Marshy, Song Fic Extrodinare @warriorheart13-blog - Tumblr Blog

warriorheart13-blog

Jul 29

pureprofanelove24

Vixen.

Benn Beckman x innocent female reader (pt. 1)

Beautiful. Crushingly so. You look like the rest of my life - quote by Beau Taplin

WARNINGS: NONE FOR NOW

Synopsis: Upon preparing to dock on a seemingly deserted island, the last thing the Red Hair Pirates expected was to witness a colossal explosion — a devastating event that reduced the land to rubble and nearly dragged the Red Force to the bottom of the ocean.

The biggest surprise, however, came upon discovering the true cause of the cataclysm: you, a naive civilian oblivious to the gravity of your own deeds, capable of creating weapons with the potential to annihilate entire islands. Realizing that your innocent genius could turn the crew's artillery into an apocalyptic threat to the World Government, Shanks and his crew quickly take you in as the newest member of the gang, making you the official gunpowder maker of the crew.

Assigned to be your personal guardian, Benn Beckman finds himself trapped in a daily impasse. The First Mate must balance strict control over that devastating arsenal with the mission to shield your innocence, ensuring that you only see the fun and beautiful side of piracy. All this while trying to maintain his sanity to deal with the constant temptation of your proximity and with each of the obscene accidents you cause without even realizing it.

[Next chapter] [Masterlist]

There is an implicit order in the chaos of being a Sea Emperor's first mate. For Benn Beckman, the ritual never changed: the first cigarette lit even before the sun conquered the horizon, the bitterness of black coffee, and the familiar weight of the Flintlock rifle resting on his knees during morning maintenance. Each groove in the wood of that weapon was known by his fingers, just as each deep line that time and the relentless weather of the New World had carved into his face. His hair, once completely dark, now showed a dense, grizzled gray that contrasted with his sun-marked skin and ancient scars — indelible reminders of countless battles fought in the name of a flag.

At forty-eight years old, the belief that the sea had already exhausted its capacity for surprise was the pillar that kept his mind anchored. Benn was a man of mental archives, of cold strategies and perfectly cataloged faces. After all, he had been present for every step of that journey; he saw his captain rise from an impetuous boy with an easy smile to a grown man, closely following the evolution of Shanks from a rookie pirate full of promise to a feared Yonkou. Having witnessed the construction of an empire from absolute nothingness, Beckman had the firm certainty that no creature or phenomenon in the Grand Line would be able to shake his solid perception of the world. Nothing prepared him, however, for the sharpness with which that specific day would be engraved in his memory, the day that would change his life a second time since a red-haired brat convinced him to sail with promises of freedom and dreams of grandeur.

It was a normal day like any other, a morning in which the Red Hair Pirates prepared to dock at the next island indicated by the Log Pose. As had already happened on thousands of other occasions, the approach to that fateful piece of land should have been purely routine. The map indicated a forgotten and deserted piece of rock, the kind of place that served only to replenish the freshwater supply and offer a few hours of firm ground to the crew. The Red Force cut through the waters with a silent elegance, and the crew was already organizing on deck for the anchoring maneuver; while some men rolled up the thick mooring ropes, others checked the supply barrels, all relaxed under the false security of an empty horizon.

The mistake was believing in the calm. The first sign of the catastrophe defied the speed of the senses. Before any sound or tremor, came the light: a blinding, absolute white flash ripped through the center of the mountain, an explosion of energy so violent that it burned the men's retinas and transformed the sunny day into a blinding blur. Almost in the same millisecond, the atmospheric shockwave hit the Red Force. A gust of wind and brutal pressure struck the ship with the strength of a giant's punch, displacing the air from the pirates' lungs and causing the sea to rise in a wall of churning water that tilted the hull dangerously, threatening to capsize the immense vessel.

Only then, with a cruel delay, the sound arrived. It was not a common rumble, but an apocalyptic roar, a continuous thunder that seemed to split the very structure of reality. The magnitude of the noise was such that it deafened the crew instantly; shouts of command and warnings were silenced in a second, replaced by a sharp, painful ringing that destroyed anyone's balance.

The mountain, now a silhouette in flames, collapsed in a rain of granite and destruction. Incandescent boulders, shrouded in red smoke and sulfur, were spat against the sky and began to plunge toward the ship like meteors.

Even disoriented, with blurred vision and their inner ears affected by the echo of the explosion, the Red Hair Pirates acted on pure survival instinct. There was no time for despair. Through the deafening ringing, the strongest fighters advanced to the ship's railing; unsheathed swords cut through the air and gusts of wind fired by punches and kicks shredded the largest rock boulders before they could collide with the wood of the hull. Below them, chaos was spreading.

Smaller fragments of stone, which managed to pass through the defensive line, tore through the Red Force's sails like razors, turning the imposing fabric into smoking rags. Sparks and lit debris rained down on the structure, starting small fires along the aft deck and ropes. Crew members ran from one side to the other with buckets of water, fighting against time to put out the flames and stabilize the ship while black smoke suffocated the air and the ocean continued to punish the structure with primitive fury.

It was in the heat of this immediate response that the atmosphere on board changed drastically. In seconds, all the relaxation that defined the Red Hair Pirates died. That crew, known across the seas for their loud parties and easy laughter, transformed into a perfectly coordinated war machine. Even with their minds affected by the pressure and their hearing reduced to a linear ringing, the crew's military instinct took control.

The metallic click of triggers being pulled and the sharp sound of steel sliding out of sheaths echoed across the deck, merging with the crackling of flames that the crew members tried to contain. Huge men stood along the railing with weapons ready, muscles tense and eyes narrowed by the smoke, positioned to intercept and destroy any imminent attack. There was a violent expectation in the air; a Yonkou's crew was ready for war in the blink of an eye, but, against all expectations, no visible threat marched in their direction. There were no enemy ships, no sea monsters, nor the roar of a rival. There was only the grotesque spectacle of the mountain burning and collapsing upon itself in a deafening visual silence.

This absence of a tangible target made the atmosphere even more charged. Shanks was on the bow, his left hand resting on the hilt of Gryphon. The relaxed posture of seconds ago had disappeared completely; the captain displayed a cutting seriousness, his expression carved in hard lines that rarely came to the surface, but which reminded everyone why he was one of the rulers of that sea. He was not there out of mere foolish curiosity, but ready to subdue whatever had caused that devastation. His eyes cut through the curtain of dust and soot that swallowed the coast, deciphering the chaos.

"Stay here, stabilize the ship, and keep the cannons ready."

His voice, although firm, carried the relentless weight of an absolute order. Shanks did not wait for a response or any contestation from Benn. Using the momentum of his legs, the red-haired captain leaped from the high deck of the Red Force directly into the chaos of the destroyed coast, advancing with impressive speed toward the epicenter of the explosion, until he disappeared completely into the thick mist of dust and fire. The first mate watched his trail vanish, his thumb caressing the cold metal of his rifle while time began to dilate in an uncomfortable way. What should have been a quick check dragged on for hours of corrosive waiting.

From the deck of the Red Force, the crew kept an absolute silence, interrupted only by the rough sea that still lashed the hull and by the intermittent echo of new detonations. They were no longer colossal and deafening rumbles like the first, but a sequence of rhythmic and surgical explosions that continued to punish the interior of the island. Each dry crack traveled through the sulfur-saturated air and made the ship's wooden structure vibrate, a constant reminder of the relentless destruction occurring beyond the curtain of smoke. They were smaller, yet devastating detonations; the sound resembled the shattering of immense granite slabs being split in half by an invisible force, followed by the heavy rumble of tons of earth and rock collapsing into the bowels of the hills.

The atmosphere on board became suffocating with the waiting. Beckman noticed the weight of that silent tension on his men; the pirates, accustomed to the bloodiest combats of the New World, tightened their knuckles around the hilts of their swords or gripped the necks of their rum bottles with each new roar coming from the coast. No one dared to break the silence. Sweat rolled down the faces of huge men, their eyes fixed on the black mist that swallowed the beach, their teeth dug into tense lips. It was a type of abstract violence that they could not catalog; there was no clamor of an enemy fleet, the rumble of naval cannons, or the familiar clash of blades. There was only the sound of the earth being ripped apart by something they could not see.

With his rifle cocked and ready to fire at any sign of threat, Benn lit his third cigarette. The ember glowed brightly in the gray twilight that was beginning to form over the deck, the smoke inhaled slowly, mixing with the smell of burning in the air. The first mate knew Shanks better than anyone in those waters; he knew perfectly well that the redhead possessed enough power to survive almost anything the sea could throw at him. Still, the absolute unknown was a factor that Benn's strategic mind refused to keep out of control. His instinct, usually tuned and precise as a blade, remained on high alert, groping in the dark for a military logic that would explain why a deserted mountain would decide to implode and reduce itself to dust in that manner.

The agony of that waiting that dragged on for hours was only broken when Shanks's silhouette finally emerged from the thick mist of dust that hovered over the beach. The captain walked with an atypical slowness, his heavy steps dragging through the sand until he reached the boarding ramp of the Red Force. Dozens of pirates leaned over the railing, weapons in hand and triggers ready, watching the redhead's every movement. However, as his figure became clear under the twilight light, the crew furrowed their brows in perplexity. There were no traces of fresh blood on his clothes, no burn marks from battle, and much less the decapitated head of an enemy or monster hanging from his waist.

Benn watched Shanks with the habitual cynicism of someone who already expected the captain to bring trouble, but what he saw made him freeze the movement of bringing the cigarette to his mouth. Shanks's single arm, which should have been free to draw Gryphon at the slightest sign of an ambush, was occupied. He was carrying a woman, holding her firmly against his chest, completely wrapped in his black cloak. The captain climbed the ramp with a calmness that contrasted violently with the war scenario behind both of them.

As Shanks's steps echoed through the wood of the deck, a murmur of pure perplexity spread like wildfire. The entire crew, who until a few seconds ago were alert and ready to repel an enemy attack, lowered their weapons slightly. Huge men exchanged confused glances, arching their eyebrows at that completely unexpected scene. They expected a monster, a rival, or the announcement of an imminent war, but they received their captain carrying a small and fragile figure, protected by the dark fabric of his clothing.

Benn's gaze, however, became icy and analytical. While the other men lost themselves in silent questions about who the visitor might be, the mate's mind was already working at a much deeper level. He did not just see a mysterious figure covered in soot and debris; he looked for patterns. A mountain did not implode without reason, and Shanks did not rescue a stranger at the epicenter of a disaster unless you were the fundamental piece to solve the puzzle.

You seemed fragile, almost brittle under the layer of gray dust that covered you, but Benn knew that appearances were just noise to distract less attentive observers. You were alive in the middle of a total destruction. Whether you were a surviving victim, an eyewitness, or the target of someone very powerful, he did not know yet, but he had the full certainty that the secret behind all that chaos was hidden right there, under his captain's black cloak.

"What the hell happened down there, Shanks?"

Benn's question was direct, devoid of any trace of concern that was not purely strategic. He needed to know if the person in his captain's arms was a victim of the destruction or the key to understanding it.

The redhead, however, solemnly ignored the heavy looks of doubt and the semi-raised weapons that surrounded him on the deck. In front of the entire crew, his priority was to set you down with a gentleness that the Red Hair Pirates rarely saw their leader bestow upon strangers. The moment physical contact was broken, you reacted like a cornered animal. Your legs buckled for a second, your scraped knees betraying your hurried escape through the rubble, and you immediately sought refuge behind his back.

Your fingers closed tightly, gripping the fabric of Shanks's shirt in a desperate hold. Realizing your terror in front of the crew, the captain squared his shoulders and pulled his own black cloak back over his body. The dark, heavy fabric fell like a protective wall, and you shrunk there, completely hidden beneath his cloak, using the Yonkou's imposing stature as an absolute shield against the curious and intimidating gazes of the men surrounding you.

Shanks broke into a wide grin, the kind of expression that indicated he had found something that amused him immensely, before finally facing his first mate. What Benn did not know was that, at that exact moment, in the center of the Red Force's deck, the logic of his life would change in a way that was not recorded in any of his files or strategic maps, marking the beginning of the only timeline that would truly matter from then on: life before and after you.

"Look here, boys! I found a survivor. We have a new nakama! I found our new ballistics expert!" Shanks exclaimed, his voice loaded with that contagious joy that seemed to completely ignore the fact that half a mountain had just turned to dust and an entire island was on fire.

Benn narrowed his eyes, the cigarette forgotten between his lips. He observed you: a woman in her early twenties, wearing light clothes that were now just soot-stained rags. You looked like a tropical flower picked from the center of a hurricane, trembling and pale with terror. For the mate, the math simply did not add up. How could that figure, who looked ready to collapse before a strong wind, have any connection to the devastating violence he had witnessed moments earlier?

Ignoring Benn's silent scrutiny, Shanks moved his arm calmly. With a light and patient touch, the captain used his hand to gently encourage you to come out from under the dark fabric, nudging you slightly forward so the crew could see you. However, as soon as you took a step out of the cloak's protection, the reality check of coming face-to-face with that pack of gigantic pirates hit you like a punch.

In an immediate reflex, you shrank back. Driven by pure panic, you hid again behind the redhead's broad back, your fingers groping blindly until they gripped the heavy fabric of his cloak with desperate strength. You used the shadow of Shanks's body as the only possible shield against the wall of stares coming down upon your figure.

The redhead let out a low laugh, amused by your reaction, and guided you across the deck with an almost protective caution. He maintained a calculated distance so as not to scare you further, while gesturing to the men with wide, slow movements, signaling them to restrain their usual wild energy. It was an almost theatrical scene to Benn: on one side, the most dangerous warriors in the world, covered in scars and armed to the teeth; on the other, you, curled up and trembling, looking ready to break under the weight of your own breath.

"No sudden movements, boys."Shanks warned, and although the tone was light, there was a subtext of an order that no one would dare ignore. Benn released a cloud of smoke, his eyes fixed on the way you avoided any eye contact, keeping your face partially hidden. To the mate, that display of terror was almost too perfect, but he still could not decide if what he felt was an instinct of discomfort toward the unknown or a deeply rooted suspicion regarding the possible danger you might represent.

Ignoring the suspicion exuding from his most trusted man, the red-haired Yonkou continued to display you to his crew. Since you completely refused to step out from behind his back, Shanks used a more subtle strategy: he began to rotate his own body in a slow, calculated manner, changing angles on the deck so that, inevitably, you were brought into view before the crew, even as you tried to camouflage yourself in his shadow.

The problem was that, contrary to what the captain expected, the heavy atmosphere of the ship did not dissipate. The pre-battle tension remained alive, rigid, and dangerous. Those huge men did not relax; they stayed alert, their hands firm on the hilts of their swords and their faces locked in expressions of extreme suspicion. For the crew, the New World left no room for distractions, and the presence of a stranger at the epicenter of a catastrophic explosion was a clear warning sign.

This hostile atmosphere, charged with the smell of gunpowder and the sepulchral silence of dozens of warriors ready to kill or die, hit you with full force. The weight of those stern, distrustful stares made your panic reach its limit. Your entire body began to tremble violently and visibly, and your fingers gripped Shanks's cloak with even more desperation, as if you were trying to dig a hole into his back to vanish from the spot.

Benn saw the exact moment when the amusement in the captain's eyes died, giving way to impatience. Shanks realized that the crew was scaring you far too much with that defensive posture and that their suspicion was ruining the moment. Wanting to break that military rigidity to finally reveal the valuable secret he had brought, the redhead took a deep breath, expanding his chest, and broke the group's stillness with a theatrical gesture that made you startle behind his back.

"You guys have no idea what I just witnessed!"

Shanks fired off, his voice resonating with a theatrical enthusiasm that cut through the tense, military silence of the deck like a blade. With a wide, deliberate movement, the captain finally turned his body around, pivoting to face the crew and forcing you to take a step to the side, leaving your figure completely exposed before dozens of pirates. He alternated his gaze between Benn, who remained motionless with the cigarette between his lips, and the rest of the crew, who still kept their hands on the hilts of their swords.

Gesturing broadly toward the mountain that was still spewing ash and smoke on the horizon, the red-haired captain flashed a wild grin, using an almost musical intonation to narrate what he had seen, though the glint in his eyes conveyed the absurd seriousness of that discovery.

"I found her in the middle of the chaos, surrounded by filthy scavengers. Those worms thought they had cornered an easy prey, but she simply decided that entire mountain was in her way."

The captain made a dramatic pause, extending his single arm to point directly at you with an ironic pride. The flamboyantly staged gesture made the pirates lean their bodies even further in your direction, absorbing every word.

"She threw something she mixed herself, boys! A tiny flask that seemed to contain hell itself bottled up. The chemical reaction was so potent, so absolute, that the displacement of air almost knocked me off my feet! She didn't just clear her escape route all at once, she turned solid granite into fine dust in a matter of seconds. I've sailed this sea from end to end and I've never seen a formula react with that kind of destructive fury."

Shanks let out a short laugh, but his tone of voice softened into a cutting seriousness immediately after, looking directly into Benn's eyes to ensure the mate understood the magnitude of the situation.

"What we have here isn't just a frightened survivor. It's the specialist who is going to make our current gunpowder stock and our cannons look like children's toys. She pulverized half an island out of pure survival instinct! Take a good look at her, because this girl right here has just redefined what I consider true firepower."

Beckman held his captain's gaze, but did not respond immediately; instead, he just averted his eyes and kept them fixed on you, processing the insurmountable abyss that existed between Shanks's enthusiastic report and the figure he saw in front of him. To him, and to every veteran surrounding the deck, you did not exude danger; you exuded vulnerability. You were covered in gunpowder, your small hands visibly trembling as you clung to Shanks's cloak as if their boss were the only anchor in an ocean of chaos.

You looked small, a frightened and displaced creature in the midst of men who smelled of blood and iron. In the perspective of Benn and any other pirate, the idea that you could have imploded an entire mountain sounded almost like a hallucination of the captain.

Taking advantage of the fact that you kept your face tilted downward, looking fearfully and timidly at the wooden floor of the deck, the mate allowed himself to make a meticulous reading of your features. It was in this detailed examination that the gray-haired man felt the first tremor in his unshakable logical structure. On paper, you were a military specialist; in his eyes, you were just a prey that had just stumbled into a wolves' den.

Your silhouette completely clashed with the hostile environment of the Red Force. There was an almost lyrical softness to your angelic features, a pure and delicate beauty that contrasted violently with the grime of combat and the brutality of the Grand Line. Over decades of sailing the most dangerous seas in the world, Benn Beckman had already crossed paths with countless beautiful women — queens, luxurious courtesans, and ruthless pirates —, but, for some reason he could not immediately explain, your appearance stirred something in him in a totally different way. That genuine fragility and the sweetness contained in your despair pierced through his tactical coldness, awakening an exotic restlessness he had never experienced before.

Unable to catalog that irrational reaction and bothered by the break in his own mental control, Benn preferred to ignore what he felt. He took a hard drag from his cigarette, letting the smoke fill his lungs while forcing his mind to return to his usual military pragmatism, pretending that the sight had not affected him.

Despite his efforts to keep his mind anchored in military pragmatism, Benn's control did not prove entirely infallible. Once the purely analytical filter had been broken, his eyes betrayed his discipline, inevitably descending from the soft contour of your face to the region that, magnetically, drew the men's attention the most: your breasts.

Beneath the light, torn fabric of your colorful clothes, which could now barely disguise your curves due to the wear of the explosion, your body revealed an exuberant femininity that was almost outrageous by the standards of that warship. Your breasts, full and beautifully outlined beneath the smoking rags, immediately enchanted every pirate orbiting the deck of the Red Force, leaving everyone completely awestruck and hypnotized.

The rapid, shallow breathing you tried to control made your chest rise and fall in a trembling rhythm, accentuating the incredibly soft, beautiful, and succulent appearance of that highly desirable contour. There was a collective shift in weight among the crew members; the swords and the danger of the island were forgotten the instant their gazes, heavy with instinctive fascination, focused on your silhouette. It was a silent and unanimous communication: everyone there agreed that you were an excruciating sight.

Even Benn Beckman, whose tactical coldness usually shielded him from carnal distractions, saw his logical barriers momentarily crumble before that pure magnetism. The strategist swallowed hard, forced to admit deep down that your breasts were the most beautiful he had ever contemplated in his entire life; probably the most perfect humanity had ever produced. For a weathered man like him, that sight was a violent contrast to the brutality of the deck, a glimpse of pure softness amidst the smell of gunpowder and iron. It was a silent temptation of flawless shapes that tested every drop of self-control he so prided himself on possessing.

But neither Benn nor any of the other pirates allowed that overwhelming beauty to completely divert them from the gravity of the captain's report. There was something deeply disturbing, almost sinister, about reconciling that delicate image with the apocalyptic destruction still smoking on the horizon. It was a true logical abyss to process that you — who remained with your head down, your small shoulders trembling under the weight of visible fear — carried in your hands the secret of a formula capable of wiping mountains off the map.

For long, dense seconds, the deck of the Red Force plunged into an absolute silence of pure shock. The men blinked, alternating their gazes between the burning hillside on the island and your cowering figure. In the logic of those sea wolves, real danger should have sharp teeth, brutal scars, and a cruel look. Looking at you, the story simply did not add up. To the crew, you looked much more like a damsel in distress who had tragically lost her way from home or, perhaps, a helpless civil who had somehow escaped from Amazon Lily — after all, that exuberant and almost divine beauty seemed like the only conceivable superpower in someone who appeared so fragile. The idea that you were the architect of the explosion that almost capsized their ship seemed like a joke by Shanks.

However, the explicit mention of the imploded mountain acted as a powder keg in the minds of the veterans. The silence of stupefaction suddenly burst, giving way to a noisy buzz, heavy with testosterone, incredulity, and a distinctly predatory excitement.

"The boss must be delirious from the heat of the New World...", one of the men muttered through his teeth, letting out a skeptical laugh.

"That little thing over there brought down a granite mountain? She isn't even big enough to carry a gunpowder barrel!" one of the crew members exclaimed, shaking his head in total skepticism. The comment served as a trigger for the circle of immense men to begin closing in around you. Veteran pirates and expert marksmen moved with that raw, contained energy of someone who has just stumbled upon a lethal and fascinating enigma.

"This pretty young lady blew all of that up?" Yasopp murmured, his voice coming out in a tone that oscillated between doubt and fascination as he leaned his body forward, trying to see past the barrier the captain formed. They openly resisted believing it, but curiosity pushed them closer and closer.

Feeling like the epicenter of an overwhelming and oppressive attention, you shrunk down until you almost disappeared under Shanks's protection. Your fingers gripped the black fabric of his cloak with desperate strength, while your eyes, wide and damp with terror, darted from one scarred face to another. You looked like a cornered animal searching for an escape hatch in a cage of giants.

It was then that Lucky Roux took a step forward. The cook's massive silhouette cast an immense shadow over you, but his movement held the dangerous precision of an elite combatant. After all, Roux was not just another ordinary pirate in the crew; he held the position of third-in-command on the Red Force, figuratively acting as Shanks's left hand, just below the captain and Benn Beckman.

His heavy hand rested on his pistol holster at his waist while he studied you with narrowed eyes. However, his judgment was not based on sight alone. As the ship's cook, Roux possessed an extraordinarily sharp sense of smell, trained to isolate the most subtle components in the air, and he used this ability to decipher the enigma in front of him. He tilted his head, inhaling the saturated air analytically before fixing his gaze on your trembling figure.

"The smell of sulfur and soot on her is real, Yasopp." Roux broke the silence, his deep voice carrying the authority of his rank. "And it's not ordinary fire smoke. You can feel the chemical combustion impregnated in her skin; the smell of the gunpowder is genuine. But the flask… I want to know what kind of stabilizer she uses to maintain a density like that without blowing sky-high before the throw."

Seeing your figure so helpless, seeking refuge behind the redhead with an almost childlike shyness, made the third-in-command's realization even harder to digest for the rest of the crew — while the ruined land, in the distance, served as a mute and terrifying testament to the chaos you were capable of engineering.

This thorough analysis by Roux made room for the ship's clinical scrutiny. Hongo, the doctor of the Red Hair Pirates, took a step to the side and advanced toward you, breaking the circle of marksmen. He did not just see a beautiful woman or a military enigma; he was looking for the biological evidence of Shanks's report.

Without warning and moved by pure professional instinct, the doctor reached out his open hand and firmly gripped your wrist, pulling one of your hands — which was digging desperately into the fabric of the captain's cloak — to bring it into the twilight light.

The sudden, firm touch of the strange man terrified you completely. A gasp of dread escaped your lips and your entire body leaned back, trying to break free from that grip in a pure reflex of flight. However, Hongo ignored your startle, keeping his grip firm just enough to turn your palm upward, exposing the skin under the deck's illumination.

"Look at her hands, Lucky. Those marks aren't ordinary dirt," Hongo intervened, his voice deep and analytical. "They are contact burns from an acid reaction. She was handling the reagents when the mountain gave way."

