"You two check the bridge. I'll head to the captain's cabin."
Those words were enough. They knew what to do if anything went wrong.
As Bill made his way to the captain's cabin, he prepared his body.
His ribs began to merge slightly, the bones in his arms strengthened, joints started to protrude slightly, and hard shells appeared on his knees and elbows.
On the outside, he looked almost the same, but these changes and other measures had been taken after he was wounded by the Fork Pirates' cannon. With the "Iron Body" technique and these modifications, he no longer feared traditional firearms.
Opening the door to the captain's cabin, Bill saw two men. One sat at a table, the other on the floor, leaning against the wall with his legs stretched out in front of him.
Both looked exhausted, as if they had been arguing and had finally lost all motivation.
Despite the scene before him, Bill recognized these men from the article, and entering the room with a smile, he said, "Admiral Krieg, Demon Man Gin. My name is William Ox, and you are both under arrest."
At that moment, Bill thought that pirate hunting might not be such a bad job after all.
Arriving in Loguetown, Bill finally breathed a sigh of relief.
A week had passed since they arrested Krieg and his crew, and what seemed like an "easy" 37 million Beli bounty turned out to be one of the most exhausting tasks of his life.
Over the last week, no crew member, except Yoko, had slept for more than five hours at a stretch. It turned out that there were 271 pirates on Krieg's dreadnought, with more than seventy percent of them dying from dehydration or scurvy. The holding cell on the "Frontier Breakthrough" could accommodate no more than one hundred and fifty people, but even approaching that number would have killed half of the sick pirates.
The only solution Bill saw was to place the healthiest pirates in the cell and tie the sick ones on the main deck. Of course, their seven-member crew could not attend to the needs of more than two hundred people, so they had to become jailers, bringing the pirates out in groups and overseeing as they fed and cleaned their comrades.
To make matters worse, the two most dangerous pirates seemed to have fallen out and hated each other. Because of this, Bill couldn't keep them in the same cell and was constantly walking around with Demon Man Gin tied behind him.
Due to their proximity, Bill often spoke with Gin. Although most of the conversations were one-sided, he learned a lot over the course of the week.
It turned out that Gin had been following Krieg since his teenage years. For a long time, he respected Krieg and feared the power of this large man, but over time his fear and respect dissipated.
"Krieg is a big fish in a little pond," Gin assessed him, adding that it was for this reason Krieg had become foolish and lazy.
When Bill asked why Gin didn't simply leave Krieg, Gin muttered that he needed to ensure the crew's safety after their defeat by the Straw Hats pirates.
It wouldn't be a sensation that pirate crews fought each other, but Bill was surprised that when two major crews clashed, it should have made it into the newspapers.
When he pressed Gin on this matter, Gin didn't say much except that the Straw Hats had thwarted Krieg from seizing the floating restaurant Baratie. Gin also spoke respectfully of the Straw Hats' cook, whom he called Sanji, and expressed respect for Fia, who had prepared hundreds of light meals in the past week.
Of course, Bill noted all of this in his reports. He also questioned both pirates on why they had fallen out and received roughly the same story. Gin wanted to land on one of the islands they passed to restock and repair the ship, while Krieg wanted to first reach safer waters.
It turned out that Krieg wasn't afraid of the Straw Hats but of a certain swordsman they encountered a few weeks earlier. They referred to him as Dracule Mihawk and said he was one of the Seven Warlords of the Sea.
Bill was shocked when Krieg claimed that this man worked for the Marines, and after lengthy questioning, he believed the pirate and asked Sasha and the others.
Both Bill and Rans were stunned when Sasha and Ricky told them about the Seven Warlords of the Sea and described the privileges these notorious pirates received. They also emphasized how powerful these pirates were and even said they were considered the third greatest force in the world.
After lengthy discussions, Bill recorded this in the report and decided to acquire a transponder snail as soon as possible to speak with his father and get a better understanding of the situation.
It didn't take a genius to see how such a system could be abused. The fact that allies of these pirates could receive pardons seemed completely insane to Bill and Rans.
Setting these thoughts aside, Bill and the others brought the ship into port, and after they docked, Ricky ran to the Marine Base.
With 271 pirates, it was too many just to dump them onto the streets, so they followed the instructions of the local captain, and they didn't have to wait long: Bill noticed smoke rapidly approaching