OP: AMP Ch. 228

The explosion that tore through the sky was so massive it erased part of the floating island in an instant. But the shockwave wasn't done yet, not by a long shot.

Maybe it was because the detonation happened ten thousand meters above ground level. The violent tremors and blast waves spread faster than anyone could have predicted. The thunderclouds overhead shattered immediately, torn apart by the sheer force of the explosion.

As for the two fighters who'd been inside those clouds...

Shiki had taken the attack head-on, then gotten caught in the massive blast radius. Even if he survived, he'd be running on fumes at this point.

And Luffy...

His diamond armor had shattered, though not every piece broke at once. The lowest durability items, his boots and helmet, exploded first. His chestplate and leggings were still intact, and the enchanted golden apple provided some blast resistance too.

In terms of survival odds, he had way better chances than Shiki. Plus, he still had the Riptide effect active. Even if he couldn't move fast, escaping the core blast zone wouldn't be impossible.

Inside the obsidian shelter, Vivi pressed her fingers to her temples, maintaining mental contact with Luffy.

"I've got him! Luffy's still alive, but... the second explosion launched him pretty high."

Hearing that Luffy was okay, just airborne, everyone let out sighs of relief.

"What about Shiki?" Usopp asked.

"Looks like he's unconscious. The only reason Luffy's still awake is probably because of the enchanted golden apple. He said the blast knocked him out for a few seconds, but he came to pretty quick."

"Damn..." Goliath whistled softly. "That's some serious power."

A B1 explosive could demolish a town square. A B4 could reshape terrain. But an A4? That was operating on a completely different scale. Each tier increase meant ten times the destructive power.

If you hadn't witnessed it yourself, no amount of words could properly describe what they'd just unleashed.

"Wait... shit!" Usopp's eyes went wide. "With an explosion that big, is the Merry okay?!"

The question hit everyone.

They'd found the Going Merry earlier, but obviously couldn't take her with them into battle. Marcus had built a small obsidian bunker and sealed the ship inside.

But...

Was the Merry's location inside the core blast zone?

They'd placed twelve B4 explosives across the battlefield, plus several B1s. If those B1s triggered a chain reaction in the core area, even obsidian might not hold.

The crew's emotions shifted, going from relief about Luffy to anxiety about their ship.

Marcus didn't make any promises. Under everyone's expectant stares, he could only sigh and shake his head slightly.

The Merry had been with them through so much. Sure, when Shiki first appeared, they'd been terrified enough to abandon ship and flee. They'd mentally prepared themselves for potentially losing her.

But to find her again, only to lose her immediately after? That process was hard to accept.

Usopp opened his mouth to say something, then just let out a silent sigh instead. He'd personally watched Marcus wrap the Merry in obsidian. He'd even deliberately planned the B4 placements to be farther away from the ship's location.

Who could have predicted a B4 would still reach the obsidian shelter? The probability should've been so small...

Was it good luck or terrible luck?

"Have faith in obsidian," Vivi said with an encouraging smile. "It'll definitely be fine!"

"Yeah! It should be okay!" Usopp added, trying to convince himself as much as anyone else. "We're all fine in here, aren't we?"

---

A full ten minutes passed before they finally stepped out of the obsidian shelter.

The air outside was scorching hot, thick with smoke that carried the smell of sulfur. It was like breathing inside an active volcano.

"I can't see a thing through all this smoke," Nami said, waving her hand uselessly in front of her face.

"Over there!" Alvida pointed toward a patch of pure black visible through the haze.

The sight of intact obsidian made everyone's shoulders sag with relief. If the obsidian was still standing, that meant whatever was inside should be protected.

Everyone relaxed.

Well, everyone except Marcus.

His expression was troubled as he stared at the obsidian bunker, and his hand drifted unconsciously toward his mini-map interface.

An avatar icon had quietly appeared on his display. It definitely hadn't been there before.

Indigo.

He frowned. How had Indigo gotten inside the sealed bunker? And more importantly, why was his icon only showing up on the mini-map now?

Then understanding clicked into place. His mini-map was configured to only mark entities that held hostile intent toward him. In crowded areas, he always used this setting, otherwise, if there were more than a hundred people on an island, the densely packed icons would make finding anyone impossible. Before this moment, Indigo hadn't harbored any hostility toward him. If anything, the mad scientist had shown obsessive interest and greed.

But something had changed. Something had turned that greed into malice.

Marcus' expression darkened as he realized what must have happened.

Devil Fruits.

When he'd sealed the Going Merry in obsidian, there had been too many witnesses around. To disguise any potential Devil Fruit spawns, he'd deliberately filled the ship's storage hold with regular fruits, over a dozen varieties, turning the entire warehouse into what looked like a grocer's stockroom.

