What happens when science and soul collide? And what will World do when it finds out what Vegapunk has truly become?
---
They parted that day without a handshake. Dragon disappeared into the wind. Vegapunk returned to his lab on Egghead with one idea growing like wildfire.
Safety didn't come from loyalty. It came from power.
He already possessed the Nomi Nomi no Mi, allowing him to store every piece of knowledge he'd ever consumed. No library could match his mind. But memory alone wasn't enough. The world was ruled by strength.
He needed muscle. He needed presence. He needed the ability to defy kings.
And so, the project began. Everything else was shelved.
Sea Prism Alloy Research? Deferred.
Instead, his lab became a haven for a single obsession.
Nano Machines.
A hundred designs failed. A thousand systems overloaded. Every budget request from the Celestial Dragons got funneled into a black hole of research. They didn't notice. They thought he was making them more toys.
They didn't know he was building a being.
The lab lights hummed low, hummingbirds of voltage nesting inside the cold silence. Egghead Island's main core laboratory—a jungle of steel and glass—reflected Vegapunk's silhouette as he stood alone beneath the observation dome. His back remained straight, too still for a man, his gaze fixed on an orb spinning slowly in midair—his most recent biological scan.
His own scan.
It projected veins, muscles, nerves, brain folds. Labeled. Color-coded. Alive.
One gloved finger rose, hovered over the heart, then dragged the projection outward to expand it into a living anatomy.
His fingers danced across the air, opening files. Human Performance. Marine CP0 data. Kaido's post-battle autopsy notes—stolen. Whitebeard's rib regeneration pattern—reconstructed. Big Mom's genetic density—studied through DNA debris from Elbaf incident.
He spoke to the system...
---
Inside a humming, chrome-lit lab deep beneath the ocean floor. Monitors flicker, robotic arms twitch above glowing canisters. Vegapunk stands shirtless under a scanning ring, wires running from his spine to the ceiling. His voice is a steady murmur—half note-taking, half confession. The nanomachines swirl like ink under his skin.
---
"Muscle density first," I muttered, typing midair on a projected screen. "Compressed fibers. Not bulky—efficient. Kaido's hide wasn't about show. It was tension. Pressure coiled under his skin like hydraulics wrapped in meat."
I twisted my wrist, watched the fibers tense and pulse under the transparent layer of my arm.
"Giant lineage gives the frame. Fishman structure gives the pressure buffer." My fingers danced again. "Integrate micro-bundles. Smart tissue. Let it bulk only when needed. No wasted volume. I want strength that cracks seastone bare-handed, not a circus show."
A small chime echoed. Muscle calibration—green.
"Good...good."
---
"Speed," I whispered, pivoting my heel against the floor. The neural interface registered the pressure instantly. "CP9... they never understood the math. Soru wasn't power—it was displacement. Seventeen steps in the same instant? No. It was rhythm."
I exhaled slow. "Tendons need to become coils. Flexible, reactive. Not just rebound, but pre-tensioned—like a slingshot of flesh."
Electromagnetic pulses shivered along my legs.
"Bio-pulsers activate adrenaline spikes. Short bursts. Controlled chaos. Like flicking the nervous system with a cattle prod."
My lips twisted. "Someday...fast enough to outrun light."
---
"Now bones," I muttered, glancing at the scans. "Durability doesn't mean mass. It means resistance. Wapo metal and calcium. Blend the unbendable with the organic."
I pulled up a schematic of an old bio-cyborg leg.
"They made the outer shell invincible. I'm burying it inside. Layered keratin plating, carbon-reinforced. Subdermal, not surface. Skin needs to flex, not crack."
The display flashed a cross-section of Sea King scales. "Toughness isn't an accident. It's a pattern."
My jaw clenched. "I'll grow my armor. And I'll shed it when it breaks."
---
"Regeneration," I said flatly, typing again. "Hm...this one is surprisingly the easiest one."
I blinked. A faint tingle traveled through my bloodstream. Nanites surfed along my arteries.
"But when I regenerate, it'll slowly improve my body, need to adapt faster and better—stem repair? Hm, I just need to keep my nutrients intake keep up with regeneration."
Tiny drones hovered near my head. They didn't buzz—they waited.
---
I paused. "Organs."
The word tasted bitter.
"Heart fails under stress. Overload tears valves. Watched it. Studied it."
A heart diagram spun before me.
