Chapter Text
Zoro wakes up to the sound of heeled boots making their way across tile and the feel of stairs digging into his back. The sound stops a few feet away and there is a rustle of paper.
He’s just thinking maybe he should try opening his eyes when there’s another rustle and a growl as Perona digs the toe of her boot into his side repeatedly to punctuate her words, “I should make you apologize for being so rude to me when I was trying to save your stupid life! How are you not dead!?”
She seems to be trying to hurt him this time, but based on the fact that she’s using her boots, she must just be venting. Her kicks couldn’t break boards, let alone dent steel.
Zoro opens his eyes, Perona standing over him with a scowl, a newspaper bunched in the hand at her hip and a couple of hollows circling above her head, “What do you want Pinky?”
“The paper arrived about an hour ago,” she says, waving it at him like she thinks it proves something.
“And?”
Perona huffs in irritation and drops the bundle on his face. He tries to lift his arms to remove the offending object, but they don’t seem to want to move.
Pinky lets him struggle for a minute, “I wish I had a cameko snail right now.”
She picks up the paper and holds it so that Zoro can see the picture of Luffy in the center of the page, “Seeee, you nearly killed yourself for nothing.”
His captain is covered in bandages. Zoro feels some relief that someone has tended to Luffy’s wounds and that he’s not alone.
His face is somber and his hat is placed over his heart, but his feet are splayed and his other hand is clenched in a fist. Solemn but determined.
His captain has made a decision. Zoro just has to figure out what it is.
He scans the article describing Luffy’s return to Marineford and the elaborate, un-Luffy like ritual he carried out. It mentions Rayleigh and the former warlord, Jinbe.
“Hey! Are you done yet? My arms are getting tired!”
Oh, yeah she’s still here. The order has to be coded into his actions or appearance somehow.
“Just a minute,” Zoro starts thinking out loud, in the hope of preventing her from leaving, “There’s something here…Luffy isn’t the sort of guy to do this kind of thing.”
So why did he do it? “If Rayleigh’s with him, then this must’ve been his idea… There’s got to be something more to it...!”
He’s been focusing on the description of Luffy’s actions because actions are usually what matters with his captain, but if this was Rayleigh’s idea maybe he was focusing on the wrong thing.
About a minute later, Perona drops the paper back on his face, and clomps off.
With some effort he shifts around until he’s leaning one shoulder against the wall lining the steps and the paper is in his lap.
There aren’t any footsteps this time before he hears, “Are you ready to behave in a more reasonable manner?” Mihawk’s tone suggests that Zoro is a toddler that has finally worn himself out flailing on the floor, “There’s some noodles left from dinner if you can get yourself to the kitchen.”
Zoro has finally noticed the mark on Luffy’s arm in the picture. There is a sense of relief. The captain has given an order and its nature implies confidence that the others are alive to see it. The path has been made clear again.
He looks up at Mihawk and smiles, “You know how to cook? These last few weeks have been murder on my stomach.”
“Indeed, the ghost woman started crying over her plate,” There is definitely a note of amusement n there somewhere.
As Zoro works to lever himself up to his feet, Mihawk adds more seriously, “You two have made a mess of my home, particularly the kitchen, you will put it to rights before anything else is done.”
---
Mihawk allows him to shovel down some noodles in tomato sauce and crash on the pallet in the pantry for several hours, but when he wakes up the older swordsman sets him to cleaning up one of the many spare guest rooms until it is fit to be occupied.
“After you are done there you can help clean all the dirty sheets and towels that have been left lying around.”
“Pinky has been living here for weeks, I’ve only been here a couple days.”
“She’s been scrubbing down the kitchen and the bathroom. She seems to think the endeavor might kill her,” he seems to be wondering if Zoro is going to be similarly melodramatic about doing a little house work.
Zoro goes back to sweeping up the copious amounts of dust gathered on the floor of the previously unused room.
The World’s Greatest Swordsman can’t be expected to play house keeper to a couple of uninvited guests after all.
“I recharged the dials in the water heater and I’ll make lunch in a couple hours. If you’ve finished cleaning up the mess you’ve made you can clean up and join me.”
Zoro nods.
“We are several days sailing from the port city of Angustus,” he adds dryly, “I find myself in unexpected need of supplies. In about a week conditions should be favorable to head there. You may make your way wherever you wish from there.”
Zoro nods again and Mihawk walks off.
