3/5

"Shishishishi! It didn't hurt me but thanks anyway." Luffy said and snatched it up before moving to look for his coolest treasure he had found today, Gaimon trailing behind him out of curiosity over the odd rubber pirate boy.

Zoro had only ever been interested in going after one specific pirate. He had never called himself a bounty hunter and he hadn't created the nickname "Pirate Hunter" for himself either.

It had been the people in the bounty offices and other hunters who had started calling him that when he became known for nearly exclusively bringing in pirates instead of bandits, thieves, or counterfeiters who tended to be easier to catch. He had only started bringing them in so he could afford to buy some food, drink, or transport as he traveled. The only thing that mattered to him during a fight was whether the person fighting him used a sword or not and more often than not it was pirates as a whole who used swords to fight.

It was pure chance that had him coming across another one of the clownishly dressed pirates from the other crew in an open clearing who appeared to be looking for something. This one was the most clownish of all the pirates he'd seen so far. A slim blue-haired man with a big, red nose on his face. Aside from the red nose, his face was also covered with face paint: a set of crossbones going down his face forming an X and exaggerated red lipstick.

Before Zoro could even say anything though the clown pirate grabbed a handful of knives, holding the handles between his fingers in a fist, and began accusing him of nonsense.

"You're one of the thieves hiding out on this island, aren't you!" Buggy accused, feeling confident about his assumption.

"I'm not a thief, I'm a pirate." Zoro denied it before continuing. "I'm looking for Medaka, our pirate apprentice. She came in here with the captain of you clown pirates a little while ago."

Buggy nodded his head and in a weak attempt to spook the other pirate from searching too hard for Medaka said, "So you're not one of the thieves? Good, good. This is a cursed island I've heard. No one in their right mind would come here."

Zoro wasn't phased though and asked, "Well then why did you guys come to this island if you think it's cursed?"

"We were robbed of course. We wouldn't even be here if it weren't for that." Buggy snarled with irritation.

"It doesn't matter anyway. Before I go will you tell me if you've seen a kid with red hair anywhere?" Zoro asked.

"No." Buggy lied. "This island is a robber's den crawling with thieves all over. My crew must've been mistaken about a kid coming in here with me. Who knows where a kid could've ended up. "

"Well if you don't know I'm sure whoever robbed you knows," Zoro said as he began to leave.

Buggy froze a moment before he hissed, "Hold it right there and repeat what you just said."

Feeling impatient Zoro huffed and replied, "I said, I'm sure whoever robbed you knows."

"You said it again! Rubber nose!" An angry vein appeared on Buggy's forehead as he snarled. "You're saying you think my nose looks funny? That it looks fake!?"

"I never said that but now that you mention it..." Zoro peered at Buggy in silence for a moment. "Yes, it does look fake."

With that statement, the short fuse attached to Buggy's even shorter temper burnt down to nothing and with a scream of rage, he moved to attack Zoro using rapid slashes with the knives he held in his hand. "Prepare to die, you emerald idiot! Your crime of insulting me won't go unpunished!"

Zoro, always ready and able to battle (unless sleeping and even then he might be able to manage it), easily evaded the attack. Retaliating nearly instantly, with a quick sweeping motion, he focused a strike upon the wrist of the hand Buggy held his knives in and severed it completely and cleanly from the rest of his arm.

The hand landed with a thud somewhere on the ground behind Zoro while he focused his attention back on the clown pirate. The expression on his face as he stared at his new stump was not exactly fearful, but instead a tiny bit more manic. Maybe he was going into shock?

"You've lost a hand and if you continue to attack me you'll lose your life as well," Zoro warned as he looked down the blade of his unnamed sword at the other pirate.

The clown, instead of backing down or retreating in fear, smiled instead before letting out a hearty laugh, "You're trying to say I'll lose my life fighting a swordsman? Gya-ha-ha-ha-ha! What a joke! One sword? Three? Ten? Even a hundred swords would never be enough to kill me and you want to know why - you bumpkin of a swordsman?"

