Sunlight threaded between the slats of the treehouse and painted the floor in warm, uncertain bars. Mike sat up on instinct, the aftertaste of sleep still in his mouth, breath fogging the air mild with salt. The ring on his finger felt like a private weight, cool and constant; the bat leaned against the railing like an old companion. Below, the camp smelled of smoke, wet rope, and the metallic tang of the sea — the daily liturgy of a place that lived by tides and nets.
Luffy was already gone by the time Mike slid his feet into boots. The boy's laughter drifted back in small gusts — he'd bound into town the moment light broke and likely already had the run of whoever was awake in Foosha. That quickness of movement was as much a part of Luffy's face as his smile: first to rise, first to eat, first to test any new thing with the earnestwill that made the world a friendlier place.
Mike strapped his bat across his back and took the steep path down toward the docks, moving through the village like a shadow with muscle memory. The market throbbed with small urgency: pails overturned, an old man lecturing a young apprentice on the proper knot for a seine, children darting and shouting. He was recognized now with a nod or a grunt rather than a curse. The difference was small but it multiplied; permission accrued in little ways.
At Gyoru's stall the morning had a steady rhythm. The fish lay like sleeping coins, gleaming and wet. Gyoru himself was a mountain in shirt sleeves, hands blackened by salt and work.
"You here to buy or to be a talking head?" Gyoru grunted before his eyes slid up to meet Mike's.
"Helping finish the south brace," Mike said, lifting his chin to the pier with a casual gesture. "I brought a length of tarred rope and a hammer." He set his pack down and let the man see the answer before him: not words, but tools and effort.
Gyoru gave a flat huff that might have been approval. "You don't come to the market if you aren't wanting something." He pulled a still-breathing snapper aside. "Take this one. But if you're messing with nets, don't cut near the knots."
Mike nodded, wrapping the fish carefully in seaweed and coarse cloth. A small thing: the market boy who usually chased stray cats was sulking at the stall's edge, hand to a grazed knee. Mike crouched without thinking, fingers trained by months of practice now to move with calm. He cleaned the small wound and wrapped it, giving the child a bandage with a joking smirk. The child's lip trembled, then flattened into a grin when Mike made an exaggerated frown at him. Laughter fixed what a stitch could not; the perfumer trait eased the moment, scent drifting like a warm note.
Gyoru watched. "You work more with hands than words," he observed, turning his knife with a flick.
"That's the plan," Mike said. "Do things, keep people fed." The answer was honest and small and it landed.
On the pier they found the snag that had been worrying Gyoru for days: a wayward post half pulled free by the previous high tide. The village used what it had. Mike used the bat as a lever and his Adept Blunt Weapon Mastery lent his arms a strength that felt more like technique than brute force. He guided two bandits how to use a fulcrum and where to brace so they could set the post without splitting it. The action was physical thinking — torque, balance, pressure — and it pleased him in the same way a well-solved puzzle might.
"Not bad," Gyoru grunted when the post sat true. He pressed a salted fish into Mike's hand — a small minted approval — and Mike accepted it with a half-bow. These were the currencies of the village: fish, work, favors. He had a private ledger building in his head, and each small kindness widened the ledger's margin.
After the dock work, Makino called him over with a small scrap of paper and a pointed look. "We need more tonic jars," she said. "Take what you need from the herbs. But make it strong—Elder Omi's cough is worse."
Mike moved through the herb patch like a person who'd learned the language of leaves: bitter root for fevers, astringent leaf for bleeding, eucalyptus for clearing lungs. He boiled water over a borrowed pot and simmered pinches and handfuls of things Makino recommended. Cooking and medicine shared a rhythm — precise heat, patience, a certain ruthless practicality — and he followed it with the devotion of someone who'd learned to make life stay.
As the tonic simmered, the murmur of the village threaded with other small sounds: a cart's single wheel scrapping, a child practicing a wooden sword, someone cursing the weather under their breath. All of it made the world feel alive and solvable. Mike wrote measurements in the margin of an old news page with charcoal and folded the list into his pocket. He labeled jars in awkward handwriting, and tucked the cork-stoppered bottles into a crate for delivery. Makino clapped him on the shoulder in a show of gratitude that was more about trust than thanks.