So he has a few days to convince Mihawk to let him stay.
Luffy’s orders are clear: two years to become stronger before they meet up again.
He’s been struggling to develop a new technique for a while. At Enis Lobby he managed to manifest some kind of demon aura from the sheer rage at what was being done to Robin, but since then he hasn’t made any progress being able to call that ability up at will.
He’s grown somewhat in pure physical strength, but hasn’t mastered any new techniques even though he knows they exist. He’s fought against them.
Until he can grasp them, he’s never going to be anywhere near a match for Mihawk.
It’s pretty obvious what he needs to do.
He needs to convince Mihawk though.
---
He heads out in the evening to find some sparing partners.
Of course now that he’s looking for the monkeys, they are nowhere to be found.
After a couple hours he somehow finds himself approaching the front of the palace. He’s surprised to see a fairly large gathering of humandrills along the retaining wall that lines the broad top landing of the front steps. From the front door they would be fairly well hidden, but from this angle they are in plain sight.
Tiny is sitting on the railing at the top of the step staring at the door, chin on her fist, looking bored.
“Mihawk is back you know,” he calls out to them from a dozen paces away.
Tiny does a double take and nearly falls off the railing, while the rest of the troop shrieks in surprise and scrambles into more defensive positions.
When he makes eye contact, they shuffle uncertainly.
“If you’re going to fight, give me your best. Anyone who runs away today is getting a blade through the back.”
There is a little bit of shuffling at this, but Tiny rolls back her lips and hisses at them before going into a tirade of hooting and growls that involves her slapping her chest several times and also puffing herself up and making noises in a jeering way that suggests she is throwing their own boasts back in their faces.
They all settle down, some of them looking determined others sulky.
That done, Tiny makes her way down the stairs in a sideways knuckle walk and then stands upright to draw the three blades she is carrying with her.
She opens with a familiar charge, followed up by a variety of other moves she has learned from him over the past couple weeks.
Zoro quickly starts to feel like he is sparing with his own shadow.
As they move back and forth around the open area in front of the palace, something like anger starts to come into her face. She seems to realize he isn’t pulling out any new techniques.
She calls over her shoulder to one of her followers leaning against the wall, disgruntled, and they respond, clearly defensive. A couple others, sporting fresh scars, grumble in agreement.
“Heh, I’m still trying to get the hang of that one.” She glares at Zoro, like she thinks he’s screwing around.
It’s frustrating; he can feel that extra sense, like something at the corner of his eye.
He’s reminded to pay attention when Tiny nearly jabs him in the eye.
Every opponent has tells in the way they shift their weight, grip their weapon, move their eyes. All these things come after the thought.
If he could take all those twitches and shifts and trace them backward they would intersect at his opponent’s intentions. He realizes he’s reaching the wrong way.
He blocks all three of her blades only to get kicked in the stomach so hard that half a second later he gets another impact into the wall by the stairs. Monkeys scatter out of his flight path, shrieking in alarm.
He takes Wado Ichimonji out of his mouth so he can spit out some blood before moving in again.
He focuses on not focusing on any one thing. He needs to take it all in.
For a moment it feels like he woke up from a dream in which he thought he was already awake.
He moves to block where he knows Tiny’s swords are going to be.
He loses his grip on it after only a few heart beats, but by that time two of Tiny’s swords are striking the ground and blood is welling up from shallow cuts that extend from between his opponent’s thumb and index fingers to her elbows. She is staring at him wide eyed.
To his surprise, given their early timidity, several of her followers cry out in alarm and charge him, getting between them.
Tiny retreats, but only as far as the wall, where she leans to watch, licking at her forearms like a cat. She squints at him as if trying to discern something that her eyes are not quite sharp enough to see.
“That doesn’t work!” he shouts in her general direction, not taking his eyes off his new challengers.
She finishes her grooming and holds up her forearm to show that it has, in fact, stopped bleeding. The spit had nothing to do with it, Zoro is pretty sure.
Tiny seems satisfied at first that she has recovered from her injury so quickly, but as he continues to fight and knock down her followers she starts to lean forward more and more, bobbing her head around.
Eventually, she starts and pacing back and forth along the wall and even smacks her hands against the ground in frustration.
She can’t see what he is doing, so she can’t copy it.
It’s still only coming in flashes, but he seems to be able to call it up a little easier now. Only for a moment, but each time another opponent falls.
