Behind the bounty
A briefing room at Marine Headquarters, years after Marineford. Commodore Brannew has just run through the bounties of the four sitting Emperors when he pins up two more posters for comparison: Gol D. Roger's, and Edward Newgate's at 5,046,000,000 berries. On that day, Whitebeard's poster is no longer there to get him arrested. It is a yardstick, held up to tell a room full of officers that Kaido and Big Mom allied would outweigh him.
The gap to Roger comes to 518,000,000 berries, the distance the World Government kept between the Pirate King and the man it ranked immediately behind him — already called the Strongest Man in the World before Roger died, and the man closest to the One Piece afterwards. Once Roger was executed, no bounty ever climbed as high as his again.
What the figure never achieved was to push him backwards. His body came out of Marineford carrying 267 sword wounds, 152 bullet wounds and 46 cannonball hits, with half his head burned away, and he died on his feet. In seventy-two years he never took a single wound on his back, having never once fled a fight.
His final speech cost the government far more than the bounty could ever have earned it. Ace's execution was meant to shut down the Great Age of Piracy; Whitebeard used the live broadcast to confirm to the entire world that the One Piece exists, and to promise the war that will swallow that world the day somebody finds it. The reader, meanwhile, only saw the figure at that briefing, close to four hundred chapters after the scene.
