Monkey D Luffy's Arc

Chapter 1 of 1

Luffy leaned over the rail of his sheep-headed ship and squinted at the empty blue ahead. He wanted to be Pirate King. That meant sailing anywhere, free, with no one to stop him. But right now, he had no map, no crew, and no idea which way the wind should take him. He spotted a wooden marker bobbing in the waves. It was the last sign of charted sea, an old compass nailed to a post, its needle still spinning toward true north. Past it, the water turned darker. Quieter. Wrong. Luffy climbed the mast and pulled down his flag. He laid it flat on the deck. With a piece of charcoal, he scratched lines across the skull's face, marking the sun's path, the wind, the place where the compass post had stood. A map made of guesses. Then he saw the fruit. It floated past on a snapped plank, glossy and swirled with every color at once. Around it drifted broken boards, a torn sail, a cracked figurehead. Ships had come this way. None had left. Luffy stared at the wreckage. He grinned anyway. "This is the part that matters," he said to no one. He grabbed his charcoal-marked flag and hoisted it back up the mast. The wind shifted. His ship turned, slow and certain, toward the dark water past the post. He had no real map. He had a direction. That would have to be enough — until the sea gave him his next problem.