5 Chapter 5: Year Two

During his first year of training, Josh made sure that he did not try to train the other powers but instead kept a strict schedule on what to do.

He had already made a plan the moment he saw the powers that he got. First and foremost would be for his body to be able to handle said powers and techniques. Otherwise, not only will he not be able to use them, he might even hurt himself during the process.

So.. our blue eyed protagonist build his foundations in his body and pushed himself to almost the breaking point everyday.

In the middle of an uninhabited island, dubbed as "the Island of Isolation" by it's only human inhabitant, there stood a mighty tree that towered above all other trees in the forest.

On a lower branch of the mentioned tree, stood a young man, he look like he just became an adult, age wise. This young man had an extremely well toned body and his muscles can clearly be seen even under his clothing. His hair was a bright blond and seems to defy gravity the longer he stayed in the wilderness. His navy blue eyes contain unshakable confidence inside them.

This young man is none other than Joshua. The teen was smiling a confident smile because he looked much better than he did a year before, he was so much stronger as well.

His time spent on training his body and devil fruit powers were not for naught as his strength, speed, endurance, flexibility, dexterity, and even life force have increased by too many fold to count. He had enough mastery over his devil fruit and all the moves that comes with it.

"Sadly, I wasn't able to 'Awaken' my devil fruit but I'm extremely satisfied with my results.", the now 18 year old chuckled to himself.

He did not seriously expect himself to be able to train his devil fruit to the point of awakening but a man can dream.

Even Luffy, who has had his devil fruit for over 13 years did not awaken them yet.. but then again, it's probably because he doesn't know about it and therefore, never actively tried to awaken it.

Josh assumed that awakening was something that would happen naturally and there was no way to rush things but that did not mean that there weren't ways to make that happen naturally faster.

It was just a theory but affecting and turning physical things into lightning is probably what the awakened Rumble Rumble fruit does.. much like Doflamingo's. His new found connection to the lightning storm could be a hint but Josh just left that thought in the back of his mind.

Anyway, enough about last year, we're here for this year.. am I right!? "Yeah!!"(imaginary shout of agreement)

Although Josh would focus on the Rokushiki this year, that did not mean that he would completely stop doing what he did before.

It was just that he would spend 90% of his time on the Rokushiki. He would still train his body and try his damnedest to increase his strength but it has been getting harder and harder for him to push himself to the limits nowadays so improvements were hard to come by.

He would train his body like normal but not as extreme as the first year because most of his time is spent on the Rokushiki.

Every now and then, he would get an idea for a new attack with his devil fruit and would test them out and if they worked, master them but that was it for his devil fruits... as mentioned earlier, he had other things to do.

"The first and easiest is probably Kami-E." Josh nodded silently to himself.. he was once again correct, out of all the Rokushiki techniques, the Kami-E was by far the easiest to learn and the least taxing on the body, not that exhaustion was a problem for Josh anymore.

The Kami-E is basically a watered down version of an Observation Haki master. There are differences but essentially, they produced the same results... which is dodging the opponent's attacks. Learning Kami-E now would be helpful for when Josh trains his Observation Haki.

Kami-E meaning Paper, is when you make your body go limp and rely on your natural senses, movement of the air, movements of your opponent, and your flexibility combined with your reaction speed to dodge the attacks of an opponent. As your proficiency in the technique increases, the less you need to concentrate on it. It becomes almost instinctual when you have it down to a certain level.

There are several problems with this though.. one, you need to concentrate hard. Two, you need to go limp which can be dangerous. If an enemy was faster or has much better reaction speed than you, Kami-E is basically useless. Three, if you haven't mastered it adequately enough, using Kami-E during a real life and death battle can be a gamble because when you focus hard on the technique, you become stationary and limit your movement.

This technique was trained by the 'help' of someone that Josh has managed to 'befriend' (*cough* threatened *cough*) after their many 'sparring' sessions.

"Alright.. Winnie, all you have to do is attack me. You can go slow at first but do speed up when you think I'm getting used to it." That's right folks... Josh named the boss of the island, which by the way is a bear, after a disn- I'll just let you figure that one out.

It took the recently made adult by age a few weeks to get it down but he had mastered Kami-E to above basic level. It was now time to move on to the next technique. After he got the feel for all of them, he would go back to train them until full mastery.

Josh spent the next 2 months on the 3 techniques; Soru (Shave), Geppo (Moonwalk), and Rankyaku (Tempest Kick).

