One Piece: Lust Haki

The assembly was called at 0600 and within five minutes the rumor had already made two full laps of the parade grounds.

A former Admiral was coming to train them. Two weeks. Joint intensive. The recruit who told me this was a second-year named Goro who talked too fast and couldn't keep his collar straight and had heard it from an Ensign who'd heard it from a Lieutenant who'd heard it from someone in the Fleet Instructor's office who probably shouldn't have been talking. The chain of unreliable sources was long enough that I should have dismissed it.

I didn't dismiss it because every officer on the grounds was standing at attention, and officers at Marineford didn't stand at attention for rumors.

We lined up in formation. Two hundred recruits, six rows deep, in the grey light of early morning with the bay wind cutting through our uniforms. The parade ground was the big one, the formal grounds facing the harbor where they held promotions and sentencings and anything that required the full institutional weight of the place. I'd stood here for three assemblies in seven months and none of them had drawn this many officers. Vice Admirals I'd only seen in passing were along the east wall. Hina was near the instructors' hall entrance with her cigarette holder conspicuously absent, her pink hair pulled back, her narrow eyes scanning the formation. Gion was at the front with the other senior officers, Konpira at her hip, coat draped.

Her posture was different.

It took me a second to identify what. Gion was always composed. Thirty years in heels and the heels had become load-bearing columns. But this morning the composure had an edge under it. Her chin was a fraction higher. Her shoulders were set in a way I hadn't seen before.

She was standing at attention for someone.

I'd never seen Gion stand at attention for anyone. She scolded Garp. She sparred with other Vice Admirals like they were furniture she was rearranging. The only person in the building I'd ever seen her defer to was Tsuru, and that was private, soft, mentor respect. The posture she had now was public. A student whose teacher was about to walk in.

The doors of the instructors' hall opened and the man who walked out made the doorframe look small.

Zephyr.

I knew him from a movie I'd watched twice on a laptop in a life that didn't exist anymore. Fleet Instructor Zephyr. Former Admiral. The man who'd trained Kuzan, Borsalino, and Sakazuki. Three monsters who currently held the three Admiral seats, and he'd built all of them from recruits. His bounty had been among the highest in Marine history during his active years. He'd walked the Grand Line when the Grand Line was wilder than it was now, and he'd come back with a prosthetic arm and scars that said the Grand Line hadn't been entirely happy about it.

The prosthetic arm. The right arm, mechanical, dark metal, articulated at the elbow and wrist. He wore it like he'd been wearing it long enough that it was just his arm now. The metal caught the grey morning light. Seastone-laced, if the movie had been accurate about that. Maybe not. The movie had been a lot of things, and I couldn't remember which details were canonical and which were production choices.

But the arm meant the massacre had already happened. His trainees. The students he'd taken into the New World and brought back in boxes. Edward Weevil, or whoever the Warlord had been, had carved through them and left Zephyr alive with one less arm and a reason to stop believing in the system.

He was still here. Still wearing the coat, training the next generation, the arm grafted on and whatever was left of his belief in the institution holding together enough to get him through the morning.

His face was broad, heavy, deeply lined. Old enough that everything you were seeing had been tested, and the parts that survived were the dangerous ones. His eyes swept the formation with the unhurried patience of a man who'd evaluated ten thousand recruits and could sort them from a glance.

I'd seen this man fight in animated sequences drawn by people who probably knew less about combat than he did. Standing thirty feet from the real thing was different. Gion's presence filled a room like a blade edge. Zephyr's filled the parade ground like a wall.

Next to him, half a step behind and to the left, a woman.

Slender. Dark blue hair cut to her jaw, parted to the side, one strand curving across her forehead. Reddish-brown eyes in a face built from straight lines and right angles. Military posture that made every recruit in formation, including me, look like we'd been assembled from loose parts. She wore a Marine uniform modified with a dark blue coat over her shoulders, no rank insignia I could identify, and she stood perfectly still with her hands at her sides and her weight centered and I got the immediate sense that she could go from standing to killing someone in about half a second.

Ain.

Return-Return Fruit. Modo Modo no Mi. Touched you and de-aged you twelve years. Per contact. Stackable. Touch you twice and you lost twenty-four years. Touch a fifty-year-old three times and they were a fourteen-year-old wondering what happened.

The tactical assessment ran itself, and the second thought arrived right behind it: she was beautiful and she looked like she'd rather be standing in a fire than in front of two hundred recruits.

Her eyes moved across the formation. Slow, even, systematic. She evaluated each row and dismissed it. Her mouth was a line. Just where her face lived when she wasn't using it for anything.

