The Marine

In this large world, where travel time was so predominant, Bill had perfected his routine and over the last two months had designed and redesigned the plans for the large furnace they would construct to melt down the scrap.

It was an ingenious furnace that would be powered by nonpolluting dihydrogen fuel.

What made this machine so unique was that it wasn’t just a furnace for steel but with modest adjustments, and enough power, Bill could create bio-organic metals and even seastone alloys.

Bill didn’t think he could create pure seastone with the furnace he designed, but he was confident that he could recreate the seastone found of Marine ship hulls and perhaps even achieve weapons-grade purity.

While he did this kind of work, Masterson had taken Nelsons advice and after becoming more proficient with Iron Body had made great progress with Shave and Moon Step.

Yoko had continued to practice every day and every day Bill saw her come closer and closer to being able to feel her blood, it was stunning for Bill just how much the twelve-year-old had changed in under a year.

Carol never put her books down and always seemed interested in mechanical systems that the old engineers could teach her, and Nelson had lost another seventy-five pounds.

Besides routine work, the trip from Lougetown to the wrecked island and finally to Little East Blue was largely uneventful. He had gathered up hundreds of tons of scrap and ordered the machines to be shipped.

He had come to learn that Straw Hat Luffy and his crew was seen in the Grand Line, but Captain Maynard’s investigation led to the 30m Beli bounty quietly being dropped.

Bill didn’t know whether or not Monkey D. Garp was involved but according to Nelson that was something that he had never even heard of happening.

Normally if a person got a false bounty the only way out was to sign a contract for silence and get pressed into the navy.

Even this, Nelson made a point to emphasize that was for low level bounties. For Monkey D. Luffy who had an initial bounty of 30m Beli and made the News Coo, it was just not something that happened.

To this, Bill could only shrug. Nelson had opened up a lot more over the months, but his cynical personality wasn’t something that seemed to be changing.

Literally everything he explained made it seem like the World Government was a pernicious organization. Every good thing Bill said about it, Nelson pointed out the action in the most manipulative sense.

According to Nelson, Bill was foolish because he had never been to non-Marine islands besides those like Water 7.

Bill didn’t like to be laughed at, but he gave Nelson a pass after everything that had happened between them. It was also a benefit to have the knowledge of a person who grew up as a noble.

Sasha was technically a noble too, but she had grown up in the Marines whereas Nelson had gone straight from private life to the Marineford Cadet Academy.

Thinking about the past couple months, Bill stood on the Victory’s main deck and directed the Helmsman.

Pulling into the magnificent natural harbor, he saw the newly constructed single dock and the spiraling wooden and stone towers of the new town.

With the last of the refugees with him, all the residents had been moved and the largely uninhabited island was now brimming with motion.

He could see that they had followed the town designs to the letter, more or less, with the islands uppermost and lowest levels containing the population centers.

The small forests had all been cut down, save one small grotto which had the pond and large Willow tree where Bill had rested at. It was regretful but Little East Blue island was not large enough to keep a forested area.

Seeing a large crowd moving to the newly built dock, Bill smiled but sighed. He had hoped to surprise everyone with his arrival, but Boss the Beetle spotted the Victory and came to investigate.

The bug was much bigger than the last time Bill had seen it, almost the size of a small car, and it saw Yoko he could have sworn he saw it smile.

Yoko was happy too, and unafraid jumped on its back and rode it up to her old secret base.

Bill couldn’t help but be a mother goose when he seen this, and almost had a heart attack when he saw the girl flying on top of the bug. He was more worried for her falling than he was worried about himself when he fought the Revolutionary Dragon!

But he had watched them disappear over the rocks and controlled himself from jumping into the air to make sure if she fell, he’d be there to catch her.

‘Well…’ Bill thought as he directed the ship to a stop and lowered the ramps.

‘I could have made it that far even if she fell.’ This was how he consoled himself, and it was not mere exaggeration.

During the last seven months Bill had grown very strong.

Besides his brain he had completely reconstructed his body, broken a mountain of iron with his bare hands, and had walked Nelson twice a day.

This work was already enormous, but it was made more so by the fact that Bill could target individual muscle fibers to strengthen.

Thinking back to when he fought Monkey D. Luffy, that skinny but incredibly powerful man, Bill thought he would have just bodied him if he had his strength now back when they fought.

The battle with Revolutionary Dragon would have also been different, at least, Bill was sure he would be able to take more than one good hit.

He suspected that if they fought again the true determining factor would be if he could suppress the entity in Dragon’s shadow.

This was because, as Bill walked off the ramp and greeted Mayor Fabre, Borodo, Akisu, Miyagi, and the head engineers he had absolute confidence in himself.

“Well, it looks like you all’ve been busy!”

Speaking with a wide smile, the group met him halfway and started saying that they’d heard he had been busy himself.

After their initial greetings, Akisu couldn’t help but ask: “Is it true that man you fought was the worlds most Wanted criminal?”

Nodding his head, Bill laughed and answered: “Apparently so!” Hearing this, Akisu looked amazed but only for a second when he started to talk again.

“Hey, where’s Yoko?”

This made Bill laugh again, before he had been concerned about this boy but not now. So, he answered that she rode on Boss back to the hideout and the boy promptly said his goodbyes.

After he left, Bill, Ranse, and the others started helping the elderly off the ship and towards their new homes.

There was no celebration besides those individually coming from families reunited, it had been decided that the island would celebrate once the town was built.

Now, after meeting with various people, Bill was brought into the garrison quarters and was shown his new office.

