Over the next six months, the cadet courtyard at Marineford learned a very simple, unspoken rule: Do not engage with Garp’s shadow.
Bogard, now approaching his eleventh birthday, had become a ghost haunting the sun-baked training grounds of Headquarters.
He didn’t sleep in the barracks with the other recruits.
He didn’t eat in the mess hall.
He stood at the edge of the courtyard, dressed in his tailored dark grey suit and fedora, his left hand permanently glued to the black wooden scabbard at his hip.
The other cadets—teenagers built like brick houses who could shatter stone pillars with their bare hands—avoided him like the plague.
They had all seen what happened to Rance.
The hulking boy had spent three weeks in the medical ward trying to regain the feeling in his arm and leg.
‘In the world I remember,’ Bogard’s internal monologue hummed quietly, analyzing a group of cadets sparring fifty yards away, ‘a child isolated in a high-stress, militarized environment would suffer severe psychological degradation.
The human brain requires social friction to maintain empathy.
But the isolation is necessary here.
If they get too close, if they surprise me, the red mist will react.
It will calculate the fastest way to collapse their tracheas before I can stop it.
The scabbard keeps the monster locked in a cage, but it doesn’t make me deaf to its barking.’
He squeezed the smooth wood of the sheath.
It was his anchor.
His sanity.
Suddenly, the hairs on the back of Bogard’s neck stood straight up.
The fragmented instincts of his past life—the master assassin who had survived a hundred firefights—screamed at him to move.
There was no sound.
There was no battle cry.
‘Incoming mass.
Twelve o’clock.
Velocity is completely abnormal.
The air is compressing in front of the object.’
He simply pivoted on his right heel, dropping his center of gravity and throwing his small body violently to the left.
A split second later, a solid iron cannonball the size of a watermelon slammed into the exact spot he had been standing.
The impact sounded like a bomb going off.
A crater five feet deep exploded into the dirt courtyard, sending a shower of pulverized rock and dust raining down over the terrified cadets.
The sheer kinetic wind pressure of the passing cannonball tore a shallow gash across Bogard’s cheek.
He hit the dirt, rolling gracefully to his feet, his thumb instinctively clicking the katana a millimeter out of its scabbard.
A faint, terrifying wisp of blood-red mist leaked from the exposed steel.
“Too slow!” a booming voice echoed from the balconies above.
Bogard snapped the sword shut.
The red mist vanished instantly.
He looked up, wiping a bead of blood from his cheek.
Vice Admiral Garp was standing on a third-story balcony overlooking the courtyard, casually tossing a second iron cannonball up and down in one hand like it was a baseball.
He was grinning from ear to ear, clearly amused by the crater he had just put in the middle of a Marine training facility.
“You’re relying entirely on visual tracking and basic anatomy, Bogard!” Garp yelled down, entirely ignoring the panicked cadets scrambling out of the way.
“You saw Rance wind up a punch, so you knew where the punch was going! But a cannonball doesn’t have shoulders! A sword slash from a master doesn’t telegraph! If you wait for your eyes to tell you where the danger is, you’re already dead!”
‘He threw a two-hundred-pound sphere of solid iron over three hundred feet with enough precision to clip my cheek without shattering my skull,’ Bogard analyzed, his chest heaving as the adrenaline flushed through his ten-year-old veins.
‘A normal human arm would tear itself from the socket generating that kind of torque.
The leverage required is completely impossible.
He isn’t using his muscles.
He is using something else.’
Garp leapt from the third-story balcony.
He didn’t brace for the fall.
He simply slammed into the courtyard, cracking the stone tiles beneath his boots, and casually strolled over to the boy.
“Your instincts are sharp, kid,” Garp rumbled, towering over Bogard.
“You’ve got the mind of a killer. You look at a man, and you see a meat puzzle waiting to be taken apart. I don’t know who you were before you woke up in that village, and I don’t care. But the tricks you used in your past life aren’t going to cut it in the New World.”
Garp pointed a massive finger at the crater.
“Out there, you’re going to fight pirates who are made of magma. Men who can turn into literal light. Monsters who can shatter the air itself just by punching it. You can’t hyperextend an elbow if the man is made of fire, kid.”
‘He is right.
My fragmented memories rely on the unbreakable laws of human biology.
But biology is a suggestion to the people at the top of this world.
If I try to fight an anomaly with normal geometry, I will die.’
“So,” Garp grinned, a terrifying, predatory smile that promised absolute agony.
“We are going to beat that old logic out of you. We are going to teach your body how to break the rules.”
“How?” Bogard asked softly, his voice completely deadpan beneath the brim of his fedora.
“By throwing you off a cliff, obviously,” Garp laughed, slapping Bogard on the back so hard the boy’s boots left the ground.
“Come on. Pack a lunch. You’re going to need the calories.”
**Author’s Note** *Faceplants into a massive pile of textbooks…* **Typing_In_My_Sleep** here.
First off, let’s clear something up.
If you are reading some of the hyper-detailed thoughts or descriptions in this story and thinking, *”Bro is definitely using AI,”* I can assure you I’m not.
I am just elbow-deep in studying human anatomy.
When my brain is this heavily fried from strenuous studying, weirdly specific biological details just naturally bleed into my writing.
Speaking of my brain being fried, real-life is currently kicking my butt.
Here is the deal: I am committing to uploading **at least 20 chapters** of this story.
Once we hit chapter 20, I’ll take a step back and decide if I can actually keep juggling this along with my studies.
Trying to edit chapters while memorizing body parts is draining whatever little sleep I have left, and we all know how much I value my naps.
Since I am basically a walking zombie right now, my *advanced forgiveness* policy remains fully active.
If I upload the wrong chapter again, mess up the formatting, or write a sentence that makes absolutely zero sense…
please just blame the anatomy books.
Alright, back to cramming…
or snoring.
Definitely snoring.