A small island somewhere in the New World.
Deep within a dense, heavily canopied forest, a small group had gathered around a crackling campfire to rest.
Sitting right at the center of the perimeter, a young man with wavy blond hair and a distinctive black top hat poked at the embers. It was the Chief of Staff and second-in-command of the Revolutionary Army, Sabo.
His breathing remained noticeably ragged and unstable, a glaring diagnostic sign that his physical vessel had only recently emerged from a series of extraordinarily fierce, high-stakes conflicts.
Anchoring the defensive perimeter around him were three of the Revolutionary Army's Division Commanders.
Sitting nearby were two women: Princess Vivi of Arabasta, her striking blue hair tied back, and a glamorous, provocative woman with light pink hair—Jewelry Bonney, a prominent member of the Worst Generation.
But the most jarring visual element in the clearing was the colossal silhouette slumped heavily against a massive tree trunk right behind them.
The body was profoundly fractured, massive tears in the organic fabric exposing large sections of raw cybernetic plating and mechanical scaffolding, with occasional bursts of static electricity sizzling from the loose wiring.
Former Warlord of the Sea, Bartholomew Kuma.
At this current juncture, Kuma had completely de-linked from his cognitive sanity. His physical vessel was indistinguishable from a sterile, inanimate machine, stripped of a single shred of personal consciousness. Furthermore, he had entirely lost his capacity for basic locomotion.
This was the structural trauma inflicted when he sustained a direct, catastrophic hit from the residual shockwaves of the preceding battle.
"Sabo, our communication channels have successfully re-established a link with Headquarters. A extraction vanguard will cross our coordinates to secure our position very shortly," Lindbergh, the Commander of the South Army, noted with a bright flash of relief on his face.
Hearing the transmission, a rare, long-awaited smile finally broke across the faces of the exhausted group.
Their operational trajectory up to this hour had been a textbook nightmare of extreme danger. They had initially been forced to wage an unrestricted war against two Marine Admirals simultaneously. Had Sabo not optimized his combat systems over the preceding two-year timeline to firmly stabilize his output within the absolute zenith of global powerhouses, their survival metrics would have flatly hit zero.
Yet the active data verified their success: they had cleanly penetrated the hyper-secure perimeter of the Holy Land of Mary Geoise and executed a flawless tactical extraction.
Not only had they survived, but they had traded balanced blows with the absolute apex of the Navy's military power while concurrently compiling a comprehensive topological map of Mary Geoise's internal defenses.
Most crucially—they had extracted Kuma.
They mathematically refused to permit a treasured comrade to languish in that untouchable abyss, subjected to the horrific, systematic depravity of the Celestial Dragons. That was a structural boundary the Revolutionary Army would never allow the world regime to cross.
Particularly for Sabo—Kuma was a senior executive who had anchored the line since the days of his childhood. The gentle, iron-willed titan had effectively constructed the sanctuary of his early memories.
The exact microsecond his intelligence channels verified that Kuma had devolved into nothing more than a brain-dead, rideable slave for the World Nobles, Sabo's incandescent fury had completely shattered its structural constraints.
To hell with the Celestial Dragons! To hell with their Holy Land!
This time, his absolute, unadulterated rage had awakened. An emotional detonation of this scale hadn't surfaced within his psychology since the dark hours of the Summit War two years ago.
Ultimately, to secure Kuma's asset, they had intentionally burned their operational security, triggering a catastrophic physical clash against the Navy's main defense matrix. During the height of the violence, Bonney had shifted her coordinates to reinforce their flank, enabling them to finalize a clean retreat.
However, the Navy had proven completely relentless, hounding their heels across every single nautical mile of their escape vector.
Along their withdrawal route, they had intercepted Princess Vivi, who was being aggressively targeted for absolute neutralization by a high-level CP0 assassination vanguard. At the absolute threshold of crisis, Sabo had unleashed his arsenal to cleanly extract Vivi from their dragnet.
Vivi had instantly mapped Sabo's identity. As a core companion of the Straw Hat Pirates, she was deeply familiar with the data files of Luffy's lineage.
Throughout these two years of global separation, she had treated every single fraction of intelligence tied to Luffy as a sacred asset. When her networks initially unsealed the disclosure that Luffy actually possessed three fraternal brothers, the sheer magnitude of the layout had delivered an immense shock to her system.
Not a single one of Luffy's brothers was an ordinary entity.
Sabo was the absolute second-in-command of the global resistance, while Luffy's biological father was the Supreme Commander of the Revolutionary Army himself—Monkey D. Dragon.
Consequently, Vivi had maintained an incredibly dense analytical focus on the Revolutionary Army's operations. Furthermore, the specialized socio-political philosophies propagated by the resistance had proven phenomenally efficient when mapped onto her own sovereign methodologies for state governance. She harbored profound respect for Luffy's father.
"Excellent. Moving forward, we shall simply maintain a low profile at these coordinates to buffer the timeline. Before long, our vessel will safely cross back into the Revolutionary Army's sovereign territory."
"The next microsecond our vanguard anchors itself before the gates of Mary Geoise... it will signify the formal initiation of a total, world-shaping war!" Sabo murmured, an icy, lethal gleam fracturing the warmth of his eyes.
