"Haki," Lucian said seriously.
The word seemed to vibrate in the air. His casual, gluttonous demeanor was still present as the firelight flickered in his mismatched eyes.
"Haki? What's Haki?" Sanji asked, his brow furrowing as he lit a fresh cigarette.
"Haki," Lucian repeated, his voice dropping into an instructional tone, drowning out the distant sounds of the Skypiean celebration. "The power of the spirit. The manifestation of one's sheer willpower. It is the only true weapon in the New World. Without it, you are all just children playing pretend in a world of monsters who can turn into light, smoke, and cause tremors to sink entire islands. Without Haki, you cannot truly reach the goals you all aim for."
He let that sink in. He turned his eyes to Luffy, who had gone uncharacteristically quiet, as he stared at Lucian with a hard look. "Haki, in the simplest terms, is your will manifested into reality. It is the proof that the will can overcome the physical limits of the flesh."
He took a slow, deliberate sip from his cup, then looked over the so-called 'Monster Trio.' "This world is a dangerous place, Monkey D. Luffy. Sometimes, just being able to punch harder, kick faster, or cut deeper isn't enough. I'm sure you think you're strong because you've made it this far, but the truth is you're weak. So weak, in fact, that right now you're basically nothing in the eyes of the true powerhouses of the sea. You are ants crawling across a map drawn by giants."
Luffy's face immediately began to fume, his cheeks puffing out. "Hey! That's not true! I'm strong! I'm gonna be King!"
"Compared to the nobodies in the East Blue? Sure," Lucian countered with a thin, mocking smile. "But the East Blue is called the 'Weakest Sea' for a reason. Up until now, you were a big fish in a very small pond. There are people in this world strong enough to cut mountains in half with a single, casual swing of a sword. People who can kick warships into splinters as if they were made of balsa wood and dried leaves. And here's the kicker, even some of those people are considered 'average' by the standards of the New World. They are the foot soldiers of the legends."
He turned his gaze to Zoro, who was gripping the hilt of his sword so hard his knuckles were white. "Can you cut a mountain with a wave of your sword, Roronoa? Not with a desperate, all-or-nothing strike, but with a casual wave of your wrist? Can you?"
Zoro's face soured, his silence providing a sharper answer than any word could. He remembered the feeling of Mihawk's tiny knife against his chest.
"Dracule Mihawk can," Lucian continued, twisting the metaphorical knife. "He could cut an entire island if he had the whim. And while he is the greatest swordsman alive, he still isn't the strongest person on the sea. That should tell you how vast the gap is between where you are and where the throne sits. You aren't just miles away, kid, you're in a different league of existence."
That revelation sent a shockwave through the group. Some of them had seen Mihawk's power firsthand, but hearing that there were people even stronger, people who treated such feats as mundane, was almost impossible to process.
"There's also someone much closer to you, Luffy," Lucian said, his eyes glinting with a predatory spark. "The Marine Hero, Vice Admiral Monkey D. Garp. A man who used to crush mountains as a warm-up for his fists. He was one of the few men the King of the Pirates, Gol D. Roger, considered a true rival."
Luffy gulped, a cold sweat breaking out on his forehead. The memory of a giant, shadowed fist loomed in his mind. "G-Grandpa? Grandpa's really that strong?"
"Grandpa?!" the rest of the crew shouted in unison, their jaws hitting the cloud-floor. "Your grandpa is the legendary Marine Hero?!" Nami looked like she was about to faint.
"He is," Lucian said, enjoying the chaos. "He's one of the strongest people in the world. Have you ever wondered, Luffy, why his punches always hurt you? You're a rubber man. Bullets bounce off you. Cannons don't do a thing. But when your grandpa hits you with a 'Fist of Love,' you bruise. Why?."
Luffy winced, rubbing the top of his head as if he could feel the phantom pain of a thousand past lumps. "Yeah… it always hurts when Grandpa hits me. It feels like my rubberness just goes away."
