Revenge

Nanohana's underground prison for serious offenders never saw the light of day.

This was Rain's third night here. For three days, he had curled up in a foul-smelling corner, enduring beatings from three death-row inmates as he swallowed moldy black bread and muddy water like a stray dog.

Seastone had drained away his Devil Fruit abilities, but his three years of training had not been wasted. The fighting instincts and muscle memory of a top hunter were still etched into his bones. Over the past three days, he had used what little energy he had to slowly mend his broken ribs and build up his strength.

Around midnight, unsteady footsteps came from outside the cell.

The monkey-faced guard who skimmed prisoners' meals every day and kicked over Rain's water bowl was patrolling the corridor with half a bottle of cheap rum in hand, drunk as a skunk. He belched as he banged his rusty iron bar against the cell bars, savoring the fear in the prisoners' eyes.

When he reached Cell Four, he saw Rain still sprawled in the corner like a dead dog and could not help sneering.

"Sir..."

Suddenly, an extremely faint, hoarse voice, as if it might stop breathing at any moment, came from the dark corner.

The guard stopped, raising his brows in surprise. He leaned toward the bars and, by the dim torchlight, looked at Rain slowly lifting his head.

"What? Pretty boy, finally come to your senses? Too bad Captain Gore already took your money. You can't squeeze so much as a fart out of yourself now." The guard belched, his face full of mockery.

"No... there was more than that..." Rain struggled to crawl a few steps toward the bars. In a faint voice only the two of them could hear, he said in fits and starts, "Near Twin Cape... on a deserted island at the entrance to the Grand Line... I buried a chest... inside are... some treasures I saved up... and a Devil Fruit..."

"What did you say?"

The guard's pupils instantly dilated, and overwhelming greed completely washed away his drunken haze. A Devil Fruit was worth at least a hundred million Beli on the black market!

"Which island? How do I get there? Tell me, now!" The guard trembled with excitement, pressing his face between the thick iron bars as though he wanted to crawl into the cell to hear Rain's whisper.

"It's right..."

Rain's lowered eyes suddenly snapped up.

There was not a trace of weakness or impending death in those pitch-black pupils!

Bang!

Rain sprang up, thrusting both hands through the gap in the bars. He seized the guard by the hair and viciously yanked him inward.

Before the guard could even cry out, Rain's right hand curled in an instant. His index knuckle protruded as he formed an eagle-beak fist and savagely drove it into the guard's Adam's apple.

Crack—!

The guard went limp like a heap of rotten mud, hanging outside the bars with his eyes still wide open.

Without time to catch his breath, Rain reached out with a bloodstained hand and searched around the guard's waist for a moment.

A brass key dropped into his palm.

With his back against the bars, Rain slowly inserted the key into the lock of the Seastone handcuffs around his wrists.

Click.

An exceptionally crisp metallic snap echoed through the deathly silent cell.

The heavy ash-black handcuffs fell onto the sour, muddy floor.

The instant the Seastone left his skin, a long-lost power exploded through every limb and bone in Rain's body!

Buzz—!

The floor and walls of the entire underground prison began to resonate faintly beneath the invisible pressure of his Logia power. The bruises and wounds on Rain's body healed, reformed, and shed a layer of grayish-white stone skin in an instant as they assimilated with rock.

"What was that? An earthquake?"

Deep within the cells, the three death-row inmates who had been asleep were jolted awake. The bald brute rubbed his eyes and sat up. When he saw Rain standing in the moonlight with his cuffs undone, he froze.

"How did trash like you get those cuffs off? Trying to die?!" Skinning Hand Zack cursed instinctively.

Rain slowly turned around.

He slowly raised his hands. The flesh tone vanished from his long fingers in an instant. Under an insanely intense high-pressure compression, grayish-white rock became sharp, deep-black Obsidian spikes!

Whoosh!

The spikes shot from Rain's fingertips.

Aaaaargh—!

Screams of unbearable agony instantly tore through the underground prison's silence.

