Mike was halfway through a shadow-claw drill when a voice cut through the trees like a bright, reckless bell.
"Oi! Whatcha doing up there?"
He blinked. One moment he'd been threading a finisher into a routine—thumbed breath, extend, retract—and the next, a small figure scrambled up the nearest trunk and flopped down beside him, eyes bright and ridiculous with the kind of honesty that made the world easier to bear.
Luffy, hair mussed, straw hat perched crooked on his head despite the hour, grinned like he'd found the world's best secret. "Training! I wanna train too!"
Mike let a corner of his mouth twitch. "You sleep, then wake up, then—"
"—train!" Luffy finished, punching the air once. He rolled to his feet, bounced on the balls of his feet, and peered down at Mike's hands. "What's that? Claws? Cool!"
The trees carried the lazy chorus of the bandits' evening—murmured jokes, a spoon clinking on a pan—and yet here, on the rooftop, there was an electric hush, the kind that settles when something small and important is about to start.
Mike closed his fingers, the shadow-claw dissolving into nothing with a soft hiss only he felt. He had practiced alone enough to know two things: first, Luffy would not let a polite refusal stand for long; second, unpredictability was its own weapon. He sighed, then shrugged. "Alright. But we do this proper. Warm up. No stupid moves that break things."
Luffy's grin widened until it hurt. "No promises!"
Mike tapped the air. A thin ripple, a whisper behind his mind—an old summoning signature. The familiar answered, threads of dusk folding into form at the edge of the rooftop.
Tiche took shape like a shadow made of colder shadows: a humanoid silhouette, hooded, small and precise. For training she bore no blood-keen edge; the knife at her hip hummed faintly but she moved without the lethal economy that had marked her in darker memories. Her voice was a quiet thing, a blade humming in a scabbard.
Luffy clapped. "Cool! A ghost lady! Let's go!"
Mike set his stance. He let the shadow claws wink into place again—soft at first, like leather, then focusing into thin, glinting crescents along his knuckles. Tiche's posture was a study in economy: nothing wasted, everything measured. She lifted one hand and pointed, and the rooftop felt smaller, denser, charged.
They started slow. Tiche moved like a taught wire: dart, feint, withdraw. Mike parried, the shadow-claws whispering air as they met her mock strikes. Each tap she put through was deliberate—pressure without puncture—forcing him to move his whole torso, not just his wrists. Luffy watched with his head tilted, eyes narrowed in the delicious concentration of someone trying to understand a riddle he loved.
"Again!" he shouted after the first pass. "Faster!"
Mike obliged. He let the bat hang loose at his side—Durable Baseball Bat, heavy in his hand as a promise—an anchor for balance rather than a primary weapon. Tiche used the space differently: she attacked from blind angles, slid along the wind, and tested how he corrected with footwork rather than force. Mike felt the lesson sink in: defense was a conversation, not a blockade.
Then Luffy stepped forward.
"What if I do this?" he said, and his whole body became an experiment. He lunged like he'd always lunged—no form, no finesse, pure momentum and terrifying joy. The move that would have been a wild, clumsy hit for anyone else carried an elastic, springy quality on him. Mike's shadow-claws met Luffy's paw-like grab more by improvisation than by textbook technique. He barely stopped the momentum, felt the pull of energy, and had to let go and re-anchor.
Luffy laughed. "Ha! You're slow, slow! You need to be faster—like this!" He ducked under Mike's arm, popped up behind him, and jabbed at the air with a sloppy, enthusiastic strike that had Mike spinning with equal parts irritation and amusement.
"Stop moving like a tornado!" Mike complained, but he didn't step back. Luffy's style forced him out of habit—Mike was learning to accept messiness, to make order out of chaos. That was the real training.
Tiche shifted. She increased the pressure in a controlled way, pressing Mike's guard, then withdrew to test his recovery. He changed his rhythm, then Luffy changed it again, and the rooftop became a small storm of learning. Mike found new ways to wedge his feet, to roll and reappear, to use the bat as an extension of his center rather than an instrument of blunt force. The Adept Blunt Weapon Mastery hummed along his muscles; a swing that might have landed as a thud now stabbed through space with surprising precision.
