A new ship can carry the crew onward only after an old argument is answered.
Back in Water Seven, recovery includes more than healing injuries. The crew has openly challenged the World Government, lost the Merry, and left Usopp’s membership unresolved. New bounties make the consequences public, while Garp’s arrival reveals how much of Luffy’s family history his companions have never heard.
Franky uses the stolen money’s surviving value—Adam wood—to build a ship suited to the future he wants to see. His dream is not complete when the vessel leaves the yard; he needs to sail with it. The Thousand Sunny therefore arrives as both a replacement home and an invitation to its maker, but the new beginning does not automatically remove the need for an apology from the friend who left.
Story
Garp arrives with Coby Ch. 431–434
The crew is asleep in Galley-La’s guest house when a Vice Admiral punches through the wall and knocks Luffy across the room with a fist he calls love. Monkey D. Garp is Luffy’s grandfather, the man who threw him into jungles as a child to make a Marine of him, and he has come to see the boy who just burned the Government’s flag. Two young Marines stand behind him at attention: Coby and Helmeppo.
Garp talks more than he should. Luffy’s father is Dragon, the most wanted revolutionary alive, a fact Luffy hears with the same blank face as everyone else. Coby has learned to fight and has learned, from Garp, what the Four Emperors are. Far away, two of those Emperors are meeting: Shanks boards Whitebeard’s ship to ask him to call Ace back from his hunt, and when the old man refuses, their clash splits the sky.
The price of a burned flag Ch. 435
The newspaper arrives with the whole crew in it. Luffy is now worth three hundred million, Zoro a hundred and twenty, Robin eighty, Franky forty-four, Nami sixteen, Sogeking thirty, Chopper fifty. Sanji, whose photograph was never taken, is represented by a sketch so bad that he cannot look at it. Chopper is listed as a pet.
Iceburg, the shipwrights, and the Franky Family read the same page and understand what the numbers mean: the people they helped are now the Government’s enemies, and Water Seven cannot keep them. The Franky Family goes to Luffy with a request instead of a demand. Take Franky with you, they say. He has been building the ship you need since you arrived.
A shipwright finishes the beginning Ch. 436–437
Franky has spent the crew’s stolen gold on the only thing worth spending it on: a length of Adam wood, the tree that does not break. With Iceburg and the Galley-La foremen he builds a ship around it in the shipyard while the crew heals, a lion-headed brigantine with a lawn on deck and a soldier dock in its hull, and refuses every invitation to sail on it.
Robin settles the matter by seizing something Franky cannot leave behind and walking toward the shipyard with it. The Franky Family lines up to tell their boss what Tom would have told him: a ship is only finished when it reaches the end of the sea, and its builder ought to be aboard. Franky puts his speedo on, and Iceburg gives the ship its name. The Thousand Sunny is launched with a shipwright who is now a Straw Hat.
The crew makes room without erasing the breach Ch. 438–439
Usopp waits on the pier for someone to ask him back, and nobody does. Zoro is the one who says why: a man who left the crew and drew a weapon on its captain does not get to stroll back aboard as if nothing happened, and if Luffy lets him, Zoro will leave. It is the coldest and the most loyal thing anyone says in the arc, and Luffy accepts it.
Garp attacks at dawn with a fleet, throwing cannonballs by hand, and the Sunny casts off under fire. Usopp runs down the pier behind it shouting the apology he has rehearsed for a week, and Luffy’s arm stretches back across the harbour to pull him aboard. Franky lights the Coup de Burst for the first time and the Sunny leaves Water Seven through the air.
Fire meets darkness Ch. 440–441
On Banaro Island, Portgas D. Ace finally catches the man he has hunted since Jaya. Marshall D. Teach was a Whitebeard Pirate until he killed a crewmate for the Dark-Dark Fruit and ran, and he greets his old commander with an offer to join his new crew and a plan to take Luffy’s head to the Government. Ace declines both.
Their fight burns and swallows the town. Ace’s fire meets a darkness that pulls it in and pulls Ace with it, and each time Teach’s hand closes on him his flame goes out. It is the first Devil Fruit that has ever answered another. The chapter ends with two attacks meeting above the ruins, and the crew on the Sunny knows nothing of it.