The Free Invisible Fruit (Extra Chapter Thanks to a Big-Supporter Reward)

Lucas and his group left the Capone Family stronghold three days ago, and a medium-sized Marine warship slowly pulled up to the dock.

The gangplank lowered, and a Marine officer with a black mustache, brown hair, and a linear scar over his left eye was the first to step onto the dock.

His leather shoes stepped on the stone slabs, making a dull sound, followed by a group of marines wearing white uniforms.

"Another death like this."

A young marine squatted on the ground, looking at the shriveled corpse in front of him, and gasped deeply several times.

Even though it was broad daylight and the sea breeze was warm, he felt a chill down his spine, as if a cold hand was crawling up his vertebrae.

He subconsciously rubbed the goosebumps on his arm, and several colleagues behind him nodded silently, no one laughing at him. They felt the same way.

"Colonel Sicily, there's a corpse here that died differently!"

A marine stood beside the collapsed building debris, pointing at Gotti's remains on the ground and shouting loudly.

The limbs of that corpse were twisted into angles a normal person could never achieve, and the strangulation marks on the neck were clearly visible, as if several pairs of hands had choked him at the same time.

The expression was frozen at the last moment before death, mouth open, tongue purple, and eyeballs protruding.

The Marine officer named Sicily walked over. The eye beneath his linear scar swept across the corpse, and he pulled out a recording Den Den Mushi from his pocket, squatted down, and took several pictures of Gotti's corpse in succession.

After inspecting the battlefield, Sicily led the marines toward the town behind the stronghold.

The massive amount of ammunition consumed in Capone Bege's battles did not come from Kong. Without a stable supply source, that kind of blanket firepower strike could not withstand the consumption.

The civilians in the back-country town were the ones who specifically produced ammunition for him, and these were also the people who, on the morning of the second day after the gunfire ceased, dialed the number of the Marine branch.

Normally, they would never dare to do this; in West Blue, no branch could do anything to Bege, let alone the fact that quite a few branches had been bribed by Bege with money.

However, Bege was dead, so they didn't have that many scruples anymore.

After some questioning, Colonel Sicily closed his notebook. No intelligence regarding the "killer" had been obtained.

When the battle took place, these civilians hid far away out of fear. They heard the sounds of explosions, screams, and the roaring collapse of the fortress, but no one dared to lift a curtain to take a look.

By the time everything grew quiet, the killer had already left, leaving behind only corpses.

Sicily did not blame them. He repeatedly confirmed that nothing was missed, organized and summarized the information he had obtained, and wrote a concise report. He sent the report back to Marineford through a facsimile Den Den Mushi, along with the scene photos.

Marineford, Marine Headquarters.

Kuzan finished a day of exercise, his muscles still carrying the soreness of the workout. He walked through the wide corridors inside the headquarters fortress, came to the door of a spacious room, and pushed open the heavy wooden door, the warm yellow light and bustling human voices gushing out together.

In the center of the room was a huge wooden board that occupied almost the entire wall.

The wooden board was pinned with documents, photos, and sticky notes from all over the world, stacked in layers, and every piece of paper represented an incident that a branch base could not independently resolve.

Generally speaking, if branch bases encountered such incidents and reported them to headquarters at the first instance, they could basically be properly resolved.

After all, headquarters had plenty of monsters. But the problem was that there were always some branch bases that were overly confident, feeling they could handle things independently.

As a result, they found out the matter exceeded their capability, the people couldn't be caught, the issue couldn't be settled, and the unresolved matters were dragged out and dragged on, until they were finally listed on this wooden board, waiting for some headquarters officer who had both the ability and time to casually resolve them.

The officers at headquarters usually lacked neither capability nor spare time. Therefore, the papers on the wooden board piled up thicker and thicker.

Kuzan pushed through the crowd, forcing several low-ranking officers who were whispering in front of the wooden board to the sides with his tall physique. They looked up, wanting to complain, only to swallow their words after seeing clearly who it was.

He stood in front of the wooden board, hands shoved into his pockets, his gaze carelessly sweeping over those dense slips of paper.

"The Marine Hunter is still committing crimes on the run... Suspected Zoan type, Bear-Bear Fruit, Ancient Species, Short-Faced Bear Form."

"A suspected Clear-Clear Fruit user has appeared on XXX Island, committing multiple peeping and molestation cases, still at large, and the local branch base is helpless..."