At one point Tiche feinted low; Mike dropped, shadow-claws slicing a breath's width from the deck. The knife grazed where a wound would have been, but training mode held, and no blood fell. He tasted adrenaline, but it was clean, focused. He could feel Tiche's appraisal like a cool hand on the back of his neck.
From below the trees, a shout: "Dinner's getting cold!" Dadan's voice carried, rough as gravel but softer than it sounded when someone else needed her. Luffy's face lit at the call. "Food!" he declared, and then he shoved Mike with dramatic affection. "Hey! Same time tomorrow? Teach me that claw trick!"
Mike laughed, the sound easy in the night air. "Yeah, same time. But you gotta stop breaking the practice dummies."
Luffy's grin threatened to split his face in two. "I promise I'll be gentle!"
Tiche faded as easily as she had appeared, her outline receding into the rooftop's shadow.
Mike lounged back against the railing, breathing in the sweet, woodsmoke-scented breeze. Luffy settled beside him, chin on his knees, hat shadowing his face into the kind of peace Mike had seen once before in other lives—simple, whole.
"Mike," Luffy said after a moment, voice small in a way that made Mike look at him properly, "are you staying? With us?"
Mike watched the horizon where the sea swallowed the sun. He felt, for the first time in a long while, a choice that wasn't steered by panic or survival—one that tasted like belonging. "For now," he said. "We train. We eat. We keep the village safe."
Luffy's laugh burst out again, bright enough to make the stars blink. "Good! I like that. Tomorrow we get faster. Then we get stronger."
Mike nodded. He had weapons, traits, and a dangerous friend who could cut wounds that wouldn't heal—but there was something steadier here: the small, honest thing that Luffy carried like a banner. He had the year before the sea took Luffy away, and in that time he could learn to be useful—not just powerful.
Below, the bandits' laughter rolled like distant thunder. Above, the rooftop held two shapes against the widening dark: one trained, composed, and careful; the other a living weather, unpredictable and fierce.
They would make a strange, effective pair. As he was contemplating he decided to roll the ticket he received from training with luffy
[SYSTEM] ACHIEVEMENT UNLOCKED: "Silent Evasion." Ticket earned: SILVER — Blue Stoneplate Ring
[Blue Stoneplate Ring]| Rarity: Uncommon Item |Dark Souls - Stoneplates, the symbol of a true knight, grant the strength to face various hardships. The cyan stoneplate symbolizes ice and boosts defense against ice and cold.
Mike slid the ring onto his finger before he could talk himself out of it. It closed around the first joint with an almost polite click, cold blooming across his skin like a sliver of winter. For a half-second the world sharpened—the creak of the roof, the distant clink of spoons, the breath in his chest. The cyan gleam of the band caught the last light and ran a thin line of color up his hand.
[SYSTEM] ITEM EQUIPPED: Blue Stoneplate Ring (Uncommon Item)
Description: Dark Souls - Stoneplates, the symbol of a true knight. The cyan stoneplate symbolizes ice and is said to bolster one's resilience against cold.
Mike flexed his fingers, feeling the simple weight of metal. Luffy, chewing a scrap of bread, squinted at the ring. "Hey, where'd you get that?" he asked between bites.
"Got it," Mike said, keeping his tone light. "It's… part of my power."
Luffy hummed once, satisfied with that answer. "Neat," he said, then vaulted to his feet. "Food! Come on, Mike—eat!" He bounded toward the stairs, already forgetting the ring as easily as he forgot his hat when he ran.
Mike watched him go and let the small secret sit against his skin.
Mike watched Luffy disappear down the stairs, the boy's laughter trailing behind him like a kite tail, and then turned his attention back to the cool weight of the ring on his finger. It felt ordinary now — a private thing he could feel but not explain. He slid his hand into his lap and let the night settle around them. The bandits' camp hummed below, dull and comfortable. Tomorrow, he decided, they would train again.
What began as a single rooftop spar grew, almost without plan, into a habit. Days folded into one another: wake, train, eat, sleep, and somewhere in the middle of that small rhythm, Mike learned how the world moved when you paid attention to its edges.
