As the sun hurried past a gap in the clouds and cast its rays onto the sea at a slight angle, Ronan's yacht had already crossed the Tropic of Capricorn.
Kolo Base lay ahead in sight.
It was around ten in the morning on May 16, 2097, Di City time.
Compared with modern aircraft, even a high-speed yacht was painfully slow. They had traveled at nearly full speed the entire way, yet crossing two thousand kilometers of ocean had still taken seventeen or eighteen hours.
Of course, storms along the way and other human variables had also played a part.
Only ten hours remained until the High Seas Auction.
Kolo Base had once been the most important outpost northeast of Di City... and it still was. However, as the World Government gradually shifted to the offensive against the Wilderness and even the oceans, the pressure on the outer perimeter had eased considerably. This former military stronghold had slowly absorbed more and more commercial elements.
The region with the world's highest density of mercenaries, the "fishing grounds" with the largest catches of Marine Aberrant Species, the trading hub with the most frequent transactions in aberrant raw materials, and the "free port" where underground black markets ran rampant... all those titles belonged to Di City, certainly, but this key Southwest Pacific Ocean location, pieced together from hundreds of islands, undoubtedly accounted for a considerable share of them.
Influenced by its heavy "commercial atmosphere," the military-controlled zone now covered only West Su Island and North Sa Island, the two largest islands. The hundreds of Pacific islands scattered to the southeast, large and small, were entirely a paradise for merchants and explorers, existing in a state of extreme freedom and disorder.
The yacht deliberately veered in a small arc and entered the archipelago from