The dawn came soft over Swallow Island, painting the sky in shades of pink and gold that would have made any normal person stop and appreciate the beauty of it all.
Law was not a normal person.
She dropped into her five hundred and forty-seventh push-up, her arms screaming in protest as sand ground against her palms. Sweat dripped from her forehead, leaving dark spots on the beach beneath her. The air was cool with morning mist, and somewhere behind her, waves lapped against the shore with the kind of peaceful rhythm that made her want to punch something.
Five hundred and forty-eight.
Her muscles burned. Good. Pain meant progress. Pain meant she was getting stronger, building a body that could handle the chaos living inside her veins.
Five hundred and forty-nine.
Corazon's face flashed through her mind. That stupid smile. Those ridiculous sunglasses. The way he'd looked at her like she was something worth saving.
Five hundred and fifty.
She collapsed onto the sand, chest heaving, arms trembling with exhaustion. For a long moment she just lay there, staring up at the brightening sky and hating how beautiful it was.
This cove had become her sanctuary over the years. A hidden stretch of beach on Swallow Island's western shore, tucked behind a wall of jagged rocks that kept out the curious and the annoying. Wolf knew about it, of course. The old bastard knew everything that happened on his island. But he'd never told anyone else, and Law had claimed this place as her own.
Here, she could train without Bepo's worried looks or Shachi and Penguin's attempts to help. Here, she could fail in private.
She pushed herself up from the sand, ignoring the way her arms protested, and moved into her stretches. Hip flexors first, then hamstrings, then the deep spinal twists that made her back crack like breaking wood.
The Ope Ope no Mi was a demanding master.
Most Devil Fruits just gave you power and let you figure out the rest. Hers required something more. The ability to manipulate space, to rearrange matter itself within her domain, demanded a level of body awareness that bordered on the supernatural. She had to know exactly where her limbs were at all times, had to feel the flow of her own energy like blood through her veins.
A weak body meant a weak ROOM. Simple as that.
After twenty minutes of stretches, Law rose to her feet and brushed the sand from her shorts. Her yellow crop top was already dark with sweat, clinging to her skin in ways that would have sent Shachi and Penguin into cardiac arrest.
Good thing they weren't here.
She walked to the water's edge, where the tide had deposited its morning treasures. Shells, mostly. Fragments of coral. The occasional piece of sea glass worn smooth by years of tumbling through the waves.
Her fingers closed around a perfect spiral shell, its surface gleaming with mother-of-pearl iridescence. About the size of her palm. Delicate ridges spiraling inward toward its center.
This was today's target.
Not driftwood. Not rocks. Something fragile. Something that required absolute control to manipulate without destroying.
A true surgeon's test.
Law set the shell on a flat stone and stepped back three paces. She closed her eyes, took a deep breath, and reached for the power coiled in her chest.
"ROOM."
The dome of pale blue light expanded outward, encompassing her, the shell, and about ten feet of beach in every direction. The familiar weight settled onto her shoulders, a constant drain on her stamina that never got easier no matter how many times she did this.
Law extended her hand toward the shell, fingers spread wide. Within her domain, she could feel it. Every ridge. Every curve. The microscopic layers of calcium carbonate that had built up over years of the creature's life.
Her goal was simple. Separate those layers. Peel them apart like pages of a book without shattering the whole structure.
A real surgeon could dissect a patient without killing them. A real surgeon had control.
The shell trembled on its stone perch. Then, slowly, it began to rise.
Sweat beaded on Law's forehead. Her breath came in short, controlled bursts as she poured her concentration into the floating shell. She could feel its structure in her mind, could sense the boundaries between each layer.
There. The outermost coating. Thin as paper. She just had to separate it from the layer beneath without cracking either one.
The shell wobbled in the air.
Easy. Easy. Like removing a bandage from a wound. Gentle pressure, steady hands, and...
"What kind of Devil Fruit you got?"
Law's concentration shattered like glass hitting stone. Her ROOM imploded with a sound like a soap bubble popping, and the shell dropped from the air. It struck the stone below and cracked straight down the middle, its beautiful iridescent surface ruined.
Law whirled toward the voice, her hand flying to Kikoku's hilt so fast she nearly drew the massive blade on pure instinct. Her heart hammered against her ribs, adrenaline flooding her system in a cold rush that made her vision sharpen and her muscles coil for violence.
Elijah Sparrow was leaning against a palm tree.
His purple eyes caught the morning light, and those red rings seemed to pulse with lazy amusement as he looked her up and down with obvious appreciation. His dreadlocks were messy from sleep, his red bandana slightly askew, and sand dusted the hem of his trousers like he'd been walking the beach for hours.
How long had he been standing there? How much had he seen?
"WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU DOING HERE?!"
The words exploded out of her before she could stop them, raw fury masking the spike of panic in her chest.
"Get the hell out of my cove before I cut you into pieces small enough to use for fish bait!"
She meant it. She really, genuinely meant it. Her fingers tightened on Kikoku's hilt, the familiar weight of the cursed blade ready to answer her call.
"Whoa, whoa. Hostile." He took a single step toward her, and Law felt her body tense like a bowstring drawn to its limit. "I was just curious. You put on a good show."
"A show?!" Her voice cracked with outrage. "You followed me here! You spied on me! I'll rip out your intestines and strangle you with them!"
"Creative. I like that." Another step. His eyes never left hers, holding her gaze with an intensity that made her stomach do something complicated. "But you're right. It's rude to ask without offering something in return."
He stopped maybe six feet away. Close enough that she could see the individual threads of his red sash, the faint stubble on his jaw, the way his chest rose and fell with each relaxed breath.
Law kept her hand on her sword. Her knuckles had gone white from the grip.
"Tell you what." His voice dropped, becoming lower. More intimate. The playful tone shifted into something else, something that made the hair on the back of her neck stand up. "I'll go first."
He let the words hang in the morning air, heavy with implication.
"I'll show you mine..." A pause. That grin became something sharper, hungrier. "...if you promise to show me yours."