A Serious Duel...?
"Hah... hah...! Damn...!"
It was an open, desolate place. A wasteland with nothing around it.
At its center, Roronoa Zoro stood with all three swords at the ready, breathing hard through his shoulders. His entire body was covered in cuts, stained with blood.
Blood trickled from his mouth, dyeing the hilt of his beloved Wado Ichimonji red. The opponent he faced was a single woman swordsman, standing with long white hair and a white haori rippling in the wind. From the Jade Sword in her hand, drops of his own blood fell, left there from receiving her slashes time and again.
Against his battered self, the woman swordsman, Sue, remained completely unscathed. His wounds were by no means small; his condition was so dire that delivering anything close to peak performance seemed hopeless.
Yet even so, Zoro's fighting spirit had not diminished in the slightest. He gritted his teeth, ignored the pain, and spun the two swords in his hands, Shusui and Sandai Kitetsu, in front of his body.
"Three-Sword Style... Secret Art...!!"
"...! One Sword Style, Secret Sword...!"
Seeing this, Sue shifted from her relaxed, unguarded stance. She stepped back with one foot, turning sideways, and raised the Seven Star Sword to mid-level guard.
The very next instant,
"Three... Thousand... Worlds!!"
Zoro's greatest technique, unleashed with every ounce of strength and every shred of Haki he could muster, tore forward with enough force to shred and sweep away everything before him.
But,
"Cross Over!!"
Sue's double strike, tracing an X shape, wreathed in red light, in Conqueror's Haki. The first slash broke through Zoro's all-out attack, cutting it aside.
And the second slash, following without a heartbeat's delay, carved deep into Zoro's body.
At which point, Zoro woke up.
"Gah...!? Hah... hah... Damn... couldn't win again...!"
The place where he woke was a certain meadow on Lubots Island, his usual training ground. As far as the eye could see, soft grass grew like a green carpet. The perfect spot for sunbathing and napping.
There, Zoro opened his eyes, drenched in sweat.
"Yo, good work. Here, you'll want some water. You're sweating like crazy."
"...! Yeah, thanks. I'll take it."
He gulped down water from the canteen Beauty handed him; she'd been standing by nearby. At the same time, Sue, who had been sleeping right beside him, sat up with a wide yawn.
"Beauty, water for me too, pleease."
"Yeah, yeah, I know. Here."
"Thanks. Oh, and thank you too, Noko. Sorry for dragging you into all this."
"No, it's totally fine! If there's anything I can help with, just say the word."
Sue smiled at the boy beside Beauty, Noko, who was grinning happily.
"After a short break, it's Saga's turn next. So, Noko, one more round if you don't mind."
"Yes, leave it to me!"
* * *
Allow me to explain.
Just now, Zoro woke up drenched in sweat. And I, who had been sleeping beside him, also woke up. But make no mistake: we were absolutely not slacking off and napping. This was legitimate training.
The boy next to Beauty, his name is Noko. Like the other kids, he's one of the orphans Beauty took in and looks after. But here's the thing: he's actually a Paramecia Devil Fruit user who ate the Sleep-Sleep Fruit, a Sleep Human with the power to put people to sleep and manipulate their dreams.
Using that power, Zoro and I had been fighting each other inside a dream. By falling asleep at the same time and sharing the same dream, it becomes possible.
Inside a dream, you can do absurdly intense training that would be impossible in reality, and you can fight without worrying about injuries that would be fatal in the flesh. Case in point: just now, in the dream, I inflicted wounds on Zoro that could have killed him. But it was just a dream. Once you wake up, Zoro's just lying there perfectly unharmed. That's all there is to it.
Of course, since it's only a dream, it won't build muscle or anything like that. But the main purpose of this Dream Training is to push into levels that normal training can't reach, to hone technique and develop a sense for combat, so that's not a problem. We've been doing this for several days now, and it's actually producing real results. Haki getting stronger, attack timing becoming sharper, things like that.
And honestly, it's not just benefiting Zoro and the others. I feel like this training is making me stronger too.
Having a place, a situation, where you can fight at full strength and gain Experience that way really does make a huge difference. Come to think of it, that's pretty much how it always was when Rayleigh was training me. I'd come at him with everything I had, fully intending to kill, and he'd brush it off like it was nothing. But during those times, I feel like the harder I went, the more I grew.
Lately, and I know this sounds like bragging, there really aren't many people I can go all out against. You'd probably need someone on the level of a Great Pirate whose name echoes across the New World. And if I went picking a fight with someone like that, it would cause a massive uproar, so I can't exactly do that. Besides, it's not like I want to fight that badly in the first place.
Seriously, being able to have a genuine duel so easily, all thanks to Noko. What a blessing.
Well then, now that I've dealt with the sweat and rehydrated, it's Saga's turn next.
So... goodnight. ...zzz...
* * *
Persistence Is Power
A different day.
Zoro was running. Alone.
Running without pause.
Not on the ground, but through the sky. Through midair.
"Hah... hah... damn, I've gotten used to it, sure, but keeping this up for so long, it's still brutal...!"
