When Katakuri first entered Sabaody, he hadn't moved to take control of the city in any real sense. He had raised the Grey Kingdom's flag over the Heavenly Palace, and then simply waited. Everything else had to wait for Rosinante. Without him, there was no point in trying to manage a city of this size, and the handful of Oathblood Guards who had come with Katakuri were nowhere near enough to hold it.
That changed the moment Rosinante arrived with Enel and the rest of the Oathblood. From that point on, the takeover moved quickly and completely. Guards were dispatched across the city, and Sabaody's streets came under the Oathblood's watch.
Four hundred people, for a city this vast, should not have been enough.
But these were Oathblood Guards. Every single one of them had mastered Observation Haki, and with that came a kind of coverage that raw numbers couldn't replicate. A few dozen people with fully developed Observation Haki could stabilize the order of an entire city. Four hundred of them made it look effortless.
There was also the matter of what each Guard represented individually. Any one of them, pulled at random from the formation, was a fighter on par with a pirate captain carrying a bounty in the hundreds of millions. Their presence on the streets alone was enough to make most troublemakers reconsider their choices before doing anything stupid.
Those who didn't reconsider were dealt with, cleanly and without hesitation.
And above it all, Enel watched. His range covered the entire city, and whenever someone decided to push their luck, lightning came down from a clear sky with precise, unhurried accuracy. After the third or fourth time, the mood across Sabaody shifted. The pirates who had stayed behind began to understand that the rules here were different now, and one by one they pulled their impulses back in line.
...
The journalists had been ready since the moment the Grey Kingdom's flag went up over the Heavenly Palace. The instinct had been immediate, the same pull a shark feels at the first trace of blood in the water. Cameras out, moving toward the story.
Then their editors had stopped them cold.
For years, the World Government had maintained a near-total embargo on news involving the Grey Kingdom. No publication, no coverage, no exceptions. The editors knew what their organizations were risking. And so, despite sitting on what was obviously the biggest story any of them had seen in years, they had held back.
Until Rosinante himself appeared on the archipelago.
That was the moment the calculus changed. The Dragon King Rosinante's return was not the kind of event that could be suppressed by an editorial decision. It was a tsunami in the making. Every news organization on the island recognized it at the same time, and the restraint broke all at once. Reporters flooded into Sabaody, photographing the flag over the Heavenly Palace, the Oathblood Guards on patrol, anything and everything they could get in frame.
By evening, the headlines were already set.
For the first time in ten years, the Grey Kingdom's flag flies once more above the Heavenly Palace of Sabaody!
The Dragon King Rosinante, missing for a decade, leads the Grey Kingdom in reclaiming the Undying City!
The Dragon King has returned. Sabaody belongs to him.
The Grey Kingdom assumes full control of the Undying City.
The presses ran, the News Coo took flight, and the papers scattered to every corner of the world before the night was out.
Afterward, the editors waited. Anxious, uncertain, bracing for consequences. Every hour that passed without a response from the World Government felt like borrowed time.
Then the response came, and it was not what anyone had expected.
A document arrived at the offices of every major news organization. Delivered from the office of the Five Elders themselves.
The editors who read it stared at the page for a long moment before they could find words.
"He's a Celestial Dragon? The noblest bloodline in the world?"
The document laid out two things clearly.
First: Rosinante had been born of Celestial Dragon blood. When his father voluntarily renounced that status, Rosinante lost it along with him. However, the Five Elders and the Celestial Dragon Council of Elders had now convened and resolved to restore Rosinante's Celestial Dragon status in full, and to further confer upon him the position of Vice President of the Council of Elders. He was henceforth to be addressed as Saint Donquixote Rosinante.
Second: the Oathblood Guard were to be recognized as the personal escort of Vice President Saint Donquixote Rosinante, and were not to be considered pirates. All bounties were hereby rescinded, including those on Katakuri, Binks, Enel, Dark Thorn, and every other member of the organization.
"What on earth could have made the World Government bend this far?" one editor murmured, setting the document down. He had spent years navigating the space between the press and the World Government. He understood how these institutions worked, and more importantly, how they thought.
Rosinante's father had walked away from his Celestial Dragon status willingly. In the eyes of the Celestial Dragons, that was not a resignation. It was a betrayal. And the Celestial Dragons did not forget betrayals, and they did not forgive them.
No achievement, regardless of how extraordinary, should have been enough to make the World Government overlook that. This was a matter of the Celestial Dragons' standing and their pride, and those two things had always been placed above everything else.
Unless the World Government had no choice. Unless something had forced their hand.
And then there was the position itself. Vice President of the Celestial Dragon Council of Elders was not a ceremonial title. The Council was the highest governing body the Celestial Dragons possessed, the institution that administered and directed their world. For those who still weren't certain what that meant, there was one reference point that made it clear: the Five Elders, the supreme authority of the World Government, held the rank of Vice President in that very Council.
Five of them. Five Vice Presidents.
And now Rosinante was the sixth.
The concession the World Government had made was not just unprecedented. It was the kind of thing that shouldn't have been possible.
The editor felt a chill move through him. Does the Dragon King possess something capable of destroying the World Government itself?
Had Rosinante known what was passing through that editor's mind, he might have smiled and said nothing. Had the Five Elders known, their response would have been simpler and considerably less pleasant.
You know far too much.