Twenty years after a lord was boiled alive, his retainers return to open a country Kaido closed.
Wano is a closed country, sealed from the world by its own tradition and then by Kaido, who rules it through the shogun Orochi. Its people live in a fantasy of the Flower Capital while the surrounding regions starve, drink from poisoned rivers, and dig weapons in the Udon mines. Twenty years earlier the daimyo Kozuki Oden, who had sailed with Whitebeard and Roger and seen the last island, was executed for trying to open it again. His retainers were sent forward in time with his son, and they arrive now.
The Straw Hats enter in disguise, one group ahead and one behind, and are almost immediately scattered. Luffy fights Kaido too early and loses so completely that he wakes in a prison mine. The arc spends its first half building an army out of prisoners, courtesans, shamed samurai and the crew’s own patience, and its second half burning that army against Onigashima, the island fortress where two Emperors have gathered to celebrate a festival and plan a war.
The raid is the longest sustained battle in the manga. Nine retainers charge the man who killed their lord; a generation of pirates tests itself against two Emperors on a rooftop; and Luffy is knocked from the sky, drowned, and returns changed into something that laughs. Wano ends with a shogun crowned, a people freed, and a world in which the balance of power, and the names on the Emperors’ list, have been rewritten.
Story
Samurai in disguise Ch. 909–924
Zoro arrives first, framed for murders by a corrupt magistrate and forced toward seppuku until he cuts his way free. Luffy loses the Sunny to a waterfall and washes ashore in the poisoned region of Kuri, where a girl named Tama shares the water she has been saving for the day Ace returns. Ace is dead, and Luffy cannot tell her. The others arrive as Kin’emon’s plan dictates, taking Wano names and occupations: a geisha, a dancer, a ronin, a carpenter, a shrine-thief who steals from the rich to feed the leftover towns.
Kuri is the country outside the capital: rivers that run with factory waste, a town called Leftovers that eats what Bakura discards, and a headman who keeps Tama as a bait for animals. Luffy beats Kaido’s men in Bakura Town for her sake, with Zoro and the samurai Kikunojo beside him, and flees to the ruins of Oden Castle, where Kin’emon lays out the plan: gather allies in secret, and strike Onigashima on the night of the Fire Festival, when Kaido’s crew will be drunk. The graves of Oden and his retainers stand behind him as he speaks.
Luffy breaks the plan within a day. When Kaido himself arrives in Kuri, drunk and in dragon form, hunting for Law and levelling the castle ruins in his boredom, Luffy attacks him alone. He hits the Emperor with everything Gear Fourth has and stops him for a moment. Kaido’s club puts him down in a single blow. Luffy wakes in the Udon prisoner mine wearing sea-stone cuffs, and Kaido tells Law that he wants the boy alive and broken, so that he can be made into a soldier who has forgotten how to lose.
A prison mine in Udon Ch. 925–949
In Udon, Luffy hauls stone beside the old yakuza boss Hyogoro, once the most respected man in the Flower Capital and now a starving prisoner, and learns from him the advanced Armament Haki that flows into an enemy without touching him. Queen, one of Kaido’s commanders, turns the mine into a sumo arena where the losers are executed, and then, when the prisoners will not die fast enough, into a slaughterhouse with a plague. Raizo slips inside to steal the keys to Luffy’s cuffs, and finds Kawamatsu, another of Oden’s retainers, thirteen years in a cell.
Big Mom arrives in Wano to collect a debt from Kaido, loses her memory in a fall from the waterfall, and is brought to Udon by Chopper and Tama as a hungry, harmless woman who wants only red bean soup. Queen has eaten it all. The uprising that frees the prisoners begins when she remembers who she is, and it ends with Luffy, cuffs broken by Raizo’s key, standing on Queen’s back with a mine full of men who have watched him spend days refusing to fall. Udon becomes the rebellion’s barracks, and its prisoners its army.
A poisoned city laughs Ch. 927–958
In the Flower Capital, Orochi holds a banquet where the courtesan Komurasaki is apparently killed for refusing his hands, and where Robin, spying as a geisha, is nearly caught by the shogun’s ninja. In Ebisu Town, the poor laugh at everything because Orochi fed them defective SMILE fruits that stole their ability to express anything else. Yasuie, a former daimyo, is executed after claiming the Kozuki plot was his own joke, and the crew watches a town laugh at his death while its eyes stream.
