"Why?!" a Beast pirate covered in quickly expanding, violently red boils cried out in anguish.
"How could you do this to us?!" yelled another whose skin turned yellow with jaundice and even started to split in gnarly gashes.
"BGHjKkBF?!?!?!" a third tried to scream, but his nose and mouth were flooded with mucus that, if you looked close enough, was moving under its own power.
"Gross," Luffy summed up the situation succinctly.
"That bastard probably has the cures on him, despite what he claimed," Chopper reasoned. "He's surely not crazy enough to release epidemics that he can't stop."
"There aren't any samurai up this far," Sanji said. "We can just leave. Luffy needs to get to Kaido."
"That could change very quickly," Jinbe pointed out. "If we don't handle this now, our forces will be decimated or worse."
"The animals are our allies too!" Chopper growled. "We have to help them!"
"Chopper's right. We can't abandon our friends," Luffy concurred. "Not like him."
Sanji and Jinbe nodded, knowing that there was no changing their captain's mind on this nor did they really care to try.
"There...! And that one and that one too!" Chopper pointed out three of the mutant creatures. "They were hit, but they don't look like they've been afflicted! I might be able to harvest antibodies from them!"
The reindeer doctor didn't need to say anything more. Luffy, Sanji, and Jinbe jumped into action, each angling towards the animals that Chopper had pointed out. Merry stayed put to watch over him and make sure he wasn't attacked.
Chopper didn't spring out from behind their cover like they had. Instead, he took the heavily reinforced case off of his back and opened it up to reveal his field medicine kit.
It was not to be confused with the humble first aid kit. This was state of the art technology; almost everything that a doctor could possibly need miniaturized into the most compact form the tools could take without sacrificing too much functionality.
A veritable mobile laboratory, yet it was still light enough to carry in his Brain Point form.
Cherry and Franky, especially the latter, were indispensable in designing the thing. If he made it on his own, he would need to use Heavy Point at the bare minimum to lug it around everywhere.
Chopper started the prep work for the tool he would need to separate antibodies from blood. The sounds of suffering and despair grew in volume, but they could not distract him from his single minded purpose.
It was unsurprising that Luffy returned before the other two. Chopper hadn't expected his captain to act cautiously in the acquisition of his first patient. As he expected, he immediately caught a greenish smudge on Luffy's bare ankle.
"I've got the first one, Chopper-" Luffy began, only to pause as Chopper started wiping down his leg with a powerful antiseptic cocktail and then stuck him with a syringe full of immuno-boosters.
Chopper didn't think that would stop Luffy from getting sick from the engineered plagues, but it should slow down the infection long enough for him to fix it at the least.
"There you are! Die!" *BASH*
Merry headbutted a Beast pirate who lunged around the knocked over table they were hiding behind, sending the man flying back into the melee.
"Are you alright, Merry?" Chopper asked without taking his eyes off the blood sample he'd taken.
"Bah," Merry answered curtly.
"Right, right, you're made of wood! Of course you can't get sick!" Chopper nodded lightly. "This is delicate work, please keep sending any interlopers away."
Sanji and Jinbe brought back their own patients soon after the first, allowing Chopper to operate at peak efficiency. Chopper advised, "Keep a lookout for any more healthy individuals! Or try and see what you can get from that big fellow!"
"Phew," Cherry wiped her brow. "That's a lot of work. I don't envy carpenters or you shipwrights."
"There's nothing better than a cold one after a hard days work!" Franky declared. "So why are we building this barricade?"
"To keep the sick inside. Chopper's handling it, but we don't want that stuff spreading to the rest of the castle unbidden," Cherry explained.
"Super good thinking!" Franky exclaimed. "I caught the flu once; it was terrible!"
"Those diseases are a bit worse than the flu, I think," Cherry said. "They can break themselves out when they need to, so we don't have to stick around. Are you gonna find somebody to fight?"
"It's the manly thing to do!" Franky posed.
"Right," Cherry said. "Although you don't have that much man left in you."
"A man is a man is a man!" Franky countered.
"Fair enough," Cherry didn't get it.
Franky went off to man it up and Cherry did a scan of the castle for the umpteenth time.
"Uh oh," Cherry found that the Red Scabbards weren't doing so hot. "I guess I can give them a little support. They won't say no to that, will they?"
Cherry bounded along and picked up a stray arm that fell through Kaido's roof hole, before climbing up through said hole to the roof.
Kaido was toying with them. That was Cherry's first impression of the sight before her.
None had fallen yet, but it was a close thing. Kiku was the one who had lost the arm, but even so she was there with the rest, fighting just as hard.
Kiku took a full brunt strike from Kaido's kanabo. Cherry stealthily relocated herself to where Kiku would land.
"Ugh!" Kiku struggled to get up after smashing into the roof.
"Psst," Cherry whispered. "I got your arm."
"Huh?" Kiku found the sight almost comically perplexing. PErhaps it simply hadn't settled in that she'd lost the arm.
Cherry tip-toed over, jamming the severed arm over the cauterized wound where the arm had been attached to her shoulder.
"Agh?!" Kiku hissed into pain from the rough handling until- "Ooooh, that's nice..."
"Aaand done!" Cherry announced, removing her magical, wonderful hands and the incredible sensations that they had brought.
"Huh?" Kiku uttered a second time, coming out of that fluffy headspace she had fallen into inadvertently.
Kiku wiggled her fingers, then realized that she had ten fingers! "You... you just stuck it back on? Just like that?"
"Isn't that how arms work? Silly woman," Cherry shook her head in exasperation.
"Wait, is that how they really work...?" Kiku wondered aloud. "Ah! I'm still in a battle! Thanks for the, er, arm?"
Kiku didn't wait for a "You're welcome" before rushing back into the fray.
Even the extra arm didn't help the Red Scabbards much in their fight, though. Although, Cherry was glad to say that the extra arm and leg she had built for Duke Dogstorm and Cat Viper were putting in some real work. At least her efforts in the prosthetic limbs hadn't been for naught.
Haki was bullshit, though. The blades she added into the designs could tear Akainu's steel battleship asunder without haki, yet even with their haki included they could not pierce Kaido's bare skin.
Kaido was well and truly the world's toughest brute. She could take the Red Scabbards by herself, too, but she couldn't claim to come out unscathed if she let them land all their attacks. They'd give her some superficial wounds that healed near instantly at the very least!
In front of Kaido, though, they were like babies swinging their rattles at, well... a dragon.