The first week was awkward in the way all new rhythms are. Luffy's idea of drills was to do everything fast and loud; Mike's idea was to do everything precise and slow. At first they clashed. Mike would set up a pattern of footwork and patience and Luffy would cannonball through it like a living battering ram, grinning the whole way. Mike corrected him, Luffy corrected Mike, and somewhere between Mike's control and Luffy's chaos a third thing took form that neither of them could have invented alone.
Mike started each morning with shadow-claw drills. He practiced the feel of the claws like a pianist scales: extend, hold, retract. It was about timing and tendon memory more than force. The claws were sharp in concept — a blade made of absence — and if he pushed too hard the sensation slipped into something brittle, a phantom bite that left his hands aching. He learned to coax the edges, to let the claws be tools for opening lines, not for brute closure. Luffy watched him from the rafters, eyes bright and absurdly earnest, asking a hundred questions that never slowed his hands.
"Do it again! Faster! How about you make them big and then tiny but then big again?" Luffy jabbered, all scatter and sincerity. He wanted to copy everything. He wanted to poke at the world and find the soft spots. Mike could have taught the boy every step in one sleepless night; instead he taught him rhythm. He taught Luffy when to breathe, how to watch a line of movement, how to feel an opponent's intent in the space between breaths. Luffy learned, as Luffy always did, by being himself: by moving in a way that ignored fear and accepted consequence.
They made training a game. Mike used the bat not as a club but as a balancing rod — a counterweight for spins, a stabilizer for sudden shifts. With Adept Blunt Weapon Mastery humming under his muscles, the swings that would have simply cracked wood became precise leverage, subtle redirections of energy. He showed Luffy how the same motion could be a shove or a feint, how a bat held lightly could feel like an extension of a hip. Luffy's attempts were messy and wonderful; he did not care about elegance. He cared about the result. When he finally managed to land a tidy, improvised combination — one graceless punch followed by a silly but effective hook — both of them whooped like they'd won a war.
Tiche became part of the curriculum but only when the two of them needed lessons in threat and silence. Mike kept the familiar's appearances controlled; he never called her in the middle of a town square and he never let her take a life. Training mode limited her movements, made her a teacher of gaps and pressure points rather than a predator. She taught Mike how violence could be quiet and precise and how to read an opening that looked like nothing at all. Luffy watched her like a child listening to a ghost story — fascinated but unnervingly unconcerned about the danger — and in those sessions Luffy's unpredictable style pierced patterns that Mike had held as rules. Tiche would feint, Luffy would romp through, and Mike would be forced to recalibrate his expectations. The effect was good; it made him faster and less rigid.
Every week they stretched the miles: they ran through the woods, crawled across the low rocks near the shore, practiced balance on narrow logs. Mike taught Luffy a basic drill — not the claws themselves but a way to angle a blow so that it slid off without catching flesh. Luffy, in return, taught Mike how to throw himself into a mistake and come out laughing. That laughter was training too; it taught Mike to work with luck and perhaps to trust it.
The bandits watched with a noisy mix of skepticism and pride. Dadan grunted a lot and said little, but she would toss over a scrap of meat or bark a joke that had only a kernel of affection in it. "Don't let him bust the rafters," she'd snarl when their practice got too extravagant, but the warning had no sharper edge than a parent's concern. Gyoru came down from the stall now and then with a basket of fish and a scowl that softened when he saw how Luffy beamed. Small favors piled up into acceptance. The village had a short memory for mysteries; they preferred food and safety to questions.
Mike pushed himself in ways he'd never allowed before. Blue Tear's presence became a dark, private knowledge he promised himself not to test unless he had to. He rehearsed exhaustion without flirting with death: breath holds by the shore, controlled exertions until his legs felt glassy, learning how the world bent at the edges when he touched a threshold. When he did flirt with that brink — once, accidentally, blocked by an unexpected fall down a mossy slope that left him gasping with a trickle of light-headedness — the trait bloomed a little and he felt the surge: sharper reflexes, a pressure in his limbs like a tide reversing. He used the moment to pull someone to safety, then lay on his back and let the sea air stitch his scattered senses back together. Afterwards he felt hollow and full both: grateful and guilty, as if he had borrowed someone else's marrow to run.