Hot and sudden pain in four different spots struck his lower back, nearly severing his spine and puncturing his kidneys. Zoro staggered a bit but didn't fall. He craned his head to look behind himself. The hand that he had severed from the arm of that clown was floating in the air and had moved to strike him with a vicious blow to his lower back.

The clownish pirate laughed again at Zoro's confused expression. "Gya-ha-ha-ha! You can try as much as you want but it's impossible for you to cut me. I'll never be hurt because I'm a Splitting Human who ate the Chop-Chop Fruit. I'm Captain Buggy the Immortal Clown, after all!"

Zoro, faced with a pirate who wouldn't be killed from being cut up, smiled back at Buggy but it was about as friendly as one attached to a shark going in for a meal. "So you say your name is Bug? Well, that doesn't matter to me. I'm Roronoa Zoro and I'm going to be the World's Greatest Swordsman. There won't be anything in this world impossible for me to cut one day."

Buggy scoffed and began to egg Zoro on by saying, "Well even if you are the infamous Pirate Hunter Roronoa Zoro it's not possible for you to harm me today. So you've abandoned bounty hunting and have started a pirate crew? Once I kill you and everyone else on that little crew of yours I'll take that red-haired brat as my own apprentice- and of course, I'll be a very strict master! Gya-ha-ha-ha!"

Zoro's eyes flashed like steel striking steel and with another feral smile he leveled his swords up again and said, "Well I'm not the Captain but if you think I'll give up or let you hurt a single one of my crewmates you're even dumber than you look."

First, he was working on the challenge of cutting through something like steel and now he had to fight someone specially made to be cut without getting hurt? What an interesting day he was having.

Nami tried to ignore the pangs of guilt she was still had from running away from Luffy the moment he had been shot. She had turned to run as soon as she saw Luffy's head jerk back from the force of the bullet that had been fired at him.

Bile threatened to ride up from her stomach though and she was simply grateful it was too empty to even dry heave thanks to being on the run for the last couple of days. Headshots would always make her ill thanks to what had happened to Bellemere that day. She forcibly buried that line of thought. (This was not the time to be scared and sad. She had to wait until everyone was safe before she could cry for herself.)

Nami was so preoccupied with running and mentally pulling herself back together though that she didn't notice until it was too late that another person was running straight at her from the opposite direction.

"Ahh! Watch out!" Nami heard before she slammed into something fast (and feathery?) causing both herself and the other person to fall over each other.

Nami painfully sat up and looked up when she heard the quacking of a duck. The other person had apparently tucked and rolled in order to avoid hurting the odd duck-turtle hybrid she carried. The outrageous costume the other girl was wearing immediately clued Nami into the fact that she was one of the clown pirates searching the jungle for her. Before she could get back up to run again however, the other girl was already back on her feet.

She looked down at Nami with a surprised expression on her face and instead of attacking her held out a hand to help Nami get back on her feet. "I'm so sorry! Are you alright? I should've been paying more attention to where I was running."

Nami eyed the hand reached out to help her and then back up into the eyes of the pirate. There didn't seem to be any sign on insincerity or hidden malice in her expression (another airheaded pirate, what luck she was having today!) so Nami carefully reached out and took the offered hand.

"Thank you. What were you running away from anyway?" Nami asked.

The other girl caught off guard by the question flushed a bit and said, "It was nothing- I mean it wasn't anything scary- just embarrassing. I really don't want to talk about it."

"More embarrassing than walking around in that carnival costume?" Nami asked and tried to stifle her smile when the other girl blushed harder and tried to hide her face behind the duck-turtle she was holding.

"I really don't want to talk about how that happened either, why were you running?" The blue-haired girl lowered the duck-turtle and peered at Nami to study her closely. "Oh! You have orange hair." (Ann realized this must've been the thief that other guy had mistaken her for.)

"I prefer tangerine if you must use a fruit description." Nami bantered playfully back. "My name's Nami by the way, who are you?"

