Kizaru and Akainu had joined the Marines in the same intake. They had already been sixteen when they enlisted, and now they were nearly fifty. Sixteen was no ordinary age.
It was a golden period of growth. What a person learned then could shape the next several decades of their life. That was why the Dragon People hated Loa so bitterly: he had ruined Rob Lucci, P9's greatest talent in eight hundred years, while he was still in that crucial period.
Since Kizaru had joined the Marines at that age, and had said he hadn't been a good guy before, who had he been? And what had made him enlist?
There was plenty there worth digging into.
But this wasn't the time for that discussion.
Kizaru might look idle all day, as if nothing mattered to him, but he kept his cards close to his chest. Ask him outright, and he would only brush the question aside.
Loa had no desire to waste his breath. He shrugged and continued showing the two of them around.
"This is the imitation Poneglyph. Look." Loa walked up to the stone tablet and pressed it lightly with his fingernail, leaving a thumb-sized mark. The moss around it and the tablet's sheer size made the mark hard to notice.
There was nothing strange about Loa being strong enough to leave a mark in stone. But on a Poneglyph, that mark told them everything.
Only a fake Poneglyph could be damaged so easily!
When the Kozuki Family had made the Poneglyphs, the entire nation had searched for the stones that would bear the truth. Those stones were nearly indestructible. Otherwise, they would have vanished long ago instead of surviving to this day and giving the World Government cause for alarm.
Loa covered the mark he had