Chapter 105: Marineford 95

To be a Marine was to face tribulation with poise.

Pirates, sea kings, plots, and conspiracies were all a part of the duty; however, it was life on the open ocean that was perhaps the hardest thing for a Marine to contend with.

Day after day on a ship with no land in sight, everything reverted back to the same old routines.

After a few years of life out on the water, Bill had his routine and understood clearly that its’ quality would be the determining factor in success or failure for life in the Navy.

And because this notion that he held, he instituted a wide range of mandatory training programs that were geared toward various occupations and fields of study.

In this way, Bill hoped that every Marine who served under him would expand their horizons and not become degenerate gamblers or layabouts as they crossed vast stretches of water.

This produced mixed results, as many service members just wanted free time after their six-hour shifts, but overall, Bill had been satisfied enough to continue the funding for supplies even during the hard times they had just come out of.

Unfortunately, now they had been out to sea now for two weeks, and Bill was experiencing the headache that his mandatory programs had caused on the instructors who were meant to teach them.

Sitting in his office endlessly looking over papers ranging from basic Marine etiquette to mathematics, Bill wondered if he had been too hasty back then.

After he received the Communication Snail about his Court Martial, he had jumped into action.

Due to the fact that the case involved a Vice Admiral it was going to be handled personally by Fleet Admiral Sengoku, and that meant it would take place at Marineford and not Enies Lobby.

It was unknown how long it would take to travel from Hannabal Island to Marineford, but apparently the journey starting from Alabasta Kingdom took two and a half months.

Because Bill had three months to report to court, and Hannabal Island was two weeks from Alabasta, this all meant that he had to leave the following day.

In his haste, Bill got together with Ranse, and they split up the sailors deciding who would go with who.

Including the new recruits, his Department had ballooned close to 550 Marines, and 500 of those were at Hannabal.

Ranse needed most of the people as they had decided to keep Gaspardes flagship, the Salamander, and needed crew to sail the pirate ships they planned to sell off.

Bill on the other hand, needed a crew large enough that his ship wouldn’t slow down during the journey.

There were other considerations too, but end result was that Bill took on the entire former pirate crew of Fish-men, 62 in all, as well as twenty individuals from both Ruluka Island and Onigumo’s former crew.

The twenty Marines that had come from Onigumo’s crew were long time professionals, and without them Bill would have been lost with the others.

The twenty Ruluka Islanders were not sailors, or very sophisticated for that matter, and they had only signed up a week before Bill rushed them into his company heading for Marineford.

And while they were a pain, the Fish-men were worse.

They were great sailors, Bill had to admit. One Fish-man was worth several base-line humans when it came to that.

The problem was that Bill had never spent large amounts of time with non-humans, and although the Fish-men were not totally alien in their behaviors, they had several peculiarities and made it quite obvious that they were not human and given their physical size and reputation as ‘whales’, they stubbornly made their way around the ship.

Willy was different than most and it was easy to understand how he had become the leader of the Fish-man crew, but even his slyness and wit was not quite the same as a humans.

At this point, Bill wasn’t sure if their stubborn brashness was an inborn trait or if he could attribute to them being former pirates.

Either way, he thought as he looked over their horrible Marine etiquette grades, over the next several weeks he would train them like circus field mice and regardless of their nature they would learn how to stand still and salute.

They may refuse to use guns, but Bill would be damned before they refused to stand straight and salute.

In terms of his officers, until the rendezvous with Sasha and Ricky, Bill only really had Nelson to rely on for the voyage and was glad that the former ‘7 foot wide’ man was now mobile enough to walk around.

He had brought along Yoko too, despite his misgivings, but she was currently spending night and day with Boss while the insect molted.

There was also Pearson, whom Bill thought was one of the few bright spots out of the Ruluka recruits, but unfortunately for Pearson, he didn’t realize that the last thing the other man wanted was to be noticed.

