"Can't have you pummel my first mate like that without getting some back," Shanks said, rolling his knuckles with a wide grin. "That would make me a pretty bad captain."
"I am not your first mate," Buggy announced from the ground, with the conviction of a man who had decided this was the most important thing happening in the street. "I never agreed, I will never agree, I will form my own crew and rule the seas entirely on my own terms. Not your first mate. I want that on record."
Neither Lucien nor Shanks looked at him.
They started forward at the same moment. The distance closed fast.
The first punch came as a right hook, fast and committed. Lucien got his forearm up in time, felt the force travel all the way to his shoulder — more than he'd expected — and pushed off it into a side kick at Shanks' ribs. Shanks slipped sideways like he'd already known it was coming, let it pass, and came back with a combination that Lucien only half-read and had to eat the last piece of. It snapped his head back. He reset his footing and took a breath and reassessed.
This was different from Buggy. Different from the pirates on the docks. Shanks moved with the particular quality of someone who had been fighting seriously for a long time and had not wasted any of it. His hits were timed rather than just fast, which was considerably harder to deal with, and he covered his own gaps the way people cover gaps when they no longer have to think about it.
Lucien stopped trying to match him and switched modes.
He had learned this in the months of being taken apart by Cael every evening. When the opponent was better, the answer was not to fight harder. It was to watch. He let his body handle the immediate problems on instinct — blocking, evading, keeping the distance workable — while his full attention went somewhere else entirely, into the pattern of Shanks' movement. The weight shifts. The tells that everyone had whether they knew it or not.
He took three more hits finding it. They were not pleasant.
Then he found it — a narrow window in the transition between Shanks' left kick and whatever followed it, a fraction of a second where the weight was fully committed and the guard hadn't reset. He waited, let the kick come, stepped around it, and threw a straight punch at Shanks' midsection.
Shanks read it and moved to absorb it at an angle. Lucien stopped the punch halfway, dropped his weight, and swept the leg that was carrying Shanks' shifted balance. There was nothing to do with that but take it. Shanks rolled with it cleanly, came up fast, and stood looking at Lucien from five metres away with something new in his expression.
"Interesting," Shanks said. He was smiling — the genuine kind, not the performative one from before. "You're good. Are you part of a crew?"
"No," Lucien said. He was breathing harder than he'd have liked. "I came here with an old man to watch the execution."
"How old are you?"
"Thirteen."
Shanks looked at him with open curiosity, the kind that had no competitive edge in it. "Younger than both of us and you fight like that." He seemed to find this genuinely satisfying. "We're apprentices on Roger's crew. Or we were." Something moved briefly across his expression and was controlled before it finished arriving. "Come with us. I'm putting together my own crew when this is done. You'd fit."
"I'm not joining his crew either," Buggy said from somewhere behind them, having apparently recovered enough to resume his position on the matter.
"Nobody asked you," Shanks said pleasantly. He looked back at Lucien. "What do you say?"
Lucien considered him for a moment. "No."
"No?"
"I'm not interested in following someone else's direction. I have somewhere to be and I'm already late." He turned. "Take care of yourselves. Both of you."
He had taken two steps when a house thirty metres down the street ceased to exist.
The wall came out first, then the structure behind it folding inward, and through the dust and the sound of it a figure crossed the gap and hit the far side of the street hard enough to leave a shape in the cobblestones. Someone had been thrown through an entire building. Lucien stood very still and calculated the force required for that and arrived at a number he did not enjoy.
The man stepped through the destroyed wall. White Marine coat, the kind worn by people who didn't take orders anymore, and it had no business being that clean. Tall. Built like a decision that had already been made. Square jaw, short hair, a cigar at the corner of his mouth producing a thin thread of smoke that rose perfectly straight in the still air. He looked at the three of them the way someone looks at a door they are about to open.
He didn't say anything.
That was worse, somehow, than if he had.
He drew on the cigar once, slowly, and let the smoke out, and the silence stretched, and Lucien became aware that he was being assessed the way a person assesses something they already intend to take. No urgency. No performance. Just the particular stillness of someone who had done this enough times that the outcome had stopped being interesting to them.
"Roger Pirates," the man said finally. His voice was level. "Apprentices." His eyes moved across the three of them without lingering. "Surrender. Come with me. Or don't." He drew on the cigar again. "I don't have a preference."
Lucien looked for the fruit. There was nothing — no heat, no charge in the air, no element waiting to be called. Just a very large, very capable man standing in a destroyed doorway who had thrown another man through an entire building with what appeared to be his hands, and who had said I don't have a preference as though both outcomes genuinely suited him equally. That was the most frightening thing Lucien had encountered in what was already a fairly frightening afternoon.
He felt rather than saw Shanks arrive beside him.
"No fruit," Shanks said quietly. Not a question.
"No," Lucien said.
"That's what I thought."
Behind them, Buggy had moved to a position that was technically still in the street but was also technically behind Shanks, maintaining it with the committed energy of someone who had made a tactical decision and was not going to discuss it.
The Marine took one step forward.
That was enough. They moved.