"Well, that's Haki," Lucian explained, leaning forward until the firelight cast long, demonic shadows behind him. "Haki is the ultimate equalizer. It allows someone to bypass the defenses of a Devil Fruit. canceling out their abilities. It's like how you met Smoker in Loguetown and couldn't do a thing, right? You were a fly hitting a windshield."
Luffy nodded slowly, the memory of his helplessness against the smoke-man clearly still stinging. "Yeah. I couldn't touch him at all."
"And in Alabasta, you fought Crocodile. Here, you just battled Enel. Both Logia users that you found nearly impossible to defeat. But let me be honest with you," Lucian said, his eyes showing amusement. "Your wins against them were pure luck. Against Enel, you were a natural counter. Against Crocodile, he was rusty, arrogant, and had forgotten what it meant to fight someone who could touch him. He was styling himself a king who had eventually grown fat on his own hype."
"Rusty?! You called that monster rusty?!" Usopp yelled, his voice cracking into a high-pitched squeak. "That guy almost turned the entire country into a graveyard! He buried Luffy in the sand twice!"
"Oh, he was definitely rusty," Lucian said flatly, his silver and crimson eyes gleaming. "He had spent too many years hiding in the shadows playing big bad boss. And crucially, he didn't even use Haki against you. Had he used even a basic coating of Armament, Luffy, you'd have been a corpse in the desert right now, dehydrated and forgotten."
A heavy chill ran through the group. The realization that they had survived only because their enemies weren't trying their hardest was somewhat a bitter pill to swallow for the more prideful members of the group.
"The point is," Lucian continued, "that to truly reach the pinnacle of this world, to stand where the Pirate King stood, one must master Haki. It is kinda the entry fee for the final stage. Without it, you aren't even worth the effort to some of the other people running these seas."
He allowed a long silence to hang over them as they pondered the weight of his words. Finally, Zoro spoke up, his voice raspy and determined. "So... how do we learn this 'Haki'?"
Lucian shrugged cheerfully, leaning back and grabbing another piece of meat from the pile. The seriousness was gone, replaced once again by the hungry brat. "I don't know."
"WHAT?!" the crew screamed in unison, their collective shock nearly blowing out the campfire.
"What do you mean you don't know?!" Nami shouted, waving her fists in the air, her face turning a bright shade of red. "You just gave us this huge, terrifying speech about how we're gonna die if we don't have it, and now you say you can't teach us?! You're a scam artist!"
"I'm telling you all this so that you know it exists," Lucian said between massive bites of meat. "Finding a way to learn it is your problem, not mine. I'm just a poor, simple merchant, not a sensei. I sell the 'what,' I have not what I don't have. Knowledge is the product here, and I've given it to you. Now you need to find a way to learn yourselves."
He swallowed and continued, "Anyways, as I was saying about haki. Haki comes in three distinct forms, Observation Haki, Armament Haki, and Conqueror's Haki. You've already seen the most basic application of Observation."
They all frowned, as if trying to remember if they had encountered anything like a special move or something like that.
Lucian smiled through a mouthful of food. "Mantra."
"Mantra?" Sanji whispered, the realization dawning on him. "You mean what Enel and his priests used? The way they could sense our every move before we even thought of them?"
"Exactly. That was just a local name for Observation Haki. It enhances the senses to a superhuman degree, allowing the user to sense the 'voices' or presences of others even if they are hidden, read their intent, and predict their movements before they even make them. Armament Haki, on the other hand, creates an invisible armor for both offense and defense. It hardens the body or weapons, and crucially, it's what allows one to strike the intangible bodies of Logia users as if they were solid flesh."
He paused, looking at each of them before lowering his voice for the final, most mysterious type. "And then there's Conqueror's Haki. This one is... different. It's the rarest."
"How so?" Robin asked, her intellectual curiosity overriding her wariness of Lucian.
