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With the transaction finalized, there wasn't much left to talk about.
Rocket carefully tucked the Human-Human Fruit, Model: Plain Human, into a protective thermal pouch at his belt. Although his newfound excitement was practically buzzing beneath his fur, his hardened mercenary instincts were still screaming at him to stay sharp. He accepted the deal, turned on his heel, and walked out toward the lobby without looking back.
The truth was, Rocket wasn't like any of Rosh's regular Earth clients.
Back on Earth, Rosh didn't need to pitch himself anymore. His reputation was already legendary. Walking, breathing miracles like Captain America served as the ultimate proof that Devil Fruits were the real deal. People on Earth had long since stopped questioning abstract concepts like "Luck" or "Destiny Points." Even if top scientists couldn't explain the physics behind it, the general public had accepted Rosh's shop as an undeniable fact of life.
Rocket, however, belonged to a completely different world.
He had never heard the name Rosh in his life. He didn't know who Captain America was, nor did he care. Most importantly, Rocket had survived the cruelest corners of the galaxy by living under one golden rule: trust no one.
To a battle-tested bounty hunter, anything that sounded too good to be true almost always came with a hidden trap. A deal this ridiculously generous immediately set off every alarm bell in his head. There was zero chance he was going to blindly bite into a weird, glowing fruit handed over by a self-proclaimed "interstellar merchant" without running a full battery of tests first.
Who knew what kind of nasty surprise might be waiting beneath that pretty peel? Nanites? Tracking chips? Mind control parasites?
Because of that, Rocket made up his mind. He was taking this fruit straight back to his ship. He was going to scan it, run deep chemical analyses, dissect every byte of bio-data, and put it through every diagnostic test known to galactic science. Only after he was one hundred percent sure it wouldn't liquefy his brain would he even consider eating it.
Rosh wasn't offended in the slightest. In fact, he completely respected the raccoon's healthy sense of paranoia.
Rather than trying to force a hard sell, Rosh simply offered a relaxed, knowing smile. With a casual flick of his wrist, he activated the power of the Door-Door Fruit once again. A sleek dimensional doorway materialized out of thin air, snapping open to reveal the bright, crowded plaza of Xandar right on the other side.
In the blink of an eye, Rocket and Groot stepped through, returning to the bustling alien crowd as the portal sealed shut behind them.
The moment the doorway vanished, the peaceful silence of the shop returned, but Rosh's attention immediately shifted elsewhere.
He pulled out his phone, unlocking the screen to finally check the Devil Fruit Family Group Chat. The device had been buzzing relentlessly against his hip the entire time he was busy giving Rocket and Groot a tour, but now that he had a quiet moment, he could finally see what the fuss was about.
The second the screen lit up, he was hit by a massive, blinding wall of notifications. The app was practically glitching from the sheer volume of incoming alerts.
The group chat had completely, utterly lost its mind.
While Rosh had been distracted walking his new space-faring guests around, hundreds of frantic messages had been pouring in, one right after another. His notification tray was a sea of red alert badges, and his handle had been tagged so many times that the chat text was almost buried in a non-stop blur of rapid-fire messages.
Something massive had just gone down on Earth.
Something terrifying enough to send the planet's most powerful, composed elite customers into a full-blown spiral of pure panic.
Client #12: "This is completely insane! I'm looking at the news feeds right now, those things look line-for-line like zombies out of a trashy horror movie!"
Client #21: "What the hell is actually going on?! I always thought zombie flicks were just Hollywood making up sick stories to sell movie tickets!"
Client #67: "No way... if those really are flesh-eating zombies, should we be packing our bags and flying off to underground bunkers right now?!"
Client #100: "This defies all medical logic! How can a single virus turn healthy, living human beings into brainless, cannibalistic monsters in under a minute?!"
Client #134: "Where is the Manager?! Something this massive is unfolding on Earth, and he's still nowhere to be seen! How is the man always this impossibly calm?!"
Rosh rapidly scrolled through the endless flood of messages, his eyes flying across his glowing phone screen. But the deeper he read, the tighter his brow furrowed.
