"In recent years, Merfolk slaves have almost disappeared. You've been working with me for several years too, kid. Do you know the starting bid for Merfolk?"
"I remember. Male Merfolk start at 1 million Berries, female Merfolk start at 70 million Berries, and split-tailed Merfolk start at 10 million Berries."
"Exactly. Ordinary humans only start at 500,000 Berries. Even a Devil Fruit user might not be worth as much as a Merfolk!
They say Mermaids are all stunningly beautiful. Plenty of rich people are willing to throw money away for that.
Seventy million Berries is an old price. If there really were Merfolk now, the starting bid would probably have to be 100 million Berries…
Hurry up and arrange the slaves. I'll go out front and stir up the customers' emotions first."
With that, Zeke walked out to the front through a small side door. After Zeke left, his assistant prepared to carry out his instructions.
From the surrounding cages, countless gazes seemed to converge on him.
Sorrow, pleading, resentment, anger—every kind of emotion was mixed together.
"Don't look at me like that. I'm just a salesman. I hope you unlucky b*stards find a good buyer. Maybe your lives will even be better than before."
He was just about to bring the auction items out of the cages when his body was suddenly wrapped in a strange force, as if something had clamped down on him.
Then the invisible power lifted him straight into the air. He opened his mouth to cry for help, but no sound came out.
That strange force locked onto his throat, and intense suffocation quickly set in.
"Don't be afraid. Feeling dizzy is normal. Pain is normal too."
As a half-breed of Fish-Man and Giant, Sebastian's strength was top-tier even among Fish-Men. Using brute force to deal with an opponent like this was absurdly easy for him.
"Everyone, please remain quiet. Freedom is waving at you."
Sebastian took the keys to the cages and chains from the man.
The bomb collars on the slaves were troublesome. Although Haki could act as a special kind of lockpick, forcibly removing them that way would cause the collars to explode, easily causing chaos.
Having the keys was naturally better.
Under normal circumstances, Sebastian handled infiltration missions. With his invisibility ability, doing this kind of work was twice as efficient with half the effort.
He was a very traditional infiltrator. Not the type who believed that killing all witnesses meant no one would notice.
One by one, the cage doors were opened, and Sebastian removed the collars from their necks. However, chains still remained on their hands.
"Um… Mr. Invisible Man, why not unlock the chains on our hands too?"
Sebastian had not revealed his body, and no one present knew how to address him.
"This is for your own safety. Without these, it would be hard to confirm your identities later."
At this moment, they still didn't understand what Sebastian meant, but the answer was revealed soon enough.
When the front curtain was drawn open, the people who had come to buy slaves saw not the high-quality merchandise they had been longing for, but corpses of guards strewn across the floor, and slaves who had long since left their cages.
"Ah!!!"
With a single scream, the crowd scattered in panic. So many people had died; something was obviously terribly wrong.
"What's going on?! Where are the guards?! Hurry up and contact the Marines on the island!"
Zeke shouted at the top of his lungs for guards to maintain order, but he himself ran toward the backstage. At the same time, Nereus and his group also sprang into action.
"The usual rules: kill anyone who tries to stop us. And as long as they're not wearing shackles, don't worry about friendly fire!"
This was a human auction house—a place dedicated to selling slaves. It could be said that anyone who walked through these doors was hardly innocent.
Even if everyone here were slaughtered to the last, you'd be hard-pressed to find many who were killed by mistake.
But these were nobles from all over the world. Killing them all right now would damage the reputation of Fish-Men and Mermaids as a whole.
Killing only those involved in the slave auction was something many could understand. In fact, quite a few nations who had abolished slaves privately approved of Nereus's actions in this regard.
However, those same countries still had their own noble classes. If everyone here were indiscriminately killed and the newspapers ran with it, it would be easy for all kinds of labels to be slapped on them, and with one misstep, Fish-Man Island could end up becoming a public enemy of the world.
That would be bad for the future of Fish-Man Island, so for now they were relatively restrained. Still, they wouldn't go out of their way to protect these people; some accidental casualties were inevitable.
That was precisely why Sebastian left the shackles on their hands: they didn't hinder escape, yet prevented them from being attacked.
Meanwhile, after receiving news of the situation, the Marines quickly dispatched a small unit. They initially assumed it was just a group of pirates robbing an auction house. Something like that wasn't uncommon.
After all, everyone who attended the auction carried large amounts of money. It was only after arriving on the scene that they realized who the enemy actually was.
When infiltrating the auction house, Nereus would slightly disguise his appearance, but once he took action, he made no such effort.
At the cost of the vanguard unit being completely wiped out, they finally learned who the enemy was.
"Reporting to Admiral Kong! We've received news from the garrison at Sabaody Archipelago. Nereus is carrying out an indiscriminate slaughter at the Public Employment Security Office in Grove 1. The vanguard unit has been completely annihilated. We request Headquarters' support!"
"So even he couldn't stand the silence and has started making his move… remnants of Rocks… every last one of them is a headache…"
Hearing the soldier's report, Kong didn't look particularly flustered. Instead, he leaned back in his chair and rubbed his temples.
Outsiders might think that Rocks's death meant the seas would usher in an era of peace, but that was far from the truth.
In the year since the end of the God Valley Incident, names like Whitebeard, the Golden Lion, and Big Mom had reemerged one after another across the seas, bringing endless trouble to the Marines.
Especially at this stage, with vacancies among the three Marine Admirals, their forces often felt stretched thin.
"The Fleet Admiral is currently in Mariejois. Sengoku and Zephyr are in the New World…"
Kong himself needed to remain stationed at Mariejois. He knew full well that if the opponent was Nereus, sending a few Vice Admirals would be meaningless. Without Admiral-level strength, no one could stand up to him.
Even Admirals could only barely manage to hold him off.
"Garp, you…"
"I'm not going. It's just a slave-trading place. Why bother with it? That guy will leave on his own eventually."
"Garp!"
The term "slave trading" was generally not spoken at Headquarters. Usually, Marine Headquarters referred to such places as the Public Employment Security Office, carrying out their self-deceiving brand of justice.
But this wasn't the time to fuss over terminology. Although Garp's response gave Kong a headache, when he considered Nereus's previous actions… Garp's words actually made a bit of sense.
"Order the garrison at Sabaody Archipelago not to interfere. As long as he doesn't take the initiative to attack government or Marine bases, let him leave."
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