Night fell.
Although they had learned in advance that the Dragon Palace Kingdom of Fish-Man Island had found a new backer—a supposedly incredibly powerful newcomer, the great pirate Annie Hastur of the Brat Pirates, who didn't even take the Navy's Three Admirals seriously—and had raised the Brat's flags throughout Fish-Man Island and Dragon Palace, Hody Jones and Vander Decken IX's pirate alliance was already poised to strike. That very night, they launched a surprise attack on Dragon Palace.
Boom!
Boom! Boom!
Boom!
See?
Tonight, outside the hard-shelled tower where the mermaid princess Shirahoshi lived, a dense barrage of impacts rang out again and again, unlike anything heard before.
Except...
Unlike the axes and swords that Vander Decken IX had hurled at the tower in the past using the powers of the Target-Target Fruit, this time he had thrown living people—armed pirates, by the look of them.
Now that the impacts had stopped, the pirates lay sprawled across the ground in heaps. A rough estimate put their number at more than a thousand!
Amazingly, although a great many of them had gone completely still—some bleeding heavily as they remained embedded in the walls, others with their skulls smashed open—some were still alive, shakily trying to sit or stand.
As for the two nautilus guards who should have been posted on either side of the entrance to protect it, the barrage of "human cannonballs" had already knocked them to the ground. No one could tell if they were alive or dead.
"Anyone still alive?"
"Cough, cough!"
"Get up! Gather round!"
"We're out of time!"
After an unknown amount of time, a pirate leader with a captain's hat and blood all over his head and face barked at them. The pirates who hadn't been killed on impact and had regained consciousness staggered toward