The sound drifted from somewhere ahead and a little higher up the slope, narrowing the possibilities to a focused point.
Liam moved through the trees toward it — not quickly, not cautiously, just at the pace of someone following a sound with purpose. The undergrowth was thicker here, the mountain flattening slightly into a series of natural terraces where the trees grew close, and the light arrived in broken columns. He could hear something beyond the treeline: impact, movement, a voice that was not using words anymore so much as volume.
The clearing revealed itself between two massive trunks, and he paused at its threshold.
---
The tiger was One Piece large in the way that the boar had been One Piece large — not cartoonishly, not impossibly, just a substantial recalibration of what the word tiger meant in terms of weight and consequence. Its shoulder was above Luffy's head. The fact that this did not appear to concern Luffy in any operational way was the first thing Liam registered.
The next thing he noticed was that Luffy was winning.
Not cleanly. Not elegantly. There was nothing in Luffy's fighting style that suggested anyone had ever sat him down and explained the concept of technique, and the absence of it was visible in every movement — arms swinging wide for momentum rather than precision, footwork that followed no pattern except the pattern of whatever seemed right in the moment, impacts taken without apparent concern for what they would do to a human body, because what they would do to this human body was considerably less than what they would do to any other one.
An arm stretched back six feet, loaded up, and came forward with the kind of momentum that required all that distance to develop. The impact it landed knocked the tiger sideways. The tiger recovered. Luffy was already moving again — inside its reach, below the line of its paw, grinning.
Liam remained motionless at the edge of the trees.
He had known Luffy for years. He had known the story, the voice actors in two languages, the broad and specific architecture of who this person was and what he would become. He had watched the moments — the ones that arrived on a screen and did something to his chest that he'd never had words for, the declarations and the refusals and the absolute, unbreakable things this person chose to be.
He had never expected it to feel like this.
Watching from the trees as a sixteen-year-old rubber boy fought a tiger with pure, untroubled confidence—the kind that never learned to imagine losing—he felt the distance between knowing and witnessing. It was not disappointment. It was its opposite. It was the unmistakable weight of something turning real.
Luffy caught the tiger's neck in a grip it could not break and held on, patient in the rare, focused way he reserved for only a few things. The animal struggled. He held fast. His arm looped around twice—impossible, yet true—and his face showed the calm of someone treating this less as a crisis and more as a puzzle to solve.
Eventually, the tiger decided this clearing was not worth the effort and slipped away. Luffy released it, straightened, and was grinning even before the tiger vanished into the trees. He watched its retreat with the satisfaction of someone who had just closed a deal on his own terms.
Liam stepped forward, leaving the shelter of the trees behind.
---
Luffy turned at the sound. His posture did not become defensive — it became curious, which, for Luffy, was apparently the default position when encountering the unknown. He looked at Liam with the open, direct attention of someone who had never in his life met a stranger he felt threatened by, which meant he was reading something else.
"Hey." Bright. Immediate. No preamble.
"Hey." Liam kept his hands visible and easily accessible. "You fight tigers often?"
"When they show up." A shrug, completely sincere. "Are you lost?"
"Not particularly. I heard you from down the mountain and came to look."
Luffy considered this. Then: "You were watching?"
"For a few minutes."
"Cool." He appeared to find this entirely fine. "I'm Luffy. Monkey D. Luffy." Said the way you say your name when you expect it to eventually mean something, not with arrogance but with the simple forward-facing certainty of a person who has never questioned where they are going.
"Liam." He nodded once. "I'm working at Makino's bar at the moment — came in off the water a few days ago."
The name landed exactly as expected. Something in Luffy's face opened up another degree, a small but unmistakable warming — Makino as a fixed coordinate in his world, and anyone connected to her moved into a different category without needing further qualification.
"Makino's bar?" He said it with the specific satisfaction of a person whose two favorite things had just been mentioned in the same sentence.
"That's the one."
Luffy flopped onto a fallen log with the effortless grace of someone who treated gravity as a suggestion. He fixed Liam with a look of lively curiosity.
"What were you doing up here?"
"Game, mostly." Liam found a nearby rock and sat. "Brought a boar back yesterday. Figured I'd see what else the mountain had."
"I see boars all the time up here," Luffy said, this like it was a perfectly ordinary thing to say, which in his life it was. "The big ones are fun."
"I noticed."
"Did you catch one by yourself?"
"Took about ten minutes."
Luffy stared at him for a moment with the expression of someone recalibrating an estimate. Then: "How?"
"Grabbed it. Got it to the ground. Choked it out." Liam kept the delivery flat, which was the correct delivery for this kind of statement. "It took a while."
Luffy was quiet for three seconds, which was a meaningful amount of silence for Luffy. Then he said, with total sincerity: "That's awesome."
