The World Government had mobilized its absolute mass for this coordinated purge, and the explicit strategic objective of the campaign was to systematically liquidate Sabo and his entire vanguard.
Achieving this outcome would deliver a devastating structural wound to the core infrastructure of the Revolutionary Army, buying the global regime a massive window to stabilize and consolidate its power. Once the subversives were fractured, the Navy's subsequent campaigns to completely wipe out the remaining resistance nodes would become exceptionally simple.
However, to the analytical minds of the Five Elders, an alternative objective that carried an identical threat level was the absolute, clean capture of Princess Nefertari Vivi of the Arabasta Kingdom.
Deep within the primary deck of the chasing warship, an elite strike team cloaked in masked visages and sweeping white robes was covertly orchestrating a tactical plan.
They had received an absolute, unyielding command directly from the Gorosei to secure Princess Vivi alive—and the explicit caveat of this mission dictated they avoid generating a single fraction of noise that might alert the Marine Admirals sailing alongside their fleet.
A classified black-operation.
The Five Elders' fanatical, absolute obsession with securing the arrest of Princess Vivi sent a primitive chill down the spines of even these hardened CP0 assassins.
Throughout the entire history of their service, they had never witnessed the supreme architects of the world regime project such a toxic, intense layer of pure malice.
A short timeline prior, when they had crossed the threshold of the hidden sanctuary in Mary Geoise to receive their field directives, the behavioral parameters of the Five Elders had completely shattered their past expectations.
Across their memory files, the Gorosei were legendary monuments who remained perfectly immovable, their faces failing to register a single fraction of emotion even if a mountain collapsed before their perimeter.
Historically, though the Elders maintained an immense, unbridled arrogance befitting their supreme status, their administrative dealings were generally conducted with cold, measured serenity. They had never once erupted into a state of genuine, blinding rage over any historical crisis.
But this timeline had thrown back a completely inverted data pattern, effectively overturning the assassins' absolute baseline understanding of the regime.
The exact microsecond the syllables naming Princess Vivi of Arabasta saturated the air, the faces of all five supreme administrators instantly hardened into masks that resembled cold corpses.
Particularly the bald Elder, who had historically maintained a continuous stream of vocal commands throughout their councils. This time, he had remained entirely tight-lipped, the raw, suffocating darkness radiating from his expression looking terrifyingly intense.
From the inception of the conference to its final second, he had driven only a solitary sentence into their communication channels: "Failure is mathematically forbidden; absolute success is your solitary option. Should your vanguard return with a compromised outcome, your vessels shall execute immediate self-liquidation to pay the debt!"
Even now, as the operatives replayed the technical parameters of that meeting within their minds, their physical vessels executed a sudden, involuntary shudder.
That frozen, heavy tone—devoid of a single shred of human emotion—left their baseline composure permanently fractured.
They possessed absolute data verifying that the Gorosei were not speaking in hyperbole. If their campaign suffered a structural failure today, the consequences would be absolute...
"This Princess Vivi anchors a highly specialized identity parameter across the global matrix. Central Command has explicitly decreed her asset must be secured alive. Our campaign cannot tolerate a single fraction of operational failure," the vanguard commander stated behind his mask, his voice heavy with solemn gravity.
"Understood!"
The surrounding operatives nodded with intense focus, locking down their resolution.
A military realignment of this staggering magnitude engineered by the World Government and the Marine Headquarters was mathematically incapable of remaining hidden from the global surveillance arrays of the world.
The prominent, top-tier powerhouses ruling the seas rapidly compiled accurate data regarding the Navy's vector—especially the pirate armadas.
The Navy's systematic campaigns to suppress and liquidate the pirate factions had historically proceeded without a single hour of intermission.
Ever since Akainu had formalised his ascension to the throne of Fleet Admiral, the raw violence unleashed against the pirate population had scaled at an exponential rate. The exact microsecond a Marine cruiser mapped a pirate vessel, their eyes would turn bloodshot with incandescent fury.
Throughout these two years, the waves had been a continuous theater of relentless warfare.
Yet down the line, the Navy's global operational structure had suddenly executed a total paradigm shift, completely freezing their aggressive campaigns against the pirate territories.
Claiming that this sudden relaxation of military pressure lacked a massive, underlying cause was an analysis not a single pirate across this ocean would believe.
Recalling their front-line fleets, condensing their primary flag officers, consolidating their absolute combat mass—it was glaringly obvious that a world-shaping blitzkrieg was initializing.
Following a frantic sequence of intelligence gathering, the global networks rapidly unraveled the core puzzle: the Navy was deploying its absolute mass to launch a total crusade against the Revolutionary Army.
Multiple Marine Admirals had initiated synchronized deployments simultaneously.
A military event of this scale hadn't materialized across the sea for two long years.
The historical benchmark for an mobilization of this magnitude was the Summit War of Marineford—yet this time, the target of the purge was the global resistance.
The exact microsecond the data stabilized, the pirate populations across every sea quadrant erupted into pure frenzy. The news that the Navy and the Revolutionary Army were locking horns in an unrestricted, total war was the absolute best layout they could have ever dreamed of.
With the Navy exhausting 100% of its resource margins to neutralize the revolutionaries, they would possess absolute zero operational capacity to regulate the pirate factions.
The lawless elements were naturally ecstatic.
Pirates, by their very biological engineering, were creatures who thrived exclusively on global chaos. Now that the Marine command had pivoted its attention toward the resistance, the criminal networks were suddenly granted absolute, unconstrained liberty.
