(Note this happens the day after shanks left leading up all the way to 2nd month(1week 4days befor raid on the villa ship) For more info on the world read Author's notes)
The cove kept its secrets like a closed fist. Wind threaded through the broken teeth of its cliffside and sang in a tone that could be lullaby or warning, depending on the tide. Donden's lab sat half-swallowed in the cliff: crooked rusted plates, glass jars, and the stubborn, cheerful smell of oil. A narrow path stitched down the cliff—granite bare where rock had been scraped smooth by boots and bare soles. Roots dangled like buried fingers and vines braided the handrails. The last stretch to the beach was a scatter of sand and sun-bleached stones that clicked like teeth when you walked across them.
The cove held other small rules too: which paths swallowed shoe soles, which rocks held frogs, which tides left kelp like ribbons to be braided. People who knew its rhythms could move blindfolded and still not be surprised. Those who did not learn the cove's grammar tripped over memories and left curses on the wind. It was a place that rewarded attention in quiet measures and punished excess with sudden, salty correction.
Luffy woke because the world moved him awake. He blinked, tasting salt and sleep, the metallic tang of Donden's workshop at the back of his tongue. For a moment he lay curled on the rough plank floor—his hair a small riot against the wood—and let morning find him. He could have slept. The sea called in a steady baritone. The lab smelled of solder and boiled fish, of oil always an inch too hot. He let that smell sit a second, the way boys do with stolen comforts.
He let that smell sit a second, the way boys do with stolen comforts. It told him where nights had been warm and where a man had stayed late to mend something. It was a map of small kindnesses: a soldered hook, an extra bowl left for workmen, a chair that had been saved from rain. He learned those favors as currency, and he hoarded them like currency—little, private economies that kept him from feeling alone.
Then he rolled and sat up. The cove sucked distance with the hush of an empty theater before the curtain. He listened. Below, a gull argued with the tide; above, a cliff swallow lived off the lip. Donden's contraptions—half-boat, half-thing-that-might-be-useful—hummed idly. Dadan's voice was gone for the night, and so was any other warmth. Only place and him remained.
A grin split his face—slow, wolfish, something older and careful that didn't belong to someone who still needed naps. The grin held mischief yet to be performed, plans half-formed like seeds in a pocket.
"Three months, huh," Luffy said aloud even before his feet hit the floor. His voice was small in the lab's hollow, but it carried an honest threat that made old men grin and beasts lean closer. "That's a deadline."
He shoved his feet into sandals too big and swung a hand free, testing the air like a map. Donden's lab was a mile—sometimes two—from Fuchsia Village, depending on the tide's mood and how gulls felt. Donden liked to pretend his place was hidden because it added romance to his tool catalogue. Dadan liked to pretend they'd hidden him for protection. Luffy knew the truth: the lab sat in the last place a stranger would expect; the right place to practice things strangers oughtn't see.
He bounded down the worn stone path; the granite under his sandals whispered, sharp. He passed the pool where Donden kept glass jars of seawater that glowed when shaken—experiments meant to jar the cove awake. Luffy didn't think about alarms. He thought about the note on Makino's counter. He'd seen it last night when Dadan had scooped him up and moved him like a prize. He wanted to read it again. The note was small, smeared with ale and time, and it said, in Shanks' looping, easy scrawl: "We'll be back in three months."
Three months. A blink of time for a man with a ship and a grin; for a boy who measured his life by the size of his next meal and the number of stars he could count before sleep, three months felt like a promise—and a challenge.
The run to the village was longer than he'd expected: two miles if you took the route Donden mocked as "the scenic disaster." Luffy did not mind. Running solved problems. Problems were knots; running pulled at them. The path veered through trees that smelled of sap, fried fish, and old boots. The wind drove at his face and taught him its direction, and Luffy let that knowledge stitch itself under his skin—wind direction, cloud thickenings, the way gulls angled their wings when a storm gathered.
Fuchsia woke slowly; houses hunched like tired people around chimneys. Smoke cried softly from pottery kettles. Makino's bar sat at the village heart like a ledger on a desk, a place where debts and stories were paid in coin and stew. A small crowd had yet to gather; gossip had not yet enforced its daily laws. Luffy slid through the flap as if he lived there—that, in a way, he did. The bar smelled of long mornings: toasted fish, boiled bones, and the faint sheen of dried ale on the wood.
The note on Makino's counter gleamed with the kind of mundanity that always accompanied important lies.
"We'll be back in three months."
