One Piece (Love Story) [Part One]

Chapter Eighty Eight [Rewritten]

-Chapter Eighty-Eight-

"It's Rapanui!" Rongo brightened.

"He came back to us!" Akibi grinned.

"Thank goodness, Rapanui" Isoka sighed in relief.

"Oh man, I was worried about him too!" Usopp sobbed.

"There, there" I said, patting his back as he sniffed.

"I'm sick of this mayor, how big of a pain can one guy be?" Zoro grumbled as he and Akibi helped Luffy and Rapanui out of the water.

"What? What the...?" Henzo frowned, looking around as a loud banging noise began to echo within the mist which was then followed by a violent trembling. "It can't be..." he muttered in disbelief.

"Professor?" Robin questioned.

"What's going on?" I asked, curiously looking around.

"This isn't good at all—Ape's Concert maintains only a very delicate balance to begin with, if you set off an explosion like that one in a place like this...there's no telling what might happen next" Henzo stressed.

"What's that?" Zoro asked upon noticing something strange in the sky.

"Whatever it is, it doesn't look too good..." I nervously muttered.

"You're right, it doesn't" Henzo agreed. "The warping of space and time is expanding quickly, at this rate we'll get caught up in it and we'll all die."

"Alright! We have to get out of here!" Usopp cried out.

"Yeah, but how do we do that?" Nami asked.

"Hm, got anything in that book of yours, Robin?" I inquired.

"I'm looking..." she mumbled as she quickly flipped through the pages of her book. "The author of this book once visited Ape's Concert, he must have talked about the way out somewhere in here" she explained.

"What's wrong?" Usopp asked when the archeologist suddenly gasped.

"It must be in the next volume though..." she weakly admitted.

"You have it, right?" he hopefully asked. "Oh crap!" he frantically wailed when she shook her head.

"What now?" Luffy asked.

"Look over there!" Rapanui suddenly shouted, pointing toward a bright light in the distance that was barely peeking through the mist. "The light over there, it's the setting sun!" he proclaimed.

"The sun?" Usopp and I questioned.

"That's right" Rapanui nodded. "The light of the sun is shining through the crack in space—Luffy and I followed that light earlier and we ended up outside" he explained.

"You did?" Usopp asked.

"Really?" I tilted my head, amazed that this entire time the two of them had been outside of the mist while we were left looking for them.

"We need to hurry, that light could disappear at any moment now!" Henzo shouted once he realized that the two were right and that we were now running on limited time.

"Up—throw the sails, everyone! Row as hard as you can!" Nami quickly ordered.

"Right!" we nodded before setting off to do as we were told.

"Why don't you guys come and give us a hand too? We're trying to get out of here now" Zoro offered, calling down toward Lake and his men who were all currently squished together in a small rowboat.

"Okay" one of them nodded after exchanging looks and small talk with the others before they finally rowed over to us and climbed aboard the ship to help. Once everything was in order and everyone was in position, Nami blew her whistle and signaled for everyone to start rowing.