Chapter 23

Disclaimer: If you recognise it, surprise, I don't own it.

Chapter 12– A Goal.

Edited: 31/03/2023

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"Hm, brat. Why are you at the beginning of the book? I could have sworn that you were at the end of it the last time I looked." Garp asks while resting near the campfire. I myself also resting on the side opposite to him. I have been under his tutelage for... I don't know how long. I just know that I am very different from the boy that first arrived on this island.

And like every night after a long hard day of training, I rest on my makeshift bed made of a bunch of leaves next to the fire and read my book. But having been here for a long time and not having anything other than my book to relax, I had read through the entirety of these books multiple times, and so I have been rereading them.

"I am reading the book again, Garp-san." I answer him, not looking away from the book and trying to instil the information in my head so that I have a firm theoretical base I can use when I finally get around to doing some practical work.

"Okay." Garp simply answers before going back to whatever the hell it was he was doing. I don't know. I am not paying attention. And so we sit in silence for a while, the crackling o the fire keeping us company, as well as the loud snores of George, who sleep under a tree.

"But, why are you reading it again? Why aren't you doing any of the things it is actually telling you to do?" Garp breaks the silence, asking the questions he must have been thinking of for a while. Honestly, the reason why is obvious.

"Because I can't do anything without the proper tools, I can't chop down trees, I can cut the wood down, I can't fix the joints together. I just can't do any of it without the proper equipment, so all I can do is read the book until we finally get back to Conomi Islands, where I can actually start to do some carpentry." So I speak, expecting Garp to just reply with another okay and go back to whatever it was, but instead, I hear him get up off the ground and walk towards me.

I look up to see Garp looming over me with an angry, as well as disappointed, face. He suddenly reaches out and grabs my book before flinging it into the darkness behind him, taking me completely surprised and leaving me stunned for a second before I react and jump up to face him.

"WHAT THE HELL? WHY DID YOU DO THAT FOR OLD MAN!? I WAS READING THAT!" I shout at him, enraged that he just took the one thing keeping me occupied on this island and giving me some respite from the intense training. But thankfully, when I look to where he flung the book, I can see that it is just resting on the sand further down the beach, and some of my anger bleeds, knowing I can just pick it up.

"You stupid little shrimp, what the hell have we been doing this entire time?" Garp calmly asks, a slight tone of anger in his voice, but more than that, I can hear him thinking I am an idiot for some reason, as if I was doing something wrong.

"You have been training me?" Even though I know it is the correct answer, I can't stop it from coming out as a question. The only thing we had been doing on this island was training, yet there must be something I am missing if Garp is acting like this, some sort of hidden lesson.

"You said you wanted to be the world's strongest man, didn't you? So come on, follow me, brat." Garp asks, turning his back on me and walking towards the forest. I quickly scramble to my feet and follow him. After all these days full of training and listening to his orders without question, it has been drilled into me, and I don't question him when he asks me to do something unless it is insanely absurd.

"Yes, I want to be the strongest man in the world. I will be the strongest man in the world." I answer him as we finally reach the forest, and Garp stops in front of a giant jungle tree.

"You don't want to be the world's best swordsman, or axeman, or poleman, or gunman?" Garp turns around and looks down at me, regarding me with a calm neutral eye.

"No, I don't want to be any of those things. I only have one goal: to be the world's strongest man." Of course, I answer, to which Garp seems to be happy as he rewards me with a slight smile and a nod.

"Good, good. Then, WHY ARE YOU TRYING TO USE TOOLS AND EQUIPMENT, YOU DUMBASS!!?" Garp suddenly yells, completely changing his tune and catching me off guard. I stumble back, surprised by the sudden change of tone. I bet he woke up most of the animals in the forest with that, though George being the lazy lump that he is, is still snoring away just fine.

"W-What? I-I NEED TOOLS AND EQUIPMENT AND STUFF TO BUILD STUFF! HOW ELSE WOULD I MAKE ANYTHING!!?" I shout back immediately, feeling like I am not in the wrong here since I am correct in what I am saying. However, I have no clue what the world's strongest stuff he was saying has to do with carpentry. There is no connection.

"WHY DO YOU NEED AN AXE TO CUT DOWN A TREE WHEN YOU CAN DO THIS!?" He punctuates his sentence by bringing his left hand up and slicing through the tree to his left, the side of his palm slipping through it as if it was made of butter and completely. I watch as the tree begins to topple before it starts falling to the ground, but before it even hits it and I have the chance to process it, Garp continues his tirade.

"OR THIS!?" Garp kicks his leg to the side and sweeps it through the air. I see a mesmerising arc of blue energy flash off into the distance and through multiple trees, seemingly having permeated through all of them without doing anything. But then, after a second, as one, they all slip and start to fall, even before the first one Garp chopped with his hand reaches the ground. And Garp doesn't stop there.

"IF YOU NEED TO DRILL SOMETHING, THEN DRILL IT!" He reaches his right hand out, and with his pointer finger, he begins to poke into the tree to his right multiple times with an insane speed, his fingers dipping into the tree like he was putting his finger inside jello.

I could hardly tell what had happened before he pulled his hand back. I can see multiple holes shot into the tree, all imperceptibly close to each other, with less than a millimetre between them. They make a perfect circle, except the finger thrusts are so precise and powerful that the tree still stays perfectly together.