Zoro protects the girl Toko, whose father has just been shot, and finds Komurasaki alive: she is Hiyori, Oden’s daughter, hidden for twenty years in plain sight. In the snows of Ringo she gives him Enma, her father’s sword, a blade that drains the Haki out of whoever holds it and cut the only wound Kaido has ever carried. Kaido and Big Mom, after fighting for a day and a night, agree to an alliance to take the world. Kanjuro, unknown to anyone, is a Kurozumi spy who has been feeding Orochi every plan since Zou.
When the retainers reach the port where their allies should be waiting on the night of the festival, the ships are gone. Orochi believes he has ended the rebellion before it began, and the news from outside the country says that the Warlord system has been abolished and the Marines are turning on their own former allies. The story pauses here, with the samurai staring at an empty harbour, to explain who Oden was and why twenty years of waiting were worth it.
The man who left Wano Ch. 960–966
Kozuki Oden was the heir of Wano’s shogun and a disaster as a son: a child who lifted boulders, dammed rivers by mistake, and made a habit of fighting mountain gods. Exiled to the wasteland of Kuri, he tamed it into a prosperous region and became its daimyo. His retainers were gathered from castaways, orphans and thieves: Kin’emon, Denjiro, Kanjuro, Raizo, Ashura Doji, Kikunojo, Kawamatsu, Izo, and Inuarashi and Nekomamushi, the two Minks whom Wano had abused as monsters.
When Whitebeard landed on Wano, Oden clung to his ship’s chain for three days demanding to be taken aboard, and was. He married Toki, a woman born eight hundred years earlier who had used a Devil Fruit to travel forward. He met Roger, and Roger asked him to read a Poneglyph. Oden left Whitebeard for a year to join Roger’s final voyage, reached the last island with him, and heard the story that made Roger laugh. He wrote it down and never showed anyone alive.
The lord who was born to boil Ch. 967–972
Oden returned to Wano to find Orochi installed as shogun and Kaido occupying the country. For five years he did nothing but dance naked in the capital each week, and his people called him a fool. The truth, told only afterwards, was that Orochi had threatened to slaughter Wano’s citizens unless he humiliated himself, and Oden agreed rather than test the threat. When he finally attacked with his retainers, Kaido was warned, and the raid on Onigashima failed.
Oden and his retainers were sentenced to boil in oil. He carried them all on a plank above the cauldron for an hour, buying their survival with his own skin, and asked only that Wano be opened before the day, twenty years hence, when a figure of liberation would be needed. Kaido shot him himself. Toki sent Momonosuke, Kin’emon, Kanjuro, Raizo and Kikunojo twenty years forward, and stayed behind to die. Her poem about nine shadows and a dawn became the country’s only hope.
The traitor and the promised port Ch. 973–982
The allies were never lost: Denjiro, who has spent twenty years as the yakuza boss Kyoshiro, moved the ships and freed the prisoners Orochi thought he had captured. Kanjuro is exposed and reveals his contempt with a laugh, then carries Momonosuke off to Onigashima on a bird of ink. Kin’emon’s misdirection of the traitor turns out to be luck he does not confess to. Jinbe, promised at Whole Cake Island, arrives at sea in his own ship, having brought the Sun Pirates through the Emperor’s waters, and takes his place as helmsman of the Straw Hats.
The fleet of samurai, Minks and three pirate crews reaches Onigashima under the cover of the Fire Festival. Luffy, Kid and Law argue over who will strike Kaido first and are stopped by the Beasts Pirates’ ships before they land. Inside, the Straw Hats scatter through a fortress full of drunken Beasts Pirates dressed as their enemies. Luffy is drawn away by the sight of food being wasted, and meets Kaido’s child, a masked figure who has been waiting for someone exactly like him to arrive.
A son who calls himself Oden Ch. 983–999
Yamato, Kaido’s child, tore up Oden’s journal as a boy, read every word, and decided to become Oden instead of his father’s heir. Kaido answered with sea-stone handcuffs that will explode if Yamato ever leaves the island. Meeting Luffy, Yamato removes the mask and swears to fight beside him, because the journal says that on this night a man would come who could open Wano. Yamato has spent twenty years defending Oden’s grave from Kaido’s men and calling the retainers who left him behind by name.