With the tips of his calloused fingers, he assessed the fresh marks. The doctor pointed to the slight but characteristic burns spreading across your palm and the tips of your fingers, the exact type of dermatological injury that proved, without a shadow of a doubt, that you had been holding highly unstable and corrosive chemical components moments before the disaster.

Before Hongo could extend the physical examination or ask any other question, the temperature around them seemed to drop significantly. Sensing your terror and your body's desperate resistance against the doctor's touch, Shanks subtly changed his posture. The captain did not say a single word, but shot a silent look of reprimand directly into Hongo's eyes. It was the mute warning of a Yonkou, an implicit order for the doctor to back off.

Understanding the message immediately, Hongo let go of your wrist as quickly as he had grabbed it, stepping back with his hands raised in a gesture of neutrality, while you pulled your injured hand against your chest and tucked yourself even deeper behind the redhead's protective back.

With Lucky Roux's surgical confirmation and Hongo's clinical diagnosis, any remaining trace of doubt that hovered over the deck evaporated, causing the crew to explode into an even more intense and visceral agitation. The certainty that you carried the secret of that destruction acted as a catalyst in the minds of the pirates. While the officers tried to decipher where such a small creature could hide such a destructive capacity, many other men let their gazes descend in a terribly obvious way to the full, succulent contour of your breasts, which your dirty, torn blouse insisted on highlighting. Between technical comments about ballistics and contained laughter, there was a palpable, dense tension of testosterone in the air; the men studied you as if trying to reconcile the fragility of that trembling woman with the overwhelming firepower described by their captain.

The deck had turned into a showcase where your exuberant beauty and genuine fear were the main spectacle. Benn Beckman, maintaining a strategic distance but without missing a single detail of the scene, noticed how his companions' interest migrated rapidly from gunpowder to flesh. The way the men closed the circle, narrowing the space around you, was no longer just about evaluating a new specialist or a possible nakama; it was the purely predatory reaction of those who coveted the possession of something that seemed too precious, beautiful, and dangerous to be left unprotected in the New World.

It was this drastic shift in the crew's energy that forced the first mate to act. Under normal circumstances, under the rigid military discipline he himself imposed on the ship, Benn would never question Shanks's decisions or reports in public, in front of the entire crew; he always saved strategic debates for the privacy of the captain's cabin. However, your presence had completely destabilized his logical gears.

The sight of your beautiful features and the silent temptation of your curves had stirred the gray-haired man in such a deep and inexplicable way that his usual coldness had wavered, pushing him to intervene ahead of time.

Taking a step forward, his cigarette smoke rising in a slow spiral, Benn's gaze cut through the crew's noisy excitement like a cold blade. He did not need to raise his voice to command respect; the imposing nature of his figure alone established a silent boundary that made the closest crew members step back a foot. He stopped a short distance from you, his narrowed eyes analyzing your trembling figure. Striving to deliberately ignore the impact your beauty had on him, the mate fixed his attention on your total lack of preparation and the terror consuming you, preparing to put to the test the destructive treasure Shanks had just dropped onto his deck.

"A civilian on board the Red Force, Shanks?"His observation was short, but loaded with the crushing weight of the logic that the captain often chose to ignore. Benn was not just pointing out an inevitable fact; he was outlining the abyss between reality and the redhead's idealism. Having an entirely untrained civilian on the main ship of a Yonkou, one of the most targeted and dangerous vessels in the entire New World, bordered on foolishness. He observed the way you trembled and how your injured hands clung to Shanks's cloak, before fixing his gaze directly on his captain.

"She doesn't have the necessary balance for the deck, let alone the psychological fortitude for the horror we face with every nautical mile. In her current state, she isn't a technical reinforcement; she's a point of vulnerability that our enemies won't hesitate to exploit." Benn dragged on his cigarette, his voice dropping to a dark, deep tone, heavy with old memories.

"You know better than anyone that this ship is no place for innocents. The last time we made an exception and tried to shelter someone who didn't belong to this world of piracy, the line between protection and tragedy shattered. You remember very well the pain that caused all of us. The New World doesn't spare civilians, Shanks, and we can't carry that burden again."

The gray-haired man was not the only one analyzing the situation through a strictly practical lens. Beside him, Hongo crossed his arms with professional skepticism, his eyes scanning your trembling body in a quick triage. As the crew's doctor, he was already calculating the biological and structural risks: the lack of immunity to tropical pathogens of the Grand Line islands, the fragility of a body that would not withstand the jolt of a severe storm, and, above all, the fact that your nervous system seemed to be one step away from collapse. To him, you were a critical damage control problem; an organism far too delicate to survive the brutal toxicity and steel of a warship.

Behind him, the older members of the crew shared that silent suspicion. They observed your slouched posture and thin hands, trying to imagine the weight you would represent in the Red Force's brutal routine. You would not have the strength to hoist the sails under the pressure of a hurricane, nor the stomach to endure the smell of blood and viscera that impregnated the deck after a boarding. In the New World, where the mere presence of a powerful enemy's Haki could make you faint or have a cardiac arrest, you were a responsibility that none of them wanted to carry. For the old guard, having someone who had never stepped on a deck was like carrying a glass anchor: heavy, useless, and dangerously easy to break.

However, the cynicism of the veterans contrasted with the electric vibration running through the rest of the crew. A few meters away, younger pirates like Limejuice were not at all worried about logistics or survival.

His gaze was fixed, with a hungry intensity, on the single worn strap that still kept your blouse in place; he and other men watched your every tremor, clearly hoping that gravity or your next sob of fear would cause the fabric to give way for good. While Benn saw a strategic mistake, the rest of the crew saw a physical temptation that made their blood boil, creating a silent tension that divided the ship between the icy judgment of the older officers and the raw desire of the younger crew members.

This discrepancy in reactions did not go unnoticed by the first mate and the captain. Both Shanks and Benn noticed how the air on the Red Force grew heavy, not from imminent danger, but from a divergence of interests that rarely manifested so crudely. The deck had become a board of opposing stances under Shanks's silent command.

On one side, the younger and more impetuous wing of the crew exchanged smiles and nods of approval, already captivated by the aura of fragility you brought to that brutal environment; for them, your presence was an exotic trophy and a welcome distraction from the boredom of patrols. On the other side, the guard remained high. Minds like Gab's and Bonk Punch's shared the officers' skepticism, cataloging you as an unnecessary variable that would demand resources and attention that the Red Force, in full activity in the New World, should not waste.

Benn Beckman was the gravitational center of all that distrust. While the crew, inflamed by Lucky Roux's and Hongo's observations, significantly raised the volume of the arguments around them, the first mate remained in silence. The deck had become a true tribunal of overlapping voices: on one side, pirates arguing about the danger of vulnerability and the ghosts of the past brought by the mute mention of the crew's old pain; on the other, men fascinated by the destructive power described by Shanks and the mesmerizing beauty you exuded. The debate over whether or not you should stay on board the Red Force simmered like a cauldron, dividing opinions among the Red Hair Pirates.

Benn, however, did not even notice the noise of his own crew. The shouting of the men, the protests, and even the smoke from the cigarette forgotten between his lips simply spun out of orbit the instant his world tilted without warning, because, in a hesitant movement, you allowed curiosity to conquer terror for a single second. Cowering behind the captain's back, you subtly leaned your body to the side, peeking through the gap left by Shanks's missing arm. There, where the black cloak fell freely without meeting resistance, you found a window to the outside world, and, for a dense and eternal instant, your eyes met Benn's for the very first time.

It was a silent collision. The first mate was completely stunned. The unshakable structure of the gray-haired man, which operated with the surgical precision of a clockwork mechanism, simply locked up. There was no time for tactical analysis, military screening, or any judgment; the voices of the pirates debating your fate in the background became a distant and irrelevant hum. The instant your gazes crossed directly, deeply, and electrifyingly, there was a fraction of a second where your pupils aligned, yours shining with a spark of interest and a mute recognition of who he was flashing deep within your irises before vanishing. He did not just see the terror in you; he saw an absolute singularity, a focal point that neutralized the entire Red Force.

Before he could catch the breath he did not know he had been holding, you startled at the overwhelming intensity of that eye contact. In a swift reflex, you shrunk back, returning to hide behind the red-haired barrier and burying your face in Shanks's back, clinging to his cloak as if trying to erase yourself from the map.

Benn felt a subtle and violent tightening in his chest, a strange restlessness he would never know how to label. The cigarette grew heavy between his lips and, as the noisy chatter of the crew gradually invaded his ears once again, the gray-haired man realized, with an internal jolt, that for a millisecond the entire New World outside of that pair of eyes had simply ceased to exist.

Shanks, whose instinct for reading people and the environment was as sharp as his own blade, caught the immediate change in the atmosphere. The first warning sign did not come from the men's chatter, but from Benn's silence; a sudden and absolutely anomalous vacuum in the first mate's usually critical presence. The captain noticed the gray-haired man's static shock, noting how he remained completely motionless, with the cigarette ember burning dangerously close to his calloused lips, his eyes fixed on the exact spot where you had just camouflaged yourself. To Shanks, who knew every gear in the mind of the man who is his right hand, that sudden muteness was a fascinating mystery, but the redhead had no time to decipher it.

Behind that strange quietness from Benn, the crew's discussion escalated into much more dangerous territory. The arguments about your stay on board became increasingly loud, rude, and angry. The pirates' blood was still boiling, full of the adrenaline and rage stemming from the near-destruction of the Red Force. For men who had just seen death up close in the explosion of that mountain, military logic spoke louder than carnal fascination.

"The ship almost capsized because of the damage this girl caused! How are we going to keep a threat like that sleeping under the same roof?" cursed Building Snake, his harsh voice echoing across the deck.

"If she's really that unstable, she's a time bomb! We can't risk the Red Force in the middle of the New World for a whim!" shouted Bonk Punch, slamming his fist hard against the wooden railing. The tone rose with every second, turning the reception into a hostile environment of pure hostility.

Feeling the impact of those brutal voices and the palpable fury of the men deciding your fate, your psychological state collapsed completely. You clung to Shanks with a renewed desperation, your nails digging into the heavy fabric as you tried, uselessly, to merge with his shadow. The fear reached its peak: beyond the violent trembling that shook your entire being, a loud, painful sob escaped your throat, followed by others that shook your small shoulders. The sound of your restrained crying, muffled against the redhead's back, was the pure testament of a civilian broken by the panic of being in the center of a wolves' den.

Shanks felt each of those desperate sobs echo against his own back, and the frantic tugging on his cloak was the definitive sign that the limit of that noisy reception had been crossed. The redhead changed his posture instantly. The smile remained on the captain's lips, but the glint in his eyes became sharp, emitting a subtle wave of pressure that made the crew shut their mouths and step back a pace out of pure survival instinct. He did not need to shout; his voice simply acquired the absolute weight of a Yonkou who admits no contestation, making it clear to every man there that the discussion was over — and that you were now under his personal protection.

"She's staying."

Shanks said the sentence with a slight smile on his lips and a softness in his tone of voice that sought to cushion the impact of those words on your already fragile psychology. However, the look he maintained over the men on the deck belied any trace of hesitation: his pupils were fixed and sharp, making it absolutely clear to the crew that he was stating an executive sentence, and not opening a vote to know anyone's opinion. No man dared to utter a single sound.

With immense patience, the red-haired captain took a short step forward to begin untangling himself from you in a gentle manner. Feeling your injured hands still dug into the black fabric of his cloak, he extended his single arm and wrapped his fingers around your trembling ones, beginning a careful movement. With extreme delicacy — as if dealing with fine porcelain that could shatter at the slightest carelessness —, Shanks removed each of your fingers from the fabric, one by one, undoing your desperate grip.

He did not let go of your hand immediately. Maintaining a firm and comforting touch, the redhead used that same subtle guidance to lead your trembling body out from the shelter of his back. Shanks took another step, positioning you right in front of him on the deck and keeping his open hand against your waist, serving both as a supportive barrier and an incontestable force that, with extreme gentleness, forced you to face the immensity of that crew watching you.

"Later, we'll discuss the details of her role, but for now..."

As he spoke, the captain raised his face and looked directly at Benn Beckman. The two men locked into a dense and lingering exchange of glances, a true silent conversation that only decades of companionship allowed. Through that line of sight, Shanks answered the mate's mute protests and dug his heels into his decision, while Benn, still processing the numbness that had caused him to freeze minutes earlier, held his gaze with inflexible seriousness, reluctantly accepting his leader's ultimatum.

The red-haired captain then flashed a smile that exuded unquestionable authority, though his voice maintained a light and relaxed tone, calibrated not to scare you any further.

"Everyone welcome our newest ballistics expert. She's family now. Be gentle."

The weight of those words reverberated across the deck like an absolute order, loaded with a surgical subtext that the Red Hair Pirates understood immediately. Shanks was not just asking for hospitality; he was establishing a strict protocol of conduct. The command to "be gentle" was, in reality, a military directive for all those immense, brutal, and weathered men to cleanse their own predatory aura. It was an order to retract their aggressive instincts, restrain the covetous stares burning over your breasts, and act as harmlessly and mildly as possible in front of you, knowing that any sudden movement would shatter the little that remained of your psychological state.

The pirates observed the maneuver with the precision of those who knew every gear in the mind of the Yonkou they had sailed with for decades. Behind you, Shanks's body language changed in a way that was imperceptible to a layman's eyes, but perfectly clear to the crew.

The way the red-haired man strategically positioned himself right behind your back, pressed against your body, was not just a consolation for your trembling or a shield against the world; it was a tactic of subtle control and containment. With his single arm positioned so as to circle your flank and his firm hand anchoring you by the waist, he ensured you were completely surrounded. He neutralized any angle of escape, pinning you to his side without you even realizing you were being contained by one of the most dangerous men in the world.

From Benn's point of view, your despair was an obvious choreography. The mate observed the subtle movement of your throat as you swallowed hard, struggling to catch your breath and force the air out through your trembling lips. By the urgency contained in your helpless expression, Beckman knew exactly what you were trying to articulate: a desperate plea, an irrational request to be left back on that ruined island. However, to the gray-haired man's clinical eyes, your attempt at dialogue was brutally cut short before the first word could even cut through the air.

"Oh, you're going to see just how much fun it is to sail with us!" Shanks cut you off, raising his voice in a loud and deliberately cheerful tone that echoed across the deck, silencing your every whisper before it could even take shape. The captain ignored the terror written across your features and gestured to the beloved primate on Bonk Punch's shoulder. "Monster, come over here! Let her hold you for a bit. Look at how cute and soft he is! You're going to love him, it's exactly like having a living stuffed animal."

The pet monkey, Monster, promptly leaped from the railing, approaching with an agility that made your heart race. From his spot, Benn Beckman observed the exact subtext of that move. Your desperate plea to return to the island died in your throat the instant the mischievous animal climbed your legs with swift claws, scrambling straight into your lap. You froze, completely terrified by the prospect of holding the creature, while your fingers twitched in pure panic around the brown fur, trying to balance the weight of the monkey clinging to your torn blouse, dangerously close to the trembling contour of your breasts.

The mate read his boss's maneuver with surgical clarity: Shanks had used the animal intentionally to divert your attention, sabotaging any attempt of yours to ask to leave. In the face of your despair, the redhead merely watched the scene and let out a loud, relaxed laugh, deliberately ignoring your pleading glances and your clumsy movements to try and hand Monster over to his arm.

Each crew member on the deck understood the line the captain had just drawn. By using that false lightness and using the mascot to break the ice, Shanks raised an invisible wall around you. To Benn, it was evident that this imposed kindness was the most absolute form of dominance, transforming the Red Force into a dome where your utility would be preserved and your freedom, silently, would cease to exist.

In response to the redhead's silent will, the officers and the rest of the crew retracted the aggressive energy and rude comments that had previously weighed in the air. There was an exchange of silences between Yasopp, Lucky Roux, and the others; they decoded the captain's implicit order and began to disperse across the deck, making the environment around you considerably less claustrophobic. For men who lived on violence, the change was of a surgical delicacy. Without any further protest, they accepted your presence as a fait accompli and began to move around to resume their immediate tasks, moving to inspect the rigging, repair the small holes in the sails caused by the distant shrapnel, and prepare the Red Force to sail again.

After all, there would be months, hopefully years, to decipher the secrets and observe every detail of the new recruit once you adapted to that routine; there was no need to exhaust your little remaining resistance on the very first day. However, as the noise of the voices diminished, the claws camouflaged themselves under a guarded courtesy, and the space opened up, the remaining silence only made Benn Beckman's scrutiny denser.

The first mate was the only one who did not move; he remained there, static, being the last man to look away or step back. The weight of this solitary attention was almost physical, filling the void left by the crew and acting as an implacable lens that refused to release you.

You still shuddered under Monster's weight in your lap, your eyes fixed on the floor, but the gray-haired man's icy and stunned presence seemed to paralyze your movements, keeping you trapped in a trance of pure dread. Shanks noticed immediately that you were about to collapse under that silent pressure from his right hand. Noting the trembling contour of your chest and your distress, the one-armed man let out a low laugh, a vibrant sound that tried to dissipate the mist of tension enveloping the three of you. He leaned slightly toward you, closing the distance to create a bubble of safety, keeping his voice in a confidential tone, yet loud enough for Benn to hear.

"Don't let that unfriendly face scare you," he commented with genuine amusement, indicating the gray-haired man with a nod of his head. "Benn might look like an executioner at first glance and, well, he rarely smiles, but he is the most reliable soul on this ship. If he is around, nothing bad happens. He just needs some time to process that you aren't going to blow up the ship… I hope."

While Shanks's words tried to soften the environment, in your lap, the interaction with Monster dictated your true state of mind. The pet monkey seemed oblivious to the gravity of the pirates; he settled against your chest with an audacious familiarity, insistently pulling at one of the already loose and torn straps of your colorful blouse with his playful fingers. The animal's touch made you startle, and your fingers, still stained with soot and marked by chemical burns, twitched once more before resting, trembling yet with more confidence, upon the animal's furry back. You tried to push him subtly toward Shanks, desperately seeking to rid yourself of that proximity, but the redhead just laughed again, refusing to take him back and leaving you surrendered to the primate's weight.

And without you noticing, disguising it under the pretext of working on the ropes and sails nearby, some pirates followed the scene from the corner of their eyes. Seeing Monster's little paws pulling and stretching the worn fabric of your shirt strap, a silent and malicious cheer ran among the men, who watched intently, waiting for the miracle of the animal ripping the cloth for good and exposing what was left of your curves. To their deep sadness and frustration, however, the fabric bravely resisted the tugs. Monster soon grew tired of the game and shifted focus, stretching his snout to curiously sniff your goosebumped neck, leaving the sailors in the distance letting out contained sighs of disappointment while you kept trying to push the creature away with shrugged shoulders.

Benn, however, did not look away or soften his expression in the face of the captain's provocation or the almost comical scene with the mascot. Unlike the other pirates, who distracted themselves in the distance in a silent and pathetic cheer for Monster to rip your shirt strap, the first mate did not show the slightest interest or inclination to participate in that cheap voyeurism of the men. He deliberately ignored the full cleavage that the worn fabric insisted on framing, refusing to lower his strategic focus because of a loose piece of cloth.

He just dragged on his smoke, letting the smoke escape slowly while thinking about how dangerous your total ignorance about the New World was. You were there, paralyzed and dividing your attention between the dread his presence caused you and the annoyance of the monkey in your lap, visibly relieved to have found protection against the mercenaries hunting you on the island. What you failed to process, and what kept Benn's eyes fixed on you with such severity, was that the men around you belonged to a nature fundamentally different from yours; and that the true danger did not come from the claws of a mascot, but from the very crew in which you had just sought refuge.

In Benn's cruel logic, the human race you shared was just a superficial and biological similarity; in practice, you were not of the same species. To the first mate, it was evident that you belonged to totally distinct ecosystems: while you were a civilian doe, delicate, made of silk, startles, and the fragile morality of someone who grew up away from the sea, the Red Hair Pirates were apex predators, a true pack of wolves shaped by iron, blood, and fire, who knew no other language than war.

Your total innocence in trusting Shanks and cozying up in his protection was, from Beckman's perspective, a terrible error in judgment. In your desperate search for shelter, you were driven by pure survival instinct, but you did not realize that, by fleeing a pack of mere stray dogs on the island, you ended up voluntarily stepping right into a den of wolves hungry for violence.

This disparity of natures was not a theoretical matter for Benn; it materialized in the way your presence visually assaulted the established order on the Red Force. For the gray-haired man, it was impossible to ignore the obvious: your exuberant beauty and your fragility were noisy distractions on a warship that demanded absolute precision. Seeing a creature so flagrantly vulnerable step onto that blood-stained deck was, to him, an immediate warning of danger; not because of the military risk you posed to them, but because of what the nature of that crew would do to you. The Red Force was a brutal ecosystem, governed by its own laws and ancient superstitions about the disruption a woman brought to a strictly male environment.

Benn's mind, always focused on logistics, was already cataloging the structural problems: the lack of privacy, the sexual tension that your presence and your curves would inevitably awaken in the men, and the need to waste precious resources to protect someone who did not even know how to hold a sword. He saw the way you cowered under Monster's weight, how your eyes avoided his with an almost childlike fear, and this only fueled the visceral discomfort in his chest. To the mate, you were a dangerous anomaly; a delicate jewel dropped into a nest of veteran pirates who, as much as they were under Shanks's short leash, were still men driven by basic and violent desires. His gaze was not just one of judgment, but of a dark premonition about the chaos your simple existence would cause to the discipline of those wolves.

However, behind all the tactical projections and concerns about the ship's order, there was a technical flaw that Benn could not ignore: the overwhelming impact that direct eye contact had had on himself. He was still trying to process the residue of that eternal moment, a disturbing sensation that refused to be filed away in his mind like ordinary data. The gray-haired man searched his veteran repertoire for a rational explanation for the blind knot that had formed in his stomach and for the sudden arrhythmia of his heart, but the usual categories of suspicion or military caution seemed insufficient to describe what had just occurred. It was a profound estrangement, a silent irritation at feeling that, in a single second, the sight of a disoriented civilian who possessed such tempting curves had created a noisy interference in his frequency of thoughts, unbalancing the cold logic he swore was unshakable. He simply could not swallow the fact that you had made him freeze.

Shanks, who knew every nuance of his first mate's silence, caught the rigidity in the gray-haired man's posture. The Yonkou realized that Benn's scrutiny was crossing the line of technical analysis to become something much denser and more disturbing for you. In an almost imperceptible movement, the redhead tilted his head, capturing his friend's gaze over your shoulder. There was no hardness in the gesture, but rather a mute and profound communication through their expressions. With a slight furrowing of his eyebrows and a nearly invisible nod of his head, Shanks signaled the command: there would be a formal meeting in the captain's cabin later, and Benn should gather all the high-ranking officers to debate the matter with the necessary seriousness.

The glint in Shanks's eyes carried this gentle warning: now was not the time for the coldness of silent interrogations or the weight of logical judgments in front of her. The redhead recognized his right hand's concerns, but demanded that he save the pragmatism for the meeting. The immediate priority was not to shatter the little that remained of your calmness. Yielding to the captain's silent authority, Benn exhaled the cigarette smoke with a deliberate slowness, finally forcing himself to look away from you, although the feeling of imbalance and the magnetism of your features continued to pulse, invisible and persistent, beneath the surface of his indifference.

Sensing that the impasse had been broken, Shanks wrapped his arm around your shoulder more gently, leading you away from the mate's heavy gaze and the latent curiosity that still hovered in the air. Moving you away from there, the captain assumed the role of your personal guide, escorting you through the wooden corridors of the Red Force while maintaining a light and animated interaction, using his usual charisma to try and pull you out of that state of shock.

"You'll see, life at sea isn't just smoke and gunpowder," he began to say, with a warm and laughing tone of voice, gesturing with his single arm as they walked. "We visit the most incredible islands in the New World, places you can't even imagine exist! And the food? Our crew knows how to party. You're going to eat diverse delicacies, experience banquets fit for kings, and meet new people along the way. Not to mention that, as our ballistics expert, you'll be entitled to a fair share of the treasures we find. Jewels, gold... whatever you want from our chests to match your future new blouse!"

He spoke with a contagious excitement, acting as a shield between you and the brutal reality of that war vessel. The amusing promises about what it meant to be a Red Hair Pirate echoed through the corridors, serving as a comfortable distraction until, by late afternoon, he finally decided it was time for you to rest. With a calm and protective gesture, Shanks led you to the cabin destined for lower-level crew members — a clean, safe, and functional space that would be your initial refuge to spend the night away from the wolves on the deck.

Before saying goodbye, Shanks crossed the threshold of the collective dormitory, guiding you with that same gentle firmness. The space, though clean and functional, exuded the typical rusticity of veteran sailors, but the captain made sure to ignore the usual layout of the hammocks. With an analytical and protective gaze, he scanned the room until strategically choosing the best corner for you: a more reserved space, slightly away from the main flow of the door, where you could have a modicum of privacy and withdraw without feeling suffocated.

As soon as he indicated the spot, the redhead changed his posture. He turned to the men who already occupied the room and cast a cutting, dense, and terribly heavy look upon them; a silent warning that required no words. Although Shanks nurtured a deep respect for all his subordinates, regardless of hierarchy, he was a man of the sea and knew perfectly well the rawest instincts of that crew.

