The sea literally parted for the Gates of Justice, violently churning as the colossal wooden doors groaned open.
Bogard stood near the bow of the dreadnought, the ocean spray misting against his dark grey suit.
He was ten years old, small for his age, practically swallowed by the massive, bustling environment of the Marine warship.
He kept the brim of his fedora pulled low, his eyes fixed on the towering, crescent-shaped fortress of Marineford rising from the water like a mountain of white stone and blue tile.
His left hand was glued to the black wooden scabbard at his hip.
His knuckles were white.
Ever since waking up in the medical bay, Bogard had realized something horrifying about his own mind.
The obsessive, murderous train of thought didn’t just disappear when he sheathed the sword.
It was always there, whispering in the dark, constantly mapping out the vulnerabilities of everything he saw.
The scabbard didn’t cure the disease; it just built a dam to hold the red water back.
A squad of Marine guards marched past him on the deck, their boots thundering in perfect unison.
One of them, a man easily pushing eight feet tall with shoulders as wide as a dining table, glanced down at the tiny boy in the suit.
‘Look at his spine,’ the cold, fragmented memory of his past life whispered in his head.
‘In the world I remember, a skeletal structure carrying that much upper body mass would buckle under its own weight.
The lumbar vertebrae would shatter just from walking.
But his posture is perfect.
His muscle fibers must be woven like industrial cable.
It is physically impossible for a normal person to strangle a man with a neck that thick; the muscle density would protect the windpipe.
I cannot out-muscle the anomalies of this world.
I have to dismantle their architecture.
Joints only bend one way, no matter how strong the bone is.’
Bogard exhaled a slow, shaky breath.
He squeezed the scabbard tighter.
The urge to draw the blade just a fraction of an inch to test the giant’s Achilles tendon was terrifyingly strong.
He forced the thought down, anchoring his sanity to the smooth wood under his palm.
“Intimidating, isn’t it?”
Vice Admiral Garp stepped up beside him, blocking out the sun.
The giant of a man was casually picking his nose, looking up at the towering fortress of Headquarters.
“Most rookies piss themselves the first time they see it,” Garp laughed, a booming, obnoxious sound that carried over the wind.
“But you’ve got that dead-fish look in your eyes, kid. Try to blink every once in a while. People are gonna think I adopted a corpse.”
Bogard didn’t say anything.
He just adjusted his fedora and followed Garp as the dreadnought finally docked.
Walking through the central courtyard of Marineford was a sensory overload of kinetic violence.
Thousands of soldiers were drilling in the punishing midday heat.
The air smelled of sweat, hot dust, and gun oil.
Everywhere Bogard looked, he saw men lifting boulders that should have crushed their spines, or leaping thirty feet into the air as if gravity were merely a suggestion.
His fragmented assassin’s mind was working in overdrive, frantically trying to reconcile the unbreakable laws of physics with the cartoonish reality playing out in front of him.
‘The man running laps with the iron anchor on his back.
A normal human heart would burst from the blood pressure required to supply oxygen to those muscles.
Yet he isn’t even hyperventilating.
His cardiovascular system is an anomaly.
Lethal injection or blood-loss tactics would be inefficient; his body would likely clot a severed artery in seconds.’
Bogard swallowed hard, keeping his head down.
*I am surrounded by monsters,* he thought, the terrified fisherman’s son surfacing for just a moment before the cold logic pushed the fear away.
Garp didn’t take him to the administrative offices to fill out paperwork.
Instead, the Vice Admiral veered right, kicking open the iron gates of a cadet training ground.
“Lieutenant!” Garp bellowed, his voice silencing the chorus of grunting and clashing wooden swords.
A heavily scarred man with a missing left ear snapped to attention, saluting so hard he nearly bruised his own forehead.
“Vice Admiral Garp, sir! We are honored by your presence!”
“Yeah, yeah, save it,” Garp waved a dismissive, calloused hand.
He reached down, grabbed Bogard by the scruff of his tailored suit, and unceremoniously dropped the ten-year-old into the dusty training ring.
“This is Bogard. He’s my new shadow. Teach him how to swing a stick without cutting his own foot off.”
The Lieutenant blinked, looking down at the tiny, dead-eyed boy in the fedora.
The fifty cadets in the courtyard—all teenagers ranging from fourteen to eighteen, heavily muscled and covered in bruises—started whispering.
A few of them snickered.
“Sir,” the Lieutenant hesitated.
“He’s… a bit small for the standard curriculum. And he’s armed.”
“He doesn’t draw the sword,” Garp said, his voice dropping its jovial tone, turning hard and absolute.
“Under any circumstances. Give him a *bokken*.”
A heavy wooden practice sword was tossed onto the dirt at Bogard’s feet.
It was thick, carved from solid oak, and nearly as tall as he was.
Bogard looked at the piece of wood.
Then, he looked at the cadets.
‘Fifty hostiles.
Unarmored.
Armed with blunt force instruments.
