[Zephyr's Special Training Camp – Week 3]
The sun blazed overhead, its heat searing the sand into rippling waves of distortion. A sharp sea breeze rolled across the training ground, laced with salt—and the acrid sting of gunpowder.
Beneath that unforgiving sky, over a hundred boys in identical uniforms pushed their bodies to the breaking point under the iron command of Zephyr.
Sand combat.
Weighted sprints.
Brutal calisthenics.
High-intensity sparring drills.
And—most grueling of all—the first lessons in the Naval Six Styles:
Soru: A burst of speed, vanishing in an instant.
Moonwalk: Defying gravity with controlled aerial glides.
Finger Pistol: Piercing steel with nothing but fingertips.
These weren't performance arts. They were tools of survival—forged in blood, honed in fire.
Dust and sweat mingled in the air, thick with the scent of exhaustion and split knuckles. Yet amid the chaos, one figure moved with unnatural precision.
Ronan.
His sprints cut through the haze like a predator's charge. Every punch, every elbow strike, landed with surgical lethality. Where others faltered under the weight of fatigue or fear, Ronan drove forward—relentless, methodical, almost inhuman in his discipline.
On the observation platform, Zephyr crossed his arms, his hawk-like eyes locked onto the black-haired recruit.
After a long silence, he murmured, low and gravelly:
"Exceptional physical reflexes."
"Instinctive mastery of movement."
"A will that refuses to yield—even when his body screams to stop."
A born fighter.
But Zephyr hadn't stopped there. Recognizing Ronan's potential, he'd introduced him to the deeper arts—Haki.
Days bled into nights of hand-to-hand combat. Thousands of punches thrown. Countless blocks absorbed against reinforced dummies—and Zephyr's own Vajra Arm Bone. Through bloodied knuckles and aching bones, Ronan clawed his way toward awakening the power sleeping within.
At first, it was only a whisper—a faint tightening of the skin. But after seven consecutive days of head-on collisions with Zephyr's hardened fist…
A sliver of inky black luster flickered over Ronan's right knuckles.
Fragile? Yes.
But undeniably real.
Elementary Armament Haki.
Yet even as he mastered the fundamentals, Ronan never neglected his true edge—his Air-Air Fruit.
In a forgotten corner of the camp, far from prying eyes, he trained in secret:
Air Compression Step: A pulse of pressurized air beneath his feet, launching him faster than even Soru could achieve.
Floating Flight: Minute control of air currents, granting brief, silent levitation.
Air Shock Slash: Compressed air twisted into a razor-edged vortex—deadly at range, devastating up close.
Through relentless repetition, he began weaving these techniques into his close-quarters combat: Soru to close the gap, Air Compression to amplify his momentum, Air Shock Slash to carve openings before his fists delivered the final blow.
His style was taking shape—fast, precise, lethal.
Like an unpolished longsword: raw, but already sharp enough to cleave flesh from bone.
At first, his peers only felt awe.
But awe soon soured into something darker.
"He's just another recruit…"
"How is he this strong?"
"Did he cheat? Take some shortcut?"
Whispers slithered through the ranks. Envy festered in the shadows of admiration.
And deeper still—in places Ronan never thought to look—watchful eyes tracked his rise with cold calculation.
Darkness does not tolerate unchecked light.
But Ronan neither noticed nor cared.
He trained.
He bled.
He sharpened himself under the sun's wrath.
Because he knew the truth:
His real enemy wasn't the jealousy of weak men.
It was the rotting, world-spanning beast that sat upon the throne of this broken world.
Behind the crowd, Rett stood motionless—his pupils narrowed to slits.
He wasn't just stunned by Ronan's terrifying growth.
He was shaken by something else entirely.
Just days ago… he'd overheard the truth of Ronan's past.
That boy, too, had walked alone through the ruins of a shattered home—through pools of blood and seas of fire.
His parents had been slaughtered by pirates. His relatives, his friends—everyone he loved was gone.
How alike they were.
Rett's fist clenched. His knuckles whitened under the strain.
Deep in his chest, a pain long buried—and an obsession forged in fire—stirred, overlapping with the grief of the lonely boy standing before him.
Not out of pity.
Never out of pity.
But out of a resonance born in blood and ash.
That resonance had lain dormant in his heart for years—unseen, unheard, unshared.
Until now.
Until this battle.
Until Ronan.
[Evening – After Training Ground]
The setting sun bled across the sky, staining it gold and crimson.
The afterglow spilled like blood onto the cracked earth of the training ground.
Sweat soaked Rett's uniform; blisters burned his palms. The air hung thick with the acrid tang of gunpowder and exhaustion.
Around him, the other trainees departed in twos and threes, laughing or silent, but always in pairs.
Rett said nothing as he approached the black-haired boy methodically gathering his gear.
He stopped. From a tattered pocket, he pulled a sweat-stiffened cloth strip—worn, frayed, yet carefully kept—and held it out.
His hand trembled faintly, but his resolve did not waver.
"I'll stand in front in battle," he said, voice low but firm.
"Wherever you point—I'll fight."
Ronan looked up, momentarily startled.
Staring into the eyes of the dark-skinned, silent boy before him, something soft—almost imperceptible—flickered in Ronan's gaze.
No empty words.
No hollow oaths.
He accepted the cloth without hesitation and bound it tightly around his left arm, as if sealing a vow with sinew and silence.
The wind howled.
In the dying light, two figures stood side by side—
one in front, one behind—
forging, in the quietest way possible, the first oath of what would one day become Absolute Justice.
From that moment on, Rett became Ronan's first true follower—
and in time, the first adjutant of the Absolute Justice Fleet, marching beside him through the blood-soaked tides of the planetary seas.
[Meanwhile – Outside the Training Ground]
High on a secluded ridge, far from prying eyes,
a figure stood motionless.
Clad in a white military coat and flowing cloak, he seemed carved from molten stone—silent, immovable, radiating quiet power.
It was Sakazuki.
His eyes, sharp as obsidian, burned with the heat of magma beneath still earth.
They fixed on the slender yet unbroken form of the young man below.
This wasn't surveillance.
Nor suspicion.
It was something deeper—
a concern buried so far beneath layers of duty and discipline that even he rarely acknowledged it.
Every time Ronan charged into battle,
every time he fell and rose again,
every time that relentless, almost obsessive will blazed under the sun—
a flicker of tenderness, brief as a spark, would pass through Sakazuki's gaze.
"Not bad," he murmured, voice low and smoldering like subterranean flame.
"Indeed… the will of our blood."
He closed his eyes.
His Advanced Observation Haki unfurled like ripples across still water, sweeping silently over the training grounds.
Almost immediately, he sensed them—
shadows cloaked in decay, eyes gleaming with conspiracy and greed.
Hostility, cold and coiled, lingered in their auras.
Like crocodiles in murky depths, they had set their sights on his only nephew.
Sakazuki's eyes narrowed. Fire danced in their depths.
Without a sound,
without a single shift in posture,
he committed every detail to memory—
their breath patterns, their auras' frequencies, the subtle rhythms of their intent.
Each one was etched into a silent ledger in his mind.
Stroke by stroke, he was writing their names on a death list.
"Dare touch a single hair on Ronan's head…"
His voice was a whisper, but it carried the weight of an executioner's axe.
"…and you will learn what hell truly means."
The wind roared across the scorched land—
a land forged in sweat, blood, and unyielding will.
And above it all, beneath a sky turning violet with twilight,
a star of Absolute Justice began to burn.
Silent.
Deadly.
Unstoppable.
And high upon the ridge,
the sleeping volcano had opened its eyes.