A couple of the humandrills do try to run and, true to his word, they get a flying slash to the back.
Tiny starts to berate and encourage her followers with hoots and growls, she’s clearly angry, but it seems to be directed at her followers.
They renew their efforts even though they aren’t having much success breaking through his guard and are still getting knocked out.
Zoro grins at her around the hilt in his mouth, “You really have a way with words.”
She bares her fangs and makes several growling and hooting noises followed by a rude gesture she must have picked up from the former human inhabitants of the island.
She has a point.
Chopper had commented once that he found it odd that, of all the species on the planet, humans were the only ones who could only talk to their own kind.
Robin had found his comment very interesting and, ironically, their conversation about animal linguistics had quickly become so technical it was incomprehensible to everyone else at the table.
Zoro finishes knocking out the last of Tiny’s followers. In response, she jumps down and picks her blades up again.
This time when she charges him he can see anger and an edge of desperation in her strikes.
He can also feel a pain building behind his eyes. This new technique is definitely straining something, but he’s got a grasp on it now and he’s not going to let go.
He feels something trickle down around his nose. Tiny’s grins at him and her fighting regains some of its confidence.
He blinks the irritant away and keeps fighting.
When she still can’t break through his guard, even as the blood leaking out of his nose and eyes starts to interfere with his vision and drip off his chin, her uncertainty comes back in even greater force and her strikes become more vicious and uncontrolled.
Finally, she jumps back and takes up a familiar stance, her three blades arranged in a pinwheel.
Zoro takes up his own finishing stance, “Don’t let it get to you so much. You’ve run into something that’s giving you trouble. That’s when you find out who you really are.”
She covers the despair that flashes in her eyes with a snarl around the blade in her mouth.
In a flash, six blades cross and the impact causes a shockwave of dust and rocks to roll away from their meeting point and rattle the windows of the palace.
Zoro straightens up from his charge. Behind him he hears the thud of Tiny’s body hitting the ground, followed closely by the chiming of her shattered blades clattering down around her.
He allows himself to let go of his death grip on his new perception.
The pressure behind his eyes is relieved just a bit and Zoro suddenly realizes he really needs a nap.
He leans up against the base of the stairs and falls asleep.
---
He’s woken up what seems like short time later by one of Pinky’s exploding hollows. As he sticks a finger in his ear to try and clear out the ringing, he hears her demand, “Do you want to get stabbed in your sleep!?”
He squints up at her, “What?”
"Ack!," Perona darts up in alarm, “What the hell happened to your face?! Are you bleeding out of your eyes?!”
Zoro rubs at his face, “No, it stopped a while ago.”
He holds up his hand to show that the blood is dry and flaking.
She opens her mouth and Zoro tries to stop the tirade that is about to happen, “Don’t you have someone else to bother now?”
“Mihawk is no fun,” Perona pouts. Zoro scowls at the implication that he is somehow entertaining, but the ghost witch doesn’t seem to notice, “What are you doing out here now?”
“I got a lead on something the other day,” he smiles as he levers himself up, “I got to it happen again.”
“You were deliberately recreating the state you were in the day before yesterday,” she clarifies, “when you nearly died.”
“It worked.”
He goes inside to find Mihawk.
---
His plan was make himself interesting by mastering this new skill on his own. It works better than he had hoped, he doesn’t even have to explain what he’s figured out, Mihawk seems to already realize.
Asking for Mihawk’s help is a blow to his pride, but coming back to his crew without having done everything he can to get stronger would be a cause for regret. And that is by far the less acceptable consequence.
Mihawk seems to understand this as well without it being explained. He was ready to despise him for making a choice out of fear, but this motivation, to fight for something greater than pride, seems to make the normally stern swordsman outright cheerful.
Zoro’s declaration that he still intends to defeat Mihawk someday, even though he is asking the older swordsman to teach him, only seems to make Mihawk more open to the idea despite his assertion that Zoro is being ridiculous.
---
The ghost witch had told Mihawk not to boss her around when he had ordered her to care for Zoro’s injuries and then almost immediately turned around and bullied him upstairs to fix his bandages again. “Are you finally going to stop getting yourself torn to pieces?”
“Unlikely.” Mihawk’s training was bound to be demanding.
She tries to choke him with the bandages she’s wrapping around his neck, “You shouldn’t seem so pleased about that.”
