Everything on the island was too big.
Trees a hundred feet through at the base. Ferns standing higher than the Merry's mast. At midday something inland made a noise that came up through the deck and into everyone's boots, and Nami looked at the compass, which was spinning, and said she wasn't going ashore.
Luffy went ashore.
Usopp went because Luffy went. Vivi went looking for the town they were supposed to be near. There wasn't one. There hadn't been a town on that island for a very long time.
Zoro took a sword inland to find food, because the ship needed it and somebody had to think about that.
He killed a tiger the size of a house and brought it back over his shoulder. Under two hours. He'd cut a mark into a tree every hundred paces on the way in, an old habit from a life where men who didn't mark trees didn't come out of forests, and the marks were all still there when he wanted them.
He got back to the beach and both the others were gone. Giants, Sanji said, and pointed inland.
They hadn't been taken. They'd been invited.
Dorry sat by a fire big enough to cook the tiger whole, drinking out of a barrel, laughing at something Luffy had said. A hundred feet of scarred old man in a horned helmet, one eye gone milky. Four humans in his clearing didn't seem worth remarking on to him.
"Hundred years," he said, when Usopp asked about the noise. "Me and Brogy. Twice a day, when the volcano goes."
"A hundred years? Over what?"
Dorry had to think about it, and then he laughed. "Don't remember. Neither does he. We had a disagreement, we couldn't settle it, so we came out here to settle it, and we haven't." He drank. "Reason stopped mattering about eighty years back. Now we fight because we said we would. That's Elbaf. You swear a thing, and after that you're a man who swore it."
Usopp had gone very still.
"You fight for a hundred years over something you can't remember."
"We fight for a hundred years because we're the sort who fight for a hundred years." Dorry showed his teeth. "The gods watch the ones who don't quit."
Zoro sat outside the firelight with the tiger at his feet and let them talk.
He'd known men like this once. The outer sects had them, and the old mountain schools, before the great clans turned everything into a ledger. Men who did a thing because they'd said they'd do it, long past sense, until the doing was most of what they were.
He'd have said that kind of man had gone out of the world. Out of any world.
He'd stood forty-one years at a threshold himself, and it hadn't been a reasonable thing to do either.
The volcano went at midday.
Dorry stood up, took his sword, and walked out to the field between the two halves of the island. He didn't hurry about it. Brogy came from the other side with a shield and a blade about the length of a fishing boat.
They hit each other. The sound came up through the ground.
Zoro watched the exchange and didn't much care about the size of it. What he wanted was the shape. Neither giant was trying to be clever. They'd fought this same fight ten thousand times and there wasn't a trick left that the other one didn't know, so what was left over was the true part — a man putting everything he had into a strike his enemy could see coming, and landing it anyway.
He hadn't seen fighting that clean since he got here.
They broke apart. Neither one went down. They walked back to their own sides of the island, and Brogy howled once at the sky, and that was the duel done for the day.
Dorry's barrel exploded that evening.
He'd carried it back to the clearing and drunk from it and gone down in the middle of a sentence, and then it went off inside him. Zoro had Usopp behind a rock before the debris came down.
Dorry lay in the wreck of his fire with his stomach open and blood coming out of him faster than seemed possible.
Zoro went and stood over him.
Six weeks in this world. He'd been lied to and drugged and shot at in that time and none of it had got into him, because none of it had been about him. This was different. Somebody had put explosive in a duelist's drink.
Where he came from you could kill a man a hundred ways and nobody would say much. Not that way. Sects had been put to the sword over that. He'd done it himself once, and it had never cost him a night's sleep.
"Who brought you the barrel."
Dorry laughed, and it was a bad thing to hear coming out of a stomach with a hole in it.
"Brogy. Brogy brought it. Same as always."
"He didn't."
"He did. That's how it's done." He was trying to sit up. "He wins one, he sends me drink. I win one, I send him drink. Hundred years."
"Somebody got to it first."
Dorry stopped moving.
Then he got up, because the volcano was going and he could hear it.
Zoro found the wax house at dawn.
He'd have found it sooner if he'd known to look. Nami and Vivi had gone missing in the night and he'd spent the dark quartering the forest for them, and what told him in the end was the new sense — six people close together in a place that should have been trees. Two of them small and frightened. One enormous, and slow, and getting slower.
He came into the clearing and stopped.
