The thought drifted in the way gentle ideas do before you are fully awake, unbidden but unmistakably there. Chopper.
A tiny reindeer doctor. Blue nose. That unmistakable vibe of someone who aches to be seen as cool, keeps failing at it, and somehow becomes even more endearing for the effort. He had watched Chopper on a screen and felt a fondness that was hard to label but instantly familiar—the affection you reserve for fictional souls who are unapologetically themselves. Now, he was about to meet that person in the future in a world where meeting someone meant encountering all their vivid, tangible reality.
The thought lingered in his chest, glowing with warmth and a touch of absurdity, before he rose to his feet.
He set out toward the mountain.
---
Two months and a little more had reshaped Luffy in ways anyone could see if they looked at him from then compared to now. That morning's sparring session was fiercer than the first, not just because the pace had picked up, but because Luffy himself had leveled up. He wasn't just hitting harder. He was reading the fight, moving with a new tactical sharpness beneath his instincts, his body making choices that used to require thought. The rubber body was still its wild, unpredictable self—the odd angles, the reach that always seemed to come from nowhere, the blows that spread and vanished. What had changed was the mind steering it all.
Liam could sense the gulf between this Luffy and the one who might have existed without those daily sessions. It was a difference you couldn't measure, but you could feel—like the familiar heft of something you've carried for years compared to picking it up for the first time. Luffy would set sail not just stronger, but transformed from the version Liam had watched on a screen.
That knowledge settled quietly in his chest. It was simply good.
They wrapped up the second round and stood as they always did after a tough session—breathing, apart, each taking a moment before moving on. Luffy leaned on his knees, grinning down at the ground with that look he wore when a fight had taken something from him and he decided it was worth every bit.
In that hush, the decision that had been quietly building in Liam's mind finally arrived, clear and complete.
He would be at sea in a matter of weeks. The East Blue was no Grand Line, but it was far from safe—Morgan was out there, Arlong too, and the dangers of the first arc were etched in his memory like a map. Beyond East Blue, the Grand Line waited with all its chaos. Beyond that, the New World. The difference between arriving at each stage already adapted to its threats and stumbling in unprepared, while lethal dangers closed in, was worth any discomfort he could choose now. In the end, he was unkillable. The price was short-term pain.
Sitting on a rocky slope in the crisp mountain air, he understood that logic did not make things feel less strange. He was about to walk into the woods and hurt himself on purpose—with fire and a kitchen knife. Both ideas made sense, and both were utterly bizarre, and he carried both truths with him as he headed back to the village.
---
The first thing he needed was a kitchen knife.
Makino was at the bar in her afternoon rhythm—prepping for the evening, moving with the calm precision of someone who knew how to manage time. She glanced up as he entered.
He placed his hands on the counter.
"Can I borrow a knife? One of the smaller ones."
She didn't ask right away. She gave him that full-attention look—the one reserved for things worth truly understanding. Then she disappeared into the kitchen and returned with a spotless paring knife, the kind of tool made for careful work.
She set it down on the counter between them.
"Bring it back," she said.
Just two words. Everything she wasn't saying was packed into them—the trust, the worry that came with it, and her choice not to ask what he planned to do. She had decided to trust him, even if it left her uneasy, and both feelings flickered across her face for a moment before she returned to her work.
He picked up the knife. "I will."
He slipped back into the woods.
---
Fire came first—he built a campfire in a clearing, away from the trees, with the same methodical care he brought to any task where mistakes mattered. The basics: a ring of stones, tinder, and a structure that would burn on its own. He'd done this before, in another life, in a world that now felt distant.
He let the fire settle for ten minutes, then sat close beside it.
He began at the edge of the heat—not the heart of the fire, but the border where warmth was real, and harm was on its way but not yet there. His skin responded instantly. He stayed put. The sensation grew. He stayed through the pain.
Adaptation started as it always did—pressure under the skin, a shifting, the body deciding what it was and what it needed to become. But fire was a different messenger than impact. The feeling didn't just sharpen and then dull; it changed altogether—from a warning of harm to a pure report of heat, the body rerouting the message but keeping the information. He could still feel the heat. The part that screamed this is hurting you faded, then faded again.
He edged closer.
This was the moment for not thinking too hard about his actions. He pressed his forearm into the outer edge of the flame and held it there, letting his body recalibrate as the sensation traveled its odd path from pain to pressure to something almost like harmless warmth. It took longer than the stake test. Longer than the boar. Fire was a new kind of threat, and his body responded by throwing everything it had at the challenge.
After an hour, he could hold his arm in the fire and feel only heat—real, intense, unmistakable—without injury beneath it. It wasn't comfortable. It wasn't something he'd ever choose if he didn't have to. But it was survivable, with full function, and that was the standard he'd set—and reached.
He leaned back from the fire and examined his forearm. The skin showed no marks in the clearing's light. He pressed his thumb to the spot that had touched the flame. No tenderness. The adaptation hadn't just lessened the harm—it had changed how his skin met heat, which was something else entirely, and far more intriguing.
He rebuilt the fire, sat with it for another twenty minutes, letting the resistance deepen. Then he let the flames die and set off to find his clearing.
---
The knife was easier in some ways, harder in others.
Easier, because his body already knew a little about blades—the stake test, the countless tiny cuts from months of sparring on rough ground. The foundation was there. Now he was building on it, deliberately and precisely.
Harder, because knowing your body will adapt to being stabbed and actually choosing to stab yourself are worlds apart. The logic didn't make the choice easier. He paused in the clearing, knife in hand, had a quick, honest talk with himself about what he was about to do, reached the same answer as before, and went ahead.
