Heaven Has No Limit Chapter 15 - Skill Issue

There was unspeakable carnage.

“This… this is a massacre.”

“W-w-what in the world happened here?”

“Oh, god… I’m going… going to be sick…”

Tsuru covered her nostrils with a handkerchief as the smell of blood wafted into her nostrils with such pungency that it made her eyes water. To the side, several of her men had begun to lose their breakfasts, bending over and retching. The holes that perforated the terrain looked as though they had been unleashed from some form of weapon or the other, but the type, she could not say. It made it harder to get an accurate count of the casualties when bodies were reduced to ground beef.

“What kind of weapon could…”

“Hm. It’s not a weapon.”

Garp stood off to the side, looking at a tower that had been sliced clean in half. His hand ran across the smooth cut, sliced so perfectly clean it was almost as if the tower was made of butter rather than stone.

“...Rokushiki Arts,” Garp muttered. “This was done by one of the Rokushiki Arts. Rankyaku.”

Garp’s hand moved to a hole in the tower. He placed his index finger into the hole, which was unusually small, so small that his index finger could not enter it.

“This was Shigan. Some variant of it. Changed… to be long ranged. The person who used it is either young or has very small hands.”

“Do you think it was the Saint? If he engaged in a fight with the Donquixote Pirates… that would explain this…” Tsuru grimaced. “Massacre.”

“I thought those World Nobles who grew up in the Holy Land couldn’t fight their way out of a paper bag.”

Tsuru’s gaze swept through the carnage.

“...I thought so as well.”

“Ma’am!”

A Marine ran up to her, stomping his foot on the ground before saluting.

“Vice Admiral Tsuru, Ma’am! We’ve apprehended all of the Donquixote Pirates who were unconscious on the docks! They’ve been put in seastone cuffs, but they have no recollection of what happened here, ma’am! They claim they were rendered unconscious the moment they set foot on the docks.”

“Rendered unconscious?”

“Yes, ma’am! But the scum are rather tight-lipped! They won’t say anything else.”

“That’s fine. We—”

A cry cut through the air.

“DOFFFYYYY!”

“Let — Let go of me!”

The Marines under Tsuru’s command collectively lifted their flintlock rifles. There, in the midst of the carnage, there was a heavily bleeding man, with snot pouring from his nostrils. The man’s body was also riddled with holes. The injuries bled, as the man wheezed, and rasped, and gasped, holding on to a Marine Officer by the neck, as he pointed a pistol towards the man’s head.

Tsuru recognized the man at first glance.

“YOU! M-marines! You… Don’t come any closer! I’ll… I’ll shoot! I… I will…”

“You’re not going to last long with those injuries, Trebol,” Tsuru said. “You’re on your last legs. Let my man go, and we can patch your injuries as you rest in a cell.”

The man, Trebol, trembled. At the sight of her, he started to laugh. “You… Tsuru! If… if it weren’t for you… for you… always visiting Vinsmoke Judge… we… we wouldn’t have met that… Doffy wouldn’t have met that monster! Doffy wouldn’t have had to fight, that… that monster!”

Tsuru frowned. “Monster?”

“The Saint! That World Noble! He— he did this! Clashing with Doffy! He—” Trebol coughed up blood. “Him! If… if we had known he was related to one of the Gorosei… we wouldn’t have… we wouldn’t have…!”

The word ‘Gorosei’ spread through the gathered Marines as though fire had been set on steel wool. Backs collectively stiffened, breaths collectively hitched, hands collectively trembled. Even Garp, ever flippant, snapped his head to her, as if to ask, did you know?

Tsuru did not know.

She knew frighteningly little about the Celestial Dragon who’d turned her into a personal errand girl. She grasped that he was given more special privileges than other World Nobles, but she did not grasp why. Now, however, she did.

“The… Gorosei?”

“They’re… real?”

“I thought they were a myth…”

“No way… I’d heard of them but…”

The Gorosei, the Five Elders, were the Highest Absolute Authority in the World. They were ancient, old monsters who were so mysterious and elusive that few could ever say they had been seen. However, they were very real, and the authority and influence they had was beyond the understanding of most people. Kings had to pay deference to them. Nations had to submit to them. 

Even the Marine Fleet Admiral had no choice but to obey them. 

