Chapter 31: The Moat and the Headlock

The Grand Line was every bit as chaotic as the rumors claimed.

In the span of four hours, the Sky-Rift Roc had flown our carriage through a localized blizzard, a sweltering heatwave, and a thunderstorm where the lightning rained upward from the sea.

But inside the insulated, teardrop cabin, Gammamon and I were perfectly comfortable, poring over a sprawling navigational map spread across the table.

“We are blowing past a lot of really interesting places, Gammamon,” I noted, tracing my finger along the dotted line of our current heading.

“Like what?” Gammamon asked, leaning over the map and accidentally dragging his tail across the compass.

“Well, we completely bypassed Whisky Peak and Little Garden,” I said, tapping a pair of islands near the start of the route.

“I read Little Garden is stuck in a prehistoric era.

It’s an island entirely populated by giant dinosaurs.

You would have fit right in.”

Gammamon’s yellow eyes went wide.

“Giant dinosaurs?!

Can we punch them?”

“Maybe,” I laughed.

“And over here is Drum Island, a winter kingdom with medical marvels, and Water 7, a city built entirely on top of the ocean with the greatest shipwrights in the world.

I’ll tell you what.

Once we pick up Jas, we’ll backtrack.

We’ll take the carriage and hit all the islands we skipped.

A proper Grand Line vacation.”

“With lots of food,” Gammamon insisted, crossing his arms.

“With an obscene amount of food,” I agreed.

I looked out the reinforced glass window.

Breaking through the cloud cover ahead of us was a lush, sprawling island dominated by rolling green hills and thick, vibrant forests.

According to Koala’s coordinates, this was the Revolutionary Army’s forward operating base in Paradise.

“Alright, Roc, take us down,” I ordered through the Digivice link.

“But keep us out of sight.

Land in that dense forest on the western ridge, a few kilometers away from the camp.”

The massive metallic bird shrieked in acknowledgment, banking sharply.

We descended through the canopy, the Roc gently depositing the heavy oak carriage into a secluded clearing completely hidden by towering ancient trees.

I dismissed the bird, and Gammamon and I hopped out, pulling our cloaks up.

It took us about thirty minutes to hike through the brush until we reached the edge of a high, rocky ridge overlooking the valley.

I crouched behind a boulder, extending my Observation Haki to scan the Revolutionary base below.

I blinked.

Then I rubbed my eyes and looked again.

“Victor?” Gammamon whispered, peeking over the rock.

“Are the Marines attacking?”

“No,” I muttered, staring at the sheer absurdity of the military encampment below.

“The Marines definitely aren’t attacking.”

The Revolutionary base looked less like a temporary staging ground and more like a paranoid doomsday bunker.

A fresh, ridiculously deep moat had been excavated in a complete circle around the central command tent.

Stacks of heavy titanium barricades and sandbags were piled ten feet high.

Anti-aircraft netting crisscrossed the airspace above the camp, and heavily armed rebels were frantically manning searchlights, sweeping the sky despite it being the middle of the afternoon.

I pinched the bridge of my nose, letting out a long, exhausted sigh.

She wasn’t fortifying the base against the World Government.

She was fortifying it against me.

She knew I had a flying bird, and she knew she was in deep, deep trouble.

“We’re not walking through the front gate,” I told Gammamon, standing up.

“I’m not getting tangled in my sister’s anti-aircraft nets.

Come here.”

Gammamon waddled over.

I tapped the black disk at my hip.

Summon: Night-Terror Ferret.

The shadows cast by the boulders suddenly elongated, pooling around my boots like liquid ink.

The darkness rippled, wrapping over Gammamon and me like a shroud.

We didn’t walk down the hill.

We flowed.

Melting completely into the shadows, we slid down the ridge at blinding speed, completely invisible and entirely silent.

We slipped right past the outermost patrols.

We glided seamlessly down the steep walls of the newly dug moat, up the other side, and slipped right through the tiny cracks between the titanium barricades.

The rebel soldiers stationed on the walls were sweating profusely, their eyes glued to the sky, completely oblivious to the shadow sliding right between their boots.

We flowed directly into the heavily guarded command tent, reforming in the darkest corner of the canvas room.

The inside of the tent was a mess of tactical maps and scattered reports.

But standing in the center of the room was my sister.

Jasmine looked different than the girl I had lost eighteen months ago.

She was wearing full, battle-hardened Revolutionary combat gear.

Her dark hair was cut into a messy, practical bob, and a jagged, faded scar ran across the bridge of her nose.

Leaning against the desk behind her was Coil Mjolnir, a massive, terrifying pole-hammer that practically hummed with latent electricity.

But despite looking like a seasoned, lethal warlord, she was currently pacing back and forth like a terrified student right before finals.

Sitting on a crate nearby, casually munching on a green apple, was Palmon, a bipedal plant Digimon, roughly the exact same size as Gammamon, with a massive pink tropical flower blooming on her head.

“Okay, let’s run it from the top,” Jasmine said frantically, tapping a dry-erase marker against a large tactical whiteboard she had wheeled into the center of the room.

I looked at the whiteboard from the shadows.

Instead of troop movements, she had drawn a desperate, heavily bulleted list titled: REASONS WHY A 300-MILLION BOUNTY IS ACTUALLY A GOOD THING (AND WHY I SHOULDN’T BE GROUNDED).

