Luffy breaks into the world’s most secure prison to save a brother who has already been moved.
Impel Down is a fortress in the Calm Belt built as a descending sequence of hells. Each level is designed to punish a class of criminal more permanently than the one above it, from the blade forest of the first floor to the freezing dark of the fifth, and the sixth exists only as a rumor. Warden Magellan’s poison makes the place effectively unbeatable from within; his subordinates are more concerned with avoiding him than with the prisoners. Nobody has ever escaped, and Luffy arrives knowing none of this.
The rescue becomes a collection of old enemies. Buggy, Mr. 3, and Bon Clay each meet Luffy on a different floor and attach themselves to his descent for their own reasons, and Emporio Ivankov, a commander of the Revolutionary Army, is found hiding in a level the prison does not know it contains. Their alliance is unstable and frequently absurd, but it works because Luffy treats each of them as a comrade the moment they fight beside him.
The descent fails. Ace is transferred to Marineford before Luffy reaches Level 6, and what began as a rescue turns into a mass breakout that must succeed against the warden himself. Bon Clay, whose loyalty was forged during a single farewell in Alabasta, makes the sacrifice that gets everyone else out. Luffy leaves Impel Down in a stolen warship, badly poisoned and with ten years taken from his life, still unwilling to count any of it as too high a price.
Story
A stowaway on the warden’s tour Ch. 525–526
Hancock’s ship is searched at the gates by guards who will not meet her eyes, and Luffy rides through the inspection pressed under her cloak, invisible to everyone but the wardens’ surveillance snails, which Hancock silences by turning their handlers to stone. The entry hall is floored with Seastone, and he has to be carried across it. Once loose inside the prison he heads down, because down is where Ace is, and finds the first level is a forest of trees whose leaves are blades. He also finds Buggy, chained among the prisoners and delighted to see anyone who might get him out.
Buggy has no interest in rescuing Ace but knows the prison’s layout, and he wants the armband Luffy has been wearing since Thriller Bark, a treasure map from the legendary Captain John. The two strike a bargain that neither intends to honor. Hancock, meanwhile, completes the official visit that gives her cover. She is permitted to see Ace in the deepest level and uses the moment to whisper that his brother has come for him. The information is a gift Ace can only receive as a new fear. Above ground, the alarms begin.
Blade trees, a knight of the sea, and a hole in the floor Ch. 526–528
Crimson Hell is a plain of spider-grass and razor trees where every step draws blood, and Buggy, who can separate his body into pieces, floats over it while Luffy bleeds through. Guards close in from above. Buggy’s solution is to drop them both through a hole to Level 2, where the beasts are kept, on the theory that no jailer will follow. The prison’s administration begins to register that something is loose, and the Vice Warden Hannyabal seizes the crisis as a career opportunity, loudly and repeatedly.
In the bottom of the prison, the story pauses on two men in chains. Jinbe, the fish-man Warlord who sits in Level 6 for refusing to raise a hand against Whitebeard, argues with Ace about a war that has not yet begun. Ace wants his father to stay away; Jinbe knows that Whitebeard will come and that Fish-Man Island, which lives under the Emperor’s protection, will burn if he falls. Neither man can do anything but wait. A few cells away, Crocodile listens and says nothing.
Mr. 3, Bon Clay, and the Minotaurus Ch. 529–532
Level 2 holds a basilisk hatched from a chicken’s egg, a sphinx that speaks only in the names of noodle dishes, and, in a cage, the wax man Mr. 3, who once made trophies of the crew on Little Garden. Luffy frees him, reasoning that anyone is useful, and Mr. 3’s wax becomes the tool that jams cell doors and shapes the escape. The guard Saldeath sends his blue gorillas in, the sphinx wrecks the floor, and the three of them fall through to Level 3, Starvation Hell, where the prisoners are kept on the edge of dying of hunger in a room of sand.
A voice Luffy knows calls his name. Bon Clay, the Baroque Works officer who let the crew slip past the Marines after Alabasta, greets Luffy as the friend he has never stopped considering him to be. Then the Minotaurus arrives, an enormous cow-headed jailer with a spiked club and a speed nothing that size should have, and it puts Buggy and Mr. 3 through the floor. The three of them finally combine their powers to bring it down, a cooperation none would have believed possible a day earlier. Bon Clay learns that Ivankov, the person he most admires, may be somewhere below.
Blazing Hell and the warden’s venom Ch. 533–535
Level 4 is a lake of boiling blood beneath a burning ceiling, and Bon Clay, disguised as the vice warden, walks the group into it just as Magellan arrives. The warden is a man who spends most of his day in the lavatory because his body produces poison in every form, and he sends it after Luffy as a three-headed hydra of violet venom. Luffy hits him, and every blow that lands poisons the fist that landed it. He keeps hitting. Then the hydra swallows him whole, and what falls out of it is a boy covered in a poison that would kill an ordinary man in minutes.
