The sea revealed itself as vaster than the shore had ever hinted.
That was the first thing: the way your senses adjusted when land vanished from the edges of your sight, and only endless water remained. The island behind them had already faded to a rumor. Ahead, the horizon was a seamless divide of blue meeting blue. The boat slipped forward, unnoticed by the sea.
Luffy stood at the bow, not holding on, not bracing—simply balanced, as if the moving deck was as steady as solid ground to him. His hat lifted in the wind. His face was lit with the rare joy of someone who has longed for something for years and now finds the reality every bit as sweet as the dream.
Liam shipped his oar and took stock.
A small boat. Two barrels of basic supplies. Water stretches in every direction. And somewhere ahead, guided by memory, something enormous was waiting to emerge.
He did not have to wait long.
---
The Sea King surged up from the depths with the certainty of something that had never needed to warn the world of its arrival—a swell of water, a shadow, and then suddenly a vast, undeniable presence. It regarded the small boat with the focused intent of a creature that had decided it was prey. Up close, its size was a revelation. No screen could prepare you for what it meant to be seen by something so massive from only fifteen feet away.
Luffy wound up.
Luffy's punch landed squarely on the Sea King's face, and the sound was sharper and heavier than Liam had imagined—a blow that carried authority, not just force. The creature left, not in a slow, reluctant retreat, but as if it had been decisively informed it had made a mistake.
It was faster, further, and more complete than it should have been.
Liam watched it vanish and felt a quiet warmth settle in his chest—the calm satisfaction of proof. Two months on the mountain, daily sparring, and Luffy at sixteen had become the version who left with those months behind him, not the one who would have left without them. The Sea King was already a distant shape, still retreating.
"That was good," Liam said.
Luffy turned around, grinning. "It was really good."
"You hit it harder than you needed to."
"There's no such thing as harder than you need to."
Liam considered this a philosophical position and found it internally consistent, given that it came from Luffy.
They let the boat drift, carried by the sea's slow, indifferent current.
---
The question of where surfaced the way it always did between two people adrift with no destination: slowly, inevitably, and with no answer waiting for them.
"Where are we going?" Liam asked.
Luffy looked at the water. Then he looked at the sky. Then he looked at the water again.
"The sea," he said.
It was technically true. Liam gave it a moment's thought. "That really narrows it down."
"It's all connected." Luffy sat down in the bow with the boneless ease of someone whose relationship with gravity had long since become a matter of preference. "We'll find somewhere."
The truth was, neither of them had a better plan. The sea was vast, and aiming for somewhere—anywhere—felt like a reasonable goal. Liam took up his oar.
The water changed first—not with drama, but with the subtle shift that meant something was gathering below. The surface took on a new texture. A pull emerged where none had existed before. The current pressed against the hull differently.
He stopped rowing.
"Luffy."
Luffy was already watching the water. His relaxed look lingered, but something beneath it had changed—not fear, but a sharpened focus. The sea never frightened Luffy; it only caught his interest when it counted.
"Whirlpool," Liam said.
Luffy's expression said he had also arrived at this conclusion.
---
The barrels were at the back of the boat, and the situation did not leave time for extended deliberation. Luffy could not swim. This was a fact about him with no workaround — the sea rejected Devil Fruit users with the total impersonality of a physical law, and Luffy's rubber body in water was as useful as a stone in water, which was to say not at all. The barrel was his only option.
Liam's situation was different. His adaptive body made him more than capable in open water—far beyond what his old self could have imagined. He could definitely handle a whirlpool.
He thought about it for about 3 seconds, then got the barrel.
He refused to imagine Luffy sealed alone in a barrel, adrift on the open sea. Too many unknowns, too much risk in the time between going in and coming out. His own comfort in the water was not worth it. This was not about bravery. It was simply the right decision, made swiftly and without fuss.
He got Luffy sealed. He got his own barrel sealed around himself, which required a specific physical orientation he had not previously considered, and maintained a grip on Luffy's barrel through the gap. The whirlpool had reached them by the time this was done.
Inside the barrel, the world became noise.
It was not just loud—it was the raw, physical chaos of water racing in clashing directions, all of it pounding through wood that strained to hold together. The barrel spun, then spun on another axis, then both at once, defying logic. Up lost all meaning. Time twisted. Only one thing stayed constant: his grip on Luffy's barrel, held by sheer will, because letting go was never an option.
He had promised himself he'd be fine. His body made that technically true—the spinning caused no harm, the water's pressure was just another condition to adapt to. What it could not fix was the disorienting reality of spinning in three directions at once, with no sense of up left to hold onto.
He thought, with the clarity that sometimes arrived in completely disorienting situations: I am inside a barrel in a whirlpool in the One Piece world, holding onto another barrel that contains Luffy.
This thought did not help him feel better. It was, however, accurate.
His body felt no distress. Even as the barrel spun like it had forgotten what direction meant, there was no damage, no panic—just the odd state of someone whose body had decided whirlpools were normal. He had adapted to the ocean from the start, and over two months of daily exposure had only deepened that. The water itself was never the problem.
Time passed the way it does inside a spinning, sightless barrel in a whirlpool: unevenly, with no markers to measure it by.
Then the spinning eased. The current settled into something recognizable, and the chaos unraveled into the simple state of floating—a vast improvement over what had come before.
He held on.
Eventually, light filtered through the wooden slats—the kind of light that meant you were no longer deep below. Voices followed. Then came the unmistakable feeling of a barrel being lifted by hands, not water.
