-Broadcast-
Eight words, and they captured the Golden Emperor's situation precisely: I am the fish, and others hold the knife. Gild Tesoro had no interest in dying early. The Marine had given him a stage on which to demonstrate the Gol Gol no Mi's value — so he would carry the Fleet Admiral's intent and be exactly what was required of him: an honest, capable gold miner who understood his position.
Talented pirates like Tesoro had been folded into a category the Fleet Admiral called non-staff personnel. Some Marine members objected privately to the arrangement. These objections changed nothing. Non-staff members did not join the Marine's formal structure, carried a high mortality rate, and worked in exchange for limited, conditional freedom. The arrangement was not designed to be comfortable.
Managing them required careful preparation. The Admirals under Artoria were skilled at finding the cracks in a person's psychological defenses and pressing until something gave. But Artoria herself trusted none of them to loyalty, which was why each non-staff member had received a parting gift before their first assignment: a biological bomb, implanted in the brain, developed by Caesar Clown. Remotely triggered, instantly lethal. It didn't matter how far they ran or how cleverly they disappeared. The Fleet Admiral could end any of them with a thought.
Artoria Pendragon had named the unit the Suicide Squad, with a faint suggestion that she found the name appropriate in more ways than one. She had no particular attachment to the survival of Gild Tesoro or anyone else in the group. As long as they demonstrated value, she was willing to keep them working. The moment that changed, the assessment would change with it.
With the Golden Emperor's introduction concluded, the afternoon session moved to project applications. Each Admiral came prepared to argue for their department's share of a budget that could not satisfy everyone. Whether any given project received funding came down entirely to the Fleet Admiral's judgment. In practice, the Marine had become exactly what the Sky Screen's audience was watching: one woman's show.
Admiral Sakazuki chose not to speak first. Instead, Admiral Esdeath — the radical faction's most outward-facing representative — rose from her seat and turned to address the hall.
"This era is more turbulent than any that came before it. The pirate factions are superior in both quality and quantity. The World Government shelters behind the Marine and contributes nothing — but we cannot afford to yield. Every step back we take is a step forward for them. Gentlemen, a new war has arrived."
Esdeath in this particular mode was almost radiant. War was not a problem she needed to solve — it was a destination she was trying to reach. Her arms opened as she spoke, an extravagant gesture that seemed to want to embrace the entire concept of a battlefield. Her eyes burned with it. Every sentence had the quality of a woman barely restraining herself from adding isn't it wonderful? to the end.
The radicals' proposal was expansion: absorb more combat-ready populations from across the world, run intensive selection processes, and add the results to the Royal Guard under Admiral Sakazuki. The Guard currently operated at under five hundred members — an elite core that cost more per head than any equivalent unit in the Marine — but that, the radicals argued, was precisely why it needed to grow.
Sakazuki had been making this case to Artoria in various forms for some time. He would appear at the Fleet Admiral's office with a different pretext each visit, but the request was always the same. With Gild Tesoro's gold operations behind the institution, the funding existed in theory — but committing it entirely to Guard expansion meant everyone else received less, and Sakazuki asking for more was not a new development.
"Let's discuss this. This isn't a small sum to approve."
Artoria's hesitation was genuine. She wanted to hear what the other Admirals had to say. The Marine's money was not infinite, and handing all of it to Admiral Sakazuki to spend at his discretion was not how the institution intended to function.
The radical members were pleased by their faction leader's proposal. The conservatives were less so. Admiral Kuzan kept his expression unreadable — whatever he thought about the expansion plan was not available on his face.
Kuzan didn't need to voice it first. Admiral Gin stepped in.
"I have objections. I respect the combat capability of the Royal Guard's core members — every one of them is a talent capable of outperforming a Marine Vice Admiral. But has anyone actually run the numbers on what adding five hundred more of those people costs? The final training fee estimate in this proposal is notably vague. There is room in that vagueness for significant private manipulation."
Gin had identified exactly the right pressure point. If the radicals walked out of this meeting with the bulk of the discretionary budget, the conservatives would receive even less than they had the year before. Both factions understood that starving the other of resources was a legitimate long-term strategy — drain their operational capacity, absorb their territory, and defeat them without the expense of an open confrontation.
The underlying conflict between radical and conservative had no resolution available to it. Sakazuki and Kuzan were constitutionally incompatible, and without Artoria Pendragon in the equation, the retirement of Sengoku would have been the signal for open hostility between them. The possibility of one faction eventually driving the other out of the Marine structure entirely was not out of the question.
What neither faction fully grasped — or perhaps grasped and chose not to examine too carefully — was the degree to which Artoria was not a referee managing two equal parties. She was the game itself, and they were competing within it. The only way to access resources was to earn her approval. Which meant both factions were, in practice, continuously adjusting their positions to appeal to a single audience of one. The radicals and conservatives competed fiercely with each other for the privilege of the Fleet Admiral's favor, and the Fleet Admiral used the competition to ensure that neither side accumulated enough independent momentum to become a structural problem.
Even Gion, who was as close to Artoria as any officer in the Marine, navigated most interactions with her carefully. There was an old saying: serving a ruler is like serving a tiger. The woman who had built the Suicide Squad and maintained it with brain bombs was not someone who rewarded carelessness.
The budget debate ground forward through the afternoon. Eventually even Sakazuki and Kuzan themselves entered the argument, their exchange carrying the particular charge of two men who had been not-quite-enemies for years and were making no effort to disguise it. The room understood that the dispute between them had reached a point from which it would not easily descend.
While all of this continued, Gild Tesoro had already delivered a different kind of announcement — one that reached far beyond the lecture hall. Through a Sky Screen projection, he had passed to the entire world what he knew: that gold existed on the Sky Islands in quantities that defied imagination, and that somewhere in the long history of the world, a Golden City had vanished and was waiting to be found again.
The military meeting that would determine the Marine's strategic direction for the coming era was still in progress. The Admirals had not yet reached a conclusion.
They did not know — could not know yet — that the pirates had chosen this exact moment.
Two places. Two symbols of the world's highest authority: the Marine headquarters at Rome, and the holy land of Mary Geoise.
Both of them were about to come under attack.