(Strap in, I think this is my longest chapter ever - also don't worry about the details of the chapter image, just keep the Expression in mind. You'll know for when ♥).
The raid that night was broken into several teams. You, Kid and Law were on one very mobile team, with Killer, Emma and Hip on another team, and Boogie, Heat and Wire on another. House and Reck were nearby, in case someone needed medical attention, but they didn't have an active role. There were support groups around the area in case Decken slipped the net, but after going over the plan nearly a dozen times before you had headed out you were fairly certain things would end tonight.
Killer's team took point, the three of them being the fastest and quietest people on the crew. Everyone was wearing collars that allowed for communication down to whispers. It was voice-activated open channels, so everyone was quiet once they put them on.
Aside from Killer's team, you were the only one dressed in dark colors. Kid and Law were the best defense you could hope for, but because of Decken's ability they needed to obscure your appearance as much as possible. The things he threw couldn't change directions immediately, so as long as you could move around, they wouldn't be enough to lock onto you with other means.
"Patrol found." Killer's whispered voice was clear in your ear, as though he was right beside you. "Emma left, Hip right. Wait. ... now!"
You jumped a little at the sudden raise in volume, even though it was still quite soft. There was a moment of silence and then, "Down and stowed, moving on."
Decken had protection. Not enough to stop someone like Doflamingo, and not enough to stop Kid. But it was enough to cause problems for Kid and the crew, so the soft and quiet approach was needed to thin the proverbial ranks.
A change in the air made you sniff, and Law and Kid both looked at you. You pointed to the air and then fluttered your fingers as you moved them down. There was a moment of confusion on Kid's face until he sniffed as well.
"Fuck," came the soft swear. You heard it from the comms, but it had been so quiet otherwise you wouldn't have. "It's gonna rain." Kid says softly, letting the rest of the crew know exactly why he swore.
Rain wasn't enough to stop the raid, but moving around on the abandoned hilltop faux town that was used for TV movies back in the day in the middle of a downpour was going to suck. Buildings and roads hadn't seen maintenance for a decade at least, meaning most of the area was going to be leaky and muddy.
Killer and his team took down a second patrol shortly after, and you could feel the smell of rain getting heavier, the rumble of thunder in the distance. The strange twinge slipped along your spine again and you started looking around at the same time Kid did. You could feel his power coiling up around him when a soft voice came through comms.
"Room." A strange sensation followed as something moved through you easily. "Shambles."
In the blink of an eye there were several dozen weapons stuck into the ground behind you, and you heard the soft thumps of stones falling onto the dirt some distance away a moment later. There was a moment of confusion on your part for a second before you realized it was Law's power. Eustass is scowling but Law just offers a shrug.
"It's quieter." The smaller man replies softly.
"Third patrol down, but there's a problem." Killer says over comms, continuing before anyone can ask. "I think they know she's here. I can hear something about how the weapons turned course unexpectedly."
"Next step then," Kid says with a wolfish grin. "Time to make some noise. Heat, light it up." He turns to Law. "Get us in there."
There's an unnerving weightless feeling and a second of nausea as your body shifts a great distance in a split second. You urp a little, putting your hand over your mouth before everything in your system settles.
"All good, Mouse?"
You nod. "Yeah."
You're inside a dark building and there's an opening in front of you where a window used to be. Looking out into the immediate area you see two events happen in short order.
Fire billows into the air and there is a cacophony of noise that follows as the crew goes wild, and then it begins to rain. The sky opens and the rain is just heavy enough to obscure visibility.
"Rain's not going to do either side any favors." Kid growls.
"It's a boon for me." Law admits.
"Save your strength. You got one job from here on out." Kid reminds him.
Law nods and the three of you begin moving through the building. In the midst of the chaos of the crew going wild there were updates from Killer helping to guide Kid through the area. Trafalgar's fruit ability shifted the three of you one more time, and the second time was a lot easier to stomach than the first shift.
"Over there!" Someone yells outside and you weren't sure what had prompted it at first.
