Makino moved through her morning rhythm as he came downstairs: ledger open, something simmering on the stove, radiating the quiet self-sufficiency of someone who had long ago mastered solitude at sunrise. She glanced up only when the stairs creaked.
"Going up again?"
"Sparring," he said, filling a cup. "Luffy invited me."
She returned to the ledger. "He'll have eaten already. Go before he gets impatient."
Liam drank the cup, set it down, and went.
---
The walk to the fork at the big rock took forty minutes at a pace that covered ground without ever feeling like a climb—the kind of steady movement that lets distance slip by almost unnoticed. Higher up, the mountain revealed its own character: ancient trees spaced wide, undergrowth thickening where sunlight broke through, and an air so still it seemed to hush the world, as if the place had forgotten how to expect visitors.
He reached the big rock, turned left, and kept going until the path faded into little more than a suggestion. From there, he let the sound guide him onward.
The sound reached him before the den itself: voices, movement, the steady rhythm of a place running on its own clock, set firmly to mid-morning. He slipped through the last trees and took in the den with a single glance.
Rough and functional, the place had been built by people who needed shelter and storage, nothing more. The structures had weathered past newness into a kind of stubborn permanence, earning their dignity by simply enduring. Gear was stacked haphazardly against the walls. The fire pit, used so often it seemed part of the land itself, smoldered at the center. Somewhere inside, voices rose in lively conversation.
Luffy stood in the clearing, his arms moving with a range that defied what arms should do. The moment he saw Liam, all motion stilled.
"You came." Bright. Satisfied. Like he had not specifically told Liam to be here and given him directions.
"Left at the big rock," Liam said. "As advertised."
A few bandits by the entrance turned to watch, their faces balanced between suspicion and appraisal—not unfriendly, just the practiced vigilance of mountain folk who measured newcomers by instinct. He noticed a broad-shouldered woman leaning against the wall, feigning indifference but watching him with unwavering focus.
Luffy waved a hand in the general direction of the den. "Those are the bandits. That's Dadan." The wave toward the broad woman was the entire introduction. "She acts like she doesn't want people here, but she always feeds everyone anyway."
Dadan made a sound that conveyed several things at once: that she had heard this, that she disagreed with the characterization, and that she was not going to bother articulating the disagreement.
Liam nodded at her once, the neutral acknowledgment of a person who understood they were being assessed and had no particular objection to it. She returned it with the minimum angle of head movement that could be classified as a response.
"Where's Ace?" The question was natural and not pointed — the kind of thing a new person would reasonably ask about a name they'd heard.
"Gone already," Luffy said simply, the way you say something true that you've already made peace with. "He left a while ago. Off doing his thing."
Liam filed this. Consistent with the timeline. Ace was already on his road, already moving toward the shape of who he was going to be. The thought arrived and passed.
"Show me where you train," he said.
Luffy was already moving.
---
The training area was less a formal space and more a patch of mountain Luffy had claimed by sheer repetition—a long, open slope where trees surrendered to rock and scrub, wide enough for movement, uneven enough to demand attention. The ground bore the scars of countless impacts, its battered surface a quiet record of every fight.
They wasted no time on ceremony. Liam rolled his shoulders. Luffy bounced on his heels with the effortless elasticity only rubber could manage, his hat on his head, his face settling into that clear, open focus he wore before a fight—the look of someone ready to give everything the next few minutes demanded, and perfectly content with that.
"Same rules as the tiger?" Luffy asked.
"What were those rules?"
"Hit it until it stops."
"Close enough," Liam said.
Luffy moved first.
---
The initial exchange clarified several things in rapid succession.
First: Luffy's reach was not just long. Long suggested something measurable, predictable. When Luffy struck, his arms stretched across impossible distances, gathering momentum that defied expectation and landing with a velocity that made instinct useless. Liam had understood this in theory. In practice, theory was a poor teacher.
The second: he was going to get hit.
He rolled with the first hit, absorbing as little force as possible—a smart move when you were still mapping the fight. Still, his side thudded with the impact, proof that rolling only helped so much. Adaptation kicked in instantly: not the slow heat of the stake test or the lingering ache of the boar, but something sharp and immediate, a circuit snapping on before he finished the roll. His baseline shifted. He kept moving.
He came back at Luffy with a combination built around information-gathering rather than outcomes—what the defense looked like at close range, how the rubber body distributed force when struck directly versus glancing, and where the natural openings were, in a style that operated on instinct and refused to telegraph. Luffy absorbed the first hit with his body doing what rubber bodies did, and the absorption was visible: the force was distributed outward and dissipated without the usual physical consequence. He slipped the second with the casual ease of someone who had learned to read attack angles by getting hit by them enough times. The third landed clean, and Luffy grinned.
