"Bastard. Garp, that bastard."
Saint Nusjuro's voice struck the vaulted ceiling of the Room of Authority. His fingers rested on the rosewood tabletop, his fingertips pressing down on an open file. Sunlight spilled over Ace's photograph, making it gleam.
The boy in the photograph was smiling, a leaf held between his lips. Behind him lay the deck of the Moby Dick, with a huge, white-mustached figure blurred into a vague outline in the distance.
He rarely lost his composure. As the de facto leader of the Five Elders, Saint Nusjuro calculated every aspect of his conduct-the wording of every sentence, the angle of every lift of his head, the duration of every lingering glance. But now he had lost his composure.
Not because he was angry, but because he had discovered that the string in his hand had snapped more than a decade ago, and the severed end was now held by someone he could not touch.
"Hmph." Saint Warcury's drooping mustache twitched.
"Our Hero of the Marines really has given us a difficult problem this time."
He had read all those reports: every time Garp defied orders, every time he slammed a table in front of Sengoku, every time he sailed a warship out of port only to return with a shipload of pirate prisoners instead of their heads.
He understood Garp's defiance better than anyone, and he understood better than anyone that without Garp, the Marines would no longer be the most feared force on these seas.
"We sent him to search for and execute infants in the South Blue, intending to wipe out the Pirate King's bloodline once and for all. Who would have thought our Hero of the Marines would adopt his sworn enemy's child himself? More ironically, he raised another one as well. The son