[Chapter Extra · Days on the Kuja East Route · Bug Fix · "The Game of the Princess and the Future Empress"]
[After arriving on Rusukaina Island, Robin and Hancock summoned Liam's Stand and had it extract each of their Devil Fruits so they could exchange them…]
[Baby 5 left in tears, completely devastated.]
["'Don't worry. I don't bully little girls.'"]
[Robin nodded, rubbing her chin as she muttered, "That much is true."]
[Liam glanced at her.]
[Robin smiled.]
[Doflamingo forced himself to remain standing and asked calmly, "I still want to know… why did you insist on helping the Marines kill me…?"]
[Liam turned around, thought for a moment, then asked, "Which do you think matters more to me, you, or the Marines?"]
["Fuf fuf fuf…" Doflamingo gave a low laugh. "It wouldn't be the Marines, would it?"]
["Neither you nor the Marines matter to me," Liam said. "But having you gone is more important."]
["I see…"]
[Doflamingo gave a faint response and curled the corner of his mouth. He seemed to want to give another contemptuous "fuf fuf fuf," but he simply didn't have the strength left.]
[He stood frozen in place until, little by little, his voice faded away.]
[Liam clenched his fist and looked toward Robin. A moment later, flames began to burn around his fist…]
---
The flames finally died away. A tall, charred humanoid stood motionless amid the smoke, his features almost impossible to make out.
"Could that be…"
"That Doflamingo?"
"Donquixote Doflamingo?!"
The Marines arrived and slowly lowered their weapons, staring blankly at the blackened figure still giving off smoke. A huge, burned-out hole had been blasted through his chest, his heart completely pierced and destroyed.
With injuries like that, followed by being burned to this state, there was no question he was thoroughly dead.
"What on earth happened here…?"
The Marines looked around in horror. Craters of all sizes pocked the terrain, and frozen blood remained in many of them. It was easy to imagine how brutal the battle here had been.
"Was this really a fight between human beings?!"
Apart from the enormous slash that had nearly split half the island apart, the surrounding ground was covered in countless tiny, crisscrossing cuts…
"One battle completely changed the terrain. How is that even possible?"
Huge sections of ground had been forced upward. It didn't look as though the terrain had simply been smashed apart. Despite its bizarre new shape, everything was still largely intact, just horribly distorted, as if the ground itself had stopped looking like ground.
"Your ability really did awaken…"
Tsuru walked over with her arms folded.
She stopped before the charred, hollow corpse that somehow remained standing even in death, looked up at it, and said calmly, "And even so, you're still the one who lost… Donquixote."
Who had ultimately defeated Doflamingo?
Giorno? Or Jolyne Cujoh?
Tsuru had been kept outside the Birdcage and was too far away to see what happened clearly. She also wasn't very familiar with these two newly appointed Shichibukai, so she couldn't piece together the exact details of the battle.
One thing, however, was certain: the Donquixote Family had been destroyed here today.
Wiped out in one stroke by the JoJo Pirates…
Just two people had uprooted the powerful underworld force that had dominated the North Blue for years!
The whole thing had been so easy, so absurdly simple, that it almost felt unreal.
Giorno and Jolyne Cujoh had heard that Doflamingo was here. They came. They killed Doflamingo. Then they left…
That simple?
Yes. That simple. It hadn't even taken them several days from start to finish. They had accomplished, cleanly and decisively, something the Marines had failed to achieve for years.
Honestly, this made the Marines look pretty useless…
Tsuru sighed softly. Naturally, she could comfort her fellow Marines by saying that without the crucial intelligence provided by the Marines, which had allowed them to locate the Donquixote Family, even these two members of the JoJo Pirates could never have wiped out the entire family so easily…
There were always excuses to be found if you wanted one.
But as a veteran Marine who had served in the same era as Sengoku and Garp, Tsuru had no interest in making excuses for herself, nor did she need to.