The paper was smudged where a thumb had rested, edges curled. Shanks had scrawled it in ink that glinted like a coin. Luffy read it like a map to a place the world was going to change.
He read the note slow as a schoolboy tracing a teacher's neat hand, tasting the shape of each letter. Promises written in a hurry carry a particular honesty; they are blunt and therefore hard to bend. Shanks' handwriting meant someone had thought to mark a time, to anchor a return. For Luffy the note was not only news but a scaffold: a reason to learn, a deadline that made practice urgent rather than endless.
A chuckle escaped him, very small. Makino, pinning an apron to her waist, watched him with the casual affection of someone who'd raised more than one trouble-maker and expected more before supper.
"You're up early," she said. Her hands were small and competent, stained with flour and history.
Luffy shrugged, fingers dirty with last night's pine sap. "Shanks left a deadline. Thought I'd see how the village's doing without him."
Makino's mouth softened. She meant not the whole world but the small, sturdy part where shoals, gossip, and chicken bones mattered. "You keep out of trouble, I won't have to charge you for the cleaning."
Luffy's grin dipped into something like a vow. "Deal."
From behind the bar, Uta hummed a melody like the start of a braid. She had been there all night, it seemed—at least, she had not been among the shouting crew that left the note. Her voice was threadbare and bright; when she hummed, the bar folded into something smaller and safe. Uta's hair caught the light—white at the roots, sinking into crimson at the tips—and she hummed like someone who could make thunder laugh.
Makino glanced. "You want more stew, Red? You look like you'll sing the roof off if you don't eat."
Uta's head tilted. She had a way of looking like she meant everything she didn't say. "I'll help clean later," she promised, but her attention was already half on Luffy's face. "You're back?"
Luffy nodded. "Yeah. I read the note."
"You going to fight anyone while I'm looking?" Makino said with mock severity.
"Depends on the definition of fight," he said. He winked, which was his way of filing away the world into three columns: people to protect, things to fix, and treasures to be found.
Makino laughed, the sound that folded the room in, and it was honest enough to be a rebuke against worry. "Be careful," she said, more to herself than to him, handing over a bowl of something steaming and heroic. "The world's been looking kinder than usual lately—too kind, maybe."
The village moved in deliberate rhythms after that: men and women and children taking their stations, small wheels catching on each other perfectly. Luffy ate and made faces at the fish so that Makino would laugh. He tied his sandals and shuffled through tasks—fetching a rope, carrying flour sacks—what Dadan would call "useful boredom." Makino watched him with the tired patience of people who had learned to measure storms before they reached the shore.
He returned to the cove with his arms full of errands and his brain full of plans. Training didn't begin with jumping to conclusions or dramatic speeches. It began with the chores, and the chores began with a level of rigor that, for Luffy, felt like a respectful insult: Makino's tasks were practical, but they had a cadence that could be turned into drills if you were clever. He learned to carry two trays balanced so a dropped tray would not spill; the weight's center shifted and he could correct it with a wrist flick. Carry a tray while blindfolded, he thought, and you could learn the smell of a bar enough to navigate it at night. So he did.
Chores became lessons when repeated with intention. Each dull task folded into training: sweeping taught balance, hauling sacks taught leverage, tying knots taught patience and cleverness. He practiced corrections until they felt like instinct; mistakes were worth keeping because they showed the place where improvement lived. Often he let frustration sit in his hands and rearranged it into timed motion, and by evening his body was both tired and, secretly, grateful for the proof of use. He watched others and folded their small teachings into experiments; Donden's jokes became exercises, Dadan's scolds a kind of map.
Weekdays blurred into routines that let the day do the teaching. Dawn came with Makino's chores turned into precision and balance drills—tray-bearing became study in small corrections; sweeping turned into footwork training. He learned to place a bowl without glancing and set cups by reading the wood's sighs under his fingers. Observation that began as a superstition matured into a craft: notice the way a jar's rim vibrated when someone laughed, how the rope at the dock held a different note when the tide was treacherous.
Midday belonged to the wild. Luffy's runs through the forest were an orchestra of small, practical things: he measured wind by slamming his hand into it and feeling how it tried to pull. The forest offered him an unending set of problems—paths that tried to hide themselves, slopes that tried to break your feet, animals that taught a boy what speed looked like. He ran until his chest tightened into use, until he could close his eyes and let the terrain whisper directions. He mapped the currents of wind and water and the patterns of animal travel in the small, secret ledger a child keeps between the ribs and the mind. He could look at a fallen branch and tell you which storm it had been born of; he could feel, somewhere underneath the skin, the way a ridge sloughed off danger.