Buggy and Mr. 3 have fled upward with a mob of freed prisoners; Bon Clay has not. He picks up a captain he has no reason to save, in the body of the vice warden he has no right to impersonate, and carries him down while the guards look for a man they think they can see. Hannyabal and the chief guard Sadi hunt them. Bon Clay keeps going because he has nothing left in the world but the friend in his arms, and because someone once told him that friendship does not require a reason.
Freezing Hell and the country between floors Ch. 536–539
Level 5 is a frozen wilderness of wolves, and Bon Clay, who has spent the descent carrying Luffy, fights the pack with his hands and feet and loses. He and Luffy are found unconscious in the snow and dragged to a place the prison does not know exists: Newkama Land, a cavern hollowed out between the fifth and sixth floors where prisoners the guards have written off as dead live in feathers and sequins. Its queen is Emporio Ivankov, whose hormones can change a body into anything, and who Bon Clay has worshipped from a distance for years.
Ivankov can save Luffy, but only if his body can survive two days of treatment that would kill most people. Luffy screams through the night and Bon Clay screams with him, outside the door, refusing to stop. Luffy emerges in twenty hours, at the cost of ten years of his life, because Ace has none to spare. Ivankov learns whose son he is, since Dragon commands the army Ivankov belongs to, and decides to join him. Inazuma, who cuts stone like paper, opens a route to Level 6. The floor is silent when they reach it.
Level 6, and a brother already gone Ch. 540–541
Ace was moved to Marineford at dawn. Luffy has descended through the entire prison for an empty cell, and the men in the neighboring cages watch him understand it. Jinbe, who spoke with Ace hours earlier, tells him what happened; Crocodile, who has never forgotten Alabasta, laughs and then offers a bargain. He will help them out of the prison in exchange for a shot at Whitebeard in the war to come. Ivankov knows a secret from Crocodile’s past that keeps the former Warlord honest, and Luffy, who has no time for grudges, accepts.
Jinbe asks to be released as well. He has refused to fight Whitebeard, and if the war is going to happen, he means to be on the right side of it. Luffy frees him, and Crocodile insists on adding his old partner, Mr. 1, who has been sitting in Level 6 for the crime of being Crocodile’s partner. The descent reverses. The Newkama flood upward with them, the wardens learn that the deepest floor has been breached, and Magellan unchains the one prisoner he trusts to kill on his behalf: Shiryu of the Rain, the former head jailer.
A man who wants the prison’s worst Ch. 542–546
Blackbeard walks in through the front gate with his crew and beats Hannyabal at the door, the second man to enter Impel Down uninvited in a day. On the burning fourth floor he meets Luffy coming up. He was the one who caught Ace, and Luffy knows it; Jinbe has to hold him back, and Blackbeard, who has no interest in fighting a boy he expects to lose to fate anyway, lets him pass with a laugh. He is going down. Impel Down’s sixth floor holds monsters, and he has come to recruit them.
Magellan blocks the stairs above Level 4. Luffy’s second fight with the warden is different: Mr. 3 coats his fists in wax and the poison cannot touch them, and Luffy, hours from death, hits without hesitation. Magellan is still stronger and still unhurt by anything single. Ivankov and Inazuma hold the doorway while the rest climb, and the warden pours poison down the stairwell after them. Hannyabal makes his own stand against Luffy on the stairs and gives a speech about protecting the world that Luffy respects even while knocking him down.
The escapees reach the first level and the surface, where Jinbe calls whale sharks from the sea to carry two hundred convicts across the water to a Marine warship. Buggy, who accidentally led a mob to freedom, is proclaimed their captain. Behind them Magellan’s poison fills the halls, and the only route to Marineford is the Gates of Justice, which open on a signal from inside the prison. Somebody has to stay to give it.
A warship, a gate, and one friend behind it Ch. 547–549
The stolen warship rides the current toward the gates, and they do not open. Then they do. Bon Clay, impersonating Magellan in the control room, has ordered the release himself and stays where he is to face the real warden when he arrives. His last words to Luffy are shouted through a snail across a distance he knows he will not cross, and Luffy, who understands what has happened only as it happens, cannot turn the ship around to answer them. The gate closes behind the escape.
Whether Bon Clay survived is not shown; Magellan reaches him in a room with no exit, and the story leaves his fate in the dark he chose. Blackbeard walks out of the prison at the same time with the men he came for: Shiryu, who has switched sides, and four monsters from Level 6 whom the Government erased from the record. Luffy sails for Marineford with ten years gone, a hundred convicts he does not know, and the knowledge that the man who took Ace has just become stronger.