She was seven years old when a sword spoke to her for the first time. It was a brittle, frail thing, no more than a shoddy piece of iron gripped in her too-small hands. Like everything else in that accursed home, it was old and rotten. Weak.

  The sword didn’t feel weak as it bit deep into the turned back of her father. His belt, poised in one hand to lash out, fell to the ground with a soft clatter to be forgotten amongst piles upon piles of alcohol bottles. His screams of agony melded beautifully with the singing of her sword. Blood and bile intertwined with the sharp scent of metal to the point of indistinguishability, piercing her nose with a feeling of savage power. She faithfully followed the whispers of the sword as it instructed her, until the man was rendered no more than chum to be tossed to the fishes.

  Only once the remains of her sole kin had been tossed to the watery depths, and the moon’s glare was harsh upon fields of shattered glass, did the sword finally fall silent again.

  From then on, she traveled the oceans of the world. Marines and pirates alike hunted her, but their swords were dull and quiet. They did not have the depth nor the will to challenge her. They were nothing compared to the elegy swords sang when she wielded them in hand.

  Swords were her companions.

  They were her friends.

  Her mentors.

  They were everything.

  She did not understand why they deigned to speak to her. She could only hope that the day would never come when their voices left her for good.

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  Clang!

  On a muggy, desolate island of the Grand Line, she was defeated for the first time. Now a teenager, she sank to her knees, the cut on her chest weeping red tears. The hawk-eyed demon stood overhead, his black blade utterly unsullied by her blood. She clenched her sword tighter and attacked again, only to be parried like a child trying to hit the wind.

  The hawk-eyed demon’s sword song was too beautiful. He and his black blade parted the flow of her communion with her sword like a stone bisecting a river torrent. With a final slash, his sword cut the sky, rays of sunlight falling through sundered clouds like the herald of her loss.

  No matter how hard she tried to reach him, it was useless.

  Perhaps her sword realized it too, for it never spoke again.

  She stands in what they call the New World, the wildest and most untamed of seas. The wind caresses her face, but her hair is unmoved. At some point, both her eyes and her hair had adopted the steel-gray sheen and the hardened sharpness of a sword— almost as if she had become a sword herself.

  The ocean around her is raging, thunderstorms stirring in the sky and purple lightning flashing down endlessly, but her boat remains undisturbed. The sea cannot rampage in her domain, and the waves cannot shake her vessel. She cuts them before they can.

  Before her, a crew of motley pirates jeers atop the decks of their galleon.

  She draws her sword.

  One of the pirates catches sight of her face and promptly begins shaking his captain, white-faced with fear.

  In between the descent and flash of a lightning bolt, she moves.

  To them, still trying to turn their ship around and escape her, it seems as though nothing has happened. At least, until the ship splits in half, one smooth line to the other side. The sea swallows their screams.

  She breathes in the smell of crackling ozone and resheathes her sword.

  Until the day she meets the hawk-eyed demon again and bests him, and her sword sings once more, she will continue wandering.

  From the remains of the sinking galleon, a bounty poster flutters through the air. It says:

  Wanted dead or alive: 2,777,000,000 Belli

  ‘Sword Seeker’ Asphodel.