Afternoon meant Dadan. Dadan was all promises wrapped in gravel—she broke softness like bread and taught you to eat the pieces whole. Her punishments were lessons that wore like armor: logs that were too heavy, cliffs that dropped away into nothing where the sea met clouds, stones in place of chairs to make your balance dishonest and correctable. When Dadan told him to haul a log, she meant for him to learn leverage, to find the point in which a weight would listen to a child's insistence. She grunted and swore, then handed him secrets wrapped in scoldings.
Evening belonged to Donden and invention. The lab filled with the electric smell of things that wanted to improve. Donden delighted in failure and rewarded it with tools. He handed Luffy springs, glass, remnants of a stolen contraption, and said, "Make it do something worth a curtain call." Luffy found a way to make springs into traps, to solder thin wire into a crude latch that could, on a bad day, slam a door shut without a man's hands. He learned how to crush a blossom into a color that would stain a cloth for a day and how to make smoke from kitchen debris that would not suffocate. He invented capsules—tiny, shaky things sealed with hopeful oaths. At first capsules were cork pockets for berries; later they held stones, small nets, wire hooks. The first capsule that survived a toss and kept its contents made Luffy laugh so bright it frightened gulls.
Night was for the roof. He and Uta—when she managed to steal a break from the bar—would sit and let the world spill. His counting became a prayer. Her hum balanced his plans. Her voice had the unsteady, perfect quality of a small thing that could, without meaning to, move the mood enough to settle a bar full of drunk men into a hush.
At first training felt like stacking pebbles: repetitive, silent, almost cruel. Luffy was careful with boredom like a child with coal: it warmed him into practice. He measured the space under his ribs for breathing and squeezed his hand into a fist until his wrist spoke truth. He turned his body into a catalog of tricks so the world, if it surprised him, would meet a prepared motion.
And in the middling days—between the tenth and sixtieth—something like a whisper stroked the air. Luffy was in the cove one afternoon, returning a bit early because Donden had promised cake for anyone who could fix his temperamental pulley. Makino had sent a small package of bread and raisins wrapped in greaseproof paper. Uta had been at the bar the whole day, humming as she swept. Luffy, being a man of action and curiosity, climbed the pathway to the headland above the cove where a narrow lookout jutted like a finger pointing to all the possible roads the sea could take.
Uta, who had stepped out onto the bar's little wooden deck to string a lantern, leaned too far over the railing to peer at a kitten that had decided the rafters were a reasonable kingdom. The deck was high; below it the cliff dropped away into a fog that gulped at sound. Luffy saw her movements from a distance—he would say later it had been only a motion like a falling leaf, but the memory of it tightened his chest when he thought about it. The deck slivered under her barefoot. Her foot slipped.
Instinct is a shallow thing and a deep thing. The shallow part screamed. The deep part—something older than his chest, something that wore no name—reacted before thought finished dressing. Luffy tunneled a breath and moved, making the path between lookout and deck like an arrow finding home. He planted his feet and barked a sound—part laugh, part command—and reached.
He did not remember moving. Later, when he tried to retrace the moment, he could only describe a strange lightness, the feeling of a hand that was not all his. His fingers closed around Uta's wrist as she fell; he felt a pull—not rope, not wind, but like the world lending a hand then drawing it back. Uta's eyes were wide and perfectly round in a way that made him want to keep them like a secret. The deck creaked and she grabbed for the railing and the kitten abandoned all dignity and made a dramatic leap for the rafters.
Uta did not cry. She blinked and laughed—an awkward, stunned sound like someone pushed into cold water who loved the chill. "Luu," she said after a breath. She called him by the pet-name she'd already made into a weapon against sorrow. "Don't do that."
Luffy sat back on his heels and felt the air close like a lid. The wolves in the valley below had gone quiet. Dogs that usually barked at fishermen had their heads turned and sat with their jaws slack. Dadan—ever the remote observer—was halfway up the ridge a kilometer away, and she watched with an expression that was half suspicion, half satisfaction. She kept her lips sealed. That was Dadan's way. She had questions, but she kept them wrapped in a handkerchief.
Luffy had no name for it. Something mouse-sharp ticked in his chest and answered like a sparrow finding seed. He wanted to test it. He wanted to press on the thing until it sang a tune he could recognize.
Over the weeks that followed, small moments like that collected themselves around him like evidence. He'd carry sacks up a bluff and his arms would not ache as expected; a blister might vanish like a shadow. He would jump across a puddle and feel his toes bite the world in a way that made the next leap simpler. He learned to trust the things that made little promises and kept them—wind direction, the way the rope would take the load if you shifted your weight correctly, the way a laugh could disarm a man twice your size.
