After the Battle

"Good job, Steve!" Captain Alexander, who had been lying on the ground pretending to be dead, immediately jumped up, his face brimming with excitement.

After Buck had unleashed his Spinning Wheel, Captain Alexander had stayed sprawled on the ground, playing dead. Only now, after seeing Doflamingo win a resounding victory, did he finally emerge.

"Ahhh! The Captain—the Captain is dead!"

"That's a Logia Fruit ability user! Without Haki, it's impossible to hurt him. Run!"

When Doflamingo turned around, he found speechlessly that the other members of the Cyclops Pirates had already begun to flee.

What was this? Shouldn't they be charging forward to avenge their Captain? They really were a rabble.

"Catch them!" Captain Alexander became even more energized and charged straight at the pirates.

Behind Captain Alexander, several officers who had survived the previous disaster followed him in beating the dogs in the water.

Even the shipwrights who had suffered heavy losses from the boulders Buck had thrown were invigorated now and began to encircle the pirates.

Buck was extremely powerful, but the pirates under his command were far inferior. Now that Buck had been taken down, they had no will to fight and cared only about escaping.

After a chaotic brawl filled with clanging blows, everyone except two or three relatively powerful officers was captured.

Seeing so many pirates captured, Captain Alexander grinned from ear to ear. But when he turned and saw the dead Navy soldiers, his expression became sorrowful again. The look on his face was indescribably strange.

Doflamingo sighed as well. In the Pirate World, being a low-ranking grunt really wasn't easy. You might die to some unexplained AOE at any moment.

Marineford, Navy Headquarters.

Kong was still the Navy Fleet Admiral, but he was already advanced in years and delegated more and more matters to his subordinates.

Sengoku and Zephyr were the current Navy Admirals. However, Zephyr devoted more of his energy to his duties as Navy Chief Instructor, leaving Sengoku to handle the actual affairs, with at most Tsuru, who was still serving as a Navy Vice Admiral, helping out.

As for Garp, his remaining old partner, Sengoku only hoped that he would stop causing trouble. Let Garp handle official business? That would be worse than letting his pet goat do it. At least his pet goat knew how to destroy documents!

Just as the future Fleet Admiral was processing documents, Vice Admiral Tsuru walked in with a trace of anger on her face.

"What is it, Tsuru?" Sengoku looked up at his old partner and asked.

Vice Admiral Tsuru was not yet fifty and showed no signs of age. She could still be considered a great beauty, but unlike two or three years later, she was not so calm and composed. Instead, she had a somewhat fiery temper.

"Plan Three has been exposed. Our warship was nearly seized by pirates!"

Sengoku's face immediately turned grave. Plan Three was the plan to manufacture Sea Stone warships. Within the Navy, only a few Vice Admiral-level officers truly knew about it.

Other than the Captain, no one at the Seventh Shipyard knew what the Sea Stone warships were for. They had merely followed orders and laid those materials across the bottoms of the warships. They did not even know that what they had laid down was Sea Stone.

"Was the warship taken? Which Pirate Crew was behind it?" Sengoku asked tensely.

He could not help being nervous. Sea Stone warships were absolutely a revolutionary invention. With warships capable of crossing the Calm Belt, the Navy's mobility would increase severalfold. What that meant on the seas went without saying.

One could even say that the invention of Sea Stone warships was almost more significant than the Navy gaining two top-tier combatants. It was easy to imagine how great the shock would be if the new experimental warship were seized by pirates.

"The Cyclops Pirates made their move, but we were lucky. They were taken down by the Navy branch in Water 7."

Sengoku finally let out a long breath, then immediately felt something was off. "The Navy branch in Water 7? Since when were they capable of that? Alexander is stationed at that branch, isn't he? Could he stop the Cyclops Pirates?"

That young Alexander had left quite an impression on Sengoku. After all, even among the Navy's countless oddballs, his tendency to blurt things out was particularly distinctive. It was impossible not to remember him.

Fortunately, the seas were filled with all sorts of eccentrics. In a more normal world, no matter how hard someone like that worked, he would never become an officer.

Because Sengoku remembered him so clearly, he knew Captain Alexander's strength very well. Against ordinary pirates, he was passable and could be considered a qualified officer.

But against a Pirate Crew like the Cyclops Pirates, one that several Navy Vice Admirals had failed to capture despite making repeated moves, even if the entire Navy branch of Water 7 had gone out, they would only have been throwing their lives away.

"That's why I said we were lucky." A rare smile appeared on Tsuru's face. "They happened to recruit a Navy newcomer there. He was quite strong, and he was also a Devil Fruit ability user. He took down Cyclops Buck."

"So that's what happened." Sengoku nodded, finally understanding the full story. "It seems the Navy has found another promising seedling. We can transfer him to Headquarters at the end of next year and have him attend Zephyr's Elite Training Camp."

Tsuru nodded as well. Seeing another rising star appear in the Navy naturally pleased veterans like them, who had served in the Navy their entire lives.

"All right, now let's discuss the leak. I don't think this incident was a coincidence."

Sengoku frowned again at her words. "Even if there were spies among the Vice Admiral-level Navy officers, they should not expose themselves over something like this. Other than us, the only ones who knew about it were the World Government."

Tsuru fell silent at once. Aside from a few intelligence agencies, the World Government's other departments were like giant sieves. No—even the intelligence agencies leaked like sieves at the upper levels. Expecting them to keep confidential intelligence secure was almost impossible.

Precisely because there were too many possible sources of the leak, there was no way to investigate. Moreover, the Navy was an organization under the World Government and had no authority to investigate those people.

Under such circumstances, what could they do besides curse the World Government for being a useless teammate?

With that, the matter came to an end. Other than Steve, whom Doflamingo was impersonating, leaving some impression on Sengoku, it caused no further ripples.

Though it was only a small impression, for Doflamingo, it gave his Navy career a good start.