This is a chapter that doesn’t disappoint. Things are really heating up as we hit the tenth chapter of volume 109 with Egghead’s likely final end-of-volume cliffhanger to come in the next chapter or two.

But we start out with a new cover story, and yeah, it’s Yamato following Oden’s tour of Wano, which is probably the least exciting thing going on this week. However with the last cover story having such a large and immediate connection to the current story, I’m going in with an open mind and considering my hopes. Seeing some of the stuff that got shortchanged in Wano’s clipped epilogue would be cool, like Ryuma’s grave for example, or passing by Izo’s tomb and seeing Kiku visiting. Perhaps a more direct confonrtation of the public’s feelings about Tama’s Kurozumi heritage. That one might be hard in the pantomime format of a cover story, but you never know. It’s going to be a few installments before there’s enough info to make any real prediction about the story’s trajectory though, we know they never quite stay the course they seem to start on.

Getting back into it, Oda spends a couple of pages building into the big reveals. We also get a timeline update, with 3 minutes down already, which is a brisk pace as Shonen countdowns go. The summoning circles definitely seem closer together and like they’re placed in a more rubble-strewn environment than in the final spread of the last chapter, enough to ease my concerns about the space shifting slightly.

And the monster designs that come out when the shadows are pulled back are truly awe inspiring. I don’t know a lot of yokai or much about any of them (could tell you a little bit about classic sandworms though), but these are easy 10/10 beasts with all of Oda’s best character design ideas on full display. When One Piece ends and he inevitably gets restless after his well-earned break Oda should absolutely do the Toriyama (RIP) thing and design monsters for games. What do you even say to a pair of pages like this? I can’t stop looking back to them.

And these guys are made to feel like a threat too. None of them speak in the whole chapter; similar to Saturn’s original rampage it makes them feel all the more inhuman. (Saturn did speak when he confirmed the summons in the last chapter, so we know they can but you still get the same effect from how sparse their dialogue is.) They spring immediately into action with no apparent coordination or communication between each other, and they go straight for their goals. There’s no posturing or speeches or taking test shots at Luffy to measure his power. Nasjuro is off and running already, cutting down Pacifistas to unblock the Buster Call fleet, solving problems for the bad guys. Mars takes a shot at the barrier, and even though it doesn’t work you know he’s going to be there the moment it goes down for real. And Ju Peter and Saturn go straight for Luffy. They really don’t feel like playtime villains, which is exactly what you need at this late stage of the story.

The absence of Warcury is curious though. Is he also fighting Luffy, or is he going for something else? Charging towards Bonney perhaps?

But what are they? The fact that the odaboxes simply give creature names without specifying a Devil Fruit type is super suspicious. Nasjuro’s ice powers mirror Brook’s abilities (which allegedly come from having returned from death, rather than being directly a feature of his fruit), which could maybe suggest that he as well has returned from some kind of underworld.

I’m not ready to totally rule out it being a misdirect and them having Devil Fruits of a matched kind, but the weird details are adding up.

Speaking of weird details, I can’t quite tell if it’s weird scaling/camera angles or not, but it almost seems like Lucci knocks Enma away from Zoro only for it to boomerang back to his hand. I’m not crazy, right, other people are seeing this? At a glance you think maybe it goes up and he catches it as it comes down, but that flight path is curved in every panel. So what, did Zoro just get lucky with the amount of spin, or is there some strange new property of Enma’s power/contained Haki being shown here. Or something to do with Zoro’s close grim reaper encounter? Stick a pin in this one I think we’ll be coming back to it later.

I’m ambivalent about the Zoro and Lucci fight as a whole. The outcome was never in doubt, and it was too offscreen to provide any real character interaction or clash of ideology to add substance. Zoro snapping and finding the motivation to take the win right away when Sanji talks him down is a decent bit for the two of them, but it’s not quite enough to make the whole fight feel like more than padding.

Truly, if Lucci had been handcuffed properly after the death game portion and never made his breakout attempt, I don’t think the arc would have played out any differently. Even the silly anticlimax of the sliding ship serves the purpose of justifying the Sunny getting from A to B over dry land, but Lucci? Was taking Stussy off the table that important? Was it the only way to make it believable that Zoro wouldn’t follow Sanji and Vegapunk down to the Labophase and get involved with the Elders too soon? I’m having a hard time seeing it, but the arc isn’t over yet.

The final spread is a fantastic callback and great hype-builder for the next chapter. And I think it’s going to prove just how far the Elders’ regeneration is able to go. The Elders aren’t going down here, definitely not, but with Dorry and Brogy there might just be enough muscle on Luffy’s side to hold them back until the broadcast goes ahead.

We’re getting colour pages next week, and I have to wonder if an Akira Toriyama tribute is coming. Jump has to do it, there’s no way they won’t, but the gap between when the pages are finalised and when we see them, and the break between when Toriyama died and when it was announced to the public makes it all kinds of tough to figure out the earliest that could happen. I could definitely see Oda pivoting last minute and trading out a finished colour spread to something in honour of Toriyama, but the timing is tight. We’ll see soon, I suppose. May the hits keep on coming for the Egghead finale!