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One Piece: As Heavy as a Gale #129
🕑 Added 2025-09-06 13:55:28 +0000 UTCGale cracked his eyes open with the kind of sigh a man gives when he realizes the nap he gambled his life on had officially gone to hell. Cold steel glinted around him, rifles and pistols aimed square at his head and chest.
One of the pirates sneered, spit dribbling down his beard. “We ain’t stupid, brat.”
Gale blinked at him, deadpan, then casually reached up and pushed the nearest rifle barrel out of his face like it was an annoying mosquito. He stood slowly, dusting grass and dirt off his coat with deliberate calm, then straightened the collar.
“‘Course not,” he said smoothly. “In fact, you all look like very intelligent men to me.”
His eyes drifted lazily across the group, taking in the jagged scars, the crooked teeth, the general smell of unwashed socks that seemed to hang around them like a cloud.
“Brilliant men, even,” Gale added, lips twitching at his own sarcasm. “So brilliant, in fact, that you’re obviously going to let me walk away right now. You handle your business, I’ll handle mine… seeing as none of this has anything to do with me.”
The pirates exchanged looks. One burst into a grin, showing off gums that probably hadn’t seen a toothbrush in a decade. “That’s not gonna happen, pal. You saw and you heard. Which means you gotta be silenced.”
“Boss has a lot riding on this,” another chimed in, waving his pistol for emphasis. “And he don’t like complications.”
Gale’s smile dropped. His gaze sharpened as he crossed his arms, shoulders relaxed but voice low.
“All the more reason,” he said, “that you should point those toys anywhere but at me. Because here’s the thing—” He tilted his head, eyes narrowing into a cold glint. “—I’m a very petty, very vindictive person. And you already interrupted my nap. Which means…”
He let the words hang, slow and heavy.
The pirates glanced at each other. Then, as if on cue, they all exploded into wheezing laughter.
“Get a load of this guy!” one howled.
“Five seconds ago he was pretending to be a corpse, too scared to even blink, and now he’s full of hot air!”
“Petty and vindictive, he says! Ahahaha!”
One even bent over, slapping his thigh, his flintlock shaking in his hand as tears welled up.
Gale pinched the bridge of his nose with a tired sigh. “Let’s just get one thing straight first,” he said. “You don’t scare anyone. I’m just currently—”
BANG!
The pistol went off, muzzle flash bright in the dark.
Gale’s world slowed. Observation Haki flared like instinct, his body moving before his brain caught up. His hand snapped up, two fingers raised.
Clink.
The bullet stopped, pinched between his thumb and index finger an inch from his eye. Smoke still curled from the metal.
For a moment, silence.
Every pirate froze, jaws unhinged. Even the dogs stopped growling, ears perked at the sudden stillness.
Gale slowly lowered his hand, holding their gaze the entire time. The bullet gleamed under the torchlight, trembling slightly as he rolled it between his fingers.
Then, with a soft crrk, he squeezed.
The lead crumbled like dirt, scattering from his hand in tiny metallic flakes.
“That,” Gale said flatly, eyes cold as the sea, “was very stupid.”
His voice wasn’t loud. It didn’t need to be. The weight behind it pressed down like a storm front, and for once, the pirates didn’t laugh.
Not a word. Not a sound. Just wide eyes and nervous gulps as they suddenly realized maybe, just maybe, they hadn’t tripped over a corpse after all.
...
The girl’s consciousness crept back not with clarity or peace, but with… meat. The warm, mouthwatering scent of roasting meat.
Her stomach growled loud enough to startle her awake, and she felt drool spill past her lips—except instead of sliding down her chin like any self-respecting drool should, gravity yanked it up her face, over her nose, until it was threatening to glue her eyelids shut.
“Eugh—!” she winced, blinking furiously as the sticky warmth smeared across her lashes. Slowly, reluctantly, she pried her eyes open.
And immediately wished she hadn’t.
Because the first thing she saw was a face. A human face, swollen beyond reason, painted in grotesque blotches of purple, green, and black, like some nightmarish fruit left too long in the sun.
She screamed. Loud. The kind of scream that makes birds abandon their nests and dogs tilt their heads.
“AAAAAAAHHHH—!”
Then she squirmed. Flailing, wriggling, twisting like a worm on a hook—until she realized why the blood was rushing to her head in the first place. She wasn’t lying down. She was hanging. Upside down. From a tree.
Her frantic eyes darted around, and she saw them. All of them. The men who had been chasing her.
Their faces were the source of the horror show she’d woken up to—each pirate looked like they’d gone ten rounds with a gorilla, then lost to the gorilla’s baby.
They had black eyes, busted lips, swollen cheeks. Barely recognizable except for the shredded clothes that confirmed who they were.
Every single one was strung up in the trees beside her, dangling like grotesque fruit decorations.
And then she saw him.
The young man she’d tripped over. The “corpse.”
