The first profound thought that crossed Bogard’s mind after spending an entire year traveling the Grand Line with Vice Admiral Monkey D.
Garp was not about justice, duty, or the indomitable Marine spirit.
It was, quite simply: *The laws of physics in this universe are a polite suggestion, and I am entirely too sober for this.*
He was eleven years old now.
The tailored grey suit he wore was already getting a bit short at the ankles, a byproduct of the absurd diet Garp forced upon him.
For the past twelve months, Bogard had been dragged across the most chaotic oceans in the world.
He had seen men who could turn their arms into literal scissors.
He had watched pirates shrug off point-blank cannon fire because they simply *believed* they were tough enough.
He had spent his eleventh birthday watching Garp punch a sea king the size of a cathedral into a fine red mist just because it interrupted his nap.
Bogard’s fragmented, past-life assassin’s mind—the cold, calculating part of him that mapped out human anatomy based on actual science—was in a state of perpetual, exhausted denial.
Currently, Bogard was sitting on the edge of a steel cot in the Marineford medical bay, staring blankly at his right leg.
During a raid on a pirate galleon yesterday, a particularly massive buccaneer wielding a ship’s mast like a baseball bat had managed to clip Bogard’s thigh before the boy could completely dodge.
The impact had snapped his femur like a dry twig.
‘In the world I remember,’ Bogard’s internal monologue hummed, a lazy, deadpan drawl cutting through the underlying psychopathic static in his brain, ‘a compound fracture of the femur requires emergency surgery, titanium rods, and six months of agonizing physical therapy.
At best, you walk with a cane for the rest of your life.
At worst, a fat embolus travels to your lungs and you die.’
An older Marine doctor with a thick mustache walked over, holding a glass bottle of standard, full-fat cow’s milk.
He tossed it to the eleven-year-old.
“Drink that, kid,” the doctor grunted, not even bothering to look at the horrifying purple bruising on Bogard’s leg.
“Do some light stretching. You’ll be back to drills by noon.”
Bogard caught the cold bottle.
Beneath the shadow of his fedora, his dead eyes stared at the glass in profound, exhausted disbelief.
He popped the cap.
He drank the milk.
Almost immediately, a horrifying, unnatural warmth spread through his right leg.
He could literally feel his shattered femur knitting itself back together, the bone snapping into perfect alignment with a series of sickening, wet *pops*.
The deep purple bruising faded to a dull yellow right before his eyes.
‘Ah, yes.
Calcium,’ Bogard thought, tossing the empty bottle into a nearby trash can.
‘The ultimate cure for catastrophic structural damage.
Biology here is just magic with a protein quota.
I hate it here.’
By noon, Bogard was walking perfectly fine.
He didn’t return to his quarters to rest.
He didn’t take a nap, though he desperately wanted one.
He walked straight to the cadet training courtyard, his left hand resting lazily on the black wooden scabbard at his hip.
The midday sun beat down on the packed dirt.
Over a hundred cadets were running drills, sweating through their uniforms and shouting with entirely too much enthusiasm for a Tuesday.
When they saw the small boy in the grey suit step through the iron gates, the drills came to a grinding halt.
The whispers started instantly.
They all remembered what Garp’s shadow was capable of.
Vice Admiral Garp was already there, sitting cross-legged on a massive boulder, casually eating a block of cheese the size of a dictionary.
“Look who decided to crawl out of the infirmary!” Garp boomed, spitting cheese crumbs everywhere.
“Leg feeling better, Bogard?”
“It has miraculously recovered, sir,” Bogard replied, his voice completely flat.
“I credit the bovine lactations.”
“Good!” Garp grinned, a terrifyingly wide expression.
“Because the Lieutenant over there has been complaining that my shadow is getting soft. So, today, you’re taking on a squad. And if you draw that sword, I’ll tie an anchor to your waist and throw you off the cliff again.”
Bogard let out a long, silent sigh.
He just wanted to find a quiet corner and read a book, but apparently, violence was mandatory.
He walked into the center of the ring.
Three cadets stepped forward.
They were older—easily seventeen or eighteen—and built like brick walls.
They clearly wanted to put Garp’s weird little pet in his place.
The Lieutenant tossed Bogard a heavy oak practice sword.
It landed in the dirt at the boy’s feet.
Bogard looked down at the wooden weapon.
He didn’t pick it up.
‘The oak is too long,’ his assassin’s mind calculated instantly.
‘If I swing a weapon of that length, the torque will require unnecessary cardio.
Cardio makes you sweat.
Sweating ruins the wool of this suit, and doing laundry builds character.
I actively avoid building character.’
Instead of grabbing the *bokken*, Bogard unclipped the leather strap holding his real katana to his belt.
He didn’t draw the blade.
He kept the steel firmly locked inside the black wooden scabbard, gripping the sheath itself near the middle, treating the entire sheathed weapon as a short, heavy baton.
The cadets frowned, instantly insulted.
“You’re fighting us with your scabbard?” the lead cadet sneered.
“Don’t cry to the Vice Admiral when we break your ribs, brat.”
‘Three hostiles.
Armed with blunt force instruments,’ the psychopathic red mist whispered from the dark corners of Bogard’s brain.
‘Target the trachea.
Rip the throat out.
Bathe in their arterial spray.’
‘Do you know how much paperwork is involved in murdering a Marine cadet?’ Bogard mentally replied to his inner demon.