She simply said, "Search the surrounding area. There should be bodies belonging to the other Donquixote Family officers as well…"
They didn't have to go far. Among the nearby piles of broken stone, the Marines soon found half of Pica's body.
"One of the Donquixote Family's top officers… Pica, the Stone Man…"
The Marines swallowed nervously.
Just then, a Marine came running over with a Den Den Mushi in his hands.
"Vice Admiral Tsuru! The Den Den Mushi seems to be working again!"
'Purupurupurupuru…' The Den Den Mushi gurgled softly. The radio interference that had plagued them earlier was finally gone, allowing it to receive and transmit normally again.
Tsuru frowned slightly. But the incident had passed without any clear cause, and there was no point dwelling on something they couldn't explain.
"Then take plenty of photographs of the scene. We'll send them to Headquarters, and they'll also be needed for the newspapers."
"Yes, ma'am!"
The Marines followed her orders and spread out.
Before long, they found the bodies of the Donquixote Family officers Jora and Gladius nearby. Then, in the abandoned town beneath the high slope, they found the other officers, Trebol, Diamante, and Machvise. One had been beheaded, another had died after being pierced through the chest by a barrage of blades, while the third had twisted limbs and a shattered skull, as though the impact of a heavy blow had crushed him from the inside out…
'Click. Click. Click…'
The Marines went around photographing the entire scene with the Den Den Mushi. Naturally, among all the officers, the most important subject was Doflamingo himself, still standing upright as a charred corpse.
They then gathered the bodies of the Donquixote Family officers together and arranged them around Doflamingo before taking another series of photographs.
"It really is over…"
Only now did the Marines truly feel the reality of it. The Donquixote Family, a criminal organization that had been entrenched in the North Blue and causing trouble for years, had been completely wiped out.
"It feels like we didn't even do anything. A criminal force this huge just vanished like smoke…"
The Donquixote Family had essentially followed an elite strategy. Apart from its core officers, whatever other members it had were little more than insignificant fringe figures.
Even without the Donquixote Family taking them in, those people would have joined some other pirate crew and muddled through life, or simply found an island and become bandits, tyrants, thugs, or common criminals… Once the Donquixote name collapsed, those minor players naturally scattered as well.
The Donquixote Family of the North Blue had officially become history.
"Vice Admiral Tsuru!"
Marines from another direction came hurrying over, carrying several people. "We found some survivors… They're also high-ranking officers of the Donquixote Family. Señor Pink and Lao G!"
Tsuru frowned and looked at the two men her subordinates had carried over. Both were covered in wounds and still unconscious, looking as though they might stop breathing at any moment.
"Lock them up for now and take them back to Headquarters," she ordered.
"Yes, ma'am." The Marines carried away the two surviving members of the Donquixote Family.
After bagging the bodies of Doflamingo and several of his top officers, the Marines headed back toward the battleship on the shore.
…
When they reached the shore, the Marines could already see a tall, muscular man sitting on the battleship's railing with his bare upper body exposed, alongside a tall woman.
The Marines stationed on the shore and deck watched the pair with varying expressions, some nervous, some wary, and some carrying a hint of admiration. Yet the two seemed completely oblivious to the attention. Sitting side by side, they casually enjoyed the snowy scenery of the North Blue and chatted as if they hadn't a care in the world.
"Giorno!"
"Jolyne Cujoh!"
The Marines returning with Tsuru exclaimed in surprise. The scene they had witnessed after the battle was simply too shocking, and the fact that the Donquixote Family had been wiped out in one sweep was almost unbelievable.
Everyone knew that two Great Pirates with a combined bounty of more than 700 million were terrifying. Everyone knew that the reports of them clashing head-on with Whitebeard weren't baseless rumors. And everyone knew that anyone granted the title of Shichibukai certainly hadn't earned it for nothing…
But only after witnessing the aftermath of the battle that had destroyed the Donquixote Family, well, they had only witnessed the aftermath, since the actual battle had taken place inside that enormous cage, could they truly understand what kind of terrifying existence a Great Pirate capable of stirring up the New World in the second half of the Grand Line really was.