When she’s done she sits down beside his bed and asks, “So, what was that all about anyway? I thought you were in a huge hurry to leave.”
Zoro gives her the paper and explains the message that Luffy had sent his crew: two years to get stronger before they head to the new world.
“What about you?” Zoro asks, “Mihawk said Moria probably isn’t dead, I thought you wanted to find him.”
Perona leans back and her eyes widen slightly, as if the question had surprised her.
Abruptly, she stands up and looks down her nose at him, “Don’t worry about it idiot. Unlike you, I don’t intend to run off without even having any idea where I’m going.”
He wouldn’t have thought too much of it except that her ghosts had stopped circling lazily around the room and come to hover near her shoulders just before she spoke.
Huh, so now that she can leave she doesn’t want to anymore.
Zoro shrugs, “If Mihawk is okay with you mooching off him, it’s none of my business.”
She sniffs at him, then turns and strides out of the room as if she has somewhere important to be.
---
Zoro tries to be patient. He meditates, practices his katas, and limits himself to only a couple thousand sit ups and pushups a day. However, by the morning of the third day he’s already starting to feel cooped up. How long is he going to be expected to sit around?
He looks up at the back of the newspaper Mihawk is reading. Perona and he are sitting across from each other, a few seats down from where the older swordsman is sitting at the end of the banquet sized dining table drinking coffee.
Mihawk doesn’t look up from the paper, “I haven’t forgotten you’re here.”
Zoro grumpily shovels in another mouthful of oatmeal, “What do you consider healed up?”
“I want you to be able to practice for more than five minutes without bleeding or breaking something spontaneously. You aren’t supposed to bleed without being cut, you know.”
Perona snorts into her bowl. Zoro scowls and opens his mouth to retort.
“Do what you want, but I won’t train you until Perona stops having to rebandage you every day. Your body is part of your weapons. You wouldn’t treat your swords in as shabby a manner as you’ve been treating yourself.”
Zoro doesn’t mention that he has broken quite a few swords over the years.
---
Zoro goes through his katas slowly in the courtyard as he tries to evaluate how his various cuts, cracked bones, and bruised organs are holding up.
He doesn’t like this; it feels too much like giving into weakness. But he asked Mihawk to train him; he’s obliged to follow his instructions now.
He sees a shadow lurking in the trees, but doesn’t acknowledge it.
Eventually Tiny comes out and starts shadowing his forms.
“This is all stuff you ripped off from me already.”
She lowers her swords and shrugs at him.
They stare at each other for a few seconds.
Zoro goes back to his practice. Tiny goes back to copying him.
This goes on the next day and the next. Perona finally removes the last of his stiches and he’s down to just the bandages around his chest.
Zoro admits to himself that he’s feeling more energetic than he has in a long time, but he’s still wondering how long he has to ‘not bleed’ before Mihawk will stop making him wait.
---
The next morning when he goes out onto the back courtyard, there is a row of stuffed hybrid monstrosities sitting on the railing, staring at him with creepy button eyes.
He finds his way back to the kitchen and slams the door open to find Perona sitting, happily eating pancakes and Mihawk reading the paper and drinking tea.
“Pinky, what the hell?” She has to be responsible for this somehow.
She looks up disinterested, “Hmm?”
He waves a cow-wolf thing in her general direction.
“Oh, that’s not bad!” She jumps up and grabs it out of his hand to inspect it, “The smaller ones are actually kind of cute. They look like surprised coconuts.”
“Smaller what?”
“About a week ago, when I was putting Gentleman Badgerphant together, I noticed a few of the younger ones watching me. They kept coming back, so a couple days ago I took some of the old sheets and curtains that are lying around everywhere and brought them out with me. They were really excited about it.”
“So by yesterday evening I had all these new friends!” She holds the toy up and spins. Zoro isn’t sure if she’s referring to the young humandrills or their sewing projects.
“I guess they made more overnight,” She hugs the dubious plush to her chest and trots off, presumably to inspect the other offerings.
Mihawk looks up from his morning paper just long enough to say, “Find something else to distract those monkeys.”
Then he goes back to reading as though the matter has been taken care of.
“Are you serious?”
“I’m always serious,” Mihawk returns in a tone that is too dry even for him.
“I’ll need some supplies.”
This gets the older swordsman to look up at him again, “You’ve already thought of something?”
“There aren’t a lot of options.”