In order to settle her frazzled nerves, Ann began to carefully pet down the duck-turtle's feathery head, against the grain of the feathers causing her to clatter her bill together in a pleasing sounding buzz. Ann then took a breath and introduced herself in return. "I'm Ann - just Ann. Were you trying to go somewhere? I'll try to help you if you need it. You should be careful on this island, there are pirates going around looking for a thief. Some of those morons will definitely be too aggressively dumb and would, without a moment of hesitation, attack an innocent girl wandering around on her own, you see."

Nami mentally cooed over the girl pirate's complete naivety in trying to warn her away from the island to safety while Ann wondered if the thief in front of her would even bother to realize Ann was hinting at the fact that Ann knew she was a thief.

An idea quickly flashed through Nami's mind and like the opportunist she was immediately seized onto it. With a bright and friendly smile she said, "Actually now that you brought it up... if you don't mind would you join me on a quick trip back to the beach? There's safety in numbers like you said and I left something behind out on the beach where some of the pirates landed. I don't know if they're ones you know or not though. Things might get a little dangerous for the both of us if we go. Can you handle yourself in a fight if someone tries to catch us?"

Ann had to admit to herself that Nami was an interesting person. Did she really intend to return to the ship of the pirates who were actively hunting her down for robbing them in order to presumably steal even more stuff from them? Ann couldn't even imagine being that gutsy if she didn't have Balloon or magic (or more recently her new crew) backing her up.

"I'll be fine in a fight, but I'll warn you right now that I won't ever hurt a child or bird - even if I'd be killed for it." Ann's eyes sharpened and she leveled an even gaze towards Nami. "That won't be a problem with you, will it?"

Nami's smile softened a touch, becoming more genuine, before she said, "Not a problem at all. While we go you can tell me how in the world you ended up on such a weird pirate crew. You seem so normal."

Ann huffed in exasperation and walked beside Nami as they headed off towards the clown crew's pirate ship. "Is it that obvious that I'm a pirate already? I admit I never went through my life intending to be a pirate, but my captain ended up helping rescue my best friend and me when we were captured by an even worse pirate a few weeks ago. My crew is pretty unusual I'll admit, one of the weirdest things is my captain ate a devil fruit and turned into a rubber person so that's definitely unique for an East Blue pirate crew."

"A devil fruit? I thought those were a myth. If he helped you and this friend of yours though what was it that stopped you from going back home?" Nami had to ask, wondering how such a fluffy brained girl could've survived being on a pirate crew even if it was only for a few weeks so far.

"I don't really have a home to go back to so I figure it wouldn't be so bad considering how awful a lot of pirates can be. My captain's fun to be around though even if he does tend to act childish a lot of the time."

The duck-turtle let out a loud quack and Ann's eyes lit up when she spotted what had caught the odd bird's interest. She lengthened out her stride in order to walk a little bit faster with Nami trailing behind her for just a moment before moving to match her stride to walk beside her again.

'Well that at least finally explains the costume,' Nami thought to herself with a grin and watched curiously as Ann walked over to a patch of unbroken sunlight shining down from a break in the trees around them. There, growing like it was being fed from the light, was a tall shrub that was fully blooming with bunches of flowers all clustered together in bunches. Red, orange, yellow, teal, blue, and purple with deep emerald green leaves and stems that grew bound together like they were naturally occurring rainbow bouquets.

There was a touch of awe in Anns voice as she softly spoke up. "I can't believe it. It's really a six colored flower. I've never seen a plant so pretty while in bloom before."

Nami aggressively buried the memory of a brightly smiling pirate showing her a rainbow-colored shell and instead said, "It is a pretty flower, isn't it? You should pick off a branch to keep as a memory for later. Sneaking past pirates will be hard work and hard work deserves a reward, right?"

Ann smiled back at Nami and said, "You're absolutely right."