"Slightly."
---
The conversation moved in the easy, branching way conversations move when neither party has an agenda beyond finding out about the other. Luffy asked what Liam was — not in a suspicious way, just the way Luffy asked everything, directly and without concern for whether the question was rude. Was he a pirate? A Marine? A traveler? He had a specific interest in sorting people into categories that mattered to him and in determining which applied to each.
"Traveler," Liam said. "I want to see the world. I came in off a ship in the storm and ended up here."
This satisfied Luffy completely. He had a simple taxonomy, and the traveler fit in it without complication.
At one point, Luffy's arm stretched out absentmindedly to snag a branch several feet away. He inspected it, lost interest, and let it fall. His body simply moved like that, without needing a reason.
Liam watched it happen.
"Rubber," he said.
Luffy glanced at his own arm, as if noticing it from the outside for the first time. "Gomu Gomu no Mi. I ate it when I was seven." He said this the way you would say you'd put on a pair of shoes at seven that still fit. "Everything bounces now. Punches, kicks, bullets — just bounce right off."
"Bullets."
"Yes," Luffy confirmed, cheerful, completely unconcerned.
"Does it have limits?"
Luffy thought about this with genuine effort, which was noticeable. "I can't swim anymore." He said it like a man reporting a weather fact — true, unpreferred, not worth arguing with. "And it doesn't do anything about hitting. Like if I punch something, it still hurts me if the thing is really hard. I just bounce back after."
Liam nodded. He knew all of this. He had known it for years. Hearing it in a voice — a specific, real voice belonging to a specific, real sixteen-year-old sitting on a log in the mountains above a village — was different from knowing it.
"What about you?" Luffy had leaned forward on the log, elbows on his knees. "Do you have a power?"
"Not a Devil Fruit." Liam turned this over for a moment, deciding how to render it accurately in a vocabulary that would survive contact with Luffy's brain. "I have abilities. Anything that hurts me or damages my body makes me tougher. Every time. Gets stronger, harder to hurt. And if something actually kills me..." He paused. "I come back. Harder to kill. Adapted against whatever got me."
Luffy stared at him.
Liam watched the processing happen in real time. The abstract layers — the compounding mechanic, the long-arc trend toward theoretical invulnerability, the specific architecture of two complementary systems building on each other — all of that moved through Luffy's brain and came out the other side as something much simpler and more essential, which was the correct output. He watched Luffy essentially perform triage on the information until only the parts that mattered remained.
"So you just get tougher when things hurt you?"
"That's most of it."
"And you can't die?"
"Not permanently."
Luffy's eyes widened—not theatrically, but with the honest surprise of someone who never bothered to hide what he felt. His reactions simply arrived, unfiltered.
"That's so cool."
Liam felt something slightly helpless and completely genuine in his response to that. "It has its uses."
"Can I hurt you?" Asked with total earnestness, no malice, the way someone asks if they can pet a dog.
"You could try. I'd adapt to it."
Luffy lit up. His face transformed with the delight of someone who had just learned that hitting something hard would only make it better—a revelation that, for him, was perfect. He studied his own fist as if weighing a tool for a new purpose.
"Can I try right now?"
"Tomorrow," Liam said. "When we spar. That way we both get something out of it."
Luffy took this in and nodded. The logic made sense: hitting someone now or in the morning was equally good, but the morning came with the official promise of a spar, which had its own charm.
"Do you want to spar?" Liam asked.
"Yes," with the uncomplicated immediacy of someone for whom the answer had been obvious since the concept was introduced. "When?"
"Tomorrow morning, if you're free."
"I'm always free in the morning." He seemed to reconsider this slightly. "I'm usually free in the morning. I have to do Dadan's stuff sometimes." A pause, then, dismissively: "She can wait."
The mention of Dadan was the confirmation Liam needed about the den's general location, layered into the sentence without Luffy registering that he'd provided it. He stored it.
"Come up to the den tomorrow." Luffy had already shifted into the mode of someone making plans, which for Luffy meant the plans were concrete and non-negotiable regardless of how casually they'd been made. "It's up the mountain, past where the path forks at the big rock — go left, keep going until you hear the bandits, the den is right there. Hard to miss."
"Hard to miss."
"Probably." A beat. "The bandits are loud."
Liam kept his face straight. "I'll find it."
"Oh." Luffy had just remembered something, which registered on his face as a sudden brightness. "You said you brought a boar back to Makino's bar."
"Yesterday."
"Is there still some left?"
"I would think so."
Luffy sprang to his feet, every muscle ready, as if he had just been handed a mission he could not wait to start.
"I'm coming back with you."
---
Whatever the bar's evening might have been, it shifted the moment Luffy walked through the door.
