I really am just loving this whole beautiful mess.

I like how GM just went along with the idea that marines would jump in front of a moving dragon cart with no regard for their personal safety of having jumped in the way of a dragon card that is barrelling downhill.

Well, if they were already there... the might hold their ground? But otherwise only higher ranking marines would (Because higher ranking = stronger and more crazy in One Piece)

Once blew the party’s minds by having the commander of an absurdly dangerous mercenary group be a mere badass normal. No superpowers, no cybernetics, he did have custom power armor, but everyone in that outfit had power armor and most of his customizations were based around communications and keeping track of battlefield data. Also one of the few antagonists smart enough to parlay with the party to work out why they kept coming to blows and how to avoid such incidents in the future (after all, fighting heroes is bad for business).

A villain smart enough to get the party, who may or may have been murder hobos, to parley? Consider my mind blown as well.

Well he wasn’t a villain, just an antagonist. In a world where superpowered maniacs were coming out of the woodwork, the need for private military contractors capable of dealing with these newfound threats increased greatly. After all, you never know when some guy will gain weather control powers and decide it’s his god given duty to go gaia’s vengeance on some oil rig, or some African warlord finds out he actually does become invincible if he eats a baby before battle.

This guy wasn’t even intentionally against the party, it’s just his team had the misfortune of happening to be involved in whatever the party happened to be doing. Like the time these guys were hired to work security at an event that a super villain the party had been tracking was about to attack. When a bunch of costumed weirdos start brawling in the middle of a charity dinner, you tend to shoot first and ask questions later. Or the time the party needed to secure an ancient artifact from a dig site these guys happened to be guarding.

Really the negotiations boiled down two “I need some secure way for you to identify yourselves to my agents so we don’t start another brawl that’ll level half of Shanghai”

Seriously, I think i'll keep smiling at Cory being all rational and careful until the end of the arc. :)

And Phil, too. At this point he just go along with whatever is happening in the game.