The marines arrived with the practiced precision of people whose reputation always preceded them—more than the handful from the post, more than the second group at the fence. In the time it took Liam to turn, the courtyard shifted from aftermath to active crisis.
Zoro stood—just barely. The post had left his legs with the memory of movement rather than the reality, but standing was what mattered. He eyed the incoming marines with the cool calculation of someone already solving the problem.
"My swords." Not a question.
"The vault." Liam kept his voice even. "Morgan's building."
Zoro's eyes moved to the building and then to Luffy, who was already moving.
"I'll get them." Luffy was already moving, calling back over his shoulder, in the tone of a man for whom this was a simple problem and simple problems got solved immediately.
He disappeared around the corner.
Liam turned to face the arriving marines.
---
Holding a corridor against a swarm of armed opponents was a matter of never letting them settle. He slipped along the column's edge before they could form ranks—skirting the center, targeting the perimeter where marines were still shifting from motion to readiness. The first three fell before the rest even realized it. After that, it was all momentum.
They fired.
The first shot struck his left shoulder, delivering the simple fact of injury without any urgency. The next two hit center mass—real force, real impact, but his body, trained for this, simply logged the data and moved on. More bullets followed. He noted each one, but none slowed him.
There it is, he thought, satisfaction blooming—not because pain was gone, but because his preparation had worked. Blade resistance, fire drills, daily sparring with someone who hit harder than any marine—all of it proved itself in the simple irrelevance of bullets. He had done something strange to himself in those woods, and now it paid off in the only currency that mattered.
He registered three more rounds and kept moving.
He already knew the asterisk: haki-imbued attacks would be a different category when they arrived. Haki operated on a layer beneath pure physical force. The first exposure to a serious haki-user was going to be instructive, probably painfully. But his adaptive physiology had handled every other category of threat the same way — first exposure, rapid adaptation, ceiling rising. There was no reason to think haki would be different. He was not worried. He was genuinely interested in finding out.
He cleared the space and held it.
Luffy came back around the corner at speed, three swords in one arm and the expression of a person who had completed a task and was immediately ready for the next one.
"Zoro!"
---
The handoff was not a transaction.
Zoro's hands found the three hilts in the unhurried way that hands found things they knew completely — the grip adjusting without thought, the weight distributing across fingers that had learned this distribution over years until it was simply the natural position of his hands when they were doing what they were meant to do. He straightened.
The change in him was instant and unmistakable. His body still bore the limits of captivity, but something deeper had shifted. He was no longer improvising with what he had—he was himself again.
He looked at the remaining marines with the flat attention of a person to whom this had just become a different kind of problem.
Liam stepped aside.
The three—Luffy, Zoro, Liam—dispatched the rest with the rough but effective energy of people whose instincts aligned enough that words were unnecessary. Zoro and Luffy's unfamiliarity showed in their occasional overlap, but neither needed the other to succeed, and the marines were simply outmatched.
He noticed, somewhere in the middle of it, that there were more of them than canon.
The thought came and went, light as air. More marines, altered timing—just the ripples of a timeline already changed since he'd arrived three months ago. He'd made peace with this on a mountain trail: things would always be a little off, and curiosity was a better companion than anxiety.
His adaptation followed a simple logic: the world shifts because you're part of it. Move through it as it comes.
---
Axe Hand Morgan entered with the confidence of someone untouched by failure. He strode through his domain with the blunt authority of a man who'd never needed a plan B.
Luffy and Zoro took him in roughly the same spirit.
The collaboration was rough — two people who had been in combat together for approximately 8 minutes — but it was not complicated by that roughness because neither of them needed the partnership to be refined to work. Luffy's and Zoro's approach was what it always was. The fact that these were simultaneously happening to the same person was sufficient.
Morgan fell with the abrupt certainty of someone who had always been the biggest presence—until something bigger arrived. No drama, no flourish. He simply met a level beyond his own, and that was that.
The Marines who had come with him looked at this and looked at each other.
Zoro rolled his shoulder — testing range of motion, not complaining — and turned to look at the rest of them with the expression of someone available to continue if that was what they wanted.
Liam looked at the ones still standing. The silence communicated the situation adequately enough without assistance.
---
The restaurant was different from how it had been an hour ago.
Nothing looked different—same tables, same food, same faces. But the room itself had changed, the air lighter, the weight of oppression freshly lifted and still dissolving into the walls. People spoke at normal volume now. That was new. They met the doorway with their eyes instead of avoiding it. Food arrived without the wary pause of people watching the entrance.
Liam ate, letting the room settle around him, content to simply exist in the moment. Not every instant needed to be dissected; some were meant to be lived. The food was good. The room was better. Tonight, these people would sleep more easily than they had in ages.
Koby sat across from him, gathering himself for something he'd been preparing to say since they docked.
---
Luffy cleared his throat.
Luffy's throat-clearing was theatrical—he was not the type to do it naturally—and it carried the weight of an announcement forming. Koby looked up. The table fell silent, everyone sensing something deliberate was about to happen.
Luffy looked at the room — not at Koby specifically —
"I've never met this kid before in my life." He spoke to the room, with the complete and committed straightness of face that Luffy brought to things he had decided were necessary. "He's not with us. I don't know who he is."
Koby's eyes widened, then softened—understanding dawning the way it does when a gift is given without being named.