It was not chaos—Luffy never brought chaos to places where he belonged, and Makino's bar was one of those rare places. But the energy changed, the way it does when someone enters who simply has more of it than anyone else. Makino glanced up, and her face softened into something quietly warm before she even realized it.
"Luffy." She came around the bar, and he was across the room before she'd finished taking two steps, and the hug was the kind that only exists between people who have that particular history — fond and familiar and brief because Luffy was already looking past her at what Betto had in the kitchen.
"Is there any meat left?"
"There is boar left," she said.
He was already heading toward the kitchen.
Makino turned to Liam with a look that held at least three layers: amusement on the surface, and deeper things she would sort through later.
"You found him."
"He was fighting a tiger."
She took this without visible surprise. "How did the tiger do?"
"Made a tactical decision to be somewhere else."
Makino pressed her lips together, suppressing a smile, turned it into a nod, and slipped back behind the bar.
---
Luffy ate the way Luffy ate — with total commitment, no conversation capable of distracting from the primary task, though he managed both simultaneously in a way that somehow worked. He had opinions about the boar preparation that he expressed with the authority of someone who had eaten in this bar his whole life. He told Betto, through the kitchen pass-through, that it was good. Betto made a sound that probably meant something complimentary, or at minimum acknowledged.
"It's better than yesterday's fish," Luffy announced to the room in general.
"I caught the fish," said one of the regulars at the bar end, a weathered man named Corren who had been coming in for a decade and apparently had feelings about this assessment.
"The fish was fine," Luffy said, in the tone of someone clarifying a technical point without retreating from it.
Old Fels and his table were three drinks into their evening and had a firm grasp on the situation within about four minutes. The eldest fisherman leaned over to Liam with the conspiratorial energy of someone who had been a regular in this bar since before Luffy could walk.
"He's in a good mood." He nodded at Luffy. "When he is not — it is louder."
"I can imagine."
"No." Old Fels shook his head with the gravity of a man speaking from experience. "You cannot, not yet."
Corren, still nursing his grievance about the fish, muttered something into his drink that went unaddressed by everyone except Pent, who patted him once on the shoulder and returned to his own.
Liam watched Luffy from across the room—the way he filled the space with loud, genuine energy, the effortless banter with Makino, the total absence of self-consciousness in anything he did or wanted. There was no act here. The person and the legend were one and the same, and right now they were debating Makino for a third plate of boar.
He thought: I know what you become. I know the scope of it. I know the chapter headings.
And he thought: I have no idea who you are.
Those two truths were not contradictions, exactly. But the space between them was wider than he had imagined, and sitting in Makino's bar watching Luffy live at full volume, it felt like a distance worth crossing. Not with more knowledge—he had plenty of that. With time. With presence. By being there for the person, not just the legend.
Makino gave him the third plate. Of course she did. She caught Liam looking, and her expression was the expression of someone who was also completely unsurprised by this.
Before the evening ended, Luffy bounced over to Liam's side of the bar with the energy of someone who had just remembered something important.
"Tomorrow morning." Pointed. "The den. Left at the big rock."
"Left at the big rock."
"Come early." He grabbed his straw hat from the counter where he'd put it and settled it on his head in one motion. "The bandits wake up loud, but they slow down after breakfast, so — before breakfast is better."
"Before breakfast," Liam said. "Got it."
Luffy grinned, said goodbye to Makino in a way that was mostly just her name and a wave, and went out the door and was gone.
The bar felt a little smaller in his absence.
---
The room upstairs was quiet. Liam lay back and let the day close around him.
No deep reflection was needed—the day had delivered everything he sought and more. Tomorrow was set. The week ahead now had a shape.
The dream, when it came, was not the dark-hair-and-orange-hair dream. It was something wider.
Islands that had no business existing floated at the edges of what he saw — forests above clouds, cities under the sea, places built on the logic of a world that had decided early on that physics was a suggestion rather than a rule. A sea that ran in rivers through the sky, wide and blue and impossible, carrying ships above the world. The particular quality of air at the top of something very high and very far from where he had started.
Faces moved through it that he had not yet met — shapes without definition, impressions more than portraits. Voices he would recognize when he heard them and could not hear yet. Things that, when they had arrived on a screen in another life, had made something in his chest catch in the specific way that only happened when a story was doing what stories were supposed to do.
He was not watching anymore.
The dream swept forward, fast and warm and wide, never lingering long enough for anything to become ordinary. That was perfect, because nothing ahead would be ordinary. He was here now, three months before the story began. Unkillable in theory, growing closer to it each day. A sixteen-year-old destined for kingship had just invited him to the mountain den before breakfast.
The dream carried this forward without commentary and kept going, wide and unhurried and warm, until sleep took the edges off it entirely.