These techniques did not require much work as they are pretty physical. As long as someone has enough physical strength and knows what to do, they could basically preform them.

Especially Soru, as many marines use them. It wouldn't be surprising if someone saw it and copied the technique successfully.. heck, even Kuro of a "Thousand Plans" managed to preform a bastardized version of it.

The technique Soru is where you kick the ground 10 times in a second. It's literally in a blink of the eye! These kicks would then propel you forward at incredible speeds that the naked eyes have a hard time following.

The problem with this technique though, is that once you've moved and used the technique, making a turn or stopping cannot be done. You can adjust the distance that you "Soru" to by the amount of kicks or how hard and fast you preform the kicks but changing mid Soru just couldn't be done. Still very useful though.

The next technique, Geppo, is probably one of the most useful techniques that exists in the one piece world... that's at least the case for Josh. This technique is similar to the Soru, however, instead of kicking backward to propel yourself, you kick down enough times to make it possible to kick the air.

This way, you can maneuver or stay stationary in midair! This technique is probably the best life saving technique for devil fruit users because they can essentially stay in the air or whisk themselves away if they ever found themselves falling towards the ocean.

Come on! This is flying (sort of) we're talking about.. if this isn't a man's romance, then I don't know what is.

(I hope Boss is proud of that comment!)

Using Soru and Geppo in conjuncture is completely and absolutely possible and just makes you look twice as badass. However, it'll tax your body twice as much as it normally would.

The next technique is called Rankyaku. This technique consist of kicking really fast that you cause enough friction to create a wind blade that, if powerful enough, could even cut steel.

In hindsight, this technique seems really powerful, but that isn't exactly the case. Any exceptional swordsmen are able to create wind blades as well. The only difference is that the Rankyaku will most likely be much weaker.

While a top rate swordsman can cut down diamonds and seastones, the limit of Rankyaku is sadly just steel. You can kick as fast as you want, the technique is physically incapable of producing a wind blade strong enough to slice through diamond.. it's like that by design.

You could probably extend the range of the blade and make it bigger by kicking faster and harder but that's the limit. Josh wasn't too worried about it though because sinking a warship with a single sweep of his leg is badass enough for him.

The next 2 months were spent on the last two techniques of the Rokushiki which are the Tekkai (Iron Body) and Shigan (Finger Pistol). One month for each techniques because they needed a bit more time compared to the rest.

To train Tekkai, Josh had our favorite bear 'Winnie', along with any other wild beasts that he comes across on the island 'help' him out. They would punch, hit, smack, bite, and claw at Josh while he stood there and tensed his muscles as hard as he could and hope that they would at least leave cool looking scars.

Josh had to take off all of his clothes except for his shorts so that the only clothing he had on the island doesn't get destroyed.

From the start, Josh has been wearing the same clothes everyday. At some point he would wash them and tried his best to keep them safe.

The said clothing consists of a plain black long sleeved T-shirt over a white short sleeved T-shirt. Over his double T-shirts he had a black, blue, and red hoodie that matched perfectly with his current stature... he was lacking some muscles when he first started out so now they fit perfectly.

For his pants, the recent adult wore a simple red joggers that extended down to his ankles. The shoes he wore were also plain white and had no exotic designs.

If you haven't noticed, our mc's favorite colors are black, white, blue, and red. As a kid, he never understood the fixation of some other people on only 1 color.

The training for the Shigan sounded simple. All he had to do was to preform a partial Tekkai on his finger, which is actually pretty hard. You had to make it just one finger and not the whole hand. All of this control took him more time than necessary hence the reason he needed a whole month.

By now, anyone who's heard about his training would think that he had mastered biofeedback.

After finally managing to harden only his finger, he had to make sure he could do it with all of his fingers just Incase he needed to be able to, Josh practiced to be able to thrust his finger so fast that it produces a wind bullet.

In a normal Shigan, you would need to directly stab your finger at the opponent but Josh, the overachiever that he is, took it a step further and trained to be able to shoot wind bullet through the use of Shigan.

As for the secret technique of the Rokushiki, the Rokuogan, he did not get that as part of the Rokushiki as it is a secret technique, however, this did not mean that he couldn't buy it at a later time.

The young hero— I mean the soon to be pirate spent the rest of the year on polishing and mastering all of the Rokushiki techniques and did not slack off on training his body.