Nami found him at the rail in the late afternoon. She always did this after turning something over in her mind, then deciding—wordlessly—that she was done thinking and ready to act.
She had already decided. "I want to ask you something." She offered the words as a ritual, a courtesy extended because she was Nami—someone who always chose her entrance, even when she walked straight through the door.
"Go ahead."
She looked at the water for a moment rather than at him, which was the tell. "Do you actually trust Vivi?"
"I do."
"How? You've known her for—" She stopped, recalculated. "You knew who she was before she told us. You trusted her when she was still Miss Wednesday, before the rest of us had enough information to decide anything."
"That's true."
"So it's not trust that developed. It's the trust you arrived with."
"It's both." Liam said, "I knew what I was looking at before Vivi told us, and what I was looking at was worth trusting. The time since has confirmed it." He looked at Nami. "Is the question really about Vivi, or is it also about Robin?"
A pause. The pause was its own answer.
Nami looked at the water again. "Robin came onto this ship uninvited," "and you talked to her like she was a person you'd already decided about."
"I had."
"She's working for the man who's trying to destroy Vivi's country."
"She is. I think she'll stop, eventually. The reasons have nothing to do with us and everything to do with who she is." He kept his voice even. "I know that answer isn't satisfying. I know it needs more trust in my read than you've had reason to develop yet."
Nami looked at him with the sharp, direct attention she brought to things that mattered to her. "You'd trust her with your life."
"Same as I'd trust Vivi. Same as I'd trust everyone on this crew." He held her gaze. "Including you."
She fell silent for a long moment. It was not discomfort. It was the quiet of someone untangling something important inside themselves.
"All right." Her voice carried the weight of someone handed a truth she would need time to unpack. She drifted back toward the helm without any explanation for her next move. He let her go.
---
Little Garden appeared at dawn, its sheer scale defying anything words could have prepared them for.
The flora struck first—overwhelming abundance. Trees as wide as houses and ancient as empires. Plants stretched upward, as if the island had always played by its own rules. As the Merry neared shore, it shrank—a careful model, a tiny sailing symbol against a world that dwarfed it.
The crew gathered at the rail. Together, they remained silent. Each of them quietly recalibrated what they believed the world could hold.
Luffy broke first. "There are dinosaurs on this island."
Vivi answered from beside Carue, who picked his way across the deck with the dignified adaptability of a duck long used to surprises. "It operates on its own schedule. The prehistoric fauna never left, because nothing made them leave."
"We're going there." He was already moving toward the gangplank.
Liam stepped onto land that had been stretching skyward for millennia. He drew in air flavored with the memory of ages before people. He gazed up through a canopy—if it could be called that, beginning three hundred feet overhead. He felt the gravity of a world untouched by human measure.
Usopp made noises that left no doubt about his feelings on dinosaurs. Zoro glanced at the nearest tree, then at the endless forest, and strode ahead. His face stayed unchanged. For Zoro, the world was just the backdrop for whatever came next.
Carue waddled down the gangplank, took in the shoreline, and marched beside Vivi with the calm of someone long resigned to following his person into the absurd.
---
They came across a Tyrannosaurus in the first twenty minutes.
This was the genuine article—not some scaled-down island oddity, but the full, monumental reality of the beast. It stood in the clearing, eyeing them with the cold calculation of a predator deciding if its meal was worth the trouble. The moment stretched.
Luffy tilted his head. "Do you think it wants to fight?"
"It's deciding if we're worth eating." Low and quiet.
"We're not worth eating." Usopp, at approximately the same volume, though his voice was slightly different in pitch than usual.
The T. rex made its decision and moved on. The crew exhaled collectively.
Liam talked as they pressed deeper into the island, Vivi steadying herself on the strange terrain. "They fight on a schedule—same times, same places. Neither has landed a final blow. They keep at it because to stop would admit the argument was never worth the fight. Neither can do that."
"What was the argument about?" Usopp asked.