He eats what left of the pancakes and goes out to the disused garden just outside the kitchen. It doesn’t take him long to find what he’s looking for in the remains of a closet set against the castle wall.
He takes the tools and walks until he finds himself in the clearing with the rows of stones. This will do.
He starts tearing up weeds and breaking up chunks of earth that have settled and grown hard after not being turned for years.
Perona comes and leans against one of the stone blocks, a thing that looks like a ball of hair with tusks under her arm, “I thought we’d established that you only know how to stab things.”
Zoro snorts, “Do I look like a noble’s son to you? Only the rich can spend all their time learning to fight.”
Perona looks doubtful, “I guess so. What exactly are you doing?”
Zoro tells her.
She shifts her weight from one foot to the other, waiting for him to admit he’s joking. When he just continues to hack away at the ground, she wilts slightly before sighing and disappearing back into the trees. Presumably in the direction of the castle.
It’s a decent workout, breaking up the overgrown soil and digging up rocks.
Tiny comes out of the trees and watches him for a while before going over to the pile of tools and poking at it suspiciously. She scratches her head then knuckle walks back into the trees.
She comes back a little while later with some of her followers, not the troop leaders, but some of the ones that usually just watch.
They pick up some of the tools and start imitating him in a forceful and somewhat haphazard way, each picking their own patch of ground.
Several hours later, Zoro stops working and the humandrills follow suit, most of the troop going to relax under the trees. They’ve overturned a good portion of the clearing.
Tiny leans on the hoe she had been using, contemplating the field, confusion in her beady eyes.
Zoro’s idea seems to be working, but he’s not really sure why, “I’ve seen other animals that worked with or imitated humans, but there was always something in it for them, usually food or safety. Why are you imitating me when you don’t even know what I’m doing?”
She gives him an exasperated look and then purses her lips as if thinking before knuckle walking a short distance to a creek flowing by the edge of the field where she starts picking up rounded, greyish stones.
Zoro waits to see what she will do. He did ask a question, he needs to give her a chance to answer.
She comes back, stomps an area of newly turned earth flat with her foot, draws a circle with her finger, dumps the river stones into the circle and, finally, spreads them out into a single layer.
She waves him down impatiently. Zoro obligingly sits on his heels the other side of the circle.
Tiny lifts one of the pebbles and taps it against another. She picks up the tapped pebble and draws a finger across her throat before setting it aside.
Zoro points at the stones, “Each of these represents a monkey?”
She moves her hands apart in a ‘bigger’ gesture.
“A troop?”
She rocks her hand, ‘sort of.’
“A battle?” She nods. So, one tap equals multiple deaths.
She taps two more stones together, removing one. She reels her left hand in an ‘on and on’ gesture, while repeating this process several more times with her right.
“This has been going on for a while, that’s obvious from just looking around.”
She picks up a stone; a dark red compared to the grey of the others, and makes eye contact as she taps her chest several times.
She then uses her stone to tap out several others and remove them from the circle. She’s been involved in the fighting too.
She picks up a greenish stone and waves it at him with a fang filled grin, until he says, “Yeah, I get it.”
She proceeds to tap the green stone on several others including her own, but not remove them. She scratches her head as if in confusion and sets the green stone toward the edge of the circle.
The tapped pebbles are then picked up and each quickly ‘defeats’ several others, leaving a cleared area around itself. A handful of pebbles are set aside.
By defeating opponents but not killing them, letting them learn, he had upset the balance of power. The number of humandrills being killed had suddenly increased because he had spared the ones he fought.
The red and green stones and a third are set near each other. She looks up at him.
“Yeah, I remember that.”
Tap. The extra stone is moved aside.
“You left out the bit where you tried to stab me in the back.”
In response she picks up the handful of recently ‘dead’ stones and pours them through her hand into her palm.
“I didn’t make them do that.”
She curls her lip at him, but sets the stones back on the ground.
She taps the green stone against the red one again then sets the green one aside again. She picks up her own stone and examines it as if contemplating its existence.
Carefully, she reaches out and taps one of the other stones with an area cleared around it. Rather than removing it, she moves it to the center of a cleared area. She gathers several others in a similar manner.
Zoro’s stone contacts a few others and leaves them. Tiny collects them as well. Stones that try to attack her collection get incorporated instead.
“So you’ve got quite a clan going.”
She holds up a single long pointer finger before picking up several stones within the group and striking them against her own. She’s being challenged.
