-Broadcast-
After being dressed down by the Fleet Admiral, both Marine factions in the lecture hall found religion quickly. Grudges went back in their pockets and the room turned to the actual problem: the Four Emperors. Those four mountains needed to be moved. If the current generation refused to pay the price, the bill would simply be passed to the next one.
So the logic was simple — pick the softest persimmon first.
Compared to the other Emperor groups, which guarded their internal affairs like fortresses and were difficult to assess from the outside, the Big Mom Pirates had made their problems visible. Anyone paying attention over the past six months could see the outline of an organization in slow decline.
"According to intelligence from the underground networks, Charlotte Linlin is experiencing near-daily episodes caused by her Devil Fruit. Her children are terrified. By any measure, this is the weakest the Big Mom Pirates have been."
Naraku had come prepared. He passed his compiled intelligence to Brannew, who fed the files through a visual snail and projected the images onto the screen. Several photographs of Charlotte Linlin mid-episode appeared before the assembled officers — frenzied, incoherent, nothing like the Yonko who had carved out her territory through decades of consolidated terror.
Whether there was any performance in it, the assembled Admirals didn't think so. The Four Emperors had no incentive to stage weakness. If outsiders believed they were declining, the sharks would come circling, each one hoping to tear off a piece of Totto Land before a rival beat them to it. That kind of vulnerability wasn't something an Emperor faked.
The specific nature of Charlotte Linlin's illness resembled dissociative identity disorder — but where ordinary patients experienced personality fractures at the psychological level, Big Mom's case had a distinct and uniquely terrible character. The personalities inhabiting her body were not abstractions. They were independent souls, each one a genuine consciousness formed over decades of using the Soru Soru no Mi (Soul-Soul Fruit) to create life from the spirit of others. She had spent her life manipulating souls to produce servants, homies, and weapons — and eventually that power had turned inward. At any given moment, more than twenty separate personalities could be active in her body, each with its own voice and memories and demands.
A lifetime's worth of careless play with forces she understood but never fully respected, now demanding repayment. It was difficult not to see it as exactly the kind of retribution the universe occasionally chose to deliver.
Her children had tried every approach to restore her. None of them held. Even the methods that showed some initial effectiveness stopped working within ten days, after which the condition would relapse in full. The woman who had once drifted across entire seas and refused to die was now sometimes unable to care for herself — reduced to the mental state of a child, requiring her own sons and daughters to attend to her most basic needs. By any standard, it was a miserable way for a legend to end.
"Taking control of Totto Land would give us a permanent foothold in the New World. The Marine gains a reliable supply base, and the constant problem of logistics stops being a problem."
The Marine did maintain branch bases in the second half of the Grand Line, but their practical value was limited. The supply lines were fragile, the positions exposed, and pirate interference was a routine occurrence rather than an exception. A garrison being raided or besieged wasn't an emergency — it was Tuesday.
Totto Land was different. If the entire territory came under Marine control, it would function like a nail driven directly into the heart of the New World — self-sufficient, defensible, positioned to shift the Marine's strategic posture from reactive defense to genuine offensive capability. The other Emperor groups could be addressed in sequence from there.
What made the Big Mom Pirates' position especially difficult was that their rate of power growth had clearly fallen behind the other Emperor factions. The only confirmed new addition of significance was a powerful Three-Eyed Clan member and one particular daughter — and that daughter was already giving Admiral Kisame cause for concern.
"The Uchiha clan's lost bloodline has produced a capable heir through Big Mom. Charlotte Hikaru. If she needs to be engaged directly on the battlefield, at minimum one Admiral will have to be committed to that encounter — and they cannot afford to be careless."
Kisame shared what he knew about Charlotte Hikaru and her red eyes in detail. Her capabilities, her defensive techniques, her Amaterasu. The point was not to inspire fear but to ensure that no Admiral walked into range of a five-year-old Uchiha assuming it would be a manageable problem. Underestimating her had already cost experienced fighters more than they expected.
The discussion on encircling and suppressing the Big Mom Pirates ran through the rest of the morning. Predictably, radicals and conservatives diverged immediately on the questions of assault allocation and what to do with prisoners. The lecture hall came close to repeating itself. Fortunately, the Admirals chose to intervene before it escalated, absorbing the valid points from both positions and forcing the two factions into a working compromise. The terms were clear: execute the mission, take Totto Land, and everything else becomes negotiable. Fail, and accountability would reach from the lowest participant all the way up the chain — Admirals included.
The morning had been about pirates. The afternoon was about the Marine itself.
After a one-hour lunch break, the lecture hall reconvened for a second session of high-intensity discussion. Eventually the topic arrived at money, and the Admirals found themselves with more opinions than answers.
Finance was the blood of any functioning institution. Corrupt finances meant decay regardless of how capable the fighting force was. Without healthy revenue and rational budgeting, even the most well-planned operations became impossible to sustain — equipment couldn't be upgraded, personnel couldn't be properly trained, and the most brilliant strategy in the world sat idle for lack of resources to execute it.
In the old Marine era, Fleet Admirals had treated the financial question as someone else's problem. They submitted requests to the World Government, the amounts depending on whoever was holding the position at the time, and the money that eventually arrived had typically passed through enough hands that a meaningful portion of it never reached its destination. Corruption at the transfer layer was so normalized it had stopped being noticed.
Since Marshal Artoria had taken command, that arrangement had effectively ended. The Marine was on an independent path now, and the financial subsidies from the Five Elders had been shrinking steadily ever since — to the point where they were essentially symbolic. The World Government had deteriorated to the point where it was occasionally the Marines being asked to provide resources to the institution that had once funded them. A poor master demanding money from the dog that had outlasted them.
What had kept things functioning was foresight. During the chaos that followed the Battle of Marineford, Artoria had begun redirecting Marine units unsuited for front-line combat into commercial operations — supply networks, trade routes, logistics support that generated rather than consumed revenue. That project had grown steadily in the years since. Today it was the Ministry of Commerce.
The Ministry of Commerce was how the Marine's financial problems were going to be addressed. This was what the afternoon's session was here to make clear to the assembled military leadership: the Marine was already in a fiscal crisis, and understanding that was the first step toward solving it.