The cove learned him in ways he did not intend. He practiced forming a fist where he would want it to be, not where it felt natural—because positions are lies you tell your limbs until they believe you. He tried to press himself into shapes a hammer could trust. He practiced letting breath out like a promise and holding it like a ledger. Donden taught him to listen to a hinge's soft cough and fix it before it failed. Dadan taught him how to bruise without breaking. Makino taught him that a pot of stew could be a school.
Night after night he and Uta sat on the roof. She hummed and he would trace constellations in the dark that only made sense if you were looking for places to hide from storms. Sometimes he would whisper lists—things he intended to learn. Sometimes he would sketch machines in the sand with a stick. She listened and hummed; sometimes her hum settled the cove like a lid. Once, when she sang a tune she had learned from a traveling merchant, the cats dropped their tails and slept. Once, when she tried a verse she'd never known, it rained out of season on a field of young lavender.
By the end of six weeks the foundation of their quiet learning lay like mortar. Luffy could run a dock thrice without tasting the sea in his breath; he could climb cliffs faster than gulls found food in storms. He had managed to solder a crude capsule with a hand trembling but stubborn, the lid sealed with wax and the hope that wax can hold. The capsule that survived Donden's pulley drop into surf was a small miracle; Donden sniffed victory and took it apart with loving hands.
None of it felt final. It felt like stacking, preparing the house while the sky changed color. Luffy learned the thrill of small correctness: the exact moment you altered your grip and the board did not give. The world still held its deeper mysteries like a hand under a cloth. He tapped the cloth's edge; it shivered in unexpected ways.
When he slept, he thought of the note: "We'll be back in three months." He tucked it like an ember in his chest; it warmed him oddly. Sometimes in the middle of the night he would wake and imagine Shanks' voice: "Don't be a coward, Luffy." He would laugh softly and go back to sleep.
Below Dawn Island's roots, things stirred like gravestones deciding to sigh awake. The island ate slowly: coral and metal bones beneath the mantle shifted like a giant forgetting to sleep. The island felt the pull of three children: a boy who learned too quickly, a girl who sang without knowing the power of her notes, and another child—still not yet in Luffy's world—whose shadow would soon find a place at their table. The earth kept its counsel, but things that listen pay attention.
And Luffy kept going. He practiced because a deadline was a bridge; it told him that time could be folded and arranged. He practiced because the world, in its quiet way, was watching. He practiced because making things that worked felt like a small declaration against the chaos outside them.
On the last night of week six, the two-mile run felt shorter. The path back to Donden's Cove glowed with moonlight. Luffy held his latest capsule—wax charred, contents safe: a scrap of old glass that shivered into color. He felt the world press a little lighter against the ribs.
He climbed the path, not because he wanted to sleep, but because there was always more to do. The cove had a dozen small mouths that needed feeding. In the dark, the gulls argued softly, and the lab hummed the way a ship did when it remembered where it belonged. He opened the lab door and paused, listening to the cove breathe. His grin returned, less wolfish, more a promise.
Three months. A deadline worth meeting.
Luffy found him on the sixty-first morning; the world has places where things unlatch, and the Gray Terminal was one. The Terminal was a reef of rusted metal and half-sunken hulls, an old docking flank for merchants who liked their deals whispered and their cargo left uninspected. It smelled of brine, mildew, and copper; gulls picked over whatever courage the tide left.
The Gray Terminal had names in other towns: the Grave, the Rust, the Unkind Dock. Merchants who used it did so because it let them abandon burdens without accounting. Bits of ships and forgotten freight gathered there like flotsam confessions; it was the kind of place where people lost things on purpose. Luffy liked such edges of the world. They showed where rules thinned and curiosities slipped through. He went because those places told stories in the language he liked best: fragments, hurts, and the small, raw things that could be put to use. He collected their stories like bright, battered shells.
He came around a half-broken mast and saw the boy curled against blackened timber, shoulders folded against the wind. The child looked too small to hold the marine knife he cradled like a charm. His hair, dirty-blond, clung in lank strands to his forehead. His eyes—clear blue, sharp as glass—watched Luffy approach with the careful patience of someone used to measuring every footfall. There was something quiet about him, like the kind of silence that sits politely at the edge of a conversation until it's needed.
