T Bone’s Bounty at 500,000,000 Berries

An ordinary resident of the Kingdom of Pepe — a territory where more than a thousand people starve to death every year — kills Vice Admiral T-Bone with his own hands to collect the five hundred million berries Cross Guild had placed on his head, then publicly thanks Buggy for paying out. Cross Guild itself never had to lift a finger.

A vice admiral with no Devil Fruit since his debut at Water Seven, T-Bone never needed a power to earn his place in the ranks of Justice. His death exposes a flaw nobody, least of all him, ever planned for: a bounty written to target a uniform ends up cashed in by the hunger of a civilian, inside a kingdom the Marine was supposed to protect in the first place.

The news reaches Sengoku and Tsuru, who can't quite believe that the very people the institution was meant to feed with justice turned on it for money. Tsuru reads it as cold logic rather than betrayal — the Kingdom of Pepe's poverty explains enough on its own — and adds that if this was Buggy's calculation all along, the Marine underestimated its opponent. T-Bone's file closes not with a lost fight, but with the admission that Cross Guild didn't even need to fire a shot.

His listing still shows five stars, five hundred million berries by the scale — a rating now posthumous, frozen on a man his own countrymen ended up killing.