"Looks like Newgate made it in time."
On Sabaody Archipelago, after giving Imu a good scare, Magnus of course could not stay in Mary Geoise. He returned to Sabaody and maintained a standoff with Imu up on the Red Line.
Imu's redeployments naturally fell under Magnus's observation.
Magnus immediately realized that Imu had captured the scientists from Mechanism Island to recharge the Heavenly King, but the Heavenly King was not yet fully charged.
Otherwise, back when Magnus was already on Sabaody, Imu would have fired a shot at him long ago.
Or, the energy was ready but still sitting on Osgu Island.
That was why Magnus had called Newgate.
It did not matter what they had prepared on Osgu Island. If he simply sank the entire island, all that preparation became meaningless.
As for how Magnus knew what was happening on Osgu Island:
Where there is a heavy enough reward, there will always be someone willing to take the risk.
Magnus directly bought off several South Blue newspapers and had them loiter in the seas near Osgu Island. They did not need to get close, just observe and record from afar.
Even though this world's oceans were unimaginably vast and most people would spend their lifetime repeating a few limited routes, that did not mean this world lacked long range communication.
The most famous tool, naturally, was the transponder snail.
Many newspapers kept a special breed called Visual Transponder Snails that worked like cameras, capturing live images and transmitting them to their paired snails elsewhere.
Right now, Magnus and the others were in their temporary base on Sabaody, eating seeds and chatting as they watched the battle on Osgu play out.
"Your crew is out there fighting, and as their captain you are here snacking?"
Gloriosa could not help but question him.
"You are the one who said there might be a lot of top tier fighters on that island, people on par with Marine Admirals, right?"
If you told Gloriosa that Osgu Island was crawling with World Government powerhouses, she might not grasp the level of that battle.
But say there were at least four fighters of Admiral level on Osgu Island, and she understood.
In the past, Admirals rarely left Marineford or Mary Geoise. Unless the target was a pirate with a bounty over 100 million, they seldom moved.
Now it was completely different.
Across the entire world, among the great pirates, some had chosen to throw in with the World Government, some had been drawn to Magnus's banner, and the rest were being crushed by both sides at once.
Many pirates liked to talk about "freedom", how pirates should not be bound. Magnus thought that was nonsense.
If their so called freedom was built on arson, murder, and robbery, on looting the fruits of others' labor, then prison bars and shackles suited them better than "freedom" ever would.
So life was hard now for the big names in the New World. Since the New World was Magnus's turf, and the Marines did not want to provoke him at home, the Admirals turned their sights on the four Blues and the first half of the Grand Line.
That was how the Kuja Pirates, who had always worked close to Marine territory, got dragged into trouble.
Originally, the Marines did not pay much attention to the Kuja Pirates. The "raids" they carried out were, in truth, more like scenes of noblemen and merchants willingly parting with their wealth after being charmed by the Kuja warriors' beauty.
When questioned, those men would swear they had offered their riches of their own free will, that the Kuja women were innocent.
If many of those men had not been married, and if the wives had not described the Kuja warriors as monsters after discovering their husbands had been enchanted, the Marines would not even have known how to write up Kuja's bounty posters.
Even so, when a Marine ship encountered the Kuja Pirates, they usually could not do a thing.
Most Marines were hot blooded young men.
Most Kuja warriors were young and dazzlingly beautiful.
Put those two together, and the Marines would be lucky to fight at twenty or thirty percent of their strength.
Soon enough, the Marines simply turned a blind eye.
They were not a particularly powerful crew. They posed some threat to surrounding routes, but they were not true monsters.
So the Marines tolerated them.
But once Magnus seized the New World and the Admirals were free from worrying about its giants, everything changed.
In the last two years, the Kuja Pirates had encountered strong Marines more than once. Among them was Admiral Heinz Oran.
If the Kuja Pirates had not been lucky, if Heinz Oran had not been chasing another pirate crew and unleashed his wide area ice attack from long range, freezing an entire island and scaring them half to death, they might have clashed directly with an Admiral.
And if they ever crossed fists with an Admiral head on, they would either be rotting in Impel Down now or serving as playthings for Celestial Dragons.
That was why Shakky had said that if Magnus invited them into the White Wolf Alliance, the Kuja warriors would say yes.
Their situation was far worse than Magnus imagined.
Magnus was, in many ways, the root cause of this mess.
But which Amazon Lily warrior would dare blame a top powerhouse like him?
Gloriosa had seen with her own eyes how terrifying an Admiral could be. When this came up, she could not help but worry.
Next to her, Stussy shot Gloriosa a sideways glance.
Helping or not helping was the White Wolf Pirates' business.
Since when did an outsider get to point fingers?
"Haha, the World Government does have a lot of strong fighters, but my crew is not so easy to beat."
Magnus laughed heartily, then suddenly realized something.
"Come to think of it, you are the Kuja Pirates' captain, right? Why are you here, anyway? This is not your crew's base."
You only noticed me now?
Gloriosa had just begun to feel like he had accepted her presence, speaking to her naturally like this, but then she realized he simply had not noticed before.
"Hmph. I only came to make sure you were not mistreating Shakky."
As she spoke, Gloriosa deliberately showed off her model worthy figure. Her dress with its cheongsam like cut left no doubt about her full curves and long, shapely legs.
She had spent days observing before reaching this conclusion.
Each of Magnus's women had her own charms. In terms of sheer beauty, even an Amazon Lily empress like her could not dominate them all.
But she had one clear advantage.
Her legs were longer.