Luffy slowed because he'd learned to stop when others might be hurt. Two steps, a pause, another two, the way the sea taught rhythm. "Hey," he said, because that was often enough and because curiosity sounded softer with a consonant. "You hungry?"
The boy's gaze flicked up, then away. He took in Luffy's sandals, his sun-baked grin, the way his hair flared silver at the light and gold at the edges. He measured without moving—an assessment like a scale—and then, after a ridiculous small amount of time, nodded. He did not pick up the knife. The knife lay across his lap like a forgotten fact.
Luffy dug into the small bag of dried fish Makino had sent—goodwill sewn around the cove—and offered some. "Eat," he said. "It's good."
The boy's first contact with Luffy came as if he were trying to learn the weight of the offering in the air. He took the fish with fingers that smelled of old salt and something metallic. He tasted; his face did not change. Fish was no blessing where he came from. He swallowed and said, as if performing a small test of syntax, "You're… interesting."
Luffy's grin widened. He liked interesting. Interesting made the world less dull. "You look like you know how to break things properly," he said. "Wanna train?"
The boy's eyes slid over to the horizon as if he were always counting how far it was between him and trouble. Then he looked back at Luffy, and there was an almost deliberate curiosity there, clinical and unhurried. "Maybe," he said. His voice was small and calm and had the odd effect of making wind fall silent.
Luffy had a habit of acting before naming things. He made a decision—one that would tangle itself into many future plans—and said, "C'mon. I'll take you where no one'll try to teach you to be a soldier."
He walked the boy back along a path of iron, salt, and old promises. The day was thin; the sea's skin shivered like a sketch of weather. Luffy kept glancing at the stranger because people were puzzles and Luffy liked to solve puzzles by touching their corners. The boy tapped a rock in a rhythm like testing the mineral for patience. He watched a gull with dispassionate interest. He accepted Luffy's jokes with a small curl, not quite a grin.
When they reached the main street, Luffy led the boy to Makino's. The bar smelled of morning stew, smoke, and the faint note of ale spilled and forgiven a hundred times. Makino looked up and registered the boy with economy. Her hand slipped toward a rag, as if to wipe an invisible surface.
Luffy beamed. "This is where you can get fed, man."
The boy's blue eyes scanned the bar like a map and settled on Makino—calm, analytical. He dipped his head in a way that was neither rude nor deferential. "I'm AO," he said, and Luffy liked the sound of it because it was a name that fit in pockets. AO. Like an engine with a quiet hum.
Makino slid a steaming bowl toward him. Her movements were gentle, maternal by habit and tradecraft in a bar used to poor choices. AO took the bowl with both hands, ate with practiced economy, and met her eyes once to say, "Thank you." The word was simple and clean and made Makino's shoulders drop the hairline of an inch.
Dadan appeared in the doorway, announcing herself with less expense than fireworks. Her silhouette filled the frame with purposeful menace, like a giant filling a valley with shadow. She looked AO over and snorted—a sound halfway between skepticism and amusement. "Where'd you drag up that rag?" she said.
AO's eyes rolled in a motion so small Luffy almost missed it. He didn't flinch. "Gray Terminal," he said. "I sleep where there's less to steal."
Dadan folded her arms and considered him as if judging which boot to tie. "Well, you'll sleep under someone's roof tonight. Don't get used to the rents down here being charitable."
AO's gaze moved to Dadan for a long, nearly still second. He watched the set of her jaw, the way her beard twitched when she held back a curse. He watched the brass chain where Makino hung tokens and the small iron bell used to call people to the back room. Something—perhaps a pattern in his memory, a reaction keyed to uniformed shapes—tightened in his expression for the briefest of beats. The air around him seemed to note the change. Luffy, too, saw it. A little. It was like someone adding a dark brush stroke to a simple picture.
That day, the sort of details others missed gathered around him like a halo: a knot in a rope, an old scuff on a boot, the angle of a hat that told you how a man slept. Those were the things Luffy used to guess how someone lived. He collected small signs and made them into stories privately, practicing the act of understanding people without asking too many questions. It felt honest and dangerous both. Learning to read a face was like learning to hold a knife: useful if done well, harmful in careless hands. He liked the trade. It helped him.
AO remained calm. "I do not like men who dress like soldiers."
Dadan's face did not change in surprise. She shrugged like an old rug. "Wrong thing to say if a Marine happened to be in here," she grunted and, cruel and kind, tossed a half loaf into AO's pocket. "You learn tricks, or you go hungry."
AO accepted the bread. He ate as if hunger were an art he'd practiced. Luffy watched every movement as if memorizing a dance.
