Tsugikuni Yoriichi and Issho had not been gone long when Garp raced to the battlefield.
By then, the wreckage of the warships destroyed by Tsugikuni Yoriichi's slash had surfaced one after another, blocking the entire waterway.
Garp descended from the sky and landed on a floating plank. Looking at the scene in the canyon, his heart trembled. Surviving Marines occasionally emerged from the sea, but far more had gone down with their warships, leaving not even corpses behind.
A faint crimson haze of blood spread through the channel, where the currents had nearly come to a standstill.
Only a few minutes had passed from the moment Garp sensed Tsugikuni Yoriichi's Conqueror's Haki to the time he reached the battlefield.
Yet in that brief span, the advance force led by Kuzan had been almost completely wiped out.
"Kuzan."
Standing on the floating plank, Garp searched the battlefield for Kuzan. This young Marine Admiral was one of the most promising figures among the middle generation of Marines in Garp's eyes.
Kuzan's growth since his youth had been inseparable from Garp. It could be said that Kuzan had practically been trained by Garp himself. Their bond ran even deeper than the one between Kuzan and Zephyr.
Garp had thought that even if Tsugikuni Yoriichi and Kuzan fought upon meeting, it would not have turned out this disastrously.
But he had not expected Tsugikuni Yoriichi's mindset to have changed.
The friendship between Marine Headquarters and Tsugikuni Yoriichi had gradually been worn away by the World Government's repeated actions.
Thinking it over carefully, Garp could understand why.
There were only a handful of Marines who truly had ties with Tsugikuni Yoriichi, and when Yoriichi left the Marines, he had taken several hundred Marines with him.
During Tsugikuni Yoriichi's growth, only people like Zephyr and Garp