There were nights dedicated to quieter work. Expert Medicine became more than a curiosity; it was a tool and a bond. Mike set up a makeshift clinic in the bandits' hideout — an old trunk cleared of tools and refashioned into a workbench. He learned local poultices and mixed what he knew with what he had seen in a dozen half-remembered textbooks. Luffy would bring him odd ingredients — a bitter leaf, a string of algae — and watch like an apprentice. Mike stitched cuts that would have lain festering in the wilds and taught small bandits how to bind a sprain properly. In return the bandits taught him how to move without making noise and which kinds of roots made the good stew.
The month did not pass without friction. There were moments Mike had to step back and ask himself whether he was becoming something the world would punish. Tiche's whispering efficiency, the bat's obscene resilience, the claws under his skin — they were tools, but tools can teach you new things about being cruel. Once, when a poacher snuck too close to a trap line, Tiche suggested a solution that required a level of finality Mike could not stomach. He argued. He found another way: a trap that broke a leg but left room for mercy and later repair. The bandits cheered and Dadan gave a gruff nod that carried both respect and warning. "You got a soft heart and a hard head," she said. "Don't let one ruin the other."
Mike learned to hide parts of himself, not from shame but from strategy. He did not advertise the claws or Tiche to every curious face. He let Luffy see the work, let the boy learn in broad strokes, but kept the edges — the ring's private chill, the way Blue Tear hummed like a low alarm in his chest — personal. There were practical reasons: secrecy kept the villagers calm, and secrets kept men like the Marines uninterested. There were moral reasons too: power without stewardship was a contagion.
One night, a storm rolled in from the sea and the village turned into a black bruise of wind and rattle. A small fishing skiff went missing beyond the point; its cries were swallowed by rain. The bandits scrambled, lanterns bobbing like alien fireflies through the trees. Mike did not think, he moved. He dove into the surf, the ring catching cold against his finger. The water was a mouth of knives but he pushed through it, and when a piece of splintered timber pinned a fisherman under its weight, he found the edge where effort met salvation and he hit it. Blue Tear flared in the deep angle of risk and he felt the world sharpen into a single, terrible focus. He wrenched the timber free and dragged the fisherman up, lungs burning. By the time he staggered back toward the shore, the trait had faded and left him hollow, and the bandits' shouts became claps on his back.
"You're mad," Dadan said later, by the low light of the fire, but there was something like gratitude in the rough syllables. Luffy licked the salt from his lips and grinned with a hero's love for the ridiculous. "You're my friend," he said simply, and did not ask about the thing that had made Mike stronger in that moment.
Weeks turned into a month and the routine carved grooves into their days. Mike's movements tightened and loosened in equal measure. Luffy grew faster in the way that mattered — his instincts sharpened, his timing grew a hair more lethal, his laugh deepened in a way that made the world feel safer. Mike grew too: not invincible, but more like a tool that had been tempered and learnt to bend when needed. The ring sat steady on his hand, an unremarkable band that held a promise. The bat thudded in the corner of the hideout like a patient dog. Tiche folded into the shadows when she was not needed, a quiet teacher who watched him learn not to be cruel.
On an evening when the sea was a sheet of black glass and the wind smelled of coming rain, Luffy flopped beside Mike on the rooftop and stared at the faint shimmer of the horizon.
"Mike?" he asked, small in the way he was when he asked simple, important things. "Do you think I'll really go?" He tapped his straw hat with a solemn paw. "Out there. Far away."
Mike thought of the year stretching ahead — the months he could spend teaching Luffy small tricks, the days he could rescue a fisherman, the nights he could sleep under the watchful stars of a village that had taken him in. He felt the weight of what training meant beyond technique: the promise of being there when the world folded and a friend needed a hand.
"You will," Mike said after a long breath. "And when you do, you won't go alone."
Luffy's smile broke like sunlight. "Good!" he said. "Then we get faster. Then we get stronger. Then we—" he squinted at Mike and added seriously, "we come home."
Mike looked at the boy and felt, with the strange clarity that had become more common these days, that the year would shape them both.