On the morning of Day 9, Luffy threw the punch that had landed all week, only to watch it freeze in place for the first time.
Not slipped, not dodged—stopped. Liam's forearm rose, absorbing the force until it vanished, his arm unmoved. For a heartbeat, they stood on the rocky slope, punch suspended in limbo. Luffy studied the spot, pulled back, reset, and tried again. Nothing changed.
"Huh," Luffy said.
That was the inside of two weeks: silent, sudden, and real.
---
By the end of Day 2, the routine had built itself—no upkeep needed. Up before the bar stirred, the path to the den as instinctive as breathing, Luffy already in motion when Liam emerged from the trees. Sparring until noon. Sometimes, extra work: sprints up steep slopes and fighting mountain beasts on the way, the kind of wild training only One Piece mountains could provide. Down to the village in the afternoons. Bar shift from dusk until close.
Makino no longer remarked on the early mornings. To Liam, that silence was the highest form of approval.
---
The first session after their initial spar made the work ahead clear. Luffy struck with his usual style—raw, momentum-driven, more instinct than technique—and the gap between them stayed exactly where it had been. Tangible, measurable, built over years.
Darwin did not erase gaps in a rush. It closed them steadily, which was slower but, in its way, more powerful.
On the third morning, Liam landed a combination that pushed Luffy back two steps. Not far—just two steps on a mountain slope, not a reversal. But two steps were made in progress from Day 1, when the same move had meant nothing. Progress was measured in degrees, and that was enough. He noted it quietly and pressed on.
By midweek, their sparring had become its own language: Luffy pushing harder, as he always did when things got complicated, and Liam adapting in real time, his body learning to feel the shifts rather than just notice them. He was not planning ahead—he was responding in the moment, recalibrating with every exchange.
It did not feel like growing.
It felt like a ratchet: each click subtle, precise, and irreversible.
On Day 7, their spar ended in a draw for the first time. Luffy would never call it that—he never used words that suggested a draw could exist. But both had run out of momentum at once, standing in the clearing, breath high, neither willing to break the silence for another round.
Luffy grinned—wide, genuine, stripped of any performance.
"You're as fast as me," he said.
"Getting there." Liam turned his wrist, checking the density in his forearm that had not been there a week ago. "Give it a few days."
Luffy's grin stayed fixed, already turning toward the challenges the next week would bring.
---
On the second morning, after their first session, they sat on the slope—Luffy munching on something conjured from nowhere, Liam gazing at the valley through the trees—when Luffy turned and spoke without warning.
"Come on, join my crew."
Luffy's bluntness was expected. What caught Liam off guard was the sheer simplicity of the reasoning that followed—offered not as an argument, but as something obvious.
"You're good people. You can fight. I'm going to be Pirate King, and I need strong nakama." A pause, the pause of someone completing a proof. "So come."
Liam took a moment, eyes on the valley below.
He had been thinking about this since he filed the question a few days ago — not running from it, just letting it sit and develop, the way decisions that deserve time develop when you don't force them. The shape of the answer had been building itself from the pieces he'd laid down since Foosha Village: he was in this world, he was here with the particular advantage of knowing what was coming, and the difference between being inside the crew and adjacent to it was the difference between being able to do something and watching it happen.
He knew the arcs. He knew the moments where the story bent in directions he had not, watching from a screen, been able to argue with because they were not his to argue with. They were now. He knew which moments were coming, where people he would come to care about would get hurt, and where outcomes were treated as fixed, not needing to be fixed. He was not arrogant about what he could change. He was honest about the responsibility to try when the moment was there.
This was not a small commitment. He was not joining a crew. He was committing to a world to the full weight of what this world was and what it asked of the people inside it, for as long as it asked.
He chose it anyway. No version of standing apart felt right.
"What role?" His voice stayed steady—practical, though the answer was already clear.
Luffy thought about it with the open, unhurried expression of someone who was genuinely asking rather than expecting a specific answer. "What do you want to do?"
"Problem solver." Liam watched a bird glide through the trees below. "Generalist. Whatever needs doing."