That night the three of them—Luffy, AO, and the cove—fell into an arrangement less like family, more like necessity. Luffy insisted AO sleep in the loft above Donden's workshop, so at odd hours the boy woke to metal's clink, hot oil, and gear-edged dreams. Donden's contraptions, half-complete and mischievous, watched them like things not yet finished. AO climbed into the loft with only a knife and a borrowed sack; he lay back and watched the night as a page to write on.
Training became their language. For Luffy it was play that hid strategy. For AO it was testing, an audition for the future. For Uta—when she joined later—it would be rhythm that moved the marrow of things. At first the rhythm was Luffy's: push the world toward mischief.
They trained under patient skies. Luffy invented a circuit of drills—movement and manufacture. They began with the "wind-run": long runs to feel how a leaf chose the air. AO watched, learned, then suggested tiny foot placements to pivot on air and shift momentum. Luffy laughed—he felt like a cone of possibility.
Donden did what he always did: made tools into games. He handed AO a spring-latch. "Make it catch a fish," he said. AO examined its geometry like a riddle and wound it into a net-throwing holder. His fingers moved like hammers. Donden whistled as if given a new theory to disassemble.
Days folded into weeks and the rhythms tightened. Luffy ran the forest with AO as a mapping exercise and a gauntlet. They sprinted ridgelines where gulls argued currents, hopped trees, and fell through leaves like deliberate mistakes. AO's precision astonished: his steps placed where the earth marked in invisible ink. He could find an anchor point on any bark that would not give. Luffy learned, folding AO's quiet calculus into his own explosive inventiveness.
Uta arrived a few days later: a hum, Makino's broom, then her small face at the doorway, hair catching the morning like flame. She looked at AO for one breath and hummed a note that settled like a pebble. AO didn't react as he did to soldiers; his face stayed unreadable. Yet a tiny lift at his mouth hinted at softness only the watchful noticed.
Uta tended to file people away—this one would be a project. "Hello," she said, and her voice, for reasons the village did not understand, made the room feel cleared. "You look like you need a bed not made of ship-splinters."
AO replied careful, factual: "I'll sleep where offered." He bowed once, not out of fear, but because manners had paid rent before.
Makino watched them with an intuition that measured damage and goodwill alike. She slid plates of stew and watched them share. Luffy ate like someone announcing gratitude with his mouth. AO took careful bites and folded his utensils in quiet. Uta nibbled at crust and hummed a tune that, without intention, made the old clock on the wall slow its tick for a moment. Outside, dogs nosed each other and unaccountably sat in a new order.
Training intensity tripled with AO's stay. His presence turned exercises into technical contests. Luffy invented drills mid-run—wind-run to tree-slam to equipment-carry blindfolded. AO refined each drill, making the brutish efficient. Donden applauded by handing new springs and cogs.
Uta found a voice inside the drills that made them sing. Her humming became a subtle engineering feedback loop: she hummed a rhythm and the boys timed steps to it; the rhythm improved reflexes not by counting beats but by shifting intent. Her songs—while scrubbing or threading petals—began to have effects. A man arguing a fishing quota calmed mid-sentence and split the catch. A pack of snarling dogs went calm as if the tune had wrapped them in a blanket.
They learned rules by breaking them. AO smashed an ironwood trunk with a motion so precise it cleaved like a new seam. The impact left a handprint melted into the trunk, finger lines etched like a seal. Men who had watched forest fights for their whole lives blinked, as if some truth had been rearranged.
Luffy did what would become rumor and private notes. He stood under a boulder the size of a small ship and caught it. He did not grip; he caught it like a child catching a ball, palms open and steady. The following sound was a dull knell as the world, expecting the boulder to roll, felt something willing hold it. He rolled the rock aside like a child's toy. The valley below—where wolves had listened—shifted mood, birds leaving trees as if embarrassed at being surprised.
Uta's lullaby started soft, an experiment in mood. They tested melodies on gentle days. Once, drawn by curiosity, Uta walked through a field where elder bandits kept Lord-class tigers—riders used them for border patrol. Uta hummed because she always hummed, and the tigers curled their ears; the riders found them snoring, dust settling like a blanket. No one could explain that depth of sleep: not poison, not lock, not exhaustion—something older, like the feeling of safety when a lullaby covers nightmares.
Those small miracles made neighbors look, then look away; miracles need stories and stories cost explanations. The bandits who once warned children now sidled with caution and left extra food. They told of the boy who caught mountains and the girl whose song silenced lions. The tale softened into a marketable danger: be polite, and perhaps the children wouldn't be a problem.