"How'd they get in there?!" The question hit your ears just before the sounds of items slamming into the wall nearest you.
Kid grabs you and tosses you deeper into the room and away from the wall just as it starts to give way. You arced through the air for a second before landing on a mattress. You had just enough weight and the framed had just enough rot that it shattered under you, but the battered mattress was stuffed with straw, and that was enough for a soft landing.
The amount of items slamming into the building was ripping away chunks of brick and plaster. Kid was repelling as much as he could, but a lot of what was directed at you wasn't metal.
"Bastard's either run out of weapons, or knows what he's up against." Kid says, his teeth nearly grinding. "Stay with the freak doc, Mouse." He commands taking off through one of the window openings. You can feel a tug at the sword in your hand, and can hear all the metal in the area getting pulled toward Eustass.
You and Law move in a way that lets you keep one eye out for Kid and one eye out for anything incoming. The doctor doesn't say much except to activate his ability. You can hear the rest of the crew over comms, though with Kid out and rampaging, there's not much to hear except for him.
The comms are calibrated well enough that they don't pick up the ear-shattering sounds of his metallic collection – you can hear that clearly enough even from several yards away – but Kid focuses his devil fruit powers verbally like most users do. Seeing how careful Law is with his ability, it's a little unsettling to see how nearly constant Eustass uses his own.
"Found him!" You heard Emma's voice on the comms and grab Law.
You and Eustass spoke at the same time.
"Take me there!"
"Don't move Mouse!"
You glared at Law for a second and when he didn't do anything you bolted toward the commotion. You were yelling as you ran, but it wasn't like you had a booming voice.
"I came here for this, don't you dare tell me to stay away!"
"That's not- MOUSE LOOK UP!" Eustass' voice takes on an edge of fear you hadn't heard from him before. You manage to look up and see a waterfall of items coming toward you. The torrent of items that had been hounding you the last few months was nothing compared to what you were seeing now.
It was like Decken was commanding the entire hilltop to bury you.
"I got her," Law says, and you feel the weightless feeling again as you're moved from the ground to a rooftop.
You look around to reorient yourself and smack Law's arm as the waterfall bends and comes back toward you. From the new perspective you realized that it was mostly water with items in it. Even if you could protect against the debris in the water, you could easily be drowned or crushed by the 30ft diameter "water snake" that was coming for you.
"L-Law."
"Hang on."
You turn away from the water, unable to watch it get closer and closer while Law is waiting for the last second to move the two of you out of the way. When you look behind you see another column – barely visible in the dark rain, if not for a bolt of lightning illuminating the space behind it.
"There's more than one!"
"Fuck, did he awaken his fruit?" You heard Eustass' voice over comms, and your mind barely registers the phrase.
Awakening fruit abilities was an old wives' tale. At least as far as you knew. Devil Fruits were closely cataloged and monitored; it had been your job for years. Talking about an awakening was akin to asking someone to go get a box of blinker fluid. It was a joke. An awakened fruit user would've been the biggest news to hit the world, never mind the Metro itself, on par with someone finding the One Piece – since neither were believed by most people to be real.
"Shambles!" You and Law were moved to another rooftop.
The two of you barely had time to get your bearings before there were several people yelling at you over comms.
"Oh hells." You murmur.
Eight rolling coils of water and debris surrounded you. Thick as grain silos, snaking up from the hillside and homing in on you.
"They stop once they slam into something else, right?" Law questions.
"Yeah."
"Eustass-ya, I might need a break after this."
"Tired already?"
"Tch, ungrateful punk." Law grumbles. "Room!"
Your jaw drops as the room Law creates is massive, engulfing the twisting torrents around you. What you'd seen of devil fruits and their limits was starting to look like misinformation compared to the scope of what you were seeing right now.
People said that Warlords clashing with each other or Emperors were the only natural disasters of the Grandline Metro, but you were beginning to think the truth was more that Devil Fruit users were the natural disasters. If this fight had been happening anywhere other than atop a hill of an abandoned TV movie location, there'd be panic in the streets. The collateral damage alone would have been astronomical.