“Reason one,” Jasmine read aloud, her voice tight with panic.

“It proves I am capable of self-defense.

He always worried I couldn’t protect myself!

Well, nothing says ‘safe’ like being classified as a global catastrophe!

Right, Palmon?”

“I think the World Government classifying you as a catastrophe is exactly what’s going to upset him, Jas,” Palmon replied reasonably between bites of her apple.

“Not helping!” Jasmine shrieked, pointing at the board.

“Okay, Reason Two: I’m making a difference in the world!

Fighting tyranny is a noble pursuit!

He can’t ground me for being noble!”

I stepped seamlessly out of the shadows, Gammamon right beside me.

I crossed my arms, looking at the board.

“Let’s jump to Reason Three,” I said casually, reading her own messy handwriting.

“Inflation?

Really?

You’re going to blame your bounty on the macroeconomic devaluation of the Beri?”

Jasmine froze.

Her soul practically left her body.

The marker slipped from her trembling fingers, hitting the floor with a soft clack.

The ambient electricity in the tent violently spiked, causing the lights to flicker.

She slowly turned around.

Her wide, terrified eyes locked onto mine.

For a split second, the fearsome “Thunder Maiden” kicked in.

Her legs sparked with lightning, and she tried to bolt toward the tent flap using a high-speed movement technique.

She was incredibly fast.

But she wasn’t Fa-Jin fast.

I flooded my legs with kinetic energy, crossing the room before she even made it two steps.

I grabbed her by the collar of her heavy combat jacket, spun her around, and effortlessly locked her into a classic, inescapable, older-brother headlock.

“Ah!

Let me go!” Jasmine squeaked, kicking her legs.

“Three hundred million Berries?!” I yelled, aggressively driving my knuckles into the top of her head for a merciless noogie.

“Do you have any idea how much stress you’ve caused me?!

I spend a year and a half stuck on a prehistoric island fighting dinosaurs, and the second I get back to civilization, I find out my little sister is a globally wanted terrorist?!”

“Ow!

Ow!

I’m sorry!

I was fighting tyranny!” she whined, frantically trying to pry my arm off her neck.

“I don’t care if you were fighting the devil himself!” I scolded, tightening the headlock just enough to be annoying.

“You made me worry!

You raised your bounty higher than a Warlord of the Sea!

And what is this moat outside?!

Did you really think barbed wire was going to stop me from grounding you?!”

“I panicked!” she shrieked, her voice cracking.

And then, the comedy evaporated.

Jasmine stopped fighting the headlock.

Her hands moved from my arm to grip the fabric of my coat.

Her fingers curled into the dark material, clutching it desperately.

I felt her entire body begin to tremble.

“You’re actually here,” she choked out, a wet, ragged sob tearing from her throat.

The tough-guy, exasperated brother act melted away instantly.

My own eyes burned.

I released the headlock, spinning her around, and pulled her into a fierce, desperate, crushing hug.

Jasmine buried her face into my chest, wrapping her arms around my torso so tightly it bruised.

She sobbed, eighteen months of suffocating grief, night terrors, and desperate hope finally shattering all at once.

“I thought you were dead,” Jasmine cried, her tears soaking my shirt.

“When I got back from college that afternoon…

there was a massive explosion right next to our house!

The blast hit, and then Damine’s portal ripped open and pulled me in!

I thought…

I thought you died in the explosion, or I dragged you into the dark with me!”

I froze, the missing puzzle pieces finally falling into place.

No wonder she had been having night terrors.

She thought the portal was triggered by a bomb that killed me.

“Jas, what explosion?” I asked gently, rubbing the back of her head.

“I didn’t feel any blast.

I was taking an afternoon nap on the couch.

One second I was asleep, and the next I woke up in a dark cave on an island.”

She let out a choked, watery gasp, pulling back just enough to look at my face, realizing I had slept through the very event that had been tormenting her for a year and a half.

“You…

you were napping?” she hiccuped, letting out a wet, exhausted laugh before burying her face back into my coat.

“Yeah,” I whispered, my own voice breaking as tears spilled down my cheeks.

“I didn’t feel a thing.

I’m right here.

You didn’t hurt me.

I’ve got you.”

We stood there in the middle of the command tent, surrounded by the absurdity of tactical maps and whiteboard excuses, just crying and holding onto each other like the world was ending.

For the first time since waking up in that dark cave in Zone 1, I felt like I could finally, truly breathe.

“You did good, kid,” I whispered fiercely.

“I am so incredibly proud of you.”

A few feet away, completely ignoring the intense, tearful emotional climax of the Costa siblings, a small white dinosaur waddled over to the wooden crate.

Gammamon looked right across at the green plant Digimon, the two of them standing exactly eye-to-eye.

He tilted his head, his yellow eyes wide and curious.

“Hi, I’m Gammamon,” he chirped politely.

Palmon wiped a sympathetic tear from her eye with a vine.

“Hello, Gammamon.

I am Palmon.

Jasmine has told me so much about Victor.

I didn’t know he had a partner too!”

Gammamon nodded, looking over his shoulder at Jasmine and me, who were still crying and holding onto each other.

He looked back at Palmon and pointed a stubby white claw toward the wooden crate she was sitting on.

“Are they going to be doing the crying thing for a long time?” Gammamon asked.

“Because if they are…

do you have any more of those apples?”

Word Count: 1908

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