Beware of Quillbur 1 (Beware of Chicken/minor Worm & One Piece crossover) (Patreon)

AN: This story came about from rereading an old commission while listening to the audiobook of Beware of Chicken. The backstory of the MC can be found in detail here, but the tl;dr version is thus: A male version of Emma Barnes in a world without powers dates Taylor, proposes on prom night, lives through the car accident that killed her, goes to college, joins the army, falls in love, lives through her death, hangs himself, meets a ROB.

I listened to the offer the Entity (the capitalization was required, no ifs, ands, or buts) made. A chance to go back, be with Taylor and Amelia again, the opportunity to have a family…

My knee-jerk reaction was a firm and enthusiastic yes. The opportunity to have a life with the women I loved with all my being… it should have been a no brainer… but…

“No,” I whispered, but the Entity heard me regardless.

“No? You are willing to pass on this opportunity?” The Entity asked, its voice filled with curiosity and a hint of amusement.

“They wouldn't be the ones that I fell in love with, they'd have the same names, the same faces, but it wouldn't be them. So no, but… thanks. It's the only thing anyone has said after the IED that actually felt genuine,” I said, accepting that the Entity would throw me away, back into my crippled body hanging from a noose in the basement.

“You are proving to be far more interesting than I anticipated, Mr. Barnes. I'll tell you what, I'll send you to a different world, where you'll have a chance to find new love. Like you did after joining the Rangers. I cannot say you will change the world, but you just might change a person's world.”

I sighed, “Fine, sure. What can I expect?”

“You saw Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, yes? Think a version of that, in the way Dungeons & Dragons compares to Robin Hood. You surprised me, so I won't make you eat the fruit this time. Oh, and be careful around roosters.”

“Wait, what?”

[hr][/hr]

I landed on my head with a crash. Well, to be more accurate I crashed head first on a root or a rock. I then fell into a mound of snow. I think the Entity was drawing amusement at my suffering, because I had the strangest sense of deja vu. Sitting up, I rubbed my head. A look at said hand showed no sign of blood, which made me sigh in relief. But come to think of it, that sort of conk should have hurt a lot more than it did.

Putting it aside for the moment, I took stock of my surroundings. There was a lot of snow, and what looked like might be maple trees, but not much else. A glance down showed that I wasn't wearing what I'd been wearing when the Entity yeeted me, instead I was wearing what almost looked like those pants martial artists wore (they had a specific name, but I was drawing a blank on them) and not much else.

Almost as soon as I finished the thought, a breeze blew through the trees, causing me to shiver and rub my arms. Right, step one: find either warmer clothes or shelter, I wasn’t feeling particularly picky at the moment. Step two: still working on that. Step three: profit.

Picking a random direction, I started walking. I didn’t know where anything nearby was, the sun wasn’t visible through the canopy, and I couldn’t see any kind of moss or anything like that on the surrounding trees, so I had nothing to give me any sense of direction, but if I stayed put I’d definitely wind up freezing to death. My teeth were chattering like a pair of enamel jackhammers at this point, and I idly wished I had something to keep warm.

What happened next… it was almost like a switch in the back of my brain was flipped, and I was suddenly experiencing a terrible case of vertigo. My field of vision widened, my depth perception turned to shit, I was much warmer, and I had nothing under my feet. For all of a fraction of a second, because for the second time that night, I dropped into a snowdrift. Shaking my head, I took stock of what had just happened. I… I was now a porcupine. A porcupine wearing a pair of pants.

“Well this is fucking weird; oh good I can still talk,” I muttered to myself. Mentally prodding the switch in the back of my brain, I got the sense that it had three ‘options’ to it. The current one, a middle one, and one on the ‘opposite side’ for want of a better way to describe it. Playing around with the mental switch, I shot up in height, going right past my already tall six and a half feet. Another inspection, “I’m now a porcupine-man. Just what the hell did that guy do to me?”

I was still warm in my hybrid form, so I stayed like that and kept walking. I didn’t have anything to help me keep track of time, but what felt like hours later, I heard the sounds of voices, and saw the orange glow of what had to be fire. As I got closer, my left eye started to ache, and I had a really bad feeling, so I shrank down to my full porcupine form. Waddling ever closer, that bad feeling and aching in my eye got worse.

Finally, I was able to see the source of fire and voices. Some sort of group camping, but it didn’t look like the sort of thing you’d expect to see at a family campsite. For starters, the thirty or so individuals were all men, and all of them had weapons of some kind. But no guns, they were all swords, spears, bows, that kinda shit. More than that, I had a feeling that they weren’t exactly the friendliest individuals.

It was only as the bushes on the far side of the camp rustled, as two men came out, that I noticed something else. All of them looked asian. Every last one of them had that iconic eye shape. Pushing that aside, I waddled around the outside of the camp, getting closer to the two newcomers and the burly guy they were talking to.

“…manor by the old hideout, we heard a bunch of men and what sounded like a woman. They have to be fucking loaded,” one of the newcomers was saying.

