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“You don’t mean to say this is too taxing for you, Roronoa?”
Before the boy could answer, Perona interrupted from the other side of the clearing.
“You two idiots are taxing my fucking patience!”
Unimpressed, Mihawk tilted his head in her direction to better display his single raised eyebrow. Perona was not put off.
“You already took his eye, and I thought at least one of you might learn something from the experience, but here you are just trying to kill each other all over again! Are you stupid?”
Roronoa’s brow was crinkling in a way that wanted to be a scowl, but was prevented from qualifying for the boy’s varied repertoire by the pull of fresh scar tissue.
“What do you care?” he asked, and Perona sniffed.
“I refuse to clean up when he inevitably lops off something even more important,” she said, ignoring the face Roronoa valiantly made at her despite his injury. Instead, she rounded on Mihawk himself.
“Is it working?”
For a brief moment he was tempted to question what the girl could possibly know about his training of Roronoa. She was no kind of swordswoman herself, as she had so vehemently announced early on in their acquaintance, and she swore she had less than no interest in whatever the two men were up to.
Yet here she was, and so she had been for a great many of the days he had spent working with Roronoa.
She had not become one of Moria’s commanders for nothing, after all. Who was to say what she had seen.
“Let us say for the sake of argument that it is not.”
“I thought not. I can only assume you sprang from the earth already a master swordsman, but most of us mere mortals need things explained to us.”
“Speak for yourself,” Roronoa grumbled, clearly only arguing out of habit.
“What did you want him to do when you attacked just now,” the girl continued, ignoring Roronoa entirely. “How was he supposed to respond?”
Mihawk peered down at her, unsure how to answer. “He was meant to defend himself.” Obviously.
“Ok, so he wasn’t supposed to dodge?”
Was that why the boy had thrown himself to the ground. “No.”
“Like pulling fucking teeth, by the Deeps,” she muttered. “So why don’t you tell him that ahead of time, hm?”
“Any other enemy won’t just announce how I’m supposed to counter their moves,” said Roronoa, petulantly.
“Ok Mister Santoryu-whatever-the-hell, anything you say. That’s not the point, though. Right here and now if he tells you how you’re supposed to react, then you can learn to recognize it before you lose your other eye.”
She eyed Mihawk for a moment, then added, “One better would be if he could demonstrate an attack or whatever where you could watch and not be on the receiving end every single time, but I’m aware that’s asking rather a lot of creativity from you fools.”
Well. One did have to adapt to become the Greatest.