"Well, unlike the other two, this one can't be learned through training. You're born with it, or you aren't. It's the mark of those with 'the qualities of a king', the one-in-a-million individuals destined to stand above others. It allows a user to manifest their overwhelming willpower to dominate or even knock out weaker-willed individuals without lifting a finger. It is the aura of a ruler. With Conqueror's Haki, numbers don't matter to a king, an army of ten thousand is just ten thousand puppets waiting for their strings to be cut."
"But anyway, everything I've said is still just the basics."
"ONLY the basics?!" Nami exclaimed in disbelief, her head spinning. "What kind of hell is the other side of the grand line?"
"Indeed. There are advanced forms. With advanced Observation, the perception becomes so refined that some people can literally see several seconds into the future."
"Is that even possible?" Usopp asked, his eyes wide as dinner plates. Seeing into the future, could people really get that type of power just by training?
"Well, it sounds easy, but less than twenty people in the entire world can actually do it, so don't sweat it too much for now," Lucian said, seeing their bewildered and defeated faces. "You aren't going to run into them tomorrow. Probably."
"That's so cool!" Luffy yelled out suddenly, his eyes sparkling. "I want to be able to see the future too! And I'm gonna hit the smoke guy! And the sand guy!"
"And with advanced Armament, it's possible to destroy something from the inside out by emitting Haki a short distance away, bypassing external armor entirely. As for Conqueror's... well, I don't know much about its advanced stages, only that it can be used to augment the other two types for a truly terrifying effect."
Well, it was true, while he could describe it, not much was really known about conqueror's haki and its advanced forms. Sure, there was Shanks's wifi haki, but as he said, he didn't know much about it, and it's better to just say it like that.
Silence followed for a few long seconds as the Straw Hats processed the scale of the world they were entering. The celebration around them continued, but for this small group, the world had just gotten ten times larger and a hundred times more dangerous. Then, Luffy started jumping up and down, punching the air with rubbery vigor. "I'm gonna learn it! I'm gonna learn all of it!"
"Hey, can you teach us?" Luffy asked, leaning so far into Lucian's personal space that their noses almost touched.
Lucian pushed the boy back and swallowed a large piece of meat before answering. "Sorry, but as I told you already, I myself don't know how to use Haki. Not yet, anyway." It wasn't a lie, while the Meta Essence had granted him the 'Mantra' ability from Aisa as part of the deal they made, he didn't have the "how-to" manual for the other types.
That seemed to dull the rubber boy's mood for a split second before he cheered up again, babbling about how he'd find a teacher or figure it out himself.
Lucian returned his attention to the feast, eating with a gusto that rivaled Luffy's. He could feel the eyes of Nami, Sanji, Zoro, and Robin burning into him, suspicious of his motives.
He finished his plate, wiped his mouth with his sleeve, and stood up. "So, Captain. Are you satisfied with the information and my side of our little deal? Have I earned my keep?"
Luffy gave a firm, honest nod, his grin returning to its full, face-stretching width. "Yeah! Thanks, Devil-guy! That was helpful! I'll definitely learn that Haki stuff!"
At that moment, Lucian felt a click in his mind, the contract was fulfilled.
"Well, if so, then we're done here," Lucian said, turning to leave.
"Wait," Zoro called out, his hand still resting on the hilt of Shusui. "What about the deal? Your reward? You said you wanted a 'copy' of something from us."
Lucian stopped and looked back over his shoulder, giving them a wide, mysterious smile as his eyes twinkled. "I've already gotten what I asked for, swordsman. Don't worry yourself. In my line of work, the best deals are the ones where you don't even feel the weight of what you've lost. The transaction is complete."
And with that, he turned and walked toward the center of the party, humming a low tune. He had no intention of leaving just yet. He had been a poor, starving, low-class devil for too long to walk away from a free feast. He found a place with fresh drinks, food, and exotic fruits, blending into the chaos of the celebration.
As the music of the sky people roared and the firelight danced off, Lucian Lux Raum laughed as he partied with them, his mismatched eyes reflecting the future.
———————————————————
If you want to read ahead and access 10 advanced chapters, check the patreon. $4 Dollars
Link:patreon/Phantomking785