"Martha, stop using the ion cannon. Use the flamethrower!"
"I already tried. But these vines are too strange. The flamethrower has very little effect."
Right.
Martha wasn't some machine that needed every little thing commanded by hand. As a piece of black-tech, a Terminator had autonomous combat analysis. If the flamethrower worked, she would've used it long ago.
By now, the Devourer had also woken up, but in the face of vines thicker than its own body, there was very little it could do.
As for Wrecker…
That idiot was still sleeping flat on his back, dead to the world, with a string of drool hanging from his mouth.
At that moment, one of the vines suddenly coiled around Martha.
Then it began to tighten.
The liquid metal on her outer layer was visibly squeezed and warped under the pressure.
But Martha's internal metal skeleton was absurdly tough. The crushing force of the vine did almost nothing to it.
Instead, Martha simply brought out a chainsaw, severed the vine, and broke free.
Seeing that, Ren tightened his grip on his flip-flops, activated his power, and charged in.
With Observation Haki guiding him, those vines had no chance of wrapping around him. Meanwhile, every strike from his flip-flops landed exactly where he wanted.
And once his attacks connected, the vines either turned into brittle blocks of ice or burst into flames on the spot.
This was a new application of his power.
By channeling his ability into the flip-flops, he could make them absorb heat from a target the instant they struck, freezing the vines solid—or load them with so much heat that they ignited immediately.
Either way, his transcendent-grade flip-flops couldn't be damaged, no matter how recklessly he used them.
So once the vines were hit by his power, they more or less lost the ability to keep fighting.
Before long, the dozens of attacking vines had been almost completely destroyed.
Just as Ren was about to catch his breath, the forest in the darkness suddenly shook again.
A fresh wave of vines surged out and rushed toward The Lucky.
"Damn it!"
Ren cursed and immediately threw himself back into the fight.
After several more minutes, he and Martha once again beat back the vines.
But almost immediately after that, more began pouring out.
At that point, Ren understood.
If he didn't deal with the source of the vines, then they would keep coming forever.
At this rate, the vines might not be able to defeat him right away—but once his stamina ran dry, they'd wrap him up sooner or later.
Ren turned his gaze toward the forest in the darkness.
That was where the vines were coming from.
If he burned down the entire forest, then whatever was hiding inside would have nowhere left to hide.
The problem was that the vines were attacking nonstop, and Xu Nian was still asleep.
He and Martha had their hands full just dealing with the endless assault.
But that didn't actually stop Ren.
He suddenly leaped off the ship and landed beside The Lucky on the beach.
He placed his left hand on the sand and gripped a flip-flop tightly in his right.
Then he activated his ability.
At once, the beach began to harden, and the surface of the nearby sea started freezing over.
At the same time, all the heat he absorbed flowed into the flip-flop in his right hand.
When he felt it had reached the limit, Ren hurled it with all his strength.
Empowered by his monstrous physical force, the flip-flop shot into the forest like a cannon shell.
Bang! Bang! Bang!
Every tree in its path was punched straight through.
Only after blasting through dozens of trunks did it finally stop.
Then, in the next instant, the massive amount of heat stored inside it erupted outward.
A red dome spread across a hundred-meter area.
Within that zone, every tree and every blade of grass burst into flames.
In the blink of an eye, the forest became a sea of fire.
The flames spread wildly, devouring more and more of the woods.
At the same time, Ren stood outside the burning forest and created powerful gusts of wind, feeding the fire and making it swell even further.
He didn't know exactly where the vine creature was hiding.
But if he burned the entire forest to the ground, he refused to believe it could stay hidden.
And sure enough, under the pressure of the flames, the thing finally revealed itself.
It could no longer remain in the burning forest.
A monstrous mass of tangled vines burst out of the inferno. It ripped off the burning outer layers of itself as it emerged.
And for the first time, Ren saw its true form clearly.
Its real body was nothing more than a single vine covered in countless branching tendrils.
The moment it escaped the fire and saw Ren standing on the beach, it reacted as if it had found a mortal enemy.
All of its vines converged at once and lunged straight at him.
Ren clenched his left fist and growled,
"Iron Body!"
Then he activated his power and punched forward.
The instant the vines collided with his fist, they froze solid.
In the blink of an eye, half the creature was locked in ice.
Crack. Crack. Boom!
Ren smashed the frozen half apart with one blow.
Then he pressed his right hand against what remained and released all the heat he had stored.
The high temperature instantly evaporated the moisture inside the vine creature.
The dried vines ignited at once.
But because the heat was too overwhelming, the burning mass didn't last long before it turned into a lump of charred black material.
Looking at the motionless remains, Ren spread out his Observation Haki.
It was still alive.
So he scraped away the burned outer layer.
At the center, what remained was a small green mass about the size of a fist.
Ren picked it up and started trying to communicate with it.
Thanks to his Myriad Worlds Language Mastery, he eventually pieced together the truth.
The vine had originally been a plant called Moonlight Vine.
It was a parasitic plant that only became active at night under moonlight.
Once mature, Moonlight Vines released seeds during moonlit nights. Those seeds drifted on the wind, and when they landed on other plants, they extended tiny tendrils into them, absorbing nutrients and reproducing that way.
The reason it had transformed into a monster like this was because, back when it had still been a seed, it had landed on a fruit with a very strange color.
After absorbing the nutrients from that bizarre fruit, it found that it had gained a special power—
it could make its vines proliferate explosively.
But that kind of multiplication consumed an enormous amount of energy.
So it began killing the animals in the forest, because plants simply didn't contain enough energy to sustain it.
Compared to plants, animals were far more efficient sources.
And the island's human residents?
It had captured and killed them as well, preparing to absorb them for energy.
That was also why there had still been so many corpses left in the pit Ren found earlier.
Its absorption speed had limits.
Those bodies simply hadn't all been consumed yet.
And the number of corpses in that pit was less than a third of the town's total population.
Once Ren understood everything, he formed a guess almost immediately.
That strange fruit the vine had fed on...
was probably a Devil Fruit.
And it was that Devil Fruit power that had turned an ordinary vine into a monster capable of wiping out an entire town.
After learning all that, Ren froze the green core completely.
Then, through Observation Haki, he sensed the last traces of life inside it disappear.
At last, the monster was dead.
Ren let out a long breath of relief.
Then another thought suddenly struck him.
Would a Skill Extraction Card work on this thing too?
He still had plenty of them. Even if it failed, losing one wouldn't hurt him much.
So he took out a Skill Extraction Card and placed it on the frozen remains.
The card dissolved immediately.
Which meant the extraction worked.
"Congratulations, Host. You have extracted the Paramecia-type Devil Fruit ability: Proliferation Fruit. This ability allows the user to massively proliferate a chosen substance."
Ren's eyes lit up.
The card had actually extracted the Devil Fruit ability.
But then another problem occurred to him at once.
"System, can I have another ability?"
"No. The host does not meet the requirements to withstand dual abilities and therefore cannot possess two."
Ren frowned.
"Then what happens to the ability I just got?"
"You can give it to Martha."
Ren blinked.
"But Martha's a robot. She can't eat a Devil Fruit."
"But you obtained it through a Skill Extraction Card," the system replied.
Ren looked at Martha.
Then he looked at the newly extracted ability.
Finally, he waved her over.
"Martha, come here for a moment."