War had begun.
After a brief period of rest and recovery, in the fourth year after the Battle of Acropolis Harbor, the World Government finally moved. It was Sea Calendar Year 1469.
They formally issued the Crusade Order.
In an instant, Marines from all Four Seas and from the first half of the Grand Line began to gather.
With the Calm Belts and the Red Line as natural walls, the World Government had no fear of Magnus turning around and attacking the Four Seas.
Besides.
If you attack a member nation, what does that have to do with the World Government?
The Marines had always been the World Government's private soldiers.
They might be paid with the member nations' money, but when it truly mattered, the Navy always answered to the World Government first.
Across the entire world, the number of Marine soldiers.
Approached five million.
It had to be said: anyone who made it into the Marines was already an elite among ordinary people, full time trained soldiers.
Take some member nation with ten million people that claimed it had six hundred thousand in its standing army. Those "six hundred thousand" were not all full time professionals. Most of them were militia.
Anyone who understood the difference between militia and full time troops knew how big that gap really was.
But in this pirate world, even these so called "elite" full time soldiers were not even qualified to be cannon fodder in the monster infested New World.
So even though the Navy's headcount was impressive, only about one fifth of them were actually assembled for the front.
The lowest rank allowed was sergeant.
Above sergeant was master sergeant, and above that came the commissioned officers.
Yet in this kind of war, a sergeant who normally commanded several men was nothing but the bottom rung of cannon fodder.
One million Marines meant several thousand warships. When they massed together, they practically covered the entire sea at the end of the first half of the Grand Line.
It took six full months just to complete the mobilization. Thanks to the bubble cableways, these Marines did not have to climb Reverse Mountain like ordinary pirates to enter the Grand Line.
They could sail through the safe waters of the Four Seas to the Red Line, board the World Government's bubble cable cars there, cross the Calm Belt directly, and arrive at Marineford, Navy Headquarters at the end of the first half of the Grand Line.
The current Ardent, Ortega, had a splitting headache.
"I really want to quit."
Lazy by nature, Ortega had been praying for a slow, peaceful term from the moment he took over as Ardent. His plan was to sit on the title for a few years, then toss it to Kong and retire happily.
And now, only a few years later?
Even he had not expected the World Government to suddenly launch a war against the White Wolf Pirates, and not as a probing strike, but as a fully mobilized world scale crusade.
That one million Marines were only the beginning.
The World Government even started drawing troops from its member nations. In Ortega's eyes, that million Marines were more like supervising troops.
If this was a full blown war, there was no way the World Government would fight alone.
The member nations had to contribute too.
The World Government's greatest advantage over the White Wolf Alliance lay in manpower. They could grind the White Wolf Alliance down by sheer numbers.
If they could obtain an overwhelming numerical superiority, they could open multiple fronts and, by brute force, wear down the White Wolf Pirates.
The plan was simple.
No matter how strong White King Magnus was, he was only one man.
As long as they attacked on many fronts at once, as long as their armies burned in many theaters, then even if Magnus appeared here or there, the member nations under the White Wolf banner could all be destroyed.
Unless the very first move of the White Wolf Pirates was a decisive battle against them.
But that outcome suited the World Government just fine.
If they razed the traitorous nations under the White Wolf Alliance, yet the Pirates themselves took no casualties, those enraged monsters would rampage across the world in revenge.
If they went straight to a final battle instead.
Then even if Magnus escaped, the officers under him might not. With the White Wolf Pirates cut down to one man, Magnus alone would still be a headache, but no longer a threat to their rule.
That was right.
The World Government had already made up its mind.
Before, they had hesitated because they were afraid that if Magnus slipped away, he would inflict terrible damage on them, and they had no way to deal with a Magnus who went all out.
But after Osgu Island, after watching the White Wolf's new officers grow stronger with their own eyes, they finally understood they could not delay any longer.
Rocks and Newgate were both men who, in the past, would appear perhaps once in half a century.