By noon the hideout smelled of cooked fish and wood smoke. The bandits clustered around, rough hands tucked under chin or wiping fingers. Dadan sat with a steaming bowl, expression somewhere between scorn and pride. She had the impossible ability to speak hard truths with affection threaded through them. "If you make a habit of saving fools," she muttered into her meat, "you'll run out of scolds."
Mike laughed soft and carried the crate into the trunk-turned-clinic. The space had become a study of small miracles: jars lined in rows, spare bandages folded neat, a set of improvised splints. He taught whoever had an interest how to fold a sling and how to check wounds for swelling. Education was part of survival; it made their networks thicker and more reliable.
Toward afternoon he took the newly earned few minutes for himself—minutes where he tested Sandstream in a controlled pocket of sand near the shore. It was time carved out, practice and exploration. He found the rhythm of breath that produced the grain flow: a quiet center, a shift of intention, and then a thread of grit that answered him like a call. He formed a wall, the grain spinning like a translucent curtain that rasped wood and stung a mannequin's canvas. He learnt the cost as well as the utility: each use sapped a measure of his mental energy. He'd come to respect both the output and it's payment.
By dusk, Mike carried his pack back up to the hideout. Laughter broke across the camp as the moon swung over the trees. He sat long enough to listen, learning how to read small things: the way Dadan's scolding turned to talk about the past if you prodded, the way Luffy ate everything without asking, the way Gyoru would leave work early if the tide favored him. These were the patterns that made a village more than roofs and rope.
He slept that night with the smell of tonic in his nostrils and the bat at his reach. For the first time since he'd first stepped into this world, the ledger of his day read not as an inventory of survival but as a sequence of usefulness. That was a powerful thing to wake to.
Dusk's first blue softened into a true night, and the hideout took on a quieter tone. The fire ate at its core and the bandits shifted into a language of shared stories. Some evenings were loud, full of bravado and the clink of mugs; some were hushed, wound tight around a whispered problem. This night would be the latter.
A woman arrived breathless and salty from the shore, Makino hurrying at her side with a small bundle in her arms. The infant inside was hot as a coal and thinner at the edges than he should be. The mother's fear was immediate — less the raw, animal terror of a mortally injured limb and more the deeper, corrosive terror that eats at the chest. They laid the baby on the trunk bench, eyes frantic.
Mike's hands worked with the slow economy of someone who knew which motion ended the problem. He checked the infant's mouth and throat for obstructions, felt the chest's rise and fall and heard the rasp he'd come to recognize as fevered breath. He measured temperature with a crude but clean thermometer and took the baby's weight and hydration level quickly. His mind ran through lists — possible infections, safe dosing, the risk of convulsions. He asked calm questions to the mother and to Makino. He moved with the authority of knowledge.
He prepared a mild antifever poultice and a measured dose of diluted syrup, instructing the mother in how to give it without forcing her child. He packed a small bundle with a rehydration recipe — sugar and salt boiled and cooled — and a note in heavy script: dosage, return in forty-eight hours, seek the barge doctor if convulsions start. His movements were surgical and gentle; in the end, the baby relaxed enough to drink the syrup and the sobs in the mother's chest abated.
The village responded quietly but with depth. Gratitude was measured in returned favors now: someone would watch the mother's second child while she slept; someone would ferry herbs in the morning. That small network formed a social scaffolding that kept life upright. Mike's hands had become a node in the net.
As word of his help spread the old man from the pier came by groaning and clutching his midriff. The bandits grumbled — old men had debts and grudges — but Mike accepted him the same. He learned that the man's chest pain came from a fracture-borne complication; an bruised rib that made every breath a small torture. Mike applied a stable splint and taught two of the bandits how to re-tie it and how to watch for signs of infection. He made sure the man's sleep position would ease the breath; he brewed a warming tea that eased the cough.
