Sakazuki’s Bounty at 5,000,000,000 Berries

It is the most insolent document ever printed in this world: a wanted poster with the Fleet Admiral of the Marines on it.

Cross Guild inverted the machine. Founded by Buggy, Dracule Mihawk and Crocodile, it sells contracts on Marines instead of collecting them on pirates — and it grades targets on a scale of its own. The posters carry no sum at all. They carry symbols: stars for the rank and file, crowns for the leadership. The scale is not an author's footnote added later; the story states it outright, once when Cross Guild explains what Koby is worth and again over Garp. A star buys a chest holding roughly one hundred million berries in treasure, a crown roughly a billion, and the rate is read off the rank rather than the man. Five crowns is the standing price of the Fleet Admiral's chair, and Sakazuki is the only name in the catalogue sitting in it.

The choice of symbol says more than a figure would. The World Government prices its enemies to the last berry — 3,996,000,000 for Blackbeard, 4,611,100,000 for Kaido. Cross Guild works in round tiers, like a menu. The implication being that these particular heads are not negotiated in detail.

The case writes itself. Sakazuki's Absolute Justice took him to Ohara, where he shot down a civilian evacuation ship rather than accept any margin of error; to Marineford, where he killed Portgas D. Ace in front of his brother; and to Punk Hazard, where he took the Fleet Admiral's chair off Kuzan in a ten-day duel that left the island split in half, one side burning, the other frozen.

Nobody expects the contract to be collected. That was never the point. The point is that an organisation finally had the means and the nerve to list the top of the Marines at a price.