After his loud declaration in Loguetown and the destruction of the Pirate King's execution platform—after such an open spit in the face of the entire world—who did not know the true reason behind the former bounty hunter's enormous bounty? The whole world knew. Everyone understood perfectly well that his notorious two hundred million berries had very little to do with his actual strength.
And, importantly, exactly the same could be said of his previous bounty.
The newspapers never stated it outright, but anyone capable of even a little thought could read between the lines. A man whom nearly the entire world's press had praised as the Savior of East Blue had suddenly become a pirate. Who could forgive something like that? He had been exalted as a genuine hero, only for that hero to suddenly reveal the 'rot' inside him. The Government had held him up as an example to others, and he responded by giving them the middle finger.
Could people in power simply forgive an insult like that? Exactly. Hence the bounty.
In reality, everyone understood that even fifty million would have been too much. And if you stopped to think about it, what had he actually done that was so special? Killed a bunch of weak pirates in the weakest sea of them all? Ha! What an achievement! As though nobody else could manage that.
Besides, the moment the 'Pirate Killer' lost the favor of the 'big shots', all kinds of interesting details previously unknown to the general public immediately began crawling into the light. By now, everyone knew for certain that Roronoa Zoro's fame as an unsurpassed bounty hunter—the virtual Savior of East Blue—had, shall we say, not been entirely honest. Not entirely? It had simply been dishonest.
The great pirate hunter, mercilessly killing every criminal who crossed his path for years, before finally crushing an entire pirate armada and putting a definitive end to piracy in East Blue. It sounded impressive. What had especially been emphasized at the time was that the pirate armada of a certain Don Krieg supposedly consisted of a full hundred ships and more than ten thousand men.
And Roronoa Zoro and his people had defeated such a force while numbering only four people at the time—one of whom was a beautiful navigator who had not participated in the battle at all.
Although such a victory looked absurd under ordinary logic—three people against ten thousand? Come on!—amid the wave of hype whipped up by journalists, nobody had paid much attention to the contradiction. The important thing was that East Blue had become safe. There were practically no pirates left in the sea. Hooray! And the public swallowed it all without complaint.
There had certainly been plenty of people who doubted the truth of such reports—how could there not be?—but very few had been seriously inclined to smear good news, even if that good news had been exaggerated beyond all reason. The moment the 'Pirate Slayers' unfurled black sails bearing pirate symbols and raised a proper pirate flag, however, the situation changed completely. Everyone who had previously been dissatisfied immediately straightened proudly and began turning up their noses with the words, 'I told you so!'
As anyone who read newspapers even occasionally understood, the moment the Government gave the signal, the journalists went straight to work. For the first couple of weeks, they diligently fed firewood into the boiling cauldron of public anger. Then they turned to the past of Roronoa Zoro, who by that point had already become an almost legendary pirate hunter.
And the moment journalists began digging into his past, the incredible rise of the unsurpassed pirate hunter immediately began acquiring additional details. The consequences followed quickly. The more details appeared, the less 'incredible', 'unsurpassed', and 'legendary' the story of the 'Pirate Killer' became.
Who still remembered Gadi 'Bloodsucker', with a ten-million-berry bounty? Roronoa Zoro really had killed him. But why had nobody mentioned that while Zoro was fighting him, Gadi's men were being attacked by three full Marine platoons?
And what about Sarg 'Bright-Eyes', with a twelve-million-berry bounty? Roronoa Zoro had killed him too, and that was true. But it was equally true that by the time of his death, Sarg and his people had already spent almost three days fleeing ten Marine ships. By the time Roronoa Zoro boarded Sarg's vessel, less than half of the 'Bright-Eyed' pirate's original crew remained, and every survivor was wounded and exhausted beyond measure, including Sarg himself.
Was it difficult to kill someone who was already practically a corpse? Exactly. And there were plenty of similar stories.
At the same time, none of the journalists denied that Roronoa Zoro possessed fairly significant strength by East Blue standards. By East Blue standards, and nothing more. A legend? There was no question of any legend. Just competent publicity, nothing else. Someone might ask: what about the destruction of the pirate armada?
At the time, the 'Don Krieg Affair' had received such enormous public attention mainly for two reasons. First, because only a handful of people had supposedly defeated more than ten thousand opponents. Second, because piracy in East Blue had been almost completely eradicated afterward.
Photographs showing thousands upon thousands of corpses, a coastline churned apart by explosions, and the skeletons of destroyed and burned ships protruding from the water? All of that was true. There was evidence. There were photographs. Naturally, explanations were not long in coming. Or perhaps 'explanations' would be the better word.
