Teaching himself the Six Powers

Come to think of it, Rubick had always felt that Garp must have taught Luffy the Six Powers. After all, many of Luffy's moves really weren't all that different from them.

For example, activating Gear Second gave him speed comparable to Soru.

The Gum-Gum Daydream he used against Enel also worked along much the same lines as Kami-e. And he had only ever used that move against Enel, because Enel's hand-to-hand combat skills were just that terrible.

Jet Pistol was a lot like Shigan.

Even later on, once he activated Gear Fourth, he picked up Geppo without a teacher.

Rubick figured he might not get anywhere by training the proper way, but following this line of thought certainly couldn't be wrong.

So he set his sights on Iron Body. In the original story, some people couldn't move after using Iron Body because all their muscles were tensed up. Others, however, could move freely while maintaining it, and some had even hardened individual parts of their bodies.

Rubick therefore figured he ought to be able to do it with the Gum-Gum Fruit, too. This kind of training was rather subtle.

For instance, some people could wiggle their ears, some could flex their pecs, and some could raise a single eyebrow. All of these required specific training of the relevant muscle groups, though some people could naturally do them, too.

What Rubick was training now, then, was control over every muscle in his body. And this training actually involved a certain mental component. First, he had to convince himself, then convince his brain, and finally use his brain to control his muscles.

Rubick remembered a Lion Head in CP9 who could control his hair to use Shigan. So, in theory, it should work.

As a result, Kaya and the others noticed that Rubick now spent more and more of his time sitting cross-legged beneath a tree, often for an entire afternoon. He didn't move a muscle the whole time. It was downright eerie.

After a month of this training, Rubick grasped the key trick. He swore that if he'd had this kind of aptitude back in high school, he wouldn't have ended up working as an errand runner.

Then Rubick began training Shigan.

Someone had once said that the strongest punch was one thrown with the strength of the entire body. Shigan worked on the same principle. If you concentrated all your strength into your fingertip and released it, it would hit harder than a pistol.

Why did boxers wear gloves, for example? To increase the area of contact, provide more cushioning, reduce damage, and protect the athletes.

The boxing champion Tyson could deliver a punch measuring 800 kilograms in tests, and around 170 kilograms during a match. What did that mean? Almost nobody could take one of his punches head-on and remain standing.

And that was with Tyson wearing gloves. Without them, the smaller contact area would make his punches even more powerful. Whether he could kill someone was uncertain, but breaking bones would be child's play.

Compress that force even further, concentrating it into a contact area the size of a fingertip, and punching a hole through someone's body would be all too easy.

Rubick considered how Shigan required an instantaneous burst of power. Because of the way the human body was built, you had to crouch first if you wanted to jump high. If you wanted to hit hard, you had to draw your fist back first.

Shigan was the same. Without pulling your arm back, you couldn't generate much force. And when it came to techniques for producing an instantaneous burst of power at close range, the Inch Punch had to be mentioned.

Of course, Rubick only had a vague understanding of the Inch Punch and had no idea how to train it. He could only rack his brains to devise a workable method himself.

The first step was generating force. Shigan's purpose was to channel strength into a finger to injure the enemy, and the process involved transmitting that force.

Unless Rubick could activate Gear Fourth and retract his finger to produce powerful elastic force, he would have to stick to an ordinary person's methods of generating power.

Even people who didn't practice martial arts knew a little about this. For example, you first had to plant your feet to generate force effectively. That was easy enough to understand. Someone standing on the ground could obviously exert more force than someone suspended from wires.

That was why those young pretty-boy actors went stiff as boards when they were suspended from wires to perform lightness skills. Their cores had no strength, so they couldn't execute the movements at all.

Rubick remembered a simple method of generating force: push off the ground with the feet as the starting point, then twist the waist and swing the arm into a hook. For Shigan, that meant using the strength of the waist, thrusting out the arm, and carrying the force all the way to the fingertip.

He also remembered a video of Daoist Chen making his sword ring. He had repeatedly stressed the need to relax and use intent to guide the force to the sword's tip. His movement had indeed sent power from his feet straight to the tip of the sword.

To keep the Navy from calling him to account later, Rubick simply renamed the move "Immortal Points the Way."

As for Tempest Kick, Rubick gave up on it. There were far too many better options for ranged attacks.

Geppo and Soru, however, were worth practicing. Geppo hardly needed explaining. Its principle was to stomp on the air with tremendous force, generating enough lift to stay airborne. That let the user walk through the air and freely change direction to launch surprise attacks on enemies.

In other words, fighters on the level of the Shichibukai or the Four Emperors could easily stomp on the air. Geppo was entirely unnecessary for them. Besides, if they possessed something like an imposing aura, then most of the time, you could only meet their attacks head-on. Once their aura locked onto you, dodging was impossible.

It was just like those experts on the forums discussed: why did everyone insist on meeting attacks head-on when they clearly could have dodged? They simply couldn't get away. Otherwise, Observation Haki would do nothing but exploit a bug, with two people predicting each other's predictions. All you'd see during a fight would be two people standing there, twitching their eyebrows and making faces.

Soru was similar. Its principle was to stamp on the ground at extreme speed, accumulate kinetic energy in a thoroughly unscientific manner, and then release it all at once. The resulting reaction force allowed the user to reach tremendous speeds.

But what about the truly powerful?

Rayleigh could knock Kizaru out of his light form. Did anyone think he was slow? In fact, judging by what the manga showed, Kizaru's speed didn't come anywhere close to the speed of light.

In short, the Six Powers fell short against the best but were more than enough against the rest. For the Navy, having them was better than not.

And learning one or two of them could let you defeat someone of roughly equal strength. Against someone stronger, they could keep you alive. Against a renowned master, at least you could put up a struggle.

Besides, if you mastered the Six Powers and grasped their ultimate technique, their power was nothing to scoff at.

During Luffy's battle against Lucci at Enies Lobby, faced with a rubber body immune to blunt blows, Lucci used the ultimate technique, Rokuogan, to send a shock wave straight through Luffy's body and attack his internal organs.

If Luffy's organs hadn't been rubber too, that single hit might have killed him on the spot. A move like that, striking through a barrier to hit what lay beyond, required exquisite control over force. It was no less difficult than the Ryuo application of Armament Haki.

And it had to be said that the way those two powers were used was practically identical. If Lucci had known Haki back then, Pirate King would have ended long ago.

So, in the end, Rubick devoted most of his energy to Kami-e.