Awakening Technique: Pale World

"Ed!"

Without a word, Shuga fought through the pain and threw the Storyboard Fruit he had seized to Ed. "Get out of here!"

Ed felt as though he had caught a hot potato. He was completely stunned.

Wait, wait, wasn't this supposed to be safe? Just a simple mission? What was simple about this?!

Mammon grabbed Ed by the shoulder. "Let's go."

With that, a pair of wings suddenly sprouted from his back. He lifted Ed and flew straight toward the venue's entrance.

The two remaining Marines exchanged a glance and chose to obey their superior's order, immediately hurrying after them.

Seeing this, Dimon got to his feet.

Azshara said in astonishment, "You're not thinking of stealing it, are you? They're Marines! And one of them has a flying ability!"

"Our deal is over. Goodbye."

With that, Dimon vanished from where he stood in the blink of an eye.

Azshara's pupils contracted, and her lips parted slightly.

That's... the Six Powers!

A Marine robbing other Marines? No, were they in it together all along?

"You... how dare you steal my toy!"

Knox, the Evil Child, was beside himself with rage. Tears welled in his eyes, and he looked as aggrieved as a child. "I'm going to kill you, Marine!"

Vice Admiral Hyuga was also somewhat bewildered. Naturally, he had seen Dimon go after them.

A mysterious man who could use the Six Powers. He was definitely not a member of the Marines. The higher-ups could not have assigned Shuga this mission while also sending someone to follow him in secret.

Still, with Mammon there, he was not too worried. The immediate priority was dealing with the crazed pirate Supernova in front of him.

"Childification!"

Suddenly, Knox, the Evil Child, let out a roar and reached out toward Vice Admiral Hyuga from a distance.

In an instant, Shuga felt a strange force descend upon him, and his body began to shrink. His battle-hardened physique grew smaller at a rate visible to the naked eye.

In just a few breaths, he regressed from a middle-aged man in his forties to a child of about ten.

"What?!"

Shuga's face was filled with shock. His body had shrunk, which meant his fighting strength had also fallen back!

The next second, the fourth and fifth Knoxes appeared out of thin air, surrounding him and blocking every possible escape route.

Knox himself had eyes that seemed accustomed to death. They held not a trace of emotion; he was like a completely different person from before.

"Let's play a game, my favorite game when I was little... It's called breaking fingers."

As he spoke, he broke the little finger on his own right hand without changing expression.

Then he said:

"Your turn."

Meanwhile, elsewhere.

Mammon flew through the air with Ed in his grasp, deliberately slowing down instead of traveling at full speed.

The two Marines behind them ran swiftly along the ground, but the distance between them kept growing.

Just then, a streak of pitch-black sword energy came at them from behind. The crescent-shaped slash locked precisely onto the two men flying through the air and struck across several hundred meters.

"We have an enemy."

Mammon gave a quiet warning and immediately shielded Ed with his wings.

The next moment, boom!!

The sword energy struck the bat wings, and the violent impact sent both men tumbling out of the sky.

Ed landed face-first, his arms wrapped tightly around the Devil Fruit and his backside sticking high in the air.

"Ptoo, ptoo, ptoo... Mr. Mammon, what do we do now?"

"I'll hold him off. You go on ahead."

Mammon spoke calmly, then activated his ability.

Darkness Realm!

In an instant, black mist spread out from beneath his feet, rapidly enveloping an area several hundred meters across.

"I can't see a thing! How am I supposed to go?" Ed shouted in a panic.

"Go straight ahead. Don't stop."

Mammon's voice came from the darkness. Immediately afterward, Ed heard the sounds of a fierce fight.

He had no time to think. He lowered his head and ran wildly forward.

In the darkness, he seemed to run into a wall. Immediately afterward, he suffered a heavy blow to the back of his head and passed out on the spot.

The Storyboard Fruit he had been holding fell to the ground.

"Stealing really is faster."

Dimon bent down and picked up the fruit, chuckling. "A fruit worth 800 million, and I didn't have to spend a penny."

"Master." Mammon stood beside him and said quietly, "I've successfully joined the Marines. This man is no longer useful. We might as well kill him to keep from being exposed."

"There's no need. Ed is still quite valuable. Maybe we can recruit him as an outer member of our organization."

Dimon shook his head, rejecting the suggestion.

The Seven Deadly Sins were made up entirely of devils, but there was no need to be too rigid about some things. It would be good to bring in a few outsiders as outer members of the organization.

Mammon did not insist. Instead, he said, "That Vice Admiral Hyuga is a problem. If Headquarters investigates afterward, they'll take his account seriously. He sensed your malice at the auction house earlier, Master."

"Mm, he'll die, won't he? At the hands of that Evil Child."

Marine Headquarters Vice Admirals were a mainstay of the Marines' fighting strength, but not all Vice Admirals were the same.

Judging by the fighting ability Shuga had shown earlier, Dimon strongly suspected the man might not be able to beat a pirate Supernova.

The Evil Child's fruit ability was insidious. Without sufficient information, one was very likely to suffer at his hands.

