Survival of the Fiercest

Under the midday sun, the sea adjoining Mercury was a poodle of silver shimmering, unbelievably calm from a shore in the New World. From her daunting height, Durga could barely see significant wrinkles on the water surface on the water for miles and miles away; the horizon was also clean and calm, with no cloud in the horizon. The little wind she was experiencing could barely be called a breeze, though it still uplifted a sweet fragrance of mirth.

Sitting on a spur of rock plunging down the sea, Durga could help but think of peaceful all of that was. And the little dots coming close from far away would put an end of all this peace. She could see from the banner that the Maw Pirates ship was approaching, bringing to this corner of paradise their version of fire and brimstone.

The Iron Legion had studied the modus operandi of this band of mavericks, even fought with them in a few instances of underworld warmongering. They hopped from place to place and razed everything on their path with the same ferocity of a horde of locusts, though not for money or any kind of personal glory, but war and violence purely for its own sake.

“Mother” Mary, their commander, was especially known for her fanatical reverence for strength and brutality: she personally recruited the few who were brave and strong enough to fight back and encouraged brutal infighting among her subordinates to weed out the weaker members. A follower of social Darwinism through and through, for whom only the mighty had the right to exist and war was a righteous purge.

Durga stood up, shaking the cliff only by her sheer weight. The Iron Legion and her father hold a not dissimilar philosophy regarding a need for strife as a catalyst for evolution and a loathe for inefficiency, even if their view of “strength” and “valor” bore a greater scope than those of Mary. For all her bravado and bloodlust though, Mary was but one among the many zealots sailing in the Blue Sea who longed to turn the world on fire; few of those carried enough strength, intelligence and imagination to actually lit the fuse.

Durga was there to test if Mary was among those people.

Taking a leap, she welcomed the embrace of the sea with open arms. She found the slap of the ocean’s surface on her face reinvigorating, and the freshness of the depths pleasantly refreshing. Her gills were already in motion, extracting oxygen from water and pumping it in her lungs in an akin manner to fishes, but more efficiently. The modification she was graced from by her father ensured she had the same bond with the sea as Fishmen, and she could survive the abysses with the same if not greater ease. To make sure she didn’t damage the island too much, Durga swum a bit.

The Maw Pirates' ship shadow loomed quite far from, though still much larger from her perspective than a mere dot. Durga could probably get right below the vessel and smashing into flotsam without being noticed, but that was not the purpose of her visit: since even the strongest pirates were at their most vulnerable at direct blows at the hull, she had to give her opponent more of a chance of not losing her ship. More mercy than Mary would probably show to her and anybody, but Durga was striking first and by surprise, so some sportsmanship was due.

Clouds of sand surged as Durga’s plunged on the seafloor searching for a solid base. Tightening her muscles to an extreme amount, she coiled her first close to her hips, charging for a classic move of Fishman Karate: a straight, deadly punch.

“Yarinami”

As the name pointed out, her punch lodged straight like a spear, exploding with tremendous force. Following a rumble, the water around her punch coalesced in utter massive lance, greater in size than a battleship, whom Durga hurled against the Maw’s Pirate’s ship. Due to the breakneck speed it was launched with, the spear made an extremely noisy hiss as it traveled, foam rippling on its surface; a whirlpool took place around the gigantic warrior, as the surface was flowing back to its natural, calmer state.

Durga didn’t give the ocean a chance, and she punched many, many times more in the span of seconds, each time throwing a colossal spear and each time causing a tremendous hiss. The whirlpool around had grown larger, turning in a hole gaping above the sea floor, from which one could see Durga smiling as she was bombarding the Maw Pirates with more projectiles one could probably count at a give glance, the kind of assault which would be more than enough to demolish whole fleets and perhaps entire coastal cities.