Bang-!
Sengoku slammed his palm heavily onto the desk before him. He glared at Sephiroth and roared furiously:
"What kind of joke are you making!?"
Sephiroth shook his head and reiterated:
"Admiral Sengoku, I already told you.
I'm not joking.
Name your price. How much will it take for you to hand the 'Marines' over to me?"
Compared to Sengoku's fury, Steel Bone Kong remained much calmer. He raised his right index finger and lightly tapped the table twice, speaking in a somewhat meaningful tone:
"Sephiroth, the Marines are not merchandise. They are not something you can buy just because you want to..."
"Oh, fine! I was a little too blunt just now.
Let's put it in a more pretentious... cough!... subtle way.
Right now, the World Government has suffered an unprecedented blow. Holy Land Mariejois was blasted so thoroughly by an unknown, terrifying attack that not even scraps remained, and the World Government's central administrative offices were completely destroyed as a result...
The Marines urgently need a huge sum of money to deal with the aftermath, but you simply cannot come up with it. You do not even know who to ask for money, so you have fallen into a predicament of insufficient funds, haven't you?"
The reason the World Government could control a force of millions of Marines ultimately came down to... money!
Yes, reality was that straightforward.
As the world's largest violent institution, the Marines needed an astronomical sum of hundreds of billions of Beli every month just to pay salaries—not tens of billions, nor even a few hundred billion.
Ordinary nations simply could not afford such terrifying military expenditures.
A million Marine soldiers sounded like a lot, but spread across the world, it was really nothing remarkable.
After all, even the Alabasta Kingdom had a standing