I said I couldn’t wait, but now that I have this chapter, there’s an oddly bittersweet about something as endgame as a prospective final boss’s powers being revealed. Not just because it means the ending is creeping closer, but because how risky this kind of escalation ends up being. There’s an obvious storytelling need to make the final (or final-ish) guy stronger and more unique than everything before, to give them an extra surprise skill that goes outside and beyond the normal system. Make it like they’re cheating so it feels extra satisfying to beat them. A lot of stories mess it up. It’s a delicate thing to change the rules so late in the game. So here, One Piece navigates a treacherous footing as Oda makes the decisions that will either cement him as the one that stuck the landing, or will have us all reminding ourselves that it’s about the journey not the destination.

Speaking of endings, the Yamato cover story has to be close. But there’s one more region to visit from the original travel plan. Is Oda building up to a stinger, or will it just be an epilogue?

The first spread here is rough around the edges in a whole bunch of ways. First is the group of giants that run in. Are they adults from the village? They have to be, the pirate group doesn’t show up until a couple of pages later, and when they do they come out of the trees at the back of the line instead of from the front. But I don’t remember a party setting out from the village in any previous chapter. It’s not hard to believe it happened, it’s just a little odd not to have gotten one panel setting it up. (I’m open to having missed it, those early chapters of the kidnapping came out in a very busy time of my life; I didn’t absorb them as deeply as I normally try to.)

Second, the choice not to draw the thorns surrounding Collun as the first giant approaches him makes that panel hard to follow. Even if they are meant to be fully invisible, the translucent version used in previous chapters makes for a much smoother read. Particularly if you’re an early scanlation reader, where they don’t fill in the sound effects to help out. And on the topic of that sound effects, the one in the bottom right seems like it should have been drawn with the traditional sound effect white stroke around it to stand out. And there’s a couple of other examples of this later in the chapter, making the effects less readable and the panels feel murky. These have to be unfinished.

And finally, there’s the sheer amount of art escaping the panel borders. The haki bolts I could have taken as an intentional effect, but Collun’s mouth up above and the rendering on the giant collapsing down below are definitely not supposed to be like that. It’s a cool window into how the series’ inking is done before a final cleanup, but it’s never nice knowing a chapter came so down to the wire that it missed that last polish. At least it’s an easy fix for the volume release.

Going back to the actual story, the scope of Imu’s haki blast is immense considering the size of the island. And it’s strong too, if a member of the Giant Pirates would go down to it. The party in the Underworld must have gotten at least a tingle of that. We’re so overdue for a cut back to them, but I don’t want to miss any of what’s happening up top.

I’m a big fan of the classic devil look the possessed Gunko takes on. The wings have to be Imu’s, but I wonder if the tail and pitchfork are coming from her power. Honestly makes it feel a bit on the nose in hindsight. And then she makes this arcane summoning circle just to fire a mundane canon through it. Fantastic bit, especially when it gets repeated later to draw book which then opens to provide a gun and a knife. What was the point of the book? Maybe this is just what you have to resort to when your borrowed body doesn’t come with the pockets normally provided by a pair of pants. Whatever else comes of this, I’m glad Imu isn’t just an ‘even stronger energy blast’ kind of villain. The weapons remain mundane, but they’re used creatively and augmented by soft powers like portals and mental control.

A couple more weird bits on the next page. Jinbei’s observation haki has to be running in top gear to be able to tell that Gunko transformed at all from this distance. And then there’s the discussion about where Luffy and Hadjrudin went. Seems like it’s Brook saying it, but him and Usopp were both totally snookered at the feast scene. Hard to believe either of them picked up that much about all those people sneaking off. Maybe this info should all have come from Nami. I guess there must be a whole offscreen segment where Gerd returns to the party after beating the info out of Rodo to gather up the rest of her crew plus Sanji to go chase Luffy and Zoro. It’s one of those things that’s technically possible, but it’s not good for the flow of the story that I’m going back nine chapters and inventing my own scenes to explain it.

Love to see even more of Robin being a badass at the bottom of the page. I wonder if she’ll join Chopper in puzzling out the ways to fight immortals. It’s a good role for the two analytical Strawhats.