When the papers were finally done, Bill moved on to his next and most important job over the next six weeks.

He would analyze the battle reports front to back and come up with new equipment and tactics that would hopefully mitigate casualties in the future.

So far, he had come to two large conclusions.

Despite the low caliber round, the Rivet Pistols were worth their weight in gold against unarmored pirates.

Also, that he had greatly overlooked the need for battlefield medics.

The operation counted 37 killed, and more than fifty seriously wounded.

The wounded numbers wouldn’t have changed much, but Bill was certain that about half the KIA would have survived with immediate first aid.

With this in mind, and the fact that Miyagi would finally be back with the main body of Marines, Bill thought up an emergency first aid training regiment as well as the need for field medics.

The skills of these medics did not  have to be at a very high level, but he would need to greatly expand the number of Surgeon Mates and planned to use Sasha and Miyagi accordingly.

With these ideas and more Bill continued to steadily work as the weeks went by.

He had recently spent a lot of time on the Victory, but one thing he loved about the Frontier Run was the higher spec physical training equipment.

Being a small-sized Marine Frigate, it was much smaller than the Victory. The maximum carrying capacity for the Frontier Run was only 250, while the Victory could hold 2,000 Marines if need be.

However, the Frontier Run had been personally restored by Aramaki, and that come along with a complete refitting of most of the equipment inside.

Obviously, the Commodore knew the capabilities of his son, and so he had changed out the free weights with hydraulic presses.

With Bill’s current level of strength, putting numbers on what he could ‘lift’ meant less and less. The hydraulic press on the Frontier Run could exert 1000 tons of pressure, and Bill could casually bench press the amount.

He had even started doing selective muscle fiber training, something that would be impossible without mastering Life Return, but in doing so allowed Bill to never need to take a rest day.

If Bill didn’t have other responsibilities what he could have become would have been frightening.

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However, Bill started most of his mornings training the Marines – read mostly the Fish-men – followed by mountains of paperwork and Snail Communications and finally new making designs for both firearms and protective gear.

His dinners were always spent with Yoko and sometimes Nelson. In truth, his only free time was at night, and he thanked god he didn’t need much sleep as he worked off the stress from the day.

As the weeks continued to pass, Bill had made some progress and after thumbing through other similar actions like the one taken Hannabal Island, he came to some realizations.

For whatever reason, fighting almost always resorted in hand-to-hand combat.

This fact didn’t even stem from the lack of time for reloading matchlocks or even the Marines being unable to provide firearms.

His data was limited, but from what he could see, battles generally turned into giant melees where the sword and axe were used more than the firearm.

Bill had to think about this because in a world of superhumans, martial weapon really could be stronger than a firearm, but he kept coming back to the fact that those cases were in extreme minorities.

It was true that Sasha or Ricky could use their swords to destroy scores of gunmen, but this was clearly not the case for one of the new Ruluka Island recruits.

Perhaps one of the whale Fish-men using a club could take out a few gunman on brute strength alone, but Fish-men were rare and not really represented in these battles.

Another thought that he had was this inclination for huge melee battles was the Marines trying to capture pirates alive rather than dead, but this was quickly refuted, as even from Bill’s meager data he could see that KIA on all sides tended to be appalling.

As they were only a couple weeks out from Marineford, Bill put new orders out to his engineers on New Haven and started going over his newly proposed idea for future battles.

The orders to his engineers were simple.

First, he wanted a better service pistol and sent them his own designs for a handgun that held a twelve round clip.

Second, he wanted a cheaper alternative to the Pulse Boots which would allow all the Marines serving under him a way for both quick escape in front of superhuman enemies and a way to get better positioning against base-line humans.

Third, and finally, since most pirates favored the cutlass and axe, he wanted his men to have a minimum of armor that protected against slashes.

The designs Bill had in mind for this was not one of medieval knights, but more of modern riot police. Long sleeve cloth uniforms with knee, chest, elbow, and shoulder pads would be possible to make – but would be hard to make affordably in this world.

