This text was originally written for Arlong Park forums’ discussion thread.

Another fight down, and very likely another volume as well, although I guess there’s a nonzero chance it’ll run one more chapter to full confirm King’s defeat and maybe wrap up the Orochi thread as well. And I think with both Queen and seemingly King falling off the island after being beaten, we can finally put to rest the theories that Kaido’s officers will get back up via Awakening or some other nonsense. The bigwigs aren’t just down, they’re gone. Not on the island and not equipped to come back. The end is close at hand for the battle of Onigashima.

The new cover story is a pleasant surprise. Showing the aftermath of the naval battle off Cacao Island though… I was kinda hoping we’d see more of that in a Jinbe flashback later. The Vinsmokes and Jinbe both getting to just sail off, even after Big Mom returned to the fray, feels a little to easy. The long wait for more on the battle had me expecting some kind of a secret cost that hadn’t been revealed yet. Someone dying offscreen wouldn’t be Oda, but someone captured or short a chunk of their lifespan would have been nice. I guess we haven’t seen who’s actually on these Germa ships yet, but I doubt they’d be pulling back if anyone major had been captured. It does also seem to be the morning after the battle already, so I imagine, like Bege’s escape, the cover story will about what the Vinsmokes do next, not the battle. Twenty installments of silliness as they take on a new contract followed by a tantalising plot hook right at the end sounds about right. Given that this is back before the Reverie, I wonder if the last-minute tie-in could involve the SSG or the big moves the World Government is making on the Warlords and other big name pirates.

But that’s getting way ahead of ourselves…

Alright, so Queen is done and dusted, as expected. Some people wanted more back and forth between him and Sanji before it was done, but this battle was a mental one for Sanji, and he won it already. There wouldn’t be any substance in more hitting. The callback to Sanji feeding mice as a kid is a really nice bookend to him choosing his humanity in this bout. There is a question as to what kind of damage Sanji has actually taken, knowing his broken bones heal on their own. Is his collapse just exhaustion, or is there other internal damage not covered by the healing?

Zoro and King’s fighting is flowing a lot better than last time we followed the two of them, with some incredibly well drawn fire and magma effects now in the mix. I’m really looking forward to seeing this one in colour in a few years, all of the clashing with explosions in the background and flaming dragons twisting around. But a feeling lingers that the fight-ending solution doesn’t really gel with the choreography up to this point. I still don’t have a good idea of how the stretchy-headed Imperial Deep Pride Stake is meant to work. The moment in chapter 1033 where King seems to explode entirely because Zoro stabbed the right spot also doesn’t feel like it was ever fully explained. I can appreciate that looking back over the fight we can see the fire going on and off King’s back just like Zoro notices here, but maybe we could have used some moments where Zoro wonders about things that actually play into the solution, like “he bled when I hit him before but he shrugged the last one off, is his durability fluctuating” or “damn, he just got a lot faster all of a sudden.” I really go like how the section of the fight right after the flasback goes, but the battle as a whole can’t help feeling like it wasn’t planned all the way in advance.

We get a little more on Lunarians here, confirming that the World Government is specifically hunting for them. Given the similarities – the World Nobles styling themselves as dragons compared to King’s use of a dragon motif in his fire attacks, Lunarians being known as gods in the past and the Celestial Dragons calling themselves the descendents of gods today, and of course both groups seemingly having inhabited the Redline – it’s becoming clear that the World Government usurped and exterminated the Lunarians. What remains to be seen is whether the Lunarian civilisation is the same important one alluded to by Clover, if they’re the same group that hid the One Piece and the Poneglyphs, and if they’re the same group that gave the world Joyboy back in the day…

King’s subordinates being tempted by the hundred million for a tipoff brings up an angle on bounties that I hadn’t really considered. It’s often noted that there don’t seem to be any bounty hunters at the higher levels, raising the question of “why bother giving bounties that high at all?” But here we see that a fraction of King’s actual bounty in exchange for a tip-off is enough to present a real threat of betrayal. High level bounties pit pirates against each other. And while it doesn’t seem common for pirates to cash in on the bounties of other pirates, we have seen Blackbeard and Law approach the government directly to exchange wanted men for things they want, so we know the government is willing to look the other way if a big enough threat is taken out of the picture.

I loved seeing a flash of Punk Hazard in the past. The first thought I had was whether these old experiments on King were where Judge got whatever Lunarian liniage factor went into Sanji, but I don’t think Judge was ever directly employed by the World Government as a scientist (MADS was before Vegapunk was recruited by them and was broken up by the World Government) and thus he probably wouldn’t be at Punk Hazard. And of course, if it wasn’t Judge getting Sanji’s flaming feet from these experiments, who was working on them and what did they get out of it?

I’m sure this won’t be the last we hear of Lunarians and World Government science…

Kaido looks bloody weird without his beard. It’s not surprising he has confidence in his ability to change the world though – it seems he picked up enough important info about the One Piece and the the true history of the world through his position in Rocks’ crew long before he started chasing it himself.

It’s also cool to get King’s real name and confirmation that the card themeing in the Beasts Pirates is all codenames. It’s a shame the Vivre Cards for this lot have come and gone already, we could have had a huge dump of new info like when the Baroque Works agents’ true names dropped. They also missed out on some great lore and killer panels by doing the databook in the middle of the arc like they did. Oh well, maybe in the SBS instead…

And the fight ends on another fairly brutal note with King’s wing being cut off. Between this, King’s arm, Jinbe curshing Who’s Who’s hands and Robin’s assault on Black Maria’s spine, we’ve had some pretty full-on takedowns for the Wano villains. And as I said above, the fact that this has happened to King while he’s off the side of the island is a strong sign he’s not coming back.

The next steps for this arc, as we go into volume 103 and the new year, have to be the resolution of Orochi, Fukurokuju, CP0 and the armoury clusterfuck, but the armoury is the only one of those I think will actually need more than a chapter to wrap up. The two Emperors are a bit more complicated though. A few weeks ago I would have said Big Mom was next on the chopping block after Orochi, but lately I’ve been giving her more thought. It’s tough to picture the arc ending without Big Mom and Kaido both falling, but the first outright defeat of an Emperor of the Sea in the whole series (and who knows how many in-universe years) is going to be such a game-changing moment. Is Oda going to let Law and Kid take the honour of the first Emperor victory from Luffy? Is the arc going to be able to keep its momentum if Big Mom is still fighting after Kaido falls? Or will Oda contrive a way to make their defeats all but simultaneous (leaving room for the three captains to argue about who actually was the first to conquor an Emperor)?

Between the strong action beats, great art and interesting lore snippets, this has turned out to be a great chapter to close out the year with. I’m looking forward to the final battle and post-arc worldbuilding dump in the coming months.