At night, in an ordinary apartment building in the Alhambra neighborhood of Los Angeles, the young Hawke jolted awake in bed.
The room was pitch-black and completely quiet.
His forehead was drenched in sweat. Weakly, he pushed himself upright, looking dazed and exhausted, but the haze quickly cleared from his eyes.
"Detected: cursed matching necklace (1/2). Proceed with replacement?"
Hawke stared fixedly at the virtual prompt floating before his eyes and clenched his teeth.
So it really was this damn necklace.
Hawke Miller, seventeen years old, attended an ordinary high school in Los Angeles. His mother had died of illness when he was very young. A year earlier, his father, a truck driver, had died in a traffic accident, leaving him roughly $730,000 in compensation. That sum included wrongful death compensation, funeral expenses, child support, emotional damages, and several other related payments.
In 2003, that was no small amount of money, but Hawke would never have chosen to receive it that way.
It had taken him a long time to crawl out from under that shadow. He buried the grief deep inside and forced himself to keep living.
Then, half a year ago, during a school outing, he met Sarah, a girl his age who attended an elite private school. Thanks to Hawke's striking looks and easy way of speaking, the two of them quickly became a couple. Half a month ago, while out shopping together over the weekend, they discovered a beautiful old-fashioned pair of matching necklaces in an antique shop.
The pendants were shaped like two broken halves of a heart. Put together, they formed one complete heart.
He had never imagined that was the moment his fate would change.
That very night, Hawke began having nightmares. The details were vague, but the fear lingered like a stain that would not wash away. At the same time, his body began to grow alarmingly weak.
The condition persisted. He became weaker and weaker by the day. When Sarah found out, she rushed over to visit him, deeply worried.
Only in the last two days had things suddenly shown slight improvement. Then, just now, after waking from another nightmare, he had abruptly broken through the veil that shrouded his past and awakened the memories of his previous life.
With the memories of both lives merging together, names like the billionaire playboy Tony Stark and the mutants from this life's memories made one thing perfectly clear to him: the universe he lived in was Marvel.
A universe crawling with monsters.
S.H.I.E.L.D., HYDRA, aliens, demons, angels, Asgard, and more. In just a few years, the curtain would rise on a new era, and one catastrophic crisis after another would make its entrance.
Fortunately, when Hawke awakened those memories, he awakened a system as well.
The Replacement System.
Just as the name implied, it allowed him to trade items of special value to the system in exchange for something else. The greater the item's value, the better the reward he would receive.
The moment the system appeared, it immediately identified the item with that special value.
[Cursed Matching Necklace (1/2)]
Which meant Sarah's necklace was cursed too.
But if that was true, why was she fine?
No... wait.
Sarah had not contacted him at all in the last two days.
Could it be...
A terrible foreboding suddenly gripped Hawke's heart.
No matter what, he had to deal with his own situation first.
So he immediately chose to begin the replacement.
"Replacement initiated. Congratulations. You have obtained Character Card: Borsalino."
The necklace around his neck vanished, and at the same time, a virtual card appeared before him. On it was a man in a black hat with a cigarette hanging from his lips, drooping eyes, a crooked smile that looked lazy and faintly sleazy, and a crisp white Marine coat draped over his shoulders.
[Borsalino: Logia-type Glint-Glint Fruit user. At this point in time, he had only recently become a Marine Vice Admiral. Born with extraordinary talent and potential, he was a monster who had systematically mastered the Six Powers, swordsmanship, and both forms of Haki. He was hailed as a "Marine Monster."]
Hawke's pupils contracted, and a tidal wave of emotion crashed through him.
Without question, he had hit the jackpot.
He had never imagined he would draw the character card of someone whose flashy combat style contrasted so sharply with that shamelessly sketchy face.
The future Marine Admiral Borsalino, codename Kizaru.
A Logia user of the Glint-Glint Fruit, he could turn any part of his body into light, move at the speed of light, attack at the speed of light, and even convert that speed into devastating impact.
He also possessed the absurdly overpowered ability of elemental transformation, letting him shrug off most energy attacks, non-Haki attacks, and ordinary physical attacks.
On top of that, he had top-tier Observation Haki, Armament Haki, the Six Powers, and swordsmanship.
Despite his lean frame, he was an absolute monster of endurance and durability. He had the stats, the skill, and the power to match. Even before eating the Glint-Glint Fruit, when he had first joined the Marines, he and Akainu had already been called monsters by their fellow recruits in the elite Marine training camp.
At his peak, his raw physical strength was absolutely above two thousand tons. The only ones likely above him in pure physique were monsters at the absolute top tier, people like Whitebeard, Charlotte Linlin, Kaido, and Garp.
And that was before even factoring in both forms of Haki. The Glint-Glint Fruit alone elevated his combat power on an exponential level.
By comparison, that failed "superman" type only had around twenty-five tons of raw physical strength in his normal state.
Of course, the card specifically stated this was Borsalino during his Vice Admiral period, still some distance away from his true peak. But Hawke himself was still young. Fusing with a character card meant gaining not only the other person's power, but also their physique and talent. That naturally included potential.
He had plenty of time to train and grow stronger.
Without the slightest hesitation, Hawke immediately chose fusion.
Boom!!
The instant he made the decision, the character card before him suddenly exploded into countless particles of light and shot into his body.
It felt as if a volcano had erupted inside him. A searing force crashed through every limb and organ. His once ordinary body was stretched open by invisible power. His bones crackled violently as they were reforged into something denser and stronger. Muscle fibers twisted and tightened one by one. His shoulders and back swelled into sleek, powerful lines. Veins bulged beneath the skin of his arms like coiling dragons.
A second ago, his body had held no sense of strength at all.
Now every inch of flesh was being tempered into something terrifyingly powerful. Brutal force surged through his bloodline in wave after wave. When he clenched his fist, his knuckles whitened.
With every casual motion, the air around him quivered faintly under the pressure of a newly awakened Vice Admiral-class physique. Even the floor beneath his feet trembled slightly, kicking up fine dust. The frailty of an ordinary body had been completely torn apart, leaving behind only terrifying explosive strength rushing through him.
Then, in his mind, a sharply defined web of perception suddenly burst open, and the movements of the entire building, even the neighboring buildings, became impossible to hide from him.
The path of leaves swirling in the wind outside the window. The rise and fall of his neighbors' heartbeats inside their chests. Everything was as clear as if it had been carved directly into his mind. His awareness was lifted to an entirely new level. He could precisely catch even the movement of the air itself.
It was as if he had become one with the world around him, his senses sharpened to their absolute limit.