At noon, the sun blazed overhead, and the sea breeze was especially hot and humid.
At Marine Headquarters, Marineford, a large group of workers were hard at work, sweating profusely as they carried out postwar reconstruction.
Meanwhile, many of the families of the Navy officers and soldiers who had lived in town and been forced to evacuate to the Sabaody Archipelago during the war had moved back. They wandered in twos and threes between the spacious harbor square and the ruined streets, bringing some much-needed life to the island, which still looked rather battered.
But no matter how much Marineford was rebuilt, or how hard they tried to restore it to its former state, nothing could change the ironclad fact that:
The Navy had fought Whitebeard and the Brat here, and had suffered the worst defeat in its history. Countless elite Navy officers had fallen, and the Navy had nearly been brought to its knees for good!
Perhaps that was the main reason Navy Headquarters and the World Government's Commander-in-Chief had agreed to Marshal Sengoku and Vice Admiral Garp's resignations, yet still retained their ranks and sent them to the sidelines to train new recruits.
It made sense. The Navy had already suffered enough losses. They couldn't afford to lose two powerful commanders, even if one of them had been pushed out as a scapegoat and the other had close ties to the rebels and certain pirates.
But matters of state had nothing to do with the laborers working on the construction site in Marineford. They didn't care what the Navy's higher-ups were thinking. They were just workers who had come by ship from other islands with a construction crew, and all they cared about was their three meals a day and their wages. Nothing else mattered to them.
Clang!