One journalist from the 'World Herald' had gone to the trouble of assembling an entire assortment of specialists—'specialists'?—who analyzed every piece of available information concerning the largest battle ever associated with the 'Pirate Slayers'. The first thing the experts did after their collective brainstorming session was question the number of men who had supposedly gathered beneath Don Krieg's banner.
A pirate with a seventeen-million-berry bounty had managed to assemble more than ten thousand people under his command? In the weakest sea in the world? And the World Government had done nothing about it? Come on.
A force like that could have seized control of all East Blue. Nobody would simply leave it alone. Had such a thing actually happened, Don Krieg's bounty would have been not seventeen million but more like one hundred and seventeen million. At the very least, it would certainly not have been so small.
The World Government always cared about the safety of its citizens.
Therefore, Don Krieg's actual manpower had to have been significantly lower than all previously reported figures.
The public received this point of view enthusiastically. A considerable number of people had never believed the earlier numbers anyway, so the seeds of doubt fell onto very fertile soil.
As usual, once an error was found in the initial assumptions, the final result began to look completely different. The photographs clearly seemed to show 'thousands upon thousands of corpses', but after comparing every image and conducting a meticulous count, the experts concluded that all the photographs together showed no more than a thousand dead pirates.
Most of it, they explained, came down to optical illusion and the sheer number of photographs taken. Sometimes the same location had been photographed from four different angles, making it look noticeably different in each image and creating the impression of four separate places. According to the experts, this was exactly what had produced the illusion of 'thousands upon thousands of corpses'.
The explanation gained additional credibility from one simple fact: absolutely anyone could gather all the published photographs together and verify the experts' claim personally. Many later did precisely that, including journalists from other newspapers.
Even if one assumed that the photographs did not cover the entire battlefield and that some pirates had drowned along with their ships, how many could there have been? One thousand? Two? Fine—let it be as many as three thousand dead pirates.
Even then, Don Krieg's total force would not exceed four thousand men. Noticeably less than the previously claimed ten thousand. And in the experts' opinion, even three thousand already sounded implausibly high.
Once they had dealt with manpower, the experts moved on to the number of ships. In the available photographs, it was impossible to determine exactly how new or old the wrecks of the sunken vessels were. Pirates loved establishing bases at so-called 'ship graveyards'—places where strong currents or the activities of Sea Kings gradually carried anything that fell into the water, including the wreckage of sunken ships. Such locations often contained useful finds, even genuine treasure.
In light of that detail, nobody could say with certainty how many of the wrecks in the photographs had actually belonged to Don Krieg's armada and how many had nothing to do with him at all. At the very least, nobody doubted anymore that, just as with the number of men, Don Krieg had possessed far fewer than one hundred ships. Large ships, certainly.
Only at the very end did the experts turn to the number of people who had actually participated in the battle. According to the earlier version of events, every one of Don Krieg's men had been killed by the 'Pirate Killer' Roronoa Zoro, Johnny the 'Beheader', and Yosaku the 'Butcher'. The same three people had supposedly sunk all of Don's ships as well.
The experts needed only point to the coastline churned apart by explosions to demolish that claim instantly. If those three men alone had fought Don Krieg's forces, where had all the blast marks come from? Even a complete amateur could tell that craters like those were left by explosions, and the entire battlefield had been plowed through with them. Three people would have needed an entire day just to fire a cannon that many times.
And the sunken ships? What had they used to sink them? Their bare hands? And so quickly that nobody had managed to escape?
All those details clearly indicated that a considerable number of ships had been present on the battlefield. Marine ships, to be exact. Their presence immediately resolved every controversial point.
Summarizing their analysis of the 'Don Krieg Affair', the experts arrived at the following conclusions. First, Don's force had numbered no more than three or four thousand people, meaning the number of large ships could not possibly have exceeded thirty or forty. Second, significant Marine forces had participated in the operation to destroy the 'last stronghold of piracy in East Blue'. Quite possibly forces equal in number to the pirates themselves, if not greater.
Third, based on the previous two conclusions, one could safely state that the fame of Roronoa Zoro, the 'Pirate Killer', had been deliberately inflated on direct orders from the World Government itself.
That, in turn, could mean that for the last couple of years the Government had been carrying out a secret plan to eradicate piracy completely from East Blue. A plan in which Roronoa Zoro had served as a front, operating inseparably from Marine forces. By hiding behind his artificially inflated fame, the World Government had been able to conceal until the very last moment that a total purge of every pirate crew in East Blue was underway.
That interpretation of events looked far more plausible and logically sound than the 'tale of the legendary bounty hunter'. Every expert unanimously agreed that the World Government's plan had been excellent, carefully thought out, and brilliantly executed. It could easily have been called perfect if the 'main actor' had not betrayed them right at the end.
Unfortunately, people were far too susceptible to all sorts of vices, as had once again been demonstrated to the entire world.
