(Bellamy POV)
As it turned out, Gasparde’s fruit did not reincarnate in my hold, proving without a doubt that we had gotten extremely lucky with Enel. Though that didn't mean, that I wasn't going to be keeping a constant supply of fresh fruit on hand. Who knew what the future might bring?
What we did get was the prize money for winning the race as, unlike the Straw Hats, we hadn't been spotted by the marines and thus they hadn't had any reason to come looking for us around these parts. This had the additional benefit of making Lily a very happy woman with how full our treasury was again, which had been running rather low after Doffy drained it on Water Seven.
All in all, I put the episode down as a half success, as we made our way to the next island.
Not sure which one that was, but surely we had to be close to the end of the first half of the Grand Line. The Strawhats went to the Florian Triangle after Water Seven then a resort and then the Redline.
I went to Water Seven, Hannabal and Partia in order, the latter two not being where I had expected them to be, in that they were not located in an earlier part of the Grand Line. If I had to make an educated guess, the Straw Hats had taken a rather large detour from the usual routes through Paradise, by going to Navarone first before arriving at Water Seven.
My thoughts were interrupted by the sound of pained grunting and groaning. Looking up from my own dumbbell curls, I looked over to where Nero was overseeing the training for the boys. Sweat was flowing down like rivulets, teeth were gritted and eyes were bulging out, as my crew mates were locked in an improvised version of tug-of-war. No hands were being used, the rope having been attached firmly to harnesses around their waists, as they tried to pull the other team over the line. Nero had assured me that this exercise was a staple during his own education so I had left him to it.
On the other side of the gym with the girls, things were calmer, but arguably no less painful as Shura did his best to hammer haki into their brains with a wooden rod. So far, most of them hadn't been doing that well and hence, were covered in some painful looking welts and bruises. However, progress was being made. Whereas before, they couldn’t react in the slightest, now all of them were twitching and trying to move out of the way, though the attempts were almost always too late…
…wait. Almost always?
There it was again. Shura was swinging, Mani was dodging once, twice and sadly not thrice. I shot Shura a questioning look and he shrugged before flicking his rod in her direction without warning. This time, Mani stayed absolutely still as the rod came to rest mere millimetres from her head. So, it wasn't the girl just hearing the rod swishing through the air.
“Mani, how are you feeling?” I called out, genuinely curious. She was obviously not reacting like Coby had when he had first unlocked his own haki. Admittedly, that had been under very different and very stressful circumstances, so what we were witnessing now had to be the standard variant.
“Like, really odd. I still can’t see but…I can…hear colors? No, that’s not right.” Mani replied. “It’s really difficult to describe but if I had to give it a shot, it would be that I can hear colors giving off smells as they sing, but I can’t smell anything out of the ordinary.”
Apart from Shura & Aisa, everyone looked about as confused as I was by that explanation. “So, like the sum of your senses but more?”
“You could put it like that, yeah.” Mani nodded after thinking about it for a moment.
“Shura, what’s the verdict?”
“I do believe she has unlocked her mantra.” he admitted and with that it was official. He did look slightly miffed, but whether that was due to how quickly Mani had unlocked hers or if it was because I was still keeping him in chains was anybody’s guess, but he did look the tiniest bit proud.
As a reward, I was going to loosen his restrictions somewhat. The teensy tiniest amount, but enough to give him hope for his eventual freedom.
Shura’s presence had probably been the biggest shock to Nero when he joined up on St. Poplar. Having been a (provisionary) member of the government’s top intelligence agency, he was well aware of the existence of haki. But haki was one of those things which were practically unknown on this side of the Grand Line, much like how devil fruits had been deemed to be legends and myths by the four blues. Hence, when I offered to let Shura teach him as well, it provided a much greater incentive for him to stick around beyond merely seeking a safe spot to hide from the World Government.
Speaking of Shura, the man had also calmed down significantly. He still flinched whenever Eddy got too close to him, but he no longer looked like he was about to have a panic attack.
Our haki training benefitted greatly as a result, because if your instructor in all things willpower had no willpower of his own, he could only poorly instruct the willing in empowering one’s will to manifest willpower in a tangible demonstration of willpower. Capiche?
Anyway…
“This calls for a celebration!” And celebrate we did.
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Now, I would like to say that once the floodgates were opened, we started unlocking haki one after the other like dominoes. That was not what happened. Instead, we continued to take our lumps with Shura and continued to tear our muscles apart with Nero, only to have Muret patch us up later.
When I had first ordered a state of the art exercise facility from Iceburg, I hadn’t been expecting to have it be the most hated and still most used room on the Black Pearl. So far, I’d managed to convince my crew that the gym was a voluntary gift from the mayor of Water Seven and not a custom order. I would be only half joking if I said, that I was worried they may mutiny if they ever were to discover the truth.
