The cold, icy seawater was a brutal slap of reality, but the single, pale blue message was Leo's lifeline.
SYSTEM INITIALIZING... 1%
It was gone as quickly as it came, a ghost in his vision, but it was real. Leo surged upward out of the freezing water, adrenaline flushing the pain from his limbs. Hope, pure and irrational, flooded his chest.
"It worked," he muttered, spitting out saltwater and blood. He pressed his knuckles into the icy slush of the battlefield, a wide, manic grin spreading across his soot-covered face. "The Game-Game Fruit. The system. I didn't get killed in the transfer! I'm not just a random soldier who died in Brooklyn and woke up here to be cannon fodder. I'm the protagonist."
The immense, chaotic horror of Marineford—the cannons, the screams, the towering figures of the Admirals—suddenly shrank, recontextualized into a terrifying but manageable scenario. He wasn't trapped; he was in an Event Dungeon.
He knew this place. He knew the lore. He knew the ending.
I just need to survive.
A desperate, critical mission parameter formed in his mind: TIME LIMIT.
He thought of the red-haired figure, the Emperor who arrives to end all things. "I won't die here. I will survive this until Red-Haired Shanks arrives."
But then the tactical questions, the military training that always trumped his gamer fantasy, kicked in. When does he arrive? The timeline of a chaotic, real-world war wasn't a neat cutscene trigger. It was a fluid, bloody disaster.
"How much time do I have left until he shows up?"
He had to get out of the direct line of fire. He forced his body, aching and shaking, to move. His legs, though wobbly, still obeyed the soldier's instinct. He scrambled over a frozen wave of shattered ice, ducking beneath a chain-shot fired by a Marine warship that took the mast off a nearby pirate vessel with a horrifying CRUNCH.
Leo found a small, relatively sheltered alcove beneath a partially collapsed stone walkway—a perfect corner to check his stats. A temporary Safe Zone.
He focused his mind, mentally reaching for the interface that had teased him moments before.
Status Screen. System Check. Diagnostics!
This time, the blue glow didn't flicker. It was solid, if still faint, materializing in the center of his vision, overlaid across the smoke and the chaos.
[SYSTEM STATUS: Gēmu Gēmu no Mi (Game-Game Fruit)]
System Initializing: 5%
Time Until System Online: 3 Hours Remaining
Current Quest: SURVIVAL (Objective: Escape Marineford)
Current HP: 35 / 100 (Critical)
Abilities Available: NONE
Leo stared at the three-hour timer, his momentary triumph curdling into absolute, stomach-dropping terror.
"Three hours?" he croaked, the sound barely audible over the clash of two massive figures fighting nearby. "You think I'm a god or something? You think I'm Imu? How am I supposed to survive three hours in the middle of this battle—where people can move faster than sound and punch holes in the sea—with 35 HP and a butter knife?"
The sheer scale of the challenge was paralyzing. Three hours was an eternity of survival in this meat grinder. He was utterly vulnerable, lacking even the basic tools of his old life, let alone the power to summon game-breaking allies.
His gamer mind, which had moments ago found refuge in the structure of a system, was now overwhelmed by the terrifying difficulty rating.
"Oh no," Leo whispered, sinking against the cold, wet stone wall, clutching the Kukri knife. The taste of salt and despair was thick in his mouth. "This isn't a warm-up dungeon. This Marineford… this is going to be my grave."
He was alive, but the timer was counting down to his ability to fight, and the battlefield was counting down to his very existence.
New Quest Update: Find healing items and defensive cover.
Leo grit his teeth. He had to move. He had to start looting.
Note:(Gemu-Gemu No mi is not a devil fruit but just a name of the system that I think sounds good)