'Zombies?'
A rare flicker of genuine confusion passed over his face.
'What was this even supposed to mean?' As far as his memory of the standard Marvel Cinematic Universe went, Earth had never suffered a full-blown zombie outbreak. A global undead plague simply wasn't part of the main timeline.
Holding back his growing impatience, Rosh dragged his finger upward, scrolling past hundreds of panicked replies until he finally reached the very beginning of the chaos.
The origin of the panic turned out to be Hope van Dyne.
She had uploaded a series of short, corrupted video clips into the Devil Fruit Family group chat, accompanied by a string of frantic, caps-lock messages begging anyone with power to respond. Judging by the chaotic timestamps and her wild, unstructured tone, she had been desperately trying to contact anyone who could save them before her signal died out.
Without wasting another second, Rosh tapped the play icon on the first video file.
The footage was stomach-churning.
What was once a state-of-the-art laboratory had been turned into a literal slaughterhouse. Blood splatters painted the shattered glass panels and pristine white walls. Sparks flew wildly from torn cables, and blood-curdling screams echoed through the muffled audio feed.
In the center of the frame, a grotesque, snarling figure with torn flesh and a mangled jaw was rampaging through the facility, lunging at surviving lab technicians with feral, unspeakable hunger.
Even through the grain of the corrupted camera feed, Rosh needed only a single glance.
Despite the creature's rotting appearance, missing chunks of flesh, and clouded eyes, his sharp gaze instantly recognized the familiar posture beneath the decay.
That zombie... was Dr. Hank Pym.
Rosh's pupils narrowed into tight slits.
Then, like a bolt of lightning cracking through his mind, the missing piece of the puzzle violently snapped into place.
The Zombie Universe.
'So that was what was happening.'
He finally got it. The world he had reincarnated into wasn't strictly bound to the main, canon MCU timeline after all. Hidden beneath its familiar surface was a far darker timeline, the apocalyptic reality from What If...?, where an alien quantum virus consumed nearly every living soul on the planet.
Once he made that connection, every single detail aligned with terrifying precision.
What was supposed to be an emotional, heartwarming family reunion had instead carried an extinction-level pathogen straight back to the surface world. And from there, the infection was doomed to spread like wildfire.
Rosh remembered the original sequence of events with chilling clarity.
In the animated timeline, that single, well-intentioned mistake snowballed into the total collapse of human civilization within days. One by one, Earth's mightiest defenders had fallen to the hunger:
Iron Man dropped during his initial landing in New York.
Captain America was bitten on the frontlines.
Doctor Strange brought dark mystic arts to the horde.
Scarlet Witch became an unkillable, terrifying nightmare.
The tragic part wasn't just that the heroes turned; it was that they retained their intellect, combat instincts, and supernatural powers even as mindless flesh-eaters. Humanity was wiped off the map, leaving only Wakanda as a temporary sanctuary behind its high-tech energy shield.
Realizing that he was standing on the precipice of such a grim, horrific future left Rosh feeling a sudden wave of annoyance.
'Seriously? Of all the alternate timelines to merge with, it had to be the zombie one?'
Still...
That nightmare apocalypse was merely the future this world was supposed to follow.
The exact second Rosh had arrived in this dimension carrying the power of Devil Fruits, the strings of fate had already snapped. The bleak, gruesome ending that once seemed completely set in stone... was officially off the script.
Without wasting another second, Rosh pulled up the digital keyboard and typed out a firm, commanding message to the Devil Fruit Family.
Before he could worry about hunting down infected test subjects, he needed to put an immediate end to the hysteria brewing in the group. Panic was a far more dangerous virus than whatever was currently tearing through Hank Pym's lab. If his highest-paying clients lost their minds and started making reckless choices, the entire situation could spiral out of control before he even had a chance to lock down the perimeter.
The Manager: "I've thoroughly reviewed the video feeds and analyzed the bio-data. Your assumptions are correct. Those things are genuine, flesh-eating zombies, identical to the ones in horror movies."
