East Blue, G16 Marine Base, afternoon.
The paint on the base's outer walls was peeling, damp moss clinging to the surface. Several old coastal guns pointed silently toward the port, their barrels a dull iron gray in the afternoon sun. Unlike the perpetually tense fortresses of the New World or the Grand Line, this place was steeped in a stagnant, almost lax atmosphere befitting the title of "Weakest Sea."
Lieutenant Colonel Strawberry stood on the deck of his battered patrol ship, letting the sea breeze buffet the half-worn Marine coat behind him. Tall and powerfully built, he stood two and a half meters high, a small giant among the generally short Marines of East Blue. His eyes were sharp as an eagle's, but deep within them lay an intractable weariness and frustration.
He was one of the lingering casualties of the "Bernia Purge" four years earlier. Back then, his direct superior, Rear Admiral Raymont, whose ties with Aaron Ball, the "White Calamity," were ambiguous, had been promoted in name but demoted in practice, transferred to Marineford and sidelined. Raymont's loyal men-a contingent of West Blue elites once well equipped and high-spirited thanks to Boer's financial support-had been "exiled" in the political purge that followed. They had been dispatched to East Blue, the so-called "Weakest Sea," under the fine-sounding pretext of "filling gaps in military strength and suppressing local resistance."
Four years. The Armament Haki he had honed in West Blue's brutal battles against pirates and gangs had scarcely met its match in these waters. Every sortie, every extermination of an East Blue pirate crew whose antics seemed like child's play to him, was tediously easy. Yet this "invincibility" had brought him neither merit nor glory, only a deeper sense of frustration and helplessness.
The "routine pirate suppression" mission he had