Yamato finds Momonosuke and tells him the story of Ace, who once landed on Onigashima to fight Kaido and left behind a promise instead of a scar. Kaido announces his New Onigashima Project from a stage, revealing that he intends to move the island onto the capital and turn Wano into a weapons state with a slave class, and orders Momonosuke to declare the Kozuki cause dead. Yamato breaks his own cuffs open and joins the raid, and Kaido learns that his child has become the enemy his enemy left behind.
Two Emperors and a new generation Ch. 990–1014
The Nine Red Scabbards reach the roof and charge Kaido with the same wounds Oden once left on him, and for a few pages the impossible looks possible. Kaido shrugs off every blade, and the retainers fall. Luffy, Zoro, Kid, Law and Killer climb to face two Emperors in a fight that turns the roof into a crater. Zoro takes a blow meant for everyone and is broken; Law carries the Emperors’ attention; Luffy’s Conqueror’s Haki, coating his fists, hurts Kaido for the first time.
Below, the crew fights its own war: Sanji against Black Maria’s women, Robin and Brook in the treasury, Nami and Usopp protected by Otama’s tamed beasts, Franky against Sasaki, Jinbe against Who’s Who, who reveals that the Marines once guarded the Gum-Gum Fruit for the Government. Kaido knocks Luffy off the roof and into the sea, then announces to the fortress that Straw Hat Luffy is dead. Momonosuke, held on the stage, is ordered to declare the alliance lost, and refuses.
The commanders fall one by one Ch. 1015–1040
Luffy is pulled from the sea by Law’s crew and returns, and the fortress learns through Otama’s tamed announcer that the captain lives. Sanji beats Queen after accepting the Germa body that saves his life and choosing to remain a man who protects women rather than a machine that cannot. Zoro cuts King, the last of the Lunarians, with Enma tamed to his hand, and learns that the black flame on King’s back goes out when he chooses speed over armour. Robin destroys Black Maria as a demon.
Kid and Law, fighting an Emperor two on one for the first time in their lives, drop Big Mom into the magma beneath the island with a combination of magnetism and a scalpel that hits from the inside. Yamato holds the explosives room against Kaido’s men, and Momonosuke, aged into a dragon by Shinobu’s fruit, tries to stop Onigashima from falling on the capital while it burns. The alliance that landed with five thousand people is down to hundreds, and every commander of the Beasts Pirates lies on the floor.
The drums of liberation Ch. 1041–1049
Kaido beats Luffy again, and again, and then Luffy’s heart stops. What wakes him is his Devil Fruit revealing its true name: the Human-Human Fruit, Model Nika, a mythical Zoan that grants a body of freedom, drawn in a style borrowed from cartoons, and a laugh that has no strategic value. Gear Fifth turns the battle into a fight against a dragon by a rubber god, who grabs lightning, turns the floor to rubber, and seizes Kaido’s dragon form by the head and skips it across the roof.
Kaido meets it with clubs, with the last of his sake, and with a flame dragon that is the strongest thing he has ever been. Momonosuke lends his flame clouds to keep Onigashima in the air a little longer, and the country below watches a fist the size of the island come down on the man who owned them. Kaido is driven into the magma beneath Wano, and Luffy’s last punch leaves a fist-shaped hole in the sky. The drums that Zunesha heard from the sea fall silent, and the sun comes up on a country that has not seen a free dawn in twenty years.
Momonosuke opens the country Ch. 1050–1057
Momonosuke, twenty-eight years old in body and eight in heart, becomes shogun. Onigashima lands safely thanks to his flame clouds, and Wano holds a festival that lasts as long as its wounds. Hiyori plays Oden’s song. Toki’s poem is fulfilled in ways nobody planned: the nine shadows, the dawn, and the wounded pirates who did not know they were part of a prophecy. The crew learns that Ashura Doji and Izo died in the raid, and Zunesha appears offshore asking the new shogun to open the border.
The world reorganises: Buggy and Luffy are declared Emperors alongside Shanks and Blackbeard, Luffy’s bounty rises to three billion, and Crocodile and Mihawk join Buggy in Cross Guild, a company that puts bounties on Marines. Admiral Ryokugyu lands to finish what Kaido left and is turned away by Shanks’s Conqueror’s Haki from beyond the horizon. Momonosuke chooses to keep Wano closed a little longer, until the country can defend itself. Yamato stays to see it. The Sunny sails, and Luffy trusts Momonosuke to open the borders when the time is right.