Dressrosa arc

Lucy enters the Corrida Colosseum Ch. 700–716

The alliance splits three ways. Sanji, Kin’emon and Franky head into town, Nami’s group guards the ship and Caesar, and Luffy, disguised as the gladiator Lucy, enters the Corrida Colosseum when he learns that Ace’s Flame-Flame Fruit is the prize. In the waiting room he meets Bartolomeo, a fan who worships him; Cavendish, a swordsman who resents him; Rebecca, a gladiator the crowd despises; and Don Chinjao, who wants him dead over a grudge against his grandfather. A one-legged toy soldier befriends Franky and reveals that toys in Dressrosa are not what they seem.

Law goes to Green Bit to hand over Caesar and finds Admiral Fujitora waiting, with the exchange revealed as fiction: Doflamingo never resigned, and the newspaper report was a manipulation of the World Government itself. Robin and Usopp fall into the Tontatta kingdom of dwarves beneath Green Bit, where the tiny people believe Usopp is a hero descended from the legendary Noland, and Usopp does nothing to correct them. Sanji, in the town, is drawn to the dancer Violet and betrayed by her before she changes her mind.

In the arena the blocks are fought out in a ring surrounded by water full of fighting fish. Bartolomeo wins Block B by standing behind a barrier no one can pass; Cavendish wins Block D by doing nothing at all until Rebecca outlasts everyone else in her own block and takes it instead. Luffy defeats Chinjao in Block C, and the old pirate weeps when a punch restores the drill-shaped point of his head that Garp once flattened. Above the crowd, Doflamingo watches Lucy fight and knows exactly who is under the mask.

The kingdom that forgot its own people Ch. 717–728

The toy soldier tells the history that Dressrosa cannot remember. Ten years earlier Doflamingo manipulated King Riku into appearing to slaughter his own citizens, controlling the king’s body with his strings while the palace guard burned the streets, then arrived as the saviour who ended the madness. Sugar’s Devil Fruit made the leftover witnesses into toys and erased them from memory, so wives forgot husbands and daughters forgot fathers. A contract in the toy’s heart forbids them from telling anyone what they used to be.

The soldier has built a resistance in the underground trade port, where the Donquixote Family runs an armoury and where dwarves have been enslaved to make the SMILE factory work. His plan is a single act: knock Sugar unconscious, and every toy in the country reverts and remembers. Usopp is recruited as a hero he has no intention of being and Franky as a battering ram he is glad to be. Kin’emon finds Kanjuro, his comrade, imprisoned as a toy, and the two men argue over who should have rescued whom.

Rebecca fights in the Colosseum for a fruit she hopes will let her kill the king who murdered her mother, and the toy soldier who trained her cannot tell her that he is her father, Kyros, the greatest gladiator Dressrosa ever had. The crowd calls her the daughter of a murderer because that is what the country remembers of King Riku. Luffy, hearing all of it, promises the soldier that they will win, which the soldier has heard before from men who are now toys.

A surgeon loses twice Ch. 728–731

Law confronts Doflamingo at the palace with the man’s own strategy in mind and finds himself outmanoeuvred anyway. Doflamingo has arranged for Fujitora to join the fight, and gravity that pins a man to the earth is not something the Op-Op Fruit can cut. Law is shot, then shot again, then chained with sea-stone and told he will be delivered to Green Bit for whatever the Admiral decides. Doflamingo speaks of Corazon while he does it, and Law learns that the man knows exactly how much the name still costs him.

On the Sunny, Doflamingo appears in the sky above the ship and attacks. Sanji holds him for a moment, long enough to see how wide the gap is, and Law’s teleportation, spent from his cell, throws the ship out of range. Nami, Chopper, Brook and Momonosuke flee toward Zou with a Big Mom vessel on their heels and Caesar still aboard as luggage. Kin’emon and Sanji fall back into the town. The alliance that came to trade a hostage has lost its surgeon, its ship and its exit in a single afternoon.

A hero’s face Ch. 732–743

Underground, the dwarves’ plan against Sugar depends on a chilli-laced grape and a hero who will not run. Usopp runs. When the first attempt collapses and the dwarves are captured, he abandons them in terror, then turns back, because a lie about being a hero is the only thing keeping a whole nation of tiny people fighting. Trebol catches him and burns him, and drags him before the girl who runs the kingdom as a toy factory, a child who has not aged in ten years because her fruit froze her.

Sugar forces the grape into Usopp’s mouth as punishment. What happens to his face when the spice hits, an involuntary, grotesque mask of pure agony, is so terrifying that the girl faints from the sight of it. Every toy in Dressrosa becomes a person again in the same instant, and every memory that was taken returns to the people who lost it. Mothers remember sons; the country remembers its king. The toy soldier stands up in his own flesh, and Rebecca, in the arena above, feels the name Kyros return to her like a dropped word.

Kyros walks into the palace and takes off Doflamingo’s head, which turns out to belong to a body double. The real Warlord has been elsewhere, watching, and he emerges into a country that has just, all at once, recalled what he did. The freed toys and the dwarves declare Usopp their god. Usopp, half dead in the trade port, accepts the title because there is nobody else to do it.

The brother from Dawn Island Ch. 744–752

The masked gladiator who won the Flame-Flame Fruit removes his mask in the arena. He is Sabo, the boy Luffy and Ace swore brotherhood with in Goa, believed dead since a Celestial Dragon’s ship fired on his boat when he was ten. He lived, lost his memory, and recovered it only when Ace’s death was reported. Now the Revolutionary Army’s chief of staff, he has come to Dressrosa to claim what his brother left and to make sure nobody else does. He eats the fruit and lights his fist.

