It wasn't like you had wanted to change the entire plot of the world.
You knew that canon running smoothly kept things predictable. Predictable was safe. Predictable meant you could sit back inside this impossible second life and watch the story unspool exactly the way it was always meant to, every beat landing where the pages had promised it would. You hadn't wanted to mess it all up. You hadn't wanted to show even the faintest inkling of your power, not if you could help it, not if there was any other way through.
This was supposed to be the amazing first-class ticket to the greatest story in the world.
You had to know. You had to see it with your own eyes, had to stand close enough to breathe it in, the precise and miraculous way that Monkey D. Luffy became King of the Pirates. That was all. That was the whole of it. A spectator in the best seat ever sold, hungry for a tale you already knew by heart.
But nothing in fiction could prepare you for this.
Nothing on a page could prepare you for the carnage and the viscera, the cries and the begging, the blood soaking black into the white stone, the terror of war that did not stop and did not soften and did not care that you had read this chapter a dozen times before. It burned. It screamed. It would traumatize, and it did, and you understood now that you had never understood anything at all.
And then to see someone you knew.
Someone you had come to know, slowly and then all at once, as one of your closest friends in this strange borrowed world. To stand there with the full weight of the story pressing down on your shoulders and to know, to truly know, that it was destiny for him to die today.
No. No more.
Arise.
The marines closest to you were the lucky ones, you thought, though they would never know it. They did not have the slightest inkling of what was coming. They could not feel the air change around you, could not sense the cold thing uncoiling in your chest, could not read in your face the precise moment that something old and patient and yours finally opened its eyes.
Those higher up the food chain would not be so fortunate.
