The dojo of Old Man Hiro, tucked away a few muddy blocks inland from Port Lily's bustling fish market, was not impressive. It was a single, squat building constructed of dark, sea-weathered wood, smelling perpetually of pine resin, sweat, and the sharp tang of the nearby ocean. It was known simply as the Hiro Dojo, and its master, Hiro, was a man as silent and sturdy as the rock formations that guarded the harbor.
Hiro was well into his seventies, but his back was ramrod straight, and his eyes, though hooded by age, were sharp and penetrating. He wore simple, faded indigo robes, and he never raised his voice. His method was repetition, precision, and absolute endurance. To him, the path to the sword began not in the hands, but in the feet, the core, and the unyielding spirit.
Adam's training began the moment the first rays of the Grand Line sun touched the eastern horizon, long before the first fishermen awoke. He would slip out of Elara's clinic, his still-healing body heavy with fatigue, and arrive at the dojo grounds where he would find Hiro already waiting.
Hiro's initial focus was not on the sword, but on breaking down Adam's seven-year-old body and rebuilding it for the brutal physics of combat. It was a daily, mind-numbing grind that made Adam vomit more often than he managed to eat a decent breakfast. The rigorous discipline was necessary to strip away childish softness and build the iron will required for a life on the high seas.
The physical conditioning was designed to demand absolute and total effort. Adam had to embrace constant discomfort, turning the grinding pain into a familiar companion.
First came The Circuit: a relentless, continuous loop of punishing exercises performed on the coarse-gravel courtyard.
1. Endurance Laps: Running barefoot around the perimeter of the dojo and then onto the beach, where the sand was soft and treacherous. Adam's feet were a tapestry of cuts, calluses, and blisters. The goal wasn't speed; it was sustained, agonizing effort. When he felt his lungs might collapse, Hiro would simply stare, and Adam would force another lap, imagining the vast, terrifying sea they needed to conquer and the kind of strength it would take to navigate it.
2. The Stance of Agony: This was perhaps the most psychologically draining exercise, known as the Shiko-dachi (Sumo Stance). Adam would assume the position—legs spread wide, knees bent ninety degrees, back straight—and simply hold it. He wasn't allowed to move, shift, or even tremble visibly. He would stand there, bathed in his own sweat, until the muscles in his thighs ceased to feel like flesh and began to feel like hot, liquid agony. He would occasionally pass out from the effort, only to be roused by a splash of cold water and told, "Again." After an hour of this, his knees would lock up, and the simple act of standing straight was a monumental victory that proved his growing mental fortitude.
3. The Iron Swing: Hiro had him fill two massive, rusty metal buckets with seawater until they weighed nearly twenty pounds each—more than a third of Adam's body weight. He was then forced to hold these buckets with arms outstretched, mimicking the arc of a vertical sword swing, repeating the motion for hundreds of repetitions until his shoulders felt disconnected from his torso. This exercise was critical; it built the fundamental, explosive power needed to stop the movement of a heavy sword after a strike, preventing the disastrous recoil that could throw a green fighter off balance.
Adam was constantly sore, permanently exhausted, and hungry—a state that became his new normal. He rarely slept soundly, often waking up to the cramping of his overworked core muscles. But slowly, imperceptibly, his stamina grew. The runs became less of a crawl, the iron buckets felt slightly less impossible to hold aloft, and the Shiko-dachi stance could be held for a minute longer each week. This progress was not a sudden leap; it was the microscopic, painful accumulation of resilience that hardened his spirit.
Only once his body began to demonstrate some foundational durability did Hiro allow Adam to touch the sword: a simple, unadorned bokken (wooden sword) made of hard, heavy oak. It was a weapon of training, not of war, but in Adam's hands, it felt heavy as an anchor.
The lessons in technique were a testament to Hiro's obsessive demand for perfection. Adam wasn't taught complicated, showy moves; he was taught one move, the ultimate foundational strike: the Kirioroshi (the Vertical Downward Cut).
The entire session revolved around this single, essential movement, practiced thousands of times until muscle memory supplanted conscious thought:
1. The Grip (Tsuka-ate): Hiro would spend thirty minutes adjusting Adam's hands. The grip had to be firm but not rigid, centered on the hilt, with the pinky and ring fingers doing most of the work to ensure control and a snapping finish. "Your fingers," Hiro would murmur, tapping Adam's knuckles with a stick, "are the last lock. They guide the blade, they do not crush it. Control is everything."
2. The Stance (Kamae): Adam had to stand in a perfect Chūdan-no-kamae (Middle Guard): feet shoulder-width apart, bokken pointed slightly forward and down toward an invisible opponent's eyes. It was a deceptively simple stance that demanded perfect balance, instant readiness, and absolute economy of movement—no wasted energy.
3. The Swing: The power had to originate in the solid platform of the legs and hips, traveling up the spine and exploding out through the arms and blade tip. The swing had to be perfectly vertical, starting high above the head and ending precisely at Adam's belt height—cutting through the opponent's imaginary center mass.
• Slicing the Wind: The ultimate goal was to make the bokken cut the air so cleanly that it produced a sharp, distinct Kaze-otoshi (wind-fall sound), indicating the precise moment the blade achieved maximum speed and efficiency. For months, Adam's swings were floppy, weak, and off-center. They made only a dull, disheartening whoosh. It took four solid months of two thousand repetitions a day—a cycle of sweat, splinters, and frustration—before he heard his first faint, satisfying snap! as the blade tip broke the sound barrier of the air. It was a sound that tasted like victory, but only signaled the very first milestone.