That sharp, relentless glint in the Yonkou's eyes left a crystal-clear message engraved in the mind of each sailor present there: any form of harassment, unwanted advance, or disrespect to the new specialist's integrity would be considered a personal affront and a direct betrayal of his command. The warning was given without a single sound of his voice, ensuring that your chosen corner remained untouched and safe before he finally withdrew.

Only after ensuring that you were minimally comfortable and under a tacit protection did he withdraw to summon the high-ranking officers. The atmosphere in the main cabin became dense the instant the door closed, devoid of any fanfare.

"I saw it with my own eyes and I confess I have never witnessed anything like it in all my years of piracy," Shanks broke the silence, his voice deep and completely devoid of any trace of the relaxed tone he had used on deck. His gaze was fixed on the map spread across the heavy oak table, but the captain's mind was clearly reliving the nightmare of flames, smoke, and shattered stone.

"The firepower she possesses isn't just formidable; it's catastrophic. With a minimal, almost pathetic, amount of black powder and rudimentary materials, she calculated a chain reaction that pulverized the base of that mountain. The absolute horror I felt upon seeing that magnitude of destruction being generated with so few resources still freezes my blood."

The redhead raised his face, and the sharp glint in his eyes swept across the faces of his commanders with a relentless severity, dictating the real weight of that meeting.

"Imagine what would happen if her mind had access to a real laboratory, unlimited resources, or a military arsenal. It would be an absolute disaster, an unprecedented bloodbath if the calculations she does in her head fall into the hands of the World Government, the Navy, or any of our rival Yonkou. The ability to create that level of lethality would change the balance of power across the entire sea; she could design the death and destruction of entire archipelagos in a matter of minutes. It is immense luck, for us and for the rest of the world, that she is just a terrified civilian and hasn't processed, not even for a single second, how dangerous and valuable her own skill truly is."

Benn listened to every word in a sepulchral silence, his arms firmly crossed over his chest while the dense cigarette smoke filled the room, creating a thick mist that framed the stony seriousness of his face. Shanks's dark confession only solidified, with terrifying contours, the mate's worst fear: you were not just a visual distraction for the sailors or a logistical vulnerability on a warship; you were the greatest and most lethal weapon of mass destruction in that ocean. You were a living strategic target, a walking variable that, if discovered, would attract the armed fury, the merciless hunt, and the unwanted attention of all the powers in the New World.

Around the table, the reaction of the high-ranking officers was immediate and visceral, as if the realization had finally dawned upon them regarding the magnitude of the threat that Shanks had brought into their home. Lucky Roux stopped chewing, the huge meat chunk forgotten in his hands while his gaze completely lost its usual joviality. For a veteran who lived on heavy artillery, gunfire, and direct combat, processing that this trembling, pale woman, who could barely support her own weight without crying, carried the military secret for annihilation on a geographical scale was such a brutal shock that it achieved the impossible: it made the cook completely lose his appetite.

Yasopp leaned forward, the nervous tapping of his fingers on the wooden table echoing like short gunshots in the silence of the cabin. As the crew's sniper, his reasoning operated on trajectories and precision; he was already calculating, with a professional excitement restrained by an relentless seriousness, what this woman's ballistics would do for the crew's weapons. The prospect of aligning his projectiles with her mathematical calculations could raise the destruction power of the Red Force to a level that no other crew in history would dare to challenge.

Beside him, Bonk Punch kept his expression grim, exchanging a heavy look with Monster, who had crossed his small arms on the fighter's shoulder, mimicking his owner's tension. For a man who relied on the sanctity of brute strength and a direct punch, it caused a deep and visceral discomfort to digest the idea that the potential to decimate an entire fleet resided in such fragile hands, which could barely hold a mascot without trembling.

Building Snake kept his face rigid, his eyes fixed on the lines of the map. His analytical mind was already tracing the logistical and navigational implications of carrying the equivalent of a human Buster Call through routes closely guarded by Navy ships and the radar of the other Yonkou. From that moment on, every route would need to be recalculated; the Red Force was no longer just transporting pirates, it was transporting a state secret.

Howling Gab, on the other hand, let out a low growl, a guttural sound that mixed savage approval and pure caution. For him, absolute power was the only currency that dictated who survived in the New World, and knowing that you were the epicenter of such destructive force completely changed the weight of his steps; he would no longer see you through the corridors as a lost civilian, but as a latent threat that demanded constant vigilance.

Limejuice, whose previous cynicism had completely dissipated, felt his blood run cold. Any remnant of that mundane greed that had made him stare at the worn fabric of your shirt vanished, replaced by a sharp combat tension. He knew that everything that is precious and lethal is coveted by the world powers and attracts blood and war; by pure military instinct, his hand lowered and rested heavily on the handle of his electric staff, anticipating the trouble that would knock on the crew's door as soon as the world found out about you.

Hongo, the crew's doctor and scientist, bore the darkest and most skeptical expression of all. He adjusted his posture, staring at Shanks with a clinical and stern look. His concern was not with the range of the cannons, but with the anatomy of your psychological collapse. For the doctor, a civilian mind that possessed formulas for mass annihilation, but found itself under the effect of such violent post-traumatic stress, was the perfect scenario for an internal tragedy. If you broke under the pressure of that ship, the consequences would be unpredictable and fatal for all of them.

Hongo's medical assessment hung in the air, leaving a dense and heavy silence that seemed to pierce through the wooden planks of the cabin and travel down the entire structure of the Red Force, echoing exactly in the place where the new recruit was trying to hide from the world. For, while the high-ranking officers debated the abstract danger of that unstable mind, the real and physical fragility described by the doctor was already manifesting in a raw manner in the lower quarters.

Downstairs, the low-ranking sailors who already occupied the dormitory watched in silence the strategic corner that the captain had chosen for you. From the darkness of their own hammocks, the men followed your every move with a mixture of curiosity and genuine pity. Your body, still exhausted and trembling from the stress of the rescue, visibly struggled to adapt to the persistent rolling of the waves and the systematic creaking of the frame, curling up in an attempt to find a minimally comfortable position in that hostile environment.

For those pirates hardened by the New World, accustomed to the brutality of the sea and the rawness of life on the decks, your figure represented an absolute contrast. Under their typically masculine and unconsciously paternalistic perspective, seeing a civilian so fragile, pale, and helpless trying to settle in between the worn sheets awakened an almost pitiful sight. They looked at your trembling curves, at the outline of your hunched shoulders, and at your uneven breathing, seeing there only a defenseless creature who seemed about to break with the rocking of the ship.

This perception of extreme vulnerability ended up triggering the protective instinct of those rough men. Moved by a brute and silent chivalry — and perfectly aware of the warning look that Shanks had left embedded in the room —, a few sailors began to move without fuss through the gloom. One by one, they approached your corner, carefully leaving two of the least worn blankets and the cleanest pillows they could scavenge among the crew's belongings. For the pirates, offering that small comfort was the most natural way to shelter a creature who, in their heads, was nothing more than a frightened refugee completely incapable of surviving the immensity of the ocean alone.

Parallelly upstairs, the high-ranking and most trusted pirates of the Red-Haired absorbed with a frosty sobriety the magnitude of what you were capable of causing. Protecting you was no longer a voluntary act of kindness or hospitality from generous pirates, but a collective, military, and absolute responsibility. Every officer present there knew that the crew's safety was intrinsically linked to your integrity, and that any failure to keep you safe in the center of their board could cost the crew's future in the seas of the New World.

Faced with that grim revelation, Benn Beckman remained motionless. The flickering light of the oil lamps accentuated the deep, stern lines of his face while the first mate processed the tactical implications of every word from Shanks. For the gray-haired man, the news did not bring technical enthusiasm for the prospect of upgrading the ship's artillery; it brought only the weight of an impossible equation to solve. He knew that, in the New World, possessing a trump card of this caliber was the equivalent of carrying a lit beacon in monster-infested waters. If the Navy or the other Emperors discovered that the Red-Haired held the secret to such lethality, the Red Force would cease to be a symbol of freedom to become the epicenter of a global hunt.

Benn's strategic mind worked double time, anticipating naval sieges, infiltration attempts, espionage, and the immediate need to reformulate the ship's entire watch routine. However, what irritated and disturbed him the most was the absolute paradox of your nature: the fact that a power capable of leveling entire islands and rewriting the map of the world was deposited in someone who seemed to shatter under a firmer gaze.

For Beckman, you were a force of nature contained in a crystal vial too thin for the rough deck of a pirate ship. A living weapon of mass destruction that did not have the slightest notion of its own weight, making you, at the same time, the most magnificent trump card and the most dangerous vulnerability he had ever been forced to protect in his life.

The big problem with Benn's grim premonitions was that time, relentless as the sea, had the terrible habit of proving him right. As the weeks progressed and the silhouette of the rescue island was lost on the horizon, that night of the war council began to take its toll on the crew's daily dynamics.It did not take long for the routine of steel and gunpowder of the Red Force to suffer small but significant cracks in the face of your presence. It took the passing of a single month for Benn Beckman to observe, from high up on the command deck, that subtle change transform into an alarming phenomenon that deepened the frown on his face with every new mile sailed.

In mere four weeks, the initial fear that the men felt toward that destructive force — the latent dread of the incident where they almost had their ship capsized by the new recruit's experiments — simply evaporated from the collective memory, suffocated by an inexplicable affection. The crew seemed to have suffered a convenient amnesia about the dangers of growing attached to a fragile creature; the crew seemed to have completely forgotten the pain and the lesson of the last terrible mistake they made in the past, when they allowed feelings for a vulnerable civilian child to guide the heart of the ship, ending in a farewell that nearly broke the captain's spirit.

Now, in a way that was almost outrageous to the first mate's cynical eyes, those wolves of the New World were visibly softening before you. Their rough zeal transformed into a strange and pathetic form of daily devotion. It was almost absurd to see veteran pirates, men who bore the scars of life-or-death duels, rushing to pick up mops so that you wouldn't step in puddles of water, measuring the volume of their obscene laughter whenever you passed through the corridors, or voluntarily lowering their rough tone of voice so as not to shatter your concentration. It was enough for you to lose yourself among ballistic notes, reagent flasks, and mathematical calculations on the improvised deck table for the surrounding crew to create a bubble of silence and almost reverent protection, willfully ignoring that this very same docile and protected creature carried the potential to annihilate entire fleets.

Growing attached to you became a silent and inescapable addiction that contaminated even the high rank of the Red-Haired Pirates. Shanks, though he maintained the imposing aura of a Yonkou, began to orbit your workspace with an absurd and totally unnecessary frequency; the captain would frequently drag a crate close to your ballistics table, resting his chin on his only useful arm just to watch your fingers handle the formulas, offering broad smiles and ensuring, with his mere intimidating presence, that no one dared to interrupt your creative flow with the rough demands of the sea.

Yasopp began to treat the ship's artillery with an almost religious respect; the sniper now adjusted the sights and polished the cannons in absolute silence whenever he noticed you writing down equations nearby, scolding his own subordinates with furious whispers to avoid any clanging of metal that might startle you. Lucky Roux, for his part, turned caring for your health into a personal mission; the massive pirate began to leave generous portions of fresh fruit, fine sweets, and perfectly roasted meats at the edge of your bench under the daily pretext that "there was leftovers from the kitchen," but he remained watching from afar, arms crossed, letting out a satisfied smile every time he saw you chewing between one calculation and another.

Even the most unlikely officers yielded to your gravity. Hongo, the doctor, began to monitor the curvature of your posture and the shadows of exhaustion under your eyes with an almost affectionate rigor; he would appear uncalled for to leave soothing salves and invigorating tonics for your hands, which were already beginning to callouse from the constant handling of gunpowder and chemical solvents. Limejuice, whose cynical and once lascivious nature used to push people away, became strangely restrained and protective; he assumed the role of an unofficial sentinel, posting himself in the shadows with his electric staff and using his deadliest glare to immediately ward off any civilian or low-ranking sailor who dared to direct an bolder look or less respectful advances toward you.

In parallel, Bonk Punch and Monster the monkey adopted a silent and perfectly synchronized guard. The primate would frequently nestle on your feet or against your ankle while you worked, acting as a live alarm for any sudden approach, while the fighter ensured, with his immense arms crossed over his chest, that no heavy barrel of supplies was rolled too close to your study area.

In daily maneuvers, Building Snake and Howling Gab coordinated the sail knots and the distribution of cargo in the hold with a care unprecedented in the history of the Red Force, changing the ship's course solely to avoid sudden jolts in the waves that could knock over your delicate glass flasks. Even Rockstar, the most impetuous recruit and one eager to prove his worth in blood, found a new use for his pride: he began to volunteer daily for the most mundane cleaning tasks around your bench, scrubbing the wood with ridiculous dedication just to ensure that the floor was perfectly dry and safe for your hesitant steps.

The entire crew began to revolve around you as if you were the eye of a hurricane: the only point of calm, fragility, and purity in a world of absolute chaos and violence. If you tripped on a loose cable on the deck, the reflex of half a dozen rough and calloused hands extending toward you to steady you was faster and more desperate than any of their reactions in actual life-or-death combat. If the sun of the New World beat down too hard on the deck, an immense tarp was stretched over your head under the phony pretext of "rope maintenance," just to ensure that your civilian skin wouldn't burn.

For Benn Beckman, who watched everything from high up on the stern with his cigarette burning between his lips, seeing those veteran and bloodthirsty wolves act like tamed guardians around a trembling civilian was not a pretty scene to behold. It was the definitive, clear, and terrifying sign of danger: your weakness had become the greatest force of attraction on that ship, and Shanks's men were completely surrendered to it.

However, behind this clumsy and paternalistic chivalry, lay a much darker and strategic tactical reality. Your definitive entry into the Red Force did not just alter the crew's internal atmosphere; it violently shook the very scale of power across all seas. What you created in silence, between test tubes, chemical mixtures, and frenetic notes of applied physics, was something impossible to be replicated by any scientist in the world. The crew's veteran snipers, men who had already witnessed all kinds of weaponry and military technology over decades in the New World, looked at the new ammunition coming off your bench with a mixture of unhealthy greed and absolute dread.

The global lethality of the crew did not just experience a statistical increase; it underwent a biological and devastating mutation. Your gunpowder worked mechanical miracles so absurd that it deeply altered the ship's combat pyramid. The low-ranking sailors, men considered ordinary, without mastery of advanced combat techniques or the use of Haki, instantly transformed into lethal marksmen. An ordinary pistol in the hand of a common sailor, loaded with your chemical mixture, now fired projectiles capable of piercing the armor of Navy warships and shattering the defenses of veteran pirates. You had given the weakest men of the crew the power to face monsters.

In contrast, when this same ballistic ingenuity was delivered into the hands of the high rank, the result reached a level of almost divine absurdity. Because your gunpowder was extremely malleable and could be refined into propellant powder, explosive resins, combustion oils, and fragmentation cartridges, the high-ranking officers expanded their unique fighting styles to terrifying scales.

Yasopp, whose Observation Haki was already capable of tracking the movement of an ant miles away, now fired projectiles that combined his surgical precision with a concentrated impact force equivalent to a Buster Call; his shots did not just pierce, they imploded the targets from the inside out. Lucky Roux and the other commanders saw their handguns and short-range tactics transform into instruments of mass annihilation, capable of generating thermal detonations that were previously reserved only for large naval bombardments.

Even the heavy artillery of the Red Force was redefined by your analytical mind. With the new chemical compounds you provided for the propulsion center of the cannons, a single shot coordinated by the officers possessed the power required to fragment the geology of entire islands. The Red-Haired crew now sailed knowing that a command from the captain could turn mountains into dust and craters before the sound of the detonation even reached the enemies' ears.

But for the Red-Haired pirates, the true, greatest, and most complex logistical challenge was not adapting their own routine to the crew's absurd leap in military power — a leap that, inevitably, was already beginning to shake the structures and the status quo among the Yonkou in the New World. The real challenge, the one that required an almost miraculous tactical engineering from the entire crew, was the rigorous maintenance of an impeccable and silent facade for you.

Keeping up appearances became a veiled law onboard. The high rank needed to ensure at all costs that you continued to produce that devastating gunpowder under the innocent pretext of "combustion studies" or "academic improvements in efficiency," keeping your mind immersed in the abstract beauty of numbers and far away from the brutal reality of the sea. The crew operated like a perfectly synchronized theater gear so that you would never witness a single real battle. Every time the Red Force entered a collision course with enemy ships or bounty hunters, you were strategically escorted to the deepest and safest interior of the vessel, locked in an armored workshop under the excuse that the noise of the external cannons "would disrupt the precision of your experiments."

While you worked safely below deck, Shanks's wolves did the dirty work. They bent over backward so that you would never see the visceral slaughter, the torn bodies, and the entire fleets that your genius gunpowder was pulverizing on the surface. More than that, Benn Beckman and the intelligence division intercepted and burned every newspaper and wanted poster that arrived via the news coos, ensuring that you would never discover that the Navy, panicking at the emergence of this new technology, had already placed an astronomical and urgent bounty on your head.

The infiltration attempts and kidnappings orchestrated by spies from other Yonkou or agents of the World Government were neutralized in the dead of night, in the lower decks or during stops at distant ports, without a single cry of agony ever reaching your ears. The Red-Haired Pirates created an iron dome around you, isolating you in an untouched bubble of glassware and formulas, protecting your fragile civilian conscience from discovering that, while you believed you were merely helping friends with your science, your creations were rewriting the history of the New World with blood and fire.

Every officer from high to low rank was instructed to filter the reality that reached you. They needed to ensure that you would never realize that the trigger for all that destruction was in your hands. If you discovered that your formulas were, in fact, mass death sentences, your civilian fragility would act as a moral brake, collapsing and paralyzing the production of an arsenal that was now vital for the Red-Haired's supremacy.

It was a conspiracy of silence: they kept you in a glass dome, feeding your scientific curiosity while transforming your intellect into the most silent and lethal weapon in the New World.Maintaining this facade demanded a vigilance that went beyond the cannons; it required a guardian who knew exactly where science ended and where horror began. As the architect of this strategy and the man who best understood the risks, Benn ended up being the one who spent the most time filtering the world for your eyes. Without anyone giving a formal order, you became his absolute and unofficial responsibility. Perhaps Shanks's words had taken root in your mind in too literal a way; by saying that he was the most trustworthy man on the ship and that he "fixed everything," the captain ended up sealing the first mate's fate. For you, Benn Beckman ceased to be an intimidating pirate and became your only constant, the silent anchor you instinctively chose to navigate that world of giants.

He would close naval strategy books or abruptly pause the cleaning of his rifle to resolve your small civilian crises with a grim efficiency. However, what irritated Benn Beckman the most was the fact that he simply could not ignore you. If you appeared with your fingers stained with reagents and a hesitant look, the first mate would abandon any military duty to answer your call, a concession he would never make to any other man on that sea. Your habit of walking around the ship following his steps like a silent and tiny shadow had become a constant; it did not matter if Benn crossed the deck to give orders to the artillery or if he went down to the holds to inspect the provisions, your presence was almost always there, one step behind, waiting for the moment when his imposing figure would turn to notice you.

This dynamic transformed into his daily penance, fulfilled in an absolute and excruciating silence where irritation and attachment fought a mute battle. Every time he reached out his hand to grab a glass flask on a shelf too high for you, or paused his own walk to explain the creaking of the wood in detail to calm your civilian nerves, Beckman felt a deep annoyance. This anger, however, had nothing to do with the triviality of the task itself, but rather with the visceral discomfort of realizing the ease with which you diverted him from his duties as the right hand of a Yonkou. Your existence there was a soft yet continuous noise that broke the absolute frequency of his mind.

What truly tormented him was that his once infallible logic could no longer catalog or neutralize the space you had come to occupy in his routine. The man who commanded the most dangerous pirates in the ocean with an iron fist found himself forced to process your constant fragility, feeling the weight of your naive trust fall upon him like an anchor too heavy to be hoisted. He was becoming the involuntary guardian of a creature who, with every whispered plea for help and every expectant look directed at him, corroded a little more the structure of his legendary coldness, leaving him dangerously surrendered to an affection he hated to acknowledge.

The stress was constant, fueled by a succession of incidents that you, in your disarming naturalness and total lack of clumsiness, seemed to completely ignore. There was the night when the crew decided to anchor at a neutral island to resupply, and the high rank gathered at a local, noisy, and smoky bar. Benn was sitting at a central table next to Shanks and Yasopp, participating in the conversation in a casual manner while, from time to time, exchanging meaningful and calculating looks with a beautiful woman across the room. As an experienced man and a natural conqueror who knew well the pleasures of every port, Beckman operated in that territory with his usual confidence. However, his entire relaxed predator posture was about to be obliterated by your complete lack of civilian dexterity.

You were crossing the bar floor in a distracted manner, carrying a full mug, when your feet faltered on the slippery wood of the place. In a clumsy movement, you stumbled forward and spilled the entire drink directly onto the first mate's lap. The cold, alcoholic liquid soaked the fabric of his pants, sticking the cloth directly against the skin of that central region.

Overcome by a dramatic and comical regret, you entered an immediate panic. Before Beckman could sketch any reaction or move his chair back, you abruptly knelt in the gap between his legs. Grabbing a handful of paper napkins, you began to rub the soaked fabric of the pirate's pants with a frenetic urgency, applying a desperate pressure exactly over the rigid anatomy that was beginning to shape itself beneath the damp papers.

In your total naivety and blind focus on fixing the mistake, you did not realize, even for a single second, the overwhelming obscenity of that situation. From Benn's elevated angle, the view was paralyzing and dangerous: your head was positioned exactly between his open thighs, and the neckline of your shirt, misaligned by the sharp movement, offered the man a complete and generous glimpse of your breasts, which rose and fell as you breathed. The background canvas of that noisy bar seemed to have vanished; for the first mate, the image of you kneeling there, with your hands moving in a focused rhythm well below his hips while the heat of your distressed breath hit straight against the wet fabric, was the exact and torturous simulation of an oral sex position.

For the poor first mate, that transformed into a scenario of biological martyrdom. He felt the blood rush with a deafening force into the veins of that region, initiating a brutal battle to contain the imminent erection that pushed against the fabric exactly under the palm of your hands. He clenched his jaw so tightly that the muscles of his face popped, his fingers digging into the edge of the table until his knuckles turned pale. He suffered under the weight of the silent agreement he himself had helped to consolidate on the Red Force: the inviolable rule that you were absolutely untouchable.

The entire crew had established a pact of mutual restraint: no man of the crew would lay his hands on you to satisfy casual desires. Knowing your fragility and the trauma that had brought you there, it was rigidly determined that no one had the right to sleep with you unless they were genuinely willing to assume a serious relationship, with the clear intention of protecting your heart. The crew had the absolute duty to avoid hurting you in any way, and that included, above all, the emotional field. The slightest slip of selfish lust could shatter your trust in them, destroying the little stability you had conquered.However, maintaining this moral barrier had been turning into a daily and silent test of sanity for those healthy and visceral men. The outrageous truth that Benn kept to himself was that following that rule felt like a bad joke from destiny.

With your natural and magnetic beauty, added to a total and disastrous lack of clumsiness, you were an involuntary machine for creating absurdly sensual accidents. This combination transformed into a kind of folklore curse aboard the Red Force; the truth that none of those veteran pirates confessed out loud was that, behind the facade of protective uncles and guardians, everyone kept the mental record of some embarrassing event. In your first weeks sailing, your total lack of physical dexterity, combined with a body that seemed to fit perfectly into the gaps of each one of them, tested the crew's biological limit, having caused, at the very least, a random and inconvenient erection in each of the high-ranking officers and in half of the low-ranking crew.

No one forgot the afternoon when you lost your balance in the supply hold and fell backward directly into the hammock where Lucky Roux was taking a nap. In the panic to get up quickly, you ended up climbing over the pirate's massive body, using his thighs as support; in the confusion of arms and legs, your hips sank and pressed firmly against his groin for seconds that were much too long. Roux, who woke up with a start, felt the direct heat of that pressure and needed to lock his eyes on the ceiling, motionless and with his face completely red, while his own body reacted instantly beneath you, forcing him to hold back a nervous laugh so as not to reveal the damage in his pants.

The episode with Yasopp had been no different. During a sudden gust of wind on the upper deck, you slipped on a mooring rope and the sniper had to catch you by the waist with both arms to prevent your fall. The impact brought your back against his chest, causing the softness of your butt to press perfectly against the pirate's pants. The fit was so exact and anatomical that Yasopp lost his breath in the very same second; he felt the rigidity grow against the fabric in such an obvious way that he needed to keep you held there for an extra instant, pretending to analyze the wind, just so you wouldn't turn around and crash head-on into the distinct bulge that had formed.