At this point, Bill had plenty of money and hoped to have a stable income soon, but he couldn’t afford to have every soldier under him walking around with gear worth over a 200,000 Beli.

The helmets for these suits were an issue onto themselves, but Bill put that aside as he began to layout his rules for general engagement.

The old rule that called for retreat in the face of a superhuman still held, Bill was certain that asking base line humans to fight superhumans and Devil Fruit users was suicide. He was willing to put his people in harm’s way, but he was not willing to just send them to their deaths.

Now going forward, his Marines would be broken up into teams and squads. A team would consist of four Marines and a squad would consist of four teams.

He would have every advance into unknown territory led by a team of Beetleborgs, whose primary goal was to assess for such threats. And in this decision, he had also decided to accept the possibility of Marines in his Department using Devil Fruits.

Bill hadn’t known before if he would forbid it, but now that he was somewhat convinced that his aversion was due to some accident in his reincarnation, he decided not to fight against the accepted reality of this world.

Another major tactic change was that Bill was determined to have at least one Surgeon Mate per 16-man squad, but ideally, he wanted two per squad.

He resolved to reorganize his entire Department and make permanent squads of Special Operators who would be doubly trained to break up and lead regular sailors in mass actions.

But more than anything, Bill hoped his reforms would lesson the need to have all boots on the ground.

If he could have just five squads of Special Operators, in conjunction with his 20 Beetleborgs, Bill would have a small but very professional force of 100 Marines. Having a force like that would also be more economical as Bill resolved himself to develop better gear.

Gear that may be ‘wasted’ on the Departments’ Cooks or Carpenters if he were to freely send them into battle.

As the Frontier Run finally spotted Marineford on the distance, Bill decided to do things fully and called Pearson in his office.

Pearson: “Yes Sir!”

The reason for Bill doing what he did now was simple.

Pearson was a member of the Ruluka Island recruits, and it was the Ruluka Islanders who would make up the majority of the Special Operators that Bill set into motion training.

In addition to that, the man had shown courage in shooting at Gasparde in the last moments of that traitor’s free life and was definitely one of the more capable recruits outside of those from New Haven.

Lastly, Bill thought he felt the nature of the fruit he was about to offer and selfishly wanted to know if he was correct.

Bill: “Pearson, I’ve been going over the reports and I have to say I’m impressed by how you handled yourself in Hannabal, and just by your career in general.”

Pearson respected Bill after the battle. It was hard not to respect a powerful man who stood nine feet tall, but in the end, they were the same age and getting praised like this was awkward.

So, to alleviate that feeling in his heart he made a joke: “Well Captain, I don’t think my career is as good as yours…”

Smiling to this, Bill said simply: “Maybe not, but we were born in different places, and I want you to be at ease around me in the future.”

When he said “At ease” Bill pulled the unknown Devil Fruit that was shaped like a flat peach.

“Captain?” Pearson asked, looking at the Devil Fruit.

“I want to offer this to you” Bill said before continuing: “I don’t know exactly what it does, but I’m sure it’s strong and I wouldn’t want this power to fall into the wrong hands.”

Bill could see the calculations in Pearson’s eyes and thought it was likely that he hadn’t seen many ability users on Ruluka.

“Well, I’m not forcing you, but I’ll tell you the truth, I feel like I have to reward the recruits from your home island for fighting so close to the time you signed up with us, and you seem to be the most rounded of the bunch.”

After another several silent moments Pearson stepped forward, bit into the peach, and as he fell to the ground gagging from the taste, Bill watched with his minds eye while the mans spirit was assumed and a circular hole magically formed beneath him.

As Pearson crashed down to the lower level, the hole magically filled back in, and Bill decided to note down.

“Superhuman System, Hole-Hole Fruit. Potential, unknown.”

Then, sealing off Chaos, Bill went down to fetch his new confidant.