One Piece: Dream of Immortality

Chapter 90: Teddy Bear



Cherry carefully snuck up on the newcomer and Moria through the forest.

When she found a good vantage point, she saw the large man with little bear ears speaking to Moria.

"What?! Them?! Defeat me?! I won't be done in by a bunch of upstarts! Crocodile was a fool and a loser, I'm not the same as him!" Moria shouted at Kuma, clearly offended.

"It appeared that you were running away from them just a moment ago?" Kuma replied monotonously.

"Damn you, Kuma! I wasn't running away, I'm just forcing them to split up and search for me, then I'll take their shadows one at a time!" Moria exclaimed.

"You can ask for my assistance if you need it." Kuma replied.

"Never! I have my own pride, I won't ask for YOUR help to kill a few brats!" Moria insisted stubbornly.

"Very well. In regards to Crocodile, his successor had been chosen." Kuma explained the situation around Marshall D. Teach, also called Blackbeard.

Cherry briefly recalled Luffy mentioning the name 'Blackbeard' and that his brother was apparently hunting the man.

Cherry turned her attention to this Kuma fellow, who was apparently another Shichibukai. Most of his body had apparently been replaced with nonliving material, similar to Franky. There was a good chance he was also a cyborg.

Another thing she noticed, though it was just her intuition, is that this Kuma fellow is a big softy. She wasn't a hundred percent sure, but she'd bet a lot on that fact.

The two Shichibukai finished speaking and Moria stalked away whilst Kuma went in another direction. Cherry considered whether to follow one of them, and which one if she did.

Kuma was going to pass the time until events here were over, then make his report to the world government. He would not go out of his way to help the world government, and certainly not for Moria's sake.

'Perhaps I can blast away a few of Moria's subordinates to make things difficult for him..." Kuma thought, but he suddenly stopped walking.

He could feel something tugging on his decorative bear ears.

"I'm disappointed. I had hoped they would be real..." Cherry said.

Kuma swung at her with his pawed hands, but he found no target to strike. He turned around to see Cherry smirking at him from about 10 meters away.

"Harpin D. Cherry, aka 'Cheapshot'. Bounty of 350 million Beri." He spoke robotically.

"That's me! I see you're a big fan of mine. I don't give free autographs, just so you know." Cherry mocked.

"If you went on vacation, where would you like to go?" Kuma asked the same question he's asked many people in the past.

"That's a tough one. I suppose it would count as a vacation to go knocking on Hawkeye's door and pester him to death." Cherry said thoughtfully, casually side stepping to avoid Kuma's palm strike.

Kuma sent a flurry of attacks towards her, but not a single one touched even a single hair on her head, which was important as she just finished growing it back. Cherry didn't even look like she was having any trouble dodging at all.

"As I thought. I was right about you." Cherry nodded at her own words.

Kuma was some what curious to what conclusion she has come to about him. "Right about what?"

"You're as much of a big, fuzzy, huggable teddy bear on the inside as you appear on the outside. Otherwise you wouldn't be holding back right now, I think." Cherry explained with confidence.

Kuma was shocked at this. So much so he was thankful for his stoic cyborg face, which was quite a rare occurrence. He WAS holding back, but not by that much. He was using enough of his ability to pressure a normal pirate with a bounty around 300 million Beri.

He decided to turn up the heat, firing his mouth beam as well as using his Paw Paw Fruit to the fullest extent he could.

Cherry laughed like she was in amusement park as she danced around his attacks. It had gotten a bit tougher to do so, but between her superhuman reflexes and Observation Haki it was still manageable.

"I see, I see. You increased the difficulty because you have something to protect, something secret, and you can't afford to be seen as going easy on pirates, huh?" Cherry was just throwing a guess out there, but from the momentary pause from Kuma, she concluded it to be correct.

Kuma stopped his attacks and raised his hands into the air. A pulsing could be heard as a massive sphere in the shape of a paw appeared in the air and started to shrink in his hands. He couldn't use this attack in battle normally as it takes too long to charge up, but Cherry hadn't attacked him yet, so he decided to chance it.

Cherry just watched as he condensed the air into a smaller and smaller space, eventually clutching it between his clasped hands. When he opened them towards her, she activated Tekkai to the fullest extent that she was able and got blasted backwards along with a large portion of forest.

When the dust settled, Cherry came walking out of the mess of dirt and trees, as if she had only been caressed by a gentle breeze. "That's attack is certainly destructive, but the destruction is too spread out. It'd be much more devastating to hit someone directly with it." Kuma just stared at her silently. He wasn't sure what to do about her except using lethal force, but even that may not be enough.

"By the way, that Blackbeard fellow you told Moria about. What did he do to get the World Government's attention? It had to have been something big since you said he never even received a bounty before." Cherry asked.

"I suppose it will be known to the public soon anyways. He captured 'Fire Fist' Ace and brought him to the marines." He said.

Bells seemed to ring in Cherry's mind. 'Ah, so that's how it is... So be it.'

She sighed and simply walked away from Kuma, then stopped to look at him. "I won't tell anyone you're a revolutionary."

Kuma nearly lost his balance at those words. "What...?"

"Oh wow, really? Interesting." Cherry grinned at him, then turned away to leave for real this

time.

'She would be a valuable asset to have in the war effort. Something tells me that she wouldn't go for it, though.' He sighed in defeat and went in a different direction.

After a while, Cherry noticed the fog lifting whilst she enjoyed a bottle of rare wine that she snatched from the kitchen. The light of dawn was threatening to break over the horizon, it would bathe the massive ship with light in less than an hour.

Luffy and the others had finally manage to corner and force Moria to fight them properly. Instead of releasing the shadows from his zombies, he chose to absorb them for a massive

power up.

Cherry elected not to intervene, as they could handle him just fine without her. Moria last words before blacking out were something along the line of "If only I had Oz...", whatever that meant. Probably another zombie he never got a shadow good enough to put into.

Kuma reported Moria's defeat to his superiors, who then ordered him to destroy the

witnesses.

Cherry knew he wasn't going to do that though, especially since his real boss is Luffy's father. As expected, he found his own excuses not to eliminate them.

A big party was held to celebrate Moria's defeat and the return of the many shadows of his victims. Moria's unconscious body was dragged away by the invisible pervert and who she presumed to be Doctor Hogback. Strangely there was no signs of Perona, Cherry was curious when and how she left Thriller Bark, but didn't spare it much thought.n/o/vel/b//in dot c//om