Before long.
As they chatted and laughed, the two of them arrived at the harbor before they knew it.
Two large warships were already waiting there, ready to set sail for the New World at any moment.
One was utterly unremarkable, a temporary flagship Aokiji had picked at random, no different from any other standard warship at Marine Headquarters.
The other, however, was strikingly distinctive.
Its hull was brand-new, its white paint gleaming. Though only slightly larger than a standard warship, it had twice as many cannon ports along its sides.
Even more eye-catching was its figurehead: a gigantic azure eagle spreading its wings in flight, its gaze proud and untamed.
The Thunder Eagle.
That was the warship's name. It had left the shipyard only a month earlier and been delivered to headquarters the previous week. It had yet to see a single battle.
That was right.
The Thunder Eagle was the warship Tom of Water 7 had personally designed and built for Noah.
Half a year earlier.
Tom had solemnly promised Noah that he would build him the world's strongest warship.
And now, the old man had lived up to his reputation as the world's greatest shipwright, fulfilling that promise to perfection.
The Thunder Eagle's final performance results, following professional testing at headquarters, were nothing short of astonishing.
Beyond its doubled firepower, both its structural strength and its theoretical top speed far surpassed those of other warships in its class. It was indisputably the strongest warship in the entire navy.
The vice admirals had all been envious of it at the time. Aokiji, in particular, had wandered around touching this and inspecting that, practically drooling.
These achievements owed not only to Tom's extraordinary craftsmanship, but also to the fact that the ship's entire main structure had been built from