Chapter 443 - 94
The moment Rosinante's gaze locked onto him, Scarlet felt it in every part of his body. Fear rose up from somewhere deeper than thought, and before he could reason through anything at all, he was already moving, abandoning Indigo without a word and throwing himself into the air.
Indigo blinked, staring at the space where Scarlet had been standing a moment before.
"Running?" Rosinante's voice was cold and even. "You think you can just leave? You think I'd let something like you walk away from here with my dignity intact?"
Even as the words left his mouth, he was gone from where he stood, vanishing without a sound.
The crowd caught only the suggestion of motion before a streak of force slammed Scarlet back down into the ground, cratering the earth beneath him. Scarlet struggled to push himself up. The blow had hurt him badly, and only the absurd toughness of his body kept him moving at all. Anyone else would have been completely immobilized.
Then a figure appeared beside him without a sound.
A foot came down.
Scarlet was driven back into the ground with enough force to split it, the earth cracking in every direction around him. The one standing over him was Rosinante.
"Enel, bring me a fruit," Rosinante said, not looking away from what was beneath his boot.
"Understood," Enel said.
Lightning flashed, and he was gone. Another flash, and he was back at Rosinante's side. In his hand was an apple, which he hadn't been holding before.
"Your apple, Your Majesty. Should I bring a Seastone cell as well?" Enel asked. He already understood well enough why Rosinante had asked for the fruit.
"No need," Rosinante said with a faint smile.
"Jii-jii-jii!" Scarlet's thrashing had become increasingly desperate, his cries growing louder.
"You're being loud," Rosinante said simply.
He pressed his foot down.
The ground fractured inch by inch beneath the pressure. Scarlet's eyes went wide, then slowly, the resistance went out of him. His head dropped.
Just like that, the one who had caused all of this was still.
With Scarlet dead, the stone platform Indigo had been standing on lost whatever kept it suspended and dropped straight down.
Indigo stared at Rosinante. His face had gone somewhere past fear, past disbelief, into a kind of blankness that comes when reality stops matching what you believed to be true. Scarlet, the one he had placed every hope in, the one he had trusted to kill the Dragon King and settle what was owed to Shiki, had been taken apart like he was nothing. Like a child flailing at an adult who was barely paying attention. There had been no resistance worth the name.
It was only now that Indigo understood, in his bones, that revenge had been a fantasy from the moment he conceived it.
...
Then Rosinante did something that drew confused looks from every direction.
He set the apple down beside Scarlet's body. Then he pressed one hand flat against the corpse.
"Secret Art," he said, his voice carrying a quiet authority. "Devil Fruit Seal."
Unique sigils began spreading outward from his hand, flowing across Scarlet's body like ink through water, covering him completely.
"What is the Dragon King doing?" someone nearby asked.
"Scarlet's already dead. Is he... desecrating the body? Didn't think the Dragon King had that kind of hobby," a pirate muttered, smirking.
"You're supposed to let the dead rest. This feels like too much," someone else said, though they were careful to keep their voice below a certain volume.
"The apple..." Lambo said slowly, his brow drawing together. "Wait. Could he be..."
"What is it?" Garde asked from beside him.
"Nothing. Never mind. I'm getting ahead of myself. Something like that isn't possible," Lambo said, shaking his head with a short laugh.
But the laugh faded quickly. The expression that replaced it was one he couldn't entirely control.
"How can this be possible? He can actually do that?"
The same words erupted from what felt like every throat at once.
The sigils that had spread across Scarlet's body were moving now, gathering, drawing inward from every direction until they converged entirely on the apple resting beside him. As the last of them settled into it, the apple changed. Its shape shifted and twisted, becoming something unlike itself, something unmistakably strange.
"A Devil Fruit!"
The cry went up from everywhere, from people who had seen one before and people who never had.
Sabaody Archipelago sat at the crossroads of the world, close to Naval Headquarters, close to the seat of the World Government, home to one of the only known Devil Fruit auction houses. Everyone here had either laid eyes on one or heard enough about them to know what they were looking at.
An ordinary apple had just become something that wasn't ordinary at all.
But witnessing the birth of a Devil Fruit was not what left the crowd speechless. What left them speechless was the how of it. The fruit had not appeared on its own. Rosinante had pulled it out of Scarlet's body himself, through some deliberate application of power, and transferred it deliberately into the apple beside him.
No one in the world knew where Devil Fruits originally came from. What was known was that when a Devil Fruit user died, the fruit would reappear somewhere in the world, manifesting in whatever ordinary fruit happened to be nearby, as though finding a new vessel on its own.
But nobody had ever heard of a person extracting a Devil Fruit from a living body, or a dead one, and transferring it somewhere of their choosing.
This was something else entirely.
...