The thought was already running when he opened his eyes.
It was not anxiety, nothing pressing or unfinished. It was the distinct feeling of a mind that had labored through the night and woken with its work still shimmering at the surface. He rested in the hush of early morning, tracing the thought as it led him onward.
He had been wrong about how his powers worked. Not wrong in a way that had cost him anything — the powers were working, the progression was real, the evidence was daily and measurable. But the model he had arrived with was a comic-book model, and comics had a particular relationship with time that real life did not share.
In comics, adaptive physiology snapped into action: threat met, adaptation triggered, the hero stepping forward changed, old weaknesses gone. Everything happened in crisp, isolated moments. His own experience was nothing like that. Progress was real, but it flowed instead of leapt—each session layering onto the last, every challenge leaving a faint mark that slowly became the new baseline, and that baseline rising again. There was never a single transformation, no dramatic crossing into a new self. Only steady, lasting, compounding growth, with no ceiling in sight.
His theory now: the two mechanics had blended. Not running side by side, but woven into a single, unbroken process. Adaptive physiology alone might have mirrored the comics—threat, adaptation, resolution. Resurrection alone would have waited for the brink of death. What he possessed was always active, never waiting for a crisis, never pausing. Every drill, every spar, every ounce of stress fueled a mechanism that never stopped, never reset. The threats did not need to be dire; they simply became fuel for a system already in motion.
This changed the long-term equation. A reactive system peaked after its last real danger—it became its sharpest self against the last near-fatal challenge, then idled until the next. A continuous system is never idled. It drew strength from everything: the boar, the daily sparring, even a night's sleep as the body quietly reinforced the day's lessons. There was no plateau, because there was never a line to reach and rest upon.
In the end, this was likely stronger than either ability alone. Its power just moved quietly, almost unnoticed.
He found this genuinely fascinating. The comic version was like picking up new equipment; what he had was more like a core change. That difference mattered—not because one was superior, but because it meant his whole approach needed to shift. He could accelerate progress by chasing bigger dangers, not slow it down by dodging the small ones. All he could do was feed the process steadily and let it build, just as he had been doing until now.
He had been on the right path without fully knowing why, and there was a particular satisfaction in that discovery.
He got up and headed to the mountain.
---
Luffy was working through a sequence of stretches that would not have qualified as stretches for any non-rubber body, each one involving an extension that made the starting position look like a different object altogether. He did not stop when Liam came through the trees — just tracked the approach with the easy peripheral awareness of someone who had fought in this clearing enough times to know what it sounded like when a person entered it.
"You're late," Luffy said.
"By how much?"
Luffy considered. "Some."
"My apologies."
They headed for the slope without a word. This was how mornings felt now—slipping into a familiar rhythm that needed no explanation, two people for whom beginning was simply picking up where they had left off. Liam rolled his shoulders. Luffy adjusted his hat with that practiced flick, a gesture so ingrained it was almost invisible, and stepped forward.
Over the weeks, their sparring had taken on a new edge. Early sessions were about discovery—Liam mapping Luffy's style, Luffy realizing Liam's limits kept shifting, both testing boundaries. That stage had passed. Now, they moved with an understanding that made everything more intense, not easier. Comfort had become sharpness. It was the kind of ease that comes from mutual respect, the kind that lets neither of them hold anything back.
Luffy had learned which tactics no longer worked on Liam—he recognized the angles Liam had adapted to and shifted to new ones, unpredictable in the way only someone who had studied an opponent deeply could be. Liam, in turn, could spot the windup for a Gomu Gomu move—the kind that left Luffy exposed for a heartbeat—and seize that fleeting chance. Neither pulled punches. The spar was both fierce and friendly, the challenge and camaraderie woven together.
They finished two rounds and paused on the slope, catching their breath. Luffy, as he sometimes did, produced food from some hidden pocket—Liam no longer bothered to wonder how—and ate with the single-minded focus of someone who believed rest and eating belonged together. Around them, the mountain carried on with its morning routines, the air crisp and scented with the deep green of old forest.
Liam asked.
"When are we leaving?"
Luffy looked up at the question without the expression of someone caught off guard. He chewed, considered — not the question, which he had clearly already answered for himself, but the logistics of stating the answer.
"Two months, maybe a little more." He said it simply, the way he said things that were simply true. "When I turn seventeen."
There was something beneath the plainness—not in Luffy's words, but in the way he said them. Luffy was not one to dwell on what was coming or linger over what he might lose or gain. He lived right at the surface of his feelings, so they showed plainly. What showed now was not quite sadness, not quite excitement—something in between, the look of someone truly ready for what comes next and fully aware of what it asks. Luffy would not call it a cost. He would simply say the sea was waiting, and it was time. Both would be true.
Liam heard it without naming it. Some things were their own business.
Liam looked at the valley below the slope, the village visible in the morning haze, Makino's bar identifiable from here by the angle of the roof.
"I'll be there," he said.
Luffy looked at him sideways. The expression was the expression of someone who had already assumed this and found the confirmation satisfying anyway.
"Obviously," he said, and went back to the food.
---
The next two weeks felt full, even if nothing dramatic happened—each day purposeful, nothing squandered. Mornings meant training, the sessions shifting as both grew. Evenings brought bar work, the regulars' habits as steady as old chairs: Old Fels spinning his sea king tale into legend, Pent's silent nod, Corren's fish complaints now a kind of background music. The mountain became something his feet understood better than his eyes.
Luffy's growth was starting to show, even without keeping score. He was sharper under pressure, quicker in those split-second transitions where instinct mattered most. He had always been good, but now he was being pushed higher by an opponent whose limits kept moving. Luffy could not adapt as Liam did, but he found his own way—working harder, inventing new paths. He did not try to match Liam's defense; he found ways around it.