“He — he was fighting Doffy… he… he is… that child… no, he’s no child… he’s a Monster! His Haki… his abilities… Him… Saint… J-Jaygarcia… Noah…”

Trebol was trembling.

“Doffy… Doffy doesn’t… stand a chance. P-Please… go… go and save… Doffy! Doffy… if he falls into the hands of the Marines, he can still… there’s a chance he can still live! But if… if that monster has his way… Doffy— Doffy will— Doffy’s dream will…!”

The man broke out into a series of coughs. The hostage in his arm seized the opportunity to break free and roll away.

“Please… help… Doffy…!”

“Save… Doffy…!”

Trebol collapsed to the ground. The air was so tense, so sharp, the tiniest of noises would echo louder than cannonfire. Not a single one of them could believe it. Not a single one of them could grasp it. A Pirate begging Marines to help save one of their own. Were it in any other situation, the majority of Marine Officers present would have burst out into laughter. They would have unleashed insult upon insult, or let loose a series of mocking expletives to the pirate who would dare suggest that they aid them.

Yet, in the piss, shit, and blood-riddled air, not a single person was in a laughing mood. In lieu of the revelation that the carnage around them was, in fact, the result of a World Noble clashing with a Pirate, not a single one of them had it in them to jeer or mock. The fact that said World Noble was related to one of the Five Elders made the entire situation far more surreal. It made the man’s pleas for aid all the more haunting. 

Tsuru took the initiative, stepping forward to the man who had collapsed on the ground. Her fingers pressed against the side of his neck, gently checking for a pulse. She let out a sigh.

“He’s still alive, but he’s unconscious.”

Tsuru turned around, barking commands.

“Put him in seastone cuffs, and have his wounds treated immediately!”

“Yes, Ma’am!”

Garp, standing with his arms crossed on the side, was the quietest Tsuru had ever seen him. “Garp. Is something wrong?”

“That man’s words. What he said, before he passed out.”

“You doubt them?”

Garp shook his head. “If a pirate has to throw away his pride to beg a Marine, their enemy, for help… then he has something to protect that he thinks is more important than that pride. At that point, there’s no reason to lie.”

There was something about the man’s words that gave Tsuru an odd feeling. “Garp, are you speaking from experience?”

Garp said nothing. He was oddly quiet. Tsuru was aware that Garp had been a rival, for the longest time, of the Pirate King, Roger. There was also the matter of how Garp had become a Marine Hero, the God Valley Incident. During that incident, Garp had not only dealings with Roger, but also with another man, whose name the World Government went to great efforts to erase.

Rocks D. Xebec.

Had one of those men…or both of those men, asked Garp for something before they died?

“If the Gorosei are involved,” Garp said at last. “…things won’t be as clear as they seem, Tsuru. You need to be careful.”

The warning had the most weight of any words Tsuru had ever heard Garp say. Tsuru fell quiet. Then, she put her cigar in her mouth, and began, again, to smoke.

“Let us find Vinsmoke Judge.”

“You're not going to see if you can help this... Doffy?”

“Finding the King matters more. His Kingdom is the one that has suffered this attack, and…” Tsuru paused. “He may be the only one willing to give us important information about him.”

The Celestial Dragon Child who was the eye of the storm.

Saint Jaygarcia Noah.

=====)+(=====

Potential, potential, so much fucking potential… but being Potential Man doesn’t get you anywhere, if you get fucked before that potential can bloom.

The graveyard was silent. Completely and utterly silent. Ravaged and upheaved by a battle between gods, tombstones were crushed, graves were sliced, and coffins were unearthed. The sanctity of the dead, whoever they were, had been disturbed by two gods who gave no respect to the bereaved. One of the gods was now on his way to join those in their eternal slumber, only the other, the boy who stood over the unmoving body of a taller man, was left as the sole trespasser of the place of final respite.

Noah wiped his bloodied hand over the face and clothes of his fallen adversary, and simply… stared.

“Shit.”

Unlike with Senor Pink, whose death had come as the result of him overestimating the man’s capabilities, and the slaves whose death came as a result of being slaves, Donquixote “Donny Boy” Doflamingo was his first intentional and personal kill. 

“So much fucking glaze… just for this. The fuck were you doing… Donny Boy? If it took you so long just to reach your peak… and your peak was still the kind of bitch who’d run from Suicide Man, the fuck were you doing? The fuck were you dicking around with?”

