Two years later, nine strangers who know each other perfectly return to the same grove.
The manga resumes after two years with the Straw Hats converging on the archipelago where they were destroyed. Sabaody has changed less than they have. The groves are still lawless, the Marines still patrol, and a gang of impostors has been using the crew’s name to recruit for the New World, trading on a reputation that became legendary the moment its owners vanished. The real crew arrives one by one and spends most of the arc trying to find each other without attracting attention.
The reunion is written as a series of recognitions. Zoro has lost an eye, Franky has rebuilt himself, Sanji is unable to look at a woman without bleeding, and Brook is a stadium-filling celebrity announcing his retirement. Their new strength is demonstrated almost casually against the impostors and the Marines who arrive to arrest them. The arc ends with the Sunny coated, the crew of nine on board, and Rayleigh watching from the shore as the ship they built descends toward Fish-Man Island.
Story
Nine people on their way to the same grove Ch. 598
Two years pass in a page. A man with a scar over one eye steps off a ship and asks the way to Grove 42 while walking in the opposite direction; a woman with long orange hair haggles with a shopkeeper who does not recognize her; a man with a jaw like a ship’s prow and a hull for a chest tests the Sunny’s new fittings at the grove where Kuma has stood guard for twenty-four months. Usopp is thinner and carries a bag of seeds. Chopper has learned to control the form that once wrecked a grove. Brook is announcing a farewell concert to a stadium.
Luffy leaves Rusukaina on the Kuja ship with Rayleigh and Hancock, who has fed him for two years and would like to marry him. Rayleigh has finished the coating, and the crew that gathers at Shakky’s bar over the next day does so in a disguise of ordinary clothes and false names, because their bounties have not gone down in their absence. The Marines still remember the crew that punched a Celestial Dragon. Somebody else, it turns out, has been remembering them too.
Somebody has been using their name Ch. 598–599
A man calling himself Straw Hat Luffy holds court at Grove 46, threatening bystanders with a pistol and gathering pirate crews under the banner of a name he has borrowed. His companions are equally false, and the promise they make, of passage into the New World under a famous captain, draws the ambitious and the desperate. Nami and Usopp, arriving in the middle of it, are propositioned by the fake versions of themselves. Chopper mistakes the impostors for his crew and is delighted for a chapter.
The real Luffy, in a disguise Hancock has arranged, bumps into the false one and does not recognize what he is looking at. When the impostor threatens him and his companions draw weapons, Luffy releases the same burst of will that once cleared a plaza at Marineford. The recruits collapse without being touched, and the false captain, unhurt only because Luffy was not aiming at anyone, understands too late whom he has been imitating. The Marines, who have been watching the impostors, are now looking for the real thing.
Nine pirates, one by one Ch. 599–600
Zoro arrives first, a fact his crewmates take longer to absorb than any of his new scars. Sanji has spent two years being pursued across an island by Ivankov’s followers and has emerged both stronger and constitutionally unable to remain calm around women. Franky’s new body startles even Franky’s friends, and Robin is being trailed by Government agents who mistake her for someone who can still be tailed. Brook ends a farewell concert by revealing his true profession and walking off stage into a Marine cordon.
Nami, Usopp, and Chopper find each other in the crowd at Grove 46 and are drafted into the impostors’ ranks by men who cannot tell the difference. Robin walks away from her pursuers by refusing to hurry. Sanji, hearing that Zoro reached the meeting point before he did, treats it as the least believable news of the two years. Each recognition is written as a small shock, a face that has changed and a person who has not, and the crew that reassembles is both the one that scattered and something new.
The wrong crew arrested, the right one walks out Ch. 600–601
The Government finally sends Sentomaru and two Pacifistas to Grove 46, expecting to arrest the famous crew that has been recruiting in the open. They arrest the impostor instead, since Demaro Black has the name and none of the strength, and the real Luffy, Zoro, and Sanji fight their way out of the same grove without any of the desperation of two years earlier. Luffy destroys one Pacifista with a single Haki-hardened blow. Zoro and Sanji dispose of the other in two strikes and argue about who did more.
The scene is a deliberate echo of the earlier defeat: the same machines, the same island, a completely different result. Sentomaru, who watched the crew collapse against one Pacifista two years ago, recognizes Luffy through the disguise and is left with no machine to send after him. The crew scatters again, this time on purpose, along the route Rayleigh has laid to Grove 42 where the Sunny waits.
Rayleigh’s farewell Ch. 601–602
The Sunny waits at Grove 42, coated in Rayleigh’s resin, and the crew reaches her with Marines closing in from the sea. Hancock and the Kuja block the harbor long enough for the escape. Nine people stand on the same deck for the first time in two years, and Luffy chooses the moment to explain his plan for the voyage beneath the sea, which is to sail and see what happens. Nobody objects.
Rayleigh, who once told Roger goodbye at a place like this, watches from the shore and finds the resemblance unsettling. Zoro and Sanji cut a warship in half without appearing to compete about it, the bubble seals around the ship, and the Sunny sinks through the water toward the Red Line. The first half of the manga closes with the same crew, a different sea, and a captain who has learned how much losing costs and intends never to pay it again.
Legacy
The arc formally begins the New World half of the manga, with a crew whose members have each grown in ways the story will spend years revealing. Luffy’s use of the three Haki forms becomes the baseline for every fight that follows, and the casual defeat of the Pacifista establishes how far the crew has moved past the enemies of the first half.
Only after the departure does the crew learn that Kuma guarded the Sunny throughout the two years, a final clarification of his role at Sabaody and Thriller Bark. The impostors, including the Caribou brothers, follow the Sunny down, and Rayleigh’s farewell links the crew explicitly to Roger’s.