Nikyu Nikyu no Mi

A Paramecia by classification, this fruit lets its holder deflect absolutely anything, the work being done by pads that sit permanently on the palms. Whoever wields it is titled a Paw Human, phrased in English as the Paw-Palmed Human. The World Nobles once counted the fruit among their treasures until Bartholomew Kuma stole and swallowed it. Its name draws on nikukyu, the Japanese term for an animal's foot pad, and overseas editions market it as the Paw-Paw Fruit. Since the pads never leave his hands, Kuma keeps them covered with gloves any time the power sits idle. Years later the same effect was rebuilt in a lab and given to the Seraphim called S-Bear by way of a Green Blood transfusion. As an object, the fruit is round, pink-rinded, topped by three rounded bumps that lend it the look of a three-toed paw, and finished with a curling T-shaped stem.

Kuma sums up the gift as being able to launch everything away, worked through unbreakable five-fingered pads set into each palm. Whatever those pads meet gets hurled off at a speed and force he chooses, and no shoving motion is even needed. Its reach is staggeringly broad, covering solid things, living bodies including his own, gases such as the air itself, wholly immaterial targets like ghosts, and even abstract ones such as agony, exhaustion, sickness, and recollection. Immaterial matter gets sealed in see-through paw-shaped bubbles once repelled. Anything native to a living being, pain or memory for example, is not flung far but coaxed out as a bubble that hovers close by, waiting for a passerby to touch it and feel its contents firsthand. Orange bubbles holding memory keep their form for years and copy those memories rather than strip them away, while red bubbles carrying pain eventually creep back to their origin unless a volunteer takes them on.

Defensively the pads act as an impassable barrier, brushing off flame without scorching and blades without a cut, provided the hands swing quickly enough. On the attack he repels the surrounding air at what he brands as light speed, sending paw-marked shockwaves that bore straight through stone, or squeezes enormous air bubbles down into bombs. People often assume the fruit teleports him, which is wrong; he merely propels himself and others fast enough to look as though they blinked out of existence. His transit power has boundaries, though: destinations are limited to spots he has been to himself, obstacles such as the Red Line can halt a launch mid-flight, and heavy fatigue makes the long leaps far harder to survive. His plain weakness is that deflection only happens with empty hands, so a surprise leaves him open, a gap his Pacifista armor helps cover.

The original bearer is Bartholomew Kuma, who first ate the fruit to break free of the World Nobles at God Valley and at once used it to spirit five hundred captives to safety. From boyhood onward he pointed the power toward rescuing, mending, and freeing the downtrodden in imitation of the legendary Nika, pulling suffering and weariness out of the afflicted, which won his hands the names Hands of Liberation and Miracle Hands. Among his signature moves are Pad Ho, an air-borne shockwave that leaves paw-shaped holes in its path; its rapid, sumo-styled cousin Tsuppari Pad Ho; the guard technique Puni, which meets and repels blows; and Ursus Shock, where he crushes a colossal air bubble between his arms and lets it burst as a ruinous paw-shaped detonation, strong enough to devastate Thriller Bark and badly wound the giant Oars Jr. at Marineford. Anyone he sends off drifts for days within a shielding paw bubble before touching down unhurt inside a paw print. The Seraphim S-Bear handles the copied power identically, using it for swift travel and its own Ursus Shock, first turned against CP0. Historically, Kuma claimed the fruit during the God Valley Incident, gulping it down at Ivankov's urging before Charlotte Linlin could seize it as she had the nearby Uo Uo no Mi.