"Solution: vibrational fatigue mesh. Bio-thread inside the pericardium. It grows. It flexes. It learns."
I tapped a second screen. "Liver and kidneys: poison-proof. Doku doku no mi poison's blueprint, refined. I won't piss acid. But I'll drink it."
I winced as the injection pierced my lower back. Cooling solution flushed through my kidneys.
---
Haki… this was where things got abstract. Irrational. Beautifully unscientific.
Vegapunk had studied all three types.
He had entire data banks of Haki signatures from past field reports.
But studying it wasn't enough. He needed to experience it. Master it. Recreate it in ways no pirate ever imagined.
He wrote a new sub-file: Haki Advancement Theory
"Armament Haki..." I cracked my knuckles, flexed my fingers. "Always starts simple. Blade. Fist. Coat it, reinforce it. Basic."
I tapped the control panel, called up the internal stress test logs.
"There's Haki Internal Destruction, then Haki Impact like Garp did...but what's after that?"
Vegapunk then just imagine what's better than Garp's Galaxy Impact but no idea come, he thought that maybe he need to reach that stage before any good idea pop out to his mind.
"Next is Observation Haki." I muttered as I flipped the next calibration node.
Lights dimmed, and six combat droids unfolded from the walls. Random patterns. No instructions. No rhythm. I made sure of that.
"Predict the unpredictable."
They moved without warning—stuttered, twitched, changed gait mid-motion. One exploded into decoys. Another cloaked. My right eye tracked, tried, failed.
"Sensory overload... simulate chaos. Trick the instincts. If I can't see through it, I'll drown in noise."
The machines paused. I hadn't even moved.
"There's multiple cases of superb user of Observation Haki, some can read memories, thoughts and some can even predict the future like the one in Fish Man Island..."
Vegapunk hummed and predicted the end of Observation Haki was so obvious, it's Omniscient...but how can he get to that level is the hard question.
---
"Black blades," I murmured, eyes locked on an ancient diagram of Yoru. "Permanent Haki saturation. Not an effect. Not a technique. A state."
I leaned closer, heartbeat steady. The machines inside me buzzed like a second pulse.
"If metal can hold haki—why not me?"
I tapped my sternum, slow. "Internal organs are flesh, yes. But they're structured. Layered. Trained. Could I... blacken my lungs?"
A cough stirred deep in my chest. I grinned.
"Make them armor against sonic weapons. Shield the heart so no impact—no tremor—pierces it."
My fingers danced, pulling up another projection.
"And the brain," I said, quiet now. "What if I could harden the brain itself? Wrap it in haki so deep, even a mindblast from a telepath would bounce."
I tapped my temple. "Would I think better in Haki though?"
My notes flickered as I scrawled into the next slate.
"Marrow is organic. Marrow makes blood."
I glanced at my hand, skin lit from within.
"If I fortify my bone marrow, I'm not just protecting myself—I'm creating blood cells born infused with Haki."
I tilted my head, excited now.
"RBCs as carriers of microscopic Armament. A haki circulatory system."
The nanites in my bloodstream responded, pulsing faintly.
"It wouldn't fade. It would live. Flow."
Observation Haki logs spilled across the screen. Spaghetti lines of motion—attack paths, dodges, counterstrikes.
"Precognition," I whispered. "Everyone thinks it's magic. No. It's pattern."
"What if I trained my Observation to not guess the next move... but the next five? Seven?"
The nanomachines read my brain. Mapped predictive paths in real-time.
"If machines can predict based on raw data... why can't Haki?"
I stood still, staring into the dark chamber ahead.
"Where does intuition end?"
My hand hovered over the switch that would begin the full-body integration.
"And where does precognition begin?"
Then I paused, staring at the string of code hanging in the air before me.
"Bio-Haki conversion…" I muttered, rubbing my eyes. "If Haki is willpower—then maybe will isn't exclusive to sentient minds."
I brought up a recording: a combat spike in my neural drive. A surge during one of the training tests. Fear, focus, rage. All spiked in tandem.
"What if I recorded that moment? Let the nanomachines mimic it. Recreate it on demand."
I laughed, rough. "Simulated willpower. Triggered intensity. Synthetic resolve."
"Could I store will like energy?"
"Last but not least conqueror's…" I stopped. Said nothing for a beat.
Then: "How the hell do you train for something that doesn't follow rules?"