Dawn had been having a good bit of fun so far on the island, using her two capuchin lures to tease the clownish pirates who were still completely intent on chasing after her. She hadn't expected for her capuchin lures to be ambushed though when a second group of clownish pirates came up from ahead, cutting off her escape. The leader was a sword-wielding unicycle-riding fellow with an unfortunate looking haircut.

"Cabaji! Get those monkeys! They stole some of Captain Buggy's treasure!" One of the pirates chasing her shouted.

The unicycle pirate was quick to react to the shout of his crewmate and using some sort of secret circus technique he blew out a stream of fire like a dragon - completely roasting her lures to complete destruction in the process. Apparently, not all these pirates were ineffectual as subordinates like the last group of pirates they had encountered had been.

Offshore where Dawn had been anchored with Balloon keeping her company up in her crow's nest she raised her anchor and adjusted her sails to move out and scout the shoreline for the other pirate's landing. She figured that Luffy, Ann, and Zoro would be able to handle themselves without a lure getting in their way but she wanted to keep an eye on Medaka who, from what she had last seen from up in the canopy, had been traveling on a large lion and with a man in a horrible looking fur coat towards the shore where the other pirate ship would likely be anchored.

"Hey - you fire breathing baldy! Don't set my friends on fire!" Luffy shouted at Cabaji as he entered the clearing with Gaimon trailing at his heels, just as Cabaji had finished off roasting Dawn's lures.

Cabaji pointed his sword at Luffy and said, "You! You're that rude straw hat thief! You say those where your pets? They got what they deserved then!"

"The green monkeys were the pets of a thief? No wonder they were able to steal so much of Captain Buggy's treasure from us." The lead Fuwa acrobat blurted as he finally realized the truth.

"What did you say was stolen!?" Cabaji demanded as he turned angrily towards the four Fuwa acrobats, causing them to tremble and falter under his cold accusing glare.

"Captain Buggy's treasure," the Fuwa in the bandana admitted, "We were borrowing some of it to be used for thief bait."

"Ooooh - yellow, green, AND blue. How lucky." Luffy's voice interrupted as he looked in one of the open treasure boxes and picked out a gold coin, an emerald, and a blue sapphire and stuffed them in the vine woven pouch Gaimon had given him to hold onto his treasures. "I only need to find a purple treasure now."

"Hey, you! I'm not through with you! Give those back right now!" Cabaji demanded as he pointed his sword at Luffy again. "How dare you steal from the Buggy Pirates!"

"What? I didn't steal from any pirates." Luffy denied seemingly brazenly. "I just took these out from a box that was left open. Finders keepers - so there."

There was a long beat of incredulous silence on Cabaji's part before he smacked himself across the forehead in exasperation and said, "This kid is a moron. You may have caught me off guard earlier but this time I'm going to kill you!"

"Yeah! Get him Cabaji! We'll take care of the green freak with him!" The Fuwa in the pointed, orange, and red striped hat cheered as he pointed his own sword at Gaimon, who broke into a nervous sweat.

"Hey now - you leave me out of this. Your squabble with Straw Hat doesn't have anything to do with me."

"Even if that was true this has been a bad day for us and we need someone to take our frustrations out on - so it might as well be you." The large Fuwa in the blue jester hat jeered as he pointed his own sword at Gaimon.

Gaimon scowled at the foolish (Poachers? Bounty hunters? Traveling circus troupe?) men who were underestimating him just because of his circumstances and took out his revolver to show he wasn't a pushover. "I am the Guardian of the Island and I won't be brought down by fools like you."

The four Fuwas charged in but their movements were too slow to reach Gaimon. The blades of swords tried to slash and stab at him. Swiftly Gaimon's pistol shot out and with a short yelp, the Fuwa in a panda hat staggered back, holding onto his bleeding forearm. The striped-hat wearing one, leaped over like a panther and using his sword, knocked Gaimon back - intending for him to land on his back.

His gun clattered across the ground and now defenseless Gaimon raised his hands in defiance - willing to fight for his life for the sake of his island.

It didn't come to that, however, because the four Fuwa's were forced away when they were assaulted by a herd of animals that came caterwauling into the clearing. When the four Fuwas reformed they stared in astonishment at the large gathering across from them.

