Insistent Assitant 30 (Patreon)

Insistent Assistant

Chapter 30

-VB-

Alan Marris

“What?”

The highest-ranking Marine among the Marines we rescued grunted and looked away in embarrassment. “Our base got raided by the pirate fleet… and you attacked one of their smaller crews.”

I facepalmed, leaned back, and tried to control myself from bursting out in exclamation.

How large did the pirate fleet have to be with how many elite fighters that a Marine base was just wiped off the map?

Because apparently, that’s what happened. A big ass Marine base where the merchants regularly docked to wait for the Merchant Marines to escort them into the Grand Line, had been attacked, ransacked, and then burned to the ground while the pirates made off with the special Seastone-covered hulls of the Marine galleons.

This now meant that the pirate fleet that had attacked them could, with impunity, cross in and out of the Calm Belt!

That was … well, it was kind of bad for me but not too bad. While some of the pirate crews can escape me, it was just some and not all. It was bad for the locals, however, because those ships could be used to attack islands near the Calm Belt and then disappear into the Calm Belt that not all Marine ships could enter.

“Just how many of those Seastone bottom ships did you lose?” I asked Lieutenant Santo.

The bald man grimaced. “The base had at least two dozen galleons.”

I threw my hands up.

So it wasn’t just a random base that got attacked. This was a major naval port that got attacked and burned to the ground.

What the fuck, Marines?! This was the kind of shit you were supposed to keep in check!

“Do you at least know who did it?” I asked with a grimace after dropping my arms.

He grimaced.

“Please don’t tell me you don’t know.”

“Ah, uh, no, I do know, but it’s just that … officially, they were our allies.”

“,,, HMM?!”

“It was … the Baroque Works.”

I paused.

The Baroque Works. The pirate fleet headed by Warlord Crocodile, ie an ally of the World Government. The pirate fleet whose ships I had attacked not too long ago (defended myself, but the pirates wouldn’t care about that).

“Wait, aren’t they suppose to work with you instead of the other way around?” I asked the lieutenant and he grimaced.

“They are, but according to them, we attacked them first.”

And then he began to regale me with a story of an unknown pirate crew that had been passing by. They hadn’t flown any flag and hadn’t attacked anyone. The marines saw this and thought “it’s probably a pirate that’s low on manpower and gunpowder” and attacked. Because, of course, they would. The World Government’s Marines were less of a pirate only because they had legal authority, not despite it. After all, it was the World Government that “encouraged” the Warlords to attack islands and kingdoms that didn’t cooperate with the World Government while the Marines used their legal authority to block food shipment.

So they attacked the ship and got repelled by hands that grew out of everywhere. It was my turn to be surprised because apparently, I had attacked the same ship these marines had. The result was the Marines getting a counterattack from nearby Baroque Works, who made off with everything they stole. After the Baroque Works left, another pirate crew came by and scooped up the rest, including the people and Marines as slaves.

So the attack, as I came to learn, was a retaliatory strike. I assumed that both the World Government and Crocodile would smooth things over.

In the meantime…

I grinned.

“... Why are you smiling?” the marine grunted.

“Nothing, nothing,” I replied. “I’ll drop you all off at the nearest Marine base that’s not in ruins.”

And I walked away from that talk with an idea.

‘If I can successfully capture one of those ships for myself…’ I thought to myself. I would have to do some serious redecoration to not let the fact slip that we have commandeered one of the Marines’ own battle galleons, but, hey, everything worth doing took time and effort.

Because the thought of being able to move across the Calm Belt at our leisure?

Enticing.

First, though, I will have to find one of the Baroque Works if they were still in the area.

-VB-

A/N: so I learned that the Calm Belt was a thing in real life but for the opposite reason. The Antarctic Circumpolar Current is a violent ring of high-speed currents that surrounds Antarctica. It has two effects: 1) it prevents animals from easily crossing and interbreeding, which has led to increased size for Antarctic animals, and 2) the current, violent and going up and down the entire height (from the surface of the ocean to the bottom of the ocean some 4k meters down), kicks up nutritions into the Antarctic waters, making these waters not just rich in nutrition but also prey. Kinda why we have a lot of krill fishing in that area.

Never say fanfiction never taught you anything.