It was a quaint space, and he could tell it was modeled off of Aramaki’s office.

There was a heavy oak desk on one side and a lounging area large enough to sit about a dozen people Bill’s size on the other.

A Communication Snail was installed on the desk and empty filing cabinets lined the wall behind the command chair.

On the other side empty shelves were arranged around the lounging area, with a utilitarian chandelier hanging over the coffee table that was between four couches that face each other.

The room itself was white walled and finished wood flooring, Bill thought it looked nice. Not too cheap but not too gawdy.

After admiring the space and opening the shelves, he found four cut-out spaces for safes to be hidden inside.

This was all very nice he told the others, as he sat down with Mayor Fabre, the head engineers, and Ranse.

After they sat down, he thanked everyone for their hard work but was instantly rebuffed by Mayor Fabre.

“No, we should be thanking you! Without your efforts our home would have been open to the pirate raids.”

This sentiment was shared with the head engineers who thanked Bill for giving them a new home and freeing them from slavery.

He took their thanks politely, but Bill was wary strong sentiments when he was handed a stack of documents from the head engineers.

Glancing over the big numbers he instantly recognized that they had currently built 40% of the planned dwellings and finished 60% of the water supply.

Of course, he had been in contact with them since he had woken up from the hospital. Even though these figures seemed low there was reason for it.

That was, Little East Blue simply didn’t have any stone quarries and because they couldn’t risk mining the plateau on the back of the island, they had to rely on what they could get from nearby islands.

This was fine, but due to distance everything had slowed down.

He had a plan for it though, and putting the papers down, he looked over to Mayor Fabre and asked: “Have you experienced any geological activity since you’ve been living here?”

“Geological activity?” asked Fabre, to which Bill clarified: “I mean earthquakes and those sorts of things.”

Shaking his head, no, Bill turned towards the head engineers and asked them what their thoughts on the risks for earthquakes was after they had been down into the labyrinth of tunnels at the back of the island.

“There are no evident fault lines… this island is probably a dead volcano.” Answered the woman, who looking at her husband agreed with this hypothesis.

Bill had thought this too, since the way the island was shaped gave credence that this was a dead massive volcano. Probably the eruption ripped apart the side and that was how the islands levels were formed.

“That’s good news. We won’t be getting the shipment from Egghead Island for a few weeks, in that time I’ve decided to deepen the harbor.”

“Deepen the harbor?” Ranse asked with a laugh before continuing to say: “There’s no way we can drain the water, so what partner, are we going to dive down and mine the seabed up?”

Looking at his buddy, Bill said back with a smile: “Well, I am. You’ll have to take the men and go back to Clockwork Island to bring back the scrap.”

This would be a hard job, one made even harder by the fact that Sasha and Ricky had stayed with the Bluebird to continue collecting money from the merchants.

When he said this, Ranse looked strange and asked: “Can you actually deepen the harbor by yourself?”

Shaking his head yes, Bill could see the fire being lit in Ranse’s eyes. Of course, he had always been the strongest of his friends due to mastering Life Return, but now Bill wasn’t simply stronger than the others he was in a different category.

This didn’t make him feel proud, Bill never had and never would compare himself like that to his friends.

He also knew that in some ways Ranse and Sasha had been held back in their growth during the last year since there training always came after their other responsibilities.

But now that he would be here working on the town, they would be given a break to start back their routines in full force.

After he made this statement, Mayor Fabre and the head engineers were unsure what to say and Bill told them it would be fine, that he would bring stone up from the bottom of the harbor.

His plan was to deepen the whole area by about two meters, this in practical terms was millions of tons of stone.

This would first be used to finish the dwellings, ramps, and docks and the extra would be used to extend the island on its east side.

Because one ton of two-inch stone could cover about four-square meters, and there was no way the island would need that much, Bill decided to cut the stone used in the roads into six-inch solid bricks.

 This was very heavy duty, but in a world where superpowers were present, it was either this or just make everything out of concrete.

Though the three leaders of the island were unsure, they didn’t protest and said they awaited the good news, and after getting down to some other business – particularly about food – they left the office.

With them gone, Bill told Ranse that over the next few months he needed to keep an eye out to which of the newer Marines would be suitable to learn any of the Six Powers.

His original goal was to have at least twenty Marines under him that could use Shave, but after what Nelson had claimed, it was now to have twenty men who could use Iron Body.

For people with regular physiques firearms and cannon were always going to be the best weapons because they would either work or they wouldn’t, because if a regular group of Marines ran into a foe that couldn’t be stopped by bullets, at least they should be far away enough to attempt a retreat.

Since his goal was far reaching, Bill knew he needed an elite unit.

He reasoned Iron Body was a good martial art to learn because even if it didn’t have the instant utility and awe-inspiring speed of Shave, it would shape a person’s body to being far stronger than it would otherwise be.

 He told this to Ranse and had already started coming up with training methods with Masterson, but Bill didn’t want to trick a bunch of wide-eyed youngsters into signing a long service contract.

“Only the ones who really show progress with the Meditative Pushup.” Were his criteria, though he knew that wasn’t a fool-proof plan because of the existence of natural super humans.

Ranse nodded his head and agreed, after that the two friends spoke about the day Bill fought Dragon and Bill described his Haki.

To the best of his knowledge none of his friends could consciously use the ability, though Ranse had trained some to unlock what he called ‘Observation’ Haki – or what Bill would have called ‘Presence’.

After Ranse left, Bill went back and sat on one of the four couches, he was mentally tired, and as he closed his eyes, he told himself.

‘Buck up, Buddy. This is only the beginning.’