The Manager: "@NatashaRomanoff I don't know if S.H.I.E.L.D. has formally initiated level-five quarantine protocols yet, but I am intervening personally. I'll be stepping in to handle this outbreak myself. I expect S.H.I.E.L.D.'s absolute, unconditional cooperation, no delays, no bureaucratic red tape."
Rosh's decision was already made.
There was zero chance he was going to sit back on his comfortable leather sofa and watch human civilization collapse into a gory, apocalyptic wasteland. A planet populated entirely by brainless, rotting zombies wasn't just a horrific nightmare; it was atrocious for business.
How on earth was he supposed to farm Origin Points and trade high-tier Devil Fruits if ninety-nine percent of his potential client base turned into rabid, flesh-eating corpses?
That outcome was completely unacceptable.
A fraction of a second after his messages went out, Natasha's reply flashed across the screen.
Natasha Romanoff: "Understood, Manager. Directing Director Fury to this channel right now."
Before the message could even fade from the interface, Rosh's phone vibrated violently in his hand. The caller ID showed a secure, unlisted S.H.I.E.L.D. line.
It was Nick Fury.
Rosh swiped the screen and brought the phone to his ear. "Speak."
"Manager," Fury's gravelly, no-nonsense voice cut through the speaker without a single second of small talk. "What does S.H.I.E.L.D. need to do?"
"I've already pinned down the exact origin of the outbreak," Rosh replied, his tone ice-cold and completely relaxed. "Hank Pym's facility. I need S.H.I.E.L.D. ground teams to establish a hard containment zone around the surrounding streets immediately."
He paused, letting the authority in his voice settle over the line.
"Set up an absolute military quarantine. Lock down every exit. And make sure one thing is clear: nothing gets out."
"...Copy that," Fury replied immediately.
The Director of S.H.I.E.L.D. didn't waste time arguing, demanding proof of clearance, or asking for scientific explanations. He simply took the order, trusted Rosh's judgment without hesitation, and hung up to scramble every strike team in the tri-state area.
After forwarding the precise GPS coordinates straight to S.H.I.E.L.D.'s tactical grid, Rosh stood up from his desk.
*Creak!*
A heavy, brass-handled door materialized out of thin air right in front of him. Harnessing the spatial magic of the Door-Door Fruit, Rosh grabbed the handle, stepped into the dark void between dimensions, and crossed miles of urban terrain in a single stride.
When he stepped out on the other side, he was standing on a completely deserted, dimly lit street in the heart of Brooklyn.
The night air was eerily still. Broken glass littered the asphalt, and overturned cars sat with their headlights flickering weakly against the shadows.
Without saying a word, Rosh closed his eyes and unleashed his Observation Haki.
An invisible, high-frequency energy wave surged outward from his body in every direction, sweeping through buildings, alleyways, and underground sewers like a hyper-advanced radar system. Within milliseconds, a complete, three-dimensional blueprint of every living and non-living organism in the vicinity mapped itself directly into his mind.
Fortunately, the outbreak was still in its infant stages.
The quantum virus hadn't had enough time to spill beyond the local neighborhood. At present, the entire infected population was still tightly compressed within a three-block radius.
The situation was definitely critical... but as far as Rosh was concerned? It was completely manageable.
In fact, this specific type of enemy was precisely what Rosh was best equipped to deal with. Against a dense, slow-moving horde of mindless monsters, the absolute, apocalyptic firepower of his Glint-Glint Fruit was the ultimate counter.
*Zzap! Zzap! Zzap!*
Brilliant, blinding streaks of golden light suddenly tore through the pitch-black night sky, crisscrossing through the dark streets like hyper-lethal laser beams.
Each ray of light moved at literal lightspeed, striking with surgical, terrifying precision. Wherever the golden beams flashed, infected bodies collapsed instantly. Heads, brainstems, and vital organs were completely vaporized into ash before the monsters could even process the threat.
Not a single zombie had the chance to let out a horrific roar, not one managed to take another step forward, and not a single infected host survived long enough to spread the deadly quantum virus another inch across the city.