Nobody in the room offered a word.
The villagers watching understood. The Marines who'd chosen the right side understood. Everyone was busy not looking at Koby, which was the kindest thing they could offer.
Liam looked at his food.
Koby was a good kid, destined to become something real. He'd survived a year and a half on Alvida's ship because he hadn't known how to leave, but he'd found his way out. Now he would enter the Marines with a clean slate and a straight spine, ready to become the kind of Marine the good ones were meant to be. Luffy had just cleared his path with a straight face and a couple of words.
There was nothing to say about this. He ate.
The goodbye at the dock was brief by design — brief was better, here.
Luffy had already gone ahead to check the boat and supplies—either by chance or as his way of giving Koby a private moment without making it obvious. Liam couldn't tell which. Luffy sometimes landed on the right thing by instinct, not intention, skipping the step of deciding altogether.
When Luffy returned, Koby shook his hand—both hands wrapped around Luffy's, the gesture sincere even if it wasn't his usual style. Then he turned to Liam, wearing the look of someone holding out an offering and waiting to see if it would be accepted.
Koby met his eyes. "Thank you." Simple and direct.
"Go be a good one," Liam told him.
Koby smiled—the genuine kind, not the nervous one—and walked toward town.
---
The villagers brought a boat and supplies, offering them with the quiet generosity of people who couldn't put this kind of gratitude into words, so they let actions speak. The boat came from a man with two; the food from the restaurant, a household, and a fisherman waiting at the dock with a bundle. No speeches. The food was good, plentiful, and the boat was sturdy.
The person handing over the rope met Liam's eyes—no special expression, just the plain look of someone silently saying they understood—then turned and walked back up the dock.
Liam cast off.
---
Open water. Three aboard. The boat cut smoothly through the waves.
"How many in the crew?" Zoro asked. He was at the stern, his expression the expression of a person asking a practical question and expecting a practical answer.
Luffy looked up from the bow. "Three right now." He already had the settled ease of a person who was exactly where they were supposed to be. "We need a navigator. A cook. A musician. A doctor. More."
Zoro looked at Liam.
"Problem solver," Liam told him, before he could ask. "General. I handle what needs handling."
"Powers?"
He gave it plainly: "I take damage and adapt to it. Whatever hurts me, my body learns from — permanently. Cuts, heat, bullets. Hit me with something enough times, and it stops working. If I die, I come back immune to whatever killed me."
Zoro held the information for a moment. He did not express being impressed. He did not dismiss it either. He registered it as real information about a real person, and it went into whatever category he used for things that were worth knowing.
Zoro looked at the horizon. "Useful."
"That's the goal."
They sat in companionable silence. The water moved beneath them, the horizon steady, and neither felt compelled to fill the quiet with anything unnecessary.
Liam had suspected this about Zoro from a screen, but now he knew: the man wore silence like a second skin, the kind of ease that comes from long hours alone in your own head. Zoro spoke only when words were needed.
"What are you after?" Zoro asked.
Liam looked at the sea ahead. "Same thing as him." A tilt of his head toward Luffy. "The crew gets where it's going. Everything that tries to stop it doesn't."
Zoro absorbed this. It was not a complicated answer, and it did not try to be.
Zoro gazed at the sea. "Greatest swordsman in the world." No buildup, just the destination, spoken like a traveler naming his stop. "Everyone knows Mihawk is the current one. I will surpass him."
Luffy turned and looked at him. "I wouldn't want anyone else."
The words were simple, and he meant every one. Then he turned back to the water.
Zoro looked at the horizon.
---
The day unfolded around them. Liam considered what lay ahead with the quiet focus of someone already running the next stretch of road in his mind—the next arc forming, Buggy's island coming into view in memory, chaos and color waiting there.
Nami would be there.
He let himself enjoy a brief, warm thought about it, noticed, and decided that was fine. She would be in the same town as him, not just passing on a boat. That would be different, and he was curious to see how it would be.
He did not examine this further. The sea was in front of him, and the day was good.
Luffy stood up at the bow.
The bird was enormous—the kind of size that only made sense in One Piece, gliding fast across their path at just the right height. Luffy was already sizing it up, or doing whatever he did that looked like calculation but wasn't, and always got results.
He grabbed it.
The bird didn't slow or swerve. It simply accepted the new reality of a large rubber person dangling from it, folding this fact into its determined flight path without hesitation.
Zoro was on his feet. "Luffy—"
The island ahead was pulling into view — distant but real, a mass on the horizon with the particular profile that Liam recognized from memory.
He watched Luffy soar upward, hat steady in the wind as always, and felt the shape of what was coming settle in his chest—the way familiar things do when they finally become real.
The island on the horizon sharpened into color and shape, soon to become streets and chaos he'd only seen on a screen—now about to surround him. The next arc. Nami would be there, living her own story, and he'd finally meet her as a person, not just a distant figure.
He had been looking forward to this for three months.
Zoro stood beside him, watching Luffy with the look of someone reconsidering the fine print of his new adventure.
"Does he do this often?" Zoro asked.
"This is the second day," Liam told him.
Zoro paused. "Understood." Another beat. "I will be the greatest swordsman, no matter what this is." He gestured at Luffy, still airborne and unwavering.
"I know." Then he caught himself and looked up instead.
Buggy. Nami. The next big thing. He was ready for it.