"This time it's really become a Minotaur."
Vane drew the Cursed Sword.
Even a failed awakening of a Zoan Devil Fruit is still a kind of enhancement. It's just that, in a certain sense, he had already become a living dead, his human soul erased under the influence of animal instincts.
He traded his brain for a powerful body.
Boom! Boom!
The Minotaur struck the ice twice with his spiked club.
From one of his nostrils hung a long string of snot; the moment it came out, it was frozen into an icicle by the biting cold wind.
Whoosh!
Under that massive body, the short legs launched a remarkably refined Soru. In the blink of an eye, he appeared right in front of Vane.
It appeared—the move netizens once called "Little Thunder Bagua."
Clang!!
The Cursed Sword and the spiked club collided in midair.
"His strength is three times what it was before, and his speed has increased by a lot."
If the unawakened Minotaur before was roughly on par with a pirate worth fifty to sixty million Belly, then now his strength was absolutely above that of some pirates with bounties over a hundred million.
Judging by his performance in Impel Down, it was the same—he could briefly suppress Luffy, and Luffy's bounty was three hundred million.
The Minotaur used Soru again and appeared behind Vane.
"Frost Round Dance!"
The blade arced back, and a perfect ring of sword energy met the spiked club and knocked it aside.
"Your strength has improved a lot, but it's still far from enough."
White Frostfall!
The white flying slash cut across the Minotaur's chest from the side.
Pshhk!!!
Flesh rolled open; even with such a tough body, he inevitably fell into a faint.
"Terrifying recovery."
Vane walked up to check on the unconscious Minotaur. His wounds were healing much faster than ordinary people's. So this is the powerful body you get by trading away your intelligence?
In that strike just now, Vane used everything except Armament Haki—about seventy percent of his full strength.
With that blow, anyone under a hundred-million bounty would be down for days even if they didn't die. Judging by the Minotaur's wound and recovery speed, at most two hours and he'd be back up to fight again.
If someone treated him with the pirate world's "Supreme Bandage," he probably wouldn't even need half an hour before he could eat, run, and fight again.
"Supreme Bandage" is a joke about how, in the pirate world, people heal completely every time they're wrapped in bandages.
The pair of ferocious horns on Vane's head vanished, and he returned to a normal human state.
"Burgess, Meowth, come take a look at this big guy."
"My god, what's going on? Is this a Devil Fruit user? Why can he still maintain it after being defeated?"
As everyone knows, after ability users are defeated, most of their abilities lose effect; Zoan users revert to human form.
"This is a failed awakening of a Zoan Devil Fruit. He's become a creature dominated by animal attributes, an existence that's lost rationality. He'll never turn back into a human again."
When Burgess heard that he would never turn back into a human, he felt a bit repulsed. If he ever had a choice in the future, he definitely wouldn't eat a Zoan Devil Fruit.
...
Have Meowth go collect the drops, and Vane entered Meowth's internal castle space and saw the useless officer hanging there.
"What kind of pirate are you! Do you know there's great Celestial Dragon blood flowing in me! Let me go right now!"
When the useless officer saw Vane, he immediately started spewing abuse. The status of a Celestial Dragon was really useful here.
Vane breathed out a mouthful of white mist. The fog coiled around one of the useless officer's hands, and he quickly experienced what bone-chilling cold meant.
"It hurts, it hurts! Stop it, stop it!"
"Answer my questions. No other nonsense. First question: does your icebreaker have any Seastone items on it?"
During the interrogation, Vane had mind-reading on. But this guy was a total wimp; once he felt pain, he wouldn't lie.
"Yes. In my office, there's a pair of Seastone handcuffs."
Processing Seastone is quite complicated. The Navy rarely uses it. Even on their icebreaker, unless it's a special operation, they'd only prepare one item—or none at all.
Vane wanted Seastone to restrain the Minotaur.
The Minotaur's intelligence was worse than that of ordinary animals, and he had a strong violent tendency. Taming him in a short time would be difficult.
But as long as he was restrained with Seastone, he'd be a soft-legged bull.
If he could be tamed, great. If not, it didn't really matter.
The fleet needed a sandbag role to train people.
A character like the Minotaur—with strong recovery and strength a bit above the hundred-million-bounty range—was perfect.
As long as someone could beat the Minotaur one-on-one, it would prove they had front-line strength worth a hundred million Belly.
A strength measuring stick, basically.
...
"Vane, something's a bit strange."
The ground wriggled, and in the end it condensed into Meowth's shape.
"What is it?"
"Another Pokémon appeared. And it's a Ditto."
Another Pokémon appeared?
Vane remembered that the Ox-Ox Fruit had already triggered Ditto… oh right, Ditto doesn't have an evolution.
Giving it energy stones wouldn't do much, so the Ox-Ox Fruit's effect is to keep summoning Ditto?
"That's good. The more Ditto we have, the more we can cultivate Pokémon to be born in this world."
In Vane's view, Ditto's greatest value is being able to continuously breed new Pokémon, letting Pokémon gradually take root and flourish in this world.
"Looks like we'll have to pay more attention to the Ox-Ox Fruit from now on."
Meowth and Burgess went into the battered icebreaker to look for the Seastone handcuffs.
Vane continued interrogating the guy who claimed to have Celestial Dragon blood inside Meowth.
"The agent protecting you outside just turned into a half-man, half-beast monster and can't recover. Do you know what's going on?"
The useless officer hesitated, because he wasn't sure whether this had anything to do with what he'd heard.
"If you have a suspect, say it. I'll judge what's true myself."
The useless officer immediately told everything he knew.
He said the World Government had teamed up with scientists to create a drug that could help Zoan Devil Fruit users develop their abilities. At its strongest, it could even push them to awakening.
This drug was circulating on a small scale within the intelligence agencies… actually, it was just for experiments.
He suspected the Minotaur was also part of the government's experiments.
"Looks like there's a problem with that drug."
The Jailer Beasts that later appeared in Impel Down were very likely the failed products of this batch of drugs.
After discovering the problem, the World Government made use of these people and threw them into Impel Down as guards.