I left Shimotsuki Village when I was fourteen.
There was no grand ceremony, no tearful goodbyes from the other students, and certainly no parade.
The village treated my departure with the same quiet, collective relief a town feels when a localized hurricane finally moves back out to sea.
I packed light.
My inventory consisted of three swords, four spare green haramakis, and a canvas sack stuffed with roughly forty pounds of heavily salted, questionable meat I had hunted the week prior.
Master Koushirou was the only one waiting at the docks when I arrived before dawn.
The morning mist clung to the wooden planks, and the sea was a calm, dark glass.
He stood with his hands tucked into the sleeves of his traditional gi, his eyes permanently closed in that serene, annoying expression of his.
“You are seeking death, Zoro,” he said quietly as I tossed my canvas sack into the small, single-masted fishing boat I had purchased with my bear-hunting funds.
“The world is vast, and the sea is unforgiving to those who do not respect it.” “Good,” I replied, checking the knot on the mooring line.
“I could use the resistance training.
The gravity on this island stopped working for me a year ago.” He sighed, the sound carrying a heavy mixture of exasperation and genuine sorrow.
He reached into his sleeve and pulled out a small, heavy leather pouch, tossing it to me.
I caught it easily.
It clinked with the sound of Berries.
“If you are to hunt bounties to survive, remember this,” Koushirou warned, opening his eyes just a fraction to meet my gaze.
“A sword without purpose is just a piece of cold iron.
Do not lose your way in the blood of others.” “I never lose my way,” I said with absolute, unearned confidence.
I tied the Wado Ichimonji securely to my right hip—leaving my two standard katanas on my left for easy access—and stepped down into the boat.
I untied the line, pushed off the dock with an oar, and caught the morning breeze in my sail.
It was a dramatic, stoic departure.
Forty-five minutes later, the sun fully rose, illuminating the coastline, and I realized I had rigged the sail completely backward.
I was currently heading dead-south instead of north, dragging my boat directly toward a reef of jagged rocks.
[DING!
The ‘Grand Fleet Admiral System’ detects catastrophic navigational failure!
Bind now to unlock ‘Basic Sailing Proficiency’, a mini-map, and a talking parrot that gives tactical advice!][Y / N] “I do not take orders from poultry,” I grunted, grabbing a rock-hard piece of salted meat from my bag and throwing it directly through the holographic blue screen.
The screen shattered into pixels, and the meat splashed into the ocean.
I spent the next two hours wrestling with the sail, eventually giving up on aerodynamics entirely and just rowing the boat with my bare hands.
Thanks to my freakish muscle density, I was actually faster than the wind anyway.
My career as a Pirate Hunter didn’t begin out of a noble desire for justice.
It began out of biological necessity.
My ‘Iron Stomach’ was a miraculous engine that could digest poisons and convert garbage into raw physical power, but it came with a massive drawback: it was a furnace that constantly needed fuel.
I required roughly ten thousand calories a day just to maintain my muscle mass.
Food cost money.
Ergo, I needed a job.
And since my interpersonal skills consisted of glaring at people until they stopped talking to me, customer service was out of the question.
Pirates, however, were walking bags of cash.
My first hunt happened purely by accident.
Three days into my journey, I was starving, severely lost, and rowing my boat in what I assumed was a straight line (it was a spiral).
I spotted a large, jagged island with a hidden cove and rowed toward it, hoping to find a diner or a tavern.
Instead, I found a galleon flying a black flag with a skull and crossed cutlasses.
The ‘Blood-Blade’ Pirates.
I didn’t know that at the time.
All I knew was that I smelled roasting pork coming from their deck.
I didn’t sneak aboard.
Stealth involved crouching, which was bad for the knees.
I just climbed up the anchor chain and stepped over the railing, landing heavily on the wooden deck.
About thirty heavily armed, filthy pirates stopped what they were doing and stared at me.
I was fourteen, clad in a green haramaki, and radiating the grumpy aura of a guy who just wanted a nap and a hot meal.
“Who the hell are you?” the captain bellowed, stepping forward.
He was a massive man with a jagged cutlass and a bounty of three million Berries—a decent sum in the East Blue.
“I smelled pork,” I stated flatly, pointing a finger at the spit-roast over a barrel fire near the mainmast.
“I require it.” The crew stared at me in stunned silence for three seconds before bursting into uproarious laughter.
The captain wiped a tear from his eye.
“You lost your mom, kid?
Toss him overboard.
Take his swords first.” Three pirates charged me, drawing their cutlasses.
I sighed, reached across my waist, and drew my two standard practice katanas.
The first pirate swung wildly at my neck.
I didn’t block.
I just tilted my head slightly to the left.
The blade whistled past my ear.
I stepped into his guard, ignoring his momentum entirely, and slammed the pommel of my right sword into his sternum.
The impact sounded like a cannon going off.
His chest caved, and he was thrown backward, crashing through a stack of wooden crates.
The laughter died instantly.
The second pirate tried to stab me in the gut.
I didn’t move.
The tip of his sword struck my abdominal muscles, piercing the fabric of the haramaki, and stopped dead against my skin.
It didn’t even draw blood.
The pirate stared at my stomach, his hands trembling on his hilt.
“I do a lot of core workouts,” I explained.
Then I headbutted him.
He folded like wet paper.
The captain roared in anger, drawing his massive, jagged cutlass.
“Shoot him!
Shoot the little freak!” Flintlocks fired.
Lead balls ricocheted off the deck.
A few grazed my arms and shoulders, leaving shallow, stinging cuts, but my dense muscle tissue prevented them from penetrating deep.
I ignored the pain.
I was used to pain.
Pain was just my passive resistance training telling me it was working.
I sheathed my left sword, reached over, and drew the Wado Ichimonji.
The pristine white scabbard caught the sunlight.
I brought the hilt to my mouth and bit down hard.
I drew my second standard katana, dropping into a low, predatory crouch.
Three swords.
“Tatsu Maki,” I mumbled around the blade in my mouth.
I spun.
The resulting vortex of wind and razor-sharp pressure ripped across the deck, shattering the mainmast and sending a dozen pirates flying into the ocean.
It was a massacre.
I didn’t kill them—I wasn’t a murderer, just a guy with a severely lacking sense of restraint—but I definitely broke enough bones to put them in a marine hospital for a year.
Ten minutes later, the captain was tied to his own broken mast, groaning in agony.
I was sitting on a barrel next to him, eating the entirety of the roasted pork off the spit with one hand while holding a bounty poster I had found in his cabin with the other.
“Three million Berries,” I read out loud, chewing happily.
“That buys a lot of rice.
Thanks.” Over the next year, this became my routine.
I wandered aimlessly across the East Blue, getting spectacularly lost, stumbling into pirate strongholds by complete accident, and beating them to a pulp to pay for my groceries.
The Marines started calling me a demon.
The local towns whispered rumors of a moss-headed monster who fought with a sword in his mouth and possessed a body made of iron.
I was untouchable.
The East Blue was a kiddie pool, and I was a shark with a serious eating disorder.
I felt invincible.
I thought the insane, brutal training regimen I had put myself through had actually worked.
I thought I had broken the system by pure, stubborn willpower.
I was fourteen, arrogant, and convinced I was ready for the Grand Line.
But the universe has a funny way of dealing with arrogance.
And as I was about to learn at the age of fifteen, the gap between a big fish in a small pond and the real monsters of this world was a chasm I couldn’t cross just by lifting boulders with my teeth.
The East Blue was about to give me a brutal, bloody reality check.