"Fire!!!"
At the command, more than twenty Marine warships opened fire at once. A fierce barrage blanketed the skies above the harbor town in an instant.
Seeing this, Mongge's expression tightened as he fought Kong and Sengoku.
"Kong, you actually ordered an attack on civilians!?"
Mongge roared angrily. He had already asked the Blackheart Pirates to evacuate the civilians, and now the harbor town was occupied only by a bunch of pirates who committed every kind of evil.
But Kong didn't know that!
At Mongge's words, Kong's expression stiffened, and he even stopped attacking Mongge.
"Eliot!!!"
Kong roared toward the warships.
"Who ordered the bombardment?"
Over the years, Kong had risen to the rank of admiral candidate thanks to his intelligence work on Sphinx, and he knew even more about the island than Mongge did.
Sphinx wasn't large.
It was less than thirty kilometers across and had a permanent population of under three hundred thousand. Its resources were scarce, and pirates ran rampant. If Mongge hadn't appeared, the country would have collapsed more than a decade ago.
There were indeed plenty of scoundrels in the Marines. Some even looked down on civilians, and only helped drive out pirates because it was their duty.
If they treated ordinary civilians that way, they would be even less inclined to care about people who weren't even residents of an Affiliated Nation—civilians from a Non-Government Affiliated Nation.
But not all Marines were like that.
Kong, for example, believed that most pirates were beyond forgiveness, but he would never order an attack on civilians just to capture them.
They captured pirates to protect civilians.
If they attacked civilians to capture pirates, wouldn't that be putting the cart before the horse?
Even civilians from non-Affiliated Nations deserved human rights!
"Kong, don't get distracted!"
With Kong's attention