Where Zoro was running was the space between Sky Islands, in airspace even higher than Lubots Island. Naturally, there were no bridges, no Sea Cloud Paths connecting them. Just empty sky.
The air was thin. For a Blue Sea Dweller to operate up here, even for Zoro, who trained on Lubots Island on a daily basis, the oxygen level was punishingly low. Running from island to island at this altitude was a simple but grueling form of training.
On Zoro's feet were the shoes that let the wearer walk on air, the same ones he'd used during that beach volleyball game once before. With these, though it still consumed considerable stamina, even Zoro, who couldn't use Moonwalk, could run through the sky.
In thin air, though, just running alone wouldn't have been all that hard for the current Zoro. What was truly making him suffer, drenching him in sweat, was something else: the clothes he was wearing were incredibly heavy.
He was running in a special training outfit designed so that weight was distributed evenly across his entire body, restricting the movement of his arms and legs, and even increasing air resistance. Without going this far, it would be difficult to make the training "effective" given Zoro's current physical abilities.
And separate from all that, the biggest problem that arose when assigning Zoro this simple but appropriately grueling and effective training was, needless to say, dealing with his tendency to get lost.
Given that Zoro's sense of direction was on another dimension entirely, once the training field expanded to the open sky, even if Sue gave him instructions like "run from here to there, along this route," five minutes later he'd be running in some location that made everyone exclaim, 'How did you even end up there!?' This actually happened multiple times.
Because of this, there was a period where they quite seriously considered scrapping this training entirely. Instead, they settled on not specifying a range or course at all, just telling him, "Run from this Sky Island to that Sky Island!" As long as he clearly knew the destination, all he had to do was run toward it. Should be fine.
And that assumption turned out to be, magnificently...
"Hah, hah, hah... Still though... where the hell did those guys go? Such a pain to deal with... Seriously, how do you get lost in the sky?"
...magnificently wrong.
A moment ago, it was stated that Zoro was running "alone," but he hadn't started out alone. When the run began, the entire Merveille training group had been running together.
And five minutes later, he was alone.
"At! This! Point! What kind of clueless nonsense are you spouting!? Zoro!"
"How is it even possible to get lost this quickly without anyone noticing!? Not a single one of us picked it up with Observation Haki!"
"At this point it's practically a talent, isn't it... Perhaps ye should take up Assassination Techniques?"
"No, that wouldn't work because he'd never reach the target. Anyway, Zoro, where are you right now!?"
Angry shouts (retorts, really) came pouring through the earpiece-like communicator Zoro was wearing. Naturally, Zoro had no idea why his close friend and the three girls were so worked up.
"Huh? What's with you guys? You're all together?"
"Obviously! You're the one who got lo... ugh, forget it! Alice! Do it!"
"Roger, Mom! Grandma's special signal flare that won't scatter in the wind for a while... fire!"
Right after those words came through, on an island in a completely different direction from the one Zoro had been running toward, a plume of red-colored smoke shot up vigorously.
"Huh? Oh, I see... So I just head for that island. Sheesh, shoulda just said so from the start."
"We did!!"
Once, during the battle in the Arabasta Kingdom, during the "10 Minutes to Decide Fate" while searching for the bombardier, Zoro had somehow ended up outside Alubarna, all the way down past the Great Wall. But when Usopp fired a Red Snake Star into the sky as a signal flare, Zoro had managed to make it back by running toward it.
Because of that, Sue knew that as long as Zoro had some kind of landmark, he'd be fine. What she was learning from this experience, though, was that once he lost sight of the landmark or couldn't identify it anymore, it was completely useless.
'Maybe from next time we should just launch a signal flare from the start and tell him "run toward that smoke"...'
'Why must we rack our brains this much over such a simple training exercise...?'
'I... really have nothing to say except sorry...'
"...? Not sure what's going on, but sounds rough."
"..."
* * *
A New Technique...?
Yet another day.
Zoro had come alone, without anyone, to a rocky mountain area in one corner of Lubots Island. Before him sat a single, fairly large boulder.
For the current Zoro, who had learned Haki, it was something he could bisect without difficulty. But standing before that rock, Zoro focused his mind. In his hand was a single sword. Wado Ichimonji, inherited from his close friend.
He held it with both hands in a mid-level stance, steadied his breathing, and...
"...!!"
In an instant,
The blade flashed at a speed the eye couldn't follow, bisecting the boulder. That alone, as mentioned, was nothing remarkable.
But immediately after.
The massive rock, which should have split in two and crumbled to either side, instead, defying all expectation, moved against gravity, as if drawn toward Zoro. And not just the rock. Some of the sand grains and pebbles scattered around were also pulled in.
A second slash, released without delay, swept them all away.
Quartered now, the rock finally crumbled to the ground. The sand and pebbles, cut aside, scattered in all directions.
"...Phew."
Zoro steadied his breathing once more, sheathed his sword in its Scabbard, and...
"...Yeah, she was right. Being a picky eater's no good... You never know until you try."
He murmured to himself, and smiled.
To be continued...