In Loguetown.
Fame had gone to Roronoa Zoro's head so badly that he had come to believe in his own exceptional nature. After becoming a traitor, he had lost touch with reality to such an extent that, upon reaching Loguetown, he had not been afraid to challenge the entire world.
According to the experts, the World Government had been completely correct to place such a large bounty on his head. Madmen who had almost entirely lost contact with reality had to be eliminated without delay. Nobody could ever predict what might enter the mind of a person like that in the very next second.
After a month and a half of articles in the same spirit, Roronoa Zoro's once terrifying reputation had been completely 'flushed down the toilet'. By now, his name had not merely become proverbial; it had come to mean something like a 'sick clown'. A ridiculous fool who did not even realize that the entire world was laughing at him.
Among the 'warriors of the sea', people had even begun saying that if a pirate dared walk into a Marine branch carrying Roronoa Zoro's head in one hand, not only would they not arrest him, they would probably pay the entire bounty on the 'clown' without complaint.
In other words, absolutely everyone wanted the 'Pirate Killer' dead.
Some wanted him dead because he had 'betrayed the World Government in general and the Marines in particular'. Some wanted to kill him because of his declaration in Loguetown. Most pirates would gladly slit his throat simply because he was damaging the reputation of their entire 'honest brotherhood'. There were also plenty who passionately wanted to tear his head off for destroying the execution platform.
The Pirate King had been a highly controversial figure in his time, and among the people of the world one could still find both his friends and enemies who had respected him beyond measure.
Whitebeard himself—the Strongest Man in the World—was counted among such people. The disapproval of a man like that was practically no different from the disapproval of the World Government. Roronoa Zoro was a dead man walking.
Nobody took him seriously anymore. People were simply waiting, making bets on who would reach him first. So far, the pirates themselves were leading. Whoever controls the mass media controls power.
Although, in a world where any person with enough desire and luck could attain strength capable of destroying that entire world, the statement was not completely accurate. It would be more correct to say that legitimate authority controlled the mass media, and those media served as an excellent support for that authority. Such an 'information megaphone' made it easy to present black as white and white as black.
Were there really so few people in the world who had personally known the 'Pirate Slayers'? Of course not. People like that would read everything written in the newspapers—all those 'facts' and 'expert opinions'—and simply could not believe anyone could seriously swallow such insane nonsense.
Even ordinary Marine soldiers, whose organization's reputation rose with almost every new article about the main 'Pirate Killer', had begun questioning the reality of what was happening. To uninformed civilians, the articles and all the arguments and facts presented in them looked remarkably convincing.
But to ordinary soldiers who had carried with their own hands the corpses left behind after the 'Pirate Slayers' did their work? Soldiers who had seen dozens upon dozens of sunken ships with their own eyes? And, most importantly, soldiers who knew with absolute certainty that the Marines had had nothing to do with any of it?
After reading all those articles, such people had only one question in mind: 'What the hell kind of nonsense is going on here?!!' As a result, thousands of people could be found all across East Blue who could have told journalists the real truth about the 'Pirate Slayers' in exhaustive detail. And they did tell them.
But if that information contradicted the 'party line', what editor of a major newspaper would dare oppose the World Government itself? Only a handful of tiny papers, contemptuously dismissed as 'yellow press', could afford not to fear telling the truth. With their reputation and microscopic circulation, however, they were a drop in the ocean and could not affect the overall situation in any meaningful way.
Thus, in just a miserable couple of months, the reputation Zoro had spent years building had been hopelessly ruined. Or rather, 'hopelessly'.
Information was information, but as had already been said, in this world personal strength mattered above all else. The truth could be distorted and facts could be falsified as much as anyone liked; none of those lies could actually reduce Roronoa Zoro's strength.
At most, they might give him an incentive to become even stronger so he could kill even more people afterward. Still, one had to admit that the approach had allowed the World Government to raise its prestige considerably in the eyes of ordinary citizens while painting a target the size of the Red Line across Zoro's back.
A few thousand people who knew the real truth were not worth mentioning compared with hundreds of millions of deceived citizens—especially under total control over the spread of information.
The weak link in this entire scheme of manipulating the public consciousness was Zoro himself. But the moment he died, the final loose end would be severed and nothing could be changed anymore. The distorted facts would become reality.
And considering the size of the target on his back, whether Zoro possessed Conqueror's Haki or not no longer mattered very much. His death was only a matter of time. A perfect plan. If only Luffy had not existed.
Only a tiny handful of people knew about him, and none of them spoke. Some because of fear. Some because they were uncertain. Some simply knew nobody would believe them and could not even blame anyone for that. Roronoa Zoro was already an anomaly. Who could believe in the existence of an even greater anomaly?