Krieg's lips trembled, unable to say a single word. Bounty difference? He had only seen the eighty million Berries; to him, that was a mountain of gold, the capital for him to dominate the Grand Line! He had never considered what kind of terrifying power lay behind those digits.
Lorne tilted his head and continued to ask:
"Or perhaps you thought that because I'm an ability user, I'd be helpless once I fall into the sea, so you could easily defeat me with your three thousand lackeys and the ocean environment?"
Krieg looked up blankly, his distorted face full of incomprehension. ability user? The sea? What were those?
In a place like the East Blue, the existence of devil fruits was merely a legend to the vast majority of people.
Seeing him like this, Lorne understood instantly and sighed softly.
"Sigh, I asked for nothing."
Sure enough, they were just a bunch of frogs in a well who didn't even possess basic knowledge of the world, yet were arrogant beyond measure.
Although Krieg didn't understand Lorne's previous words, he understood Lorne's current posture of disappointment and impatience.
An unprecedented sense of deathly crisis completely overwhelmed him. His already collapsed nerves could no longer hold out, and his massive body suddenly lunged forward as he prepared to kneel and beg for mercy.
"Wait! I... I'm willing to offer all my treasures! Spare my life!"
"I..."
Before he could finish his sentence, frost began to spread upward from the ice sword at his throat, sealing his mouth and plugging his unfinished words back forever.
Amidst endless fear, Krieg's body was completely encased in a layer of translucent ice, turning into a lifelike ice sculpture with an expression of mingled pleading and terror frozen on his face.
At the same time, the ice crystal storm that had swallowed Gin and the others had expanded to a terrifying degree, sweeping across the entire frozen fleet and pulling every pirate from all thirty ships into its vortex.
After the storm passed, everything returned to a dead silence.
The three thousand pirates, without exception, had all turned into ice sculptures in various poses, standing quietly upon the ships.
Every ice sculpture was pierced by hideous ice spikes, like thorns growing out from within their bodies, pinning them into a despairing eternity.
Lorne withdrew the ice sword from the throat of Krieg's ice sculpture, letting it dissipate into points of light.
He began to stroll leisurely across the main ship, eventually finding all the treasure the Krieg Pirates had plundered in the captain's quarters: several large chests of gold and silver jewelry and some Berries.
He merely gave them a casual glance before transferring these items, along with the food, fresh water, and other supplies stored on the ship, to his own small boat.
Finally, he picked up a thick logbook. Having finished all this, Lorne returned to his single-person sailboat.
He gave the ice beneath his feet a light tap, and the hard ice around the small boat began to melt rapidly, turning back into azure seawater.
The small boat regained its freedom and, carried by the sea breeze, slowly sailed away from this frozen graveyard consisting of thirty ghost ships.
Not long after, a Marine patrol ship flying the seagull flag received a terrified report from a nearby merchant ship and cautiously entered this sea region.
When the lookout saw the scene before him clearly, the binoculars in his hand fell to the deck with a clatter.
"Report... report! The... the Krieg Fleet... all... all of them..."
The young soldier was incoherent, his face deathly pale.
A Marine Lieutenant snatched the binoculars. When he saw the terrifying scene of thirty ships frozen on the sea, filled with ice sculptures of pirates pierced by ice spikes, a chill ran from the soles of his feet to the top of his head.
"Immediately... immediately report to the branch! No! Use the highest-level emergency communication directly to report to Marine Headquarters!"
The Lieutenant's voice was trembling.
"frost fairy Lorne... bounty of eighty million Berries...! This is... a real monster!"
Meanwhile, on the other side, far from that sea of death, Lorne was leisurely sitting on his boat, flipping through Krieg's logbook.
The log's entries were vulgar and arrogant, filled with greed for wealth and disregard for life.
Lorne flipped through quickly until a place name suddenly caught his attention.
East Blue, Sambas Region, Sea Restaurant Baratie... possessing highly skilled chefs... Baratie?
Memories surfaced in Lorne's mind.
He remembered that Sanji seemed to have been exiled to the East Blue by his father, Judge, at the age of eight or nine. Later, the passenger ship he was on was attacked by Zeff the Red-Leg, followed by a shipwreck where the two of them starved on a deserted island for over eighty days. Only after being rescued did they open the Sea Restaurant Baratie.
Calculating the time, Sanji should be around eleven years old now. In that case, Baratie should already be open and have made quite a name for itself in the East Blue.
Lorne rubbed his chin; the continuous sailing had made him a bit tired of dry rations.
He closed the logbook and adjusted the direction of the sails.
"Before heading to the Grand Line, enjoying some top-tier cuisine seems like a pretty good choice."
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