Luffy's inventions grew from curiosity and discipline—repeat failure until it obeyed. He hardened resin with careful heat. He soldered a spring into a cap to keep a berry longer—later the first crude capsule. He drew a sand diagram to show compressing air in a bell for a hollow signal. He practiced compressing breath until a cough felt like punctuation.
AO's presence changed danger's tenor. Quiet and mechanical, he assessed like a craftsman among children. He measured people like a carpenter checks wood: grain, defects, load. Where a bandit brayed, AO mapped limits. He stalked like a scholar with books—collecting pages, rearranging knowledge into an outline of how to break an opponent down. He moved so shadows felt redundant; he did not merely hide—he refused to be seen.
The cove's animals reflected them—wolves listened differently; foxes let them cross. The sea, politely still, sent a current nudging small boats into alignment as if an invisible hand had decided the docks would be orderly that day. Donden scribbled a catalogue of anomalies, muttering containment ratings like cataloguing comets.
At night, when gossip and sadness were set on the floor to wrestle, Uta hummed and the room softened. AO sat apart, quiet and steady. Luffy thought AO waited for decision-time. AO's face hid choices; neutral as a shop window displaying one item—inviting focus and no more.
One afternoon, after hauling ammunition and building a new pulley Donden swore would be "greater than the last machine," Luffy took AO to tidepools where glass flared like hidden moons. They split crust on rocks. AO watched surf play with light, measuring angles in memory. Luffy scrawled sand shapes—wordless ideas—and AO copied precise lines. Luffy admired then ruined them with a grin; neatness made him uneasy.
"Why did you run?" Luffy asked. The question landed like a stone.
AO chewed. "I could not belong," he said. Not an apology: "I wasn't made for where they wanted me."
Luffy considered and flowed into the shape that fit best. "Well, you can belong here," he said. "If you like. There's food, and there's trouble. Mostly trouble."
AO's eyes slid to Luffy's face with a curiosity that made Luffy feel analyzed. "You will teach," AO stated.
"I teach things," Luffy agreed. "I teach how to laugh at big rocks."
AO tilted his head like a device calipers a fit. "You are not like the others," he said. He meant observation; Luffy took it as compliment.
A subtle shift moved through Dawn Island, as if something deep had been nudged awake by the children's rearrangement. It was a low settling, like a great beast turning over. The ground didn't quake, but the earth hummed; fishermen later said nets felt a single deep intake like a breath.
Days blurred into chores spun into practice and then routines rewritten by invention. The cove fed them—fish, work, small mercies. The bandits watched from a distance, feral and curious, offering old rope, a rusted sling, advice that smelled of regret. Donden catalogued changes with modest awe, scratching anomalies. "Containment rating: increasing," he muttered.
As the second month deepened and bodies matched demands, neighbors took note. Travelers passing between ports told tales in hushed wonder of a girl whose voice changed men and a boy who stopped a rock. Most dismissed it as coastal exaggeration; those who stayed to watch said, "There is something in those kids."
It made the cove safer and less safe. Safer because people feared the unknown; less safe because the unknown gained notice.
By month two the training became a machine of habits. Luffy's capsules improved—resin replaced cork, spring latches better, cushions crude but reliable. AO crafted small leverage tools to tuck in boots—a tiny pry bar to rend a lock with calm. Uta wove a hum into everything: a tune to mend poultices, a note to calm, a melody that made locals recall laughter.
On the last night of month two, under a curious full moon, the three sat on the windmill hill with stolen sea-king meat. They ate in comfortable chatter born of trust. The windmill's arms creaked like a ship remembering an old sea. The village below twinkled like scattered stars. Foxes moved like secrets in hedgerows. Donden's tools hummed in the lab.
And then, far out at sea, a flash of red broke the horizon like a bright edit in the sky. It moved fast—too fast to be a trading craft, too precise to be light trickery. The flash left no time for explanation. It winked and was gone.
Luffy's grey-gold eyes caught the flash like a stain. The world tightened. "Red…" he whispered, a small, old warning.
Dadan, half-hidden on the ridge, heard it as if on a wire. She gripped her pipe, squeezing so hard the wood cracked with the sound of anger surprised into fear. Makino, locking the bar with more force than necessary, stared at the horizon split between hope and dread. Donden set down a wrench and sketched a new clasp, muttering, "Containment. Containment." The word was both prayer and instruction.
Beneath them, under roots and marrow, something shifted like a great thought waking. The island answered will: Luffy's messy competence, Uta's song threading notes, AO's quiet measuring land for load. The old thing under the stone felt them like pins on a map.
