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With his sharp, razor-focused read on human nature, Nick Fury easily saw right through the underlying hesitation in Captain America's refusal.
But the Director was a patient man. In his line of work, winning was a game of inches. Now that Steve Rogers had formally signed on the dotted line with S.H.I.E.L.D., the old spy would have plenty of opportunities down the road to maneuver the soldier exactly where he wanted him.
For now, the main goal was simple: build trust and team chemistry between the living legend and the agency.
Besides, S.H.I.E.L.D. wasn't exactly hurting for a super-powered muscle. Clint Barton was an absolute ace in his hybrid form, and Fury had spent months carefully tracking other high-value targets. Trish Walker, the fierce vigilante calling herself Hellcat, and Wilson Fisk, who had eaten the terrifying Steel-Steel Fruit, were both major pieces deeply embedded in his radar.
While neither had explicitly sworn allegiance to S.H.I.E.L.D., Fury was completely confident that when a real crisis hit, mutual survival would bring them to the front lines.
Because of that, rushing a Devil Fruit purchase for Captain America wasn't a tactical emergency he needed to force overnight. Even so, the Director had made one absolute executive decision: that final unallocated slot on S.H.I.E.L.D.'s financial balance sheet was permanently reserved for Steve Rogers. No one else on the planet was more deserving to inherit a miracle.
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"And just like that, Captain America gets played right onto Nick Fury's pirate ship," Rosh murmured, letting out a soft chuckle.
Sitting inside the sleek, high-tech comfort of his executive office at the Home of the Devil Fruit, Rosh had watched the entire bureaucratic chess match play out through his Observation Haki. By dropping the ultimate emotional card, a young, restored Peggy Carter, right onto the table, Fury had secured the Captain's loyalty far more smoothly than anything seen in the original timeline.
In the original history, even during the chaotic nightmare of the Battle of New York when the Avengers first assembled, almost none of those larger-than-life egos actually respected Fury's authority. Both Captain America and Iron Man had made it crystal clear that they didn't answer to the Director. It wasn't until they had bled together in the trenches, standing shoulder-to-shoulder to break the Chitauri invasion, that they actually forged into a real team.
Yet here they were now. Before a single alien boot had even touched Earth's atmosphere, Captain America was already clocking in as a regular, structured subordinate on Nick Fury's payroll.
Nevertheless, as Rosh analyzed the landscape, he knew the timing was all wrong to harvest his next premium crop. The Captain's understanding of Devil Fruits, combined with his personal drive to actually seek out supernatural powers, just wasn't there yet. If Rosh tried to force a private deal right now, the whole thing would blow up in his face. Steve Rogers was a man of deep, old-school skepticism; he didn't just hand over his trust or strike deals with mysterious strangers.
'Let's give it a few months and see where his head is at,' Rosh decided. With a smooth mental shrug, he severed his Haki connection, letting his awareness snap back to his immediate surroundings. Besides, keeping a non-stop sensory stakeout on the guy was exhausting anyway. Spying on Cap's private quarters every single day was starting to cross the line into total creep territory.
The same rule applied to the rest of his high-value targets. Peter Parker, Scott Lang, Jane Foster, and the entire roster of future powerhouses he had his eye on weren't ready for immediate deals.
Peter Parker was a bit of a special case. Since the kid was still young and highly impressionable, offering him sudden, godlike power would have a one-hundred percent success rate. But Rosh firmly believed in drawing the line at manipulating children. Thrusting world-altering abilities onto a kid who hadn't even figured out high school yet was a surefire recipe for disaster. Since time was the one resource Rosh had in infinite abundance, there was no reason to rush. He could afford to let the chessboard develop naturally.
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Over the next two months, the frantic pace of Rosh's life settled into a comfortable, highly productive groove. He split his days between managing the busy sales counter, organizing his expanding corporate inventory, and keeping a casual, long-distance eye on his main targets.
Exactly as he had calculated, his latest sales quota was cleared flawlessly ahead of schedule. The system immediately chimed, depositing a cool 10,000 Origin Points into his ledger. Without wasting a single microsecond, Rosh funneled the entire payout straight into boosting his core physiology and combat stats.
