Illness or not, Oda is delivering hard on God Valley. Now on the seventh chapter of volume 114, I’m wondering if he’ll be able to wrap the flashback up before the book ends, or if we’ll really go a full volume without any contact with the present – or Luffy. Never too late for a first.

Yamato’s cover story draws to a close at last, and I gotta say it’s one of the biggest misfires of the cover story set. None of them are fast-moving or actually that heavy on lore, but the good ones have the hook of showing a familiar character in a new context. We see supporting villains like Hatchi or Gedatsu show their kinder sides without the influence of cruel leaders. Or we see villains that first appeared in positions of power, such as Wapol or the CP9 squad, have to rebuild themselves from the ground up. While they will be mostly fluff, plenty have ended with a change to the focus character’s status quo – generally an alliance that puts a new faction on the map for later, such as Buggy with Alvida, Koby and Helmeppo with Garp, or Germa and Caesar’s reformed MADS. Yamato’s cover story gives us a character that was already heroic, in a setting surrounded by allies, having zero fish out of water experiences despite their isolated upbringing, and while it results in some new friends they do not leave Wano to put themselves into the world as a force to someday meet up with.

It had its moments. I liked seeing Tama’s ninja skills, and a redemption for Ulti and Page One is a reasonable outcome even without them going anywhere. But this story had made 99% of its point ten installments ago, dragging the end out until it hurt. Maybe, if Oda was so committed to revisiting all of the Scabbards, it should have been a Decks of the World or Grand Fleet Stories style anthology cover story instead of a continuous narrative. Either way, it’s over now. My guess positive for the next one is either Stussy or Sentomaru, or both of them together. The negative guess is 40 chapters of the omni-Vegapunk screwing around in the drifting Labophase.

Getting into the action, we get one of Oda’s trademark battle maps, but in this case it combines with some murky dialogue to lessen my understanding of where everyone’s coming from and going. Roger talks like he’s encircled by the Rocks Pirates and the Marines, even thought they both should be coming from the same place. Rocks himself is technically at their rear, but would Roger have the intel to know he’s there but not that he’s been intercepted by Garling? I got the impression the Roger Pirates were going to try and fight straight through the corridor, but the group of them reaching the treasure store later implies that they instead fell back the way they’d come. And who’s talking when the order is given to move the ship to the southwest? Context implies Roger, but that move doesn’t make sense for his vector of escape, which is northwest out of the middle passage. It wouldn’t makse sense to be Marine chatter, given that Garp already landed on that corner. But there’s no real reason for the Rocks pirates to be making that move either; you’d more expect them to go around north to pick up their captain. And then at the end of the chapter, Whitebeard suddenly joins Rocks in the northwest, despite having the whole Roger crew between him and there last we saw him. Kaido getting there makes sense, he can fly. But Whitebeard getting past so many high level combatants who would want to stop him should have warranted at least one or two onscreen interactions.

We get a somewhat redemptive Garp scene as he confronts Sengoku about the massacred civilians. So he didn’t know coming in. But he’s going to choose to stay after. And Sengoku comes across very calm despite the level of atrocity being reported. Does he already know?

Despite only getting a couple of panels to do it, Eris makes a strong impression. The wild hair in her design feels different, even if her face doesn’t, and she takes a brave and practical approach to her tough situation. I’m curious about her past as a pirate and how Rocks managed to keep her so secret from his crew, assuming they met at sea. Maybe we’ll get a little more of her for Blackbeard’s flashback later on. I hope so, I’d love to see what this relationship is like in more normal circumstances. As a couple though, man, can these two choose hiding places. He stows her at God Valley, she says meet at Lulusia. Exclusively the doomedest places on the planet. I’d put money down on Fullalead getting nuked before the series ends purely on the basis of Rocks making it somewhere important to him.

We get a little more about God Knight powers in this scene. Garling complains about it taking a while to heal after Rocks hits him, but is that an innate thing, just from the amount of Conqueror’s Haki Rocks is able to emit or has Rocks been developing the specific technique for it since his attack on Marie Geoise? And I’m very surprise to see people Reversi’d before Imu’s arrival. Can Garling just do that? Can the others? We need to know more about the rules of this ability.

Kaido and Linlin’s scene is a fun moment among all the darkness. I enjoy how it recontextualises the conversation about him owing her one for his fruit on Wano. And that smug face he makes as he eats it, that’s a new expression for the big ogre.

Oda makes a very obvious and deliberate parallel between Shanks and Blackbeard towards the end of the chapter, juxtaposing panels of each of their rescues from God Valley. Many have speculated over the years that Blackbeard could cement his status as a final villain by taking out Shanks and robbing Luffy of their long-awaited reunion and hat return. I’m not saying this is any kind of direct evidence for that, but it paints a picture of some kind of important connection between the pair.

There’s one last little shock show of the brutality of the World Government when the Marine ships fire on the fleeing slaves. The cruelty truly is limitless. It calls to mind Sakazuki’s actions at Ohara, but with even less sense. At least we get the Kuma scene after for a sweet spot of hope.

The final spread generates incredible hype on a bunch of levels. Kaido’s dragon form? Man, I’ve been saying since the start of Wano how impressively intricate that thing is, with all the painstakingly inked scales, and how cool it is the way the snaking body fills in space. I never thought we were getting that again. Rocks, Whitebeard and Kaido fighting side by side almost feels like a bigger event than the Garp and Roger team we were promised. And then there’s Imu’s arrival, seemingly using Saturn as his portal. This leans even further on the idea that the Elders’ powers are extensions of Imu’s own. And then Rocks’ description putting a new angle on Blackbead’s present day goal. How will Rocks fall? What do Kaido and Wihtebeard see as it happens? What unites Roger and Garp? Did Garp see Imu? Oda knows exactly how to end a chapter to keep the readers coming back.