"A haunting incident occurred on XXX Island, with local civilians claiming they saw ghosts..."

Kuzan skimmed over the information from South Blue, North Blue, and East Blue, his gaze finally landing on the West Blue region section.

Suddenly, an incident that somewhat interested him entered his vision.

"The Capone Family, one of the five major families of the underworld, was wiped out..."

His gaze paused. He pulled his hand out of his pocket and picked up several on-site photos pinned next to the report.

Among them, Gotti's corpse photo was particularly eye-catching in his eyes.

"This method..."

"Could it be her?"

His gaze shifted to another photo. A mummified corpse.

"Drained of fresh blood..."

A young face with silver hair and blue eyes surfaced in his mind.

"It couldn't be that kid, right?"

"How did the two of them get mixed up together?"

Kuzan's expression grew rare in its solemnity. He pinned the photos back onto the wooden board and turned to walk out the door.

West Blue, Transparent Island.

"Darling, how is this one?"

In a jewelry store, Baccarat's gaze was firmly glued to a pair of matching rings in the display case.

Without waiting for Lucas to answer, she directly pulled out her wallet and paid the money, picked up one of them, and slipped it onto her own ring finger—the size was just right. For the other one, she pulled Lucas's right hand over and solemnly placed it on his ring finger.

Lucas looked down at the cool metal ring on his right ring finger, calculated for a moment, and then gave his answer.

"I like it very much."

Gion's birth country was an overseas branch of Wano Country, and Yamato had been steeped in Wano Country's culture since childhood.

Neither of them would make a big fuss over a small ring in the future. Putting it on now shouldn't cause any problems.

Not far behind them, Robin's lips remained pursed in an unsmiling expression, and no one knew what she was thinking.

Leaving the jewelry store, the three strolled down the town's main street, heading toward the direction of the dock.

Under the eaves of a building beside the road, a pair of eyes was watching them.

A skin-and-bones, bitter-looking youth with a scar on his forehead squatted in the shadow of the corner.

He wore a tattered top hat and a pair of shorts so dirty that their original color couldn't be discerned, while his upper body was bare and his ribs protruded one by one. He stared at Baccarat and Robin's graceful backs, a kind of undisguised greed burning in his pupils.

Absalom licked his chapped lips, stood up, and turned into a dim alley nearby.

His figure began to fade the moment he stepped into the shadow, his outline blurring, and then he completely disappeared.

On the forest trail between the town and the dock, sunlight cast mottled patches of light through the gaps in the leaves.

The three walked unhurriedly, discussing what to have for dinner today, and it seemed no one noticed that a transparent figure was closely following behind them.

Absalom tiptoed, holding his breath and concentrating as he slowly closed the distance, trying his best not to cause any commotion.

His eyes rolled in their transparent sockets, his gaze moving back and forth between the two women's plump buttocks, and the corners of his mouth split into a silent smile.

He reached out both hands, fingers splayed, probing toward Robin and Baccarat respectively.

Abruptly. His movements halted, and a sensation he had never experienced before surged from within his body—bright red blood spikes pierced outward from the inner side of his skin, spreading around with his heart as the center, blooming inside him like a thorn flower irrigated with his life.

Under the excruciating pain, Absalom dropped out of invisibility.

He maintained the wretched posture of reaching out his hands, appearing out of Kong on the trail.

Baccarat and Robin turned around almost simultaneously.

They lowered their heads to glance at the hands reaching toward their hips, then looked at Absalom's uniquely ugly face and instantly understood everything.

Their expressions turned from confusion to disgust, eyebrows knitted together, corners of the mouth pulled downward, full of utter loathing.

The blood spikes on Absalom's body completely left him, and stripped away along with them was the Lineage Factor of the Clear-Clear Fruit.

The blood and Lineage Factors were like extracted threads suspended in Kong, while the body that had lost all its blood rapidly shriveled within seconds, its skin clinging to its bones, its eyeballs drying up, and its lips shrinking into two thin lines.

He maintained that reaching-out posture, slowly falling backward and smashing into a pile of fallen leaves with a dull, light thud.

Already skin-and-bones, he now looked like a skeleton.

TO BE CONTINUED

(PS: Content regarding Devil Fruit rebirth will be omitted as much as possible from now on; writing it out every time a user dies feels like it would cause aesthetic fatigue.

Fellow readers can just assume the protagonist causes Devil Fruit rebirth every time he kills a user.)