Small acts had a ripple. By night's end, people came not for miracles but for fixing — bandages, stitches, the knowledge that there was a person who carried a fix for the small disasters that stitched a village into continuity. Mike kept a ledger tucked beneath a jar — dates and names, reactions, measurements. He was, in his way, cataloging a small history of health for the place that had taken him on.
In the week that followed, his clinic work became a rhythm: a man with a splintered thumb, a woman whose fever needed cooling, a child with a twisted ankle after chasing geese. He improved his poultice recipe, adding a coagulant leaf for better clotting and a soothing resin to help hold a dressing. Makino learned to prepare the mix efficiently and store it in corked jars with chalk labels: "Fever — 2 tsp / day" and "Poultice — cool compresss 3x." They worked with a modest inventory but ordered what they lacked by word of mouth and the small market's favors.
These medical acts were also social capital. [SYSTEM] ACHIEVEMENT UNLOCKED: "Bandage Applied."Ticket earned: BRONZE
[SYSTEM] ACHIEVEMENT UNLOCKED: "Fever Broken."Ticket earned: BRONZE
Those simple system messages were like bell chimes, noting the small acts and giving Mike a quiet accounting of his contributions. He did not chase those messages; they arrived like small, bureaucratic approvals, and he let them sit in the back of his mind.
Between treatments he kept training. He worked on refining his Shadow Claws to be less conspicuous, more efficient: a cut that cutness without dissolving into blood. His unbreakable blade was never brandished in the clinic; it was a tool inspected and cleaned, kept for situations that required precision and reliability where a poorer weapon might fail. He practiced sand shaping at the bubbled bank near the south scarp, experimenting with angles and the velocity of release so that it could be used as a shield rather than only an abrasive weapon.
One afternoon, the harbor reeled with a different kind of emergency — a merchant's crate had toppled on a child tending a stall, and several large fish-laden barrels threatened to crush the small bay. Without thinking, Mike moved. He used the Poltergeist formally the first time in public that week: a brief offering of energy, a whispered mental command, and the ghost shoved the crate clear with ghostly hands while Mike leveraged the bat to steady the nearest barrel and redirect the load. No blood, no triumphant fanfare—just a child scooped up and dusted off.
[SYSTEM] ACHIEVEMENT UNLOCKED: "Net Untangled."Ticket earned: BRONZE – Net Untangled.
[SYSTEM] ACHIEVEMENT UNLOCKED: "Dock Cleared (Quick Salvage)."Ticket earned: SILVER – Dock Cleared.
These moments changed how people saw him. The bandits ceased to treat him as merely a curiosity. The mayor's representative, Woop Slap's assistant, came down one afternoon and watched a demonstration of the brace Mike had taught the crew. He left with a gruff comment but also the small, critical nod of a local authority.
All of it stitched a new map for Mike: he was a trainer and a healer and a technician. He could step into a role the village needed and provide consistency. That felt like currency far more stable than any coin.
That night, over a quiet supper, Luffy stuffed his face with rice and beans the way he always did, talking nonstop about tomorrow's drills. "We do the climb of the old cliff again, yes?" he asked around a mouthful.
"Yes," Mike said. "But we start slow. Footwork first." He thought of how training and medicine were two sides of the same coin: one prevented the sharp edge from landing, the other helped when it did.
As he was still in thought he decided to roll his tickets before sleep took him.
[ Blue Moon]
|Rarity: Common Item|
Terraria - A flail retrieved from the cursed dungeon. It is made out of incredibly durable material and the chain can stretch up to 50 meters long.
[ Spray Water]
|Rarity: Common Ability|
Allows you to unleash a spray of water from your hands like a showerhead or a hose. Useful for putting out fires and dousing people.
[ Heat Metal]
|Rarity: Uncommon Ability|
DnD - Allows you to increase the temperature of any metal in your sensory range, the more energy you expend the faster and hotter you can increase the target's temperature.
[Megaphone]
|Rarity: Common Ability|
Allows you to amplify all noises you create, they can get so loud that they disorientate and temporarily deafen opponents.
As he loooked at the rolls he got, exitement almost took over but exhaustion finally set in. He slept that night knowing that each small act of usefulness had forged a deeper place for him in the village — a place he intended to honor.