In the silence of the graveyard, there was nothing but corpses and dead men. None of which could offer Noah the answers he sought.

“I don’t get it. I don’t fucking get it. All I did was train every single day since I was born with the best fucking resources money could buy. Why the fuck can’t you bitches compete?”

Noah ran his hand through his hair, clicking his tongue.

“What were you all doing? Holding your dicks in your hands and waiting for fucking Pirate Jesus? You couldn’t even chip my Haki. How the hell did you train…?”

Noah’s Armament Haki had been unspeakably, unfathomably, unreasonably stronger. So much stronger that Doflamingo could not harm it.

The question of how did not matter so much as the question of why.

The answer, which not even Noah could fathom, was twofold:

First, a person's Haki could grow stronger before that person actually learned they were a Haki user and even before they find out that Haki exists.

Once, the Pirate Blackbeard had noted that Straw Hat Luffy’s Haki had grown stronger, on their second meeting when they encountered each other at Impel Down. This was despite the fact that by their first meeting, on Jaya, Straw Hat Luffy had yet to be aware of the existence of Haki, or the fact that he possessed it.

Second, Haki was spiritual. It originated from an individual's spirit and not their physical body, so even if a person's mind or soul was transferred into another body, they would still be capable of using their Haki to the same degree that they normally could, even if the body they transferred into was not a Haki user.

Individuals whose bodies had been swapped or changed by devil fruits could still, as a matter of course, use their Haki, regardless of those changes.

Those two factors put together created a rare case for Noah.

First, Haki could still accumulate and grow stronger, even if the User did not know it existed.

Second, Haki followed the spirit, not the body.

If any member of the Straw Hats who possessed Haki were to somehow find a way to reincarnate, go back in time, their Haki would go back with them. Thus, any reincarnator would find that their ‘Haki’ would follow them into their new life. Any transmigrator similarly would discover that the deeds they had done in their past life, the battles they fought and the strength they honed, would have ‘accumulated’ a foundation Haki for them. 

It did not matter that in their world, Haki did not ‘exist.’

For Haki was energy which manifested from willpower, and willpower existed everywhere.

And one did not need to be aware of the existence of Haki for it to grow stronger within them.

Silvers Rayleigh once claimed that the flower of Haki only blooms in the extreme conditions of a real battle. Noah unwittingly dismissed this entirely as nonsense. Yet he forgot one key aspect: 

At no time did Rayleigh claim these battles had to be physical.

For if physical battles were the only requirement, the likes of Dorry and Brogy, the Giants on Little Garden, who spent one hundred years engaged in nothing but repeated battles to the death with each other, would have the Strongest Haki in the World.

On the contrary, Koby had awakened his Observation Haki in the midst of the Marineford War, as he faced the emotional turmoil of the needless and senseless death around him. Usopp awakened his Observation Haki because of the mental pressure of the goal he needed to accomplish at all costs on Dressrosa, requiring him to make a perfect shot. The Queen Otohime of Ryugu Island and Aisa of Skypiea were individuals who awakened Observation Haki since they were born, and their Haki was far from likely to develop because they engaged in physical battles, but mental ones.

Battles did not have to be physical.

For most normal transmigrators, this revelation would provide negligible benefits, as even the toughest ‘mental battles’ one could encounter in the somewhat relative safety of the modern world were mild. Unless, of course, they were born in a war-torn nation or had drawn an utterly terrible lot in life. Thus, one’s mental battles would seldom make their Haki bloom, especially for the average person.

But Noah was not the average person.

Even before he had gone viral, Noah fought no shortage of battles. After he had gone viral, the number of battles he fought only increased: mental battles, social battles, legal battles, and oftentimes, actual physical battles. Be it from many incensed, enraged boyfriends, be it from victims he’d conned, those he’d scammed, angry and disgruntled fans who bought his NFTs, his NoahCoins, and paid top dollar for his Gacha Games, which promised real-life waifus.

He ate battles for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Day after day after day. His every single breath was steeped in conflict. That, over time, could only have one result.

His Haki had bloomed. 

It bloomed the moment he was born; he unleashed a Conqueror’s Haki burst so strong it killed not only his parents, but nearly every other member of the Jaygarcia Family. 

That initial bloom was why Noah’s Haki was simply stronger than Doflamingo’s. For if he added up his total years lived, not only was Noah slightly older, but his Haki was a combination of both his current life and his former life. 

