Chapter -6

At my little hideout in the woods, I was true to my words I said yesterday and I gathered all of three willing or unwilling participants here to train in self-defense. Sky, Jackie, and Noah are facing me in a straight line.

”What I am teaching you today is to be used strictly in self-defense. Hell, it doesn’t even have many full frontal combat applications. It’s called krav.. you know, it doesn’t matter what it’s called. Just know that this martial art focuses on defusing many different situations, such as..” I motioned to Jackie and he walked to me while looking puzzled. I put his body to face me. I gave him a knife, he took it to his right hand and I positioned him like he would be able to easily swing or thrust the knife into my body. An advantageous position so to speak. ” Just stay there and don’t do anything unless I say so. Good. Now you have a few options if you’re faced with a situation like this. Any idea how to handle this?” I shot a quick question to them. ”Get rid of the knife” Noah yelled not so loud.

”Good. That’s the first step and there are a couple of ways to do this. First, you need to get rid of the knife, many would just try to slap the knife away and run away. Now, while admittedly. this might work once, luck plays a part in every interaction and we want certainty, so we need to be certain that this combatant is out for a while to make a good escape. To guarantee certainty this next move was added. First, we get rid of the knife by slapping it, but we need to create space for the next move so we slap it upwards in an angle so we get the arm out of the way. Like this.” I Demonstrated with Jackie and talked at the same time.

”Now you have got your space and you must use it to your advantage. How?” They hesitated for a moment and Noah came through again. ”Kick em’ in the nuts.” He said jokingly and was left aghast as I complimented him and demonstrated just that. ”Yes. Good. Really good. Exactly that. No matter the opponent's gender, a kick to the groin paralyzes them and leaves you with ample time to make your escape.” I demonstrated a few times with Jackie being the attacker and with me being the attacker.

I demonstrated a few more techniques one for disabling an unarmed person much larger than you, one for disarming a person with a firearm and couple more for disarming and disabling a combatant with a knife or another bladed weapon. Though not a sword. I could probably dodge a sword with my honed reflexes, which, and I tested, had come with some muscle memory from my past life. For muscle memory, it was self-defense combat and some staff techniques. Now the only thing needed for us is repetition and muscle training.

After an hour of repetition, we stopped and had something to drink. We still had about half an hour for two hours I had planned for were full.

”Now there’s something I’d like to try, please entertain my selfishness for some odd thirty minutes.” I got their approval and summoned a small white cloud about 1 meter long and wide, and was as thick as 50cm.

”Cool! Can you summon anything else, like rainclouds or thunderclouds?” Noah asked while poking the cloud excitedly. Jackie looked fascinated as well and Sky… Well, Sky saw that I had started using my devil fruit and transformed herself and was not paying any significant interest in me and my cloud. Sigh.

”Yea, I can summon rain, thunder, and snow-producing clouds. And with a normal cloud like this, I can do something neat... Like this!” I Jumped to the cloud and after some balancing, I stood straight on my little personal cloud and controlled it to move forward with a walking pace as I would have fallen down had I been going at any faster pace. This one didn’t disperse as I jumped on it cause I made it thicker by stacking two clouds together and making them look like one cloud.

”WOW, YOU CAN FLY?!?! Seriously I want that power!”

”I thought you wanted to be able to swim.” I retorted to Noah with a smug smile on my face.

”DAMN IT ALL!” He shouted in agony as I slowly flew past him multiple times while being extremely smug. Fun times.

”Okay enough playing around, you got something to try yes?” Sky dampened my mood a little bit as she interrupted my torment. Oh well, now to the fun stuff.

”*Coughs* Yes I wanted to try a new technique I thought overnight. If I stack my clouds like this … and then …. Yes! It should be good now. SKY! Can you come and punch this as hard as you can” I had made a wall of clouds. As I previously had stated the clouds can hold weight but I haven’t tested how they fare against impacts. Hopefully, they can hold themselves together against impacts of her fist.

Sounds of clouds dissipating

Aaaaand it didn’t. Nice. Well, that is a successfull experiment in a way. After all, I discovered that it didn’t hold against Sky’s transformation packed punch. We tested all four types of clouds that I could produce. Normal clouds don’t have much defensive power and get destroyed easily. Snow clouds have high defense power but little to no combat applications for now. Rain clouds are largely the same as snow clouds but can support more weight than snow clouds, as such they are destined to be footholds I create in battle and not shiel material. Thunder clouds have the most offensive power, and while I can’t control where they strike if I release the thunder, if I keep it inside the clouds they strike the first entity that comes into contact with the clouds. Hmmm. Maybe I should make it look like a pillow. Focus Snow clouds in the middle so it gets more defensive power and line the edges with thunder clouds so that I can rotate it and send it to attack like a shuriken if need be.