Even the stoic Hongo almost threw his medical professionalism away in the infirmary. While assessing a mild burn on your fingers, you leaned abruptly over the office table to reach for a jar of ointment, pressing the side of one of your breasts directly against his exposed forearm. The softness of the touch ran through the doctor's skin like an electric shock. Hongo froze in place, feeling the blood drain from his head and rush straight down to his pants with an alarming speed; he needed to clear his throat, pull back his trembling hands, and invent an urgent medical excuse about "checking the oxygen stock" just to run out of the cabin and stifle his own frustration in the cold air of the deck.

Not even the man who held the title of Emperor of the Seas escaped the trap of your innocence. Shanks went through his trial by fire on a stormy night when he went to check if you were safe in the armored workshop. The ship suffered a violent lurch just as he was opening the door, throwing you directly against the captain's only useful arm. To prevent both of them from falling, the red-haired man pulled you against his body with full force, trapping you between his chest and the wooden wall. The force of the impact caused your leg to rise between his thighs, brushing fully against the red-haired man's intimacy, while your neckline was crushed against his abdomen.

Remembering that specific episode, at the very moment when Shanks was trying to stifle his own laughter from across the table, was what infuriated the first mate the most. Beckman knew very well that if even the captain himself and the strongest men in the New World had capitulated before that dangerous innocence, he himself was not immune to the same fate.

Finding himself now before that very same moral prohibition, while your body rubbed against his in such an explicit and innocent way in that bar, tested the deepest limits of the strategist's legendary willpower. Benn felt cold sweat break out on the back of his neck as he tried to ignore his own treacherous body responding to that involuntary simulation of oral sex. That dynamic of "look, desire, but never be able to touch" was turning the Red Force into a powder keg of male frustration, where everyone suffered in silence to keep the promise of protecting a creature who did not even imagine the biological chaos she caused with every stumble.

Around the table, the reaction of the Red-Haired Pirates was of pure collapse. The low-ranking sailors watching the scene from afar were nearly fainting from incredulity at the audacity and involuntary obscenity of the situation, covering their eyes or turning their faces away in a moral panic. At the table, Shanks and Yasopp were red, the veins on their foreheads bulging and their eyes tearing up as they nearly choked to death from the superhuman effort of holding back their laughter. The captain bit his own fist so as not to break down into a hysterical laugh that would echo across the entire island, while Yasopp hid his face behind his hat, trembling from head to toe with the free entertainment of the first mate's misfortune.

"Enough. Stop." Benn's voice came out in a low, sharp, and terribly hoarse growl.He gripped your wrists firmly, stopping the movement of your arms before the damage to his sanity became irreversible, forcing you to look up at him.

"I'm sorry! I... I'm so clumsy, Benn! I just wanted to clean it, it's all wet, I'm sorry!" You stammered, kneeling and looking at him with genuine guilt, completely failing to notice that your proximity and the movement of your hands had nearly driven him over the edge.

Benn Beckman drew in a breath slowly, trying to use all of his legendary willpower to regain control of a mind that was being hijacked by the heat of your body between his legs. He let go of your wrists slowly, his fingers burning where they had touched your skin, and pointed toward the exit with a military rigidity.

"Get up and go back to the ship," he ordered, his voice failing slightly in authority, his eyes locked onto yours with a dark intensity that you could not decipher. "Now. Someone will accompany you."

Without understanding the gravity of what you had just caused, you stood up quickly, wiping your hands and murmuring apologies as you walked away toward the exit under the escort of a visibly embarrassed Rockstar. As soon as the bar door closed behind you, the dam broke at the table: Shanks collapsed backward in his chair, laughing so loudly that the sound echoed through the ceiling beams, joined by a Yasopp who was crying from laughing so hard, slamming his hand on the table while Beckman, with his lap soaked and his pride wounded, lit a cigarette with slightly trembling hands, cursing mentally the day he had accepted to be the guardian of that civilian.

On the next route through the New World, the Red Force finally docked at an island renowned for its hot springs, a paradise of volcanic waters nestled between black stone mountains. For the Red-Haired pirates, the sight of that dry land was welcomed with deafening enthusiasm. After more than a whole month of sailing without setting foot on land, braving the constant sea salt and the harsh deck of the ocean, the prospect of a collective break at a luxury onsen was the ultimate prize for the crew. The path to the establishment was marked by a chaotic uproar, with the officers loudly debating who would last the longest in the boiling water.

When you expressed the desire to go as well, the men's reaction was immediate and comically dramatic. As soon as they reached the entrance of the complex, the local female staff, wearing impeccable kimonos, promptly positioned themselves to lead you to the women's wing, separating you from the group.

"No! What kind of injustice is this?" Yasopp exclaimed, faking a dramatic wail while clinging to one of the portal's wooden pillars as if he were being dragged to a death sentence. "The women's wing is a cruel isolation! She's going to feel lonely, lost, helpless! Leave our little chemist with us, the crew needs to stay together!"

"The ship is mixed territory, why does it have to be different here?" Limejuice grumbled, making an exaggerated pout that didn't match his reputation as a dangerous pirate at all. "Who's going to guarantee she doesn't drown in the steam or slip on some tile if we're not there to watch over her? It's a matter of safety, ladies! Safety!"

Behind them, the low-ranking pirates formed a chorus of pitiful protests.

"Exactly! What if she gets lost on the way to the towel?" a sailor shouted, earning frenetic nods of agreement. "The world is much too dangerous for her to be more than two meters away from a rifle!" another pirate added, wiping away a fake tear.

Even the most serious officers jumped on the bandwagon, throwing looks of "deep suffering" while the female staff, completely unfazed, continued to gently push you toward the opposite side. "It's a waste of strategic protection! An unforgivable tactical error!"

Limejuice huffed, crossing his arms and tapping his foot like a throwing-a-tantrum child whose favorite toy had been confiscated. "We are her bodyguards! It is our sacred duty to enter that bath too to ensure the water isn't too hot for her delicate skin!"

The chorus of absurd complaints rose in tone, with low-ranking pirates suggesting they could form a "human isolation cord" inside the water, until a familiar voice loaded with a fake solemnity rose above the noise.

"They're right, ladies." Shanks stepped forward, placing his hand over his chest with an expression of suffering worthy of a theater actor. "As captain, my heart bleeds to think of our little chemist facing the loneliness of those waters without the leadership of her crew. What if she feels left out? What if she forgets the way back to the ship because of too much steam? I volunteer for the sacrifice of accompanying her!"

The crew let out a shout of approval, ready to follow the captain in the invasion, until a dry and rhythmic sound of flesh hitting skulls echoed through the entrance of the establishment, silencing the rebellion instantly.

BAM! BAM! BAM! BAM!

Benn distributed precise and powerful slaps to the back of the necks of Yasopp, Limejuice, the loudest recruits, and finally, with a force that seemed to carry the weight of all his years of exhausted patience, to the back of the Red-Haired's own neck. Shanks's head tilted forward with such speed that he nearly lost his balance.

"Stop being pathetic and get inside already." The first mate growled, cigarette smoke blowing out of his nostrils as he glared at the captain. "She is going to have ten minutes of peace away from your idiot voices, and chief, get inside before I decide to throw your body into the sea."

Shanks grumbled quietly, rubbing his sore neck and casting a look like a stranded dog in your direction as you were led inside. "Benn has no sense of humor... it's a tragedy for the crew..." he whispered to Yasopp, who merely nodded, equally traumatized by the blow.

The establishment's rules were absolute, and under Beckman's stern gaze which silenced the protests, you were taken into the silence of the women's wing. You left behind the trail of officers rubbing their sore necks and grumbling quietly about how the first mate lacked "team spirit," while the attendants closed the doors for your moment of tranquility.

Even after the doors to the women's wing closed, some of the sailors kept whining quietly, grumbling about the injustice of you not being able to stay in the men's wing with them. The insistence of those idiots was enough to make Benn Beckman lose the little patience he had left. Without saying a single word, the gray-haired man rose from the water and delivered sharp knuckles to the top of the heads of the men who were still complaining, sinking them without mercy under the weight of his heavy fists. The sound of the dry impacts and the bubbles of the pirates swallowing water echoed off the stone walls until the crew finally understood that the discussion was over. With order guaranteed by force, silence and respect finally established themselves in the enclosure.

On the men's side of the onsen, the atmosphere transformed into a rare and well-deserved relaxation. The high-ranking veteran pirates were submerged up to their necks in the scalding water, engaged in comfortable conversations in low tones, sharing bottles of warm sake and enjoying that relief for their tired muscles.

Away from the main hubbub, where the steam rose in dense, whitish columns, the first mate enjoyed the hard-won calm. Benn had found his own corner of peace, resting his head against the polished granite edge and keeping his eyes closed. At forty-eight years old, his stature was imposing even when submerged; his broad torso and massive shoulders bore the marks of a lifetime dedicated to the bloodiest combats of the New World.

The steaming water acted as a necessary balm for Beckman, penetrating deeply into his rigid tissues and relieving the chronic pain from the countless scars that crossed his skin, as well as relaxing the joints worn down by decades of piracy. The intense heat made the muscles of his severe face finally yield, while the damp steam condensed on the strands of his gray hair, which fell disheveled across his forehead. The peaceful murmur of his companions in the background served as the perfect setting for him to finally turn off his mind for a few moments, letting the stress accumulated over the last month be slowly drained away. That calm seemed so solid that he actually believed he would have, for once, a whole night of uninterrupted rest away from any civilian disturbance. The environment was immersed in a comfortable lethargy, where time seemed to pass more slowly between the puffs of smoke and the dense heat of the onsen.

The silence that followed, however, did not come from the men's fatigue or a peaceful consensus, but rather from a sudden, violent, and absolute shock. Benn felt the drastic change in the atmosphere even before taking the trouble to open his eyes. The comfortable murmur of conversations and low laughter died instantly in the enclosure, replaced in the exact same second by a succession of violent chokes from pirates drowning in their own sake. The sound of bodies thrashing in startle within the water echoed chaotically off the stone walls, breaking all the peace of the place and establishing an atmosphere of complete and absolute mute panic.

Benn did not even need to open his eyes for a deep, irritated frown to harden his severe features; he already knew the crew of idiots he sailed with and knew that this abrupt quietude could only mean trouble. However, when he finally raised his eyelids, the shock caused his eyes, usually half-closed and cold, to widen in absolute astonishment.

The picture that revealed itself through the mist defied any logic or military protocol. Breaking all barriers of the establishment's decency and solemnly ignoring the division of sexes, you had just invaded the men's wing. Piercing through the dense, whitish curtain of steam with your face bathed in thick tears and an expression of genuine panic, your image paralyzed the room.

You were dressed only in the onsen's standard towel, a fabric visibly small and inadequate for your body, which begged to give way with every hurried and clumsy step you took. The damp cotton could barely contain the volume of your breasts, crushing them in a way that the improvised neckline revealed almost the entire upper curvature of your skin, which was intensely flushed and reddened by the suffocating heat of the springs.

Your hair, completely soaked, clung disheveled to your neck and bare shoulders, while droplets of thermal water slid down your chest, glistening under the dim light before disappearing into the precarious edge of the towel. Your presence there, in that state of partial nudity and despair, instantly transformed the Red-Haired Pirates' moment of rest into a scenario of complete, absolute, and dangerous silent chaos.

"Benn! I am not going back there!" you protested between sobs, your voice whiningly choked with tears as you walked trembling toward the edge. "It's too deep and all that steam scares me. I thought I was going to drown! It's horrible to be alone on that side while everyone is here with you! I am going to stay here, I need to stay with you!"

Without giving him the slightest time to process the breach of regulations or reply to your clumsy statement, you simply ignored the partial nudity surrounding you and threw yourself into the hot water of the main pool, advancing straight in his direction. The impact of your body against his caused a small wave in the hot springs. Oblivious to the dozens of pairs of wide eyes from the red-haired pirates around in a complete state of shock, you clung tightly to his neck, pressing your damp skin against the vastness of the scarred muscles of the marksman's chest and shoulders.

The smack of your body pressing against Benn's echoed through the environment, breaking the lethargic trance the pool was in. For a few seconds that seemed to last an eternity, no man dared to breathe or move a single muscle, submerged in the scalding water while trying to digest the absurdity of that scene. Then, as if an invisible fuse had finally reached the gunpowder, the general paralysis gave way to an explosion of disordered reactions.

The effect on the crew was immediate and catastrophic, turning the onsen into a setting of absolute collapse. At the center of the shock were Shanks, Yasopp, and Limejuice, whose minds were unable to process the vision of you appearing half-naked amidst the steam with such naturalness.

The effect on the crew was immediate and catastrophic, turning the onsen into a scene of absolute collapse. At the center of the shock were Shanks, Yasopp, and Limejuice, whose minds were unable to process the vision of you emerging half-naked amidst the steam with such shattered naturalness. The visual impact was so violent that the three of them suffered simultaneous, explosive nosebleeds of gigantic proportions. Jets of blood shot from their noses with so much pressure that the force of the jet literally launched them backward in a comical fashion; their bodies were thrown against the tiled wall before plunging back into the pool with a dull thud, completely knocked out. The amount of blood was so absurd that the crystalline water around them began to change color instantly, spreading a dense red stain that dyed the pool an alarming hot-pink shade in a matter of seconds.

This pathetic reaction triggered a chain-reaction epidemic through the lower ranks. The sound of pirates suffering violent nosebleeds and pressure jets became continuous, followed by the noise of dozens of bodies collapsing limply into the water. The enclosure turned into a battlefield of testosterone and moral panic. The men who remained conscious plunged into a desperate frenzy to protect their own modesty in front of you, realizing that they were completely naked in the privacy of the enclosure. Giants of the New World who would face Navy fleets without blinking now writhed in the water with expressions of pure dread, submerging up to their chins. Bonk Punch and Howling Gab let out high-pitched squeals of surprise, waving their arms awkwardly as they tried to cover themselves with washcloths that looked like mere tissue paper against their bulky physical statures. Lucky Roux remained static, his eyes bulging and his mouth wide open in absolute paralysis, while Rockstar simply rolled his eyes and fainted, floating dramatically alongside the others.

Remembering that episode in the storm with Shanks, right at the moment when the captain himself now floated unconscious in the soup of sake and blood, was what irritated the first mate the most. Faced with that grotesque and humiliating sight, Benn Beckman felt the vein on his forehead pop with an expression of deep disgust and utter incredulity, mentally cursing fate for forcing him to sail with that pack of unsalvageable idiots.

Without hesitating before the sensory massacre you were causing and oblivious to the men's collapse, you sought the only shelter you considered safe. Crossing the water, you settled into the small space between his body and the stone wall of the hot spring, sitting so pressed against the oldest man on the crew that not a millimeter of air remained between you. Feeling the contrast of your soft, damp skin against his rigid, scalding musculature was a major blow to the mate's composure.

Overcome by an irrational fear of drowning or touching that water which was changing color, you sought the highest and firmest point you could find, settling almost entirely over one of Benn's massive, naked thighs. Standing at an impressive 206 centimeters tall, Beckman ran no risk whatsoever of submersion; sitting down, the thermal water barely rose past his broad chest, sculpted by decades of battles and covered by a map of scars. However, to you, the submerged leg of the gray-haired man was the only island of stability in that steaming sea.

As you adjusted yourself over that improvised and excessively firm seat, seeking a comfortable position, you ended up pressing yourself entirely against his body. To Benn, the awareness that you were wearing only that tiny towel — now a soaked, heavy, and almost nonexistent layer of cotton — was a sensory massacre. He knew, with a torturing clarity, that you wore absolutely nothing underneath that fabric. Every small movement of your hips exerted direct pressure against the rigid, rough musculature of his quadriceps, while you leaned forward, squashing your bust in a disarming way against his chest in an innocent search for balance. Feeling the full softness of your breasts pressed against his torso, rising and falling to the rhythm of your startled breathing, was a devastating provocation for which no war strategy had prepared him.

The tactical genius of the Red Hair Pirates was reduced to a statue of restraint under the moonlight. Internally, Benn fought a titanic inner battle to ignore and suffocate the imminent erection pushing against the fabric of the submerged towel, a purely treacherous reflex of his own body responding to that absurd proximity. In order not to give in to the savage impulse to close his arms around you and solidify the embrace, he forced himself to keep his arms stretched back, resting on the granite edge, while holding you firmly only by your shoulders to keep you safe. His jaw was so clenched that the muscles in his face popped, an agonizing effort to stifle any sound or reaction that would destroy the fragile trust you had placed in him. He kept his gaze fixed on the night sky, praying that the dense steam from the spring would justify the cold sweat breaking out on his temple and the sweet aroma of flowers, gunpowder, and soap that clouded his logical reasoning.

While the first mate suffered in excruciating silence to keep his promise of protecting the youngest member of the crew, the rest of the onsen operated in a scene of absolutely ridiculous medical triage. The medicinal chaos was so widespread that Hongo, the only one who managed to maintain a shred of professional dignity, was forced into emergency action. With his face completely scarlet, red as a pepper from pure embarrassment at being exposed and without any towel to cover his own nakedness, the crew's doctor began to swim and circulate frantically through the pink-dyed pool.

It was a purely desperate maneuver: cursing under his breath, Hongo had to flip over every pirate floating face down, pulling the unconscious men by their heels or their long hair toward the stone banks. The doctor grabbed Rockstar by one leg, dragged a completely knocked-out Shanks by his hair, and pushed Yasopp away from danger, individually ensuring that none of those idiots drowned in the stupor caused by the civilian invasion. Benn watched that disaster zone in a mute agony, trapped between the stone and an untouchable temptation, while the crew around the two of you collapsed into a complete human zoo.

For the next few hours, you remained glued to Benn, acting with such disconcerting naturalness that you seemed to ignore the fact that you were both in a state of partial nakedness under the moonlight. All around, the scene was one of pathetic recovery; Shanks, Yasopp, and Limejuice had "returned to life," but in a deplorable state. They alternated between trying to keep their heads above water and suffering relapses of violent nosebleeds whenever the steam cleared and revealed a bit more of your silhouette.

Limejuice was the worst of all. He tried, in a less than subtle way, to prolong his stay in the water by making up lame excuses about "cleaning his ears," while his eyes never left the curvature of your body under the water. Perceiving the audacity of those stares and feeling his own sanity hanging by a thread, Benn took a drastic measure to protect what was left of your modesty. With one of his massive hands, he pressed the soaked towel over your thigh and the contour of your buttock, forcing the fabric down to cover you better against the stone.

Even though the gesture seemed protective, his palm, wide and hot, remained there, feeling every curve and the softness of your skin through the thin cloth. Internally, Benn was mortified, his face turned toward the stars in a profile of granite, but it was either that or allow the crew to make a visual feast out of you.

Shanks, on the other hand, alternated between stanching his own nose with the corner of a towel and casting glances of pure delight at his best friend's silent agony. The red-haired captain seemed to relish the supreme irony: the most controlled man in the New World was an inch away from losing his composure, keeping his protective hand over a "doe" who, in her dangerous innocence, only snuggled closer to the warmth of that touch without realizing she was fueling the fire of a volcano about to erupt.

Meanwhile, on the periphery of the onsen upon the stones, the pirates previously rescued by Hongo from a possible drowning regained consciousness in a typically scandalous manner. The lower-ranking pirates, whose identities were lost in the mass of tattoos and scars, began to emerge from their state of unconsciousness with swollen faces and expressions of pure indignation. In a comical chorus of lamentations that echoed across the rocks, they pointed trembling fingers in Benn's direction, their voices rising in comical tones of injustice.

"This is an outrage! Why does only the Lord First Mate get a privilege like that?!" shouted one of them, with a new trickle of blood running down his mustache. "We almost died of anemia and there he is, serving as a chair!" another vociferated, kicking the water in a fit of childish tantrum while trying, in vain, to adjust his own tiny towel. Their desperation reached its peak when you, distracted by the texture of the battle marks on Beckman's chest, began to lightly trace the outline of a scar with your fingertips, oblivious to the fact that that innocent gesture was the final blow to the judgment of the men around you.

"Look at that! She's playing with his scars as if they were drawings!" a pirate screamed, tearing at his own hair in a grimace of comical agony.

"Mr. Beckman, you lucky bastard! Share that burden with the crew!"The shouting and outraged protests filled the air, turning the onsen into a courtroom of indignant pirates. Yasopp, recovered from his fainting spell but now with cotton wads stanching his dripping nostrils, slammed his fist into the water, kicking up a dramatic splash.

"That is statistically impossible!" Yasopp shouted, his voice cracking in a high pitch as he gestured dramatically with his arms in the air. "Benn already gets all the women on every island we dock at! He barely needs to say a sentence and they're already handing over their Den Den Mushi numbers! And now that we finally have a woman in the crew, instead of her realizing that I am the most charming sniper in the New World, she goes and chooses old Beck to use as an armchair?! Benn, you already have the whole world at your feet, at least leave our specialist for the rest of the crew!".

"It's the burden of the second-in-command, Yasopp! He must be suffering so much!" Lucky Roux mocked between bursts of laughter, though his eyes were narrowed in comical envy. "Benn, if she's too heavy for you, I can hold her! My arms are much softer than those hard muscles of yours, she would be more comfortable!".

"Stop lying, Roux! You just want an excuse to get close!" Limejuice protested, emerging from underwater like an enraged sea monster. "Beck, have mercy on your subordinates! We are here dying of anemia and you're there, acting as if it's a herculean sacrifice to have this beautiful little thing clinging to your neck. Let her sit here with us, we promise to be gentlemen!".

With Limejuice's words, the lower-ranking pirates agreed excitedly and, emboldened by the chaos, began to chant a rhythmic chorus, slapping their towels against the surface of the water: "Share the burden! Share the burden!".

Benn Beckman remained a statue of restraint under the moonlight, his jaw so tightly clenched that a sharp crack echoed in the silence as he gritted his teeth harder. He ignored the muffled insults, the jokes about his popularity, and the noisy envy of the subordinates Hongo had dragged out of the water, but he could not, by any means, ignore the subtle touch of your hands. Distracted by the vastness of his chest and oblivious to the collapse around you, you began to hum a low, soft melody under your breath, a sweet sound that contrasted tragically with the chaotic environment of the onsen.

Moved by an innocent curiosity, you raised one of your hands and began to trace the map of marks on the gray-haired man. Your delicate fingers, marked by small burns from handling explosives in the workshop, began to slowly outline the deep scars that cut through the hot skin of his chest. You lightly ran the tips of your nails along the rough scar tissue, moving up the line of his collarbone and down toward his rigid torso. Every millimeter and sporadic touch of your nails sent an electric shock directly down Beckman's spine, causing involuntary goosebumps that rippled across his chest and made his sculpted muscles twitch under your fingers.

For him, the real danger was not the crew's comical insubordination, but the way you tilted your head, focused on that intimate pattern, having not the slightest clue that every centimeter you moved on his naked thigh was another nail in the coffin of his sanity. The continuous friction of your hips against his skin acted as a fuse; beneath the waterline, the pirate's intimacy pulsed and hardened with an almost painful urgency, pressing against you with every innocent adjustment of your body.

Against all logic and Beckman's sense of duty, the soft touch of those nails and the warmth of your bust squashed against his chest awakened a possessive and dark impulse in the strategist. A dangerous and territorial tension took over the gray-haired man. He felt his treacherous body respond with even greater force beneath the water, and he knew, with cold certainty, that if any of those idiot pirates dared to stretch out an arm to try and "share the burden" or take you off his lap, he would probably forget the ship's pact and the fact that they were crewmates before the wretched soul could even touch the edge of the spring.

Shanks, who until then was only observing the scene while trying to stanch his own bleeding, let out a loud laugh that echoed off the stone walls of the onsen, drawing everyone's eyes. He leaned back, resting his single elbow on the edge and sporting a smile of pure amusement that boded nothing good for the man who had always been his right hand.

"Oh, stop all that whining, boys! You should have more respect for our first mate's sacrifice," Shanks exclaimed, his voice laced with a delicious irony. "Can't you see how poor Beck is suffering? He is so horrified by the situation that he can't even move! Just look at his face, looks like he swallowed an anchor!".

The redhead then leaned to the side, splashing a jet of water toward Benn just to see if he could get any reaction out of that granite statue. However, the movement was imprecise and the hot splash hit you right on your exposed back, making you shrink against Beckman's chest with a complaining, whiny moan.

As he felt your body shiver and press even tighter against his, Benn let out a low, deep growl that reverberated through his chest and hit you like a vibrating warning. He did not break eye contact with the crew, but the grip of his hand on your thigh suddenly became firmer, almost possessive, in response to your discomfort. It was this tiny protective gesture that gave Shanks the perfect opening to raise the tone of his provocation, using Benn's care as fuel for his mockery.

"You know, Benn, if the weight of responsibility is draining your energy, I, as your captain, feel it is my duty to lighten your load," Shanks continued, wiping a final drop of blood from his nose with a mischievous smirk. "I wouldn't mind at all offering my lap as a safe harbor for our specialist. After all, a captain must always put the well-being of his officers first, right? And you look… quite under pressure.".

He winked at Yasopp and Roux, encouraging the crew to increase the chorus of teasing.

"What do you say, Beck? Are you going to keep being this lonely hero or are you going to admit that you're the most hated man on this ship right now? Because, honestly, even I am starting to think you're abusing your authority as first mate to monopolize our beautiful recruit's safety!".