A vanguard of animals was now surrounding Gaimon as they stood up to defend him. They hissed, snarled, howled and growled at the clownish men. The odd creatures seemed endless and strange and included giraffe-dogs, duck-poodles, bear-tigers, zebra-ostriches, hippo-gorillas, panda-bats, platypus-sheep, rhino-kangaroos, tiger-elephants, cow-tortices, peacock-cats, crow-snakes, gorilla-bears, elephant-mice, lion-boars, rooster-foxes, tiger-horses and even duck-turtles.

The animals bared their teeth collectively towards the Fuwas who simultaneously took a step backward. There sure were a lot of angry-looking animals now.

Cabaji, in the meantime instead of fighting Luffy head-on like he had the last time decided to use his underhanded tactics this time. He began to spin his sword around rapidly, forming a dense cloud of dust and shouted, "Murder at the Steambath!"

Luffy twisted right, left and above, trying to figure out where the attack would be coming from when a sudden stream of fire rushed towards him, enveloping him as Cabaji shouted, "Breath of Death!"

Smelling the scent of singed straw once again Luffy scowled and patted out the embers as he shouted, "You stupid baldy! I told you not to hurt my hat!"

"And I told you this time I'm going to kill you - who cares about a stupid hat!" Cabaji shouted and as the smoke began to clear unleashed a hundred spinning tops towards Luffy and shouted, "Dance of 100 Kamikaze Tops!"

Luffy easily dodged the barrage of toys but let out a yelp when they began to pop and explode at his feet since Cabaji had put explosives in them beforehand. Luffy escaped the burning attack and as he looked around to reorient himself in the haze from the smoke didn't spot Cabaji speeding with his unicycle up a tree. Cabaji then ricocheted off of the top of the tree, high into the air and after flipping in the air twice pointed his sword down at Luffy - intending to stab him into the ground.

Luffy (spotting him as he came down though) rounded on him as he got close and punched Cabaji across the face, extending his fist out and out and out up until Cabaji finally hit a tree, and snapping his arm back with a crack shouted, "Rifle Shot! Take that, you stupid baldy!"

Knocked free from his unicycle and now in a daze, Cabaji pointed at Luffy rudely and accused, "Your arm stretched!"

"So what? You used exploding toys." Luffy retorted and reared his fist back, intending to punch Cabaji again, but was interrupted by a loud ruckus spilling into the clearing.

The shouting, clanging of metal-on-metal, and the chaotic mishmash of swifter than the eye sword swings and flying body parts that were Zoro and Buggy fighting came into the clearing like a tornado of destruction.

Trees were felled by Zoro's sword and would be pulped to bits by Buggy's hands full of braces of long sharpened knives.

"It's the captain!" One of the Fuwa's cheered before he yelped and ducked one of the crushed trees heading in his direction.

"Hawk Wave!" Zoro called out as he struck with his swords, creating a howling gust of wind strong enough to knock the Fuwa Acrobats and Cabaji's subordinates completely over like they were in a gale.

Zoro crossed his two swords across his chest and placed his third blade in his mouth horizontally behind them. "Rice Ball!" Zoro rushed toward Buggy and cut through the jeering clown who simply fell apart into harmless pieces and reformed behind him.

"Still using those useless swords, Roronoa Zoro! You might as well melt them all to slag and throw that at me! Then you might actually beat me! Gya-ha-ha-ha!"

"Tiger Hunt!" Zoro relentlessly put his hand swords over the blade of his mouth and rushed forth a forward while simultaneously performing a descending slash with them.

"Get him Zoro! You can beat him!" Luffy shouted his encouragement from the sidelines.

Zoro grinned ferally and went to move in again but was halted unexpectedly by hands that grabbed his ankles, pinning him into place and leaving him open to Buggy's assault.

"I've got him, Captain! Now's your chance!" Cabaji shouted, his hands around Zoro's ankle's like a vice grip.