One Piece: Dream of Immortality

Chapter 408: Ex-Husbands



A while later, as Cherry was puzzling together the shattered pieces of mirror that Luffy broke from the other side, a voice came calling through it.n/ô/vel/b//jn dot c//om

"Nami, Jinbe! Is anyone there?!" Luffy asked from one of the larger broken pieces of mirror.

"Hey, Luffy. Are you still fighting in there?" Cherry asked back.

"Cherry, that's good!" Luffy said, as the rest of the crew gathered around to hear what he had to say. "I need you to break all the mirrors on the ship! They keep trying to send people through them, but I need to focus on Katakuri!"

"You just worry about you, captain. We're all good here. Anyone who comes through our mirrors that isn't you is going right into the drink," Cherry assured him. "Hold me up for Katakuri, would you?"

Luffy made a confused face, but did as she asked.

"Hey Katakuri~!" Cherry sang loudly into the shard. "I killed-your- mother~!"

The shard of mirror shattered into little bits in Cherry's hand with no apparent cause. "Oh, he didn't like that~"

"What did you do that for, Cherry?! Now he's going to be even angrier!" Nami rebuked.

"If he did get angrier, that's actually better for Luffy," Cherry said. "Foresight is a tricky thing to pull off even with a calm mind, let alone in a heightened emotional state. I'm not so sure that he would be upset by me saying that, even if he believes me, though."

"Why wouldn't he be upset if his mother died?" Chopper asked innocently.

"Because Big Mom sucks at parenting and drives away or outright kills all her childrens' fathers," Cherry explained simply.

"That'll do it," Jinbe agreed. A lot of the kids from the Fishman District back home had terrible parents that didn't exactly inspire emotional attachment.

"We should collect all the mirrors in one place, just to make sure we don't get any stowaways or let them set fire to the ship or something," Cherry said.

Soon, all the ship's mirrors were laid on the deck lawn around the broken mirror.

Cherry did have to play whack-a-mole a few times before Big Mom's crew decided that it wasn't going to happen, but after that it was pretty quiet.

Cherry, being fairly bored whilst recovering her vital energy, watched the ocean of juice closely. She felt like some of the sea creatures beneath the surface were up to something.

They weren't following the ship around or anything, but they seemed to be spaced rather evenly apart, so she thought that perhaps they were being used to inform the Big Mom pirates or some unknown third party about the comings and goings of ship in these waters.

The truth was revealed only a few hours later as the Thousand Sunny was surrounded on all sides by Big Mom's fleet along the horizon. They could not have coordinated such an ambush without the Sunny's precise location.

"Should we use a Coup de Burst to escape the encirclement? We aren't at risk of running out of cola now that Cherry is here with her pistol..." Nami wondered aloud, mildly worried.

"They're tracking us somehow, I suspect with some kind of under sea critters, and you already showed them the Coup de Burst before, didn't you? They'll anticipate us doing it again and they have our heading, so they can guess where we're going," Cherry said.

"What?! That's SO not fair!" Nami complained. "Is there anything you can do about the... whatever it is that is tracking us down there, Jinbe?"

"Doubtful. A merperson could potentially distract them, but fishmen do not have that particular talent," Jinbe explained.

"I suppose that we will just have to fight and flee at the same time," Brook said, twirling his sword cane.

"How are we going to fight so many ships?! There's hundreds of them out there!" Chopper exclaimed.

"Quantity may be a quality of its own, but we have genuine quality on our side. We don't have to beat them all; we just have to beat enough, fast enough that they see the folly in chasing us," Cherry spoke confidently. A fleet of ships crewed by weaklings didn't seem so daunting when you have just bludgeoned their leader half to death. "Shall I give 'em the ol' Garp special?"

"Do whatever you want, Cherry," Nami sighed. "Just as long as we don't sink or get captured."

Carrot and Pedro shared a knowing look and cast their shared gaze on the sun setting in the west behind the line of cake shaped ships. It wouldn't be long before they could contribute a great deal more than they had already.

"Bring me cannonballs! Hehehehe~" Cherry giggled. She had to hand it to Garp, the man knew how to have fun on a ship at sea. "Good thing I've got my arm back! That's twice the fire power!"

"We only have so many cannonballs, you know," Nami said. "Even if you sink a ship with every single one, there'll still be hundreds of them."

"Au contraire! I'm quite confident that there will be more than enough cannonballs to sink the entire fleet!" Cherry argued.

"Are you going to blow up dozens of ships with each shot?!" Chopper seemed to grow excited.

"Nope," Cherry denied him. She was good, but not that good. "However, they're going to be shooting at us, aren't they? They'll be handing ammunition to us for free! Hehehehehe~!"

Meanwhile, aboard Bege's ship off the coast of Cacao Island.

The new wedding cake had finished baking and was now ready for the frosting as it rested on the deck of the ship.

"Who is that weirdo?" Chiffon wondered aloud, watching the large, goofy looking man who had attacked her brother Oven multiple times as the latter was attempting to stop them from leaving, the last time just before now as Oven tried to boil the ocean to stop them.

"He's your father, isn't he? I'm quite sure that he's one of Big Mom's ex-husbands, and there is a certain resemblance between the two of you," Reiju said. "Fa- Ahem, Judge did a lot of research into the marriages of the Charlotte family prior to Sanji's engagement." "What?!" Chiffon blurted out before looking to the coast to see the man who was apparently her own father about to be cut down by Oven. "No!"

Oven's sword was about to strike down the man, who only waved goodbye to their ship with a goofy smile without paying any mind to the danger he was in.

Bege heard his wife's shout, but even if he immediately understood the circumstances and gave the orders to stop it, it was too late.

*BOOM*

The townsfolk of Cacao Island shouted, "Oven-sama was hit by a cannonball! Again!"

This time the cannonball hadn't come from Bege's ship like it had when the Fire Tank pirates first arrived to rescue Chiffon, but from one of the town's defensive towers.

A scrawny old man could be seen hanging out of the turret window, waving his fist about angrily. "Don't give up, Pound! I witnessed your bravery with my own eyes, and you inspired me to act! We ex-husbands have to stick together!"

It was Heinrich, the old man living in the walls of the chateau up until Cherry found him.

As for why he wasn't on his way to Dressrosa? For the same reason that Pound didn't leave when Big Mom told him to; he couldn't abandon his children, even if they had never known him as their father.