Then again, none of them were shirking their training, turning up day after day to give it their all, despite our rather nice winning streak. I think for many, it was the realization that despite the dials, devil fruit and greater physical ability, there were still so many enemies out there they couldn’t match on their own. Enemies, many of whom they had never expected to run into, enemies like Gasparde.
Thing was though, if you were going to be objective about it, they’d all made incredible progress. It had only been a few months ago, that my crew would have had trouble against the likes of the Maruyama Alliance under Montblanc Cricket. Now, they were able to take down a veteran pirate worth 95 million belli, even if the deck had been stacked heavily in their favor and the guy had let down his guard, despite said stacked deck.
If anything, I think the world government was severely underestimating my crew. I wasn't sure they’d be able to beat the Straw Hats, but they would be able to give the weaker members at least a good run for their money. Maybe they might even win if those kids didn’t have plot armor thicker than the Red Line.
Sigh…one of these days my crew was going to be on the same level as Zoro or Sanji. One of these days...or I was liable to end up like Trafalgar Law, who got wrecked by Blackbeard because his crew couldn’t keep up. But then again, I wasn't sure if the rank-and-file members of Trafalgar's crew had haki.
Watching Lily cuss up a storm after her tenth leg cramp of the morning, I sent over some words of encouragement and got profanities in return. Though, if they kept working this hard, I was certain we'd reach my target much faster than it should be reasonable to do so. As I liked to say, One Piece physiology was just broken that way.
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(Rivers POV)
He was a sniper. In fact, he was not just any sniper, but the Sentinel of the Sky, the man who rode on a fucking big bird to rain death down from above. So why was he in the water, being dragged along behind the ship with a rope tied around his waist?
“You there, stop being a limpet and start swimming!” Right, how could he forget? It’s because Weasel-face said so. According to him, there was no better way to exercise one's whole body with the least strain than swimming. And because normal swimming was boring, Rivers was thrown into shark infested waters without a weapon and told to keep up. At least nobody was telling him to get ahead of the ship and pull. “You’re supposed to get ahead of the ship and pull, you lazy ass!”
Rivers was going to apologize to the captain for calling him a sadist. The captain was a saint when compared to the devil’s spawn that was Weasel-face.
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He’d once asked Weasel-face whether or not he had trained this way. Weasel-face had looked at Rivers before smirking and chittering. “Of course not. We just swam regular laps in a swimming pool. We’re not crazy.”
But the Crew was different, he had said. Unlike the CP9 recruits, the Crew didn’t have the luxury of having a decade to train and had to be ready within two years as per their captain’s demand. Because of this, the intensity of the exercises got upped by several orders of magnitude.
The guy had also muttered something along the lines of “Having the most fun of his life.” But at the time Rivers had chosen to ignore it. Now? He dearly regretted not punching Weasel-face in the face.
“Put some effort into it! You call that swimming?”
It wouldn’t have been that bad if this were some regular old ship. But no, Rivers had to be sailing on the only ship in the world, which had jet dials installed for extra speed. The only solace Rivers had, was that he wasn't the only one suffering. Apart from those who physically couldn't swim, all of the Crew was in the water alongside Rivers. The lucky bastards who couldn't swim were on the ship, keeping her on course.
“I’ve seen children who were better at swimming than you lot!”
Rivers would have scoffed if it hadn’t meant getting a mouthful of seawater. What kind of child could handle such torture? Likely the same kid who took out a rebel organisation before puberty, but that had to be an exaggeration. There should be limits to how tall one's tales could get.
For now, there wasn't much Rivers could do but grit his teeth and swim. And as he began pulling ahead of the Black Pearl, Rivers took heart in the fact that at least, he wasn't the captain.
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(Sarquiss POV)
Training was meant to be painful. The old adage “No pain, no gain” wouldn’t have been so widespread if it weren’t true. Even then, there was a difference between training despite the pain and training to build a tolerance for pain.
What Bellamy was doing was neither.
“Aisa, again.”
“Ok.”
Being voluntarily zapped by lightning was Bellamy’s newest brainchild and the reason why their stock of burn salve was depleting at an alarming rate.
The purported purpose of these continued attempts of self-immolation via chibi, was ostensibly to harness the power of electromagnetism for unlimited power. Well, there had been a lot more words and explanations attached, but most of it had gone over Sarquiss’ head.
“Again.”
Every time Bellamy got his dose of lightning, Aisa would blur. It had been alarming at first, then interesting. Now it was just another part of life after who knows how many repeats. At least, Aisa was buzzing out a lot less than she'd done in the beginning, no longer needing minutes to literally regather herself. Now she barely broke a sweat, so long as the voltage was low enough.
“A little more juice, Aisa.”
