A ridiculous pirate game reveals how frightening it would be to lose a crewmate.
The crew meets Tonjit on an island whose stretched animals and unusual tidal geography invite a lighter adventure. Foxy then challenges Luffy to a Davy Back Fight, a pirate competition in which the stakes are members of the losing crew. Its comedy depends on cheating, bad officiating, and Luffy accepting rules before considering the consequences.
Under the jokes is a rehearsal for the losses that follow. Chopper can be removed by a game, Zoro and Sanji must cooperate despite their quarrels, and the captain has to repair a danger he accepted on everyone’s behalf. The arrival of Admiral Aokiji then strips away the comic framework and asks a more serious version of the same question: can Luffy actually keep this crew together against the world’s strongest powers?
Story
A man on stilts and a horse who waited Ch. 303–304
Back at sea level, the Merry reaches a flat green island where everything grows long: the grass, the dogs, the foxes, and a set of stilts with an old man on top. Tonjit climbed them ten years ago to please a grandchild and has been unable to get down since. Luffy cuts him free, and the two sit in the grass and eat while the old man explains that his island is one of ten that connect only when the tide falls.
His horse Shelly has waited the whole decade beside the stilts. The reunion lasts until a fleet flying a split-nosed skull anchors offshore and a pistol shot drops the horse in the grass. Foxy the Silver Fox and his crew have come to play, and shooting an old man’s horse is how they announce the rules.
People become the prize Ch. 305–307
Foxy proposes a Davy Back Fight and Luffy, who understands none of it, accepts. The rules are old and binding: three games, and each win lets the victor take a member of the losing crew or its flag. The Foxy Pirates number five hundred because Foxy has been collecting people this way for years, and every one of them was once someone’s nakama.
The first game is the Donut Race, a course around the island in boats built on the spot. Nami, Usopp, and Robin build a fast one and are winning it when Foxy leans over the rail and uses his Slow-Slow Beam, a power that holds anything it touches motionless for thirty seconds. Porche’s boat glides past a frozen crew, and the Foxy Pirates choose Chopper.
Chopper does not go quietly, and Zoro tells him to stop crying because a man made his choice when he joined a pirate crew. It is the harshest thing anyone has said to him, and it is the only comfort available: the crew intends to win him back, and they need him to believe it.
Rivals share a task Ch. 308–312
The second game is a ball game in which the ball is a person. Zoro and Sanji, who have not agreed on anything since the Baratie, must carry a crewmate through the Groggy Monsters: Hamburg, Pickles, and the giant fish-man Big Pan, all wearing armour and weapons the referee declines to see. Chopper cheers for the Straw Hats from the Foxy side in a uniform he hates.
The two spend most of the match fighting each other, and it is exactly this that wins it. Their kick and cut land together in the last seconds, driving Big Pan into the goal with the other two monsters riding him. Chopper is chosen back at once, and Luffy learns that the third game is single combat against Foxy himself.
A captain fights on a rigged deck Ch. 313–318
The final round is fought on the deck of the Sexy Foxy, a ship that Foxy has spent years turning into a fairground of traps. Luffy is slowed thirty seconds at a time, hit with everything the crew can carry, and dropped through the floor. Foxy’s Slow-Slow Beam is not powerful, but it changes the tempo of every exchange and he has practised it against people who fought back.
Luffy improvises rather than adapts. He finds a mirror shard among the wreckage, deflects the beam back at its owner, and lands thirty seconds of punches on a man who cannot move. Foxy falls, and Luffy claims the flag rather than a crew member. The five hundred Foxy Pirates mourn while their new captain, Luffy, paints them a replacement skull so ugly that they beg him to leave.
A game ends; a warning remains Ch. 319–321
A tall man in a sleep mask is napping on the beach when the crew returns to Tonjit. He is Aokiji, an Admiral of the Marines, and he has come, he says, out of curiosity about the new hundred-million bounty and the woman who joined it. He freezes the sea so that Tonjit can ride to the next island, and then turns to Robin and tells her that every organisation she has ever joined has been destroyed.
Robin attacks first and is frozen where she stands. Luffy fights him alone, by agreement, and Aokiji turns his arm to ice, freezes him solid, and leaves both of them alive because he owed a favour to Saul and because a warning is more useful than a corpse. The crew thaws Robin in the bath and lets Luffy sleep it off.
No one on the Merry says what the day has meant. A stranger has told Robin she brings disaster, and the captain has lost a fight without landing a blow. Both facts board the ship with them and sail toward the shipwrights’ city.