Morning unfolded across an endless sea, empty of islands or ships, urgency left behind. Only water, sky, and the Going Merry gliding forward, with Liam alone on deck, quietly witnessing the birth of light.
For days, the training structure had occupied his thoughts—not obsessively, but as a quiet undercurrent, the way he approached anything needing a custom fit. Five people, each with their own rhythm of effort, learning, and self-understanding. No single program could serve them all, so there would be none.
The crew surfaced one by one. Zoro led, already deep into his morning before dawn had fully broken. Luffy followed, bursting onto the deck with his usual immediacy, eyes searching for the next adventure. Usopp appeared, nerves and hope mingling as he gauged the mood. Nami emerged last, taking in the scene and instantly sensing that a request was about to land on her shoulders.
"Training," Liam told the deck in general. "We start now."
---
Zoro required nothing from him. Liam had realised this back on Dawn Island: Zoro's method worked, and the best thing to do was let it be. Instead, Liam set the stage—Zoro trained each morning on deck, the crew working around him. The value was not in Liam guiding Zoro, but in the shared, visible effort that bound them all together.
He acknowledged this to Zoro directly, which was the right approach with a person who valued directness: "You have your own approach. I'm not changing it."
Zoro was already training.
Luffy was the puzzle that made things interesting.
The challenge with Luffy was never effort—he could summon endless reserves when needed—but how the task was presented. Ask him for fifty repetitions, and his focus would wander by thirty. Invite him to push his limits, to see just how much force he could unleash with weighted wrists, and suddenly he was all in.
He crafted the weights from a spare wooden spar, wrapping them until they were heavy enough to matter but not enough to slow Luffy down. He fastened them to Luffy's wrists, leaving just enough slack for those rubber arms to stretch and whip through the air.
"How fast?" Luffy asked.
"As fast as you can go. See what happens."
Luffy went.
Weighted rubber arms, stretched to their limit, generated forces that Liam measured with the careful attention he reserved for things that would matter later—especially when Luffy began to develop gear second. The training was real, the engagement authentic, the setup intentional.
Nami's protest landed the instant he turned her way.
Nami's arms crossed. "I'm not crew. I didn't agree to this."
"Not officially." He held her gaze. "But you know it's coming as well as I do. You can start now and be ahead of where you'd otherwise be, or you can start later and be behind." He did not add anything to this. He did not argue the point. He stated it and moved to Usopp.
She watched him turn to Usopp, wearing the look of someone who had just been seen through and found it more irritating than impressive. She stayed rooted in place.
By the time he finished setting up Usopp's routine and glanced back, Nami had already begun.
He remained silent about this.
Usopp's training played to his real strengths: endurance, precision, and the upper-body power his slingshot demanded. He accepted the plan with the careful bravado of someone anxious but unwilling to admit it. Liam had designed the sessions to be tough but winnable—challenging enough to matter, but not so hard they would break anyone's spirit. The first week was always about persistence, and Liam meant for all of them to persist.
He trained alongside them.
---
The days settled into their pattern.
Mornings belonged to the deck and the crew, each lost in their own brand of effort, the air thick with the energy of people working before the day had fully arrived. Luffy's rubber arms snapped and thudded, a rhythm that grew faster each morning. Zoro's three-sword practice ran alongside but apart, his focus so intense it felt like he was forging himself anew. Usopp's grunts marked drills that drained him but promised real change in a few weeks. By the third morning, Nami's reluctant compliance had sharpened into the fierce determination of someone who, if forced to do something, would do it perfectly or not at all.
The rest of the day was filled with the business of life at sea. Nami navigated with an effortless awareness of position and weather, so constant it seemed like breathing. Maintenance belonged to everyone and was loved by none. Five people shared a ship, negotiating space, duties, and the small habits that slowly wove them into a crew.
On the third day, Usopp decided to try out the ship's cannon.
The chain of events was easy to trace: curiosity, confusion over the cannon's workings, and the irresistible urge to touch what clearly should not be touched. One thunderous mistake later, the cannon fired sideways with the authority of something accidentally done right. The cannonball struck the water at just the wrong angle, sending a geyser of foam crashing down on Yosaku and Johnny's small boat behind a rock Usopp targeted and dumping them, soaked and startled, into the sea for the Merry's crew to rescue.
Usopp's apology was classic: beginning with heartfelt regret, detouring into self-reproach, briefly blaming the cannon's confusing design, and circling back to remorse. It lasted longer than any apology needed to. Yosaku and Johnny listened with the patience of men who were wet, alive, and simply grateful to be back on solid planks.
Yosaku raised a hand — the merciful cut that ended the apology. "We're fine."
Yosaku and Johnny, marked by their history with Zoro the way some people wear old scars, were now part of the crew temporarily. They settled in with the calm of seasoned sailors for whom surprise arrivals were just another day at sea, not a disaster.
---
The food problem crept in quietly, the way real troubles do at sea—through shrinking portions, growing tension, and the slow realisation that five people and limited stores were on a collision course.
Liam and Nami spoke up at the same instant—not planned, just two sharp eyes tracking the same problem to the same conclusion. They exchanged a brief look of shared understanding before turning to the others.
Nami looked up from the stores. "We need a cook." She was looking at the stores she had been inventorying with the expression of a navigator doing math that was not going to come out well.