The first cut was shallow, running along his forearm—careful, measured, intentional. His body reacted before the blade finished its path, adaptation spreading from the point of contact, the skin learning to meet the blade as it had learned to meet the flame. The cut sealed itself. He studied the line it left—real, visible, already healing fast—and pressed the knife flat against the closed wound, pushing until the blade met something that refused to be cut again.
He built up from there, step by step, just as he had with the fire—from the edge to the heart. By the end, pressing the blade's point to his skin met real resistance where before there had been none. Ordinary blades would struggle now. A master swordsman was another matter—the force and intent behind Mihawk's blade belonged to a different world than a kitchen knife wielded by him—but the foundation was set, and it would only grow stronger. He cleaned the knife and returned to the bar.
---
The gap with ice was glaring, and he had no fix for it. There was no way to make it really cold on Dawn Island. He marked it as a problem for later, a challenge to meet when the world gave him the chance, and promised himself he'd welcome that moment instead of dreading it.
The walk down the mountain gave him space to see the bigger picture.
He'd spent weeks training in a mountain range on a quiet island in a gentle sea. He knew, with the certainty of someone who'd seen the whole story, just how high the ceiling of human power in the One Piece world really was. Kaido had survived decades of the world trying and failing to kill him. Big Mom was just as tough. Imu stood at a height the story never fully revealed, so the ceiling was even higher than canon showed. There were people here who could erase islands, not just scar them. The distance between where Liam stood now and where he'd need to be to matter among them was not something a two-month training arc could bridge.
His adaptive body would keep growing. He knew it. He trusted it. Still, he admitted to himself that if he was wrong, it would be a lesson worth learning—and better to discover he wasn't strong enough than to believe he was stronger than he really was. The New World would show him the true ceiling and whether he could reach it. That climb normally takes years, not weeks.
That reckoning didn't shrink anything. It simply put everything in order.
---
The weeks before departure felt like the final pages of a book—each day vivid and complete, each one also a number ticking down. Sparring went on, and Luffy kept growing, squeezing a year's worth of progress into the days left. The immunity training ran alongside, fire and blade resistance deepening with every session, the ceiling rising just as everything else had.
Makino remained herself through it all—the bar, the mornings, the effortless rhythm of two people who didn't need to fuss over something for it to stay real. The orphanage got another visit. The serious boy updated his opinion on endings, announcing it like a weather report rather than an admission. Old Fels reached the philosophical part of the sea king story, which Pent accepted with the resigned look of a man who had come to terms with this twist several chapters ago.
The immunity work never stopped. Fire resistance grew with every session, the baseline inching upward, steady and permanent. Blade resistance followed suit. He wasn't making leaps—he was building his foundation. The gaps—ice, and whether his body could ever match the world's deadliest swords—he left for a future self, one with better resources to train with.
One afternoon, Luffy asked, in an easy way, things that had clearly been in his head for a while, whether Liam was going to keep getting stronger forever.
He thought about that for a moment. "As long as the world keeps throwing things at me."
Luffy considered this with genuine attention. "The world does that a lot."
"It does."
Luffy nodded, satisfied. To him, this arrangement just felt right.
Then, the countdown ended.
---
The boat was small in that particular, bold way Luffy tackled anything that wasn't quite up to the job. Two barrels. Supplies as basic as they came, and both of them knew it. The morning glowed with the kind of light that meant something was about to happen.
Makino was at the shore.
She had known this day was coming since before Luffy could even say the word pirate. She'd made her peace with it long ago, or as close to peace as you get—the kind that isn't about feeling nothing, but about accepting something deeply. She understood what the sea meant to him. She never tried to stop him, never hinted that her feelings should shape his choices.
Luffy hugged her the way he did everything—completely, without holding back, without the hesitation that made others guard their own affection. He held on a little longer than usual, and in that extra moment was everything he didn't say and didn't need to. She held on, too, with the stillness of someone letting herself feel rather than trying to control it.
When they parted, she said something softly, her voice meant only for him. He gave her the real grin—the one that was gentle at the edges, not for show—and rested his hand on her shoulder for a moment before stepping away.
Then he grabbed the boat and hauled it to the water's edge, cheerfully direct, as if the heaviness of the moment and the heaviness of the boat were just two jobs to do at once.
Makino watched him do it. Something flickered across her face—not quite sadness, but something shaped like it, worn smooth by years of living with it. She'd known this was coming since Shanks left that hat behind. That was where the knowing began, if Liam guessed right. A man hands a straw hat to a child and says: Keep it safe until you meet me at sea.
Liam walked up to her. The moment didn't need much—he wasn't Luffy, didn't share the history, wasn't leaving with a piece of her life the way someone you've raised does. What they had was smaller, different, built on shared work, mornings, and the quiet warmth of a place that had truly welcomed him.
"Thank you," he said. Simple and direct, because Makino valued plain words over fancy ones.
She studied him for a moment with that look she used when reading someone, but kept her thoughts to herself. She gave a single, complete nod—the kind that said she understood and that was enough.
"Come back when you have something worth telling," she said.
He nearly smiled. "That might take a while."
"I'll be here."
He turned toward the water.
---
The boat was tiny, the sea endless, and Luffy was already in place, straw hat tipped into the morning sun, grinning at the horizon like someone who had been waiting for this moment since before he even knew how to name it.
Liam took his place in the other half of the boat. They pushed off. The shore slipped away. Foosha Village—the dock, the bar roof peeking above the houses, Makino's figure at the water's edge—shrank, then shrank again.
The sea carried them, East Blue calm on the surface, currents swirling below, the world busy with its own affairs as two people rowed out in a small boat with two barrels and no real plan. He knew what lay ahead. Not far now, if memory served: a whirlpool, and everything that followed—the first note in the bigger song the sea was about to play for them both.
The island faded behind. Everything else lay ahead.
Liam gazed at the horizon and, without ceremony or fuss, felt himself entirely at ease.