Dorry and Brogy finally arrive and Oda takes the time to show Imu/Gunko being a physical match for them rather than completely relying on the mindwipe hack. Do we think it’s weird though, that Imu summons both a relatively normal shortsword and a shotgun that’s way too big for a human but still too small for a giant? Maybe they have limited control over exactly which weapons they can draw. Or maybe the size is designed to suit their real body. Well anyway, the shot to the arm is a much more abrupt and extreme injury than I usually expect from One Piece, even if there’s a good chance the contract lets him regenerate it.

And it’s that contract where things get really interesting. I have so many questions about how this works and what its limitations are. You would think it would take some kind of submission or true defeat to become vulnerable to a power like that, but maybe it’s just as simple as stepping on the circle. Love how rather than getting sucked in and spat out, the victim instead gets stuck halfway and the circle itself flips over before the evil version pulls themselves out by the legs. Kinda goofy but also weirdly unsettling in its own way.

The dialogue surrounding this is crazy too. Not being bound by logic or common sense under Mu’s control sure sounds a lot like what Lucci said to Vivi about the Celestial Dragons in chapter 907, that “gods are not bound by logic.” What does Lucci know? And how far do I read into this idea that demons are the “proper form for life to take,” like some kind of demonic carcinisation. Does it suggest Imu is a natural born demon/devil with a superiority complex?

The scanlations found the name “Coeurl” in the characters for the contract. Even after reading the summary for Black Destroyer I’m not quite seeing how that’s relevant. Will have to track down the full story maybe. At least the imagery in “Domi Reversi” is easy to follow.

The final spread takes the already impressive previous-chapter page of the Sleeptid invasion and escalates it. What a truly crazy way for this arc to go. Could this be why the initial enemy force was so small, leaving us all to think this wouldn’t be a 1v1 fight kind of arc, because the crew’s going to have to fight Dorry, Broggy and their crew instead? Have to surpass his “masters” could be great for Usopp’s growth at least.

There’s so much to consider about how this insane power is supposed to fit in with the One Piece we’ve known up to this point, and so much we still don’t know about it that it’s hard to do more than just ramble off possibilities. Is Imu the demon/devil-taming Forest God from the Harley text? Are they a devil that had once been tamed by that god but was freed when the Second World ended? Is this actually just a broken, Nika-style Devil Fruit, say a Human Human Model: Devil or Model: Satan? And of course all imagery of devils and hell in the series bear re-examining after seeing this. Impel Down’s uniforms, for example. (Hey remember how last week Sommers had a Crimson Hell attack, the same name as Impel Down’s first level?) Was there a world where Impel Down was a tower prison either for or run by demons before the Second World’s apocalyptic flooding let the World Government turn it into a submerged oubliette for their undesirables?

I think back to Dressrosa and Doflamingo, and how his big thing as a villain was being a puppetmaster, able to sow chaos by influencing or directly controlling the various parties he’d wronged so they clashed with each other. How he made Luffy fight Bellamy when he didn’t want to, forcing him to hurt his friends. Even just the way he preferred to rule the kingdom, be served by the people and look down from above when he obviously had the power to level the island in an afternoon when he wanted to. Given his knowledge of Marie Geoise secrets, you have to wonder if Doflamingo’s intent was to make himself into a mini-Imu all along, and the whole arc was foreshadowing and stage-setting for this ultimate battle.

And of course, we have to think about Loki and his crimes. Oh, he killed a bunch of allies and family members and acts like the situation was more complicated but doesn’t directly explain. Oh, the guys who got killed had a Holy Knight summoning circle in their palace. That feels like a few puzzle pieces fitting together from where I’m sitting. Going to be bonus tragic when Luffy inevitably shows us how to flip back captured pieces without killing them.

Because freeing them is what he has to do. We learned two arcs ago that the hero represents a god of liberation. Now that we have an evil god of dominion and conquest, what the hell else could possibly happen?

This has already turned out rambly so I don’t want to waste too much time signing off. All I will say is thank god it’s not a break week, because this is a lot to sit with.