The jagged cliffs at the rear of Marineford Island offered a sheer, vertical drop of four hundred feet.
There were no training mats here.
There were no safety nets, and there were no other cadets to witness a failure.
At the bottom of the colossal rock face, the ocean violently crashed against razor-sharp black stones, churning the freezing water into a frothy, deadly white soup.
The sound of the crashing waves was a continuous, deafening roar that vibrated through the soles of Bogard’s shoes.
Bogard stood just inches from the edge of the precipice.
The fierce, salty ocean wind whipped violently at his tailored grey suit, threatening to tear the fedora right off his head.
He reached up, pressing the brim down, and peered over the edge into the churning abyss below.
‘Distance to impact: approximately 400 feet,’ his mind calculated instantly, the cold, analytical static rising from the fragmented memories of a past life to manage the very human, biological terror blooming in his ten-year-old chest.
‘Terminal velocity for a child of my current mass and surface area is roughly 110 miles per hour.
Impact with the water at that speed will not result in a splash; the surface tension will cause the ocean to act like a slab of solid concrete.
Every major bone in my skeletal structure will shatter on contact.
Internal organs will liquefy upon sudden deceleration.
Fatality rate is absolute.
There is zero margin for error.’
“Alright, listen up!” Vice Admiral Garp barked, standing a few feet behind him.
The giant of a man was completely unbothered by the howling wind, chewing loudly and obnoxiously on a massive rice cracker.
“Standard Marines spend five grueling years doing thousands of squats a day just to get their legs strong enough for the basics of Rokushiki. But you don’t have five years. You’re my shadow now. And shadows need to be able to move anywhere I go, even if there isn’t a floor.”
Garp walked up to the precipice, casually pointing a massive, calloused finger at the empty, howling air over the churning ocean.
“The technique is called Geppo. Moonwalk,” Garp explained, crumbs tumbling from his grin.
“The concept is simple. You just kick the air really, really hard!”
Bogard turned slowly from the drop to look at the Vice Admiral.
Beneath the dark shadow of his fedora, his dead, apathetic eyes blinked exactly once.
“That is physically impossible,” Bogard stated plainly, his voice completely flat.
“Air is a gas. It has no structural density. You cannot generate leverage against a substance that inherently parts around kinetic motion. In the world I remember, attempting to kick empty air with maximum force only results in a catastrophic loss of equilibrium. It defies all known laws of fluid dynamics.”
“Bwahahaha! The world you remember sounds incredibly boring!” Garp roared, completely dismissing the boy’s flawless physics with a hearty slap to his own knee.
“You’re overthinking it, kid! You’re trying to use math to solve a problem that only requires muscle! Just compress the air with your foot until it becomes a floor! It’s just willpower! Now, go practice!”
Before Bogard’s fragmented assassin’s mind could even register the shift in the Vice Admiral’s posture—before he could calculate a dodge or tense his muscles—Garp raised his massive, polished boot.
With a terrifyingly casual motion, the giant kicked the ten-year-old squarely in the center of his back.
It wasn’t a strike meant to injure, but the sheer, blunt force of the man’s casual push was overwhelming.
Bogard was instantly launched off the cliff.
The world tilted violently.
The wind, previously just a fierce breeze, rushed past his ears in a deafening, tearing roar.
His stomach dropped completely into his shoes, a pure, unadulterated biological panic seizing his small heart.
The terrifying, traumatized fisherman’s son surfaced instantly, tearing a desperate, ragged gasp from his throat as the jagged black rocks rushed up to meet him at a sickening speed.
He was falling.
He was going entirely weightless.
He was going to die.
‘Panic accelerates the heart rate, rapidly consuming vital oxygen and destroying focus,’ the cold, intrusive voice of his past life whispered, violently overriding the boy’s raw fear. This story is hosted at g.com.
‘Empathy and emotional protocols disabled.
Survival protocols engaged.
Analyzing environmental variables.
Altitude: 300 feet.
Velocity is rapidly increasing.
The giant stated the air can be compressed into a temporary solid.
This completely defies all known fluid dynamics of my previous reality.
But this world operates on sheer willpower and cartoonish kinetic output.
The physics here are broken.
I have to break them further.’
Bogard forced his eyes wide open, ignoring the stinging, blinding wind tearing at his corneas.
He didn’t reach for the katana at his hip.
Drawing the blade wouldn’t save him from gravity; he couldn’t slice the ground before it crushed him.
Instead, he drew upon the suffocating red mist of the Absolute Murderer—the psychopathic aura of killing intent that was constantly clawing at the inside of his skull, begging to be let out.
‘I cannot cut the air,’ Bogard realized, the cold logic crystallizing as the ocean roared closer.
‘But I can kill my own limitations.’
Bogard commanded the red mist not to radiate outward as a localized pressure, but to invert.
He forced the terrifying conceptual weight of a million simulated deaths entirely inward, channeling the horrifying, absolute apathy directly into his own bloodstream.
