"Reporting, Vice Admiral Sephiroth, something terrible has happened!
Sergeant Kuro fell off the pirate ship and into the sea...
This is bad! A Sea King swallowed him whole..."
"What the hell...?"
Sephiroth sat up from his sun lounger, pulling down the sunglasses over his eyes as he looked at the Marine soldier reporting to him beside him.
Hearing such a baffling report so suddenly left him completely dumbfounded.
Honestly, he was quite surprised to hear that Kuro, who had mastered Geppo, Soru, and Paper Arts among the Six Powers, had been knocked into the sea...
After all, with Kuro's strength, dealing with a pirate worth over a hundred million in the first half of the Grand Line should have been easy!
This was no longer the first few years after the Great Pirate Era began, when powerful figures from every corner flooded into the Grand Line in search of the Laugh Tale Roger had spoken of.
After more than a decade of tireless Marine crackdowns, aside from the New World, where powerful factions stood divided and were difficult to govern, the overall quality of pirates everywhere else had suffered a cliff-like decline. Most of them were weaklings useless as dirt, and pirates who knew Haki had become exceedingly rare...
Of course, because the World Government collected exorbitant Celestial Tribute every year, coupled with the crushing taxes imposed by certain countries, people still continued to set sail and become pirates in endless numbers every year.
No matter how the Marines exterminated pirates, they remained like weeds on the plains—wildfires could not burn them all away, and the spring breeze would bring them back again.
There was nothing to be done about it. Rather than die of hunger, people would rather become pirates and sail out to take their chances!
That way,