Their life in Port Lily established a strange but necessary structure, a fusion of hard work and youthful determination. The town, nestled on the edge of a relatively peaceful stretch of the Grand Line, felt busy but surprisingly honest. It was a hub for small merchant ships and fishing trawlers, its residents hardened by the sea but generally good-natured, thanks in part to the quiet, dignified presence of Elara.
Luke and Adam's routine was tight and demanding:
• Dawn: Adam's intensive dojo training, a personal war against inertia and pain.
• Morning: Clinic duties. They ran errands for Elara—delivering powerful poultices to fishermen with deep rope burns, or tinctures to the docks to treat mild cases of scurvy among crews arriving from long voyages. Luke's quick wits and Adam's new, growing stamina made them excellent, reliable runners. This work immersed them in the real life of the Grand Line, exposing them to the common ailments and rough edges of sailing.
• Afternoon: Luke would use this time for his own experiments, usually involving scrap metal scavenged from the junk piles behind the shipwrights' yards. He was learning the range and limits of his magnetic powers, often practicing in secret on the deserted back beach, focusing the subtle pull of his fruit on handfuls of iron-rich sand, slowly increasing the mass he could manipulate from a distance. He was driven by a need to master his overwhelming gift.
• Evening: Homework (Elara insisted they study essential skills: local cartography, basic Grand Line arithmetic, and medicinal botany) and dinner, often a simple, nourishing fish stew that smelled of the sea.
This demanding rhythm helped ground Adam. Every time he carried a heavy sack of dried herbs for Elara, he felt the same muscles that ached from Hiro's training. The discipline of the dojo was leaking into every corner of his life, turning him from a panicked orphan into a focused, deliberate young man. He was learning the local geography of the island, the names of local fish and medicinal plants, and the complex, unspoken rules of the Grand Line life—all valuable education for future sailors.
Luke remained Adam's greatest motivator and most irritating critic. Luke had discovered that his own powers—the ability to move metal with a mere thought—felt almost effortless, an unbelievable contrast to Adam's grinding physical toil. Luke's genius was in leveraging that ease to maintain their competitive, yet loving, dynamic.
"Still swinging that oak plank, Swordsman?" Luke would tease, his lips curved in a confident smirk. He might be casually using a magnetic field to lift the heavy, brass mortar and pestle from a low shelf, levitating it precisely to Elara's counter with barely a flicker of effort.
Adam, catching his breath after a brutal session of practice, would scowl, wiping sweat from his brow with the back of a callused hand. "It's a bokken, and I'm building power from the ground up! You can only pull metal. What happens when your opponent is pure rubber or fire? Or if we land on an island made of sea prism stone?"
"Then I pick up the nearest cannonball or a hunk of shipwrecked metal and treat him like a magnetic target practice," Luke retorted with a casual wave of his hand, but the exchange always sharpened Adam's resolve. He knew his friend was right about the fruit's power, but he also understood its limitations. The Magnet-Magnet Fruit was a phenomenal power, but it had glaring weaknesses. Adam's path, the way of the sword, was a slower, more painful, but ultimately more versatile route to strength, one built on the certainty of his own honed body. He wasn't training to compete with Luke; he was training to be the necessary shield and the all-purpose weapon that Luke needed.
One afternoon, after a particularly exhausting session, Luke found Adam practicing a slow, heavy Kirioroshi in the fading light. Adam was dripping with sweat, his shirt soaked through, his brow furrowed in concentration.
"Your form is better," Luke conceded, leaning against the doorframe, admiring the snap of the swing. "It took Hiro almost a year to get you to stop rotating your wrists, didn't it?"
Adam dropped the bokken to his side, his arm shaking with fatigue. "It took ten months and a cane across my knuckles, yes." He paused, looking at the distant silhouette of the cargo ships waiting in the port. "I'm nowhere close to being strong, Luke. I still can't swing it without losing my balance after the snap."
"You won't be strong tomorrow. Or the day after," Luke said, his voice unusually serious, dropping the teasing persona. "But your roots are getting deeper. Every morning, you're planting yourself firmly in the dirt of this world. My power is a gift—it came free. Yours is forged in pain, repetition, and your own will. And that, Adam, is the only strength that truly lasts."
After nearly a year in Port Lily, Adam was still just a child with a wooden sword. He couldn't cut a pebble, he couldn't shatter a tree trunk, and he certainly couldn't face down a grown pirate. He was still a boy.
But the transformation was visible in subtle, yet powerful, ways. His shoulders had broadened, his core was a knot of tight muscle, and his focus was terrifyingly sharp—a deep, adult intensity in his eyes. He could endure physical pain for longer than any child his age. His movements were cleaner, more intentional, and balanced. The bokken no longer felt like an awkward piece of wood; it felt like a heavy, familiar extension of his arm. The rhythmic snap! of his Kirioroshi was now consistent, a sharp, reliable sound that promised future devastation.
He was still at the very beginning of the path, but the first agonizing phase of tempering the flesh was complete. Adam was no longer the fragile orphan who had been beaten bloody in the forest. He was a piece of raw steel, heated and hammered, ready for the next, equally painful stage of the blade's forging.
The path to becoming a pirate king's defender was long, dangerous, and demanding, and Adam had just taken his first, agonizing step with an unbreakable determination.