Rainbase, Alabasta.
This sleepless city built in the desert had grown under Crocodile's years of rule into one of the most famous dens of extravagance in the first half of the Grand Line. Towering hotels, clamorous casinos, luxurious theaters, shops laden with wares... colorful neon lights painted the night sky in a bewildering haze, a glaring contrast to the eternal darkness of the distant desert.
Rain Dinners was the largest, most luxurious building in Rainbase, as well as Crocodile's publicly acknowledged "legitimate business" and actual seat of power. The thirty-story pyramid was clad entirely in golden glass, reflecting an extravagant gleam beneath the lights. At its main entrance, two enormous golden crocodile statues bared their fangs and claws, symbols of their master's unshakable authority.
At that moment, in the private suite on the casino's top floor, Crocodile stood before a vast floor-to-ceiling window, overlooking the "kingdom" he had built with his own hands.
He wore a velvet dressing gown and held a glass of amber liquor, cigar smoke rising slowly in the light. The nightscape glittered outside the window, but there was no pleasure on his face, only cold gloom.
Just three hours earlier, contact had been lost with Mr. 5's team at their abandoned canal base in the eastern part of the city. Then, of the seven secret observation posts he had stationed around Rainbase's outskirts, three reported unusual energy fluctuations-fluctuations that closely matched the characteristics described in Mr. 5's final message: "suspected Logia lightning user."
"Lightning... the Logia Rumble-Rumble Fruit?" Crocodile murmured, his gaze sinister. "Who could it be? How could they have come to Alabasta?"
He tipped his head back and drained his glass. The fiery liquid slid down his throat, but it could not extinguish the increasingly powerful unease in his heart.
Six years. From the