Deep within Pangaea Castle in the Holy Land of Mary Geoise.
Saint Saturn sat on the edge of his enormous bed carved from ancient timber, his luxurious night robe draped loosely around him, his knuckles white around his cane.
One of the world's highest authorities, renowned for his cunning and cruelty, now showed none of his usual composure or dignity. There was only a deeply suppressed terror that still seeped from his eyes.
On the low table before him lay an intelligence summary delivered through Cipher Pol Aigis Zero's highest-priority emergency channel. The words on the page were cold and brief, but the picture they painted chilled him to the marrow:
"Throughout East Blue, from afternoon to evening on the seventh day of autumn, 1516, over approximately one hour and forty-seven minutes. Thirty-one confirmed Cipher Pol bases, intelligence posts, and monitoring stations lost contact, including one Level One Information Center and four secondary hubs. Estimated personnel losses exceed four hundred, including seventeen agents with Devil Fruit abilities. Suspected target: Aaron Ball. Operational pattern: efficient, precise, silent, indiscriminate elimination. No effective resistance or warning signals received."
Less than two hours.
In less than two hours, half the densely layered surveillance network the World Government had spent centuries building in East Blue had been erased!
Saint Saturn's fingers twitched involuntarily. What did that efficiency mean? It meant that if that man wished, he could uproot Cipher Pol's entire global network within a month! This was no longer a mere threat of force, but a systematic, devastating attack on the foundations of the World Government's intelligence and rule!
What filled him with an almost fatalistic chill was that all of this might have been inevitable from the moment he and the other four Elders made the administrative decision that "Aaron Ball must be