Luffy considered this for about two seconds—a long pause by his standards—then nodded with the certainty of someone making an executive decision.
"My crew needs that." He said it as if the role had always existed, just waiting for a name. Then, with a weight in his voice that made the words land: "You're nakama."
Not crew in the nautical sense — not people who happened to be on the same ship because the work required it. The word sat in a different place entirely, one that Liam had understood the shape of long before he'd arrived in this world. People. The chosen kind. Something that had no clean translation into any language he'd grown up speaking, that existed in the space between people and family and chose and was none of those things cleanly but all of them at once.
Luffy said it simply, instantly, as if he'd known it for days. The word landed with its full weight.
"Then I'm in," Liam said.
The valley below rested in morning haze. A bird slipped through the trees. In a few months, both would leave this island behind.
Luffy gazed at the same view, but saw something different—a future crowded with people not yet here, a crew waiting to be built. "I still need a navigator. A cook. Someone with a sword—someone really strong with a sword." He spoke his list aloud, ideas he'd clearly carried for a while. "A musician. And a doctor. A good one." The list faded into roles he hadn't named yet. "And more nakama. I just don't know them all yet. I'll know them when I find them."
That last sentence was not performance or hope. For Luffy, it was simply a fact—a truth he would shape into reality by being utterly himself until the world bent to fit.
"You'll find them," Liam said.
Luffy shot him a sideways look, the kind reserved for hearing something obvious but still enjoying the sound of it.
"Of course I will."
Luffy announced a feast simply by telling Dadan it would happen. Dadan accepted it with the look of someone who had long ago stopped fighting this kind of news.
They hunted together. It was nothing like hunting alone, or even watching Luffy fight a tiger from the trees. Hunting with Luffy was its own wild event—loud where hunting should be quiet, direct where it should be subtle, and somehow, against all odds, effective. The boar was huge. It did not last. Luffy grinned nearly the whole time.
By the time they hauled the boar back to the den, one at each end, Liam had redefined hunting together as a joint exercise in relentless pursuit with a rubber human. He decided this was accurate and not a complaint.
The feast brought out the den's best self.
Dadan managed the food with the practiced ease of someone who had fed rough crowds for years—her hands working on autopilot while her mind tracked fire, portions, and the den's order. At one point, she gave Liam the same assessing look as on his first morning, but now it had softened, as if she was quietly updating her opinion. She said nothing and returned to her work.
Luffy devoured his meal with the same total commitment he brought to everything—single-minded, fast, treating the boar as if it had earned his respect by tasting so good. Between bites, he narrated the hunt with about twenty percent more drama than reality. The bandits listened with attention that didn't always match their expressions.
"The thing is," Luffy said, around a third of a full serving, "when it charged—"
"You did,"
"I ran at it," Luffy confirmed, as if this were an obvious and sensible thing to have done, which, in the context of how Luffy ran at things, it was. "But then—"
The story rolled on. The bandits ate, listened, and didn't laugh at the funny parts—not because they weren't amused, but because they chose not to encourage the performance.
Dogra refilled Liam's cup without being asked and said, under the noise of the table, "He's been talking about this crew since he could talk."
"I know." Liam watched Luffy demolish a second helping. "He'll build it."
Dogra was quiet for a moment, as if someone who had thought about this for a long time had arrived at a settled position. "Yes, he will." Said with the specific certainty of someone who has known a person since before that person had the vocabulary to be impressive.
Across the table, Dadan wasn't watching Luffy. Her gaze drifted past him, fixed on the fire or something unseen, her face holding the look of someone lost in thoughts they'd never voice. The den had raised Luffy—the boy eating too fast and talking too much had become himself here. That truth lingered in Dadan's expression, unspoken but unmistakable.
Liam let it be.
---
The second week was easier to read from within. The first week had been about closing a gap—always harder to see than opening one.
Day 9—the punch that stopped—marked the first clear milestone. The same angle, tried twice, went nowhere. Luffy spent the rest of the session searching for a new opening, found one, and lost it by Day 11. He found another. It lasted two days.