---
He regained his bearings in slow increments, the way you do after the world has spent ten minutes shaking them loose. A ship's deck—much larger than their boat, built for work, not show. People moved with purpose. The air was thick with salt, rope, and the practiced chaos of midday at sea.
He was upright. He checked: Luffy was upright next to him, already rotating his neck, already looking at the ship around him with the open interest of someone who had just arrived somewhere and was finding it interesting.
Liam scanned the deck.
A round-faced boy stood by the rail. He radiated anxious energy, his features soft, wearing the look of someone who had spent so long in over his head that it had become familiar. But there was a core of decency that shone through the nerves—something fundamental, not performed.
Liam touched Luffy's arm briefly. "The boy near the rail," he said, quiet and direct. "Koby. Good kid."
Luffy looked, absorbed the assessment, and moved on—the way he always did when he trusted the source.
The situation did not give them long to orient before it changed.
The Alvida pirates were either already on board or wasted no time getting there. How they'd taken over mattered less than the fact that they had, announced by the movement of armed men who were clearly not sailors and the way the rest of the crew shifted around them. The ship was under uneasy management—a situation Liam knew well.
He moved before anyone told him to.
He didn't move toward any one thing—just into the flow, into the spot where he could be useful. The Alvida crew mattered more as a group than as individuals; he navigated them like a crowded room, not a battlefield. The real challenge was elsewhere.
Alvida carried herself like someone accustomed to being the biggest presence in any space. Her iron club was anything but subtle. When she swung at him—committing with the confidence of someone who expected to win—he let the blow land.
Not because he could not avoid it. He chose it.
The impact was genuine—real force, the kind that would have wrecked anyone without two months of adaptation on top of an already strong foundation. For him, it was just a sensation: present, informative, but not alarming. His body registered the blow and found nothing urgent.
He stepped back and met Alvida's gaze. She stared at him with the disbelief of someone whose expectations had just been upended.
Then Luffy stepped in.
Luffy's punch sent Alvida flying toward the horizon—a display of his current limits, which were higher than they'd been two months ago and higher than canon had allowed. The blow was harder, cleaner, more final. She traced a perfect arc through the sky, vanishing into the distance.
Luffy looked satisfied.
"Nice," Liam commented.
Luffy turned back to the ship, already scanning for the next task, his focus shifting without pause.
---
The Marines arrived with the classic timing of official response: after everything was over, and at the most inconvenient moment for everyone else. Liam surveyed the deck, the newcomers, and the waiting small boats. The decision was easy.
There was no reason to stay. The problem was solved, and explaining it to late-arriving marines would only waste time for no gain.
He headed for the boat. Luffy was already there, his sense of threat and timing perfectly aligned—never lingering where he didn't need to. Koby followed; Luffy had somehow made it clear, in their brief time, that Koby was coming too. Once Luffy decided someone mattered, he acted on it without hesitation.
Nami came last.
She moved with the purpose of someone who had already weighed her options, chosen her exit, and acted before anyone else could suggest it. The decision was hers alone. She wasn't following; her path just happened to match theirs, for reasons entirely her own.
He noticed but said nothing. She was in the boat before he'd even finished the thought.
They pushed off.
---
The merchant ship faded into the distance. The four settled into the small boat—Luffy at the bow, already looking ahead, already searching for what came next. Koby wore the dazed look of someone who had survived what he thought would kill him and was still figuring out what that meant. The water flowed around them, the sky unchanged.
Nami was to Liam's left.
He noticed her with the same anticipation he reserved for things he'd long expected—tinged with the faint embarrassment of knowing someone would matter before having any proof. She was real. That was always the first surprise: every canonical person was real in a way the screen had never captured. The screen had always flattened what, in person, carried weight.
What the screen had missed, in her case, was the sharpness of her attention. She was already scanning the boat, the people, the unfolding situation with the quick, methodical intelligence of someone who had learned early that information was survival. Orange hair in the wind. The way she held herself—not stiff, not loose, but perfectly balanced, as if readiness was her natural state and she'd learned to disguise it as calm.
He did not say anything.
It wasn't quite awkward—or maybe just a little, but not in a way that needed fixing. He knew what he wanted to say, eventually. He had an idea of the person he wanted to become for her: someone worth trusting, especially from someone who rarely trusted. That was a long-term project, and projects started at the beginning, not the end. The first conversation with someone wary of strangers was not the place to make promises he couldn't keep.
He also recognized, sitting three feet away, that he was being a bit ridiculous. He only knew her from a screen. He'd decided she mattered before he had any real evidence. Now he was choosing silence, afraid to say the wrong thing to someone who didn't even know he existed—a level of investment that was, by any standard, premature.
He was fine with being early. Living in the One Piece world for three months with foreknowledge of these relationships meant a little premature attachment was inevitable.
So he turned his gaze to the water ahead.
Luffy was already pointing at the horizon—a shape, an island, the next offering from the sea, indifferent as always to anyone's intentions. All four turned to look. The island was distant, real, and would become whatever it was meant to be: Shells Town, which meant Zoro, which meant the next piece of the crew.
He noticed, in the edge of his awareness, that she too was watching the island—her attention as systematic and calculating as before, already collecting every detail about what lay ahead.
He thought: There is time.
The boat pressed on. The island grew closer. The sea remained as vast as ever, and the people in the boat as small as they'd always been—and that was exactly as it should be.
That, in fact, was the whole point.