Now they had appeared together.
And Magnus had gathered them under one flag.
However, what the World Government wanted and what it could get were not the same. Mobilizing troops from member nations turned out to be far harder than expected, because Magnus publicly declared that this was a personal war between the White Wolf Pirates and the World Government, and that no member nation needed to join.
If they did, then the White Wolf Pirates would treat them as enemies.
A naked threat.
A blatant threat.
If this had been any ordinary pirate crew, daring to threaten the World Government and its member nations in the face of a Crusade Order, it would have been a joke passed around noble tables.
But this was White King Magnus.
In the ten years since his second rise, he had never once lost face before the World Government. Every time, he had shattered their plans.
Now he stood on equal footing with them, splitting the world in two.
Many member nations still believed in the World Government. After all, it had ruled over the world for eight hundred years. It would not be toppled so easily.
But whether or not Magnus could be truly killed was another question entirely.
The World Government's arms and legs were thick. Magnus might not be able to win.
But these little arms and legs of theirs, how could they stand against the White Wolf Pirates?
What if Magnus held a grudge?
If he chose to move personally, he could probably wipe out a country in less than half a day.
With that in mind, Magnus's one line of menace made more than a few member nations wilt. When the World Government's draft order arrived, they began to drag their feet.
A certain kingdom's shipyard had just been blown up by pirates, leaving all their ships stranded, so their soldiers simply could not embark. In another land, the king was suddenly gravely ill, and the princes had launched a civil war to seize the throne.
Two neighboring countries even went to war with each other.
Ask them why.
Old grudges, long standing hatred, the other side started it, they could not bear it anymore.
In short, sending troops was impossible.
Not in this lifetime.
Who had the courage to join a war of that scale?
By the time the dust settled.
After six months of worldwide mobilization, the World Government furiously discovered that despite their efforts, the only force that had actually arrived in full was that million elite Marines, plus a few scattered contingents from clueless or fanatically loyal member nations.
Even after scraping together every available unit.
They barely pushed their total headcount past one point five million.
They would pay. They would squeeze money out of their nations.
But troops?
Out of the question.
Even with this size of army, they still had a numerical edge over the White Wolf Pirates and their allied nations, but that edge was thin.
Most of the White Wolf Alliance would be fighting on home soil.
With a bit of training.
The ordinary people who had survived all these years in the hellish New World, if they were simply fed well and drilled properly, would not be any weaker than "elite" Marines.
In this world.
Nobles truly were born different.
You could train for a lifetime and still not match someone blessed with the right bloodline.
Unless you were one of the few freakish exceptions.
The World Government issued its Crusade Order at the start of Sea Calendar 1469. A whole year passed before they managed to scrape together less than two million troops by the dawn of 1470.
The World Government wanted to make Magnus attack first.
But Magnus, who had planned to stall for time from the start, refused to take the bait.
That year, Charlotte Linlin turned sixteen.
"Are we going to war again?"
The tall girl, whose features had become sharper and more striking and who was already being whispered about as a future "Empress of the Sea," puffed out her cheeks.
"A bunch of bad people."
Unlike Rocks and Newgate, who had sailed out to make their names on the sea, Linlin had shown Admiral class combat strength two years earlier and still had no desire to go to sea alone.
What was fun about sailing by herself?
Her biggest dream was still to throw parties at home with everyone every day.
And second, to eat all the delicious food in the world.
Though, two years ago, that "second" dream had quietly changed.
She no longer wanted only to eat.
Now she wanted to cook all the world's food herself.
Eating alone.
Was nowhere near as happy as eating together.
After all these years of education, Magnus had finally seen results. The maturing Linlin could fully control her eating fits.
You could say that among Magnus's officers, Linlin was probably the strongest right now.
Not just in current strength.
But in potential.
Even though Linlin's power was already pressing against the peak of her original timeline, perhaps even matching it.