Benn diverted his gaze from the sky, shooting Shanks a look so deadly that any other man would have jumped out of the water instantly. The red-haired captain, however, only laughed louder, relishing the fact that the smartest and most controlled man on the sea was, for the first time in his life, completely out of cards to play while you, oblivious to all the politics of testosterone and envy, only nuzzled closer against his chest to escape the water Shanks had splashed on you.

The rest of the night in the onsen became a test of psychological endurance for the gray-haired gunman. Under the moonlight, the jokes did not cease; on the contrary, the crew seemed to have found a new favorite sport: the "comical lynching" of Benn Beckman.

Amidst laughter and gulps of sake that Hongo was trying to confiscate without success, the officers fired sharp comments about Benn Beckman's "newest and most audacious plunder." The mockery revolved around the fact that, in nearly five decades of life, the grumpiest man in the New World had finally found a treasure that he strictly refused to share with the crew.

The lower ranks, with several pirates still stuffing their noses with cotton rolls to stanch the blood, seized the cue to raise the chorus of comical indignation.

"It's a historical injustice!" shouted one of the sailors, his voice nasal. "Mr. Beckman spends his entire life being a damn magnet for women in every port we dock at, leaving not a single scrap for the humiliated souls of the deck, and now he wants to monopolize our beauty? This isn't piracy, it's abuse of power!"

The joke spread like wildfire through the onsen. The men claimed, amidst bursts of laughter, that the most feared man on the seas was inaugurating a new modality of crime: cradle-robbing.

"Just look at our great strategist! After years of plundering Navy ships and intimidating Admirals, he finally found his true calling!" Yasopp exclaimed, sitting on the edge with a mocking laugh while wiping the trail of blood from his upper lip. "Benn decided that the best use for his forty-eight years of experience is serving as a luxury upholstered armchair. He's old enough to be her legal guardian, but there he is, acting like an old sea wolf who turned into designer furniture! He's an authentic cradle-robber with the charm of a gray-haired veteran!"

The crew ran with the hook, chanting in unison that the first mate was exercising a very suspicious and convenient "right of custody." For them, it was hilarious to see the veteran, always so rigid and focused on maps and tactics, transformed into the safe harbor of a girl who seemed too delicate for that pack of brutes, yet had chosen precisely the lap of the most serious pirate in the Grand Line to perch upon.

Benn, however, could not snap back with his usual vigor. The weight of your body began to shift over his thigh; the suffocating heat of the onsen and the dense steam caused exhaustion to finally defeat your anxiety. Half-asleep, you ended up relaxing completely, abandoning any hesitation as you looped your arms around his neck, pressing your bust even closer against his chest and resting your cheek against that broad, scar-marked shoulder.

Upon seeing you snuggle like that, the men exploded into new provocations, delighting in the "domestication" of the most dangerous man on the ship, who was now serving as an anatomical pillow for your nap. For Benn, however, that was the final blow. He felt your slow, rhythmic, and warm breath against the sensitive skin of his neck, a deafening contrast to the mockeries echoing off the stone walls. While the crew saw only a comical scene of a grumpy first mate being held hostage by a whiny youngest member, Beckman felt the devastating impact of every millimeter of your unarmed, soft body squashed against his, using all of his legendary willpower just to pray that you wouldn't wake up from that slumber anytime soon.

When the crew finally decided to leave, exhausted from laughing so much and losing blood from their noses, silence began to return to the environment, making the proximity between the two of you dangerously deafening. Benn knew he could no longer postpone the inevitable; he needed to get you out of there before his resistance crumbled completely.

"Hey… wake up. Enough sleeping," he murmured, his voice coming out huskier than he intended. He had to shake your shoulder lightly, feeling the softness of your skin under his fingers, until you finally began to wake up.

You blinked your eyes, confused and wrapped in a sleepy torpor, trying to understand where you were while instinctively clutching the soaked towel that barely fulfilled its purpose. With a firm arm, Benn guided you out of the water first, serving as support while you climbed the stone steps with uncertain steps that were heavy with sleep. To Beckman's mortal annoyance, the strategy of putting you ahead was a shot that backfired: upon leaving the natural pool, the sight of your naked legs and the contour of your butt, highlighted by the weight of the wet fabric sticking to your curves, was the climax of the night for the crew that was still submerged.

A chorus of low whistles and murmurs of approval rose from the water, causing Benn to stand up right after with a quickness that almost caused a small tidal wave in the hot waters of the onsen. He pressed his own towel against his waist with a defensive agility he would normally reserve for a life-or-death duel, positioning his massive body as a shield between the crew's hungry eyes and you.

Ignoring the last jokes Shanks threw out about the "head of the nursery taking the little one to the cabin," Benn led you with long, decisive strides toward the safety of the women's changing rooms. He did not look back for a single second, keeping himself as a physical barrier between you and the residual glances of the crew. Upon reaching the door, he just waited for you to enter, feeling like a man who had just escaped the gallows by a hair's breadth. The relief of finally seeing you cross the threshold was not just thermal; it was the desperate need to put walls and as much fabric as possible between his senses and the living temptation you represented.

However, Beckman's true test of patience was not yet over. Upon crossing the threshold of the men's changing room, he was greeted by a symphony of laughter and comments that proved the crew was already settled in and ready for the second round of teasing.

"Look at that, the hero of the night decided to show his face!" Yasopp exclaimed, tossing a dry towel over his shoulder while sporting a grin from ear to ear. "So, Benn? Was the 'custody duty' too tiring or are you going to need double the rest tomorrow?".

"Leave the man alone, boys," Limejuice building intervened, though his tone of voice was laced with a poisonous irony. "Didn't you see how focused he was? That wasn't the pose of a pirate, that was a marble statue in full suffering. It must be hard to maintain the serious veteran pose when you have the hottest girl on the ship using his lap as a pillow.".

Benn ignored the whistles and the indiscreet questions about "what he felt" when you snuggled against his chest, or if you were indeed as soft as you appeared. Keeping his eyes fixed ahead to hide the dark and territorial gleam that threatened to escape, he crossed the changing room in a sepulchral silence and headed to the locker where his clothes were. The crew, realizing the danger too late, made sure to keep a safe distance while mocking, in lower tones, how his piracy had reached a bizarre level of specialization. For the men, it was hilarious that the only strategist in the New World capable of standing up to a Yonkou and paralyzing the Navy was, at the same time, the only man with enough patience to serve as a bodyguard and lull a frightened "doe" to sleep in the middle of an onsen.

For Beckman, every joke was an annoying reminder that, as much as he tried to act like a protector, the line between duty and desire was becoming dangerously thin. The incident in the onsen passed, however, it did not dissipate with the steam left behind when the Red Hair Pirates finally weighed anchor and left the island.

That memory of the onsen dragged on like a ghost throughout the weeks of continuous sailing through the New World, turning every casual encounter on the deck into a true minefield for Benn Beckman's self-control. The Red Force, once vast enough for his routine as first mate, now seemed to have shrunk in size; every time you passed by him, the sweet aroma of flowers and gunpowder or the simple sound of your voice were violent triggers that made him relive the exact sensation of your weight upon his naked thigh.

To try and purge from his mind the torturing memory of your skin beneath the scalding water, he began to seek refuge in manual labor and the obsessive maintenance of the ship's arsenal. Beckman was seen cleaning the barrel of his rifle repeatedly or adjusting heavy cables under the relentless sun, using extreme physical exertion as a necessary punishment to silence the man who, in moments of lowered guard, could still feel the warmth of your breath against the skin of his neck. The master of strategy fought a silent war of attrition against his own senses; though the ship crossed the open sea at maximum speed, he felt dangerously adrift, trapped in the invisible wake of your presence.

On one of those long, calm afternoons on the high seas, the sun beat down on the wooden deck, but the atmosphere around the first mate remained dense and heavy, like a storm that refused to break. He was sitting in a strategic corner, isolated by the aura of seriousness that usually drove any sailor away, cleaning his weapon with an almost sickly meticulousness. The repetitive movement of the flannel against the cold metal served as an anchor, a conscious effort to keep his gaze low and his thoughts rigidly confined to military duty.

However, the silence he sought so much to organize his internal defense was constantly shattered by the sound he most feared and, secretly, most desired. The faint echo of your clumsy footsteps or the crystalline tone of your laughter anywhere on the deck was enough for Beckman's entire discipline to falter in that very second, turning the rifle in his hands into a forgotten object and the heat of the sun into a pale reminder of the true fire he had felt in that hot spring.

You were just above him, on the quarterdeck, on the upper level under the strong sun of the New World. Under Yasopp's distant and relaxed supervision, you were trying to organize some new gunpowder crates. Benn, positioned on the main deck, pretended to polish the cold metal of his weapon, but his senses were entirely turned upward. He could hear your voice asking curious questions, the light tone of someone absorbing every lesson, and the sniper's nasal, proud laughter echoing through the ship with every success of yours. Every time the wind blew in the first mate's direction, it brought the cracking of the crates' wood, the pungent smell of gunpowder, and the timbre of your laughter, testing the patience he took so much pride in having.

The interaction up there flowed with a naturalness that bothered Benn in a silent way. Yasopp, with his expansive posture, had just taught you the perfect sailor's knot to secure barrels on stormy days — a quick trick that demanded precision and agility in the hands.

When you finally managed to replicate the movement on your own, the knots firm and flawless against the thick rope, your eyes shined with triumph. Yasopp enthusiastically patted your shoulder, praising your speed, and that physical proximity and the sound of the sniper's approval made Benn's jaw clench on the deck below. A strange and uncomfortable tightness rose through the first mate's chest; he did not recognize it as jealousy, refusing to admit that the glimpse of you sharing an achievement with another man could affect his monolithic posture. To himself, he merely justified that the crew needed focus, not distractions.

"Benn! Benn! Look what I did!" You shouted, your voice overflowing with a vibrant excitement that cut through the heavy air of the deck.

You ran to the edge of the quarterdeck, proudly holding up the piece of rope with the perfectly executed knot for him to see, seeking his gaze and validation above anything else.

He lifted his face to answer you, his cold expression masking the internal turmoil, but the disaster was already underway before he could even formulate a word. At the exact moment you tried to take an enthusiastic step to the side, wanting to lean a bit further over the railing to show the work, your foot caught on the heavy mooring rope that Lucky Roux, in a rare oversight while going down to the galley, had left lying near the top of the stairs.

The silence of the deck was shattered by the dry sound of soles slipping on the polished wood and a gasp of fright that paralyzed the air. In a split second, gravity betrayed your caution: the knot flew from your hands and your body tumbled forward, going over the limit of the quarterdeck stairs railing. The effect was immediate and visceral; as if a silent alarm had gone off in the chest of every pirate, the entire deck tensed its muscles, and Benn's heart skipped a beat before his body acted out of pure protective instinct because unlike those men, who were true forces of nature capable of plummeting from cliffs and merely shaking the dust off their clothes while laughing at the impact, your structure was purely human and vulnerable.

You were a civilian; for your fragile structure, that fall was not just a stumble, it was a real threat of broken bones and serious, possibly even fatal, injuries. Lucky Roux dropped his plate of food, Yasopp took a step forward with wide eyes, and even the pirates playing cards jumped up, all moved by the same protective instinct to prevent the crew's specialist from crashing against the ship's rigid oak.

You were a civilian; for your fragile structure, devoid of the superhuman resilience of those New World monsters, that fall was not just a silly stumble, it was a real threat of broken bones, serious injuries and, depending on how your head hit the oak, possibly fatal.Lucky Roux was coming up the kitchen steps at that exact instant, carefully balancing a reinforced plate with the snacks he had prepared especially for you, knowing of your effort with the crates. Upon lifting his eyes and coming face to face with your body crossing the railing in free fall, the pirate froze. The porcelain plate slipped from his hands, shattering against the floor in a sharp snap, scattering food and fragments across the deck as he extended his arms in pure panic. Just above, Yasopp leaped forward with wide eyes, his fingers clawing at the air in a useless attempt to reach the edge of your clothes.

The warning of the disaster spread through the ship like wildfire. Even the lower-ranking pirates, rough men who usually kept their guard up, completely abandoned their posts in the exact same millisecond. Those cleaning the deck dropped their mops; those playing cards kicked the wooden table, scattering the deck through the air; even the lookouts in the rigging tensed their bodies, all moved by the same desperate protective instinct to prevent the crew's specialist and darling from crashing against the rigid wood of the Red Force. In a fraction of a second, the Red Force turned into a chaos of heavy footsteps and choked shouts, a blind race of dozens of men trying, in any way, to stretch themselves out to serve as a buffer for you. But due to the difference in height and the exact angle at which he was sitting right below, Benn Beckman's world did not stop; it accelerated in a time distortion that only the most lethal warriors of the ocean mastered.

Even before the first warning shout from the other pirates could actually leave their throats, Benn had already discarded his rifle with an alarming negligence. The most valuable precision weapon on the ship hit the floor with a dull thud, demonstrating that, at that moment, that metal was worth absolutely nothing compared to your physical integrity. He did not just move; he tore through space, intercepting the trajectory of your fall with the surgical precision of someone who lived decades calculating millimeters between life and death, ready to close his arms around you before any other hand on the ship could touch you.

You did not hit the hard wood of the deck; instead, you collided directly against the mountain of muscles and scars that made up the first mate's body. In a desperate reflex to halt gravity, your hands wrapped around Benn's broad shoulders, while he leaped from his sitting position in a fraction of a second.

The gray-haired man's instincts — programmed to intercept any threat with maximum force — dictated a movement of absolute containment. To ensure that your body would not slip after the impact, his massive hands locked with a zealous firmness lower down, anchoring themselves on your thighs and the flesh of your butt, suspending you in the air.

He hoisted you against his own torso with a firm tug, crushing your small silhouette against his rigid chest to cancel out any remaining momentum from the fall. However, the real disaster was the betrayal of the fabric. You were wearing a light linen blouse with the first few buttons undone, and, by the cruel play of the impact, the movement forced your body slightly downward at the exact moment Beckman lifted his chin to stabilize the rescue. The result was a clash of seismic proportions: the face of the most rational man in the crew ended up entirely buried in the abundance of your cleavage.

The sensory collision was overwhelming and immediate. Benn's nose and lips buried into the soft skin of the valley between your breasts, and the sweet scent of flowers mixed with the warmth of the sun invaded his lungs like a shockwave. The tactical genius froze, turning into a block of granite. He felt the ample softness of your flesh and the racing beat of your heart pulsing directly against his face, a devastating proximity that drained all the air from his lungs and tested the limits of his sanity.

Around you, the deck of the Red Force seemed to go mute. Just a moment before, dozens of pirates had moved in panic to prevent you from getting hurt, but the relief of seeing you safe was instantly replaced by a collective stupor. Under Yasopp's wide eyes and Lucky Roux's stunned paralysis, the entire crew processed, with dropped jaws, the scandalous details of that position.

The grumpy first mate remained completely static under the New World sun, keeping you suspended with his hands firm on your thighs, while his severe features were completely suffocated by the disheveled cleavage. What were secretly considered the most perfect breasts in humanity by the crew were now pressed against the older man's face, canceling out any trace of his usual military authority. The air on the deck simply ran out from the visual knockout of seeing the Red Hair's second-in-command being disarmed by the overwhelming proximity of a woman.

While Benn remained paralyzed, feeling the world spin, the silence was broken by the sound of your own release of tension. Shrinking against his rigid body to make sure you were truly safe, you acted like a shipwreck survivor. Panic completely stole your coordination; instead of pulling away to alleviate the absurd proximity, your fingers buried themselves into Beckman's gray hair. In an instinctive reflex to seek comfort and protection in the middle of a convulsive crying fit, you pulled his head with a clumsy and frantic strength, sinking the first mate's face into the solidity and warmth of your soft flesh.

"It was so scary, I thought I was going to die! I saw the deck coming… I… I thought I was going to break completely! It was horrible, Benn, it was horrible!" You exclaimed and sobbed loudly, your voice failing and fading away. Oblivious to the fact that the true danger to your integrity was the man holding you up, you used his head as an anchor to contain your own emotional collapse, begging for support by crushing his face against the generous softness of your bust.

The effect of that panic was a true sensory and obscene drowning for the sniper. The more your body trembled and heaved from crying, the more you contracted and dug your fingers into the nape of his neck, pressing the older man's face against your skin with an urgency so boundless that not a millimeter of air remained between you. Benn's face was completely buried and rubbed in that ample valley, filled by the absurdly soft texture of the natural thickness that shaped your perfectly full breasts, warm and scented with your aroma. The desperate pressure you exerted ended up forcing his mouth directly against the rounded curve of your partial nudity; the clash was so violent and the intimacy became so crushed that the first mate's lips opened involuntarily against your flesh.

His mouth was wide open from the shock, which meant he was feeling all the opulence and softness of your breasts pressed directly against his oral cavity, filling the space in an almost pornographic way and making him feel the real weight of that fullness against his cheeks. In the middle of that blind squeeze, your nipple, rigid from the fright, brushed directly against his tongue and teeth, lodging itself between the gray-haired man's lips. It was an immediate biological torture. As a man of nearly five decades of life, accustomed to being a playboy who slept with new women on every island the crew docked at, Benn Beckman's body memory and most primitive instincts acted before his reason. Sensing the swollen nipple and the full flesh rubbing against his tongue, his automatic first impulse was the desire to close his teeth lightly and suck the nipple hard, a purely carnal and lascivious reflex of someone who knew exactly how to feast on a woman's body.

However, in the next millisecond, the strategist's brain triggered an emergency alert. He remembered exactly where he was, how he had ended up in that situation and, most importantly, why he should never dare to suck the breast over him. You were the youngest, the protected one who was in tears and vulnerable, blindly trusting his embrace not to fall. Controlling himself, however, was an almost impossible task, since the movement of your crying kept rubbing all that sinful anatomy against his mouth.

Beckman remained absolutely static, his eyes wide open in the humid dark of that cleavage, his mind totally obliterated by the surrender of his own senses while actively fighting against his own mouth not to yield to the wild desire to devour you right there. He felt your warm and thick tears wetting the top of his head while his mouth remained glued and suffocated in the soft texture of your bust. The man capable of reading any battlefield with military coldness found himself in a purely obscene dead end; he could not push you away due to your obvious vulnerability, but he could also barely breathe, using all the strength of his trembling jaw to resist the animal and betraying reflex of simply biting, sucking, and possessing the temptation being thrust against him. Trapped between the moral duty to console you and the physical torture of being virtually swallowed and suffocated by the most perfect breasts in the Grand Line, he endured the ordeal in a mute agony under the stunned and silenced gaze of the entire crew.

For several seconds, the only audible sound was your quiet crying and the rhythmic creaking of the ship's wood. The pirates around watched the scene with dropped jaws, alternating their gaze between your trembling vulnerability and the "privileged" position of the first mate, who seemed to have turned into a stone statue so as not to make the situation worse. The tension on the deck stretched to the limit, a bubble of incredulity that finally exploded when the crew realized exactly what was happening before their eyes.

"BENN BECKMAN, YOU FILTHY PIRATE! THAT IS A CRIME AGAINST HUMANITY!" Yasopp's shout ripped through the stunned silence, while he pointed a trembling and accusing finger from the upper deck, his face shifting between comic horror and monumental jealousy. "I was half a second away from jumping to save her! Half a second! And you use your veteran pirate speed to… to… THIS?!"

The indignation, which before was a mute tension for your safety, exploded into a clamor of outraged protests that would make a mutiny look like a tea party. Pirates dropped their tasks, climbed the rigging, and leaned over the bulwarks, all pointing at the scandalous scene of Benn with his face buried in the ship's specialist's breasts.

"Look at his hands! He is holding her like she is a sack of gold!" shouted one of the lower-ranking sailors, tearing his own bandana from his head in a gesture of comic despair.

"Mr. Beckman, have some decency! You didn't catch her, you captured her! Let her go now and let the rest of the crew check if she has any broken bones… we are much more delicate!".

"Injustice! Abuse of authority!" Limejuice screamed, banging the handle of his staff weapon on the deck to emphasize the protest. "He planned this! He calculated the angle of the stumble, the sway of the ship, and the elasticity of the linen! Beckman, you are one of the smartest men in the world and you used your whole brain to end up with your face in the best breasts in the Grand Line!".

Even Lucky Roux, who was usually the most peaceful, looked at the scene with wide eyes and an expression of pure betrayal. "Benn, I left the rope there, the credit for the stumble should be mine! How do you end up winning even from my mistakes?! Share this burden with the crew, you lucky bastard!".

The chorus of "Let her go!" and "Share the prize!" echoed all over the Red Force, turning the deck into an arena of indignant men. But, in the center of all that noisy chaos, Benn remained absolutely motionless. He did not retort, did not growl, and did not even try to explain himself.

The soft pressure against his face and the warmth of your skin acted like a short circuit on his legendary logic; he was there, running out of oxygen. His lungs began to burn, an acute and biological protest demanding air, but his brain seemed to have short-circuited before that invasion of smoothness. The urgency to breathe, which should be the most basic instinct of a survivor like him, was completely silenced by the weight and the warmth of your bust pressed against his face.

It was a voluntary and numbing suffocation; he felt the blood almost bursting the veins in his neck and the fire heading down to lower parts, but his mind was trapped in a labyrinth of fabric and soft skin, unable to prioritize his own life above that sensory torture. He could not even process the need to pull away; the world had reduced itself to the perfume that flooded him and the contact that drained his sanity, leaving the great Benn Beckman dangerously close to a blackout that had nothing to do with tiredness.

In the center of that storm of indignation, the sound of heavy and hurried footsteps echoed loudly through the wood. Hongo came running from the lower decks, taking the steps two at a time, alerted by the desperate shouts and the uproar that made it seem as though the ship were under attack or that a tragedy had occurred. He carried his emergency medical case in hand, his knuckles white from the tight grip, and on his face he wore an expression of severe professional concern, ready to perform drastic interventions on whoever might be on the brink of death.

However, as soon as he stepped onto the main deck and his eyes registered the scene, the doctor stopped dead in his tracks, almost skidding on the wood.

The initial incredulity locked his movements. For a few whole seconds, Hongo blinked, completely astonished, as he tried to process the impossible and absurd angle in which the first mate found himself. He had come prepared to staunch a hemorrhage or immobilize an open fracture, but what he found was the most feared man in the New World totally buried, suffocated, and surrendered in the disheveled cleavage of the crew's hot recruit. The clinical diagnosis was instantaneous: the terrible "emergency" that had made the ship shake was not a fatal injury, but an absolute and purely pornographic sensory knockout of Benn Beckman.

Hongo merely let out the breath he was holding, relaxing his tense shoulders while a purely clinical and wicked amusement began to gleam in his gaze. It was hilarious to note that, for the first time in the history of that ship, the greatest risk to the first mate's health and survival did not come from an enemy blade or a cannon shot, but rather from the suffocating proximity and the overwhelming softness of the crew's only beauty.

"I heard desperate shouts about someone having their bones crushed and I came ready for an amputation," Hongo commented loud and clear, closing the first-aid case with a sharp and definitive snap. He crossed his arms, flashing a mocking medical smile upon seeing Beckman's mouth glued to the girl's flesh. "But, from what I'm seeing here, the only real risk is our great strategist suffering a respiratory arrest from pure lack of oxygen. Hang in there, Beckman, try to remember how to breathe through your diaphragm."

Taking advantage of the shocked silence that settled among the crew members, the blond man took a few steps forward, leaning his body slightly to analyze the first mate's bodily rigidity with a feigned and wicked seriousness. He adjusted his posture, letting out a nasal chuckle before continuing his mockery in the tone of a medical consultation.

"Benn, as your doctor, I should be worried about your oxygenation, but as your friend, I prescribe at least five more minutes in that position. It's a cardiovascular stress test: we need to see how long your heart can take before collapsing... or how high your blood pressure can rise before the blood decides to concentrate in just one area and cause an irreversible 'flow' problem."

"It's purely for scientific purposes, of course. I want to observe if this sudden hardening at the base is just muscle tension or if we are facing a classic case of priapism from mechanical stimulus that conventional medicine will have serious difficulties... bringing down. Keep it up, Benn. I want to see if, at your age, your circulatory system can still fight off an involuntary pelvic congestion or if the flow is going to completely sabotage your uniform."

He took another step forward, adjusting his posture with a feigned professional seriousness while watching you tremble, with your full breasts crushing and drowning his superior's face.

"On the other hand," Hongo continued, with the gleam of pure surgical malice in his eyes, "if you think this anatomical load is too heavy for a man your age, I can take over the treatment. I can transfer our specialist right now to the infirmary and perform a... deeply thorough clinical examination, with the doors tightly locked. You know how it is, traumas resulting from serious falls require me to evaluate the sensitivity of her skin on a stretcher, centimeter by centimeter, testing the most intimate reflexes to ensure there are no internal sequelae. It would be a terrible physical and endurance effort for me, but I am more than willing to take this 'burden' off your face and personally look after her well-being, Beckman."