What should have spiraled into an extinction-level nightmare... never even got the chance to breathe.
Before the quantum zombie virus could spread a single block beyond its initial ground zero, Rosh completely erased every last infected soul in the area with overwhelming, lightspeed force. A global apocalypse that was destined to consume the entire planet was brutally crushed before it could even take its very first step.
Without a single soul on Earth realizing it, Rosh had single-handedly saved the entire future of human civilization.
The vast majority of the world's population would never know just how close they had come to total annihilation. They would wake up the next morning, grab their morning coffee, head to work, go to school, and carry on with their everyday lives as if nothing had happened, completely blissfully unaware that the end of the world had almost begun just a few hours earlier in Brooklyn.
Sometimes, the absolute greatest victories in the universe were the ones nobody ever noticed.
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With the zombie crisis completely neutralized before it could escalate, the tension vanished as quickly as it had arrived. Life across New York returned to its usual rhythm.
The Home of the Devil Fruits reopened its doors bright and early the following morning, and Rosh easily settled back into his comfortable routine. Day after day, customers from all walks of life continued to filter into the shop.
No matter who stepped through his doors, whether a street-level vigilante or a high-ranking billionaire, Rosh welcomed them all with the exact same calm, composed smile, conducting business with effortless, terrifying confidence.
Time quietly drifted by. One peaceful day bled into the next. Before he even realized it, two solid, event-free weeks had slipped past without a single major incident.
That quiet tranquility was finally shattered when Elizabeth came bursting into his private office, her footsteps practically bouncing off the floorboards.
She looked completely out of breath, her cheeks flushed with unusual excitement.
"Manager!" she called out, unable to keep her voice from leaping an octave. "That special item you asked our logistics team to keep an eye on..."
She hurried over to his desk and carefully placed a freshly printed, high-priority intelligence report right in front of him.
"It finally dropped."
Rosh slowly lowered his eyes to the paper, scanning the satellite imagery printed on the top page. A faint, knowing smile gradually formed at the corner of his lips.
"So..." Rosh murmured smoothly. "It's finally here."
Ever since he had added Thor and Loki to his top-priority list of future premium clients, Rosh had quietly deployed private surveillance teams across the barren deserts of New Mexico. Their instructions had been ridiculously simple:
''Keep your eyes glued to the skies. The exact second a mysterious, unliftable war hammer comes crashing down out of the atmosphere... report it directly to me.''
That hammer, of course, was none other than Mjolnir, the divine weapon forged in the heart of a dying star.
For weeks, those desert monitors had reported nothing but sandstorms and heatwaves. But now, the long wait was officially over.
"Good work, Elizabeth," Rosh said calmly, sliding the report into a neat stack on his desk.
On the surface, he looked as cool, relaxed, and unbothered as ever. But deep down beneath that effortless posture? Genuine, electric excitement was stirring in his veins.
Thor wasn't just another super-soldier or tech genius with a big bank account. He was an actual, living Asgardian prince. The God of Thunder himself. The raw, divine storm energy coursing through Thor's immortal body was something Rosh had long wanted to analyze and eventually monetize through the shop.
Among every single high-tier name on his growing roster of future targets, Thor stood near the absolute top. In Rosh's eyes, the prince of Asgard was one of the most valuable, high-value clients imaginable.
And naturally... wherever Thor went, his tricky little brother was rarely far behind. Loki, the God of Mischief, would almost certainly follow his fallen brother down to Earth before long.
To the rest of the world, the sudden arrival of two divine alien princes signaled the beginning of a terrifying, world-altering crisis.
To Rosh, however?
It simply meant that two walking, golden treasure vaults had officially stepped onto his chessboard, and a mountain of untapped Origin Points was finally within his reach.
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Next Chapter: A Test of Worthiness
Next Next Chapter: The Second Interstellar Customer
Next Next Next Chapter: A Devil Fruit That Left Even Loki Speechless
Visit my P@tr3on or K0‑fi ''Isopuff'' page and unlock +20 extra chapters and daily updates!