‘It’s a logistical nightmare.
I’d be filling out forms until I’m twenty.
We are using blunt force.
It’s faster, and I don’t have to talk to HR.’
“Begin,” Bogard said quietly.
The lead cadet charged with a furious war cry, bringing his wooden sword down in a devastating overhead cleave designed to split Bogard in half.
Bogard didn’t block.
Blocking required upper body strength, which required effort.
Instead, he took a tiny half-step forward, lazily slipping inside the cadet’s guard before the downward swing could reach its maximum velocity.
He raised the black scabbard, angling it precisely at forty-five degrees.
The cadet’s *bokken* glanced off the polished wood, the heavy strike completely redirected into the dirt by its own momentum.
‘His center of mass is pitched forward.
The diaphragm is completely exposed.’
Bogard violently thrust the solid steel butt of his scabbard directly upward, burying it into the soft tissue just below the cadet’s sternum.
The impact collapsed the older boy’s diaphragm instantly.
All the oxygen was violently expelled from his lungs in a sickening *whoosh*.
The cadet’s eyes rolled back, and he dropped to his knees, utterly paralyzed by the inability to draw breath.
Total elapsed time: one point five seconds.
The other two cadets froze in shock.
That hesitation was exactly what Bogard needed to avoid breaking a sweat.
‘Target two is shifting his weight backward.
Target three is gripping his weapon too tight.
He will swing wide,’ the math unfolded effortlessly in his head.
Bogard spun on his heel.
He threw the heavy black scabbard like a javelin.
The wooden sheath blurred through the air, striking the third cadet squarely between the eyes with a hollow *thunk*.
The blunt force trauma snapped the boy’s head back, knocking him out cold before he even hit the ground.
Simultaneously, as the scabbard left his hands, Bogard dropped low.
He swept his leg in a tight, vicious arc, catching the remaining cadet precisely behind the ankles.
Before the cadet’s back could hit the dirt, Bogard was already there.
He had caught his scabbard as it ricocheted off the third cadet’s face.
The tip of the black wooden sheath was now resting gently against the final cadet’s Adam’s apple, pinning him to the earth.
The courtyard was dead silent.
Bogard stood over the terrified teenager, his chest barely rising.
His breathing was perfectly controlled.
The red mist of the Absolute Murderer had not surfaced.
He hadn’t needed it.
He had dismantled three giant, highly trained recruits in less than five seconds using nothing but basic structural flaws, gravity, and a profound desire to get the fight over with as quickly as possible.
Slowly, Bogard stepped back.
He clipped the katana back onto his belt, adjusting his fedora so the shadow fell over his eyes once more.
Garp, sitting on his boulder, had stopped eating his cheese.
The Vice Admiral was staring at the eleven-year-old with an expression of intense, quiet scrutiny.
“You didn’t broadcast it,” Garp rumbled, his voice carrying easily across the silent courtyard.
Bogard looked at him.
“Sir?”
“Your killing intent,” Garp said, hopping down from the boulder.
“When you fought on that island a year ago, you bled it everywhere. It was loud. Suffocating. But just now… you completely suppressed it. If I had closed my eyes, I wouldn’t have even known you were in the ring until those boys hit the dirt.”
Bogard looked down at his gloved hands.
Garp was right.
When he fought the soldiers at Oakhaven, the red mist had violently projected his intent to murder.
But here, relying solely on the cold, mathematical precision of his past life, he hadn’t wanted to kill them.
He just wanted them to go to sleep so he could do the same.
‘In this world, they use Observation Haki to sense the intent of a living creature,’ Bogard’s mind calculated, a lazy but brilliant realization dawning on him.
‘If I completely sever my empathy…
if I view my targets not as living enemies, but simply as a math problem delaying my free time…
I project no malice.
I project no intent.
I become entirely invisible to their radar.’
It was the ultimate hack.
Laziness disguised as lethal stealth.
“You’re a terrifying little brat,” Garp sighed, though there was a glint of fierce pride in his eyes.
He walked over and ruffled Bogard’s fedora.
“Clean up. Tomorrow, we start working on your stealth properly. If you’re going to be my shadow, you need to learn how to disappear even when the sun is shining.”
“Understood, sir,” Bogard replied, his voice a quiet, emotionless whisper.
Internally, he groaned.
More training meant more cardio.
But as he looked at the three unconscious cadets on the ground, he realized the faster he perfected this ‘no-intent’ math, the faster he could finish his fights and get back to doing absolutely nothing.
The Absolute Murderer was safely locked in his scabbard.
But the shadow had just figured out how to cheat the system.
**Author’s Note** *Stares blankly at a mountain of study notes…* **Typing_In_My_Sleep** here.
Just giving you all a quick heads-up on the schedule!
I am going to try my absolute best to drop one of my brand new works by Monday.
But don’t worry, I haven’t forgotten about this one—I will still be trying to push out chapters for this novel too!
The catch?
I have to cram like an absolute madman for my studies right now.
So, to survive this week without my brain completely melting into a puddle, I will be digging into my emergency stash: a small stack of pre-written chapters that require a little less editing and refinement on my end.
My *advanced forgiveness* policy remains fully active in case any typos slip through the cracks while I’m juggling all this.
Wish me luck with the cramming!
Alright, diving back into the books.
Or maybe taking a “five-minute” nap that will inevitably turn into five hours…
catch you later!