Vivi answered this one. "Which fish was bigger when they went fishing, on the day before they came to this island?" She paused. "One of them caught a Sea King and the other caught a whale."
The crew absorbed this.
"And they've been fighting about that for a hundred years." Nami, flat.
"Giants have very long memories and a strong sense of honor. The argument doesn't matter now. The duel is the point—they would be less without it."
He was thinking about them as they walked — about what the duel represented and what the giants represented, and about what he was going to ask them.
---
Dorry was easy to find if you understood the island, which Vivi did, and Liam filled in with his own knowledge. The giant sat outside his camp, working with a barrel of ale so large it dwarfed the trees. Seeing him—an immense, earth-shaking presence, the size of a building, calmly engaged in a simple task—was nothing like merely knowing giants existed.
Liam approached and called up to him.
Dorry looked down.
The conversation that followed had the texture of a negotiation between people operating under different assumptions about what was reasonable. Liam explained what he wanted — to fight, a real fight, with Dorry using his genuine strength without restraint. Not to kill, not as an insult, but as a test he was honestly asking for, and one Dorry could refuse if he chose.
Dorry looked down at him. "You want me to hit you," with the slow consideration of a giant working through an unusual request. "With my full strength."
"I want you to fight me as if I were a real opponent. Because I am one."
"You are small."
"I am. And I'm asking you to ignore that and fight me the way you'd fight something your size."
Dorry looked at him for a long time, with the deliberate assessment that was itself a form of respect — the consideration of a person who was taking a request seriously rather than dismissing it.
"If I hit you with my full strength, you will not get up."
"Let's find out."
The first blow landed with full conviction. For a moment, the world flashed white—the kind that comes when every atom weighs in on whether you should still be standing. He registered the ground, the distance he had traveled, and then stood up.
Dorry was staring.
Liam shook out his arms and walked back toward him.
The adaptation had started the moment the hit landed — his body processing the force of it with the focused urgency it brought to inputs at a new ceiling, building toward a version of itself that could survive the next one better. He was aware of it happening, the familiar process running at speed. He had learned to pay attention to his own adaptation as it occurred rather than waiting to discover the results afterward.
"Again."
The second hit was harder. He came back from it faster.
By round six, Dorry gave everything he had—and what he had was immense. Each hit still launched Liam across the clearing, defying the usual rules of physics. Each time, Liam landed a little closer, returned a little faster. With each approach, Dorry's face showed a new layer of respect.
On the eleventh exchange, Liam hit Dorry back with the accumulated weight of what his body had learned over the preceding ten hits, and Dorry sat down.
Not fell. Sat — the controlled descent of a person who had been knocked backward and found a landing. He looked at Liam from the ground with the full open attention of a giant encountering something worth his full open attention.
"You are not small in strength." Dorry.
"You're still bigger," Liam told him, and meant it without diminishment.
Brogy wanted his turn before the echo of Dorry sitting down had fully left the clearing.
---
Brogy fought differently — his style was less sustained force and more intermittent commitment, great swings with gaps between them, where a different kind of opponent would have pressed the advantage. Liam adapted to the rhythm of it, his body building a different set of responses to a different input profile. The same progression: early hits that sent him significant distances, the gap closing exchange by exchange, the point where he could absorb and return, and Brogy felt something real hit back.
When he knocked Brogy down, the two giants looked at each other across the clearing where their visitor was standing between them.
"He gets back up." Something like admiration in Brogy's voice.
"Every time."
"He hits back," Brogy added.
"After he gets up."
They were quiet for a moment in the way of two people arriving simultaneously at a conclusion.
"I like this one." Dorry.
"He is strange." Brogy.
"Strange people are often interesting."
Liam stood between them, catching his breath and feeling his body recalibrate. The last adjustments are locked in. A new limit became the norm, not the exception. He was not the same as when he started. He was much harder to break than he had been that morning.
Liam looked up at them. "Thank you. The both of you."
Dorry looked down at him from the ground. "You should come back." "We will fight you again when you are bigger."