Her potential still had not been fully released.
She was only sixteen.
If she got serious and poured everything into her armament, even Magnus would feel a headache dealing with her defense.
Linlin had always had a single glaring weakness.
Her monstrous natural defenses made almost any external attack bounce off her, but that did not mean she was truly invulnerable.
Two years earlier.
Even an Admiral class opponent, if they relied only on ordinary Haki attacks, could exhaust themselves to death without ever breaking through Linlin's hide.
But that was only for standard Haki.
Once someone learned internal destruction with Armament Haki, Linlin's defense stopped being absolute. Compared to her outer shell, her internal toughness was much worse.
So Magnus taught her the technique he used to reinforce his own body with Haki, a method only those with overwhelming life force could use.
Linlin could not enhance her entire body to the same level as Magnus, but she could raise her durability by another step while greatly reducing the side effects.
Once she activated the technique, Linlin could brawl up close with Magnus for a whole day and night without falling behind.
There was nothing strange about that.
Magnus's own strength was well known.
In a one on one fight with someone of equal tier, his greatest advantage was his endless stamina. He could drag any opponent of the same level to their death.
His attack power, by comparison, was not so outrageous that he could crush his peers with one blow.
Let alone the fact that those were only practice bouts. Magnus was never going all out.
Even so, Linlin's growth was startling.
Everyone knew how terrifying Magnus was.
So if Linlin could fight him to that extent, did that not mean that once she fully matured, she might even surpass Magnus?
Once that thought appeared, Lyply and the other women immediately started teasing Linlin, saying that if Magnus bullied them in the future, they would ask Linlin to go beat him up for them.
Linlin agreed without hesitation.
So in the daytime, Lyply and the others took every opportunity to make Magnus lose face in front of Linlin, and once night fell, Magnus naturally made them "pay him back."
Of course, that "payback" was only a joke.
Aside from those occasional games, even Stussy and Toki had thrown themselves into training now, like students cramming right before a final exam.
War was coming.
They might not be able to help Magnus much, but they definitely could not drag him down.
Time was on Magnus's side.
The longer things dragged on, the more the balance tipped toward him.
The World Government's greatest mistake was overestimating their influence over the member nations. In the end, after issuing the Crusade Order, they simply wasted an entire year.
But they had little choice.
Without reinforcements from the member nations, without the advantage of numbers, if they launched a war against the White Wolf Alliance, Magnus would never agree to a decisive battle.
Whether the traitorous nations were destroyed or not was meaningless to the World Government.
What mattered was the destruction of the White Wolf Pirates.
The leaders knew very clearly that Magnus's officers were the true foundation of his rule over the New World and his courage to defy them.
Only if Magnus agreed to a decisive battle would they have a chance to wipe out the White Wolf Pirates in one stroke.
The bowstring was drawn. The arrow had to fly.
Even without enough troops, under the weight of Magnus's pressure, the World Government finally chose war.
Magnus could afford to wait. They could not.
They had received new intelligence. Giants from Elbaf and a new class of samurai from Wano had already set out in force for the front of the New World.
Joining them were fifty thousand Sphinx Guards under the White Wolf banner, one hundred thousand elite fighters from Fishman Island, two hundred thousand pirates from the New World who had been subdued and reorganized over the years, and five hundred thousand soldiers from the allied nations.
Lastly, the one hundred thousand strong "New Navy" formed under Rona also marched to war.
Five years ago, they had not taken part in the Battle of Acropolis Harbor between the White Wolf Pirates and the Marines.
This time, they had to choose a side.
The World Government wanted a decisive battle with the White Wolf Pirates, but did the Pirates not want the same?
One battle to decide the world was far better than letting the Government's forces slowly march into each allied homeland.
Even if they won in the end, the lands would be ruined.
One million against two million.
In Sea Calendar Year 1470, the largest naval battle in the eight hundred year history of piracy.
Began.
(End of Chapter)
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