The docks were in chaos.
Lucien looked down at the man clutching his broken nose and felt something he hadn't quite felt before — a quiet, clean surprise at his own hands. He'd known he'd grown stronger in the abstract, the way you know something you've been told repeatedly. Feeling it go all the way through someone was different.
He filed it and kept moving.
"Who is this kid?"
The second man stepped out from behind the first, sword already drawn. He'd watched his crewmate's nose break and was processing it through anger rather than caution, which told Lucien most of what he needed to know. "Out here swinging at people. Someone needs to teach you some manners."
"And someone needs to teach you how to open a sentence," Lucien said.
The sword came at his head. He dropped under it — felt a few strands of hair go with the blade, closer than he'd have liked — came up two steps back and found his footing on the wet dock planking. Slippery. He adjusted his weight and reassessed.
The first man was already back on his feet, face sheeted in blood, moving to flank. Both of them at once, then.
He let them come. He watched the sword arm for the tell — a slight hitch in the shoulder, there — and went inside the swing before it fully committed, catching the arm behind the elbow. His heel found the outside of the man's knee and he drove into it with everything he had. The crack was audible over the noise of the docks. The scream that followed was considerably louder. The man folded and stayed folded, one hand on his nose and one on his knee, unable to decide which needed more urgent attention.
The second man stopped.
Looked at his crewmate on the ground. Looked at Lucien. Something shifted in his expression — the anger still there, but something else moving under it now, recalculating.
Then he rolled his shoulders and let it win anyway.
"Kids these days." The sword came up again. "Going to have to carve you down a little. Show you what a real pirate looks like."
"That is genuinely one of the worst things anyone has said to me," Lucien said. "And I live with an old man who pours water on my face every morning."
The man came faster this time, and Lucien caught the first swing badly — had to give ground, boot catching on a coil of rope, and for one ugly second his balance was entirely wrong. The blade came back on the return and he got his forearm up and felt the flat of it crack against the bone hard enough to go numb to the elbow. He gritted his teeth and kept moving, creating distance, shaking feeling back into his arm.
There it is, Cael's voice said somewhere in the back of his head. Now you know what the ground feels like. Get back on it.
He found solid footing, waited, and let the man come to him.
The next swing was wider — anger eating the technique. He slipped inside it, drove his elbow into the sword arm hard enough to jar the grip open, and in the moment the man's hand spasmed Lucien hit him across the face with everything the past year and a half had built into his right hand.
The man went down clean and did not get up.
Lucien looked at the two of them. His forearm still throbbed. He would have a bruise by evening that he did not particularly want to explain to anyone.
He turned and ran.
He was coming out of an alley when something hit him from the side and the cobblestones came up fast. He rolled with it, hand finding his sword on instinct, and came up with his back against the wall and his vision still catching up.
Two figures were tearing through a Marine formation fifteen metres away. The red-haired boy fought like he'd done it a thousand times, economy of movement, nothing wasted. The blue-haired boy fought like he was trying to prove something to everyone watching, which somehow did not make him less effective. A Marine at the edge of the group had been thrown wide by the chaos. That Marine had apparently landed on Lucien.
He looked down at the man crumpled against his legs, then back at the fight, and made a decision.
He grabbed the Marine by the coat and threw him back in.
He landed square between the blue-haired boy's shoulders. The boy staggered, spun around, and the expression on his face cycled through surprise and affront and arrived somewhere volcanic.
"Who threw that." It wasn't a question. "You do not throw Marines at people, that is extremely rude, I am Buggy of the Roger Pirates and I demand—"
"You threw him at me first," Lucien said.
"That was tactical repositioning." The sword came up. "This is personal."
He was fast. Lucien got that in the first second, faster than the dockworkers, faster than most people he'd sparred with who weren't Cael. The blade came in at his neck and he ducked it close enough to feel the air move, the tip catching a few strands of hair, and his footing on the uneven cobblestones nearly betrayed him as he stepped back. Nearly. He steadied, adjusted, and filed that away: watch the feet.
Buggy pressed the advantage, grinning now, and Lucien backpedalled through the debris of the Marine skirmish, an overturned cart, a dropped rifle, something on fire that he skirted without looking — buying himself the seconds he needed to read the pattern. Buggy was aggressive, and he was angry, which meant he was committing too hard to each swing. The openings were there. They were just fast.
"Tell me your name," Buggy said, between swings. Not winded. That was noted too. "Consider it a privilege. Being finished off by a Roger Pirate."
"Your captain died twenty minutes ago," Lucien said. He sidestepped a thrust, let it go past his hip by inches. "I'm not sure that title is still—"
"Don't." The next swing came with real venom behind it. "Don't."
Harder to dodge. Lucien caught the wrist instead of slipping it, felt the strength in it, more than he'd expected — and had to work to turn the arm, his shoulder screaming with the effort. He got the sword pointed at the ground and drove his elbow into the inside of Buggy's forearm. The grip didn't open. He hit it again. The sword dropped.
In the moment Buggy looked at his empty hand, Lucien hit him across the face.
It was a good hit. He felt it travel. Buggy went down hard and bounced once off the cobblestones and lay there, and the grin was gone now, replaced by something flatter and more genuine.
Lucien stood over him, breathing harder than he would have liked, and became aware that the rest of the street had gone quiet.
"Also," he said, when he had enough air for it, "you announced to everyone within earshot that you're from Roger's crew. Every person on this street is now wondering if you know where the One Piece is."
Buggy stared at the sky. The implications crossed his face one at a time, in order, like a very slow-moving disaster.
"You absolute id—"
He came off the ground faster than anyone who'd just eaten cobblestones twice had any right to, and the fury on his face was different now, less performance, more real. Lucien stepped back and set his feet and got ready, because this was the version of the fight that was actually going to cost him something.
"Buggy." The red-haired boy's voice cut across the street, flat and tired. He had finished the last of the Marines without apparent difficulty and was looking at the two of them with the expression of someone who had made peace with this situation a long time ago. "You have a Devil Fruit. Use it."
"Shanks, you know I can't use it properly yet and you know that," Buggy said. He didn't take his eyes off Lucien. "Help me with this kid."
Sighing at Buggy, Shanks finally looked at Lucien.