And in his former life…

He had been No Limit Noah.

His mantra?

NLN!

No Limit!

No Stopping!

Doflamingo was hated by villagers, perhaps in the hundreds, or at best, in the thousands. That mental battle he had fought then, as he was tortured and refused to bow his head, was what gave rise to his defiant spirit and allowed his Conqueror’s Haki to bloom. 

Noah was hated by millions. The scale and scope of the vitriol he endured on a daily basis could not be compared. That the fires and pitchforks pointed at him were virtual simply meant they were harder to quench, and more difficult to break. The opposition was real. The hate was real. The enmity was real.

The battle was real.

“...Shit.”

Noah ran his hand through his hair. He cupped his hands over his face as he walked about and stared at his latest handiwork. A handiwork that gave him no satisfaction.

“Shit.”

He pushed his body to the brink of destruction and trained harder and harder, only for his enemy to lose to one of his base attacks. It was, to Noah, no different from Luffy one-shotting a man with a single Gum-Gum Pistol.

I’m not even a fuckin’ Shonen Pirate Fantasy Land denizen. So how the fuck can’t you match my grindset? I don’t wanna lose, but I don’t wanna be fucking hitting the snooze button fighting you bitches either…! 

This isn’t Mid-Leveling! I can’t flex on fucking ants, man! I can’t aura farm while stepping on FUCKING ANTS!

I don’t get it. I don’t fucking get it. Anyone in this world can be OP as fuck if they train hard enough, so why the fuck aren’t you bitches training like crazy? Isn’t it just fucking common sense to train like hell?

Noah could not grasp that what he saw as ‘common sense’ was the furthest thing from common.

Few people in this world, less than a handful, had been training since they were born.

Few people trained as obsessively, as relentlessly as he did. Few. Even amongst them, those who were motivated to do so seldom had the time and resources, and those who had the time and resources seldom had the motivation. 

Thus, Noah was a monster of his own creation; an anomaly.

Noah did not grasp this because he had the benefit, and curse, of metaknowledge. He did not grasp this because he did not wish to be outperformed by the likes of Koby, who needed just two years of training to go from mopping the decks of the fattest she-pirate in East Blue to being able to lead a raid on a Shichibukai’s Island and unleash an attack that could devastate a Yonko’s Elite.

In his eyes, if such a significant turnaround, such growth was possible in two years from someone like Koby, then such growth should be the same for everyone in this world, thus, if people would only put in the effort, the work, the hours, then, then they would be, not on his level, but somewhere just slightly below it.

He did not see how his own actions were out of the norm, and how his thought process was out of the norm, because there was something that slipped his mind.

Koby was an outlier.

The Straw Hats were all outliers.

The two years Luffy spent training had been, for a time, done under direct tutelage from the First Mate of the Pirate King. He had been fed the best meals cooked and provided by the Pirate Empress and the Kuja Tribe, the tribe of the strongest women.

Zoro spent two years learning swordsmanship directly from the World’s Strongest Swordsman.

Sanji and Nico Robin spent two years with members of the Revolutionary Army. Franky spent two years with access to technology left behind by the World’s Smartest Man—

Koby was trained directly by a Marine Hero, a man who trained an Admiral, and a man who could be, with his strength, an Admiral himself.

Luffy had Silvers Rayleigh, Zoro had Dracule Mihawk, Sanji had Emporio Ivankov, and Koby had Monkey D. Garp.

But Doflamingo?

Doflamingo had Trebol.

Noah, from the beginning, had been comparing himself and others to outliers. He had operated on the assumption that outliers were the norm.

But they were not.

On the contrary, the fact that Doflamingo hadn’t immediately been killed by him was proof that Doflamingo was significantly better than most. However, Noah was running with the expectations of what Doflamingo would be like at his peak.

Alas, the Doflamingo of the present absolutely could not compare to the Doflamingo of twenty years in the future. 

There was no one, no one alive, who would be the same after two decades.

Perhaps, not even Noah himself.

“Fuck it. I’ll kill your entire crew and send ‘em to you, Donny Boy. I’ll start with that ugly one, Giolla. Then, the idiot always getting food on his face, Vergo. Then, Pica with his squeaky ass voice. Then, that disgusting snot bastard goes last. They’re all bums anyway, Donny Boy. Maybe if they didn’t hold you back, you’d have grown stronger. What do you think?” 