If Devil Fruits had spawned among all that produce... Devil Fruits were worth more than gold or jewels. If multiple fruits suddenly appeared in a single warehouse, it would be nearly impossible for someone not to get greedy. And Indigo had already demonstrated his willingness to dig through the storage room. Marcus showed the scientist just how valuable certain items could be by demonstrating the wheat's properties right in front of him.

"Something wrong?" Zoro asked, noticing Marcus' expression.

Marcus was already moving, striding toward the obsidian wall and swinging his diamond pickaxe before anyone could stop him. The obsidian shell shattered into collectible cubes that he absorbed into his inventory in seconds. When the final layer broke away, revealing the Going Merry in perfect condition, the crew let out relieved breaths.

"Thank god..." Usopp whispered.

But their relief was short-lived.

Someone was standing on the Merry's deck. And "someone" might not be the right word anymore.

Indigo's body had undergone a grotesque transformation. Before, he'd looked like a man in clown makeup, ridiculous but still fundamentally human.

Now his body was covered in patchy white fur that grew in uneven clumps. Curved goat horns had sprouted from his forehead, and his face had elongated slightly, giving him a bestial quality. One eye was still a normal human pupil, but the other had become a horizontal goat's slit.

"You really came... Piropiropiro!" Indigo's entire demeanor radiated unhinged madness.

"How are you still alive?!" Nami stared at him in disbelief. "And what happened to you?!"

Vivi's expression showed shock, confusion, and deep disgust all at once.

"That's all thanks to YOU!" Indigo shrieked, pointing at them with a hand that now ended in hoof-like fingers.

---

Before Luffy's fight with Shiki...

After Nami, Vivi, Goliath, Usopp, and Chopper separated from their fused state, they'd lost their invincibility stats. But they'd still retained fire resistance, which meant Indigo's flame-based weapons couldn't do effective damage.

The fight had been completely one-sided. Hell, even Vivi alone could have beaten the scientist in single combat.

So he had run, and they chased him all the way to his laboratory, which was a converted storage area filled with makeshift surgical equipment and containment cells. Inside that lab, countless people had been wailing. Humans in the middle of mutation. Partially transformed test subjects screaming as their bodies warped against their will.

The goatmen they'd seen earlier weren't actual goatmen at all. They were humans who'd been injected with goat Lineage Factor formulas. Forced transformations that turned people into monsters.

When the four had realized what Indigo was doing, they'd destroyed the laboratory completely. Set fire to the equipment, broke open the cages, and let the experimental subjects loose.

As for Indigo himself, he should have been torn apart by his own creations. The transformed victims should have ripped him to pieces.

But somehow, he'd survived.

And looking at him now, it was clear he'd done more than just survive.

Indigo stared at the utterly destroyed remains of his laboratory, at the empty space where decades of work had stood just hours ago. His mind fractured.

When his gaze shifted to the Straw Hat crew, his eyes filled with hatred.

The synthetic beasts had been twenty years of painstaking research. Twenty years of trial and error, success and failure, countless hours spent pushing the boundaries of what science could achieve. But the progress had been too slow. Shiki was getting old, his patience wearing thin, and the human test subjects who'd been injected with IQ serum had produced nothing useful, just grotesque deformities that had to be disposed of. Because of those failures, Shiki had personally eliminated humans as viable experimental material. That ban had remained in place ever since.

Until the goatmen changed everything.

The goatmen possessed something unprecedented: highly infectious Lineage Factors that could transform humans into goatmen within minutes. Even better, the transformed subjects retained some intelligence. They could understand human speech. Sure, their aggression was off the charts, but they could distinguish allies from enemies and selectively choose not to attack.

This breakthrough had come from an accident during Lineage Factor research.

The genetic similarity between humans and goatmen was astonishing. Normally, the closest match between animals and humans topped out at 98.8%, and that was only with primates like gorillas and chimpanzees. The similarity between humans and ungulates like cattle or sheep hovered around 80%.

But goatmen? A staggering 99.9%.

If he hadn't personally extracted the blood samples from confirmed goatmen subjects, he would have sworn he was analyzing human DNA.

His new assistant, not as sharp as the previous one, clumsy in both thought and execution, had made a critical error. The idiot had mixed up sample labels to the point where even Indigo couldn't clearly distinguish which samples came from humans and which from goatmen.

When he'd discovered this mistake, he was thrilled. The thought of resuming human experimentation surged back into his mind, more powerful than ever.

Synthetic beasts weren't called "synthetic" just because they used IQ plants to modify Lineage Factors. The process involved extracting auxiliary components from other organisms, creating a hierarchy of primary and secondary genetic traits. For a creature to gain new powers or abilities, specific Lineage Factors needed to be activated in precise combinations.

