Kizaru was a blur of effortless, mocking power. He barely turned his head toward the small, defiant boy. His foot, briefly infused with the terrifying gold of his Devil Fruit, moved not with the speed of a kick, but the speed of a photon.
It was not a punch, or a blast, but a total erasure.
A cone of blinding, yellow-white light—pure energy accelerated to the highest possible velocity—engulfed Bennie. There was no screaming, no pain, just the violent, instantaneous cessation of existence. The sound was a sharp crack that echoed off the nearby buildings, and then silence.
Where Benjamin had stood, there was now only a momentary column of super heated air and a rapidly dissipating cloud of fine, gray ash. The old woman gasped, falling silent. Saint Jarkel laughed—a thin, reedy sound that was muffled and distorted by his bubble helmet. He twitched the strap of the helmet to a more comfortable position.
Kizaru tapped the lingering heat off his boot with the toe of the other foot. "Well, that's settled. Little bit dusty now, isn't it? Let's go."
They left. They had no reason to linger. They had executed a worthless commoner, and Saint Jarkel's order was fulfilled.
The Spark of Consciousness
(https://youtu.be/tQmVrEAIwfU?si=ral1QAsWardlFfyJ Here is a YouTube link for the BGM for this scene)
But within the cloud of molecular dust, where atoms had been violently pulled apart and stripped of their binding energy, something resisted. The consciousness of Benjamin—tormented, scarred by two brutal ends, and driven by a desperate, unmet yearning for peace—refused to dissolve.
It was not a mind; it was a pure pattern of energy, an electric ghost in the void. It saw the scattered remnants of his own body not as ashes, but as an instruction manual. The trauma of his two deaths had forced a quantum state change, giving his psyche a terrifying new anchor: absolute control over matter.
A cold, unfeeling voice cut through the chaos: "Host, you were destroyed. Host, you have been destroyed before." Bennie's spirit screamed a final, wordless thought: No more! "You will not be destroyed again."
An unfamiliar, chillingly logical voice cut through the chaos, not in his ears, but directly into the core of his existence. It was the voice of a system, cold and non-organic.
[SELF-RECONSTRUCTION INITIATED]
[SOUL TRAJECTORY: RECALCULATED]
[ERROR: PREVIOUS HOST FAILURES INDICATE INSUFFICIENT TEMPLATE]
[SYSTEM AWAKENING: CRITICAL SUCCESS]
The ash on the ground, the very air where he had been vaporized, began to glow with a faint, otherworldly blue light. The particles—carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and everything else that made a child—snapped back together. But this was not simple regeneration; it was a methodical, hyper-precise re-knitting of existence.
It started with a nervous system of pure energy, followed by the perfect, reconstructed lattice of a skeleton. It only took three seconds in real-time, yet for Benjamin, it was an eternity of precise, mathematical rebuilding.
He reformed, standing exactly where he died. He looked the same—the same small, quiet boy—except for one crucial change: his deep blue eyes now possessed an eerie, radiant inner glow that pulsed with silent power.
He inhaled, not because he needed air, but because the act confirmed his new body's presence. He looked down at his hands, seeing the atomic structures within them with stunning clarity.
Then, a message burned itself onto his retina, hovering in the air like a cold star:
[CONGRATULATIONS HOST. YOU HAVE UNLOCKED 1% OF DR. MANHATTAN'S TEMPLATE.]
The second, longer message followed, outlining his destiny:
[THE SYSTEM JOB: PERFORM TASKS THAT ALTER THE WORLD'S TRAJECTORY—EXAMPLES: SAVE FISHER TIGER; FREE MARIE JOE'S SLAVES. FAILURE TO COMPLY WILL RESULT IN DEACTIVATION.]
Benjamin, the child who had just been erased by an Vice Admiral, felt a wave of cold, logical purpose wash over him. The burning desire for peace was now backed by a blueprint for Godhood. His mission was clear: If the world was determined to be a cage, he would dismantle it atom by atom.