With his left hand, which could still twitch faintly, Chopper shakily, and with extreme difficulty, took something out of the little backpack hanging around his neck-that little backpack was actually still there.
It was a scalpel.
An utterly ordinary, gleaming silver scalpel, the kind doctors used for surgery.
"You..." Hongo's pupils contracted again. He seemed to have guessed what Chopper wanted to do, but found it too insane, too inconceivable.
"I'm a doctor..." Chopper said softly, his voice so faint it was almost inaudible. Then, driven by the astonishing willpower that erupted in the final moments of his life, he cut open his own furry chest with the scalpel, precisely and steadily.
He made an incision in his chest, avoiding the major blood vessels. Then, with his trembling yet rock-steady hooves, he parted muscle and tissue with breathtaking dexterity and precision, exposing what lay beneath: his faintly beating heart, covered in ominous purplish-black lines, as though it might burst at any moment.
"The heart... is the engine of life... and the core where the Rumble Balls' effects... ultimately gather and backlash..." Chopper murmured, every word carrying bloody froth. Yet, strangely, a final light gathered in his fading eyes. "Doctor Kureha said... quacks treat diseases... good doctors treat patients... but truly great doctors..."
"Must understand... life itself..."
He raised his head and looked at Hongo with those clear eyes that reflected his figure.
"I might... never learn to use medicine... to end things, like you do..."
"But I believe... more than you do... in the power of life!"
As his words fell, at the critical instant when his heart gave another feeble beat and the purplish-black lines were about to burst, Chopper used the tip of his scalpel-not to stab, but to "tap"-and gently touched an exquisitely precise node on his