Zephyr stopped at the front of the formation. The wind off the bay moved his coat. He didn't shift.

"My name is Zephyr." His voice carried without effort, a volume that came from a chest cavity the size of a shipping crate. "Fleet Instructor. Some of you have heard of me. Some of you haven't. Doesn't matter. For the next two weeks, I'm going to find out which of you can fight and which of you think you can fight."

Silence. Two hundred recruits breathing.

"This is Ain. My student. My surviving student." He didn't elaborate on what surviving meant. "She'll be assisting with advanced combat training and individual assessments. If she gives you an instruction, it came from me."

Ain didn't nod. She stood at his left shoulder and looked at the formation and her expression didn't change. I was pretty sure her expression changed about as often as tectonic plates shifted.

At the front of the officer line, Gion inclined her head toward Zephyr. He returned it.

The first session was hand-to-hand on the main training grounds.

Zephyr didn't teach like Gion. Gion taught precision. She identified flaws, isolated them, corrected them with the surgical economy of someone who'd been fixing broken stances since before I was born. Her method assumed you had a foundation and she was refining it.

Zephyr assumed you had nothing.

He walked through the formation during basic drills and watched and said very little and when he did speak it was to one recruit at a time and the recruit usually looked like they wanted to sink into the ground. A second-year who'd been coasting on size and reach got three sentences about his footwork, loud enough to carry across the yard. The second-year's face went white. A first-year who'd been drilling well got a nod. Just a nod. The first-year looked like he'd been given a promotion.

Ain was assigned to the advanced mentorship track. Gion's students. Six of us.

She walked along our line during the striking drill and didn't speak for the first full pass. She watched. Her eyes moved from recruit to recruit with an expression that could have been evaluating technique or contemplating whether the species was worth preserving.

She stopped behind me on the second pass.

"Sloppy."

One word. Delivered to the back of my head while my fist was mid-extension. I finished the strike and turned.

She was close. Close enough that the detail arrived before I was ready for it. Reddish-brown eyes at roughly my jaw height, because she was shorter than I'd assumed from the formation. The blue hair was fine-textured and moved when the wind came off the bay and she didn't push it back. She smelled like gunpowder and clean linen. Two scents that had no business sharing the same airspace and did anyway.

"Tell me what's wrong."

She looked at my extended arm. Looked at my shoulder. Looked at my elbow. Reached out with two fingers and adjusted the angle of my arm at the elbow joint. The touch was precise, clinical, and her fingers were cool.

"Everything. Start over."

She walked away. The adjustment had been correct. My next three strikes grouped tighter and the difference in my shoulder alignment was immediate, from a two-finger correction that had lasted less than a breath.

She corrected the next recruit without speaking. Just moved his wrist with one hand. The recruit looked at his wrist like it belonged to someone else.

Isuka was on my left. She'd been watching the correction. Her rapier was sheathed, hands at her sides, and she had the expression she wore when she'd identified a new problem she intended to solve.

"She's worse than you," Isuka said.

"She might be better."

Isuka considered this. Her jaw worked. The bandage on her cheek was this morning's tape, straight and white against the flush the drill had brought to her face. Her eyes tracked Ain's path down the line.

"I want to spar her."

Of course she did. A woman with a two-finger correction that could rebuild a stance in one second, a body that moved like it had been assembled by an engineer rather than grown, and a face that communicated absolutely nothing unless you knew where to look. Of course Isuka wanted to spar her. Isuka wanted to spar anything that looked like it might hit back.

"Give it a day."

"Why?"

"Because she just called my form sloppy and she was right, and I'd like to figure out what she sees before you make her fight you."

Isuka's mouth pulled at one corner. The gap between her front teeth showed for a second. "You want me to wait so you can learn from watching."

"I want you to wait so I can learn from watching."

"That's what I said."

"You said it like it was a bad thing."

She kicked sand at my boot. We went back to the drill. My arm angle was better. Ain's correction held.

The mess hall was louder than usual because two hundred recruits had just spent four hours being broken down by a man whose mechanical arm could probably dent the building and a woman whose corrections felt like surgical instruments applied to a problem she found personally offensive.

I sat at the table with my tray. Fish, rice, miso. The same. It was always the same. One of these days the kitchen was going to produce a different fish and the entire mess hall would lose its collective mind.

Tashigi sat across from me. She'd pushed her glasses up twice in the time it took to set her tray down, which meant she was thinking about something that required her full attention and the glasses were in the way of whatever internal process was running.

"He trained Admiral Aokiji," she said.

"And Kizaru. And Akainu."