Maybe that was also why Bellamy wasn't frying his own brain from the constant electrical shocks he was receiving. Humans conducted electricity, didn't they? If he remembered correctly, Muret had called them all ‘useless bags of meat and water’ when they had first met.
“Actually, while human bodies do conduct electricity, I have figured out how to change the material my springs change into, so as to greatly increase my own conductivity.” Bellamy explained after Sarquiss expressed his curiosity. “It’s been something I’ve been toying with ever since Skypiea and I’ve recently managed to make a breakthrough. It’s all in the visualization, you see?”
“No, but let’s pretend I do and keep going.”
“The thing about devil fruit abilities, especially paramecia like mine, is that they are based very much around a concept and not a strictly defined set of rules. While I’m sure there are limits, those limits are rather generous. Think of Doflamingo’s fruit for example.”
"What about his fruit? It was the ability to make strings, was it not?"
“It’s a lot more than that. Strings are used to make puppets move making them a key component in the art of puppetry. A person pulling metaphorical strings to make people act according to their wishes is called a puppetmaster. See where I’m going with this?”
“Almost. I feel like a lightbulb is going to light up somewhere in my noggin...eventually.”
“Doffy took an average fruit that could only produce strings for sewing needles and turned it into a monstrosity that allows him to attach his nigh indestructible strings to people and literally control their bodies. All because that ability is tangentially related to the concept of a string.”
“…I’m not sure I want to stab him anymore.”
“The point is, my conceptual ability is a ‘spring’. Nothing says what shape or size my springs have to be or what their material composition is supposed to be. I’ve just been making steel springs because it’s the metal I’m most familiar with.”
“And now you’ve made…silver?”
“Exactly. Polished silver to increase the conductivity and energy efficiency when turning my arms and my torso into a giant LC-circuit.” Bellamy said, waving his two ‘hands’ around. Well, the two conical springs compressed into circular plates he'd turned his hands into. “The difficult part right now is building up a tolerance to electricity so I can have Aisa charge me up when it counts. I’m just glad that silver seems to be more conductive than my body, so most of the electricity stays in the spring-wires instead of dissipating into heat.”
That all made sense, kind of, though there was one thing Sarquiss wasn’t quite getting.
“Why don’t you turn those little bits connecting your neck and waist to your torso into rubber? You said rubber stopped Enel’s lightning, didn’t you?”
“…”
“…”
Surely not. There was no way Bellamy was this stupid.
“…Sarquiss, are you a genius?”
It was probably too late to jump ship, wasn't it?
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(Eddy POV)
All the aches, the leaden limbs…the pain, so much excruciating pain. But if anyone asked him now if all of that had been worth it, Eddy would say yes in a heartbeat. And to think that a simple son of a small town fisherman could go on to achieve something like this.
“I…I cut steel…” It was nary but a whisper, nearly inaudible, Eddy being fearful that the slightest breeze could break the sanctity of this moment. However, it had to be said. “I cut steel.”
Nobody back home could do it. Not the local swordsmanship instructor, not the marine captain…nobody until Roronoa. And now Eddy himself.
The cut wasn't completely clean, the path of the blade having been disturbed just before the end, but he’d done it. And better yet, his own sword remained undamaged, the mark of a proficient swordsman.
“I CUT STEEL!!!” he shouted for all the heavens to hear, for the world to acknowledge that Eddy Low was now someone of note, a swordsman in his own right.
He was so exuberant at this moment, that he forgot that there were other occupants in the room with him, until they reminded Eddy again of their presence.
Funkfreed trumpeted his approval and congratulations, adding to the general cacophony of Eddy screaming and tumbling around the gym.
And his new caretaker, Muret, was clapping enthusiastically from the sidelines before Eddy ran over to her and engulfed her in a big hug. It wasn't something he would have normally dared to do, but he was drunk on his success and arguably not quite sane at the moment. But Muret didn't stop him, so he twirled them around the gym for a few rounds before setting her down.
Of course, his rationality and that pesky emotion called self-consciousness chose that moment to come back, turning the mood awkward in an instant.
“Uuhh…”
“Congratulations, Eddy. That was really impressive.”
“…thank you. I gotta check up onthecourseheadingseeyoulaterbye!”
And then he was out of the room, slamming the door shut behind him. Why had he just done that? And why had he just left like that? Stupid Eddy. Stupid, stupid, stupid…did he mention stupid?
Sighing, Eddy trudged up to his post, checking the heading and the arrangement of the sails and the rudder, making sure that they were still on right course. They were, nothing to worry about there.
He kind of wished that there was something to worry about, if only to take his mind off the social catastrophe just prior. He wasn’t usually like this, so why now at the moment of his greatest triumph?
Sigh
Why couldn't he be smooth and suave for once?
“Land ho!”
Why?