Kunoichi amongst Pirates

The Whale Laboon

HELLO TO MY AWESOME READERS.

I want to express my heartfelt gratitude for your support and for enjoying my stories. Your enthusiasm for my work means the world to me and I am so grateful to have you as my audience. Your encouragement has been a source of inspiration for me and has motivated me to keep writing and creating.

It's been a tough couple of weeks, and I haven't been able to work on my projects as much as I've desired. I've had an especially hard time coping, but it seems that the worst has passed.

There will be a special announcement at the end.

Hope you enjoy this chapter!

Though the Going Merry had been following the lighthouse, they had lost the beacon in the storm. Nami reassured everyone that she would be able to guide them through it. She called them all into the kitchen, laying out a map on the table. Showing the entrance to the Grand Line. This map was the result of one of her proudest loots. She had taken it from Buggy after he stole it from a marine headquarters.

"The entrance to the Grand Line is a mountain!"

While Sakura looked at this earth as a different planet, she could still be taken by surprise. She was capable of reading maps, but she was second-guessing if she had done it right.

Something like this which might have seemed small truly showed Sakura how much she had lost in this world. Not just access to her friends family and home, but the knowledge she had proudly accumulated over the years such as history had become ruins, archived in the back of her mind as she made way for new information.

Starters were the Grand Line that she was sailing towards with a group of pirates she had befriended.

"I couldn't believe it at first. The light of guidance was directly pointing at Reverse Mountain located right here on the Red Line."

"That's a waterway, leading up a mountain?" Sakura curled her lip, lifting her eyes in confusion. It crossed her mind that they might have misread the map, or that this was a fake. However, Nami assured her that what they were seeing was accurate. How it was a possibility, was the confusing part. "So any idea how we're supposed to get up this mountain? Last time I checked boats don't fly....right?"

Nami ran her fingers through her hair, "I'm not so sure. There are rumors and these drawings just confirm it. The entrance to the Grand Line is definitely this mountain. It has small canals, so we might have to go up and over it,"

Zoro frowned, "Even if there are canals, a ship can't climb up a mountain,"

"Well, that's what the map says,"

Sanji chided, huffing at Zoro. "That's right, if Nami says so then it's true!"

"Don't forget you stole that map from Buggy, so can we even trust it?" Zoro asked, "Why do we even have to enter directly through the entrance in the first place? Couldn't we just head south and still enter?"

"No, we can't!" Luffy exclaimed, pouting accusingly at Zoro. He looked like a child ready to throw a fit.

"That's right and there's a good reason for that," said Nami but Luffy was determined to voice his conclusion.

"It's much cooler to go in using the real entrance!"

"That's not it!" Nami hit Luffy on the back of his head for the comment.

In the commotion that started, no one noticed that the light above had stopped swinging, or the that the floorboards weren't creaking and the wind had fallen silent. Usopp went to the window, exclaiming that the storm had ceased.