"...We're talking about the same kid who mined all the surrounding waters and packed an entire pier full of explosives?" Shanks asked, with enough skepticism in his voice to fill three buckets and a mug.
"Like I said, he was completely different before he turned five," Makino sighed once again.
"Then I take it everything happened around or after his fifth birthday? Some key event that caused such drastic changes?"
"Luffy has a very strong grandfather who wants to raise him to become a proper Marine," the young woman explained.
"Cough! Cough!" Shanks choked on his beer, along with about half his crew. "How could wanting to make a boy into a Marine turn him into... that?!"
Once he stopped coughing, he voiced the question everyone was thinking.
"I don't know all the details myself, but when Luffy turned five, his grandfather took him into the forest and left him there with orders to survive for a week. Luffy was already completely self-sufficient by then, so he didn't have much trouble. Everything went fine until the fifth night, when a tiger attacked the shelter he'd built for himself. He came back to the village covered in wounds, bruises, with a broken arm and leg. Or rather, he was unconscious, so his grandfather carried him back. That's when Luffy started to change."
Makino let out another heavy sigh. By now, everyone present understood just how much she regretted what had happened to the boy.
"And then?" Shanks prompted when the pause dragged on too long.
Makino seemed to snap out of her thoughts.
"After he recovered, the first thing he did was start studying animal behavior. Then he learned how to make and set traps while practicing marksmanship. In general, he began studying everything that might help him kill the tiger that had attacked him. The rifle gave him particular trouble. No matter how smart he was, a child's body imposed limits on him—and still does."
Shanks couldn't help recalling the power of the bullets fired at him earlier.
Whatever kind of firearm Luffy had used, he was certain the recoil must have been monstrous. It was hard to imagine a child handling something with that much stopping power. So how had he managed it? Mounted weapon? Some clever mechanism? Something else entirely?
"So the tiger survived, and Luffy decided to kill it?" Benn Beckman asked, speaking directly to Makino for the first time.
"And he succeeded," she nodded.
"Just three months after he was carried home from the forest half-dead, Luffy went back and killed the tiger.
"It was enormous. It took twenty people to drag the carcass back to the village. We celebrated all day and ate the meat. Luffy kept the skull and hide as his first hunting trophy. He still has them."
"And I suppose the tiger was only the beginning?" Shanks guessed.
"Unfortunately, yes," Makino nodded sadly. "It only got worse after that."
"Did he move on to people?"
"Not immediately." She shook her head. "His next victim was a giant bear. Then another tiger. Then a couple of crocodiles. Truthfully, nobody knows exactly how many animals he killed. At first he'd tell everyone about his hunts and ask for help bringing the carcasses back. Later he stopped. He kept going into the forest, but he wouldn't talk about what he was doing anymore. He stopped bringing trophies home. For the first time in my memory, Luffy started dodging questions, keeping secrets, and outright lying."
Shanks felt his eyes bulge. "Wait. You mean the brat secretly started hunting people?!"
In the pirates' minds, little Luffy was starting to resemble a genuine serial killer. Fortunately, that was mostly their imaginations running wild.
"No, no!" Makino waved her hands. "No people. We eventually discovered he'd started selling his prey. During one hunt, he ran into a hunting party from the kingdom's capital. Several villages had been suffering attacks from a pair of enormous bears. One of those bears was the one Luffy killed after the tiger. The other went berserk afterward, and the number of victims rose rapidly. A bounty was placed on the bears, and one hunting group took the job. By the time they tracked down the remaining bear, Luffy had already killed it."
The pirates listened in absolute silence. Objectively, there wasn't anything extraordinary about the story itself. Plenty of people could survive in the wilderness for a week. Hunting wild animals was the daily routine of countless hunters. But everything changed when age entered the equation. It was one thing to hear such a story about a grown man. It was another entirely to hear it about a five-year-old boy. Shanks and his crew had seen countless wonders during their travels. They had met all kinds of extraordinary people, including extraordinary children. Smart children. Violent children. Kind children. Yet none of them had ever met anyone who could compare to Luffy. Every story they had ever heard about a small child surviving alone in the wilderness or fighting wild animals ended one of two ways:
the child died, or adults stepped in and rescued them. Luffy shared nothing with those stories except his age.
"Looking back," Makino continued, "I'm absolutely certain those hunters were incredibly lucky to be decent people. If they'd tried to cheat him or harm him, things would have gone very badly for them. Instead, they took the bear carcass and split the reward fifty-fifty. On one hand, they technically hadn't done anything. On the other, they'd spent time tracking the bear and handling all the paperwork. It took time to negotiate with the authorities, collect the bounty, and bring Luffy his share. Even he thought the arrangement was fair. He loves money, but can't stand tedious work. And being a child makes dealing with adults difficult. After that, he became friends with the hunters. They helped him establish contacts throughout the region. From then on, he sold all the animals he killed through various buyers.
Shanks rubbed his chin thoughtfully.
"If it was just about money, why all the secrecy and lies? Hunting is an honest profession. Strange for his age, sure, but still."
For the first time since beginning her story, Makino smiled slightly.
"Because no matter how intelligent he is, in some ways he's still a child. Luffy is absolutely convinced that every real man must not only be strong but also cool and dramatic. He genuinely believes that the more mysterious his actions seem and the more secrets he has, the cooler and more impressive he looks."