The unbridled, tyrannical reign of the Celestial Dragons was officially approaching its terminal hour.
"Mm!" The comrades traded a collective, knowing smile. Their current deployment had comfortably outperformed all baseline operational metrics; everything was tracking perfectly within their strategic blueprints. The solitary variable that had generated tactical friction was Kuma's structural compromise, which had invited a higher volume of pursuit.
During the quiet intervals, Sabo requested numerous data logs from Vivi charting Luffy's recent oceanic adventures, while Vivi concurrently questioned Sabo regarding the specific details of Luffy's childhood psychology.
The moment the name Luffy saturated their dialogue, the pair became entirely incapable of arresting their verbal output. Time evaporated like a fleeting shadow.
Yet what their sensory arrays failed to register was that a catastrophic, high-velocity threat was rapidly closing the distance to their perimeter.
A short timeline prior, the Navy Headquarters had unleashed the absolute totality of its available military mass, initiating an unprecedented, global campaign explicitly designed to crush the Revolutionary Army's infrastructure worldwide.
Currently, the resistance's provisional supreme command was anchored within the Kamabakka Kingdom. Resistance nodes across every single sea quadrant were simultaneously enduring heavy orbital bombardment and synchronized strike-team deployments from the Navy's armada.
However, due to the peerless operational security and exceptionally high mobility cultivated by the resistance subsystems, the local cells immediately executed strategic dispersals the exact microsecond a threat marker materialized.
Even though the global regime had deployed 100% of its naval assets to finalize this purge, they had failed to inflict a single fatal, structural wound upon the core architecture of the Revolutionary Army. It was a mathematical reality; the resistance possessed zero static assets. Every single provisional sanctuary could be permanently abandoned in a matter of minutes.
Nevertheless, the supreme architects of the World Government—the Five Elders—had successfully achieved their primary tactical objective.
They had intentionally oversaturated the global landscape with violence to ensure that the central command structure of the Revolutionary Army possessed absolute zero resource margin to deploy an extraction vanguard to reinforce Sabo's coordinate.
Deep within the command matrix of the Kamabakka Kingdom, Dragon's expression had turned remarkably grim.
Receiving this massive flood of combat telemetry at this exact juncture made the adversary's intent glaringly obvious: the global regime was systematically locking down their logistics network to isolate Sabo. Dragon deciphered the layout with a single glance.
"Dragon-boy! The active data points are looking incredibly unstable. The containment parameters surrounding Sabo's coordinate..." Emporio Ivankov noted, his large face hardening into a mask of deep anxiety.
"There is no requirement for internal panic," Dragon stated flatly, a sharp, piercing brilliance erupting from his eyes as his dark hair began to drift under an unnatural air current. "Sabo and his vanguard will not suffer a structural failure."
"Sabo..." Koala murmured, her fingers trembling as she frantically tried to recalibrate the communications array. Although the telemetry verified that Sabo's biological signatures hadn't been terminated, the core reality was that their encryption keys were failing to establish a stable link. They had gone completely dark.
Although the Navy's strike fleets hadn't unearth the coordinates of their central command node yet, it was merely a matter of time before the CP0 surveillance net closed the loop. This was the absolute peak of the World Government's intelligence capability.
Every single motor command generated by the resistance was being meticulously tracked by the regime's phantom vanguard, rendering any direct logistics deployment to reinforce Sabo nothing more than a structural delusion.
"The Gorosei will invariably deploy a top-tier combat asset from the Marine Headquarters to freeze our position here. My analytical models project that the entity approaching our perimeter is Admiral Kizaru," Dragon noted, his gaze tracking toward the distant horizon as his thoughts returned to a state of absolute redaction.
"Admiral Kizaru?!" The surrounding commanders gasped in unison.
This was catastrophic news. The exact microsecond the Navy anchored a Marine Admiral before their coordinates, initiating an external deployment became a structural impossibility. And Sabo's vanguard lacked the necessary resource margins to endure an extended timeline.
Yet they never harbored a single shred of raw doubt regarding Dragon's analytical deductions. His data models were always flawlessly accurate.
And the reality tracking precisely along the lines of his calculation.
At this exact fraction of a second, an armada of five capital warships was leisurely cutting through the ocean currents, heading straight toward the coordinates of the Kamabakka Kingdom. Standing at the absolute front of the lead vessel, draped in a tailored pinstripe suit and a sweeping Justice coat, was Marine Admiral Kizaru.
Concurrently, across a completely distinct sector of the Grand Line—just a few nautical miles outside the perimeter of the secluded island where Sabo's group was resting—two capital warships were slicing through the waves at terrifying velocity, rapidly closing the distance to their location.
Standing at the absolute vanguard of the armada were Admirals Fujitora and Ryokugyu.
Furthermore, the World Government hadn't restricted the deployment solely to the military command; anchoring the main deck of the trailing vessel was an elite assembly of six to seven operatives cloaked in pristine, sweeping white robes and masked visages.
CP0!
The Five Elders had finalized an absolute, unyielding resolve for this crusade: they were going to systematically liquidate Sabo and permanently erase his entire vanguard from the face of the earth.