Dawn Island, named to keep monsters at bay, was still an island to those who lived on it—large and stubborn. Outside perception shaped by Nen—where some believed the world twenty times larger—other truths lingered: places larger than Dawn, continents that dwarfed it like ripples dwarf ponds. But such talk was not for a village over stew; it hung like an unmade ceiling the elders nodded toward when speaking of strange storms, a careful, dangerous joke the Red Hair crew had measured.
The children did not know the extent of that truth. They knew wind and how muscles answered when asked. They knew, viscerally, that their world tilted. Luffy's heart beat like a small drum, and that drum felt like the beginning of a sentence.
The flash of red sails was gone by the time adults decided. Men with nets called it nothing. Fishermen who had seen much waved and said the horizon played tricks. But Makino and Dadan and Donden and the bandits all stored that knowledge like a loaded coin in a pocket.
The last thing the windmill hill offered that night was a sense of debt. Luffy put his hand to his chest and felt the slow thump that had trained him into someone trusted to carry more than his size allowed. AO sat back from the edge, watching the black sea like a man who studied a chessboard before moving a pawn. Uta hummed and the tune eased tension for a breath. The cove returned to watching its children—measuring whether they'd make things better or worse.
Far beneath Dawn Island, the creature that ate slowly—part coral, part metal, stitched with echo-Nen and dead bones—turned. Its vast gut of decay shifted as if feeling three small new wills at the surface. It had slumbered while men forgot the old things, while emperors counted coins and governments wrote reasons into maps. It remembered hunger and the taste of continents, the slow plans of sailors who took it for a mountain and paid with their lives.
Tonight the taste of three small children touched something inside that monstrous interior. It inhaled. Not yet malice, but awareness. It had waited long to be recognized. The world, as old charts liked to keep secret, answered to attention.
On the windmill hill the children laughed and promised small, ridiculous things—catch a whale, befriend a leviathan, make Uta's voice the new national anthem. They did not know how their laughter would scatter seeds in the soil. They did not know three months was a promise that would become a plan needing more than courage to defend.
Somewhere, far beyond sight, the Red Hair fleet grew into rumor among men who read smuggled manifests and stitched falsehoods for profit. Someone noted a rerouted shipment. Someone else found a pattern in the stars. The clock kept slow time.
Up on the hill the moon hung like a watchful eye. Luffy chewed and felt the meat like a small trophy. AO sat impassive yet sometimes smiled a fraction when Luffy excited him. Uta hummed and the tune settled like a blanket. They were small and fierce and, in a world much bigger than their cove, had become what the island felt in its bones.
When night finished and the village slept, each adult folded a thought like a map to check later. Donden scribbled, "Containment rating; escalate to two." Makino muttered a prayer. Dadan sat up too late, chewing tobacco and cursing to nobody.
Beneath them all, the island settled its weight and made room for the next moment. The sea kept secrets with oceanic patience, and the horizon held a color like waiting for an answer.
In the loft above the lab, AO woke at an unidentified sound and listened. He had been given a place—temporary, thin, mostly old rope—and he'd slotted that space into plans. He had started to belong because belonging was practical. He folded the day into a narrow blueprint and rested his head on a sack. The knife that had been his single companion lay beside him, quiet and patient.
Outside, the island inhaled long, preparing for a game that would need more than cleverness. Luffy dreamed of gears and songs and big red sails cutting fog. He grinned in sleep, hungry and simple and ready. The world, old and vast and quietly laughing, had noticed those three small people. It would soon decide whether to teach them mercy or test their endurance.
At the cove's edge the tide hissed like an old man telling a secret. The moon watched as the three children slept. Dawn Island, still an island though not the largest thing in the real frame of the world, held them close and waited to see who they would become.
Author note: Size of the World:
The One Piece world in this story is 20× larger than canon.
True size = ???× larger, but Nen distorts perception, blocking awareness of the dangerous areas.
???
Space exists and can be traveled to.
TIME SYSTEM:
Time Conversions
1day = 49 hours
1 week = 10 days = 490 hours
1 month = 6 weeks = 60 days = 2,940 hours
1 year = 32 months = 192 weeks = 1,920 days = 94,080 hours
This influences:
Climate cycles(Longer seasons)
Character aging(Peaple Live way longer here then people on earth)
Ship travel
Seasonal monster migrations
Day/night behavior
Day/Night Cycle:
49-hour days
21 hrs night → 28 hrs of day