The silence of the graveyard filled the space between his questions. Noah wiped the dust off a nearby tombstone and sat, his hands steepled together. There was a bubbling fire in his throat.

“I’m gonna have to go gunning straight for the Yonko Crews, aren’t I? Old Man Whitebeard shouldn’t be washed up yet at this age. Suicide Man should still be a fuckin’ beast. But as for Big Slut and her thousand-and-one-brats… I’d prolly run into the same issue with you. Too many bitches out here peaking in their forties and fifties…” 

Noah tapped his right foot on the ground, clicking his tongue. ‘Hyped’ and ‘Pissed’ were the only two emotional states he considered acceptable, and everything he felt ran from one end of that spectrum to the other. Sometimes ‘horny’ would be added somewhere in the middle of that Venn Diagram, but ‘horny’ was just another variant of ‘hyped.’ 

“The Worst Gen makes em’ all look like bums by comparison… took em’ what, two, three years of sailing the New World tops, to match up to, and beat bitches that had been sailing and doing the piracy biz for decades…?”

Right now, he was somewhere on the ‘pissed’ end of the spectrum, but not fully all the way down it, yet, not fully in it either. Even he could not put it into words, which was why he continued to sit and stare at his handiwork and ramble on. It was a handiwork which, in theory, should have gotten him high on the ‘hyped’ end of the spectrum, but didn’t.

“Damn it, Donny Boy,” Noah muttered. “Look what you made me fuckin’ do. I really wanted you to be better. I really wanted you to be stronger. You were one of the shmucks that I tuned in to Nepo Piece for. You and Viola’s titties were so iconic, it kept me hooked. I would have killed you anyway, sure, but I’d at least let you go out with some aura. But now? Such a fucking shame.”

He pinched his brow.

“You know what the funniest thing is? Know what this shit reminds me of? Don fucking Quixote,” Noah snorted.

“I read that crap to write a paper on it for class. I don’t even remember what the fuck the paper was about, but I remember he was an idiot who ran headfirst at windmills and called them giants. I wrote as much. Fucking slandered him. Pointed out how he was a loser, a deluded-ahh bastard. Got a hot, fat F on that. My teacher said I missed the point. Said he wasn’t a bum because he did bum things, he was a bum because he couldn’t accept that the world around him was so fucking disappointing it needed bums like him exist.”

Noah’s gaze went skywards, to the cloudless skies.

“The deluded bastard didn’t mistake windmills for giants because he was blind; he did it because he couldn’t accept a world where giants had peaced out. So he made shit up, elevated windmills to giants, whores into Kardashians, and broke-ass inns to the fucking Ritz-Carlton. He looked around at a world that was filled with dysentry and sheep-shaggers, and pretended there was fuckin’ magic.”

“My teacher called it Quixotism. I called it being a chuuni. I told her as much. He was an eight-grade-syndrome bitch in his fucking fifties. My teacher said that I didn’t get it. Said when I was older, I’d get it. She said someday, I‘d get it. I’d get what it feels like to look at a world that disappoints me, and want it to be something more.”

Noah’s head went down.

“Bitch didn’t know what she was talking about. The world has never disappointed me, Donny Boy. It’s perfect. People fall for bait. People rage and hate, and I cash in and cash out. People are people. Your old man, Homing, he didn’t get it, did he? Didn’t get people. Renouncing all his wealth and living as a fucking peasant and believing they won’t hate him for being a rich bitch boy who abandoned superyachts and mansions?”

Noah clicked his tongue.

“Your old man didn’t get that it didn’t matter what he did, or why he did it, or what he said, or why he said it. None of those bitches would ever accept him, or you, or your family. All of those bitches would hate you all anyway. People don’t need a thousand-word essay to hate shit. All they need is an excuse.”

Noah stood up, craning his neck.

“...I used to wonder what would have changed if your old man didn’t decide to make that dumbass decision. Or, what would have happened if you managed to return to Mariejois.”

He walked over to the motionless body.

“At the end of that book, Don Quixote, the bum finally gives up his chuuni-dream. At the end, he accepts reality, and you know what happens when he does?”

There was no response.

“He dies.”

A brush of sea breeze blew upon a boy and a motionless corpse.

“Don Quixote finally sees the world as it is, not as he wanted it to be, and it kills him.” 

Noah fell silent.

“...fucking skill issue.”