Makino moved through her morning with practiced ease, restocking the quiet bar in a sequence so familiar that pausing to think would only trip her up.
She glanced up when he reached the bottom of the stairs. "Rice is on."
"I'll eat fast." He filled a bowl and stood at the counter rather than sitting, which she registered without comment. "I'm heading into the mountains today. I figure I'll try for some game while I'm up there."
Makino paused, giving him the steady, knowing look of someone shaped by years beside wild mountains—someone who could read intentions before a word was spoken. Whatever she saw in his face, it was enough.
"Betto would not complain about something fresh." She picked up what she'd set down. "He's been working the same salt stock since last week."
Liam finished the rice. "Then I'll do my best."
That was all. She offered no warnings. He made no promises. He set the bowl down, shrugged on yesterday's new jacket, and stepped out into the day.
---
The mountains, seen from below, were nothing like the distant backdrop they'd been from the village. From the docks, they framed the coast in green and blue, decorative and harmless at a distance. Up close, they had opinions of their own.
Within twenty minutes, the trees thickened—not just in number, but in age and height, the canopy closing until sunlight filtered down in dappled fragments. The air cooled and dampened, rich with the scent of soil and wet stone, the weight of a forest that had never bent to human needs. The path was an animal's creation, following priorities that weren't his.
He moved with care, not caution—a subtle but important difference. His eyes tracked the ground and the mid-distance, cataloguing as he went, moving like someone intent on learning the land, not just passing through it.
Two things he was looking for. Wildlife, obviously — he had told Makino the truth. But also signs of habitation. Some indication of where the Dadan mountain operation sat, the den that had been Luffy's second home for the better part of a decade. He didn't expect to find it today. He was mapping. Establishing which way the terrain opened up, where the water sources were, and which parts of the mountain saw enough foot traffic to have worn paths into themselves. The kind of reading that, given another day or two, would start to narrow down the possibilities.
He tucked away rough bearings and pressed onward, climbing higher.
---
The boar found him first, which, all things considered, was probably the most efficient outcome.
He heard it before he saw it — a displacement of undergrowth at a volume that communicated size, then a pause, then the specific silence of a large animal that has scented something and is deciding what to do about it. He stopped walking. The silence continued for three seconds. Then the undergrowth moved again, closer, and the animal came into view through a gap in the trees.
Large. Not fantastical, not cartoonishly huge — but One Piece large, which meant substantially larger than any boar he had ever seen or expected to see. Its shoulder came up past his hip. The tusks had the worn, yellowed look of things used rather than displayed. Its eyes were small and flat and currently pointed at him with the focused attention of a creature that had never met something it couldn't deal with and was deciding whether he qualified.
He assessed.
No weapons. Just his body, his adaptive physiology, and the certainty that if the boar killed him, he'd return tougher and boar-proof. That knowledge was oddly soothing, like a safety net—not an excuse for recklessness, but a floor beneath the risk. He wasn't reckless. He simply knew more than the boar ever could.
The boar had no idea what it was up against. That was fine. He'd keep it informed.
Let's find out what I'm actually made of, he thought, which was the most honest framing of the situation available.
The boar charged.
---
The first impact was a lesson.
He dodged to the side—a clean move, or so he thought. The boar's shoulder still clipped his ribs, and 'glancing' turned out to be a generous word. He slammed sideways into a tree, which offered no apology. He bounced off and stayed upright, thanks to instinct and legs that refused to let him fall.
His ribs filed a formal complaint.
The adaptation triggered — not gradually, not after a pause for consideration. Fast, like a circuit closing. He felt it in his side before the pain had finished: pressure beneath the skin, density redistributing, the body making emergency decisions with the focus of something that understood its priorities exactly. The complaint from his ribs quieted. Not gone — still present, still informative — but underneath a new layer of something that had not been there thirty seconds ago.
The boar had already wheeled around. It was fast—faster than he'd braced for, even after warning himself. It charged back with the single-minded energy of something that had already decided how this would end.
He charged to meet it.