Without worrying about what would happen to Vice Admiral Hyuga, Dimon looked at the Storyboard Fruit in his hand and silently activated his ability.

He had deliberately saved a use of it today so he could animate this fruit at the first opportunity.

"Let me see whether you're worth 800 million... Time to wake up, new kin."

Animation!

The power of Animation flowed into the Storyboard Fruit. In an instant, a faint golden light appeared on its surface, but Mammon's black mist enveloped the area, so no one could see it.

The golden light lasted for several seconds, and the Storyboard Fruit began to change shape.

Like a flower blooming, its peel, which closely resembled film stock, began to unfold. At last, an enormous eyeball emerged from within the fruit.

The giant eyeball floated upward and hovered in the air. Its blood-red pupil darted about before finally settling on Dimon.

He instinctively sensed that Dimon was the one who had given him life.

"Master."

"Your appearances are getting stranger and stranger after you come to life." A thought occurred to Dimon, and he gave him a name:

"From now on, you'll be called... Big Eye!"

Chapter 35: Awakening Technique: Pale World

The name Big Eye suited the Storyboard Fruit's appearance so perfectly that Dimon was quite pleased with it.

Still, all these Devil Fruits that had come to life looked bizarre. So far, Mammon was the only one with a proper human form.

"First, tell me what abilities you have. Actually, forget it. Explaining them would be too much trouble. Inhabit me, and I'll test them myself."

"Yes, Master."

Big Eye, hovering in midair, plunged headfirst into Dimon's chest and merged with him.

Having experienced the Flame-Flame Fruit inhabiting him before, Dimon was even more familiar with the process this time.

He closed his eyes and felt the Storyboard Fruit's power, his mind rapidly analyzing how the ability worked.

A moment later, he slowly opened his eyes, a flash of amazement in them.

"The Storyboard Fruit... is actually similar to the paramecia Door-Door Fruit. It's a spatial ability!"

As expected of a paramecia Devil Fruit worth 800 million, it was on an entirely different level from the zoan Den Den Mushi Fruit, which was worth a little over 100 million.

Its core ability was not complicated. Rather, it had a wide variety of derived abilities.

The fruit's core ability could be summed up in a single sentence:

It cut the world visible to the naked eye into film storyboards, which the user could manipulate at will and rearrange according to the logic of the images and the sequence of the shots. People and objects framed within a storyboard could not interact with anything outside it.

For example:

Two people, A and B, fought. The first frame showed them standing face-to-face. The second showed them attacking each other. The third showed A falling in a spray of blood and B winning.

The Storyboard Fruit could reverse the sequence of the three frames!

In the first frame, A fell in a spray of blood while B stood.

The second frame was the original first frame, with A and B standing face-to-face again.

Only in the third frame did the two attack each other.

This ability to disorder the sequence of events could even change a reality that had already occurred. If A was the user, A could lessen the injuries they were supposed to suffer so that those injuries would not affect the ensuing battle.

An ability this heaven-defying naturally had its flaws.

First, the storyboards were not some kind of intangible concept, but physical boundaries and frames that could be broken by extraordinarily powerful Haki.

Second, the more storyboards created at once, the user's stamina consumption would rise geometrically.

Third, it could not trap users of other spatial abilities, such as the Teleportation Fruit or the Door-Door Fruit. By the same token, the Door-Door Fruit could not trap a Storyboard Fruit user either.

Fourth, when creating a storyboard, it had to be of a world visible to the naked eye. Simply put, if the user could not see it, the ability could not be activated. Thus, a blind person eating this fruit would be almost the same as not eating it at all.

Even so, it was still an extraordinarily powerful paramecia fruit!

"That's only its core ability. This fruit has so many derived abilities. I can't test them in my head; I need a target to fight."

Dimon was considering whom to test it on when two voices suddenly called out from the darkness.

"Senior Colonel Ed! Captain Mammon! Where are you?"

They were the two Marines from before.

Mammon's eyes flashed, and he said decisively, "Master, I'll deal with them."

"No need. I have a good idea. In a moment, withdraw the Darkness Realm, and I'll seal you in."

After a brief explanation, Mammon immediately did as instructed.

The black mist covering the area for several hundred meters was absorbed by Mammon like a whirlpool. In the blink of an eye, the moon reappeared, and starlight shone on the ground.

The two Marines could finally see the world around them. Although it was already past ten at night, compared to the Darkness Realm, they could at least make out some things now.

"Captain Mammon!"

The two men were shocked when they saw Mammon and Colonel Ed lying unconscious behind him.

"Stay back! This man stole the fruit and ate it! He's very strong!" Mammon shouted.

The two men fixed their gazes on Dimon, who wore a black cloak and a mask that could be found anywhere.

In the moonlight, his right hand emerged from beneath his cloak, and he pointed at Mammon from a distance.

"Storyboard Impact."

A point of white light shone, tracing a square frame at his fingertip. The white frame shot out, expanding rapidly, and enveloped both Mammon and Ed in the blink of an eye.