"Takt!"
"Holy shit." You murmur, and you're pretty sure you hear a couple other people echo your sentiments over comms.
The torrents of water and debris were being forced upward. You alone could see Law struggling, his own ability crashing against the will of Decken's ability. Law controlled the things in his room, but Decken's ability went unerringly for its target until something physically stopped it. The room wasn't physical, and you realized that Law was continually pushing against all eight "arms" – forcing them up to crash into one another.
The small problem was, they wanted to converge on you. So, the crash site was going to be right overhead. It meant you had quite the front row seat to what was eventually going to be the deadliest rain of your life.
"L... Law?"
"Don't panic," he says.
"Way past that setting." You admit as the torrents converge overhead.
The torrents themselves were a solid enough mass to cause the effect of Decken's fruit to break, but the amount of water mixed into it meant that Law had to continue to concentrate on the torrents even as things began to rain down around you. You ducked down as the cascade of water and debris headed straight for the two of you, and you were practically screaming from nerves before the weightless shift happens.
Your hands and knees are in mud, and you realize you're not up on a rooftop anymore. You hear Law move around you and look up to see him shielding you with his body, as he's drawing his sword.
"Stay behind me." His words are so quiet you can only hear them through the comms.
"Move," it was only a single word, but you know who it's from. It's a voice that moves like grease, sinking into your brain like sludge.
You stand up behind Law, grateful that you're smaller than him by enough to stay hidden.
"If you won't move, I'll move you." Decken says. You don't know what he does, but suddenly the ground beneath you feels wrong.
"Law!"
The ground beneath your feet erupts as weightlessness takes over and you and Law are shifted. You don't get far, reappearing only a few yards away, Decken still nearby. You can see Law's shoulders shifting up and down and you realize he's getting tired.
"Eustass-ya."
"Almost there."
"Oh no." There's another shift in the ground and you and Law move again. It's becoming the worst reverse game of Whack-a-Mole you've ever experienced.
You appear and catch sight of Eustass – a maelstrom of metal – rising into view. It was taking shape into a giant metal skull and two hands, the skull seeming to scream in rage along with Kid. You were relieved to see him, but it felt like he was too far away still, and Law was exhausted. You turn toward the doctor, and begin to say something when he grabs you and spins the two of you around in the mud before growling in pain.
"Shit!" He swears through grit teeth before letting you go. Shifting back in the mud you look down and see a long, nasty nail pierced into his leg, sticking out on both sides. It's at least ten inches long and almost looks like a rail spike.
"... You can't use your ability anymore, can you?"
Law doesn't say anything. While his fierce eyes might be glaring at you for saying such a thing out loud, the frustration on his face speaks volumes. Fighting against the will of Decken's power had drained him.
You feel the hillside shudder, but it doesn't take long to realize it isn't Decken. He's not even looking at you, his own gaze fixed on Eustass Kid. It's Kid's ability that's shuddering the entire hill, and you can see the ground bugling in places as old pipes are rising up from beneath the surface at the call of his power.
Eustass' fury unloads from him and toward Decken. You lose sight of the greaseball in the onslaught of metal crashing down around him, but it's hard to believe he's going to survive such a thing.
"Seems a bit overkill." You murmur.
"Awakened fruits can do all kinds of strange things." Killer's voice replies in your ear. "Anything short of overkill could result in all of us being wiped out."
Oh.
Eustass' attack rips across the ground in front of you. You can feel the wind rolling off of the attack, the rush of metal and rage cutting through the air.
Kid lands on the ground behind the attack. He's covered in blood and mud, but it's hard to say whose blood. You want to go to him to check, but his focus is still on Decken, and his posture shows no signs of personal injury. Whatever chaos he carved into the area, it didn't even have him breathing hard.
The quiet was unsettling.
