Bounty Hunter

West Blue, Rum Town.

The air reeked of cheap ale, sour sweat, and the stench of blood that had never washed clean. This underground tavern called the One-Eyed Seagull had always been a playground for smugglers, murderers, and pirates to burn their money.

At that moment, an ear-piercing burst of laughter erupted from the center of the tavern.

"Ha ha ha! You should've seen that old mayor's face! He actually scraped together five million Beli, knelt on the ground, and begged me to spare the women and children in town."

The speaker was a burly man with an ugly scar running across his face. Guzzling rum, he boasted smugly to his men around him. "I took the money, so of course I kept my promise and didn't lay a blade on anyone! I just had everyone in town locked inside the church, barred the doors from outside, and tossed in a few torches!"

"Ha ha ha! Boss, that was beautiful!"

"Watching those idiots desperately pound on the windows in the sea of flames, listening to those brats scream... that sound was more intoxicating than the strongest liquor in this tavern!"

The scarred man slammed his cup onto the wooden table, his eyes gleaming with twisted cruelty. "That's what true freedom on the seas is! We're pirates! We take whatever we want and kill whoever we want!"

A brief silence fell over the tavern. Even the worldly old bartender behind the counter could not stop his hand from trembling as he poured a drink, splashing several drops of murky liquor across the greasy bar.

"Ha ha ha! Boss, that was beautiful!"

"That's exactly how you deal with trash who refuse to pay protection money!"

After that brief silence came even more deranged, frenzied cheers from the pirates.

Amid the crowd's sickening revelry, the darkest corner of the tavern seemed utterly out of place.

A young man in a black high-collared trench coat sat there.

His name was Rain.

Rain did not look toward the noisy center of the room. Most of his tall, well-proportioned body was hidden in shadow. A cup of untouched water sat on the table, while his hands calmly sorted through a stack of crumpled bounty posters.

Dim candlelight fell upon the posters. The top one bore the arrogant face with the ugly scar: "Bloodhand" Galt. Dead or alive. Bounty: 15 million Beli.

"Fifteen million... in a beginner's village like West Blue, that counts as a fat sheep." Rain's voice was soft. He carefully folded the bounty poster and tucked it close against his chest.

"Hey! You pretty boy in black over there!"

Perhaps Rain's clean aura, so out of place in his surroundings, had irritated one of Galt's men. A pirate lackey with a flushed, drunken face and yellow teeth staggered over, rusty scimitar in hand, and kicked Rain's table hard.

With a bang, the cup toppled over. Water spilled down and dripped onto Rain's black leather boots.

"The big guys are celebrating the boss's great haul, and you're over here making that dead face for who to see?" The lackey leaned close to Rain. "That outfit of yours looks like it's made of good stuff. Hand over everything valuable you've got, then strip naked and crawl out through my legs!"

The surrounding pirates stopped drinking and whistled eagerly, anticipating a good show. In their eyes, this skinny young man would wet himself in terror the next second.

However, Rain merely lifted his eyelids slightly. "Get lost."

That contemptuous attitude completely ignited the lackey's rage.

"You're courting death!" Enraged, he raised his scimitar and slashed viciously at Rain's neck, the blade whistling through the air.

"Ah!" The waitress behind the bar let out a short scream and covered her eyes.

Everyone expected to see blood spraying like a fountain and a head rolling across the floor the next instant.

Clang—crack!

An incredibly sharp explosion of sound pierced everyone's eardrums.

The expected blood did not appear. The lackey stood frozen in place, his arms numb from the recoil, the web between his thumb and forefinger split open. He looked up in disbelief at half of his blade, which had been blasted away and was now embedded deep in the tavern ceiling.

"How... is that possible..." The lackey's bloodshot eyes widened.

Following his terrified gaze, they saw that Rain's neck and shoulder, where the scimitar had struck, had somehow lost the texture of human skin. They had turned into a hard layer of grayish-white rock covered in rough granules!

The strike that could have severed human bone had left only a shallow white mark on the stone.

"That blade is too dull. And you're really loud."

Rain finally rose to his feet. As he stood, an ear-grating series of grinding cracks came from within his body, as if tons of boulders were crushing against one another in his veins.

"M-Monster! A Devil Fruit user?" The lackey finally came to his senses and screamed as he tried to back away.

"Too late."

Rain's right hand shot out. The instant it did, his originally slender arm mutated in midair. Grayish-white stone spread upward from his fingertips, assimilating and swelling over muscle and bone in an instant. In the blink of an eye, his entire right arm became a massive Granite limb thicker than an ordinary man's thigh, covered in sharp ridges!

There was no fancy technique. Carrying the terrifying density and weight of stone itself, the granite limb seized the lackey by the throat. Rain did not even need to exert any force; the sharp edges of the stone had already pierced the man's skin.

Then Rain swung his arm down with savage force.

Boom!