The pirates on the deck fell over with the new wave of wanton laughter that followed the doctor's "generous offer." Men hung from the steel cables, pointing at Hongo and Benn as shrill and malicious whistles cut through the salty air.

"Listen to the doctor! He wants to 'examine' our girl with the doors locked!" roared one of the sailors, wiping away tears of laughter. "Mr. Beckman, watch out! If you let go now, Hongo is going to put her on all fours on the stretcher and apply his shock treatment until the poor thing can't walk anymore!"

Building Snake let out a raspy laugh, slapping Gab's shoulder so hard it almost knocked him down. "Thorough examination, Hongo? You're not fooling anyone with that science talk! What you want is to lock her downstairs, tear that linen, and test her reflexes going up and down on the operating table! He wants the same suffocation that old Beck is getting!"

Even Monster the monkey started jumping around the two of them, clapping his hands and imitating the gesture of someone groping the air with both hands, which made Bonk Punch double over with laughter.

"Look at that, Benn! Even the monkey knows you have your mouth on the ultimate prize and don't want to let go of the bone! If Hongo takes her to 'auscultate' in the privacy of that bed, you're going to have to get in line for the consultation to see her moaning!"

"Listen here, first mate! The ship's doctor is questioning if you, a veteran of nearly fifty years, can still handle a fuck like this or if you're going to need help with the service!" Limejuice shouted, his voice cutting through the deck with a lascivious laugh that made the pirates around him howl. He leaned over the railing, adjusting his sunglasses while his eyes gleamed with a purely wanton malice.

"Tell us, Beck! Are you going to let the doctor steal your spot just so he gets the chance to lay her down in the infirmary and check every centimeter of that soft skin on top of him? Because if you are needing air or if your cock is too old to take the strain, I volunteer for the sacrifice! I guarantee I have much more breath to sink into this suffocation and give her the medicine she needs than an old smoker like you!"

The crew exploded into wild roars and the taunts from the lower-ranking pirates took over the entire deck. The men of the lower echelon, relieved that there had been no tragedy and fueled by alcohol and the mockery of the high-ranking officers, began to elbow each other, firing heavy jokes while gesturing obscenely about what they would do if they had Beckman's luck.

"Let the first mate rest, doctor! Pass the turn to someone with a full stock!" shouted one of the frontline sailors, being pushed by another who was already wearing a malicious smirk. "If it's to examine her backside on the stretcher, I'll become a nurse right now! I guarantee she forgets the scare on the very first thrust!"

In the midst of the chaos of laughter and dirty comments, the younger crew decided to unite in an audacious plan to completely destabilize the first mate. Moved by pirate audacity, the lower-ranking men began to bang the handles of their mugs and the soles of their heavy boots against the dark wood of the ship, coordinating a rhythmic and deafening chorus that shook the structure of the Red Force:

"In-firm-ar-y! In-firm-ar-y!"

The collective clamor transformed into an open challenge. They shouted in unison to ignite the environment, scandalously suggesting that Beckman let you go so that you yourself could choose, among all the men on the deck, who would have the privilege of taking you into the interior of the ship and "treating" each of your supposed injuries. Obviously, it was all nothing more than an immense provocation; every sailor there knew perfectly well that touching the crew's protected one was a death sentence and that none of them would ever have a real chance of taking you to bed. However, the absurdity of the joke and the unique opportunity to see the unshakable first mate in such a compromising situation made the men howl like wolves.

In the middle of that tribunal of pure obscenity, the temperature in Benn's body rose to dangerous levels. It was not just the suffocating, humid, and sinful heat of those full breasts pressed against his lips or the burning in his lungs that was driving him crazy, but rather a possessive and fierce impulse that began to burn in his blood. Even knowing that his subordinates were just distilling typical pirate audacity on top of an impossibility, hearing those men theorize about putting their hands on the soft flesh he held in his arms awakened the veteran's most dangerous side.

The monumental embarrassment of being the target of the dirtiest joke in the history of the Red Hair Pirates quickly transformed into a sharp and territorial instinct. As a purely instinctive and silent response to those voices, Benn's massive hands acted on their own: his calloused fingers dug with suddenly greater force into your soft thighs, squeezing your skin against his body in a firm and authoritative gesture, a physical claim that made it clear you were not going anywhere. While his mouth remained glued to your cleavage, suffocated by your abundance, Beckman clenched his teeth against your soft flesh so as not to growl and draw his rifle against his own crew.

The cacophony of mockery reached its absolute peak when the unmistakable silhouette of Shanks appeared at the top of the quarterdeck staircase. The Captain came with casual steps, balancing a mug of sake in his left hand, but stopped abruptly as soon as his eyes focused on the center of the deck. He set the mug aside and ran his only hand through his hair, pulling it back, observing the chaos for a moment with his hand on his chin and his eyebrows raised, before breaking into a wide, predatory smile that promised weeks of relentless humiliation for his right-hand man.

"What a beautiful view for the beginning of the afternoon!" Shanks exclaimed, his powerful voice cutting through the noise as he descended the steps with a mocking elegance. He walked calmly until stopping just a few steps away, leaning his body forward without the slightest shame, searching for the best angle to be able to see the face of his most trusted man. "Benn, my old friend, I spent years sharing the command of this ship with you, but I never imagined your contingency plan for falls involved nursing on our protected one in the middle of the deck."

The entire crew exploded into new howls of approval at the Red Hair's words, some men even punching the floor from laughing so hard. In the center of all that derision, Benn remained immobilized, alternating between the deep red of a murderous fury and the rigidity of someone on the brink of collapse. He was unable to formulate a single word, far too busy trying to maintain the remnant of sanity he had left. By this time, the hysterical panic that had paralyzed you had finally begun to subside; your sharp sobs slowed to a more regular breathing, but the post-scare shock kept you frozen in the same position. Seeking pure emotional support, you continued to keep your hands firm on the nape of the gray-haired man's neck, holding his head against your chest and caressing his gray hair as if the first mate's massive body were the only solid and safe thing in the world.

Oblivious to the men's double-entendre jokes, you just squeezed Beckman against yourself, causing his lips to remain glued, sucked, and completely suffocated by the fullness of your skin. Shanks, noting that his first mate could barely draw breath without sucking your rigid nipple, picked his mug of sake back up, swirled it, and let out a boisterous laugh.

"Look at him, boys! Our most dangerous man was completely knocked out by a pair of tits!" the Captain continued, leaning against the bulwark with his eyes shining in pure wanton amusement. "And what a beautiful pair of breasts they are!"

"Tell us, Beck, is our youngest so soft that you refuse to take your face out of there? Careful, if you keep digging like that, you'll end up finding the One Piece treasure before me! And let go of the girl's thighs, man, or the crew will think you're trying to confiscate the girl and feast on her all by yourself!"

It was the sound of Shanks's voice that finally broke Benn's sensory trance, acting like an emergency switch in his tactical mind. The awareness that he was still holding you suspended in the air, with his face buried in your cleavage under the gaze of the entire crew, hit him like a punch to the stomach. The first mate realized, with a jolt of pure adrenaline, that he had not let go of you for a single second since the exact instant he had caught you from the fall, keeping your body glued to his as if the world around them had disappeared.

For a brief instant, his massive hands moved, rising from your thighs to close firmly around your waist, his fingers sinking slightly into the fabric of your blouse to finally pull you away from his face. However, the instinct to put you on the ground fought against the realization that your body was still trembling under his touch and that your hands remained firm on the nape of his neck and his gray hair, seeking a security that you still did not fully feel.

Although the urgency to recover his own dignity before the men was desperate, Benn was not abrupt. He lowered you with an unexpected smoothness, guiding your body firmly until your feet finally touched the wooden deck, but keeping the support of his massive hands on your hips for a second longer, until he was sure your trembling legs would not fail.

When he finally ended the physical contact and managed to pull his face away from your bust, the impact of reality hit him. Only then, upon freeing himself from the suffocating squeeze, Beckman realized that his lungs were burning at a critical level; the oxygen deprivation was so severe that he had not even noticed the pain until that millisecond. Totally rigid, the first mate drew in the saline air of the New World with a painful and loud eagerness, his broad chest expanding sharply as he fought to calm his heartbeat and try, desperately, to rebuild the ice mask that you had just completely melted.

"Hongo," Benn called, and his voice came out in a gutteral and vibrating tone, loaded with a cutting authority that he normally used to command the ship in the middle of the worst storms. He did not dare look at you, keeping his pupils fixed on the horizon line, fearing that any glimpse of your tearful face or your disheveled cleavage would destroy what remained of his dignity. "Take her from here. Check if this… clumsiness didn't hurt her at all. And make sure she stays seated until the scare passes."

Upon uttering the order, Beckman finally turned his severe features in the doctor's direction. His eyes, narrowed and cold like the steel of a blade, locked onto Hongo with a silent and deadly promise. There was not a shred of humor there; the first mate's gaze made it perfectly clear that if the doctor dared to put into practice a single millimeter of the indecent jokes he had fired on the deck, or if he tried any funny business locked in that infirmary, he would pay with his own life. Hongo swallowed hard, raising his hands in a subtle sign of surrender upon understanding the real warning behind that territorial fury.

The older man practically handed you over to the doctor's care, using his friend as a necessary barrier between himself and the overwhelming temptation to keep holding your body.

"Go with him. Now." Benn ordered you, his voice coming out in a harsh and cutting tone, a necessary hardness that served both as a punishment for the monumental confusion you had caused on the deck and as a desperate excuse to keep you as far away as possible from his sight for the rest of the day. "And after Hongo clears you, go straight to the ammunition depot. Stay there preparing the gunpowder and don't dare step out of that storehouse until the sun goes down."

"Yes, sir!" you replied with a trembling voice, frightened by the first mate's sudden severity. Seeking any stability while your knees still felt like they were made of jelly, your hands moved quickly and your fingers closed tightly around the sleeve of Hongo's hoodie, gripping the fabric of the doctor's clothes like a safe harbor to manage to take your first steps away from Beckman.

Although you let yourself be guided by the doctor, before moving completely away, the desperate need to show respect and gratitude to the man who had prevented your fall spoke louder. In an impulse to make up for the disaster from seconds ago, you stopped your steps on the deck and bent into a deep reverence, almost military in its intention. For Benn Beckman, who was still trying to stabilize his heartbeat and reassemble his facade of seriousness, that movement was the final blow.

By leaning forward with such haste and fervor right before him, your blouse — whose buttons had already given up fighting after the previous impact — completely yielded to gravity. The fabric pulled away from your body like a curtain opening for the final act. From the privileged perspective of the gray-haired man, who was positioned right above, the angle offered a panoramic, sharp, and unfiltered view of an obscene scenario: your delicate lace bra was completely messy and disheveled due to the violence with which Benn's face had been crushed against it seconds ago.

The undergarment had slipped out of place, leaving the opulence of that soft flesh absurdly exposed. Before the first mate's eyes, the partial nudity of your full breasts revealed itself in an open way; the crooked fabric left your areolas practically on display under the bright light of the New World. And, to the absolute shock of the strategist, right on the full curve of the skin that had been pressed against his lips, shined a damp and unmistakable mark. Beckman's primitive instincts had left a physical trail: a slight bite mark and a subtle suction bruise, glistening from the saliva that he himself had left there in the millisecond when his playboy body had acted on its own.

Benn stood completely jaw-dropped, his mind obliterated as he stared at the carnal and pornographic proof of his own slip stamped on your breasts.

Hongo, who was by your side, froze with his hand still in the air, while the silence that fell over the Red Force was so absolute that it was possible to hear the crackling of some pirate's cigar embers in the background. Time seemed to freeze for a millisecond before the realization finally hit you. Feeling the cold sea air touch the skin that should have been covered and noticing where Benn's eyes were fixed, you lowered your gaze and let out a sharp squeal of pure desperation. Your face reached a shade of red so incandescent it felt as though your blood would boil, while your eyes widened in pure panic upon realizing your own partial nudity.

"AAAH! I'm SORRY, I'm SORRY!" You screamed, entering a state of mental short circuit. In a desperate reflex to hide yourself, you crossed your arms over your chest, gripping yourself so tightly that the effect was the exact opposite of what you desired: the gesture only compressed and lifted your bust even more, highlighting the view you were trying to conceal beneath the half-open shirt.

The chaos was immediate and overwhelming, a chain reaction that challenged the physical endurance of men hardened by the bloodiest battles of the New World. Aboard the Red Force, discipline crumbled before that forbidden image. Limejuice, who was already watching the scene with a dangerous intensity, was the first to succumb; a stream of blood shot from his nostrils with such absurd pressure that it propelled him backward, causing him to flip over a rum barrel before sprawling on the deck, knocked out with his eyes rolled back.

From up high, Yasopp fared no better. The sniper, who moments before was shouting about crimes and injustice, felt his pressure spike in a fraction of a second. The nosebleed was so sudden and violent that he lost his footing on the railing, plummeting backward to the lower deck while a scarlet trail drew an arc in the air. He hit the ground already unconscious, a stupid smile on his face and his nose spouting like a decorative fountain.

Around them, the effect was systemic.Dozens of pirates from the support crew collapsed simultaneously, as if Shanks had unleashed a massive wave of Conqueror's Haki focused purely on lust. The sound of bodies hitting the polished wood echoed throughout the ship; men who would face Admirals without blinking were now falling like dominoes, victims of a collective hemorrhage that threatened to leave the Red Force without a functional crew before sunset. The deck, once a place of physical labor, transformed into a silent battlefield, where the only survivors were those who had the presence of mind to cover their own eyes in time.

Hongo, trying to maintain his medical dignity while averting his gaze toward the sky with his face burning, grabbed your shoulder and began dragging you toward the infirmary at a fast pace. "Enough bows! Inside, right now! Before I lose half the crew to anemia!"

The doctor practically shoved you into the lower-deck corridor, blocking with his own body the view of the sailors who were still trying to crane their necks. As you were led away, tripping over your own feet and hiding your face in your hands in a mix of crying and paralyzing shame, the stupefied silence you left behind on the main deck was almost tangible.

In the center of that vacuum, Benn remained in the exact same spot, static as a pillar of salt. He didn't move, didn't speak, and didn't even wipe away the tiny scarlet droplet that threatened to betray his own nasal resistance, keeping his eyes fixed on the horizon line while his previously flawless strategist brain repeated, in a completely profane loop, the image of that disheveled lace and the damp mark against your skin.

The obscene and pained groans surrounding him seemed distant, as if time had slowed down just for him. Behind Benn, the scene was pure devastation: dozens of lower-ranking pirates were scattered across the floor, passed out from the sudden and massive blood loss following the visual knockout. The streams of nosebleeds had been so violent and pressurized that many sailors were literally thrown backward, colliding with the bulwarks, masts, and random crates on the ship before slumping onto the deck. Between the unconsciousness and delirium caused by the sudden drop in pressure, the men who remained awake groaned in pure bliss, with silly smiles on their faces for having witnessed your breasts, mixed with grunts of pain from their aching bodies.

And Benn, the man who always anticipated enemy moves before they could even draw their swords, now felt vulnerable, exposed to a force of nature that none of his tactics could ever contain.

At the center of that mayhem, he remained petrified, the image of that bow and the saliva mark burning into his retinas with a disturbing clarity. With his fingers subtly trembling — an extremely rare detail for the most lethal marksman on the seas —, Beckman felt inside his pants pocket, pulling out a crumpled cigarette. He brought it to his lips and lit the lighter, fixing his eyes on the flame for a second before taking a deep drag, letting the dense smoke flood his lungs like an anesthetic for the fury and desire fighting inside him. The master strategist was, for the first time in his life, without an escape plan, while the rigidity of his shoulders contrasted with the chaos of knocked-out and bloody bodies that now decorated the deck of the Red Force.

Beside him, Shanks had completely lost any trace of a Yonkou's composure. The Captain was almost crouching, his face red as a pepper and his squeezed eyes tearing up from laughing so hard. He used his only hand to slap his own thigh loudly and rhythmically, his whole body shaking in spasms of hysterical and unbridled amusement. The Red Hair rose and threw his head back, letting out laughs so loud they echoed through the entire wooden structure of the ship, needing to lean on Benn's rigid shoulder so as not to fall to his knees on the deck. He could barely catch his breath, pointing with his trembling index finger at the passed-out sailors and then at the first mate's stupefied face, completely battered by the final "courtesy" you left behind that had just decimated half of his elite crew.

"Benn… Benn, did you see that?!" Shanks managed to choke out between laughs, almost out of air, leaning to the side to try to look at the first mate's static face, who still kept his eyes fixed on the void. "Her timing was flawless! She knocked you out, stamped her breasts on your mouth, and still pulled off a retreat with military honors! I have never seen a combined attack so efficient in the entire Grand Line!"

The red-haired man continued to laugh loudly, wiping tears from the corners of his eyes with the back of his hand and looking at the trail of destruction around. Yasopp and Limejuice were still sprawled on the deck, completely knocked out in pools of nasal blood and smiling like idiots, while the rest of the officers tried to recover from the blow.Benn did not reply. He merely dragged on his cigarette and clenched his jaw so tightly that the clicking of his teeth could be heard over the captain's laughter. His fingers closed around the pack in his pocket, while the detailed memory of that panoramic view, the crooked lace, and the damp mark on the soft skin refused to abandon his thoughts, burning any remnant of his patience.

Shanks finally began to straighten his posture, although his shoulders were still shaking with the remnants of laughter. He gave a loud slap to the first mate's rigid back, and adjusted the red mess on his head while letting out a long sigh, steeped in pure mockery.

"You know, Beck, I've seen many kings and queens bow to me on these seas," the Captain commented, catching his breath and looking toward the door through which you had vanished, "but I have never seen a bow so… enlightening in my life. I think even the World Government would declare world peace with a view like that."

Benn finally reacted, but not in the relaxed way Shanks expected. The first mate shut his eyes tightly, taking one last drag of his cigarette before throwing it on the deck and crushing it under his heavy boot. He brought his free hand to his face, massaging his temples with a brutal pressure that threatened to crack his own skull, trying to banish the pornographic image of your breasts from his mind. The silence emanating from him grew dense and suffocating, loaded with a murderous intent so heavy that the calm around him felt like the eve of a typhoon in the New World.

"If you say one more word, Shanks," Benn growled, his voice coming out so low, raspy, and dangerous that it made the nearest sailors shut up immediately, "I swear on my rifle that the next barrel I explode on this ship will be your private stash of Wano sake."

Shanks let out a genuine and loud laugh, taking a quick step back and raising his only hand in a theatrical surrender sign that overflowed with sarcasm. The Red Hair knew perfectly well when to pull the cord, and the gleam of pure mockery in his eyes indicated that he would savor and use that humiliation against his right-hand man for the coming months.

Around them, the surviving crew continued in a state of chaotic euphoria. Limejuice, who was already wiping himself with a handkerchief while sporting a ear-to-ear smile, gestured obscenely and enthusiastically to an immensely interested Lucky Roux, using his hands to draw in the air the full curves and the privileged "architecture" of your lace bra that he had had the audacity to witness.

While routine on the Red Force simulated a return to normalcy in the days that followed, Beckman felt that the structure of his personal reality had been irrevocably altered. He remained a fortress of stoicism, pulled back together by sheer willpower and the vital need to restore the wreckage of his authority. Now, he kept his gaze fixed on the horizon with a frigid intensity, deliberately ignoring the sidelong glances. However, the first mate's aura of invincibility had gained a permanent crack through which the crew's relentless mockery insisted on leaking.

To Benn's misfortune, the incident did not die; it flourished, turning into the most valuable inside joke in the history of the crew. It became a collective sport among the pirates, from the lower to the high echelon, to create codenames and stage absurd situations that referenced the first mate's "knockout." Deck sailors now walked around deliberately with three or four shirt buttons undone, grotesquely displaying their hairy chests; it was enough for Beckman to pass by them for the men to pretend the fabric was going to give way, covering their own chests with fake modesty while letting out sharp, affected squeals, imitating your panic.

The mockery spared not even the senior officers. Yasopp, recovered from his nosebleed, had taken to greeting Benn by bowing in exaggeratedly deep reverences, almost touching his nose to his own knees, while looking up out of the corner of his eye with an outrageous wink. Limejuice and Bonk Punch made a habit of passing by the first mate whispering that they urgently needed to "inspect the elasticity of the sail linen" or "test the resistance of lace against frontal impacts." Even Lucky Roux, chewing on a giant leg of meat, held back laughter as he loudly suggested that the crew hold an "intensive breathing control training," drawing boisterous laughs from Shanks, who watched everything from the front row.

It was enough for someone to mention the need to "measure the caliber of the cannons" or "check the softness of the supplies" for the entire deck to break into muffled giggles. The term "reverence of gratitude" became synonymous with any monumental disaster. The height of absurdity happened when a young recruit, while going to deliver a report to Benn, dropped the paper and, upon leaning down to pick it up, closed his eyes and fumbled in the air with both hands behind him, reenacting the way you had held the marksman's gray nape, making the deck explode in howls.

Benn's irritation boiled silently under his skin. At night, while he tried to concentrate on tactical maps in his cabin, the sound of footsteps and conversations in the corridors became a torture. Every time laughter exploded on the other side of the door, followed by his name or mentions of your forced stay in the ammunition depot, Benn's fingers squeezed the quill pen until it creaked. He knew exactly what they were laughing about.

His authority now had to be enforced through terror: he handed out orders to clean barnacles off the hull with toothbrushes and condemned the jokers to weeks on end watching the mainmast under storms. The respect around him, though it still existed through the strength of his fists and his rifle, was now steeped in a thick layer of perverted humor. Every laugh echoing down the hallway was a vibrant reminder that, to the crew, the most serious man in the bando had finally been humanized — and completely defeated — by the irrefutable physics of a woman and a lace bra.

Acting with his usual seriousness and ignoring those veiled taunts from the crew during the day demanded a superhuman effort that drained the pirate's energy. However, that entire rigid facade cracked mercilessly as soon as he locked himself in his cabin and found himself completely alone. Without the rational control he flaunted on the deck, his mind involuntarily began cataloging the weight and absurd softness of your breasts. The pillow where he rested his head, once comfortable, now seemed rustic, stiff, and lifeless before the memory of that warm, full flesh that had crushed his face. He sank his face into the linen of the bed, but the rough texture only reminded him, by cruel contrast, of how the skin of your bust was infinitely sillier and silkier.

Even everyday objects had become triggers for the first mate's tactile memory. When his calloused fingers held navigation reports or gripped the cold metal of his own rifle, his mind drew an inevitable parallel with the firmness and warmth of your full thighs that he had supported during the fall. The anatomical shape of any object he touched paled before the memory of that sinuous and dangerously soft silhouette.

In the darkness of the cabin, Benn stared at the ceiling, letting his guard down for a brief moment of weakness. "It is merely biological," he tried to argue with himself in a raspy whisper, but logic failed before the richness of details his mind insisted on cataloging. The volume of those breasts was a geographical absurdity, an opulence that defied the military order of the Red Force, but the real problem was the trail you left beyond the physical.

He caught himself remembering how your smile was capable of disarming the tension on the deck faster than any of his orders, or how the lightness of your laugh cut through the salty air, transforming the mood of the roughest pirates. His brain, addicted to patterns and strategies, now tracked the perfume you left around the ship — a sweet floral shampoo that shouldn't match the metallic smell of gunpowder now clinging to your skin from all the gunpowder you produced for the crew, but that, on you, created a dangerous, unique, and intoxicating fragrance.

"You are a security risk," he muttered to the silence of the room, his raspy voice vibrating in the darkness as he visualized the shine of your hair under the New World sun. Benn forced himself to shut his eyes tightly, trying to replace the image of your sweetness with the coldness of a tactical map, but the texture of your skin and the sound of your grateful voice remained there, whispering that he was not just dealing with a minor accident, but with a force that no military strategy could anticipate, contain, or defeat.

The next day, long before the New World sun conquered the horizon, Benn Beckman was already crossing the quiet deck of the Red Force. As the eternal guardian of discipline, he usually used that solitary hour to plan routes and savor the rare silence of the ship, devoutly believing that the calm of the early morning would be the perfect solvent to restore his self-control. He needed today to be an ordinary day, where gravity returned to obeying the laws of physics and not the whims of the most spectacular pair of breasts he had ever seen in his life.

He entered the kitchen with the expression of a man ready to command a fleet, moving with a professional indifference intended to be an insurmountable barrier. Benn devoutly believed that, far from Shanks's boisterous laughter and the open mockery of the other sailors, it would be simple to act as if your full breasts had never been the center of gravity of his existence. He settled at the long wooden table, keeping his eyes fixed on a map of sea currents while bringing his coffee mug to his mouth with a mechanical calmness.

The shock, however, came before the first sip. The barrier of indifference he had built with such effort during the night suffered an immediate crack as he registered movement by the stove. Freezing with the mug halfway to his lips, the first mate felt his entire body tense upon realizing that the isolation he sought had just been invaded by you, the very origin of all his imbalance.

There you were, moving with a sleepy yet dedicated energy, helping Lucky Roux prepare breakfast. The vision hit him with more force than a sudden gust of wind in the New World; after all, you were invariably the last one to wake up on the ship. That prolonged sleep was a permanent privilege, a luxury that Shanks and the officers gladly guaranteed, both because they knew you lacked the stamina for the rough deck work, and because the entire crew simply loved to spoil you.