His most recent success involved birds capable of releasing electrical discharges. It was targeted cultivation, though unfortunately he'd only managed to produce a single specimen so far. But if humans and goatmen were genetically this similar, combined with IQ extract solution... could he directly transform humans into goatmen? And more importantly, could he reverse the process?

That would essentially create an artificial Zoan Devil Fruit transformation.

The problem was that human experimentation crossed Shiki's bottom line. Indigo couldn't just waltz in and propose the idea without concrete results to show. So he'd chosen to act first and report later, banking on Shiki's reaction to successful outcomes.

Besides, if his theory proved wrong, what was the worst that could happen? A few more names added to the death toll. During these past days of goatmen research, the casualty count had already exceeded double digits.

One more death hardly mattered.

And his theory had succeeded. He'd easily transformed a human into a goatman with strength matching the standard specimens.

Once his hands had begun that sinful work, he couldn't stop.

After creating the first one, he'd immediately planned a second. But he wasn't manufacturing monsters for their own sake, he was researching the reversal process, how to turn a goatman back into a human. If successful, it would be a product that transcended the era itself.

When he'd explained his breakthrough to Shiki, the Golden Lion's initial reaction had been fury. The rules he himself had set were being violated by his own chief scientist. How was that not a direct challenge to his authority?

But quickly, his anger transformed into shock as the possibilities became clear. This was equivalent to creating an army of Zoan-type users.

Most importantly, the experiment was already showing real promise. Those "partial mutations" weren't failures, they were test subjects capable of reverting halfway back to human form. The next step was achieving full reversibility.

Purposeless human modification was one thing. Targeted human modification with demonstrable results, clear objectives, and foreseeable gains? That was something else entirely.

In the end, he had been persuaded.

When the potential profit was large enough, bottom lines could be adjusted slightly.

Just like Caesar's artificially produced Devil Fruits with their massive side effects, once this process could be mass-produced, Shiki would command a standardized Zoan army with decent overall combat strength.

But now, that beautiful vision had burst like a soap bubble.

Indigo's eyes burned with rage, though not from fear of failure. Even if Shiki died, it wouldn't matter to him personally. He was a scientist. As long as a scientist had results and raw materials, losing one boss simply meant finding another employer.

His research was valuable enough that he could defect anywhere. Present these findings to Kaido, who collected Zoan users like trading cards? Easy sell. Even the World Government would be tempted by the military applications.

But the Straw Hat crew had obliterated everything.

He could live without the experimental equipment. He could replace the test subjects. Even the data, if all the records were destroyed, he could eventually replicate them from memory.

But the one thing he absolutely could not replace...

The IQ plants were gone.

This entire floating island complex had been the cultivation site for IQ plants. Even if IQ plants still existed somewhere else in the world, could he find them? More importantly, these weren't just any IQ plants, they were specimens that had been selectively bred and cultivated for twenty years!

Finding identical plants in nature again was virtually impossible.

Find substitutes? If substitutes worked, he wouldn't be this furious in the first place.

That single explosion had annihilated more than two decades of his life's work in an instant.

His body trembled violently. "You have no idea what kind of magnificent future you've destroyed!"

The little rationality remaining in his eyes vanished completely.

His body underwent total metamorphosis. Muscles swelled and twisted. Bones cracked and reformed. White fur spread across his skin.

A roar erupted from his throat. Inside everyone's minds echoed wails of anguish saturated with burning fury. It felt completely different from the terrifying howls of the regular goatmen.

Marcus watched the transformation and felt stunned.

He hadn't gone into Indigo's laboratory personally. Though he'd heard from Usopp, Goliath, and the others about what they'd encountered, human experimentation itself didn't surprise him. What mad scientist didn't experiment on people?

Every scientist who'd appeared in One Piece so far had conducted human experiments to some degree.

Caesar's gigantification projects.

Judge's clone soldiers and genetic modifications.

Vegapunk's Pacifistas and the Numbers.

Queen's mechanical augmentations.

Which of these hadn't involved human experimentation? People only ever saw the finished products. The research process inevitably involved countless deaths along the way.

What he hadn't expected was that the goatmen had been successfully developed into something resembling a transformation serum.

How was that even possible?

Did the goatmen possess some kind of infectious property, like zombies? Had this lunatic actually created a goatmen T-virus?

And judging by Indigo's current state, he seemed even more powerful than the goatmen that had been transformed from Minecraft sheep.

If Indigo had been allowed to continue his research undisturbed, he might have produced something revolutionary. The thought was both fascinating and deeply disturbing.

The transformed scientist launched himself forward with explosive speed. Marcus could feel the attack approaching his face, claws extended, mouth open in a feral snarl.

In the end, Marcus just sighed.

His blade flashed in a silver arc.

Black energy erupted from the wound. And wherever that dark aura touched Indigo's transformed flesh, the mutations began quietly reversing, flesh returning to its original human form.