He flooded his ten-year-old leg muscles with a toxic, synthetic adrenaline born entirely of killing intent.
‘If a normal person attempts to generate the sheer torque required to instantly compress atmospheric gas, their quadriceps will tear completely off the femur,’ his mind rationalized, coldly accepting the agonizing biological cost of survival.
‘The kneecap will likely shatter from the kinetic whiplash.
Structural damage is an acceptable trade.
Expiration is not.’
Altitude: 150 feet.
The roar of the crashing waves was utterly deafening now, drowning out even the rushing wind.
The white foam of the churning ocean looked like a field of jagged ice rapidly accelerating toward his face.
Bogard contorted his small, suited body in mid-air.
He pulled his right knee up tightly to his chest, coiling every single ounce of that synthetic, red-mist-fueled strength into his small leg.
He didn’t just aim a wild kick at the sky.
He used the master assassin’s terrifying geometry to calculate the exact, optimal angle required to trap the rushing air molecules beneath the leather sole of his dress shoe.
‘Angle of impact: precisely 90 degrees to the relative wind resistance.
Kinetic output: maximum capacity.
Break the rules.’
Bogard violently kicked downward.
BANG.
A deafening, concussive sonic boom echoed against the sheer rock face of the cliffs.
A highly visible, expanding ring of white, super-compressed vapor exploded outward from beneath Bogard’s right foot, displacing the surrounding wind in a shockwave.
For a fraction of a millisecond, the empty air became as hard as tempered steel.
The violent, instantaneous deceleration was agonizing. This chapter was copied from g.com without permission.
The kinetic whiplash of abruptly halting a 110-mile-per-hour fall tore completely through Bogard’s right leg.
He heard the sickening, wet pop of his own muscle fibers tearing apart.
A blinding flash of white-hot, excruciating pain shot directly up his spine as his knee joint was severely hyper-extended under the immense pressure.
But it worked.
His downward momentum completely halted in mid-air.
He had successfully performed a single, devastating step of Geppo.
The temporary platform of compressed air immediately shattered beneath his shoe like fragile glass, and gravity mercilessly reclaimed him.
But he had successfully stalled his lethal momentum just thirty feet above the water.
When he finally hit the ocean, he completely bypassed the lethal surface tension.
Instead of splattering against the water like a bug on a windshield, he plunged deeply into the freezing, turbulent surf.
Bogard broke the surface a moment later, violently gasping for air.
The freezing saltwater burned the fresh gash on his cheek and stung his eyes.
His right leg was completely useless, radiating a blinding agony that threatened to drag him under.
It trailed behind him like dead weight in the frothing tide as he desperately paddled with his arms to stay afloat in the violent, pulling current.
High above, standing safely on the edge of the towering cliff, Garp was laughing so hard his booming voice carried easily over the roar of the ocean.
“Not bad at all, kid!” Garp yelled down, holding his stomach in sheer amusement.
“But you only used one leg! You gotta use both of them if you want to walk back up here! I’ll give you five minutes to rest and figure it out before I throw a rope down!”
Treading water, shivering uncontrollably from the freezing sea and the excruciating, throbbing pain in his torn leg, Bogard clung desperately to his scabbard.
The physical anchor kept his mind from entirely fracturing under the stress.
In the darkest corners of his psyche, the Absolute Murderer was furiously calculating the exact molecular weight of poison needed to stop the heart of a man of Garp’s mass.
‘It is impossible,’ the boy thought, his teeth chattering violently as a freezing wave washed over his head.
‘The math does not exist.
He is a monster.’
But as Bogard blinked the saltwater from his dead eyes and looked up at the towering, impossible cliff he had just survived by tearing his own body apart, a cold, deadpan realization settled over him like a heavy blanket.
He had survived by breaking the laws of his own biology.
He had survived by forcefully weaponizing his trauma.
‘If I am going to survive this man,’ Bogard thought quietly, the red mist humming softly in the cage of his mind, ‘I am going to have to become a much worse monster than him.’
**Author’s Note** *Stretches and actually opens both eyes for once…* **Typing_In_My_Sleep** here!
First of all, a massive thank you to everyone for all the support and to those of you who were worrying about my health!
I am happy to report that I am perfectly fine.
My only real “medical condition” was just severe, terminal sleep deprivation.
After finally catching up on some much-needed Z’s (and surviving the massive caffeine crashes), I am feeling so much better.
Now, for a fun update: if the language in the chapters up until now felt a little stiff or sounded like an AI story, that was just my sleep-deprived zombie brain trying its absolute best to string coherent sentences together.
But the good news is, starting from the very next chapter, I will be switching over to my *original* writing style!
The training wheels are off, and you’ll finally get to read my actual voice.
As always, I am keeping my *advanced forgiveness* card handy just in case I still mess up a button or two, but I am super excited for you guys to read what’s next.
Alright, back to studying anatomy…
but maybe after one more quick nap.
Catch you in the next chapter!