Nothing moved on the hilltop for long moments. The random clunk of metal settling after Kid's attack were the only sounds. The rain had stopped at some point, you'd been too distracted by the terrifying power of Decken's awakened fruit ability to notice exactly when.
You were too nervous to speak, and it seemed like you weren't the only one. The silence stretched and finally Killer broke it.
"Sound off," he prompted, and there were a short series of "Here" and "bruised but fine" that tumbled in, one after another, through the comms.
"Down, but stable." Law says behind you, and you turn toward him. His pierced leg is going to need tended to, and fortunately for him you're still fully of energy.
"Here," you say, pulled out of your stupor as you kneel down by Law to help him.
"Stay on guard," Kid says, you can hear him breathing heavy on comms, even if you hadn't been able to see it before. "Something's off."
"You gotta pull that out before I can help," you explain to Law. You don't exactly have practice pulling things out of people, and honestly, knowing how much it would hurt someone you're not sure you have the stomach for it. The last thing you want to do right now is hurt the doc more than needed after all he's done.
There's a shift in the air and you don't even have to look to know that there's another torrent of debris forming. You'll focus on it once you're done with what you needed to do. Trafalgar couldn't move the two of you, but you could heal him and split up.
No matter what Kid might want, you didn't want anyone else to get caught up in an unavoidable attack. Being protected was fine, but having someone go down with you in vain was unacceptable.
"That... doesn't look like it's coming for you." Law says, as he pulls the ten inch rail nail from his leg with a grunt. You heal him as you look up and notice that the torrent of debris this time is definitely curving the wrong way.
"Who's it going for?" You mumble the question just as you see and hear the clang of metal being pulled together. You see Eustass a few yards away, slamming a barrier of metal in front of himself.
You start to move toward him when a strong grip on your arm holds you back. The doctor shakes his head when you turn toward him, and you can't argue. You can't do anything to protect Kid, and if you get caught up in the attack and get hurt, you won't be able to help him either.
"KID!" You screamed as the torrent of plaster and rocks slammed into him. You were certain he had gotten a wall of metal up in front of him before the attack had landed, but the amount and speed of what had slammed into him had knocked him and the metal back.
You could hear him growl in the comms. "Mouse! I'm – fuck! – fine! stay away!"
Looking up you saw the second wave coming, this was most definitely aimed at you. There wasn't mud and rock and water packed together. It was much smaller than everything before it, but it was straw and splintered wood and it wasn't going to be enough to kill you, maybe, but it was going to hurt you and anyone else caught in it.
There was no way to avoid all the splinters headed toward you, but you could mitigate the amount of damage that connected. Even if Eustass had still been beside you, he couldn't do anything about the shards of wood heading your way. Your best hope was to dive into the onslaught and do your best to outpace the velocity of the shower of splinters coming toward you.
The added bonus of running toward it was that it would lead you to Decken. He might be able to tell where you are from the direction of what he throws at you, but the reverse was also true. You didn't even have to go far, clearing a small mound of metal and finding him on the other side of it. The tunnel of splinters and wood were still in the space between the two of you, but that was no longer your focus.
Jagged pieces of wood scraped at your skin as you hurled yourself at Decken. The distance wasn't far, and the greaseball was exhausted. Using his devil fruit so much, especially to such an extent, had been more of a drain than you were sure he had bargained for. From what you could tell, it seemed to be literally threatening to rip his body to pieces.
As far as you knew, no one had physically caught up to Decken so far that night, but he was dappled in blood and mud, and his ill-fitting clothes hung off him almost pathetically. If Kid's attack had landed Decken would've died from it, but how he managed to dodge the attack was a moot point now. He didn't have the energy to move his arms in defense as you closed the distance.
The velocity of your charge through the debris carried you into Decken. You held the sword away from him and slammed your right shoulder into his gut with all the force and speed you could muster in the situation. Hip and Emma had taught you this move for when you were cornered. The idea was to barrel into the smallest target and then just keep running.
But as Decken was knocked onto his back into the mud, you didn't run.