Some of her followers leave and go out to conquer previously untouched groups. Some of them come back and take from the edge of her group.
She picks those up and squeezes them in her palm before laying them on the pile of the dead.
She covers the remaining stones in her group with her hand, clutching the rocks to her chest. She had started to create stability, but it’s already falling apart.
“You all survive by imitating humans. But this lot got it wrong,” there’s no need to gesture; they’re surrounded on all sides as far as the eye can see in destruction.
Zoro stands up and crosses his arms, “I don’t know if farming is going to help with any of that. Mihawk just wants Pinky to stop destroying his linens.”
Tiny perks up and points at the field, “Ook?”
Is she asking what he’s planning? “I was thinking cabbages would grow well here. Maybe some root vegetables.”
Tiny is far more excited by this idea then he expected. She jumps up and does a little dance, clapping her long arms over her head.
He smiles, “Let your friends know then.”
---
She brings a larger group with her the next day, including some he remembers defeating a few times.
On the third day a larger monkey shows up and starts a harangue at the edge of the field they are working on. A few of the newcomers crouch down guiltily. They must have come here without permission.
Tiny drops her spade, takes her swords off her back, and makes a declaration while holding the blade over her head and gesturing around.
Thumping her chest, she resheathes her swords and goes back to chopping at the ground, point made.
Whatever she said it must have been pretty inspiring. There are hoots of approval all around before the humandrills get back to work with renewed enthusiasm.
The other troop leader crouches, looking sullen and murderous, but reluctant to attack.
His followers uncertainly go back to work, except for one that cautiously sidles up to him. She starts waving her hands around as if explaining something to him.
He looks intrigued, “Ook?”
She nods affirmatively. The other leader rubs his jaw in thought and then knuckle walks over to the tools and picks up a spade, examining the blade and testing the handle with his teeth before he seems satisfied.
He starts digging away at the edge of the field, the one who had spoken with him, happily working alongside him.
Zoro thinks that if the cabbages don’t work out there is going to be hell to pay.
---
“The monkeys seem to be pretty excited about the idea of vegetables,” Zoro reports to Mihawk that night, “I’m going to need some seeds and supplies to plant a field though.”
Mihawk seems a little surprised at this declaration, and then he smiles at him again. “I will be heading out in a couple more days, give me a list of what you need.” He adds, speaking to himself, “They could actually go back to farming...”
Zoro thinks to ask, “How did you know that the monkeys can be taught to be peaceful?”
Mihawk considers how much to say, “When I first left this island twenty five years ago, the village just down the road was a place where important meetings were held. Everyone knew the consequences of committing any act of violence under the Tree of Peace would be dire, since the humandrills lived in its branches.”
That would explain why it still seemed to be one of their favorite places to gather.
That massive tree could only have been carved up by one person, “And you decided to turn the island’s sacred tree into a memorial?”
“The tree was dead. When the volcano at the center of the island became active…” Mihawk trails off when Zoro looks confused. He asks, “You never wondered where the red light comes from?”
Zoro shrugs, “It let me see at night.”
Mihawk actually blinks when he realizes that’s all Zoro is going to say, “The smog from the volcano made it colder here, it probably killed the Tree of Peace and caused crops to fail. The resulting food shortages would easily have sparked the conflict that consumed everything. It seemed appropriate that the dead tree would serve as a marker for the people it could no longer watch over.”
He speaks as a connoisseur of such things. No doubt he and Robin could have some thoroughly morbid conversations about all the ways and reasons people come up with to kill each other. Zoro has never worried himself over details like that.
“You don’t seem very broken up about what’s become of this place.”
Mihawk gave him a very direct look, but the man had wanted to know his character, it seemed only fair to return the favor. His answer is cold, “It was, in most regards, typical in the variety of human nature displayed.”
Zoro isn’t sure if he really cares so little or just isn’t in the mood to conveniently explain what drives him, “So the monkeys aren’t what destroyed everything?”
“The humandrills certainly amplified the damage, but they would not have started the fighting.” Mihawk asserts.
Zoro nods, that’s probably true, they almost certainly finished it though.
“I will be leaving for about a week. If you don’t do anything foolish,” he pauses, as if considering the likelihood of this, “you should be recovered enough begin training when I get back.”
Zoro grins; finally he can start moving forward again.
Just seven hundred and five days left to get stronger before he sees his crewmates again.
No problem.