Mato Mato no Mi

A Paramecia-type Devil Fruit, this power fixes a chosen mark and then permits a strike on it from any range at any instant using whatever the user cares to throw. Vander Decken IX, who captains the Flying Pirates, is its holder. Since he speaks of the ability as a curse, people also refer to it as the Mato Mato Curse; the word at its root is the Japanese term for a mark or target.

Contact from one of the wielder's hands stamps a person as a target, and Decken can carry a mark for each hand he owns, meaning two. A stamped victim can then be hit from any spot even when the user has no idea where they are, because a thrown object bends its course to chase them and will even loop back like a boomerang should the mark come close. Bulk poses no problem, since Decken sent the enormous ship Noah hurtling at Shirahoshi merely by touching it, and thrown things keep their pursuit underwater too. The limitations bite hard, though. Only the living may be branded, never an object, the flight path cannot be steered once released, a strong enough barrier blocks and cancels the effect, and both a target's death and the user losing consciousness end the chase. A branded hand has to steer clear of touching anyone else, often sheathed in a glove, and seawater still saps the wielder.

For ten years Vander Decken IX hurled projectiles at Princess Shirahoshi from a distance, meaning either to coerce her into marriage or to end her life, which is exactly why she was shut away inside the Hard-Shell Tower to soak up the barrage. With his right hand pinned to Shirahoshi's mark, only his left could take on new targets. He flung heavy axes, knives, and even mobs of his own pirates her way, and turned the power into a locator by riding a branded slab of coral to her hiding spot. He grasped that she was alive only because the projectiles kept flying, since the ability dies alongside its target. Hody Jones later abused the fire-and-forget nature of the throws, wedging Decken himself into the path of an oncoming axe.