"All three current Admirals. One instructor." She arranged her chopsticks parallel to the edge of her tray. "The probability of one instructor producing three flag officers of that caliber is statistically negligible unless the instructor's methodology is fundamentally different from standard Marine training doctrine."

"You're analyzing his pedagogy."

"I'm analyzing his pedagogy."

"Of course you are."

She picked up her chopsticks. "His student is interesting."

"Ain."

"She knows daggers." Tashigi's voice shifted into the register she used when she was talking about blades. Lower, more focused, the stammering gone. "The way she carries her weight is a knife-fighter's stance. Low center, hands free, wrists loose. And the corrections she gave during drill were edge-weapon corrections. She was adjusting angles for cutting, not striking."

I hadn't noticed that. Tashigi had. Tashigi saw swords and knives and edge weapons in everything and everyone and the world was a collection of stances and grips and cutting angles filtered through a pair of red-framed glasses.

"What kind of daggers?"

"I'll know when I see them. The stance suggests something balanced for both throwing and close work. Medium-length blades, probably seven to nine inches." She ate her rice. "I'd like to see her armory."

"Ask."

"She doesn't seem like the type who responds well to being asked."

That was probably accurate.

Isuka dropped her tray on the table and sat next to me. Closer than her usual spot. Her elbow was near mine and she smelled like the training yard, salt and effort and the mineral tang of the sand.

"He watched me during the combination drill," Isuka said. "Zephyr. He watched the full set and didn't say anything."

"Good sign or bad sign?"

"I don't know. He said things to everyone else."

"Maybe your combination didn't need anything said."

She looked at me. Her brown eyes had the competitive fire in them, the one that burned when she was measuring herself against a standard she wasn't sure she'd met. "Or maybe he was deciding whether to waste his time."

"Or maybe your combination was good and he moved on because he has two hundred recruits to evaluate and the ones who are already good don't need his morning."

Her jaw relaxed a fraction. She picked up her chopsticks and stole a piece of fish off my tray.

"You know that's my fish."

"Tax."

"You said that last time."

"It's an ongoing assessment." She chewed. "The dark-haired woman. Ain. How old do you think she is?"

"Around our age. Maybe a year or two older."

"She fights like she's forty."

"She fights like she's been fighting since she could walk and she stopped enjoying it around the time she started."

Isuka chewed on that along with my fish. "I'm going to spar her."

"I know."

"Tomorrow."

"Give it two days."

"One."

The mess hall noise filled the space between us. Someone at the next table dropped their miso bowl and the recruit beside him handed napkins without being asked and nobody else noticed. Tashigi was looking at the officers' table where Ain sat next to Zephyr, eating in silence, her posture identical to her parade ground posture, her chopsticks held with the same precision she'd used to adjust my elbow.

Gion was three seats down from Zephyr. She said something to him and he laughed. The laugh was big, rolling, loud enough to reach our table. Gion's mouth curved.

The fifth almost-smile.

It was different from the others. The first four had been private, directed at me or at moments between us. This one was public, aimed at her teacher. I was watching a version of Gion I hadn't seen before, one that existed before I arrived, before the academy. Gion at twenty, probably, learning the sword from a man whose mechanical arm hadn't existed yet.

I ate my rice. The fish was gone. Isuka had taken it.

"Two days," I said.

"One and a half."

"That's not how days work."

She kicked my shin under the table. Her boot connected with the same spot it always connected with, the bruise that never fully healed because Isuka's foot found it every time with the accuracy of a woman whose rapier could thread a gap four inches wide in imperfect stone.

Across the mess hall, Ain set down her chopsticks. Precisely, parallel to her tray edge, in the exact position Tashigi set hers. She stood, bowed slightly to Zephyr, and left.

Four words during the entire meal. I'd been counting, and four was generous because two of them might have been the same word.

"I want to see her daggers," Tashigi said, watching her go.

Isuka was watching too. "I want to see her fight."

The blue hair disappeared through the mess hall doors and the meal continued around the gap she'd left at the officers' table.

Two weeks.

The afternoon session started in an hour and Zephyr's voice was already carrying across the parade ground, giving orders to the officers who'd be running the afternoon drills, and the mechanical arm caught the sun when he gestured and the recruits who saw it went quiet.

I put my tray in the return stack. A piece of rice stuck to the bottom. The recruit behind me had a stain on his collar that he hadn't noticed and nobody was going to tell him.

I went to the afternoon drill. My elbow angle was still corrected from the morning. The adjustment held through fifty strikes and didn't slip.

She'd been right. Everything had been sloppy. And a two-finger touch from a woman I'd known for four hours had fixed it faster than a month of self-correction. That told me more about Ain than anything she'd said.

Which, to be fair, was almost nothing.

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