Once the pattern set in, it was clear: Luffy found a move that worked, it worked until Liam adapted, then it stopped working, and Luffy invented something new. The cycle sped up as Liam's resistance grew—smaller threats now triggered adaptation where only big ones had before. Darwin was compounding.
On Day 12, Liam moved first in the spar for the first time.
Not hesitantly—Liam moved first, setting the tone for the exchange. Luffy answered as only Luffy could: aggressive, unyielding, exactly as Liam had hoped. What followed was their best spar yet—both pushing hard, Luffy inventing new angles, Liam adapting in real time, the sparring turning into a true conversation between equals.
Luffy won that one. Liam won the afternoon session.
By the end of Week 2, the gap had shifted—open, in Liam's favor, not wide but unmistakable. Luffy was a different fighter now; daily sparring had pushed him further than any solo training. He had grown. That Liam had grown faster didn't bother Luffy. In his world, problems were the only things standing in the way of his dream. Being outpaced by a crewmate was not a problem. If anything, it was proof his crew was strong.
"You're faster than me now," Luffy said, on Day 14, in exactly the same tone he'd said you're as fast as me on Day 7.
"A little."
"More than a little." No resentment in it — observational, accurate, filed. "You're going to keep going, aren't you?"
"That's how the ability works."
Luffy nodded. Then: "Train harder tomorrow."
"Same time," Liam said.
---
Two weeks of evenings.
Old Fels had reached the part of his sea king tale where the creature conveyed wisdom through a dance of water spouts, a detail he was crafting over several visits with cathedral-like care. Corren still nursed his grievance about the fish, treating it as an ongoing case. Pent had begun to give Liam a small nod on arrival, which, for Pent, was practically a handshake.
One evening, Makino paused her work and fixed him with a look that meant she'd been thinking and had finally decided to speak.
"You seem better," she said. "Than when you came in."
"I feel better, too." He kept it simple.
---
The last night of the two-week stretch. The bar was quiet and closed, the village outside was busy with its nighttime rhythms. His room framed a dark square of sky—clouds tonight, no stars.
Liam sat on the bed's edge, turning the question over in his mind.
He'd been here just over two weeks. His body now sat at a baseline that would have sounded impossible before—the boar that took ten minutes on Day 3 would take two now, and the tiger from Day 4 would barely be a challenge. The curve was real, the gains compounding, the mechanic working as promised.
The real question: could he push it further?
Darwin was reactive. That was its design: encounter a threat, adapt, come out the other side at a higher baseline. The passive version was already working. The passive version would keep working as long as threats found him, and in the One Piece world, threats were not in short supply. The East Blue was the weakest sea, and it still contained Arlong, Mihawk's duel with Zoro, Morgan, and the full weight of what was coming for the crew before they even reached the Grand Line.
But East Blue was not the New World. The New World was a different beast—Admirals as everyday threats, Yonko setting the bar. If he let the curve follow East Blue's pace, he'd reach the Grand Line adapted to East Blue, and the New World adapted to the Grand Line. Always a step behind, always chasing.
The real question: was catching up the only path?
He could seek out the exposures. Extreme environments — the cold of high altitude, the heat of volcanic terrain, the crushing pressure of deep water. His body would adapt to all of these if he pushed far enough into them. He would adapt to fire if he let fire near him long enough, to cold if he stayed cold long enough. The Doomsday layer meant he would not die from the attempt — or, if he did, the version that returned would be immune to it. The cost was discomfort that his healing rate compressed into hours rather than weeks. The gain was a front-loaded adaptation to conditions he had not encountered yet.
Not tomorrow. But the idea had taken shape: a deliberate program of exposure, turning a reactive system into something proactive.
Below, the bar settled into quiet, the soft sounds of an empty building at night.
Not a conclusion—a direction. He turned it over with the satisfaction of a problem worth thinking about, in the room above the bar, on the island he'd reached with one shoe and nothing else, just two weeks before.
The problem kept turning as sleep crept in, unhurried, already searching for its next piece.