"You're faster than yesterday," Luffy said.
"You haven't seen yesterday."
"I mean, then when you came in." He was already repositioning, his feet finding the uneven rock without looking at it, his weight balanced on ground he had covered enough times to know by feel. "You move differently now than at the start."
The observation was accurate and delivered without decoration, which was how Luffy made them — simply and without trying to impress. He had noticed that because he paid attention to things that moved, the way he paid attention to things that tried to hit him. The noticing was instinct, not analysis, and it was reliable in exactly the ways instinct trained over years of real contact tended to be.
Liam ducked low. Luffy stretched impossibly high, then crashed down from an angle that should have been impossible, catching Liam's shoulder and sending him skidding sideways over the rocks. He twisted the stumble into a roll, came up facing the right way, and felt his shoulder pulse—not hurt, but noted. Adaptation logged the impact and responded.
He was starting to understand the shape of the fight.
He could sense the build-up now—after days of testing his limits, he had a rough feel for where his baseline sat and how much each blow shifted it. Luffy's hits moved that baseline. He struck not with finesse, but with total commitment, every punch loaded with all the force he could muster, and from distances no normal fighter could predict. The attacks kept coming from impossible angles, too far out, at speeds that defied their windup.
The middle portion of the spar was the most honest part of it.
He was not keeping up. That was the truth. He was present, adapting, landing enough blows to make Luffy work for it, but the gap between them was obvious. Luffy's body had been forged by years of mountain runs and wild fights, even without Devil Fruit powers—physical intelligence honed by repetition until it became instinct. Liam had only a few days' worth of rapid progress stacked against that kind of foundation.
The gains were real. The foundation was not there yet.
A clean hit to the chest dropped him onto the rock, his body briefly deciding that standing was optional. Adaptation surged—chest and upper body at once, the response tuned to the heavy force he'd just absorbed. He sat for three seconds, letting his body finish its work.
Luffy was standing over him with his head tilted.
"You okay?"
"Give me a second." Not distress — just accurate reporting of where he was. He pressed his hand to his sternum, felt the density that had settled there, and stood.
"Again?"
Liam looked at him. Luffy's expression was the expression of someone who was genuinely asking, with no particular pressure in it — he would stop if the answer was no, he would keep going if the answer was yes, and he did not have a preference built into the question.
"Again," Liam said.
The last portion was the most interesting.
His body had been adapting from the first blow, each small shift stacking up until the difference became clear. Luffy's hits still landed with the same force, but Liam's reactions had changed—he absorbed them more smoothly, moved with the impacts instead of against them, his physical baseline now higher than when they'd begun. He still couldn't match Luffy, but he was meeting him differently than he had forty minutes earlier, and that mattered.
An elbow slammed into his jaw without warning, sending him crashing sideways into the trees. He rebounded off a trunk, adaptation firing in his back and shoulder before he'd even stopped moving, and straightened up.
Luffy was watching him from across the clearing, with an expression that suggested he was working something out.
"Your face," Luffy said.
Liam ran his tongue along his teeth. Everything intact. He pressed his fingers to his jaw — tender, but the tenderness was already softening into something that felt like yesterday's bruise rather than today's.
"I'm fine."
"I hit you really hard."
"You did."
"And your face is fine."
"It's getting there."
Luffy studied him for a moment, eyes bright with the fascination of watching an idea come to life right in front of him. Then he broke into a grin—nothing smug, just pure, unfiltered delight at what he was seeing.
"That's so weird." Said with complete admiration. "Can we go again tomorrow?"
"Same time." Liam rolled his jaw experimentally. "You won, by the way."
"I know." No arrogance in it — just fact, stated the way Luffy stated facts. "You were harder to hit at the end than at the start, though."
"Give it a week."
Luffy's grin stretched wider. The thought of an opponent who only got tougher the longer the fight went on was, apparently, the best news he could imagine. "Awesome."
Liam picked up his jacket from the rock where he'd put it. "Same time tomorrow."
"Come eat first." Luffy was already heading back toward the den, hat back on in one motion, the spar filed as complete, and the next thing already in focus. "Dadan makes enough."
---
Lunch at the bandit den followed its own rules—the rules of people who'd worked hard since dawn and cared deeply about their food. The bandits weren't unfriendly, just professionally indifferent; the morning's suspicion had faded into a practiced disinterest that was its own kind of acceptance. Holding his own against Luffy for nearly an hour had earned him something here. He hadn't complained, hadn't asked for easier terms, had stood up after every blow. The den had a clear value system, and he'd apparently passed the test.