Not away—straight at it. This wasn't a strategy so much as understanding: the boar's charge was built to punish retreat, and retreat wasn't working. At the last second, he veered left, seized a tusk with both hands, and swung himself onto its neck. The boar staggered sideways, more baffled than hurt, and began to buck him off.
The shaking was relentless, slamming him twice against its flank before he found a hold that stuck. Each blow triggered another adaptation—quicker now, his body updating its threat model on the fly. His grip, once merely sufficient, was now ironclad. His hands did not let go.
The boar thrashed.
He held.
This was the middle stretch: neither side winning, both locked in. The boar had brute force and stamina. He had grip, a body that kept improving, and a patience the animal couldn't match. Pain was noted and filed away. He could almost sense his body running calculations—logging every blow, every force, and ramping up in response. It wasn't smooth or comfortable. His body made emergency decisions without asking him, which was just as well—consultation would only slow things down.
Midway through, he noticed the gap had closed.
He wasn't stronger than the boar—not yet, maybe not for a long while. But the gap between its power and his resilience was closing. At first, it had thrown him into a tree. Now, when it bucked, he moved with it, not away from it. His grip held. He could feel the adaptation in action, a strange sensation from the inside out.
He worked for leverage. Not technique—he wasn't a trained fighter—but leverage was physics, and physics didn't care about credentials. He shifted his weight, angled his grip, and used the boar's own momentum to redirect it. The animal's legs scrambled. One knee hit dirt.
From there, it was all grind. He forced the boar's head down, keeping its spine twisted, wrestling against three hundred pounds of muscle and a lifetime of wild survival. His arms burned. His grip never faltered. The boar's thrashing lost its pattern, aggression fading into desperation—a different challenge, but one he could handle.
When he finally locked in the choke, it took longer than he'd guessed—a full minute or more of steady pressure while the boar protested in smaller and smaller ways. When stillness came, it crept in slowly, then settled all at once.
Liam sat back in the undergrowth and breathed.
The forest reclaimed its calm—birdsong returned, the canopy swayed gently overhead. His breath came harder than he wanted. His ribs still complained. Everything else felt extraordinary.
He checked himself methodically, starting with his hands.
Bruises bloomed on both forearms, already fading—healing in hours instead of days, so fast it felt almost unreal. His side, where the boar first struck, was tender, but the pain felt finished, not lingering. He pressed his thumb to his forearm: the familiar resistance from yesterday, and beneath it, a new layer that hadn't existed before.
His baseline was higher now—not just a little, but clearly, measurably, across the board: tougher skin, greater impact resistance, muscle that held up under real stress. The fight had been a leap beyond the stake test, and Darwin had answered in full.
He looked at his hands.
The more real the threat, the sharper the adaptation. The stake test was a warm-up; this was a true contest with something that could have broken him, and his body had risen to meet it. The curve was steeper than he'd guessed. Soon, he'd need tougher challenges—the boar was perfect for today, but in a week, it wouldn't be enough.
He gave himself one more minute in the undergrowth, then stood and faced the boar.
"All right," he said. "Time to get you down the mountain."
---
The boar was heavy in the way only large, dead animals can be—unyielding, indifferent to his intentions. He rigged a makeshift drag from branches and his jacket, heaved the animal onto it, and began the descent.
The path refused to cooperate, which was no surprise—it was made for four-legged creatures with low centers of gravity, not for him. He detoured around trees the path cut through, crossed a slope eager to send him sliding, and skirted a rocky outcrop the direct route ignored. Twice, a root snagged the drag. Both times, he stopped, fixed it, and pressed on.
It took nearly two hours—just him, the drag, and the kind of thinking that fills the mind when the body is busy, and the path is long.
He considered the adaptation curve. Physically, he wasn't the same person who'd left the bar that morning—not in any obvious way, but in the deep, permanent sense that mattered. The change would keep building as long as this world kept throwing dangers at him, and in One Piece, there was no shortage. He was going to be fine. For the first time, that felt like a fact.