He was sitting cross-legged by a campfire, lazily turning a spit with what looked suspiciously like a rabbit skewered over it. His face was illuminated in the flickering glow, his expression one of sheer disinterest.
At his feet, the two dogs that had been snapping at her heels earlier sat obediently, tongues lolling out as they stared hungrily at the roasting meat.
The girl’s jaw dropped.
“You!” she barked, outrage cutting through the confusion. “Why am I tied up too?! This—this isn’t how it’s supposed to go!”
Gale didn’t even glance at her at first. He just poked the fire with a stick, watching sparks rise into the night sky. Only after a long, infuriating pause did he finally turn, giving her the kind of look one usually reserves for people who argue pineapple belongs on pizza.
“…What did you expect?” he said flatly. “You slapped me.”
The girl blinked. Once. Twice. “What? That’s—what does that have to do with anything?!”
“You slapped me,” Gale repeated, slower this time, like he was explaining math to a toddler. “Repeatedly. In the face. While I was trying to be dead. Do you know how hard it is to convincingly be a corpse when someone’s playing tambourine with your cheeks?”
The girl opened her mouth to protest, but Gale cut her off, raising a hand.
“No. No excuses. You brought this on yourself. Everyone else here?” He pointed vaguely at the dangling pirates, then back to her. “They deserved it. You? You earned it.”
He leaned back against a log, propping his cheek in his palm, looking bored out of his skull. “And besides,” he muttered, “equal treatment. Fair’s fair. If I leave you out, it’s discrimination.”
The girl’s eye twitched so hard she thought it might pop out of her skull.
“You’re insane!” she snapped, wriggling harder in the ropes. “You tied me up because I slapped you?! That’s—that’s petty!”
“Didn’t I say I was petty?” Gale asked, raising an eyebrow. “Pretty sure I mentioned it. Right before catching a bullet with my fingers, actually. But maybe you were too busy being unconscious to listen.”
The girl let out a noise so strangled it could’ve been mistaken for a dying goat, somewhere between a growl and a sob.
“That’s right! You headbutted me! Just—just what kind of man are you?!” she snapped, wriggling against the ropes like she was trying to saw through them with sheer indignation. “Playing dead when a lady needs help is one thing, but to lay your hands on me, and then string me up like some criminal—!”
Gale actually chuckled at that, a short, low sound that made her flush with fury.
“Technically,” he said with infuriating calm, “I didn’t lay my hands on you.” He lifted a finger and tapped his own forehead. “It was my head.”
He shrugged, as if that explained everything, and turned back to poke at the fire. “And to answer your question—I’m the kind of man who has his own shit to deal with. Big, terrifying, life-shortening shit. You caught me at a very bad time.”
The girl scoffed, rolling her eyes so hard she thought they might get stuck. “Yeah, right. Bad time. Is there ever a good time to pretend to be a corpse?”
“Sure,” Gale replied, deadpan. “When people leave you alone.”
That earned him another string of incoherent, furious noises from her. But after a pause, her tone shifted—less fire, more cautious curiosity.
“…What do you even want to do with me?” she asked, narrowing her eyes. “If you were gonna hand me over, you’d have done it already. So what? Ransom? Leverage? Some sick hobby?”
“Nothing,” Gale said bluntly. “You and your ‘friends’ can just hang in there until morning.”
He glanced up at the forest canopy, sparks from the fire catching in the dark. “By then, I can finally leave this damned place.”
With that, he pulled the spit off the fire. The roasted rabbit’s skin was golden and crispy, juices sizzling as he tore a leg free with one hand.
He flicked two smaller pieces toward the dogs, who snapped them out of the air with gleeful barks before settling back down, tails thumping against the dirt.
The girl’s stomach growled.
Loud. Violent. Like an angry whale song echoing through the night.
Gale paused mid-bite, the rabbit leg inches from his mouth. Slowly, deliberately, his eyes flicked up to meet hers.
The girl’s cheeks burned as she glared back, trying desperately to look dignified while dangling upside down like a ham in a butcher’s shop.
Gale’s lips curled into the faintest, smuggest smile.
And then—crunch.
He sank his teeth into the rabbit with exaggerated slowness, never breaking eye contact. Juices dribbled down his chin as he chewed, savoring it loudly, obnoxiously.
“Mmm,” he hummed around the mouthful, deliberately making it sound like the best thing he’d ever eaten. “Tender. Juicy. Just the right amount of char.”
The girl’s eyes narrowed into slits. “You’re evil.”
“Petty,” Gale corrected, licking his fingers one by one in the most dramatic, deliberately disgusting way possible. “I told you already. Evil’s a promotion. I’m not quite there yet.”
Her stomach growled again, louder this time. Gale raised his eyebrows, almost impressed.
“…Y’know, if you keep that up, the dogs might mistake you for dinner.” He casually tossed the bone from the rabbit leg into the dirt, where one of the dogs snapped it up and crunched it to splinters.
The girl paled.
Gale just leaned back on one arm, tearing into another piece of meat like this was the most peaceful night he’d ever had.