The bald brute and Zack had not even seen how Rain moved. By the time they reacted, those black Obsidian spikes had already pierced their thighs, shoulders, and palms, nailing the three burly men, each over two hundred pounds, to the cell's hard stone walls.

Blood gushed wildly down the grooves in the Obsidian, staining the walls red.

"Y-you... what kind of monster are you?!" The bald brute convulsed in pain, tears and snot mingling on his face. Looking at the black-clad young man before him, who seemed like an evil ghost, he felt despair unlike anything he had ever known.

Rain still said nothing. He gave the three pieces of scum nailed to the wall a cold glance. They would howl for hours before bleeding to death. Then he turned and walked out of the cell.

Outside, the piercing alarm finally sounded.

"Prison break! Fourth level!"

Dense footsteps thundered down from above. More than a dozen fully armed guards, along with Gore, the security force captain who had been drinking in the warden's office to celebrate his "windfall," rushed down with muskets in hand.

The moment Gore saw Rain standing at the end of the corridor, radiating a terrifying aura, all color drained from his fat face.

"Y-you... how could you undo Seastone?! Fire! Shoot him! Shoot him dead!" Gore shrieked in terror.

Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang!

A barrage of lead bullets poured down like a rainstorm.

Yet Rain merely stood where he was. Two meters in front of him, the ground instantly rose into a granite wall a meter thick, blocking every bullet.

"I swore an oath. Every bit of pain you inflicted on me, I will squeeze from your bones with the hardest stone in this world."

Rain's icy voice pierced the stone wall and echoed in everyone's ears.

Boom!

The stone wall exploded! Countless sharp fragments of rock blasted outward like shotgun pellets, instantly piercing the bodies of seven or eight guards charging at the front and riddling them with holes.

"Monster! Run!" The remaining guards completely broke down, throwing away their weapons and scrambling desperately upstairs.

"This is an underground prison. It's all stone." Rain slammed both hands against the walls on either side. "Where do you think you're running in my domain?"

Crack, crack, crack—

The stone walls, floor, and ceiling of the entire underground corridor seemed to come alive in an instant. Hard strata rolled and surged, swiftly catching up with the fleeing guards and Captain Gore, who had pissed himself in terror.

"No! Don't—!"

The rock swallowed their bodies like a quagmire. Amid bone-crunching cracks, those greedy guards and officials were sealed alive inside the stone walls on both sides of the corridor!

The rock perfectly conformed to the shape of their bodies, continuously squeezing inward and crushing their breastbones and internal organs. Rain deliberately controlled his strength, leaving only their twisted, distorted heads exposed outside the walls as they suffered in extreme pain and suffocation.

This was a "Corridor of Despair" inlaid with living people.

Stepping through the blood covering the floor, Rain slowly approached Gore, who was sealed in the wall and barely clinging to life.

He reached out and pulled his map of Alabasta's interior, along with several thick stacks of banknotes soaked through with cold sweat, from the pocket of Gore's uniform, already distorted by the crushing rock.

As for the backpack containing the Eternal Pose and the rest of his money, Gore had likely hidden it in a secure vault. But Rain had no time to look for it now. The main force of Alabasta's King's Army stationed in Nanohana would soon surround this place.

"Take your greed and rot slowly inside this wall."

Rain tucked the map into his clothes and casually grabbed two jugs of water from the duty room nearby.

Rumble!

The underground prison's gates were smashed open from outside by a large force of regular soldiers.

But when the torch-bearing soldiers charged into the basement, all they saw were heads embedded in the walls, still rolling their eyes in despair, and blood all over the ground.

The notorious pirate was already gone. At the very moment they burst in, he had transformed with a bang into a violent torrent of ash-black sand and gravel, surging skyward through the prison's ventilation ducts.

The night wind howled.

That ash-black sandstorm swept over Nanohana's towering walls and vanished into Alabasta's boundless golden desert, scorching and merciless.