[Current Power Level: 4×Navy Admiral Kizaru]
Following this latest breakthrough, Rosh's overall strength had scaled to a staggering four times the light-speed output of the legendary Marine Admiral. Even when stacked up against the heaviest hitters in the Marvel universe, Rosh was now a terrifying, cataclysmic variable. Short of literal cosmic entities or supreme master sorcerers like the Ancient One and Odin the All-Father, practically no one walking the earth had the juice to stand against him.
Right on cue, his system interface flashed, rolling out the next phase of his mission:
[Sales Target Of Fifty Devil Fruits]
To Rosh, this new target was an easy milestone that didn't cause him a single shred of executive stress. Granted, as the months rolled by, the initial, hysterical media frenzy surrounding the Devil Fruits had naturally simmered down into a stable baseline of public awareness.
Yet, the commercial hype around his stock remained completely unchallenged. Over a steady window of just over two months, his staff had processed 30 transactions, averaging 1 fruit every 48 hours. The shop's trajectory was flawlessly healthy.
At the exact same time, after months of intense bureaucratic gridlock, legal maneuvering, and multi-agency debates at the highest levels of government, the oversight committees finally ratified a definitive new law: The Enhanced Registration Accords.
Rosh leaned back in his leather chair, watching a breaking news segment play across the massive plasma display on his wall.
"...Mirroring the historical rules established for mutants, the newly enacted Accords mandate that every individual who has consumed a Devil Fruit must formally register their status and specific power set with federal authorities."
"…The reality is that these enhanced individuals wield an extraordinary amount of force that vastly exceeds human limits, constituting an automatic, latent threat to the civilian populace. The public has a fundamental right to know who these empowered people are in their communities. Under the new legal framework, anyone who deliberately evades registration during the designated grace period is actively committing a high-tier federal offense…"
"…To enforce compliance, a coalition of intelligence agencies has jointly formed a highly classified, specialized law enforcement unit. While the details of this task force remain strictly classified, our sources confirm that the division is spearheaded by none other than Captain America himself. As a steady volume of Devil Fruits continues to hit the civilian market, unique crimes have experienced an exponential spike, leaving traditional police forces severely outmatched. The nation looks to this specialized task force to decisively restore order..."
*Click!*
Rosh pressed the power button on his remote, and the plasma screen instantly dissolved into black.
While the general public was completely unaware of the unit's internal logistics, Rosh possessed a flawless understanding of the actual tactical roster. This grand, highly publicized "Special Task Force" currently consisted of a grand total of four individuals: Captain America, Hawkeye, Trish Walker, and Maya Hansen. That was the extent of their deployment.
Against standard, low-tier civilians who had accidentally stumbled into basic superhuman traits, a squad of that caliber could handle the containment protocols without breaking a sweat. Clint's falcon biology and Trish's enhanced agility made them elite combatants, and Maya Hansen's Devil Fruit afforded her an absolute, reality-warping advantage under the right conditions.
But the moment they collided with a genuinely high-tier Devil Fruit User, or an anomaly wielding a highly abstract, conceptual Paramecia ability, that tactical gap would become a yawning chasm.
In fact, even before the Accords had been officially signed into law, Steve Rogers had already led his fledgling unit on a dozen low-profile containment sweeps across the state. And the internal S.H.I.E.L.D. incident reports were already full of a significant, sobering number of tactical setbacks. The modern battlefield was no longer about out-punching a regular soldier; it was about countering reality-bending phenomena.
Confronted with the cold, hard reality of his own physical limitations in this new era of gods and monsters, the living legend had finally been forced to swallow his pride.
That's why the glass doors of the Midtown office parted with a quiet, melodic chime, and Captain America walked straight over the threshold, his eyes scanning the exotic interior of the Home of the Devil Fruits.
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Next Chapter: Beyond the Shield, A New Power for Steve Rogers
Next Next Chapter: The Price of Luck
Next Next Next Chapter: Cap's Awe and the Power of the Tremor-Tremor Fruit
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