You stood over Decken breathing hard. Blood dripped from small cuts you had endured, but nothing was life threatening. The point of the sword was against his throat and your foot was pressed into a bloody patch on his arm. He had yelped when you had pinned him, but now he was laying beneath you, almost as though he had surrendered, completely unresisting.
"After all this time, now I get to see you again." He says slowly and softly. His voice is still greasy, but there's something in the tone and his appearance that looks sad. If you hadn't already endured so much at his hands, you might have felt bad for him.
"You tried to kill me." Your gaze is sharp, and your heart is steady. Something about the calmness you're feeling right now scares you, but you can't be bothered by it. "You hurt my friends. You ignored my boundaries." You press the sword down a little, blood pooling around the tip. "You. Touched. Him."
"Do it then." Decken says, his eyes fixed on yours. "Your first kill. I'll sit in your memory for the rest of your life. My face will whisper love into your dreams, and you will never be apart from me."
"I'm not going to kill you. If I wanted you dead I would've let your life end at someone else's hands without a second thought." You promise him, pulling the sword away from his neck as you take a step back.
"I," You declare, holding the sword with both hands, "am going to save you from your curse."
You didn't know how to fight with a sword, aside from the basic knowledge of sharp edge vs soft flesh, but you did know how to split wood. You held Decken's arm in place with your foot, bringing the blade down with all the fury and compassion you had in you.
In one swift motion, as painlessly as your unskilled hands could do, you removed his hand. Decken screamed and writhed in pain, and you felt your stomach roil against the violence you had committed, but you weren't done yet. You force his other arm down as he's hurling curses at you and repeat your earlier motion. If you hesitated you'd cause unnecessary suffering, and that spurs you on better than you had expected.
One way or another, you were taking Decken's hands tonight, and it was best for both of you if you did it efficiently.
Your hand starts to pool with light as you kneel down beside him. He's covered in wounds, and if you left him be he would easily die from blood loss. The smile on his face says as much as he's certain he'll be in your nightmares for forever.
Placing your hand on his neck you let the light sink into him, healing his wounds. Yours was an impressive skill, and quite powerful, but it wasn't magic. You couldn't reattach limbs, regrow them, or anything of the sort. You were quite certain you couldn't bring someone back to life either, but you hoped to never test that theory.
"No."
"Yes." You answer, smacking the side of his face lightly. "I can recommend a good doctor, but I don't think my prosthetic technician is going to help you."
"No!" Decken's first word was pitiful, but now he was beginning to fill with rage. "No! It can't end like this!"
"EXACTLY LIKE THIS!" You bellow, stomping your foot into his chest and forcing him back into the mud. "You won't mark, curse, grope or hold ANYONE against their will EVER AGAIN!" You lean into your foot on his chest and grin. "Thank me Vander Decken, I've just released you from your terrible family curse."
Decken growls before his face nearly lights up in twisted glee. "I did more than touch him. I hurt him. You haven't heard from your precious guard dog lately, right? Even that bastard doctor has run off to-."
Decken stops talking. You're not sure what expression is on your face, but you know what thoughts are in your head.
"I healed you." You say in a voice almost devoid of emotion. "I can heal you forever, Decken, do you want that? Do you want to break me bad enough that I carve pain into your body for years? Healing you from each terrible wound over and over just to inflict unending pain until your worthless little brain dies on its own out of desperation?" Your hand glows but you don't even notice it. "Imagine being more terrified of the soft light touch that brings you back from the brink, than the practiced pain that precedes it. What kind of special hell would that be, I wonder?"
A terrible silence hangs between the two of you for a long moment. The look on Decken's face is one of absolute fear, and you can only imagine how terrifying you must look to make him react that way.
You take in a deep breath, and let it out slowly, before putting your hand on your shoulder and healing the few small wounds you had.
"Don't ever mistake my choices for weakness again." You say simply, shoving the sword into the mud and walking away. "Someone else deal with him."
"Where's Kid?"
A/N – One more chapter to go. >.>