Seeing you awake at that hour, performing everyday tasks that were never demanded of you — like peeling vegetables or organizing Roux's heavy pantry — broke the gray-haired man's logical sequence of thoughts. In the system of the Red Force, your only real duty was the production of the massive and valuable quantities of elite gunpowder and ammunition that supplied the crew's weapons; you never had to clean, fish, or submit to the exhausting kitchen routine.

The presence of your figure in that rustic environment instantly invaded Benn's nervous system. The sweet floral perfume, now mixed with the aroma of fresh bread and the persistent smell of gunpowder that always clung to your skin, seemed to fill all the available air in the kitchen, making his lungs demand the price of a sleepless night. Benn forced his eyes back to the dark liquid in his mug, his jaw clenching as he realized, with an uncomfortable tightness in his chest, that even the quiet of the early morning had been completely compromised by your unexpected presence.

"Good morning, Beck. Breakfast is almost ready," you murmured, your voice coming out in a slow, slightly raspy tone, typical of someone still fighting off the last remnants of sleep. There was a whiny tone in that greeting, a lazy softness that made the hairs on the back of Benn's neck stand up instantly.

Upon hearing that sound, a treacherous thought crossed his mind before he could build up his defenses: he caught himself imagining if that was exactly how, with that same low and vulnerable tone, you sounded every morning upon waking up. For a split second, his imagination betrayed him, placing him in a scenario where he woke up by your side and heard that voice before anything else. He shut his eyes for a brief moment, scolding himself with a silent fury for allowing such a domestic and intimate daydream to poison his rationality.

While Lucky Roux handled the frying pans with the agility of someone who had memorized every officer's palate years ago, you approached the table, balancing the tray with a sleepy care. Roux was following Benn's strict breakfast routine, but seeing you deliver the plate personally gave the scene a different weight.

"Lucky told me this is your favorite," you murmured, sliding the grilled fish and the steaming bowl of rice forward in front of him. With a slow movement, you placed the generous portion of kamaboko exactly where he liked it. "He said you don't start your day without your cured fish. So I made sure to help set up the plate just the right way."

You offered a small, heavy-lidded smile, and Benn noticed how proud you seemed of having memorized that detail about him, despite barely being able to keep your eyes open. The first mate looked at the plate before him and, for an instant, his analytical brain simply stopped processing information.

Lucky Roux was a master in the kitchen, but his aesthetic for the officers' breakfast was usually practical and robust. There, however, the kamaboko was not merely sliced; it had been meticulously cut into the shapes of small pink hearts, aligned with a precision that bordered on affection. Among the slices of grilled fish, you had scattered delicate edible flowers — the ones Roux bought at specific ports exclusively to decorate meals meant for you, knowing you loved pretty things.

Seeing those delicate and adorable adornments decorating the meal of one of the most feared pirates in the world was an absurd contrast. It was clear that that final touch of care, the almost artistic presentation, and the insistence on serving him personally were entirely yours. Benn fixed his gaze on the flowers and fish hearts, feeling a pang of something he refused to call tenderness, as he realized you had transformed his favorite food into a silent declaration of morning affection.

Normally, as you were the last one to wake up — a privilege the crew defended tooth and nail —, Roux only prepared your meal hours later, so there was no reason for you to go to the kitchen at that hour. But there you were, serving Benn's favorite food with your eyes still half-lidded, fighting against the weight of your eyelids. The moment you leaned over the table to position the plate, the perfume of flowers and gunpowder emanating from your skin warmed the air around him, turning the simple act of serving breakfast into something far too dangerous, far too domestic.

Benn, keeping his voice as steady as the barrel of his rifle, finally broke the silence.

"What are you doing up at this hour?" he asked, the authority in his voice softened by a touch of bewilderment. "The sun hasn't even shown its face yet."

You let out a long, sleepy yawn, covering your mouth with the palm of your hand before answering with your voice still thick with sleep.

"The sea was rough. The ship gave a lurch and I ended up falling out of my hammock," you murmured, shaking your head lightly as if trying to banish the mental fog. "I couldn't sleep after the scare, so I walked over and found Lucky starting his shift. He's always the first one up, isn't he? So I decided to help assemble your plate before trying to go back to my hammock to see if I can get a few more hours of sleep."

In response, Benn watched as you took a small step back, still swaying, realizing that the effort to decorate his plate with hearts and flowers was the first thing you had chosen to do after being thrown to the floor by the sway of the Red Force. The thought that, even dazed and knocked down by the tide, your first inclination was to take care of his breakfast, hit Benn harder than any wave in the New World. He merely nodded, gripping his coffee mug with firm fingers, trying to ignore how that simple, dedicated explanation made that breakfast suddenly feel like the most important meal he had ever had in his life.

You took a small step back after serving more coffee into Benn's mug, your body swaying lightly from side to side while a long, silent yawn overcame you once more. Your eyes, which were shining with the pride of having memorized Benn's preference for kamaboko, now fought to remain open, and sleepiness seemed to weigh on your shoulders like a heavy blanket.

Lucky Roux, who was watching the scene out of the corner of his eye while finishing preparing the rest of the breakfast, let out a low, warm laugh. The cook wiped his hands on his apron and stepped closer with a gentle smile, noticing how you looked like a tiny statue of sleep on the verge of collapsing.

"Careful not to end up falling asleep inside the teapot, dear," Roux teased, gently taking the utensil from your hands before you could spill the coffee out of sheer exhaustion. "You've already done the heavy lifting here. Beck is already properly served with his treats, and the rest of the crew is only going to show up when the smell of bacon reaches the dormitories."

He gave an encouraging pat to your shoulder, pointing toward the hallway that led to the communal cabins.

"Go rest. The sun is still far from coming up and you don't need to be up before eight. I'll take care of everything here now," the cook stated, with that typical indulgence of the Red Hair Pirates who always sought to protect your sleep.

You nodded slowly, letting out a murmur of thanks that sounded more like a sleepy sigh, and cast one last drowsy glance at Benn.

"Bye Lucky, enjoy your meal, Beck," you said, your voice almost fading away as you began to walk away, dragging your feet toward the dormitory.

Beckman remained silent, the mug of hot coffee between his hands, watching your back as you disappeared through the kitchen door. The silver-haired man felt the atmosphere grow suddenly colder with your departure. The early morning silence, which he valued so much, now seemed far too empty. He looked down at the plate in front of him, fixing his eyes on the small kamaboko hearts and the delicate flowers, realizing that, although Lucky Roux was right about the hour, his own day had already been irrevocably altered by that brief and sweet morning invasion.

He remained motionless for a long time after you left, his eyes fixed on those little fish hearts and the delicate petals decorating his plate. There was something about that sight that hit him in a way far deeper and more disorienting than the instinctive lust that had haunted him over the last few days. It wasn't just the desire for flesh or the visual shock of your open blouse; it was the fact that you, even knocked down by the sea and dizzy with sleep, had dedicated your first hour of consciousness to creating something aesthetically pleasing just for him.

That unpretentious dedication created an internal confusion that he did not dare to name.

It was a sensation of warmth that expanded through his chest, an instinctive urge to wall off the space around you and ensure that nothing — not the swaying of the sea, nor the roughness of the crew, and least of all any other man — would ever disturb you again. He felt a silent need for that affection to remain a secret shared only between him, you, and the walls of the kitchen.

But that wish vanished when, moments later, as the sun finally began to dye the sky orange, the silence was shattered by the noisy entrance of the officers. Yasopp, still humorously pale from his previous blood loss, was the first to notice Benn's plate before even sitting down.

"What on earth is that, Beck? Hearts for breakfast?" Yasopp let out a boisterous laugh, extending his fork toward the table with a malicious gleam in his eyes. "What happened to this ship? Did Roux finally decide to flirt with you, or is our iron commander softening up toward romanticism?"

The sniper tilted his head, analyzing the flowers and the precise cuts in the fish before nudging Lucky Roux's arm as he passed by with a platter of bread. "Hey, Roux! If you want to propose to Beck, I think you should have used something a bit more rustic than edible petals, don't you think?"

Lucky Roux let out a muffled chuckle, shaking his head while arranging the plates on the table. "Don't look at me, Yasopp. I just handle the fire. It was our little gunpowder producer who decorated everything like that," the cook explained, casting a knowing glance at Benn's plate.

"She fell out of her hammock because of the sea's sway… she looked like an adorable little bird falling out of its nest before its time," Lucky continued, his voice softened by genuine amusement.

"She stood there, all dazed with messy hair, but instead of accepting a glass of warm milk with my help to go back to sleep, she insisted that Beck's plate needed a 'special touch.' According to her, it was the only way to make up for the mess she caused and to thank him for preventing her little bones from breaking during that fall several days ago. She made sure to decorate every single inch of his food just to please old Benn."

Yasopp raised his eyebrows, his grin growing even wider as he turned back to face Benn's unperturbed expression. "Ah, I see. So today's coffee came seasoned with exclusive dedication? Let me see if the taste is as sweet as it looks."

Before the metal of the fork could even get near the plate, Benn's hand came down on the table with a dull thud, covering the plate in a protective gesture. The look he shot Yasopp was so icy and territorial that the sniper instantly pulled his hand back, blinking in surprise. Benn didn't say a single word, ignoring the jokes and whistles that began to circulate between Shanks and the others about his "romantic" breakfast. He simply ate every single piece with an almost sacred seriousness, refusing to share a single crumb of that sliced affection.

At the end of the meal, while the mess hall was filled with Shanks's boisterous laughter and the noisy discussions of the other officers, Benn did something that defied every fiber of his pragmatic logic. With his large, calloused fingers, he carefully picked up one of the small edible flowers that remained on the plate. He observed it for a second, feeling the delicate perfume that was now irrevocably associated with your presence, and slid it with an atypical lightness into his pants pocket.

He stood up, ignoring the curious glances that still hovered over his empty plate, and left the room with his usual firm, silent stride. However, instead of heading directly to the deck or to the crow's nest to begin his supervision routine, Benn diverged from his path.

His steps led him back to the personal sanctuary of his private cabin. In the silence of the room, he removed the flower from his pocket with the care of someone handling a sensitive, explosive component. He walked over to the shelf and picked up one of his densest notebooks, a volume filled with complex naval tactics and ammunition logs.

Benn opened the book to a random page, positioned the flower right in the center, and closed the volume firmly, pressing the petal between lines of ballistic calculations and war strategies. There, it would dry and be preserved, far from the eyes of the crew and the sunlight. It was a fragment of your sweetness that he would keep only for himself, a secret hidden beneath the steel of his professional facade, ensuring that, while you rested in your hammock, a part of that morning care remained under his absolute and silent guard.

However, the weight of that secret seemed to occupy more space in the cabin than the book itself on the shelf. Benn didn't return to the deck. Instead, he took a step back and stared at the closed door, feeling the weight of the latch as if it were the only thing keeping his sanity intact against the uproar outside.

In the weeks that followed, the Red Force glided through waters that seemed to reflect the calm Benn tried so hard to impose on his own spirit. To him, that mirrored sea was the perfect metaphor for the illusion he chose to inhabit: that his feelings — that uncomfortable, deep tenderness he adamantly refused to name — had finally submerged.

His sanity, always the sharpest tool in the Red Hair Pirates' arsenal, showed signs of stabilization, allowing him to go back to believing the comfortable lie that he could keep you confined to an isolated, cold compartment of his mind, labeled merely as "recruit" or "specialist." He strove to turn what he felt into a purely physical, controllable phenomenon, trying to ignore how the swaying of the ship seemed to accentuate the curve of your hips or how the merciless light of the New World highlighted the texture of your skin. Benn wanted to believe that the affection blooming in his chest was just background noise in the pirate life, a temporary static that his discipline would soon be able to silence completely.

However, fate — or perhaps his own negligence in underestimating the severity of what he felt — decided that the first mate had not yet been tested to his maximum capacity of endurance. The peace he was savoring was, in truth, a cruel truce, the eye of a hurricane that was merely waiting for the right moment to collapse. A new blow was about to shake the defenses he had built with such meticulous care, proving that no military discipline or code of conduct would be shield enough against the chaos that your mere presence was capable of instigating in the impeccable order of his world.

Night in the New World had begun deceptively tranquil, with a clear sky and a calm sea that allowed the ship to glide without haste. However, in that region of the ocean, calm was always a trap. In a matter of moments, without any prior warning, the weather turned completely: black clouds swallowed the stars and a violent storm broke over the Red Force, transforming the scene into a true tactical hell for all the pirates on board.

The deck, which minutes before was safe, turned into a labyrinth of hissing ropes, howling winds, and gigantic waves that struck the hull with the force of titanic hammers. However, for you, all that external danger and the fury of the elements seemed to operate in a parallel dimension.

With a serenity that bordered on recklessness, you ignored the sky painted in a heavy lead-grey and the harsh warnings of the veterans. While the rest of the crew rushed to secure the cargo and reef the sails under the whip of the rain, you went up to the upper deck, driven by a domestic logic that did not bow to the elements. You hung the clothes on the line with a disconcerting calmness, humming softly as if the ship were anchored on a summer afternoon, completely oblivious to the lightning already stitching the horizon.

The ocean, however, did not tolerate such distraction. A colossal column of water, raised by the fury of the New World, crashed onto the deck with the impact of a heavy-caliber cannon. The liquid mass washed over the gangway with violence, ripping the pieces of fabric from the clothesline and swallowing them into the darkness of the churning sea in the blink of an eye. The blow of the ocean left you soaked and trembling to the core.

Benn left the upper deck in a march that bordered on flight, but the fury simmering in his chest was faster than his steps. He had seen enough; the image of you soaked under the cascade of salt water, frightened and vulnerable to the sudden blow of that freezing wave, had burned into his retinas like the flash of a point-blank gunshot.

However, escape was a luxury the first mate could not afford. The sky was pouring down in a violent storm, and the Red Force battled against monstrous waves that demanded the presence and command of the strategist. He was trapped there, beneath the relentless rain, but his legendary capacity for focus had been completely shattered.

The reason for the anger clouding his features was not the stress of coordinating the ship under a storm; it was a purely emotional, overwhelming panic that he tried to suppress at all costs. With you out there, exposed to the fury of the New World, Benn's brain prioritized your protection above any navigational maneuver and the protection of the very crew he had commanded for decades alongside Shanks.

Every time the wind howled, he felt his stomach churn with the real and terrible fear of seeing you being swept away by the force of the water, sliced by a snapped steel cable, or crushed by loose rigging.The massive man stopped abruptly and turned in your direction, his silver eyes flashing with a severity that cloaked this zealous panic.

"Inside! Now!", he roared, his voice cutting through the sound of the gale and overriding the screams of the sailors. He advanced toward you with heavy steps, using his immense stature to place himself between your trembling body and the danger of the open deck, his fists clenched upon seeing how defenseless you looked under the deluge. "Have you lost your mind?! The ship is facing a storm and you are out here exposing yourself to this danger? Get off the deck and go straight to the cabin before one of these waves carries you into the sea!"

The rebuke was harsh, a military order that left no room for argument, but Benn's locked jaw revealed the thin line separating him from despair. He needed to coordinate the men, but his eyes insisted on tracking your every move, unable to focus until you were safe.

Benn remained motionless under the deluge, acting as a human barrier against the wind and waves, watching your every trembling step until you finally crossed the threshold of the quarters' door and vanished from sight. Only when the dry snap of the wood echoed over the sound of the gale did he allow himself to release the breath he didn't even know he was holding. The imperceptible tremor in his calloused hands betrayed the truth: he wasn't mad at you, but rather furious at his own vulnerability, terrified by the way the fear of losing you had paralyzed him.

The sea continued to roar and the Red Force was still fighting the fury of the elements. Benn forced himself to turn his back on the corridor and refocused on the storm, using the urgency of the maneuvers and shouted commands like a whip to lash his own thoughts back into line. He spent hours under the relentless rain, his clothes soaked and his face battered by salt, leading the crew alongside Shanks through the chaos until the ship finally reached a zone of safe waters, where the waves became merely a rhythmic and predictable sway.

With the end of the emergency alert and the danger duly neutralized, the order to turn in was given. The pirates, exhausted and punished by the cold, were granted permission to finally leave the deck, take a hot shower, and rest in the quarters to recover their energy. The murmur of the men slowly retiring calmed the structure of the Red Force, leaving only the sound of creaking wood beneath the calm sea.Only then did Benn seek the refuge of the oak walls of his own cabin. Upon locking the door, the silence of the room weighed heavier than the storm. Benn struggled to assemble the debris of his composure, trying to convince himself that that protective fury was nothing more than the zeal of a responsible officer. He repeated mentally that his reaction had been strictly hierarchical; the panic of a first mate seeing to the safety of a reckless subordinate amid the chaos of a drenched deck.

However, as he stripped off his damp shirt and began to unbuckle his belt, the lie became difficult to sustain. The coldness of the wet fabric against his skin was nothing compared to the heat still throbbing at the side of his skull when remembering you. He wanted to believe that any recruit in that situation would receive the same harsh rebuke, but the visceral agony he had felt seeing you exposed had no roots in military discipline. It was the raw despair of a man who saw his entire world vulnerable to the storm. He realized, with a growing bitterness, that the storm outside had passed, but the one you had ignited in his chest — the irremediable transition from professional protection to a devoted possessiveness — was only just beginning to gain strength.

He heard the hesitant footsteps in the corridor even before the wood of the door emitted any sound. The light, uncertain gait, which contrasted completely with the heavy, noisy strides of the other pirates in the crew, made Benn's fingers freeze instantly over the wet leather of his belt, interrupting the motion before the first pin was even released from the buckle. Soon after, a series of low, fearful knocks echoed against the oak of the entrance, followed by a voice that crossed the partition with the softness of an open wound.

"Beck... can I come in? Please."

The tone was trembling, laden with a vulnerability that disarmed the first mate faster than any external threat. The cadence of that voice indicated that you were still under the effect of the storm's shock — or, worse, the harshness with which he had treated you on deck minutes ago. Benn closed his eyes tightly, pulling his hands away from his belt and taking a deep breath to try and dispel the fog of conflicting feelings clouding his mind, forcing himself to recover a steady voice before giving any response.

He knew he ought to send you away. Allowing you to enter at that moment was the same as walking deliberately toward a precipice, for the line dividing the officer from the man had never been so tenuous and fragile. As the first mate of the Red Force, the officer was a fortress of ice and logic, a figure of authority responsible for the order and life of every soul on board, someone who could never afford to have favorites or weaknesses. But the man — the one who harbored dark desires and feelings of attachment that he flatly refused to name — operated under completely different rules. This man knew, with a disturbing clarity, that you would never be just another crew member; you broke all his tactical barriers and evoked a need for protection that he had never directed toward any other pirate in those seas.

The tremor in your voice was the hook that pulled the man to the surface, defeating the officer's discipline and exposing precisely the tenderness he had spent days trying to deny. Unable to fight against the primitive instinct to be the shelter for your fear and keep you safe and far from the rest of the world, Benn took a step forward, approaching the entrance without touching the doorknob.

"It's open," he murmured, his voice coming out lower, hoarser, and infinitely less severe than he intended.

Upon warning that the door had never been locked from the inside, Benn remained motionless, watching the bronze latch begin to turn slowly from the outside. He felt that, by allowing you to enter his sanctuary and cross that boundary in that state, he was accepting that there was no turning back for the order he had tried so hard to preserve.

The heavy wood yielded with a soft creak, breaking the tense silence of the room and revealing your silhouette framed by the dark corridor. The instant the doorway opened completely, the cabin's atmosphere was immediately invaded by the chill emanating from your clothes and by that familiar floral perfume, now diluted by rainwater.

You entered his cabin like an apparition born from the storm itself, leaving a trail of water that stained the polished oak floor. Each of your steps emitted a damp, heavy sound, and the constant tremor running through your shoulders accentuated the fragility of the sight he was now forced to witness in that small, suffocating space.

He remained static, feeling the cabin's air grow thin as the details that the deck's urgency had omitted revealed themselves under the yellowish light of the lanterns. The fabric of your clothes, transformed by the ocean into a translucent film, molded to your curves with a fidelity he desperately tried to classify as irrelevant. The white blouse, now a freezing second skin, revealed the tone of your flesh and the rhythmic tremor that denounced how much the cold of the sea had penetrated your bones.

Your hair, plastered to your face and neck in heavy dark strands, dripped over your shoulders, and the expression you wore — a self-conscious smile, tinged by embarrassment and cold — was the definition of a trap. Beckman watched the water trickle down your body, tracing winding paths over your pale, goose-bumped skin, and felt a dull pressure in his chest. The sight of your physical vulnerability, the way your lips were slightly bluish and how you tried to embrace your own body to retain some warmth, awakened in him an instinct that went far beyond an officer's protection.

The presence of a soaked, trembling, and vulnerable subordinate in the private quarters of the first mate was an outrageous breach of protocol. In the unwritten military code of the Red Force, Benn Beckman's room was an untouchable sanctuary of authority; allowing you to enter there, at that hour of the night, with no technical justification or navigation report in hand, was a blatant trampling of the crew's hierarchy. A rigid officer would have ordered you to knock on the doctor's door or return to the recruits' common quarters, but the words of rebuke simply died in his throat.

Under the dim light of the cabin's lanterns, you looked utterly pitiful. The constant tremor shaking your body and the rhythmic sound of saltwater dripping from your clothes and pooling on the clean oak floor made Benn's chest tighten with a painful force. In the massive man's perspective, that sight awakened an overwhelming and primitive sense of protection; it was exactly like finding a lost and frightened fawn, shivering with cold in the middle of the forest after failing miserably to find shelter from the fury of a storm.

The need to act became a physical instinct, a pressure rising up his throat and clouding the tactical vision he took so much pride in possessing. Benn was also soaked, his trousers clinging and heavy from the cold sea water, trying to rely on that physical chill to numb his own senses. However, the heat emanating from your defenseless silhouette acted like a dangerous magnet, pulling the older man away from reason.

A barbaric thought, stripped of any professional ethics, crossed his mind with the violence of a cannon shot: the urgency to wrap you in his arms, to use his own stature and the warmth of his broad chest to extinguish that tremor and, in the process, teach you what pleasure truly meant in the hands of a mature man, who knew exactly how to take what he desired. It was a swift and devastating vision — the image of both of them stripped of cold fabrics, skin against skin in the darkness, where he would guide you away from that vulnerable innocence and initiate you into the raw intensity of adulthood.

The weight of that fantasy almost made him take a step forward, his breath heavy in his lungs while his grey eyes locked onto the wet line of your neck. The temptation to yield to impulse and break the remainder of the distance between you vibrated in the air for a fraction of a second so real that the environment itself seemed to warm. However, before the line of sanity was crossed, the sound of your teeth chattering from the cold cut through the trance, bringing him back to reality with the force of a punch to the stomach.

Beckman felt the blood rush hot through his body and clenched his calloused hands into fists, closing his eyes for a second while a sharp shake of his head tried to repel the idea. He berated himself internally with a silent ferocity, considering it pathetic that a pirate with his reputation and experience was so vulnerable, with his heart hammering in his chest, simply from seeing a soaked and helpless recruit standing on his rug.

"Benn, I'm a mess, aren't I?" You laughed softly, a crystalline sound that seemed strangely fragile against the rumble of thunder shaking the ship. You hugged your own body tighter, your shoulders rising in a tremor that you tried, without success, to hide. "The storm... it took everything. I couldn't save a single piece from the clothesline."

Your voice came out soft, laden with a vulnerability that made Benn's chest burn. You averted your gaze to the corner of the cabin, your cheeks tinged with a blush of shame that only heightened the paleness of your damp skin caused by the cold.

"I should have listened to the advice. They told me not to hang anything out today, but I thought there would be time. Now the dormitory is packed, the hammocks are all taken, and I..."

You hesitated, looking small and pitiful before his immensity, an image that pulled an instant trigger of protection and deep guilt in the older pirate. Benn, who seconds before had been devouring you with predatory thoughts, felt the weight of his own lust crash down upon his shoulders like an avalanche of lead. Seeing you there, helpless and seeking his support, made the carnal desire turn into a bitter taste of shame in his mouth; it felt like a sacrilege to have directed such depravity at someone who clearly could barely stand from the cold. The innocence of your helplessness acted as a reality check in the first mate's mind, making him feel almost cowardly for having lusted after your vulnerability instead of fulfilling his role to protect it.

"Do you... do you happen to have an extra shirt?" Your question floated in the air, your voice almost fading as you looked away, visibly embarrassed by your own lack of judgment. "I just need something to wear while... while the only clothes I have left dry."

You made a vague gesture toward your own body, indicating the soaked fabric clinging to your skin like a second layer, revealing far more than you intended.

"The storm took everything else off the line. These are the only ones I have and they are heavy with so much water. If you could lend me something, I won't bother you for long, I swear."