The entire tavern floor shook violently. The thick oak planks were smashed into a one-meter-wide crater. The lackey's body was nearly embedded in the soil, his breastbone shattered, blood pouring from his eyes, ears, nose, and mouth. Before he could even scream, he had been reduced to a mangled pulp.

The tavern instantly fell into a deathly silence. The pirates who had been jeering moments ago now seemed to have had their throats seized, cold sweat sliding down their foreheads.

"Bastard! You dare kill my man!"

"Bloodhand" Galt was the first to react. His eyes bulged with fury as he yanked out the massive double-bladed axe embedded in the table. As a pirate with a bounty of 15 million, he had survived countless bloody battles. Though shocked by his opponent's ability, the brutality in his bones kept him from backing down.

"Shoot him! Turn him into a sieve! I refuse to believe stone can withstand bullets!" Galt roared as he gave the order.

Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang!

More than a dozen pirate lackeys snapped out of their stupor and drew flintlock pistols from their waists, emptying their chambers at Rain's position. Dense lead bullets formed a deadly web of firepower, completely engulfing where Rain stood.

The thick scent of gunpowder filled the air. Yet when the smoke cleared, the pirates discovered in despair that Rain was still standing exactly where he had been.

He had not even tried to dodge. More than half of his body had completely turned into grayish-white stone. The powerful lead bullets only blasted off fragments of rock when they struck him, producing a dull series of crackles. The shallow craters left by the bullets were filled by fresh stone in less than a second, restoring him completely.

"Is that all?" Rain brushed stone dust from his trench coat, his eyes cold. "Since you like ranged attacks, I'll return the favor."

Rain raised his left hand and spread his fingers toward the crowd ahead. His fingertips rapidly began to change. The previously hard stone surface cracked and peeled away, becoming spherical stones the size of longan fruit, each one incredibly dense.

Whoosh! Whoosh! Whoosh! Whoosh!

Driven by the immense kinetic force bestowed by his Devil Fruit ability, hundreds of high-density stone bullets blasted from Rain's fingertips! They flew so fast that they tore through the air with piercing shrieks.

Splurt! Splurt! Splurt!

Blood and screams erupted throughout the cramped basement at once. The seven or eight pirates at the front were instantly pierced through by the stone bullets, sent flying like broken sacks, and smashed heavily into the walls, dying on the spot.

"Damn brat! I'll chop you into pieces!"

Seeing more than half his men dead or wounded in an instant, Galt's eyes turned completely red. His massive body burst forth with astonishing speed that did not match his size. With his double-bladed axe crossed, he brought it down upon Rain's head with the force of a mountain collapse.

The giant axe descended with a shriek that tore through the air. Yet at the instant its blade was about to touch Rain's head, Rain's body exploded into pieces with a bang!

Galt's powerful strike merely split apart a sandstorm made of stone fragments. The axe blade smashed into the floor, splitting the web between his thumb and forefinger from the recoil.

"What? Where did he go?" Galt's pupils contracted sharply, an unprecedented terror gripping his heart like a venomous snake.

"A Logia?!" Galt's pupils shrank again, and his heart seemed to skip a beat. In a place like the Four Blues, a Logia Devil Fruit was practically synonymous with invincibility.

"Only figuring it out now? Be a good man in your next life."

A cold whisper, like the voice of the Reaper, suddenly sounded behind Galt's ear.

The scattered sand and stone fragments in the air, as if drawn by some powerful magnetic field, gathered and reassembled behind Galt at a speed that defied all physical laws. From ankles to legs, torso, and finally that cold face, Rain's body was perfectly reconstructed in less than half a second.

At the same time, Rain had already brought his right hand together like a blade. He drew upon the power of his Devil Fruit, compressing and squeezing the stone along the edge of his palm to an extreme degree.

Rain pressed his fingers together. The stone coating his fingertips instantly compressed and transformed into an incomparably sharp, black Obsidian short blade that gleamed in the light.

Splurt—

An almost inaudible cutting sound rang out.

The black Obsidian blade smoothly sliced through Galt's thick neck.

Before Galt could even turn around, the head bearing that ugly scar slipped from his neck and rolled across the floor soaked in blood and liquor. Only when it hit the ground did a column of blood more than two meters high burst from his headless body.

Clang.

The double-bladed axe fell to the floor, and Galt's enormous headless body collapsed with a crash, kicking up a cloud of dust.

The few surviving pirates in the tavern had gone completely insane with terror. They scrambled into the corners, and some even lost control of their bladders from sheer fear as the pungent smell of urine began to spread.

Rain ignored those ant-like lackeys. With a flick of his wrist, the sharp Obsidian blade reverted to ordinary stone dust and dispersed into the air. He tore a relatively clean tablecloth from the bar, skillfully wrapped Galt's head inside it, tied it shut, and carried it in one hand.

Pushing open the tavern's rickety wooden door, he found the wind howling outside and the West Blue's torrential rain still raging.

Carrying the heavy bundle, Rain stepped into the cold rainy night.