Insistent Assistant 27 (Patreon)

Insistent Assistant

Chapter 27

-VB-

“I was supposed to tame it?” I asked her incredulously.

“Yes, you were supposed to tame it and make it yours,” Illaoi grumbled while being surrounded by our crew who was having a great feast with the corpse of the octopus Sea King, as they called it. She shook her head like a mother shaking her head at the antics of her muddied-up kid. “Do you even know how long it took for me to convince that one to take a look at you?”

“It certainly took a look at me,” I grumbled, taking a bite of the chewy tentacle on a stick. “Less like look and more like ‘toy.’”

“You are so stupid,” she muttered.

“Well, maybe, if you tell me these things ahead of time, we wouldn’t be sitting here eating it, now would we?!”

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“They’re bickering again like an old couple,” Jeanne muttered as she chewed on her own cooked tentacle stick.

Jacobe, sitting next to her, hummed. “Yeah, well, they have been together longer than anyone in our fleet has been with him, if in a little unorthodox way.” He took a bite from his stick and chewed. “Tasty. You know, I never liked octopus before, but I can get used to eating something like this. We just need some spice to go with it.”

Jeanne hummed. “Where do you think we are going, though? We have been fighting pirates but there’s gotta be more that the captain has his sights on, right? You know, aside from making a living as a bounty hunter.”

“I’m gonna be honest, Jeanne, I have no idea what our boss is thinking half of the time, and that’s not even counting what our First Mate there is like.”

“Right. He… She… changes.”

“I think they become a whole new person,” he shrugged. “Jack and Illaoi have different way of talking, thinking stuff, fighting style, and all of that people stuff that makes people individuals. You spent a lot of time with Jack, right?”

She nodded.

Jack Sparrow was … unique. He was a true sailor but he was a self-professed pirate working with bounty hunters. He was also a pirate without a bounty. He also cared but had a flippant way of showing it. Illaoi was also like Jack. She cared but she showed it through the toughest form of love she ever experienced personally.

Illaoi broke them but only if they volunteered for it. She never even touched or held long conversations with the other crewmates who didn’t bother with her training. Jeanne knew that Illaoi was dismissive of anyone who did not do their best because, in the mind of the muscular “prophet,” anyone who did not do their best was not worth her time.

And she could kind of understand why after having gone through her training. She was no longer the thin girl that Captain Alan and then-First Mate Jack rescued. No, she was a tall, athletic and powerful woman in her own right. She threw men overboard for shits and giggles.

… Maybe she learned to be cheeky and sneaky from then-First Mate, but this was who she was now. And now that she was this strong, she understood why Illaoi insisted on training and improving.

Life was short and bright. To waste her life was to ignore her greatest gift, and it wasn’t as if she was fucked in the head like Trevor. Trevor was … he was too damaged. He stuck with the captain’s crew because he was a sailor but he was too … out of it when he wasn’t throwing himself to work.

She didn’t like to pry, but she also knew that some of the slavers from before liked to “use” him.

What was she thinking about?

Oh, right. Life, training, and grabbing destiny with her own hands.

Because she was strong now, she could think about doing something. She didn’t sit and wallow in her own helplessness. She threw men overboard, remember?

Her mindset was not the same but similar enough for most of the people who went through Illaoi’s training. Their perspective was different from those who didn’t, including most regular civilians.

In all of the ports she stopped by, most residents would scurry around and avoid fights, even when it benefited them in the short and long term to take up the fight, even if they lost. It was …

Pitiful.

Everyone was so pitiful.

Look at her captain. He just got dunked in the ocean and came back out with a Sea King for lunch. He wasn’t some Devil Fruit user or super Marine. He was just their captain.

Looking at it all like this, Illaoi was right.

They must be tested to grow, Illaoi once told the captain. And wisdom is frequently a kick to the head.

-VB-

I looked down at my Jack’s Compass, my regular compass, and a map of the South Blue as I tried to figure out where we should stop for port. We were now within a month’s voyage of the Red Line, which made me a little bit anxious, but we also needed to resupply.

This close to the Red Line, there weren’t many pirates who took their luck with attacking civilian shipping lanes or harassing islands. Marines would be all over them otherwise.

Illaoi wanted me to try again at making a Sea King my familiar (or pet) but I wasn’t about to jump back into the ocean so soon to fight a sea monster, especially when the nearby Calm Belt was the home to the biggest of Sea Kings.

I looked over the map and then paused as I noticed that we were uncomfortably close to Centaurea, the country currently in civil war between the royal authority and the Revolutionary Army.

I did not want to go close to there. Not only was Centaurea extremely close to Red Line itself, and thus very likely to be crawling with belligerent Marines on high alert, but because I did not want to get implicated with the Revolutionary Army.

I get it. I really do. They were trying to make a better world in a world where 99% of the leaders were hell-tier shit right now.

But.

I just … wanted to do my own thing. I didn’t want to get involved in the world’s affairs until I was ready to protect myself and my crew, and that meant getting stronger than Garp, which was a tall order by itself.

‘I wonder how strong I am right now,’ I thought as I charted a new course to go around the whole region where the Kingdom of Centaurea was.