One Piece: Investing In Whitebeard At The Start.

"Of course!"

Vane stepped forward in an instant, moving so quickly that only his afterimage remained. In the blink of an eye, he was in front of Rob Lucci. His fist, wrapped in the power of the Quake Fruit, slammed forward. With a thunderous crack, the air itself split.

Lucci managed to block the attack with his Leopard Fist, but he couldn't withstand the sheer force behind it. His arms fractured, blood gushed from his fists, and he was sent flying. The ground beneath them erupted violently, countless cracks snaking out like bolts of lightning. The longest fissure stretched hundreds of meters, and the widest was several meters across.

"Is that really the power of the Quake Fruit? It's just like one of those legendary pirates!" Lucci muttered, climbing out from the rubble and suppressing the pain in his right arm. He launched himself again with Soru, aiming to strike head-on.

"Ultimate Technique of Rokushiki—Six King Pistol!"

With a roar, Lucci closed the distance in an instant. Without touching the ground, he brought his fists together, top and bottom, and drove them toward Vane's chest. All of his strength focused into this attack. A shockwave burst out between his fists with a deafening boom, powerful enough to deafen any ordinary person. A tornado-shaped blast surged into Vane's body.

"Not bad," Vane remarked with admiration. But that kind of attack meant nothing to a man with a physique rivaling Whitebeard at his peak. He wasn't Luffy, who had barely survived fighting Lucci back then.

Vane didn't move a single step.

"How… how is that possible?!"

Lucci's face twisted in disbelief. His strongest technique had done absolutely nothing. His opponent hadn't even flinched! Before he could recover from the shock, Vane struck again. His fist, cloaked in the white energy of the Shock Fruit, didn't look overly muscular, but the raw physical strength combined with the fruit's destructive power made it unstoppable.

Panic set in. Lucci activated his strongest form of Tekkai, hardening his abdomen like steel.

Vane's punch landed squarely on Lucci's midsection. A deep crack in the atmosphere stretched over a meter tall, and the immense impact hit like a falling mountain, completely shattering Lucci's defense. His body bent backward like a bow and was blasted away like a cannonball. He coughed up three mouthfuls of blood mid-flight. Pain exploded from his stomach, blurring his senses and making it hard to even recognize his own body.

The destruction didn't stop there. The ground in front of Vane was annihilated with terrifying speed and force. Entire strata of earth more than five meters deep were blown apart as if struck by artillery. Yellow dust billowed over ten meters high, obscuring everything in front of him.

He stepped forward through the haze and closed in on Lucci.

The blow had sent Lucci flying over a hundred meters, crashing through more than ten buildings before finally embedding him in a thick wall. His body was broken, covered in wounds, blood leaking from his mouth, and his gaze vacant.

At that moment, Vane appeared before him.

"Weakness is a sin. You understand that, don't you? In this brutal world where the strong devour the weak, the powerless can't even find a place to live. The will that drives countless people through life is the desire to become stronger—stronger than yesterday, stronger than anyone."

"Weak people don't even have the right to survive."

"You believe that too, don't you?"

"Yes... Weak people have no right to survive," Rob Lucci replied. This belief had guided him his entire life. He once killed 500 soldiers, not out of malice, but because their incompetence had led to a national crisis after being captured by pirates. To prevent such a failure from happening again, he'd concluded that those who couldn't protect themselves had no right to live.

Rob Lucci—a man who embodied dark justice. If he hadn't been placed here as a spy, if he hadn't slacked on his training, he wouldn't have lost so easily.

He was a genius, someone who had pushed the Rokushiki arts to their limit and even developed his own unique moves.

Had he not encountered Vane today, he could have gone much further.

Vane raised his fist once more, the white energy of the Shock Fruit flaring with killing intent.

"So I'll end you here. That dark justice of yours? It's too troublesome. I don't want to deal with you ever again."

"Why… why are you attacking us?"

Lucci tried to free himself from the wall, but his body was shattered. Vane's strength was overwhelming.

"A deal. I don't want the World Government to succeed."

"You should've just taken Iceburg by force. Why bother with tricks and deception? If you follow dark justice, why even pretend to have morals?"

With that, Vane brought his fist down on Lucci's head. The vibrating force warped the air. Lucci's skull was crushed, and the wall behind him exploded outward, sending shockwaves across the area.

In the end, Rob Lucci was dead.

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