Chapter 213: Fusion

Chapter 213: Fusion



Time felt like it came to a stand still in Cherry's mind. The look of surprise illuminated on Cabernet's face was burned into her retinas.n/ô/vel/b//in dot c//om

Cherry had no way of knowing just how strong this secret weapon of the Neo Marines was. However, from the raw energy building up she could make a guess that it would annihilate the Ryugu Palace and leave nothing behind.

She didn't know it would be that strong, as she had only scanned it with Life Sense from a distance. Certainly the vital energy contained within was potent, but that was only a part of what she could feel from it at this moment.

Cherry's hand plunged itself into the side of the cannon, ripping apart the thick steel barrel as it pierced through. Her hand burned to a crisp instantly as it reached the unstable energy still barely contained within its rapidly disintegrating container.

Absorbing it was impossible as it wasn't solely vital energy. Instead she placed a bet on something else, something she still didn't fully understand. Her devil fruit.

Her dense vital energy surged into the inscription construct at her heart, only saving a portion to prevent her hand from being reduced to nothing. She felt it connect, but that was only a small relief. The energy resisted her fiercely. It refused to be contained any longer than it already had been.

The violent, destructive energy first traveled down the paths of least resistance. Down the barrel at Cabernet and through the hole Cherry had thrust her hand through.

Cabernet was blasted backwards through a wall beyond Cherry's sight. She could only hope that was a good sign, as the energy had to have been at least partially blocked by Cabernet's absurd defense in order to have knocked her back instead of burning through her. Cherry had no room to spare any concentration to check on her.

Cherry on the other hand was much closer to the epicenter of the detonation, and she had firmly planted herself to avoid being thrown back like Cabernet. The cannon's barrel started to crack and melt under the strain until nothing remained of it. Cherry was enveloped completely in the quickly expanding sphere of raw energy.

Cherry was much tougher than steel, so she was doing marginally better than the cannon on account of her still existing. At least she thought she did, not that she could spare any thought to entertain an existential crisis.

Time became meaningless to her then. All that mattered was fusion. Make the energy into one whole. In all her focus something seemed to click into place. Suddenly it made sense.

The blinding light and roaring sound disappeared, and it was replaced with endless darkness and quiet. That was only natural though, as her eyes and ears were nothing but dust in the wind.

She didn't hear Garcelo suck in a cold breath, for the first time during his encounter he was struck with genuine fear. Not for himself, no, his little life was but a sacrifice readily made for the greater good. What he feared for was his noble cause.

Harpin D. Cherry stood at the center of a sphere of destruction about 20 meters in radius, stopping just short of Garcelo himself. Her body was little more than a charred skeleton and in her hands she held a shining, pink gemstone before her. When her head turned as if to look around with nonexistent eyes, Garcelo could hardly believe his own eyes.

When Cherry's skull shifted to point in their direction, several of them nearly jumped out of their skins in fright.

"Cherry says 'All this blubbering is distracting me, cut it out!"" Cabernet helpfully passed on the message from her link.

Luffy started to celebrate, taking the fact she wasn't dead in stride despite what her ghastly state would suggest. Robin similarly heaved a sigh in relief and easily accepted it as she knew from Cherry's secrets that such a thing was possible, even if she temporarily forgot that fact due to the shock of it all.

"Yohohoho! I'm not the only skeleton on the crew now, it seems!" Brook said in a good mood. He couldn't count how many times he had wished his old crewmates' skeletons would stand up and tell him they weren't actually dead.

"Cherry says that you're also not the coolest skeleton in the crew anymore." Cabernet said. "What the hell?! I'm a world famous rockstar, damn it!" Brook shouted in indignation.

A question hung in most of their minds on how it was possible for her to still live, though. Certainly she had survived many terrible wounds before, but it never came close to this. So,

how?

"Ugh!" Usopp and Nami had to turn away when tendrils of flesh started to sprout from the charred bones and knit themselves together.

Chopper watched it with a level of professional fascination.

The remaining process took another 20 minutes before Cherry was good as new. Sanji had barely managed to scrounge up enough willpower to excuse himself from the room voluntarily to avoid peeping on her naked form. A feat that the ladies were very proud of him

for.

"Yohohoho! I've seen her bare bones, which is as good as naked in my book!" Brook teased Sanji, making the chef throttle his skeletal neck in jealous fury.

Cherry studied the pink gemstone in her hand in silent contemplation. If she was being

honest, she hadn't expected this outcome. She only hoped to save her young friends from a tragically early demise. Her life had already been quite long already, so it wouldn't be a waste in her heart to die such a noble death.

But instead, her devil fruit had awakened, and she had fused all that energy into the gemstone she now held in her hand.