Makino spoke as though the idea were laughably childish. The pirates, however, nodded in complete agreement.
"...You've got to be kidding me," she said, staring at their serious faces.
The men immediately buried themselves in their mugs. Empty or not, it didn't matter. They suddenly found their drinks fascinating. As captain, Shanks set the example by hiding behind his mug first. Benn merely lit a cigarette.
"Ahem. So what happened after the hunters?" Shanks asked, shamelessly changing the subject.
Makino looked suspicious but continued:
"A few months later, the Lord of the Coast appeared in our waters again.»
"Lord of the Coast?" Benn raised an eyebrow.
"That's what we called the Sea King that lived in these waters until recently. It wasn't especially large and looked something like a giant eel with blue fins and red eyes. It rarely came near the village and never stayed more than a couple of weeks. Still, every time it appeared, the fishermen had to be extremely careful."
"Given your words, I take it this Master of the Coastal Waters isn't bothering you anymore, is it?" Shanks suggested when the girl interrupted her story to refill his mug.
Taking advantage of the moment, the other pirates also rose from their seats, and for a few minutes Makino found herself busy filling numerous empty mugs. As she did, the bar counter noticeably grew crowded. To Shanks's left, the empty seat was occupied by Yasopp - a curly-haired man with blond hair, wearing a blue shirt and a headband with his name embroidered on it. He was also, as mentioned earlier, one of the most accurate marksmen in the world. Meanwhile, directly behind Benn sat Lucky Roo, the crew's biggest glutton. A cheerful, round, fat man, he wore a green and white striped T-shirt, a matching bandana, small round glasses, white shorts, and a black belt. With the addition of Yasopp and Lucky, the cream of the Red-Haired Pirates' crew - the captain, his first mate, and two of the crew's strongest members - gathered at the bar.
"So what happened to the Lord of the Coast?" Yasopp asked as soon as the last empty mug was filled.
"Luffy killed it," Makino replied.
"A five-year-old brat killed a Sea King?!" Yasopp said incredulously.
"A dozen cow carcasses packed to the brim with powerful explosives... it didn't kill him right away, but apparently it damaged his insides so badly that a couple of hours later he washed up on the shore, where he died."
"Explosives... mmm..." Shanks smacked his lips lightly after another sip of beer.
"I see the kid absolutely loves explosives," Lucky said cheerfully, before returning to eating the huge piece of grilled meat Makino had given him.
Because of the need to cook for so many people at once, she, as always in such cases, had enlisted the help of several village families, whereas on normal days she preferred to cook herself.
"As Luffy likes to say, what he lacks in personal strength, he makes up for with an excess of TNT," the girl answered the veiled question. "And yes, you're absolutely right, he just loves blowing things up."
"And where does he get it?" Benn asked. "The cost of the explosives, plus the shipping costs... it's doubtful that all that can be paid for with a regular hunt."
"It depends on who you're hunting," Makino sighed heavily.
"I think we've finally reached the main point," Benn concluded.
"About a year ago, a small pirate ship sailed into our village, and that's quite a rare occurrence here. And there was a two million beli bounty on the captain of that ship, which is quite a hefty sum by East Blue standards. He wasn't very good, but we didn't have much to take from us, so we could easily have gotten off with a small sum, and he would have sailed away peacefully. But by then, Luffy had become too fond of money. And words can't describe how much he values his own money."
A wave of involuntary exclamations swept through the room - this is how the pirates expressed their understanding of the situation. None of them needed a particularly vivid imagination to picture the consequences of a financial conflict with an emerging maniac who loved explosives. And age didn't matter.
"And how did he pull it off that time?" Yasopp asked.
"He paid the money, then waited for the right moment and blew up half the dock… those who weren't killed immediately, he shot from the shore."
" Just like that, he shot them?" Yasopp couldn't believe it. "Even in the Marine, there are plenty of soldiers who can't pull the trigger at the right moment! And that's after all their training! And here's a kid barely out of diapers? I have a son of the same age, and I can only imagine him with a slingshot."
As a father, Yasopp reacted more sharply to the story of little Luffy. After all, he also had a child, and a peer of the boy, so it was somewhat shocking to hear a story about a child killer. His little Usopp certainly wasn't capable of such things! Just letting go of his mother's hand in an unfamiliar place was a significant achievement for the boy. In fact, it was for any other normal child.
"I don't know why, but Luffy reacts to death in a completely different way," Makino shook her head. "After that incident with the tiger, he, so to speak, stopped valuing life. Not just other people's lives, but his own as well. Although, no, I phrased that a bit incorrectly. He's quite capable of valuing other people's lives, as long as they don't belong to strangers. He just doesn't care about the lives of strangers at all."
"Not every adult can be that cynical," Benn voiced the general sentiment.
"But you should understand that he treats his own life with no less cynicism," the girl's expression darkened noticeably. "Usually, children, not understanding the importance of certain things, simply cannot assess various risks. Most don't even know what death is, but Luffy, despite his age, understands Life and Death better than most people in our village. And if he needs to, he'll risk his life without hesitation."
A heavy silence fell - Makino had managed to thoroughly load the pirates around her.
"It's funny how age changes perception," Benn was the first to break the silence. "We ourselves are far from saints and have seen quite a few other killers, but they were all adults… A child shouldn't be a killer."
"You're the child!" came an annoyed voice from under the counter. "Just because I'm small and young doesn't mean anything!"