Kong, the former Marine Fleet Admiral, was transferred to the position of Commander-in-Chief of the World Government’s forces, while former Marine Admiral Sengoku succeeded him as Marine Fleet Admiral.
At the same time, Kuzan, Sakazuki, and Borsalino were promoted to Marine Admiral, finally filling all three Admiral positions after they had remained vacant for many years.
The Marines’ internal newspaper proclaimed this the arrival of the Marines’ strongest era, bolstering morale throughout their ranks.
The monstrous new Admirals, the legendary Hero Garp, and the steady stream of exceptional personnel emerging from the Marine training camp—
All of this caused confidence within the Marines to soar. They believed they could better deal with the perilous Great Pirate Era and uphold their justice.
In the first half of the Grand Line, aboard a Marine recruit ship, an entire vessel of recruits was facing the greatest crisis of their lives.
Though they were Marines as well, they were not immersed in that same elation.
The encouragement delivered when the new Fleet Admiral and Admirals assumed office still echoed in their ears, but words spoken from a podium could not save them now.
“Weevil! My dear son, kill every last one of these nuisances!”
“Okay, Mommy! I’ll kill them right now!!”
A burly man nearly seven meters tall was rampaging across the warship’s deck with a naginata in hand. His thick blond hair hung down his back, whipping wildly with every swing of the weapon.
His legs looked remarkably thin, but his upper body was extraordinarily muscular. Nearly every swing of his weapon claimed several lives.
A black bandanna was wrapped around his head, and a long white crescent-shaped mustache adorned his upper lip. Everything about him bore an uncanny resemblance to the pirate rumored to be the strongest man in the world, yet his dim-witted expression made it difficult to associate the two.
This pirate’s name was Edward Weevil, a man who shared Whitebeard’s surname.
“You b*stard… Stop!”
An enraged roar rang in Weevil’s ears. The instant the voice registered in his mind, a pitch-black fist was already hurtling toward him, forcing Weevil to stop swinging his naginata and raise it to block the blow from the side.
Boom!
The shaft of the naginata intercepted the black fist. Weevil was driven several steps backward, his feet punching several large holes through the deck.
The man who had thrown the punch was Zephyr, the recruits’ instructor and the former Marine Admiral known as Black Arm Zephyr. However, he was not in particularly good condition these days.
“You’re really annoying! Your punches hurt a lot. Can you stop getting in my way? Mommy told me to kill all of them. If you keep this up, I’ll become a bad boy who doesn’t listen to his mommy!”
“You… Hah… Hah…”
Before Zephyr could finish speaking, he suddenly found it difficult to breathe, causing his movements to falter. Weevil seized that brief opening and forced him back with a slash before resuming his slaughter of the Marine recruits.
“How pitiful. To think the former Marine Admiral Black Arm Zephyr would end up like this. If you hadn’t interfered with our business, how could things have ever come to this?”
Standing before Zephyr was a tiny old woman dressed in a leopard-print coat and adorned with all manner of luxurious jewelry, wantonly mocking him.
She was the now-elderly Buckingham Stussy—Weevil’s “Mommy.”
In her hand was an inhaler, which was also why Zephyr was having such difficulty fighting.
As he aged, Zephyr’s health had deteriorated compared to Sengoku and the others, and he had also developed asthma. Whenever he began fighting, an attack could easily be triggered.
Buckingham and Weevil had originally been plundering treasure nearby when they happened to encounter Zephyr conducting a graduation exercise for his recruits. However, the power Weevil unleashed was far beyond what those recruits could withstand.
Although Buckingham had grown old and shriveled, she had once been someone Rocks had recruited onto his ship through the Davy Back Fight. Her foundations remained intact, and she was likewise far beyond what a group of recruits could handle.
The Marine training camp was no kindergarten, so a certain number of casualties was naturally expected. Zephyr had not intervened at first, but an accident occurred when he realized their opponents were beyond what the recruits could handle and prepared to step in.
With Weevil’s assistance, Buckingham stole Zephyr’s asthma medication. His intermittent attacks prevented him from displaying more than a fraction of his true strength, leaving him extraordinarily powerless in the face of the massacre.
Buckingham was furious that Zephyr had ruined her plans. Although killing him outright would not be easy, Zephyr was equally unable to do anything to them. She therefore ordered Weevil to wantonly murder the students Zephyr valued so dearly.
However, no one aboard the ship noticed that, on a rocky shoal not far away, someone was repeatedly coughing up seawater while another person stood beside her, laughing at her.
“Cough, cough…”
“Ha… Hahaha…”
“Stop laughing! Aren’t we friends? It’s bad enough that you aren’t comforting me, why are you laughing at me too?!”
“Sorry… Haha… Sorry, I just can’t help it.”
The one coughing up seawater was Yamato, while the one unable to suppress her laughter was Chloe. At sixteen, they were already old enough to venture out on their own on these seas.
As long as they did not enter the New World, traveling together offered them a certain degree of security, and they no longer needed someone constantly assigned to protect them.
Besides, Chloe had a last resort of her own. As long as she remained within the sea’s range, she could summon the Sea Kings that lived in its depths.
Earlier, Yamato had suddenly come up with the idea of challenging Chloe to a race across the sea—essentially, running across the water.
Although Yamato was a Devil Fruit user, she could release cold air to freeze the sea’s surface, so moving across it was not entirely impossible for her.
Things had been going smoothly at first, but several cannonballs that suddenly came flying from nearby disrupted Yamato’s rhythm.
It would not have mattered if she had frozen a vast stretch of the sea, but Yamato had wanted to do something that looked cooler, so she had frozen only the spots where her feet landed. In essence, she had been running on tiny patches of floating ice.
Once her rhythm was disrupted, Yamato accidentally plunged into the sea and had to be fished back out by Chloe.
“I have reason to suspect that you deliberately let me swallow a few extra mouthfuls of seawater before pulling me out!”
“That was to teach you a lesson! A Devil Fruit user shouldn’t act so recklessly on the sea! You can’t fly or breathe underwater, so why were you showing off for no reason?!”
“Cough, cough. It was just a spur-of-the-moment idea. If not for that outside interference, I definitely wouldn’t have flipped over! Besides, I wouldn’t have tried something like that if I hadn’t been traveling with you.
I know Devil Fruit users should stay away from the sea.”
At that thought, Yamato suddenly sat upright and looked in the direction the cannonballs had come from.
“Let’s go take a look. I want to see who has nothing better to do than fire cannons around at random!”
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