Luffy and Sabo meet on the palace approaches, and Luffy weeps without dignity. Sabo apologises for arriving too late for Ace and promises never to be late again. Then he goes back to the Colosseum to hold the ground against the Blackbeard Pirate Burgess, who wanted the fruit for his own captain, and against Fujitora, who tests the new fire with gravity and finds it holds. Koala and the Revolutionary Army have been in Dressrosa the whole time, tracing the weapons trade that the Colosseum was built to hide.

Doflamingo closes the country Ch. 745–760

The freed toys remember everything, and Dressrosa turns against its king in an afternoon. Doflamingo answers by dropping the Birdcage: a dome of razor string that seals the country and shrinks inward. He cuts the Den Den Mushi lines, announces bounties on Luffy, Law, Usopp and the people who defied him, and offers the population a way out by killing one another. King Riku, stumbling out of the arena in the body of a toy no longer, speaks to his people for the first time in ten years and begs them to hold.

Luffy, Zoro and Law climb toward the palace as Pica turns the stone of the island into his body. Colosseum fighters who came for the fruit choose to protect a country they barely know, and Rebecca, Kyros and Viola become the centre of the resistance. Fujitora sides with neither the Warlord nor the pirates, and holds a falling shower of rubble in the sky over the citizens. Bellamy, who once knelt to this king, is turned into a puppet against the man he came to respect, and Luffy has to fight a friend who is begging him not to hold back.

In the trade port Usopp, carried on the shoulders of the dwarves, sees what nobody else can: Sugar, awake again, about to turn the whole resistance back into toys with a single touch. Something opens behind his eyes, a sight that shows him the girl’s aura across a mile of stone, and he fires. The shot lands. Sugar falls again, and the Observation Haki that Usopp did not know he possessed becomes the difference between a kingdom and a toy box. Luffy meanwhile leaves Law chained on the plateau and climbs.

The boy from the white town Ch. 761–768

Law was born in Flevance, a city poisoned by the amber lead its people mined without knowing it killed slowly across generations. The world let the city be exterminated to contain a disease it had already misunderstood, and Law escaped carrying the illness and three years to live. He joined the Donquixote Pirates to destroy as much as he could before dying. There he met Rosinante, Doflamingo’s younger brother, a silent man who threw him out of windows and was secretly a Marine officer.

Doflamingo was born a Celestial Dragon and lost that status when his father chose to live among ordinary people, whose hatred nearly killed the family. He shot his own father in the hope of being readmitted and was refused. Rosinante, called Corazon, stole the Op-Op Fruit for Law rather than let his brother sell it, then was executed by Doflamingo on Minion Island while Law hid in a chest inside a field of his silence. Law inherited his life, his hat, and a promise to make the death matter.

Every ally buys a step Ch. 769–783

The battles on the way to Doflamingo belong mostly to people who were strangers a day before. Sai fights and unexpectedly courts Baby 5; Cavendish’s sleeping self Hakuba cuts through Gladius; Bartolomeo’s barriers protect people he cannot stop insulting; and the dwarves’ commander Leo confronts the executives who tricked his people. Kyros faces Diamante, the man who killed his wife Scarlett, and Rebecca refuses to be a spectator in the fight that decides her father’s honour.

Zoro beats Pica by forcing the giant stone body down to a single, cuttable core, and Franky wears down Senor Pink in a fight the crowd cheers as a contest of manliness. On the plateau, Law confronts Doflamingo with the surgeon’s ability he was given and the Gamma Knife it was meant for, and loses again. Luffy reaches the palace at last, and the Birdcage begins to shrink faster, turning every remaining battle into a race against the wire.

A fourth gear and ten minutes Ch. 784–790

Luffy abandons restraint and unveils Gear Fourth, a technique that combines inflated muscle with Armament Haki and lets him bounce, hover and hit harder than anything Doflamingo has faced. For the first time the Warlord is knocked out of the sky and through the city he built. But the form has a time limit, and when it runs out Luffy is a boy who cannot use Haki for ten minutes, and the island must survive that long with the cage closing in.

Gatz, the colosseum announcer, becomes the voice of a country counting down. Cavendish and Bartolomeo carry Luffy, Zoro and the gladiators push at the wire with their bodies, and Doflamingo strings a girl to kill her father: Rebecca, controlled, is aimed at Kyros. Viola’s eyes find the strings, Law spends his last strength to move Rebecca out of the fight, and when the minutes are up Luffy rises with a punch the size of the plateau. King Kong Gun sends the king of Dressrosa into the earth, and the Birdcage dissolves over a country that has spent the day learning the truth.

A fleet that chose itself Ch. 791–801

Fujitora kneels to King Riku to apologise for the Government’s neglect, in front of the citizens, and leaves the question of Luffy’s arrest to a throw of dice he cannot see. The dice fall in the pirates’ favour, and the Admiral spends the next days losing a chase across the island as slowly as he can. Kyros returns to Rebecca not as a toy but as a father who lets her believe, for her own sake, that the soldier who protected her is gone. Riku takes the throne again, and Viola asks him to make Rebecca a princess.

Sabo carries Ace’s fruit into a new life and slips away with the Revolutionaries and the weapons ledgers. Seven crews who fought beside Luffy for a day, Cavendish, Bartolomeo, Sai, Ideo, Leo, Hajrudin and Orlumbus, offer him their allegiance in a shared cup. He accepts the drink and refuses the command. The Straw Hat Grand Fleet, five thousand six hundred people, exists from that moment whether he likes it or not. Doflamingo is carried away in chains, and his bounty on Luffy is replaced by the Government’s: five hundred million berries.