The apparent leader grinned, and I felt my spine turn to steel. I’d seen that grin before, on the fuckers who talked a big talk about protecting their home or traditions as an excuse to be monsters. Well, I may be one man, but from the looks of it, I think I’d be able to “persuade” them to move on.

They were sloppy, the guards they had posted not paying the slightest attention to their surroundings. Lost in their heads, I was able to sneak up on them and dispatch them with hardly a noise. The bodies I pulled into the brush outside the clearing they were camped in, taking a knife from the first one. After taking out the sentries, I remained hidden, keeping an eye out for anyone heading out of the main camp. They got a hand over their mouth and a knife to their throat before being given the same treatment as the guards.

I was both relieved and disappointed by how many I managed to stealth kill before they wised up to the fact that they were being picked off. Seriously, there were about thirty of them and I killed around half of them before the leader started barking out orders, the surviving men picking up weapons and forming a circle around the main campfire. None of the men I’d killed had brought anything more than the knife I’d been using, so I pursed my lips as I considered how to proceed. An idea came to me, and I slipped further back into the woods.

[hr][/hr]

Sun Ken, the Whirling Demon Sword himself, snarled, holding his blade in both hands, eyes dancing about, scanning the trees. Someone was picking them off, they were down from thirty to thirteen. But they were on guard now, and it wasn’t those Verdant Blade bastards having caught up to them, it wasn’t their style.

“Show yourself, coward!” he shouted, hoping to provoke their attacker. “Come out and face the Whirling Demon Sword Gang! You court death, and I will be glad to give it to you!”

The only response was the sounds wind through the trees and the racket of frogs in the distance. Sun Ken growled, moments before he felt a small burst of qi, followed by throwing himself to the side as something shot through the space he’d been occupying, piercing the back of one of his lieutenants, puncturing qi-enhanced flesh and bone to stick half way through his chest.

Sun Ken’s eyes narrowed in confusion, his mind rushing back decades to when he’d last seen something that resembled the thrown spear. Some of the northern tribes would use quills from rodents called bristlebacks for ornamentation, and except for the size, the quills looked exactly like the spear that had killed his lieutenant.

Standing to his feet, he closed his eyes and did his best to sense the qi of the one hunting them. He wasn’t good at qi sensing, but he was easily the best in his gang. What he sensed nearly made him spit blood. He couldn’t pinpoint their attacker, because in their time picking them off one by one, they’d managed to somehow leave enough of their qi surrounding them like a fog. There was another burst, and now that he was paying attention he could tell that it was stronger than any of his lieutenants were, to his left and another quill pierced through the darkness like it was launched from a ballista.

Sun Ken couldn’t dodge this time, but he managed to get his blade, The Crimson Demon Tooth, up in time to parry. Barely, the force propelling it nearly drove his blade into his chest, and the point of the quill passed close enough to Sun Ken’s face that he nearly lost an ear. Still, he now had an idea of where their attacker was.

“There!” Sun Ken shouted, pointing in the direction the quill spears had come from. “Kill him boys!”

With an eager yell, the men rallied, rushing into the forest with blades held high, Sun Ken right behind them. They passed through the qi-fog, and Sun Ken felt an itch run down the back of his spine, moments before something heavy landed on top of his shoulders, driving him to the ground as two sharp bursts of pain radiated through his neck.

[hr][/hr]

I let out a quiet sigh of relief as I pulled the quills out of the leader’s corpse. He had much better instincts than I’d been anticipating, and now I needed to hunt down the rest of the buggers before they got to whatever farmhouse or manor they’d been planning on attacking. Right, most of my tracking experience was in the deserts of the Middle East, but I’d been trained to track in forests too.

That plan came to a rather sudden stop not two minutes later when I came face to face with what looked like the cast of Old McDonald’s Farm. There was a chicken in an orange vest, an orange kitten, a pig, a boar, and what looked like a rat with anxiety. How the hell could I tell that a rat had anxiety?

You approach-near the border of Fa Ram, the interlopers spoke-told of an unknown hunter. You do not resemble the interlopers, why do you come-seek Fa Ram?

A feminine, almost squeaky voice carried on the wind, as I stared at the animals that had far too much intelligence in their eyes. Swallowing, and figuring what the hell, I’ve already died at least once, I said, “I overheard these men speaking of attacking a home, I disagreed, and did what I could to keep that from happening. I have no idea where I am, I am horribly lost, and at this point I mostly just want some food and a bed to collapse in.”

The rooster, and I remembered the Entity saying to be careful around them, stared at me, eyes narrowed. Finally, it clucked, and the rat hopped onto its back as the pigs continued the way that I’d come from.

You claim to have acted in defense-protection of Fa Ram, despite not knowing of The Great Master. Brother Chun Ke and Sister Pi Pa will determine the truth of your words.

“Right… not like I have anywhere else to be,” I said hesitantly, still more than a little weirded out. I wasn’t in some sort of asian-version of Bambi where the animals were all good and humans were all bad, was I?