For Benn, seeing you there, shivering and apologizing for something so trivial, triggered an urgent alarm in his mind. The vulnerability in your voice, mixed with the helplessness of having lost your few possessions to the fury of the sea, caused the first mate's tactical pragmatism to be cast aside completely. You looked so small and unprotected under the flickering light of the cabin that any other priority on the ship vanished, replaced by an immediate need to offer you shelter and stem that cold that seemed to punish your body.

However, resolving that situation required a decision from him that clashed directly with his entire rigid routine. His brain, accustomed to processing scenarios through the strict lens of duty, tried to recalculate the route to return control to the officer.

Benn knew exactly what the code of conduct demanded: he should order you to head to the communal showers, stand in line with the rest of the crew, borrow a change of clothes from some smaller pirate, and spend the night under the neutral watch of the infirmary. It was the logical path.

However, logic died before reaching his lips. The image of you walking back through the wet corridors of the ship, helpless and with your teeth chattering from the cold, was a scene he simply could not allow; leaving you to walk out in that state felt like both a strategic and a human error. But what truly turned the grey-haired pirate's stomach, awakening a visceral and violent rejection, was the thought of seeing you accept aid from another member of the crew. Thinking of another man wrapping a coat around your shoulders, offering you dry clothes that would carry someone else's scent, or guiding your trembling body to the infirmary was entirely inconceivable. The mere glimpse of such a thought wounded the deepest, most primitive territorial instinct that now dictated his heartbeat. Justifying to himself that, as the first mate and the highest authority in that room, the responsibility of ensuring the safety of a recruit in distress was uniquely and exclusively his, Benn made his decision in a fraction of a second: you would not cross that door again until you were properly warm and under his direct care.

This urgency to eradicate the tremor shaking your shoulders became so absolute that the massive man completely forgot about his own physical situation. He ignored the fact that he was partially undressed, without the shirt he had just taken off, and that his trousers were still clinging to his legs, soaked in freezing saltwater. The damp leather of his belt and the cold fabric stuck to his skin became mere invisible details; Benn felt neither his own cold nor the discomfort of the salt drying on his body. Every ounce of his attention and energy was focused on the mission of bringing warmth back to you, making his own well-being seem irrelevant before the need to protect yours.

"Stay here. Don't leave," he ordered, his voice coming out in a low, dense tone, almost a command.

Benn turned away, leaving you in the center of the cabin, and headed to the adjoining compartment that served as his private bathroom. The space, although compact due to the ship's engineering, exuded the understated luxury and privacy granted only to the crew's first mate. The floor and walls were lined with dark, waterproofed wood that gleamed under the light of a lantern fixed to the wall. On the grey marble countertop, genuine steel razors, fine-bristle brushes, handcrafted soaps, and a heavy-framed mirror were lined up, reflecting the steam that was already beginning to accumulate in the room.

With a mechanical motion, Benn approached the immense polished copper bathtub, which sat beside a dark metal shower. He turned off the hot water tap he had been preparing for himself prior to your arrival. That water, which he had intended to use to wash away the salt and exhaustion of the storm, now served a far more urgent purpose. He dipped his calloused hand into the water to test the temperature; he needed to ensure it was perfectly warm to chase the cold from your body, but not to the point of hurting your delicate skin.

Satisfied with the heat, he opened the door of a small cabinet built into the wall. Inside, among his stored towels, he reached into the back of the shelf for a small dark glass bottle containing floral aromatic oils — a forgotten gift from a lover of the past. Without any hesitation, Benn opened the bottle and poured several drops of the scented liquid into the bathwater, watching the golden rings swirl into the dense steam, which soon began to scent the air with a soft, welcoming fragrance, capable of neutralizing the smell of sea spray and storm.

Before returning to fetch you, he went to his main wardrobe. With a heavy, decisive movement, he pulled out one of his finest black shirts — a garment of soft, heavy fabric that he knew would swallow your silhouette and warm you — and a towel of thick, plush cotton. That bathroom, the greatest privilege of his rank, now became the only safe haven where he could hide, protect, and pamper you far from the claws of the cold.

Upon finishing his preparations and returning to the main body of the cabin to call for you, Beckman froze in his tracks beneath the doorframe.

You remained exactly where he had left you, in the center of the trail of dark water that continued to trickle from your clothes, forming a small puddle that slowly expanded across the oak floorboards. You were standing, arms wrapped tightly against your chest in a vain attempt to stem the violent tremors shaking your shoulders. What truly disarmed him, filling the pirate's chest with a painful tenderness, was noticing how you avoided leaning on any of the leather armchairs or the edge of his bed, preferring the discomfort of remaining upright, soaked, and exhausted just so as not to stain or ruin his furniture.

When you raised your face, directing a pitiful, suffering, and at the same time adorable look at him — like someone silently apologizing for causing so much trouble —, Benn felt that small display of respect and care hit him head-on. Under the golden, flickering illumination of the lanterns, you looked like a shipwrecked creature who had just found dry land, and he felt a pang of something he knew was not lust, but an affection so deep and genuine that it frightened him more than any enemy in the New World.

"Go, take off those clothes before the cold sets in your bones for good," he said, his voice coming out in an unprecedented and almost imperceptible softness that contrasted with his usual authority.

With slow steps so as not to startle you, Benn approached and placed one of his immense, calloused hands with extreme delicacy against your back, guiding your trembling body toward the heated bathroom. As you crossed the threshold of the adjoining room, the warm, fragrant moisture of the bath's steam enveloped you both instantly; Benn observed, with a tightness in his chest, the exposed skin of your neck and arms immediately get goosebumps from the comforting thermal shock. He held out the plush towel and the soft-fabric black shirt with reverent care, handing them to you as if entrusting a fragile treasure to a creature he feared breaking with a simple abrupt movement.

"Take your time. I'll be right outside," he murmured, before closing the bathroom door to give you complete privacy.Back in the main cabin, the room's silence was filled only by the muffled sound of the bathwater and the wind that still battered the windows of the Red Force. Ignoring his own physical discomfort, Beckman walked to a corner and grabbed a thick cleaning rag. With heavy, resigned movements, he knelt on the floor and wiped up every drop of the puddle of water you had left on the floorboards, wanting to ensure the room was spotless and safe for when you came out.

When he finished, he tossed the damp cloth into a corner and walked with heavy shoulders to the dark leather armchair, dragging it with a dull creak to reposition it strategically: with its back to the bathroom door and facing the cabin's main entrance. Benn sat down heavily, allowing the moisture of his own trousers and his salt-and-water-stained boots to mark the upholstery he so valued. Crossing his arms over his broad, bare chest, he fixed his silver eyes on the door leading to the corridor, positioning himself as an unwavering, protective sentinel; from there, he would not budge for anything.

He transformed into an absolute barrier, a wall of silence ensuring that your privacy was inviolable. Although they were in his private sanctuary — a place where no crew member in their right mind would dare enter without a formal invitation —, Benn guarded the main entrance with unnecessary rigor, using military tactics to justify his own stance with his back turned to where you were. Deep down, that guard facing the entrance was not against unlikely intruders, but a desperate attempt to maintain internal order, avoiding looking toward the bathroom while the sound of the water and the steam escaping through the cracks tortured his senses.

Searching for his usual refuge to calm his nerves and chase away the cold that was finally starting to take its toll, he reached into his trouser pocket for his pack of cigarettes. However, his calloused fingers found only ruined, softened cardboard; the entire box had been completely soaked during the storm on deck. Letting out a low sigh of frustration, he got up from the armchair, walked with heavy steps to the oak desk, and opened the drawer to grab a new, dry pack.

Back in his position in the armchair, he lit the cigarette with hands that were now steady, though his knuckles still throbbed from the tension of the accumulated cold. The first drag was deep, and the heat of the ember finally began to warm his chest from within, helping to combat the moisture rising from his wet clothes. However, the familiar taste of the smoke brought none of its usual numbing relief; the tobacco tasted bitter, unable to compete with the overwhelming awareness that, just a few paces behind his back and protected only by a wooden door, you were naked in his bathroom.

Through the grey haze of smoke, he watched the room become progressively stifling, warmed by the hot steam that brought with it the floral aroma of the oil mixing into the dense scent of oak and tobacco. Beckman, the man who had guarded secrets of state and treasures of incalculable value, realized he had never been so alert.

His ears, trained to distinguish the subtle click of a trigger being cocked even amidst the roar of battle, picked up with torturous clarity the sound of water moving on the other side of the wooden partition. Your every movement in there seemed to resonate in his mind like a dissonant note in his symphony of control, turning the humid heat of the cabin into a hothouse where carnal appetite flourished, suffocating and inevitable.

His imagination, fed by proximity, was an untamable force drawing every detail in the darkness beneath his eyelids. He visualized you submerged in the hot, fragrant water he himself had prepared, your skin — previously pale and punished by the salt — gradually recovering its rosy hue and life under the embrace of the heat. The dense steam kissed your curves as you settled into the bath's copper, and the initial thermal shock made your skin break out in goosebumps, accentuating the soft texture of your arms and chest. Benn could almost see the tips of your breasts harden, erect and sensitive beneath the stroke of the warm water and the stifling air.

It was silent torture to imagine you sliding slippery, soapy hands over your own body, spreading the flower-scented water down your damp thighs, moving toward your sensitive core and abdomen, only to slowly massage your breasts under the pretext of washing yourself. Every noise coming from the adjoining bathroom — the stroke of the sponge against your skin, the sound of water trickling down as you raised your arms to wash your neck and shoulders, and the long, hoarse, soft sigh of pure relief you let out upon feeling the warmth and the touch of your own hands — acted like a precision shot against his resolve. He imagined your expression now, your head thrown back against the copper rim, eyes closed and lips parted in a calm, satisfied smile to finally be safe, warm, and relaxed, entirely oblivious to the silent chaos and heavy arousal you caused in the man guarding your door.

His mind remained trapped in this labyrinth of intense thoughts when, suddenly, the soft splash of water agitating against the metal indicated that you were finally stepping out of the bath. The sound of the liquid draining marked the end of the bath and, right after, the sound of water ceased abruptly.

The silence that settled over the cabin was no relief, but a sentence. The air grew suddenly thick, heavy with an expectation so dense that Benn felt his own chest lock up. The only remaining sound was the solitary crackle of his cigarette ember, consuming itself between fingers that, for the first time in decades, seemed unsure of their next move.

He remained static, ignoring the smoke burning his eyes, as his senses turned entirely to the subtle noises coming from the other side of the partition: the soft brush of the towel against your skin and, finally, the almost imperceptible sound of his shirt's cotton fabric sliding over your body. Each tiny sound was a coordinate he mapped against his own will, constructing a mental image that tortured him with surgical precision.

The expectation was a form of controlled agony. The strategist who used to anticipate every move of an enemy fleet now felt disarmed, unable to predict the impact of seeing you wearing something that carried his size and his scent of tobacco and oak. Benn was, admittedly, an experienced lover. Over decades of sailing the seas, he had bedded and woken up with many women in almost every port in the New World, but the dynamic had always been strictly impersonal, settled in passing inn rooms or noisy taverns. He had never, in all his pirate life, allowed a woman to cross the threshold of his personal space inside the Red Force, much less yielded his own everyday clothes to her.

Now, however, the first mate caught himself subverting his own inflexible rules because of you. He had handed you the hot bath he would originally have used and his finest clean clothes, all to shield your fragile body against the risk of chills and the sea air's discomfort. While you enjoyed that intimate refuge, Benn remained out there, exposed to the biting cold of his own soaked clothes weighing against his skin, without showing a single shiver thanks to the severe physical discipline he had developed over years of battle.

It was an invasion of privacy he himself had authorized, a silent surrender of his personal territory to a woman who seemed unaware of the chaos she caused. When the doorknob finally turned, the click of metal echoed like a gunshot. Still seated in the armchair, Benn tensed every muscle in his massive body, his broad shoulders drawing a rigid line under the dimness while he kept his gaze fixed on the spiral smoke of the cigarette, forcing himself to appear indifferent while his heart hammered in his chest. He felt the cabin's air grow suddenly thin as the door slowly opened, releasing a thick cloud of warm steam that brought with it the floral perfume of the oil mixed with the sweet heat of your skin.

"Benn..." you sighed, and the sound of his first name uttered by your voice in a joyful and relieved way was the fuse that broke his paralysis.

Resting his calloused hand on his knee, Beckman rose from the armchair in a slow, almost solemn movement. He turned his immense body and forced himself to face you.

You emerged from the bathroom, and the sight was a direct blow to his chest. Wrapped in the vastness of his black linen shirt, you looked thoroughly satisfied and comforted, stepping out still a bit damp and with your face flushed from the bath's heat. In his perspective, that image was that of a content, joyful fawn finally rescued from the storm, sheltering under the wing of her protector. The dark fabric, tailored for his broad shoulders and stature, had turned into an improvised dress that swallowed your silhouette, falling loosely and reaching the middle of your thighs.

At first, the sight of that dark hem swaying against your skin made Benn's stomach churn. It was a violent jolt, fueled by a purely virile masculine instinct that lit a wild urgency in his mind: the raw impulse to throw you onto the mattress and fuck that fragility hard until tearing away every single one of your moans.

Inside Beckman, a silent and violent war instantly erupted, like two hungry wolves dueling for control of a single territory, or as if two distinct men were fighting for command of the same body. On one side stood the tactical officer, the fortress of ice and rationality demanding order and military decorum; on the other, the carnal, primitive man, roaring to subdue any trace of civility. And, before that sight, the officer lost the fight. The barrier of reason collapsed completely, forcing the strategist to yield control to the man, who now commanded his every racing heartbeat.

His silver eyes descended in a predatory manner, locking onto the stark contrast of your skin against the black fabric. He noticed how you clumsily tried to pull up the collar of that men's shirt. Being a piece of his, the size was absurdly large for your frame, causing the heavy fabric to slip insistently and reveal the delicate curve of your collarbone. That loose fit turned into an improvised, obscene neckline, opening a gap that focused relentlessly on your breasts, which nearly escaped the vastness of that garment with every frustrated attempt you made to cover yourself.

Seeing you molded, marked, and nearly naked beneath a piece carrying his ownership and dense scent of tobacco was a devastating impact. However, when his gaze finally rose and met yours, blind lust gained a new layer of complexity. Your raw, disarmed beauty beneath the cabin's dim light, combined with those shining eyes displaying a genuinely grateful, content, and dependent look, made the air vanish entirely from Beckman's lungs. The silent gratitude you exuded threw the man who usually predicted everything off his axis, causing the predatory wolf to step back a pace, tamed by the overwhelming impulse to tenderly care for you, keeping you warm, safe, and intact under his watch.

Without making a sound, he acted. The movement was fluid, devoid of any hesitation, guided by a deep trance where lust and other complex feelings — which he flatly refused to name or accept in his mind — took absolute control. He crossed the distance between you in two long strides, his immense, bare silhouette obscuring the flickering light of the lanterns and casting a dominating shadow over you. Before you could process his approach, he planted his right forearm with force against the wood of the wall, just above your head, cornering you against the bathroom door. The cold emanating from his skin clashed with the heat radiating from your body, creating a static electricity that seemed ready to set the cabin's oxygen ablaze.

He leaned over you, an imposing mass of muscle and intent that obliterated any personal space. Raising his free left hand, Benn touched your face with an unbelievable lightness for someone his size. His calloused thumb slid along your warmed cheek and descended to outline your parted lips, tracing the line of your mouth before beginning a slow, possessive descent. His fingers outlined the line of your neck, feeling the racing pulse of your artery, slid over the shoulder where the linen slipped, and went down your chest, dangerously approaching the curve of your breasts. The caress continued down the side of your waist, mapping every contour until stopping firmly at the hem of the black shirt covering your thighs. With every millimeter that large, rough hand advanced, you let out soft moans and low sighs, cornered between his chest and the rigid wood, unable to contain your reaction to the pirate's touch.

The thermal contrast was an electric shock: the skin of your legs, vibrating with the vital heat of the bath, felt like a delicious furnace to his icy fingers. Benn closed his eyes for a brief second, feeling the softness of your flesh beneath his rough touch. His hand rose firmly up your thigh, his thick fingers digging into your soft flesh with a possessive grip that made your entire body shiver. He slid his thumb slowly and deliberately along the curve of your hip, right where the thigh meets the base of your abdomen, brushing dangerously close to your warmed intimacy. The bold touch tore a small, high-pitched moan from you, a damp, involuntary sound provoked by the shock of the man's cold, massive musculature against your sensitive skin, which still exuded the bath's heat.

In an impulse of desperately naive audacity, your hands rose hesitatingly. With the tips of your trembling, warm fingers, you explored his abdomen, running the palm of your hand down his rigid, cold muscles. For Benn, the temperature of your fingers against his frozen skin was like being touched by live fire; he felt every inch where your hands passed ignite instantly. The contact made the first mate clench his jaw tightly; his eyes darkened, turning into abysses of contained desire upon feeling your disarmed curiosity invade his body.

You didn't stop. In a movement that drained the air from his lungs, you stood on tiptoe, projecting your body upward to try to lessen the absurd distance separating you. Perceiving your effort, Benn yielded to the magnetism and bent his immense stature, slanting his broad shoulders and massive chest downward, facilitating your reach. With that approach, your hands managed to climb up his chest until finding his firm shoulders, while you tilted your head back.

His lips stopped millimeters from yours, so close that you shared the same hot, chaotic breath. His tobacco breath mixed with your anxious sigh, and the sound of your faltering breath acted as fuel for his desire. Right before his chest, through the thin linen soaked with steam, the tips of your breasts pressed rigidly and erect against his body, betraying your complete physical surrender to that overwhelming proximity.

"Beck..." you whispered, his name coming out as a broken sigh against his lips, an invocation that sounded like a plea and a surrender.

The heat emanating from you set his skin ablaze, melting the last frontier of ice. His hand, which had been gripping your hip, firmly seized the hem of the black shirt that, owing to its size, could very well be a nightgown, pulling it another millimeter up, ascending along the contour of your buttocks in an obscene, possessive caress that threatened to expose you completely. That mutual exploration had turned into a promise of destruction. The first mate was one millimeter away from forgetting every single rule to claim the mouth calling him. However, reality forced its way through the door, shattering the spell before the first touch of lips could seal both of their fates.

The trance was shattered by a sound that did not belong to that microcosm of steam and desire.

Three sharp, authoritative knocks on the wood of the outer door cut through the atmosphere like a cold blade, dragging Benn abruptly back to his reality as an officer. The sound echoed like gunshots in that loaded silence, and soon the harsh voice of one of the helmsmen invaded the room, shouting to be heard over the roar of the storm that had resumed beating against the ship outside.

"Mr. Beckman! Captain's calling! The wind changed direction again and we need you on the forecastle now!"

The effect was instantaneous, a violent shock that shattered the trance. Benn's body, which seconds before seemed ready to merge with yours, tensed with the rigidity of a piano wire. He pulled back with an agility that belied his size, retreating abruptly, as if your warm skin had truly burned him.

The physical siege was broken so suddenly that the cabin's cold air seemed to strike your skin where the warmth of his body had been seconds before.

The officer swallowed hard, his eyes closing for a fraction of a second as he forced military rationality to take back the reins of his mind. When he opened them again, the flame of raw lust had been temporarily suffocated by the icy gleam of duty. Without saying a word, he walked to the back of the armchair where he had left his wet shirt and purple cape. Ignoring the freezing touch of the damp fabric against his warmed skin, he put on the wet shirt and threw the cape over his broad shoulders to protect himself from the storm awaiting him on deck.

Benn walked toward the exit, pausing for a brief moment with his hand on the doorknob, his broad back still tense beneath the coat's leather.

"Lock the door," he ordered, his voice now cutting through the silence with the precision of a blade, the tone of command overriding the desire that still clouded his gaze. "You stay here tonight. You can sleep in my bed."

He paused briefly, his hand gripping the metal latch so tightly that his knuckles turned white. He needed to speak, needed to set verbal boundaries before the magnetism of that room pulled him back to your side.

"I'll stay in the communal quarters with the rest of the men," he added, the sentence coming out dry, as though he needed to convince himself that that was the only possible way out to avoid giving in to the impulse to stay. "Do not leave here under any circumstances. Do not open the door for anyone. I will come get you myself when the sea calms down."

Before crossing the threshold, Benn could not contain his own instinct and cast one last glance over his shoulder. That quick glimpse almost made him ignore the helmsman's shouts and the creaking of the ship's structure. What he saw was pure temptation in the form of a woman: you remained leaning against the wooden wall, your cheeks marked by a feverish blush and your chest rising and falling in heavy, short, and erratic breaths.

In his perspective, you were the perfect image of a confused, disarmed virgin. Your eyes were bright and slightly lost, fixed on him with an innocent lack of comprehension regarding the very physical intensity you had just experienced. Your thighs were pressed tightly together, an instinctive and adorable gesture to try and contain the throbbing and excitement that his bold touch had awakened in your intimacy. To make matters worse for the pirate's resistance, the loose collar of his shirt revealed the tips of your breasts, still rigidly erect, pointing audaciously against the linen like a silent provocation crying out for his return. That raw vulnerability, mixed with the shock of a young woman experiencing the first awakening of desire under the hands of an experienced predator, screamed in Beckman's ears.

The conflict flared in his eyes, a visceral struggle between the first mate who needed to save the ship from a storm and the man who longed to lock that door from the inside, tear his own shirt off your body, and finish what he had started against the wall.

His Adam's apple moved sharply as he swallowed hard, forcing down the knot of lust and possessiveness that insisted on locking his throat.With a monumental effort that demanded every single drop of his discipline, Benn finally opened the door and stepped through it. The portal shut with a firm thud, leaving behind only the echo of his heavy footsteps receding down the corridor and the suddenly cold silence of the cabin, where you remained.

He hurried up the stairs toward the main deck, where the fury of the new storm awaited him with open arms.

The wind howled with violence, lashing the sails of the Red Force, and the freezing ocean water hit him with force the instant he set foot on the sea-washed planks.Even while immediately focusing on helping to maneuver the ship, shouting firm orders to the crew, and managing the rigging against the fury of the New World, Beckman could not rid himself of the ghost he had just left locked in his quarters. With every gust of icy wind cutting across his face and every drop of rain soaking his coat, the first mate's mind drew an inevitable, torturous comparison. The unrelenting cold of the ocean paled in comparison to the latent memory of the feverish heat of your skin, the soft touch of your thighs, and the sinful image of you, small and adorable, wearing his black shirt in the sanctuary that he would now defend with his life, yet for the next few hours would avoid as if it were hell itself.

[Next chapter] [Masterlist]

Author's notes: Sorry for the delay, I had a few hectic months, I failed a group project because one of my classmates was petty and decided she didn't want to do the project anymore and that if she wasn't going to do it, nobody else would.

Anyway, I hope you enjoy the first part of Vixen; it turned out so long that I had to split it into two parts. The steamiest content comes in the third chapter—and there might even be a fourth chapter (though no promises) from the reader's perspective, since the three official chapters of Vixen are narrated from Benn's point of view.

Please feel free to send questions, ideas, comments, and theories, I love answering you guys.I'm in the Wano arc and I confess I started writing down some ideas about Kaido and King in case you guys are interested.

TAG LIST: @tine1603, @mochiclouds, @vvyeislazzy, @goldnhabitx, @fandomly-obsessed, @ageingfangirl2, @cuteelucyy, @nagorii, @primaddona-girl

Dictionary:

AlcoveIt: is a small room, niche, or secluded recess, usually windowless, used as a private bedroom, retreat, or reading space. Originating from the Arabic al-qubba, the word describes private compartments, common in historical buildings. It is used to denote intimacy, as in "alcove secrets".

Capitulation: means surrender, submission, or the act of yielding to a superior force, whether militarily, legally, or figuratively. It refers to an official surrender agreement or compromise in negotiations. It can also indicate the legal classification/framing of a crime (tipificação de um crime).

Instant / Jiffy: it is a masculine noun that means an extremely short period of time, an instant, a brief moment, or a tiny fraction of something. It is commonly used in the expression "in a jiffy", indicating that something happened very quickly.

Cooled down / Chilled: it is the past participle of the verb arrefecer, meaning something that has turned cold, whose temperature has been lowered, or that has cooled down. Figuratively, it indicates discouragement, loss of enthusiasm, apathy, or something that has been dampened/soothed (such as feelings or conflicts).

The drain plug: the drain plug (or bung) is an essential drainage device, located at the stern or lowest part of a boat's hull, used to drain accumulated water, especially in double hulls. It must be closed before going into the water and removed for drainage when the boat is out, in marinas.

• Main Function: drain water that enters the hull and that the bilge pump cannot fully remove.

• Safety: It is crucial to check the O-ring/gasket and ensure the plug is securely closed before leaving, preventing sinking due to water intake.

• Maintenance: It is recommended to leave it open when the boat is parked in the garage/marina to drain rainwater, avoiding weight buildup.

• Materials: Usually made of materials...

Swollen / Turgid: means something that is swollen, dilated, rigid, or numb. Derived from the verb entumecer (from the Latin intumescere), the word describes both the increase in volume of a body part—such as a muscle or joint—and the sensation of numbness or tingling.

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