They were practically a different species of "human monster."
The Donquixote Family had come all the way from the New World to the North Blue, an enormous underworld force that seemed almost untouchable. Yet these two had crushed them without a second thought, stomped them into the dirt, then sat on a Marine battleship chatting as though nothing had happened…
Were pirates from the New World really all this fearless?
"Hm?"
Liam had been chatting with Robin when he glanced back toward the shore and smiled. "Vice Admiral Tsuru, you're finally back."
Tsuru looked up from the shore. "Do you two need something?"
Liam looked puzzled. "Naturally, we're waiting for you to come back so we can set sail. We can't exactly take the battleship out without you, can we?"
Tsuru was speechless for a moment. "Don't you have your own pirate ship?"
Headquarters had arranged for the battleship to bring these two here so they could deal with Doflamingo as quickly as possible. Now that Doflamingo was dead, they weren't even in a hurry. So why were they hanging around on a Marine battleship?
Sure, they were Shichibukai, but they were still pirates. Did they have no sense of boundaries at all?
Liam laughed. "Come on. A pirate ship isn't nearly as fun to ride as a battleship. I finally got to become a Shichibukai, so what's wrong with enjoying a ride on a battleship?"
Tsuru calmly replied, "You're not the Shichibukai. The woman beside you is."
"Eh, same thing." Liam waved a hand. "Are you coming aboard or not? Because if you don't, I really will steal this battleship."
"Go ahead and try."
Tsuru genuinely didn't believe these two would start picking a fight with the Marines immediately after becoming Shichibukai. Even as Shichibukai, stealing a battleship would certainly bring consequences. They might even have their titles revoked on the spot.
Robin let out a quiet sigh. She knew that ever since Nico Robin had become a Shichibukai, what Liam was looking forward to most was the moment when the World Government discovered that the Shichibukai they had personally appointed was actually the very "Devil Child" they had desperately wanted to eliminate. That would be enough to make him laugh all night…
So Liam genuinely didn't care about either his relationship with the Marines or the Shichibukai title. He wouldn't kindly volunteer the truth to the Marines, of course, but he certainly didn't mind being even more reckless about it.
"All right." Robin took Liam's hand and pulled him away from the railing.
It used to be Liam who was reluctant to let Jolyne Cujoh's disguise slip. Now Robin herself was the one who didn't want her identity exposed.
Tsuru didn't argue with them. She waved her subordinates over and ordered them to load the Donquixote Family members onto the battleship, securing the living prisoners and properly storing the bodies of the dead.
Once everything had been taken care of, Tsuru stood on deck looking out at the sea and casually asked, "Giorno, how old are you this year?"
"You're asking me?"
Liam and Robin were leaning against the outside wall of the battleship's cabin, with an empty circle of space around them because none of the Marines dared come too close. Liam scratched his head and turned to Robin.
"How old am I this year?"
"Two years older than me…" Robin replied.
"Oh!" Liam turned back toward Tsuru. "Then I'm…"
Robin continued, "I'm thirty, so you're thirty-two."
"…"
The lie was so obvious that Tsuru couldn't even be bothered to respond. She simply said to her subordinates, "Set sail. We're returning to Headquarters."
"Yes, ma'am!"
The Marines answered loudly.
Liam lowered his head and glanced at Robin. She rested the side of her head against his arm and quietly said, "That year, my mother was thirty years old too…"
Before long, the seagull flag atop the battleship was flying in the wind as the ship sailed through the snowstorms of the North Blue, slowly heading toward North Blue's Red Port, the port at the junction of the Red Line and the Grand Line…
…
…
〖Marineford, Marine Headquarters…〗
The fax Den Den Mushi went 'pururururu' as it slowly spat out photograph after photograph.
Looking at the scene photos faxed over from the North Blue, Admiral Sengoku was speechless for a moment. That brat Giorno had said he was going to kill Doflamingo, and he really had gone and done it…
(End of Chapter)
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