"IF YOU NEED TO HAMMER SOMETHING, THEN USE YOUR DAMN FIST!!" Garp clenches his hand into a fist and then drives it forward with the force of thunder, right between the circle of holes he just made. He blasts that chunk of wood straight out, and I can only blink as it whooshes by me and off over the water, probably not stopping till it kills a Seaking or hits another island. A nearly perfect circle is left in the tree, Garp's fist poking out through it.

"IF YOU NEED TO GET UP HIGH TO BUILD, THEN JUMP UP THERE!!" Garp pulls his fist back out and then jumps up into the air reaching about halfway up the tree, and then he jumps again and reaches the top of the tree, and then again, and again and again. He defies the law of everything to ever exist and jumps off absolutely nothing to get higher, and then he continually jumps in the air to maintain his height.

"YOU DON'T NEED WEAPONS. YOU DO NOT NEED TOOLS. ALL YOU NEED IS YOURSELF. THIS IS WHAT I HAVE BEEN TRAINING YOU FOR!!" Garp shouts before he stops jumping on nothing and begins to fall to the ground. As Garp does so, he faces towards the depths of the forest and starts to kick out multiple times as he falls to the ground, sending out numerous blue flashes that are smaller than the previous one he did, and they only slice through a single tree.

When he finally lands on the ground, the tree falls apart, and multiple wood logs fall down from the sky, littering the floor. I quickly hop backwards when the very top of the tree comes down with all the branches and leaves.

Garp then turns around and looks towards me, but I have no clue what to say after having my mind completely blown and seeing multiple super abilities that I had no clue existed, which means my journey to be the ultimate force on this planet is going to be much more complicated than I thought.

Garp walks past me and towards the beach again, and I am treated to the view of an absolutely demolished forest that has been cut down to just stumps. Logs were strewn all over the ground. Seeing the destruction wrought by this man in less than a second, I turn around to look at him, astonished, and he is not even a little bit out of breath.

I quickly run off after him as he walks past our campfire and towards the sea, confusing me as to what he is doing, but then he walks towards the boat we arrived in for some reason. He stops there, looking down at it as I come and stands next to him.

"Wow, that- that was... wow." That is all I can manage to get out since I simply don't know how else to express my amazement at the sheer power that was just shown to me. But he doesn't respond. He just stays there looking down at the rowboat in thought.

"Um, Garp-San? What are you-WAIT, DONT-" Suddenly, before I can react, Garp reaches down and grabs onto the boat before lifting it up, and he faces the ocean. Getting an inkling of what he is trying to do, I try to stop him, but before I can, he throws the boat with all his might out across the ocean, and I can only watch as it blinks out of existence on the horizon.

"Hm, there, no more boat." I can only stare blankly at Garp, who nods in satisfaction with his handy work, pleased with the result.

"Why? Why did you do that?" I speak listlessly because Garp had just rid us of our only means of transport off of the island. So now we can only wait for some ship to come out here and hope they pick us up, and I have been here for a few days now, and I know that no ships at all pass this island.

So our only hope now is to wait until Garp's crew figures out something is wrong and comes looking for us, Bogard is definitely reliable enough, but until he comes, I will be stuck here with Garp and George, two giant gorillas.

"Because, you little shrimp, I will be damned if some student of mine is going to be as useless as you are turning out to be. You say you want to be the world's strongest man, but you make stupid excuses. You want to be a shipwright too, don't you? That is why you are reading the book. Then you are going to have to make us a boat to get us off this island, and we are going to stay here until after you do. So get to it." Garp says, not taking no for an answer, and I can't exactly say no since this is my only option now.

"But Garp, you don't understand. I never wanted to be a shipwright. I just wanted to learn carpentry to do work on my own house. The book I was reading only talked about houses and not boats, and even then, it was just the basics. I have no idea how to build a boat." Seeing what Garp did earlier, I can see that it is feasible to get the resources and do the work. However, I will not be able to do it with the ease that Garp did so for many years, but I can slowly take resources from this forest and work on making something, but I still need to learn how to build a boat.

"GODDAMN IT, STOP MAKING EXCUSES! DO YOU THINK THAT THE STRONGEST MAN IN THE WORLD MAKES EXCUSES WHEN HE COMES UP AGAINST A WALL? NO!! HE KEEPS SMASHING AGAINST THAT WALL UNTIL IT BREAKS OR HE DIES, SO YOU MAKE THAT BOAT, IT IS JUST A HOUSE THAT FLOATS, GODDAMN IT!!" Garp shouts at me, and I stumble back, shocked by his sudden rise in anger, the pure vitriol in his voice and the hate in his eyes, eyes that seemed to be looking through me at something else.

Suddenly he seems to recognise me, and that hate leaves his eyes, and the anger leaves his body, his form losing its tenseness and relaxing. The angry visage on his face disappears, leaving a calm look in its place, and then he seems to regret his outburst.

"Sorry, kid, I was just reminded of something else and took it out on you. My bad. Listen, it really isn't that hard to build a boat. It is just a curved box with some seats, and it floats. You are my student now, which means you have to be better than the rest. I won't accept anything less. I have a reputation to uphold, after all. Stop giving up before you even try. It pisses me off. If you keep doing that, you will never be strong or fulfil any of your dreams." Garp then walks back over to the campfire and lays down on his makeshift bed, leaving me standing there contemplating his words.

Stop giving up before you even try, and stop making excuses...