"I'm not going to get bigger."
"You will get harder to hit. That is the same thing."
---
Baroque Works showed up as Mr. 3 and his crew, slipping in while the giants were locked in their ritual duel. The sabotage—the tampering with Dorry's ale, the cold manipulation of the fight for reasons far removed from honor—was invisible to the giants inside the story, but Liam saw it all from the outside.
He shut it down before it could escalate. Mr. 3's wax powers were real and had toppled those who took them lightly, but Liam met them at a moment when Mr. 3's limits fell short of Liam's new reality. The wax statue scheme was never finished. Zoro, Nami, and Vivi stayed free. The agents were dealt with like a problem already solved in his mind.
He kept an eye on Nami throughout.
He had been keeping an extra eye on Nami since they stepped off the ship. He had seen the prehistoric mosquito once — an enormous thing, the size of a fist, operating with the unhurried confidence of an insect that had been the apex of its ecological niche for forty million years. He had redirected it then, with a brief intervention that it likely did not register. He had catalogued it as a threat and kept it in the periphery of his awareness while the Baroque Works situation demanded his full attention.
The fighting ended.
He found Nami.
Her face did not show pain, exactly—more the look of someone listening to their own body and disliking what they heard.
"Something stung me." She was pressing her hand against "In the undergrowth during the fight. I didn't get a good look at it."
He examined the spot. The mark had already appeared—a small raised puncture, the first ring of discoloration spreading as prehistoric venom began its ancient work.
He had not been fast enough.
The frustration was sharp and specific—he had seen the threat, tracked it, stopped it once, then lost it when the fight demanded all his focus. He had tried and failed. Both facts stood, and neither changed what was happening to Nami's arm.
He kept his voice steady. "We need to get you back to the ship." "The venom from what's on this island doesn't respond to normal treatment — we need a doctor who knows it."
Nami looked at him. "That sounds like bad news."
"It sounds like we're going to Drum Island — which is the next island on the route, and which has a doctor who will be able to treat this." He kept his voice level and honest. "You're going to be fine. The path to fine goes through Drum Island."
She searched his face for the thing people search for when they're scared, trying to determine whether the reassurance was earned or performed. Whatever she found seemed to satisfy her. She let him help her back toward the ship.
The giants had come back from their duel when they reached the shore. They looked at Nami with genuine concern from two large people who had a functional understanding of illness and a strong sympathy for it.
Brogy leaned forward. "Take her to Kureha." "On the cold island. She will know what to do."
"We're heading there."
"Tell Kureha the giants send their regards." Dorry paused. "She will say something rude in return. It means she remembers us."
Liam almost smiled. "I'll pass it along."
Their farewell was the kind shared by people who had built something genuine in little time and meant to keep it alive across miles. The giants' respect was not for show—it had been earned, blow by blow, and lived in the way they looked at him, heavy with meaning that needed no words.
"Come back when the sea allows." Dorry.
"I will." He meant it.
---
The Merry was wrapped in the hush of a crew carrying a problem they had not yet solved.
Nami was below. The illness had moved faster than he had hoped — the venom from whatever subspecies of the island's mosquito fauna had gotten through to her operating on prehistoric timelines, producing results that the available care on the ship could slow but not stop. She was not in immediate danger. She was clearly unwell, getting more so, and the distance to Drum Island needed to shrink as fast as Nami's navigation could make it.
The irony was that she had charted their course from her bed before lying down, studying the Log Pose with the fierce determination of someone who would steer the ship in her sleep if she had to.
Liam stood on the deck in the gathering dark. The crew was quiet around him in their own ways — Luffy at the bow, Zoro standing, Usopp not yet on the ship.
He carried both Nami's condition and the hope of Drum Island together, letting them sit side by side. His worry for her was real, and so was his belief that this path led somewhere better. Neither felt the need to push the other aside.
The ship was still. The crew stood together, caught in that breathless tension that comes just before action is the only choice left.
The moment arrived.