Chapter Text
Zoro limps off the training grounds after his 2,001st loss. He reaches the edge of the fields—not stomping, as Kuina claims—when his rival speaks:
“Is that a soulmark on your back?”
Kuina is sitting cross-legged on a stone. While he was heading off for his next training session, here she is, sword relaxed in her lap, lounging in her victory. And making up words, too.
“Zoro, you seriously don’t know what a soulmark is?” Kuina studies his clueless look and huffs. “Have you even seen your mark?”
A white sword piercing the sky forms in his mind. The image is as clear as the training dummies on the field or the hanging full moon, even though he’s never seen the mark before. Zoro touches his upper back, right above the dojo uniform’s hem. The skin feels sharp like a blade.
“So what?” Zoro huffs back, digging his shoes into the grass. “What’s the big deal about it?”
If they were closer, Kuina would flick him. Instead, she flicks the air. “I don’t know, maybe how you care for someone so much that it marks your body? Have you seriously never noticed before? Nearly everyone has at least one soulmark.”
He remembers the blade cutting paper on the side of Kuina’s neck. The flightless bird on Koshiro’s left hand and the crossed swords on his right. Zoro thought they were tattoos, a swordsman’s rite of passage. He had planned to get one after beating Kuina tonight.
“You didn’t have that soulmark before I beat you… Wait.” She fiddles with her sword. “Our promise meant that much to you?”
“You’re my rival! Of course it does.” They swore that one of them would become the world’s greatest swordsman. How could he not take that seriously?
Kuina grips Wado Ichimonji’s sheath. The sword looks small when shifted between her hands. “Fine, then.” She jumps off the stone, her expression as fierce as Zoro’s. “We’ll keep training. Achieve our promise to become the greatest as soon as possible. So, same time tomorrow?”
“You better not cow away!”
She grins. “Why would I run from an easy victory?”
That’s it.
Zoro stomps off to a barren field littered with rocks, the one Koshiro uses to demonstrate new techniques. He places one sword into his mouth, and the other two into his hands. Practicing on training dummies isn’t enough anymore. A master swordsman can cut a mountain in half—a few boulders are nothing to him. And a master swordsman wouldn’t let Kuina have the last laugh. He’s Roronoa Zoro. He won’t be bested by a girl with a cool sword and a cocky attitude.
The next hours pass in a blur. He slices through—or, well, makes a sizable dent—in the boulders. Dawn cracks, and he’s tossing pebbles up with his feet, slicing them mid-air. He cuts through the last stone left and turns to see Koshiro watching him.
His sensei says nothing on his favored training field turned into crumbles.
“Come with me, Zoro,” Koshiro says. His usual soft smile, the one Zoro thought was stuck on his sensei’s face, is gone. “It’s Kuina.”
Within the dojo, Kuina lies still on the slab.
The pale body must be fake. Kuina would never die so easily, not when she made a promise. There’s no playful sneer on her chapped lips, no sweat on her skin from hours of training, and no sword cutting through paper on her neck.
Zoro is looking around her neck when a hand rests on his shoulder.
“Your soul leaves your body when you pass,” Koshiro says, his mentor somehow sensing his thoughts. “Without a soul, your body loses its soulmarks.”
Zoro rips off his sensei’s hand. “But I’m still here. Why’d my mark change?” Without looking, Zoro knows that the sword mark on his back has faded to gray, its sharp edge turned dull.
“Your soulmark faded because Kuina’s soul is in Heaven now. No soul connection can reach that far.”
“Who says it can’t reach that far? If my mark can’t reach her, then I’ll make it happen!” Other mourners look Zoro’s way, frowning, but he’s too mad to care. Let them hear the oath burn his throat: “I’ll become the world’s greatest swordsman. That way, my promise will ring to Heaven, and my mark will get back its color!”
Grabbing his swords from the dojo entrance, Zoro runs to the training grounds. He’ll keep training until he becomes the greatest swordsman. He’ll use two, three—no, nine swords at once. If he gets stronger, then so will his soul. Its bonds would become so strong that Kuina will scream at him from Heaven to shut up.
He didn’t just get a soulmark only to lose it. Not when the mark came from their promise.
A few years after Kuina passed, Zoro started to travel the East Blue. It was on his hunts for strong bounties that he noticed soulmarks everywhere. Townsfolk compared their soulmarks in bars, morons paid scammers to analyze soulmarks, and people’s “tattoos” moved across their bodies.
The straw-hat teen with more soulmarks than bare skin is impossible to miss. Especially when he leans right in front of Zoro, who is tied to the marine base’s pole. “Future soulmate, join my crew!”
Zoro tugs the bonds tying him to the cross. No escaping this nut. “Your soulmate?”
Straw Hat laughs before the wanted man, despite his trembling pink-haired friend begging him to stay away from this crazy sword guy, Luffy! “You’re my soulmate! I knew the moment I saw you.”
Zoro resists checking his body for a second mark. No one knows their soulmates on first meet—Koshiro told him a soul bond needs time to form. The stranger’s confidence almost makes him doubt. “Let’s say I’m your ‘destined’ soulmate. Soon as you free me, I could still kill you. The marines didn’t tie me up here for show.”
When he traveled with Johnny and Yosaku, they told him that soulmates are predestined by some god. Zoro found that ridiculous. This teen wears the same scowl Zoro gave Johnny and Yosaku.
“Destined? How could anyone decide who’s important to me?” Loofy—what did the pink-head call him? Woofy? Goofy?—holds out Zoro’s swords, Wado Ichimonji in the middle. “I know you’re my soulmate. Just like I know I’ll be the Pirate King. That weirdo marine’s gone, so why die out here? Join my crew!”
You’re crazy, Zoro thinks. No one sane would join you willingly.
“Untie me,” Zoro replies.
Zoro fights the world’s (current) greatest swordsman a few days later. Against a swordsman wielding a pocket knife, all he could do was survive. He’d have to go from breaking boulders to breaking mountains if he wants to be strong enough for his soul to reach Kuina’s.
“I will never lose again!” he had screamed to Luffy, his chest torn open, blood soaking the wooden plank he lay on. His captain had replied with a smile.
It was in rewrapping his bandages that he notices another mark on his back. A straw hat in the center of the sun. It’s beneath his back’s sword mark; another mark for another promise. Warmth spreads across his back, like a hand pushing him forward.
Zoro doesn’t know where this crazy straw-hat pirate is steering him, or when he will take down that swordsman with a feathered-cap and smug smile, but Zoro knows this:
Kuina will hear from him soon.