I started working on it and slowly everyone gathered started wathing the ever transofrming clouds in front of me.

After ten minutes I felt that it was complete and decied to test it again. I even added some thunder cloud ribbons to each of the four edges to make it more pleasing to look and have more reach. This time I warned Sky that she should be ready for a counter attack. I figured this should be a good lesson about dodging attacks. And if she didn’t dodge… well I lowered the amount of thuder clouds and just replaced them with rainclouds, but it’s only temporary.

Sound of clouds not dissipating?

”Yes, that’s a success, now take my counter attack!” I got a little high spirited and sent Sky flying when my pillow hit her.

”HELP MEEEE AAAHHha aaahh aah aah...” ”Shite...”

I quickly reacted and created some normal white fluffy clouds on top of rain clouds to make her fall soft but so that she wouldn’t fall through the white fluff.

”Phew. Went British there for a second.” seeing nothing serious happened I sighed and joked a bit to relax my tenseness.

In the en,d nothing happened, but it served as a reminder for me on how to use my powers and taught caution to Sky and the others, as to what a small mistake in judgement on BOTH sides can cause.

Today me and Sky are going to the city to try to sell the Devil Fruit. Best places would probably be an action house managed by the mayor or an underground place. We would just need to find it first.

”Halt!”

”Why should we?” I asked from the guard who was in his little guard box, clearly doing nothing important.

”You’re from the trash dunes right? In that case, you need to use the side door.”

”But why?”

”Cause normal people don’t wan’t trash coming in from the front door.” He snorted at his own response and just pointed to the side.

What the hell. You mean we can’t even go in from the front gate and need to use some old side door. Going along the wall for a bit we arrived at the side door that we presumed was the rght one.

Getting through that one while being stared at by the guards and passerbys was not the best start to a day but I kept the incoming money in my mind.

”Excuse me but can you kindly tell us where we could sell some rare and or exqusite things?”

Even though I really didn’t want to interact with the guards I really needed the information.

”Well there is the auction house belonging to the rich merhants but I wouldn’t use that, since they rip you off. Then there is the government auction house which is reliable but take some off from your profit. Ahh! There is a really big auction coming up and I hear some tenruybito are coming for that aswell. Where is that? Ah, It will be in the government auction house in ten days. Where is that then? Well, it’s just a couple of turns away here is a map.”

”Thanks” I thanked the man and ran away with Sky. Turned out to be a good decision after he realised that he had rambled some pretty serious secrets to some kid and cursed us loudly.

After putting some distance between us we asked to see a map of the city and the kind ladytold us how to get to a information board in the middle of the city.

”Just walk straight and take a left and you will get to a clearing with few benches. There is an information board right there kiddies.”

She was a sweet old lady but maybe too old as we backtracked for the fourth time. And even double checked with her.

”Oh, youngsters in this day and age are so used to being given everything. Look I may have gotten it wrong but you should have been able to find it. Just take a right here and walk straight until you see a citysquare. There will be an information board for you. Now shoo!”

Maybe the very different advice she gave this time will be correct. I glanced back at Sky who was clearly having a hard time believeing my re-assuring.

After an hour we finally found something like an info board. It’s now almost midday and quite hot. With what little money I had saved up I bought Sky and myself a few cold drinks. We found a relatively silent and quiet spot to sit and started sipping our milkshakes. She had a chocolate flavoured banana milkshake and I had forest berrie mixed with some vanilla flavouring. I have to give it to them it’s pleasingly cold at this hot day and also good enough to even be palated by Big Mom, I presume. It was peaceful. Trees surrounded us and gave a natural curtain for us to hid behind while a small pond was tranquil right a head of our bench.

”Why do you need to go to Mariejois?”

The world froze. Little birds flew in fear of something, though it felt that it wa because of me. Sun went behind a dark cloud (that I didn’t conjure). The little speech of people around us faded out.

I slurped my milkshake and Realised that Sky had started shaking.

”Cause I need to know one thing, are you two children of dragons?”