Dadan ate at one end of the long table and did not speak to him directly. She did not need to — she maintained a running commentary on the general situation of the den that covered everything from the state of the morning's supplies to whether Luffy was eating too fast again, the latter of which she delivered with the tone of someone who had said it many times before and intended to keep saying it regardless of whether it had ever made a difference.
"Chew it," she said, in the general direction of where Luffy was.
"I am chewing it," Luffy said, in a way that did not suggest he was chewing it.
"Chew it like you're a person."
"I am a person."
"Then prove it with your jaw."
The bandit next to Liam, a thick-necked man who had given his name as Dogra during an introduction that Liam had not entirely followed, leaned slightly in his direction.
"Every meal," Dogra said, quietly and without judgment. "Every single one."
Liam looked down the table at Luffy, who was eating at the pace of someone who had decided that the time spent chewing was time not spent eating and had formed strong opinions on that basis. Then he looked at Dadan, who was eating with the brisk efficiency of someone who had made her peace with this situation a long time ago and was now simply filing it as a fact of life.
"How long has it been like this?" he asked Dogra, under the general noise of the table.
Dogra considered. "Since he could reach the table."
Liam ate his food—plain, hot, and filling—and stayed quiet. The table radiated the warmth of a place with its own well-worn texture: inside jokes, small frictions, rhythms that ran on their own. He was new here, and that was fine. Given enough meals, newness always faded.
He thanked Dadan when he stood to leave. She made a sound that was not quite dismissive or welcoming, which he was coming to understand was her register for situations she had not yet fully classified. Coming from Dadan, he suspected this was approximately warm.
Luffy walked him back to the path, hands behind his head, at the pace of someone who had nowhere urgently to be. "Tomorrow," he said, at the fork.
"Tomorrow." Liam turned downhill. "Before breakfast."
"See you then," Luffy confirmed, and headed back up without further ceremony.
---
The walk back was unhurried. The mountain sloped downward through the same ancient trees, but now the afternoon light had shifted, turning the canopy golden and sending warm columns of sunlight through the branches—richer and deeper than in the morning.
He thought about Luffy.
The daily sparring had a clear consequence: Luffy would grow differently than he had in the original story. Liam's adaptation meant each session raised the bar, so Luffy wasn't fighting a static opponent but one who got tougher every day. The feedback loop ran both ways. Luffy would be challenged by someone who adapted to his attacks, who became harder to hurt the more he tried. Facing that kind of opponent for three months would sharpen him in ways the old training never could.
When Luffy set sail, he would be stronger than the version Liam had known from a screen.
He let the thought settle for a few minutes, refusing to spiral into worry. The anxious version of this idea led to fears about butterfly effects and whether the story's ending could survive a changed path. But that was wasted energy. His job wasn't to preserve the story as it was, but to move through the world as it had become.
He was standing in the divergence. He had been the diver since he arrived in the ocean near Foosha Village. The question of whether this was an alternate universe — a branching timeline that had always been its own thing, separate from whatever source the story had come from — or a direct alteration of the original was not answerable with the information he had, and the answer did not change what he should do. Navigate the world as it actually was. Know who the people in it actually were. Don't try to manage things that weren't his to manage.
Luffy would be stronger. That was not a problem. In fact, with what lay ahead, Luffy being stronger was important.
He filed it and moved on.
The village came into view below the last slope, the docks and the bar rooftop visible through the thinning trees. He slowed slightly, not from tiredness — the walk was nothing after the morning — but from a thought that had been sitting at the back of his mind since he'd shaken Luffy's hand at the fork.
Three months. At the end of them, Luffy would walk down this mountain, find himself a ship and a barrel, and begin. The crew would come together in East Blue — Zoro first, then Nami, then Usopp, then Sanji, then Chopper further out — and the world would start to move in the direction it had always been moving.
Liam would be here when Luffy set sail. Three months of sparring, of the bar, of this island's rhythms. And then the question would need an answer.
Leaving with Luffy meant being present from the beginning. It meant East Blue — the relatively safer arc, the gathering of the crew, the early shape of everything. It meant being in the story as it happened rather than entering it at an angle. He would be in it. He would be known to the people who would later become the Straw Hats.
Going alone meant something different — more time to build before the real threats arrived, a different trajectory into a world that became significantly more dangerous beyond East Blue. The freedom to find his own path, his own pace, his own entry point when the time felt right.
Neither was wrong. Neither was obviously correct.
The bar's sign was visible now, the afternoon light catching it above the main path. He looked at it for a moment.
Filed it. Walked in.