The gap was still there. Still real, still in Liam's favor. And it was not widening much. Luffy was working.
Dadan had begun leaving an extra portion out on mornings when Liam arrived early. She never spoke of it. He never acknowledged it. It was simply there, her way of deciding something without ever saying it aloud.
One evening, during a quiet stretch near closing, with only a few regulars left and Makino busy with her ledger at the far end, Liam wiped down the bar. The thought slipped in, uninvited.
The baby.
He kept his face neutral, kept wiping. Makino sat across the bar, lamplight warming one side of her face while the other faded into the bar's late-night shadows. She added up figures with the calm focus of someone whose mind was all numbers, nothing left for talk. She did not look his way.
In the anime, there was a child. In the anime, there were questions about that child that the story had deliberately left unresolved — deliberate ambiguity about who the father was, about the shape of a relationship with a certain red-haired man that had colored Foosha Village and Makino's role in it, in a way the show had never fully addressed. He did not know whether it was true in this version of the world. He did not know whether it was coming. He was not going to ask. There was no version of asking that did not require explaining how he knew there was a question, and no version of that explanation he was prepared to have — not with her, not with someone he had come to respect enough that the explaining felt like a violation of something real.
More than that: the question was not his. Whatever the answer was or would be, it belonged to her life, and she had not offered it, and he was not owed it.
He tucked the thought away and moved on to the next bar.
Makino looked up from the ledger at exactly that moment — not because of anything he had done, just the ordinary coincidence of two people in the same room surfacing from concentration at the same time. Her expression was the usual one: present, reading something at the edges, not unkind.
"You went somewhere for a second," she said.
"Just thinking."
She returned to the ledger. "You do that a lot."
"Occupational hazard."
She made a small sound—the one she used when something amused her and she chose not to comment. The room settled back into quiet, the last regulars lingering over their drinks, the bar easing into its final hour with nothing pressing left to do.
The question stayed where such questions go—present, patient, waiting to matter or not. It stayed, and that was fine.
---
The haki question had lingered at the edge of his mind for weeks. It was not a decision yet—more a shape in his peripheral vision, clear enough to notice but not to act on. He let it rest, knowing it would not rest forever.
One morning, after sparring ended and Luffy disappeared on some errand for Dadan—asked or demanded, with Dadan, it was a thin line—Liam sat alone on the rocky slope. The mountain's mid-morning hush wrapped around him as he let the question drift from the edge of his mind to its center.
He knew what haki was. He knew which crew members developed it and roughly when and how, and the canon timeline for that development was not optimal — later than it could have been, because no one had pointed at the thing and named it. The crew eventually found their way to it. They could find their way to it faster. The difference between knowing something exists and reaching for it, and not knowing there is anything to reach for, was not small. In some situations, it was the difference between someone surviving a fight and not.
He could close that gap. The question was whether, when, and for whom.
Two categories, each with its own gate. Armament haki required a foundation — a physical baseline high enough that you were weaponizing willpower rather than simply expressing it, turning the body into something that hit harder and held more than its material suggested. Most people in East Blue were not there. The sea was genuinely the weakest of the four, and that weakness ran through everything in it, including the people who called it home. Armament Haki in the East Blue was a concept the crew was not yet ready for. That one could wait.
Observation haki was different in kind, not just in degree. It was attention made conscious — the thing human instinct did at its absolute best, when someone moved before they had decided to move, when they knew where the strike was coming from before the strike had fully committed, when the room's information arrived complete in a single read rather than in pieces. It was not gated behind physical power. It was gated behind knowing it was there and understanding what to reach for. Luffy had the instinct already — the canon was scattered with moments of observation haki operating without a name, expressed as lucky reads, the right movement, or the inexplicable sense of where danger was. The instinct did not need to be created. It needed to be found.
Zoro was the other candidate for the near term, though Zoro was not yet found. When Zoro was found — soon, by the calendar Liam was working from — the same logic applied in sharper relief. Swordsmen lived and died by their reads. Observation haki was what the best swordsmen did when they seemed to read the opponent's intention before the opponent moved. Naming it and building toward it deliberately rather than stumbling into it years later was not a small advantage.
He did not decide tonight. But the question had shifted—from something for later to something for now. That shift was real, and he could feel it.
Liam let the thought settle and stood, brushing dust from his hands. The mountain was silent, the village below visible through the trees, Makino's bar marked by the angle of its roof.
Two months, more or less. Then the sea. Then East Blue. Then everything that waited beyond.
He knew the crew—not personally, not yet. But Luffy was real now in a way the story had never managed, and the others would be just as real when the time came. Nami, Zoro, the cook, the liar, the doctor, the archaeologist—all of them, real in the way people are when you share their world instead of watching from afar. He would know them as they truly were, not as they had been written. That would be different. He was already learning how different.
Liam knew the arcs, the moments on the horizon—the ones he had watched and felt, the ones that had changed him in ways he could never quite name, the price and the prize and everything in between. He knew the enemies, their scale, the weight of what was coming. None of that had shifted. But now, all of it felt more real.
The thought that surfaced was not clever or strategic. It was not a plan or a theory. It was something simpler, something that had always been waiting beneath all the analysis:
He had wanted this. Both the version of himself who watched the story and the one now living inside it had longed for something like this, even without the words for it. A world that pushed back. People worth standing beside. Something that truly mattered.
In two months, he was going into it.
Liam was, in every way, exactly where he wanted to be. He let himself feel it—not as a verdict or a stance, but as a simple fact, warm and solid, his own, standing on a mountain in East Blue with the sea glimmering beyond the village below.