OPSR: Chapter 13 (Patreon)

I arrived on Zora’s island, walked up to her, who was training in the woods, and started swinging my sword beside her. We sat there swinging for several minutes before I finally broke the silence. “Got two new swords…” After a few more minutes of swinging, I asked a question. “Want to see them?”

She began swinging one-handed as she held her hand out for me to hand it over. I handed her the Yubashiri first. Her sword paused mid-swing for a moment as she realized it wasn’t a generic sword. It felt odd having her judge a sword she should have ended up with eventually, but my plans for the future required as many special blades as I could get my hands on for my crew.

She very well could end up with these swords if she joins later, but I wasn’t as charismatic as Luffy. Without insurance to get her to join, she very well may end up staying in this sea working as a bounty hunter instead of following me out like she did with Luffy.

“Huh. Where’d you get this beautiful thing?” I kept swinging as I answered her. “Oh, that’s just one of the fifty skillful blades, Yubashiri. He gave it to me once I claimed the other sword from him.” I traded swords with her again, her still swinging my heavy lead sword with one hand as she did so. This time, once she saw the blade, she stopped completely.

“This… This is a great grade sword, isn’t it?” I smirked at her. “It is indeed. The Sandai Kitetsu.” She looked at it with a reverence I had never seen from her before. I heard her muttering to herself. “Look at that subtle coloring… the tasteful thickness of it. Oh my god, it even has a fire design…” I couldn’t help but smile at her praise as she continued.

“This sword is cursed.” “That’s right, how could you tell?” “I don’t know, I could just feel it.” I joked at her. “Hey, don’t throw that thing up in the air to where it can chop off your arm and beat the curse, because I already did that.” “Why would I risk my arm to beat the curse of a sword that doesn’t belong to me?” “Exactly, don’t do it.” “I won’t.” “Good, don’t.” “I won’t.” “Good.”

We kept swinging our swords as she handed me back the Sandai Kitetsu, and sat in silence again for another few minutes before she spoke, breaking it. “Damn it, why do I want to test myself against the sword now? It’s the only thing I can think about. Did you trick me somehow?”

“Yeah, it’s called reverse psychology. If someone tells you not to do something, it makes you want to do it more… So don’t grow up to fall in love with me.” “Heh, how can someone fall in love with a man whose eyebrows aren’t even straight?” “All right, I was waiting for a reason to fight you, and it only took a handful of sentences for you to get there. Let’s duel, I got to test out my new swords.”

We finished her sword practice. Before they could duel, they needed to swing their sword a thousand times a day. It wasn’t really a fast rule until Zora showed up and Kuina began challenging her every single day, as many times as she could. In this universe, Zora was the winner of all their duels, and the famous two-thousand-duel was only a week or two away before I showed up.

She still wasn’t a three sword style yet, my joke didn’t land quite as well as I thought it would be as she saw how terrible it was for me. I mocked her again. “Maybe you should borrow that great grade sword from Kuina, you’re going to need it to be on my level.” “I could beat you with a tree branch, Curly Brow, you just got lucky the last time we fought because I felt bad for you.” 

“How about we make this more interesting than, Mosshead? If I win, you owe me a favor, and if you win… I’ll  let you join my crew in the future.” “Heh, good try. The only way I’d get on your boat is if it were to take me to an island where a better boat would be.” “So if I get a better boat, you’ll join my crew?” “Not a chance. You should stick with cooking because there’s no way you’ll beat  me.”

Kuina chimed up from the side. “Can you two stop flirting and get on with it already? We’re all getting bored with watching this.” I could see the embarrassed look Zora shot Kuina as I smirked at her. “Well, you heard her, Zora-kun. Let’s get this party started.” We started the same way as we did before, as our swords clashed and locked up.

This time, it wasn’t training swords; we were using real weapons because I needed to test my swords. The first time we fought, I had been stranded at sea for over a month, was still recovering, and hadn’t begun any form of training… Now, I was easily pushing her back to the shock of everyone. “Not so tough now that I’m not half starved to death, are you? Oh, did I forget to mention that last time we fought, I was deserted on a reef for over a month?”

She tried to take advantage of my trash-talking by throwing me off, undoing our sword clash as she swiped at my feet. I jumped in the air before stepping on her head, kicking her face into the dirt. As she spit out the dirt in her mouth and stood up, I joked again. “Ahh, another thing is I’m actually not a swordsman. My main fighting style is with my feet.”

I tossed my blade at her; her eyes widened in shock as she moved to block the blade with both of hers, which is exactly what I was waiting for. The sword would have been deflected, flying off if she was given a quarter of a second more, but as the blade landed, I closed the distance as well before kicking the sword into her blades.

My full force kick could easily knock out a full-grown pirate. I had to taper my attacks against rowdy customers; otherwise, I might kill them, but I struck her with my full power, lifting her from the ground as she managed to keep hold of both her blades, doing a flip before landing on her feet afterward. I picked my sword off the ground as we got back to our spar.

Just focusing on swinging our swords, I was the first to notice that the fight was quickly coming to its climax as I taunted again. “I told you, you should have asked Kuina for her weapon.” She didn’t understand what I meant until I swung with all my force into her swords, both shattering as they had finally given out, before sweeping her legs with my own.

Everyone who watched the match had their mouths hung open in shock at what just happened. We were still almost children, and fighting on the level of the elites of most groups. Fighting at the level of Navy Commanders, or Pirate captains in the East Blue. Zora's loss was equivalent to injecting her with growth liquid. Only after hard fights did she improve dramatically in the show, showing that steel does, in fact, sharpen steel.

“Good match, Zora. I’d be more than happy to duel you again tomorrow before I leave, but we’d have to have a similar wager, maybe double or nothing on that favor you owe me?”