Their stances are rigid, relying entirely on upper body strength to force a block.
They fight like brawlers, not killers.’
Bogard calmly reached down and picked up the *bokken* with his right hand.
He didn’t assume a traditional kendo stance.
He simply let the heavy wood hang at his side, the tip resting in the dirt.
His left hand remained firmly locked onto the black scabbard of his real sword at his waist.
“Alright,” the Lieutenant sighed, clearly thinking this was one of Garp’s legendary, terrible jokes.
“Rance. Step up. Go easy on the kid. Just check his reflexes.”
A hulking sixteen-year-old stepped into the ring.
Rance was built like a brick wall, sporting a buzzcut and a cocky grin.
He cracked his neck, casually swinging his wooden sword, creating an audible *whoosh* in the air.
“Don’t cry when I tap you, kid,” Rance mocked.
“I don’t want Garp breathing down my neck because I bruised his new pet.”
Garp walked over to the edge of the ring, sat down on a barrel, and pulled out a fresh bag of rice crackers.
“Begin,” he mumbled with a mouthful of food.
Rance lunged.
He didn’t hold back as much as he was told to.
He swung the heavy oak *bokken* in a wide, sweeping horizontal arc aimed directly at Bogard’s ribs, intending to knock the wind out of the boy and end the spar in a single second.
To the cadets, Rance moved fast.
To Bogard, bathed in the hyper-focused, obsessive adrenaline of his fragmented mind, the teenager was moving through molasses.
‘His swing is entirely driven by his shoulders,’ Bogard’s internal monologue dissected instantly.
‘He telegraphed the attack by shifting all his weight to his right heel.
A normal human from the world I remember would tear their rotator cuff generating that much torque with a heavy object.
His bones and ligaments can handle the strain, but his momentum is entirely committed.
He cannot stop the swing.’ Enjoying the story? Read on at g.com.
Bogard didn’t block.
If he tried to block a strike from a boy twice his mass, his ten-year-old forearms would instantly shatter.
Instead, Bogard stepped inside the arc.
He moved forward and diagonally to the left, slipping into the narrow pocket of empty air right behind the swing.
Before Rance even realized his target was gone, Bogard brought his own *bokken* up in a short, violently precise upward jab.
He didn’t swing for the head or the ribs.
He used the blunt wooden tip to strike the underside of Rance’s right elbow joint at the exact millisecond the teenager’s arm was fully extended.
The kinetic energy of Rance’s own massive swing had nowhere to go.
It rebounded against the hyperextended joint with a sickening *pop*.
Rance let out a startled, breathless yelp as his right arm instantly went numb, the wooden sword slipping from his fingers.
‘Brachial plexus compromised.
Severe localized paralysis.
Target is off balance.
Capitalize.’
Before Rance’s *bokken* even hit the dirt, Bogard pivoted smoothly on his heel.
Using the momentum of his turn, he swept his wooden blade behind Rance’s left knee, striking the peroneal nerve with a sharp, calculated snap.
Rance’s leg gave out completely.
The hulking teenager collapsed into the dust like a puppet with its strings cut, grasping his numb arm and gasping in shock.
Total elapsed time: two seconds.
The training courtyard plunged into a dead, horrifying silence.
Fifty cadets stared in absolute disbelief.
The Lieutenant’s jaw went slack.
No one had even seen the kid wind up for a strike.
It looked less like a fight and more like the boy had simply touched Rance, causing the larger cadet’s body to spontaneously fall apart.
In the center of the ring, Bogard didn’t celebrate.
He didn’t smirk.
He stood perfectly still, his breathing completely unchanged, his left hand still anchored to the scabbard of his real katana.
The shadow of his fedora hid his eyes, but the cold, radiating apathy rolling off his small frame was suffocating.
‘Anatomy is still anatomy,’ Bogard thought quietly, feeling the adrenaline slowly recede.
‘They may have skin like iron and muscles like hydraulic presses, but nerves still cluster.
Joints still buckle when forced against their hinges.
I don’t need to overpower the monsters.
I just need to unmake them.’
From the edge of the courtyard, a loud, booming laugh shattered the silence.
Garp was practically falling off his barrel, slapping his knee in delight, rice crackers spilling into the dust.
“Bwahahaha! I told you, Lieutenant! He doesn’t need to learn how to swing it. He just needs to learn how not to kill the people he hits!”
Bogard looked over at the laughing Vice Admiral.
The suffocating red mist of the Absolute Murderer was still pacing like a caged animal in the back of his mind, but as he looked down at the groaning teenager in the dirt, he realized something crucial.
He hadn’t drawn his sword.
He hadn’t surrendered to the red mist.
He had used the cold, fragmented knowledge of his past life not to slaughter, but to survive.
For the first time since his parents died in the poisoned square of Oakhaven, Bogard felt a tiny, microscopic fraction of control.
“Next,” Bogard said.
His voice was quiet, deadpan, and completely devoid of inflection.
The cadets collectively took a step back.