.

“Okay, let’s go,” Buggy said, and we strode off into the island’s interior, hunting for the lost crew.

Entering the dark jungle, we cautiously stepped over roots and brushed aside vines. As we moved beneath the thick canopy, I was able to catch glimpses of old, crumbling buildings buried beneath creeping plant life. 

Not even a minute in, and we discovered a quartet of people. Two of them were men in black and white striped outfits, crude, torn, and dirty. They had their hair done up in a weird ponytail-topknot style, and were busy dragging away a pair of unconscious and badly beaten people.

I recognized them immediately. One was a green-haired man with long bangs on his left side, while the right side of his head was shaved in stripes. He had a long blue and white checkered scarf, and was shirtless with a sleeveless navy-blue jacket to cover up his torso.

The second was a wearing what looked like a white fur suit, or at least the top half of it. His head was covered up by an animal-eared hood, and had green striped pants and weird paw-shaped boots.

Buggy also recognized the duo right away as well, shouting, “Cabaji?! Mohji?!”

The men who were dragging the pair away immediately dropped them and pulled out crude spears, made by tying knives to the ends of sticks.

“Gah! More meat!” the one on the right cackled.

“More food, pretty food!” the one on the left laughed gleefully, leering at me, Jodie, and Eliza.

“Oh, shit!” Pop exclaimed.

“Cannibals!” Pep gasped, drawing his brand-new revolvers.

“Pep, take care of them,” I ordered. “But make sure you don’t hit those idiots at their feet.”

“Got it,” my gunman said, and fired.

The gunshots echoed in the dark and between the trees. Against bullets, the cannibals were no match, and even though they were strong enough to take down Buggy’s mook crew, they were unable to stop high-speed lead. Pep emptied both revolvers into the tribal warriors, and they collapsed, bleeding out from six holes each in their chest.

“Damn, that was easy,” Hep grunted, lowering his sword.

“What did you expect? There was two of them against all of us!” I replied, and with Buggy at my side we approached Cabaji and Mohji.

“Wake up you morons!” Buggy shouted, slapping the duo awake.

“E-eh? Are we in Hell?” Mohji groaned. “Because I could swear that the captain was here…”

“I am here, fleabrain!” the clown snarled.

“B-but, we, I mean-!” Cabaji stammered, tears in his eyes.

“I was still alive! Did neither of you bother to check my vitals?!” Buggy shouted, bonking the two over the head when they gained a sheepish ‘oh, we should have done that!’ look.

As his minions got their just desserts, I ventured over to the corpses and inspected them. I had questions about these people, and I wanted answers.

“Hey, Buggy… do these marks look familiar to you?” I asked, peering down at the tattoos on the back of the cannibals’ hands.

‘Not to mention, their hairstyle is also worryingly close to something else,’ I thought.

Buggy, who’d been celebrating his reunion with his two crewmates, looked over at me in annoyance, but when I held up one of their arms for him to see the tattoo, his expression suddenly twisted, and a grimace crossed his face as he saw the same thing I did.

“Yeah, it sure does,” he muttered, walking over to the downed cannibals. “That mark… it reminds me of the Hoof of the Soaring Dragon.”

I nodded grimly, having made the same connection. One could assume that the symbol was meant to represent a bear paw or the island… but there were some issues with that. First was that Kumate Island had four mountains that resembled ‘fingers’ while the tattoos only had three. And the Hoof of the Soaring Dragon had three ‘claws’ at the top, and one at the bottom.

The shape of the paw’s pad was triangular, and not at all like the Hoof’s circle. But if you fused the circle of the Hoof with the bottom ‘claw’ incorporated into the design, then it turned into something vaguely similar to what the Kumate Tribe’s tattoo resembled.

And then there was the way the tribal hunters wore their hair. It was disturbingly similar to the hair style the majority of the World Nobles possessed: an up-do that ended with a round bun of hair at the top that resembled a sphere. It wasn’t a complete one to one comparison, but it was enough to trigger some worry in my mind.

Buggy looked up sharply at me. “What do you think is going on?” he asked sharply.

“I don’t know for sure, but Buggy, when was the last Native Hunting Competition held in the East Blue?” I asked darkly.

He blanched, and then looked around. Some things began to make sense: the overgrown ruins buried beneath the jungle, the lack of any land-dwelling animals… it spoke to something… unnatural. Sinister.

“Decades ago,” Buggy replied after thinking it over. “Though considering the state of these people, and the ruins, it might be from one that occurred a lot further in the past.”

He then suddenly got close, and I felt the sharp fingertips of his war gauntlet prick against my side, drawing a tiny bead of blood. My eyes widened at that. Was he using Armament Haki to bypass my Smooth skin?!

“How do you know about the Native Hunting Competition?” Buggy demanded in a low voice. “Or about the Hoof of the Soaring Dragon?”

“A World Noble came to the East Blue about ten years ago. I saw it then, branded onto the backs of some people,” I replied evasively, mixing truth with lie.

“I remember,” the red-nosed pirate growled. “Marines were out in full force. Had to lie low for a month before it was safe enough to go out on the water again.”

“As for the Native Hunting Competition… I’m not ready to say,” I told him.

For a moment Buggy stared intently at me, scrutinizing my face before nodding with a grunt and withdrawing his knife. “Yeah. That’s fair. I wouldn’t want to talk about shit like that if I had a choice, either.”

He then folded his arms. “What now, though? I vote we leave as soon as we grab the rest of my crew.”

“I want to find out more. If these people are really the descendants of a World Noble’s slaves, then who knows what they might have lying around?” I wondered idly. “Though we’d better find your buddies sooner rather than later.”

“Yeah,” Buggy agreed. “I don’t want to have to go through the trouble of finding new ones!”

Underneath his bluster, I could tell Buggy was worried, and I nodded. “Come on. They can’t be that far. Just gotta follow the smoke.”

The red-nosed pirate nodded, and after helping Cabaji and Mohji to their feet, we continued through the jungle. What else would we discover on Kumate Island? I was almost afraid to find out.