"We're almost out of food," Liam added, which was the underlying fact that made the need for a cook urgent rather than abstract.
Yosaku and Johnny had a solution: the Baratie, a floating restaurant famed for its food and legendary chefs. Not just cooks, but artists who could conjure a meal from anything at hand.
Luffy needed no convincing. Great food, within reach, was all he needed to hear. The decision was made before the explanation ended, and the Merry changed course.
---
On the fifth morning, Liam lingered on deck after the others had disappeared below.
Over the past days, he'd sensed something off in his training—a mismatch between what he expected and what he felt. He should have been exhausted. The long, intense sessions, stacked on months of steady progress, should have left him needing rest. Instead, the wall he was chasing never appeared.
He pushed on—stretching the session by an hour, adding movements that should have drained him, running the length of the deck until the sun had shifted far overhead.
Still, the wall never came.
His body had adapted to relentless effort the way it adapted to everything else—slowly, steadily, and for good. The old limits had vanished, replaced by a stamina ceiling so high it barely existed. He noted this with quiet fascination, letting the bigger questions drift in behind it.
If his body could outgrow exhaustion, what other boundaries might it leave behind?
Sleep was just another bodily need. He knew that pushing past it would test his limits. If he stayed awake long enough, could he adapt to life without sleep? The idea intrigued him. It would take careful planning, patience, and the right moment to try. He had no answers yet—only a path to follow.
Food was a true pleasure, and he saw no reason to give it up, no matter what his body might eventually tolerate. Some adaptations simply were not worth the cost.
Liam sat on the deck, gazing at the sea, and considered how far he'd come from the drenched, one-shoed stranger who had arrived in this world with two wishes and a half-made plan. The gap between then and now was tangible: stamina, blade resistance, fire resistance, bullet immunity—all real, all lasting, all stacking into a foundation that grew stronger with every session, every blow, every mile of open water.
He was far from finished. But for the first time, he could see the outline of what he was becoming.
He sat on the deck and watched the sea.
---
Zoro was the first to spot the oddity in Liam's training.
He did not make a speech about it. He was not a person who made speeches about observations — he catalogued things, filed them, and acted on the information when action was relevant. What he asked Luffy, near the end of the fifth afternoon with the deck emptied of everyone else, was simply: "Is he always like that?"
Luffy looked at where Liam had been training. He looked at the empty space where the exhaustion-limited session should have concluded an hour ago. He turned the question over in an actual thinking pause — not long, but genuine.
Luffy's answer came slowly. "I think he just wants to get strong enough that he doesn't have to worry about anything."
The words arrived simply — without qualification, without the sense that he knew he had landed something accurate. He had looked at a person and seen what was there, the way he sometimes did, in the direct and uncomplicated way that Luffy saw things when he was paying attention rather than just moving through.
Zoro was quiet for a moment.
The idea settled in, and Zoro turned it over slowly—he never rushed when it came to understanding people. He watched the spot where Liam had been training.
Zoro looked at the water. "That's a good way to be."
His thoughts shifted to training. Sparring with someone immune to blades had been on his mind since Shells Town—not because of the immunity, but because of what it meant for practice. Without feedback from the target, he would have to trust his own sense of movement, weight, and precision. It was harder than sparring with anyone else, but it was also the best kind of practice.
"Spar tomorrow?" he asked, when Liam came back up from below with a cup of something warm.
Liam looked at him. "What time?"
"Morning. Before the others."
"I'll be there."
Zoro nodded once. The exchange was finished—efficient, wordless, nothing extra. Two people had recognised each other's value and set a plan, no fuss required.
Zoro wore the look of someone who had made a decision and moved on. Liam mirrored him. They shared the deck in companionable silence, neither feeling the need to fill it with words.
Then Zoro went below. Liam looked at the horizon.
---
The Baratie came into view in the late afternoon.
From afar, it looked impossible—a ship shaped like a building, every line designed to impress and succeeding. Calm water surrounded it. Even in daylight, its windows glowed with warmth, catching the sun's angle.
Liam looked at it.
What he knew lingered quietly in his mind—not threatening, just there. Tomorrow, Zoro wanted to spar. Tomorrow, a man with a cross-shaped blade and the title of Warlord would arrive at the Baratie, and he and Zoro would share a moment that would cost Zoro dearly and give him something priceless in return. It was one of those moments that had stirred him in another life, now about to become real in every sense.
There would be no sparring tomorrow.
Liam had not told him this. He agreed to the appointment in good faith because, at the time, the appointment was real. What he had not told him was that the appointment was going to be preempted by something he had no way to explain without explaining everything.
He looked at the restaurant ship. He looked at the water between them, and it.
The promise to spar still hung between them—simple, mutual, a small plan for something worthwhile. Behind Liam's eyes, though, sat the quiet knowledge of what was truly coming, and the burden of carrying it alone.
The Going Merry moved toward the Baratie.
Usopp leaned on the rail, eyeing the restaurant ship like someone judging a building's questionable decisions. Luffy pointed and made enthusiastic noises. Nami was already steering toward the dock. Zoro glanced at the Baratie once, then fixed his gaze on the horizon, mind on tomorrow's spar.
Liam looked from the Baratie to his crew, then to the water stretching between the Merry and the dock, letting his private knowledge rest quietly where it always did—unspoken, unhurried, simply there.
He was not going to interfere this time for Zoro's growth.