Brogy was down and going grey, cased in wax to the chest, with a wound in him from the morning that a whole man might have lived through. Nami and Vivi were up on a turntable built out of candles, encased to the shoulders, turning. A man with a spiral in his hair sat above the whole arrangement in a wax chair, explaining at some length what a fine sculpture they were all going to make.
Mr. 3. Baroque Works. He had a number and a great many opinions about his own work.
"Ah — the swordsman. You're very welcome to try. Candle Wall is harder than steel. Genuinely harder, I'm not exaggerating for effect, I've had men break swords on it, I've had men break hands —"
Zoro drew Wado and put haki into it.
The black went to the point in under a second. He'd been doing it every night on the Merry for three weeks, sitting up in the dark after the others turned in, and his arm knew the shape of it now without being asked.
Mr. 3 stopped talking.
Zoro walked up to the turntable and cut once, flat, at hip height.
The wax split. It came off in two shells and Nami and Vivi dropped out of it onto their hands and knees in the grass, and the turntable went off its base and over sideways, and Mr. 3 came out of his chair and landed badly.
"That is — that wax does not cut, I have spent eleven years —"
"It cut," Zoro said.
He went over to Brogy.
The cast on Brogy's chest was four feet thick. He put the black blade in at an angle and drew it down, then across, and the wax came away in slabs. Brogy went forward onto his hands and stayed there, hauling in air.
He looked at Zoro. Then at the sword.
"That black. On the steel." There was nothing behind his voice. "That's the warrior's colour."
"You know it."
"Elbaf knows it. The old ones had it. Our fathers' fathers." He coughed, and there was blood in it. "We call it —" and he said a word Zoro didn't know, in a language Zoro didn't know, and it wasn't the shape of haki. "The gods give it to men who won't step back. It's not in the arm, boy."
"Can it be taught?"
"They tried." Brogy got a knee under himself. "Nobody ever managed. All anyone could do was put a man somewhere he had to have it."
He got up. It took him some time.
"There's a village on Elbaf where they still know how."
Then he went to find his friend.
The rest of it went the way it went.
Luffy fought Mr. 3 through the wax house and brought most of it down on top of them both. Usopp put a fire arrow into the candle machine at the moment it mattered, and talked about that for two days, and nobody minded. Vivi handled the small one with the paints. Karoo bit somebody. Sanji arrived out of nowhere with an Eternal Pose and a story about impersonating Mr. 3 over a snail phone, and told it four times before they'd cleared the beach.
Zoro cut the last of the wax off Nami's boots and let the black go. His hands shook for a while after. He kept them out of sight until they stopped.
The Island Eater came up in front of the Merry as they pulled out. A fish about the size of the island, mouth open. Dorry and Brogy walked into the sea and cut it in half between them, one from either side, and stood in the surf shouting at the crew to get moving.
Brogy found Zoro at the rail.
He didn't say anything. He put a fist against his chest.
Zoro did the same.
Two days out, Nami was wrong.
He noticed it on the second morning. She came up on deck at her usual time and did her usual things and there was nothing anyone could have put a finger on, and he watched her cross to the tangerine trees and knew.
Her breathing was too shallow and going too fast. There was heat off her that wasn't the sun, and he could feel it from six feet, the same as he'd felt a hundred men in the dark at Whisky Peak. She'd stopped using her left hand for anything she could manage with the right.
He'd spent a long time learning to read bodies. Hers was fighting something.
She caught him watching.
"What."
"You're sick."
"I'm hot. It's the Grand Line, everything's —"
"You're carrying your left arm. Your breathing's wrong. You've got a fever and you're hiding it." He didn't raise his voice. "How long?"
Nami held his eyes about three seconds and didn't answer.
Then her legs went.
He got to her before she hit the deck.
"Sanji."
It brought all of them, from wherever they were, at a run.
"She's burning. Get her below."
Vivi took one look and lost all the colour in her face. She was already down on her knees.
"There's a fever on this route. There's a tick that carries it, it lives in the — how long has she been like this?"
"Three days," Nami said, into Zoro's shoulder. "Four. I didn't want to slow us —"
"Don't talk," Zoro said.
Luffy stood over them with his hat in his hands. Nobody else moved while he was standing there.
"Nami's sick."
"Yes."
"So we get a doctor."
He said it like that settled it, and turned to the map table, where the Log Pose sat with no island on it for another four days.