Magnus was close to two meters tall, but Gloriosa was not short beside him. Not that height alone meant anything.
Every woman at Magnus's side was tall. Even the shortest, Stussy, was nearly one meter eighty. Tsuru, once a Marine spy and now one of Magnus's women, was even a bit taller than Magnus.
It was a depressing fact.
In Magnus's previous life, his near two meter height would have made him a giant. Here, he was almost short.
But leg length was about proportion, not raw height.
Among Magnus's women, Lipley was the tallest, but that was because she was a giant. When she used her Mini Mini Fruit to shrink, her figure remained perfectly proportioned, but even then she still lagged behind Gloriosa a little.
In terms of legs, Gloriosa's were the most flawless of them all.
However, no matter how she posed, Magnus's attention was already elsewhere.
The battle had begun.
Newgate's very first step onto the stage triggered colossal waves outside Osgu Island.
Even from thousands of meters away, his first punch shattered Osgu Island into quarters, helping Shiki sever the slabs so his floating land could rise faster with the gathered scientists.
The Visual Transponder Snails were too far away to capture any detail, but they were Magnus's only window.
Still, the exact situation was easy enough to guess from someone else's emotions.
At the moment Newgate appeared, Magnus clearly sensed Imu's emotions stir up on the Red Line, in Pangaea Castle.
There you go, rattled again.
If Imu was in a bad mood, then Magnus inevitably felt great.
His relaxed expression and crooked smile meant one thing in his own mind, and something else entirely in Gloriosa's.
"So you will not look at me, but you will think about some other woman right in front of me?"
No matter that Magnus and Imu were destined to be mortal enemies, that was not how Gloriosa saw it. She only felt wronged.
Was she really that invisible to him?
"All right, since you are here, do not just stand around."
Magnus gestured to the seat beside him.
"Sit and watch. If things go south, we may have to leave this place."
He had called on Rocks, Newgate, and Shiki, three future monsters, but for now only Rocks and Newgate were truly near their peaks. Shiki, joining the crew much later, could barely keep up.
At best, Shiki could handle someone like Grindwin, the weakest of the enemy top tiers.
As the fight went on, Magnus learned that Osgu Island did not hold four top fighters, but six.
If there had only been four, Rocks and Newgate together could have handled it.
With six, if they were not careful, even retreat would be difficult.
Meanwhile, on Osgu Island itself.
Boom.
The slash from Rocks's long blade roared like a cannon. It blasted Kong back over a thousand meters. He barely had time to catch his breath before Jaygarcia Saturn, whom he had just lopped three claws off of, came scrambling up the edge of the floating slab.
At the same time, a massive hawk was already upon him.
Rocks grit his teeth.
"Get lost."
An explosive air cannon shot skyward, swatting the hawk away, but Jaygarcia's claws still struck him a heartbeat later, punching through the floating slab and sending him crashing down.
"Rocks, child of ill omen, the White Wolf's fang, you are still far from ready."
Jaygarcia Saturn looked down at Rocks with a lofty gaze, as if he were not the one whose claws had just been shattered.
"Shiki, how much longer?"
Rocks crawled straight back up through the slab. He did not dare rest even for a second as he moved to intercept Jaygarcia before the man could reach Shiki.
"I will take this one."
Baloric burst from the slab, clashing head on with Jaygarcia. He was sent flying, but Jaygarcia's attack stalled for that one crucial instant.
And in that instant.
"Gyahahahaha, done. Now let us really tear this place apart."
The moment Shiki finished speaking, the slabs that had been slowly climbing suddenly rocketed upwards.
With that, Shiki finally had the leeway to go on the offensive.
"Gyahahaha, I have been wanting to fight you people for a long time. A measly 230 million does not suit me at all."
As far as Shiki was concerned, all the big names from the White Wolf Pirates had bounties over 300 million now. He should be at least that high.
"Let us see how you like it when I slice those rotten legs of yours apart."
As a rare two blade swordsman, once he had picked up basic martial arts, he poured everything into his swordsmanship and had benefited greatly from Magnus's personal instruction.
Magnus was not just a master of hand to hand combat, a Devil Fruit awakener, and a top tier Haki user, but also a supreme swordsman.
There was no better teacher in the world.
"Lion Severing Valley."
Shiki went all out from the very first strike. He knew his real strength was still shy of true Admiral level. Against an immortal like Jaygarcia Saturn, there was no chance of victory for someone who had not yet mastered Conqueror's Haki infusion.
"An insect."
Jaygarcia easily caught Shiki's blades in his claws. Shiki might already have advanced in both Armament and Observation, but he lacked experience against true monsters. His Haki had not been tempered enough to pierce Jaygarcia's defense.
But Shiki's aim had never been to defeat him.
His goal from the start was to knock Jaygarcia Saturn off the slab.
So while many of his slashes struck Jaygarcia, even more landed on the ground at his feet.
"Gyahahaha, looks like your ability to see into the future is not as good as they say."
If this had been a true master of advanced Observation Haki, they would have seen Shiki's plan the second he moved.
Jaygarcia had seen no such future.
Which meant that, if you stripped away his Devil Fruit and his immortal body, Jaygarcia Saturn's Haki was at best on par with Shiki's own.
As Jaygarcia started to fall, Shiki's face split into a triumphant grin.
"That all you got?"
"Shut that mouth."
Rocks' voice rang out. Jaygarcia's expression did not change as he dropped, because several other strong presences had already closed in.
"We regroup with Newgate first."
(End of Chapter)
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