The chamber cooled. I pulled up the subroutine I'd written weeks ago and hadn't dared to test.
"Simulated ego-collapse," I read aloud, as if saying it would make it more rational. "Induce emotional failure. Strip back everything. No intellect. No science. Just... me."
I loaded the environment file. It flickered once. My childhood room. My dead mother's face. My failures. My shame. My other selves. The one who sold out. The one who never built. The one who broke.
"I'm going to crack myself open," I whispered. "And if there's a king underneath, it'll come out."
I stared at the injector. Nanomachines primed. Neural bridge ready.
"No guarantees," I said. "Trigger it or die trying."
And then the injector hissed. The fusion began.
My bones lit up with pain.
Would the haki follow? Or would I shatter under the weight of a soul too logical to scream?
---
Several years after the birth of Nano Machinem, back in Egghead, the World Government began to ask questions.
"Where are the Seraphim?"
"Why is SSG delayed?"
"Why is your power usage spiking?"
He lied. Easily. Eloquent.
They believed him. For now.
But the butterfly had already flapped its wings.
In another timeline, Vegapunk remained the quiet genius. Safe. Indispensable. Controlled.
In this one?
He was building a god within the shell of a man.
The Devil of Egghead Island.
His eyes scanned the horizon from his laboratory tower. Beyond the clouds, beyond the seas, the world spun on. Unaware.
The World Government still believed he was their loyal asset. Dragon still gambled on revolution. The Yonko warred like titans.
None of them knew.
None of them were ready.
The room smelled sterile—too clean for any natural place on earth. It wasn't air anymore, but atmosphere calculated to the millimeter. Temperature exact. Humidity optimized for nanomachine transfer. Gravity slightly modified. All of it—calibrated for him.
Vegapunk stood in the center of it, silent.
His body was no longer what the world remembered.
Gone was the cartoonish balloon of a head that once looked too large for his thin, aging frame. The grotesque dome of genius had been compressed, every fold of brain matter condensed by nanomachines into hyperdense structure. Think of a black hole—information without mass.
His skull now shaped smooth and proportionate, a symmetrical masterpiece honed by mathematical precision. Sharp jaw. Hollow cheekbones. Every line of his face built like an equation—unnecessary fat cells stripped, nerves hardened, bone density quadrupled.
But the eyes—those had become something else entirely.
The transformation had warped his eyes into something post-human. Sclera black as polished obsidian absorbed light rather than reflected it. Inside, two pale irises hung suspended—horizontally slitted, like a predator adapted to seeing through smoke, storm, and speed.
Micro-circuitry danced faintly along the edges, hinting at sensory overlays and perception too sharp for human biology. They weren't eyes. They were weapons.
Each blink triggered thousands of data scans, a low flicker of blue circuitry faintly rippling from the corners of his eyes across his cheekbones like glowing veins.
He used to look like a man who thought.
Now, he looked like a man who decided.
His frame was built for war.
Three meters tall. Heavier than a thousand Sea Kings in pure mass—but compact.
Where he should have been a monstrous hundred meters tall—his natural trajectory had he let his muscle and organ structures grow without restraint—he had instead chosen to compress everything.
Veins pulsed in rhythmic flashes under his skin, lit faintly with nanomachine pulses.
Every part of him moved with silence—not because he was light, but because the lab sensors no longer registered him as entirely human.
He had sculpted himself like a blacksmith sculpting a blade.
Aesthetics were a factor too.
The world worshiped strength—but feared beauty paired with monstrosity.
So he made himself beautiful.
In the way storms are beautiful.
In the way extinction is beautiful.
---
And deep in the silence of his laboratory, a synthetic voice echoed from his neural core. A voice that was once external, now lived inside.
"Initialization complete. Combat Protocol Online. Awaiting command…"
Vegapunk grinned.
His teeth? Diamond-laced enamel. Strong enough to crush seastone dust.
His tongue? Laced with language adaptation nano-strips, able to speak, mimic, and deceive in over three thousand dialects.
And his voice?
Low. Cold. Calm.
Like thunder waiting to decide if it should strike.
He stepped forward. The floor didn't creak. It shivered.
His hand clenched once.
Nano circuits surged through his knuckles, tracing patterns under his skin.
Haki sensors flared along his collarbones.
Observation readings locked onto every electrical current in a fifty-meter radius.
His gaze burned through the reinforced glass like it wasn't even there.
"Hm, whoa, look who's here...?"