He thought about the Doomsday layer beneath it all. It hadn't triggered today—the boar was a real fight, but not a lethal one. Darwin had handled it, just as he hoped. Darwin first, Doomsday only if Darwin failed. The boar was a Darwin problem. There would be Doomsday problems ahead, and he accepted that: dying was possible, unpleasant, but survivable—and the next version of him would be even harder to kill. He didn't fear it. It was just another fact to manage.
He reflected on dragging a boar down a mountain in a fictional world, only three days into his new existence—and how much he'd enjoyed it, pain and all. He'd have to consider what that said about him, but not while dodging tree roots.
He thought about Luffy.
Three months. Somewhere up here, Luffy was running wild, training not by routine but by relentless collision—learning by smashing into things and adapting on the fly. In that, they weren't so different. The methods varied, but the logic was the same: find the hardest challenge, hit it head-on, and trust that what breaks won't be you.
The village appeared below the treeline. He kept moving.
---
Makino stood out front as he returned, and her expression shifted in two seconds: recognition, recalculation, then the look of someone whose expectations had been not just met, but thoroughly surpassed.
"I said catch some game." She looked at the boar. She looked at him. "That is quite a bit of game."
"It was cooperative." He kept his voice even. "Is Betto in?"
She was already moving toward the door. "Betto!"
The chef emerged from the kitchen with the expression of a man whose day had been interrupted and had resigned opinions about that. Then he saw the boar.
He came down the steps and circled the animal once, giving it a thorough inspection, as a professional would evaluate raw material. Crouched, checked the neck and haunches, stood back up.
"How'd you take it?"
"By hand."
A beat. Betto looked at Liam the way people look at things they are deciding whether to believe.
"Meat's clean?"
"Should be. I was careful with the neck."
A pause. Betto made a noise somewhere between approval and something else, grabbed the drag's end, and hauled the boar toward the kitchen with the brisk efficiency of a man already planning his next move.
Makino watched him go, then turned back to Liam.
"Thank you." Simple. Direct. The way she always meant things. "That was more than I expected."
"It was a good morning." He meant it, even if it was a strange thing to mean. "I'll head up again tomorrow—let me know if you want anything else."
She studied him for a moment with the look that meant something was resolving behind it.
"You enjoy it," she said. Not a question—just confirming what she already suspected.
"I do." He kept it simple. There wasn't a shorter version of the truth available, and the longer version would have required explaining things he wasn't ready to explain.
Makino nodded once, her face saying she'd filed that away for later consideration.
---
The evening unfolded: the bar filled, buzzed, emptied, and closed. He moved with the comfort of a third night's routine—the room mapped, the regulars predictable, the work almost automatic. Old Fels arrived with his usual crew, spinning a sea king tale that grew with every retelling. Liam found the shifting details more entertaining than distracting.
Makino let him close up unsupervised—a statement in itself.
---
Upstairs, the room was the same small room. The window showed the same square of dark sky.
He lay back and let the question settle.
Tomorrow, he'd head back up—not for game, since the boar had served its purpose, and the next step on his adaptation curve needed something tougher than these mountains could offer at the moment. Tomorrow was for finding Luffy.
He had three months before the story started moving. He wanted to know the person, not just the legend. There was a gap between what he'd seen on a screen and who Luffy was at sixteen—and that gap mattered, because he planned to join that crew, and the crew was built on real people, not just the stories they'd become.
Also, honestly, a boy who trained by running at things until something gave sounded like the perfect training partner. Liam's adaptation curve needed fuel, and Luffy fit the bill.
He closed his eyes.
Sleep came quickly. His body had earned it.
---
Morning.
He came downstairs, ate, and told Makino he was heading back up. She handed him a cloth-wrapped piece of bread—practical care that needed no words. He headed out.
An hour into the trees, following yesterday's bearings, he moved deeper into old growth where the mountain leveled into ridges and the underbrush grew thick enough to hide anything—or anyone.
A voice rang out—young, loud, utterly committed.
"Gomu Gomu no—"
Liam stopped walking.
The sound lingered in the forest—half a technique name, the rest swallowed by distance. Somewhere ahead, a sixteen-year-old was unleashing his rubber body at full volume, unconcerned with who might hear.
He stood very still, not yet moving.