Catastrophic tectonic shifts began rippling across the entire planet. Within the pirate hierarchy, there existed small-scale exceptions like Luffy and his vanguard, who pursued nothing but absolute freedom and the purity of their dreams.
But the overwhelming majority of the population deployed exclusively to satisfy their own toxic greed, bringing absolute devastation onto the innocent lives anchoring the islands.
Broadly speaking, pirates remained a collective of lawless, chaotic subversives. Voyagers who harbored grand ideals and pure hearts like Luffy were a microscopic percentage of the demographic.
The vast majority were predatory, intensely ambitious monsters.
The exact microsecond they mapped this global disruption, their calculations aligned perfectly to exploit the window. Initiating their own strategic expansion blueprints, certain syndicates initiated localized territory wars to seize land, while others launched brutal, unbridled raids against ordinary populations.
In a matter of days, the entire maritime world devolved into a theater of total, unmitigated chaos.
The East Blue, the West Blue, the South Blue, the North Blue—all four sovereign quadrants descended into absolute lawlessness. And the disruption wasn't restricted solely to the baseline seas; the Grand Line and the New World tier were similarly fracturing under the weight of the violence.
The entire planet was experiencing an unprecedented, cataclysmic metamorphosis.
And the prominent powerhouses anchoring the high-stakes sectors of the New World had naturally processed the comprehensive telemetry detailing the collision between the Navy and the resistance.
Whole Cake Island.
Deep within the central command chamber of Queen Chateau, Big Mom and her elite progeny had convened a high-level summit.
Anchoring the front lines of the assembly were the remaining Sweet Commanders, Charlotte Katakuri and Charlotte Smoothie.
At this current juncture, the atmosphere saturating the Big Mom Pirates had completely shed the unbridled arrogance of their past.
Setting aside the initial operational failure they had sustained during Drake's first cruise, their recent deployment to Wano Country had been an absolute, defining disaster for the fleet. They had slunk back across the horizon thoroughly broken.
To add to the humiliation, global intelligence organizations had cleanly stripped the mantle of an Emperor from their mother's profile.
The physical trauma their Mother had sustained during that conflict had failed to achieve full optimization; her current strength metrics remained substantially depleted.
Countless rising pirate syndicates were frantically trying to leverage this precise data window to launch predatory campaigns against Whole Cake Island, calculating that successfully stomping upon the fractured Big Mom Pirates would instantly secure them an absolute, legendary reputation across the New World.
After all, regardless of their active depletion, their organization had historically functioned as a Yonko-tier armada.
For the magnificent empire of Big Mom—which had held an uncontested, sovereign dominion over these waves for decades—to have its imperial reputation completely erased from the hierarchy was a narrative that would have shattered the cognitive sanity of anyone a few months ago.
But the active era had altered the laws of probability. Realities that ordinary men had deemed mathematically impossible were now materializing back-to-back without a single hour of intermission.
The sudden ascension of the Legendary Four Brothers had fundamentally reconstructed the global worldview of every living soul on the planet.
Ordinary minds had never dared to rationalize that individuals possessing that tier of absolute, unrefined strength and world-shaking reputation could realistically exist at such a young age.
And the anomaly wasn't restricted to a single entity—there were four of them!
Every single strategic action they executed across the timeline was more than sufficient to carve their names permanently into the eternal bedrock of global history.
Their initial awakening: penetrating the lines of Marineford to cleanly extract Fire Fist Ace from the scaffold.
The incandescent fury of the Flame Emperor: completely obliterating the entire Marshall D. Teach network from the annals of the sea.
The coordinated cruise of Drake and Luffy: permanently shattering the sovereign myth of the Big Mom Pirates across Whole Cake Island.
The cataclysmic summit of Wano Country: simultaneously conquering the combined mass of the World's Strongest Creature, Kaido of the Beasts, and Charlotte Linlin.
And now, the Dragon King Sabo: the absolute second-in-command of the global resistance, leading a minimal vanguard of Division Commanders into the hyper-secure core of Mary Geoise, trading balanced blows against two Marine Admirals, and executing a total, clean retreat!
This continuous stream of monumental milestones left the collective consciousness of the ocean experiencing a profound, almost magical sense of unreality.
To carry the banner of a true pirate meant refining one's vessel to match the legendary blueprints etched by the Legendary Four Brothers.
Consequently, throughout this recent timeline, the stream of ambitious interlopers arriving to challenge the borders of the Big Mom Pirates had been practically limitless.
During the initial phase of the disruption, Big Mom would still personally step onto the shoreline to unleash her Soul Pocus, restoring absolute terror across the vanguard. But the incoming pirates quickly unraveled the telemetry of her unresolved injuries, rendering their subsequent assaults even more reckless and self-sacrificing.
Though the challengers remained completely outmatched by Big Mom's raw physical mass, not a single faction aborted their deployment.
Over a prolonged timeline, the volume of provocations failed to decrease, instead scaling up with high-velocity momentum.
By this stage, Big Mom had entirely lost the patience required to personally neutralize every piece of street-level garbage hitting her shores. Permanently delegating the elimination of these interlopers onto Katakuri's shoulders, she had entered a phase of total, unconstrained seclusion to focus exclusively on optimizing her biological healing.
The structural trauma she had sustained during her lethal clash against Drake and Ace was profoundly deep; it was far from a wound that could be resolved in a brief timeline.
And today, the elite core of the family had gathered to finalize a definitive strategic decree.
Given the chaotic, reality-bending paradigm shift currently fracturing the global matrix—where exactly should the Big Mom Pirates steer their empire to preserve their existence?